Dead Time Read online

  Moments after meeting Martin, I had recognized that he was an impatient man, a compact car running on fuel with too much octane. Some part of his body was always moving. A foot tapping. His face grimacing. Fingertips rubbing together. Something. At first, my diagnostic curiosity was piqued, and I wondered if he had a mild form of Tourette’s.

  I soon decided he was merely annoyingly fidgety.

  Less than twenty minutes into the reception after the funeral—the house was just beginning to fill with Adrienne’s friends and loved ones—he insisted I join him on the west-facing deck outside the living room. He placed an unwelcome hand on my shoulder and said, “Al.” The tone he employed was a faux-sincere that made me suspicious.

  He explained that although he knew it was a “difficult time for everyone” and that he was sorry for all the inconvenience that Lauren and I had experienced—he, not I, should have been the one to go to Tel Aviv; of course, he still didn’t know why he hadn’t been called, but that was water under the bridge—he was prepared to “muddle” through the “legalities” of transferring Jonas’s guardianship to him and his wife “right away, to minimize confusion, et cetera, et cetera, for the boy.”

  He added that the estate would take care of the necessary legal expenses—I needn’t worry about that.

  I didn’t know what to say. I fought the urge to tell him that of all the things I was worried about, paying lawyers hadn’t made my top fifty.

  My flabbergasted silence troubled Martin enough that he felt compelled to inject an additional explanation. “You know my sister,” he said.

  He hadn’t said it kindly. Martin must have been assuming that he was conversing with an ally. Could he be misreading me that badly? I wondered. Grief does funny things.

  I wasn’t comfortable with the eye-roll that he used to accompany the statement about knowing his sister, nor the little nostril-snort that effectively completed it. I couldn’t be certain what he meant with his comment about knowing Adrienne, but I suspected that when I did understand, I would conclude that it was demeaning to my stepson’s mother’s memory. I feared that it was, in four vague words, Jonas’s uncle’s way not only of trying to undo the wishes of my dear friend only minutes after her body was buried, but also his way of attempting to enroll me as a conspirator in whatever suspect endeavor he was contemplating next.

  I took a quick step back so that his hand would fall from my shoulder. It worked. The hand tumbled to his side with a fat thwop, as though his arm had fallen asleep while it was up there.

  “I did know your sister,” I said. “Very well.”

  “Good then,” he said. “We see eye to eye.”

  Like his sister, Martin was wide in the hips, and less than tall. He and I didn’t see eye to eye literally. Figuratively? The odds were long, and getting longer by the minute.

  “You know, Martin—Do you prefer Martin?”

  “Marty is fine.”

  “Thank you. You know, Marty, I don’t think we do,” I said. “See eye to eye.”

  “About?” he said.

  He was either honestly perplexed, which made him dim, or he was being disingenuous, which made him dangerous in one or two of a kaleidoscope of ways that I would have to sort through at a time when I was less distracted.

  “Jonas,” I replied. “My son.”

  My words were deliberately chosen. Marty smiled his reaction to them in a way that made me want to smack him. After a provocative pause he shook his head. Then he nodded his head.

  Confusion? I wondered. Or, more accurately, I hoped.

  He closed his eyes tightly and grimaced with his teeth exposed. It wasn’t an attractive expression. With his eyes that way and his lips peeled back he looked like a rodent suffering from near-terminal constipation. When he reopened his eyes, things didn’t improve much. He glanced my way again, but with a fresh look on his face. I interpreted it to be a melodramatic attempt to convey the sentiment that I should take whatever step I was contemplating taking next with a truckload of caution.

  I did a reality check. I had to convince myself that this conversation was really occurring during Adrienne’s memorial. My contemplative pause had the unintended consequence of softening Marty’s tough-guy comportment, which made me begin to fear that he’d concluded his hushed warning had done the trick.

  To be certain that I hadn’t missed his meaning, he said, “I don’t think you want to do this, Al. ‘Go there’ is what I think the kids say these days. I really, really don’t. Blood is thicker than water.”

  I counted to ten. It didn’t seem to help, so I did it again. My anger wasn’t abating. I said, “I don’t know what ‘this’ you’re talking about, Marty. What my wife and I plan to do is to strive to honor your sister’s wishes regarding her son, whom she loved in a way that was magical for us to watch. You and I have seen the same documents. In her will, Adrienne asks Lauren and me to raise Jonas. We intend to do that to the best of our abilities.”

  He lowered his gaze. When he looked back up he was facing away from me, contemplating the seemingly infinite swath of the Front Range. “You know she was…bisexual?” He swallowed the last word—the loaded word—as though it was a revelation not to be shared in polite company.

  I raised my eyebrows involuntarily, not as a comment on Adrienne’s sexuality—her sexual adventures, and occasional misadventures, were a far-from-secret part of the texture of the fabric of who she was—but rather as a reaction to her brother’s condescending judgment about her. At that moment Marty and I were standing in a location with a fine view of Boulder, and I was inclined to give him credit for being sufficiently cosmopolitan that he would have at least an inkling that the rooms behind us were infiltrated by men and women whose sexual identities were not describable by limiting his choices to words that began with the prefix “hetero.”

  Marty caught my raised eyebrows but misinterpreted the gesture to be a sign of encouragement. He leaned forward a few inches and added, “More l than s if you know what I mean.” He lifted a fist in front of his mouth and coughed.

  “Excuse me?” I said, hoping I’d heard him wrong. And hoping that he really wasn’t someone who used snorts and throat noises as punctuation.

  The l was likely “lesbian.” The s is “straight”? I thought. That must be it.

  I wondered if I should tell Marty that Adrienne did not consider herself bisexual.

  He said, “That’s what I’m talking about. With Adrienne? At times, she could have a sweetheart—my kids adored her visits—but there’re things that, well, you don’t really want to know about her. My sister had her…call them blind spots. She didn’t make the wisest choices. And she wasn’t always a good…judge of what’s best for the boy.”

  I despised that Marty was denigrating Adrienne’s mothering, something he knew almost nothing about. I despised that he considered choosing Lauren and me as guardians to be one of Adrienne’s unwise choices. I despised that he referred to Jonas as “the boy.” I despised that he used “et cetera, et cetera” in conversation.

  I despised that he called me “Al.” That one was petty, but there it was.

  “Because of whom she slept with?” I said. I was going to say “loved” instead of “slept with” but feared the nuance would sail over his head like an errant Frisbee.

  He exhaled. “Exactly.”

  He still thought I was agreeing with him about something.

  “Marty, could we talk about this later, after things wind down here?” I said. “We have many guests. People who want to talk, need to talk, about Adrienne. This”—I turned toward the room full of her friends and loved ones—“is about your sister.”

  I made my living as a psychotherapist. Had Marty walked into my office as a prospective patient, within two minutes I would have recognized him as an annuity.

  There was that much work to do. That many rocks to turn. That much resistance to which to apply the forces of psychotherapeutic hydraulics.

  My professional radar had also pegged M
arty’s pathology as being of the personality-disorder variety. Unlike people with garden-variety neuroses who come in to see people like me because they are miserable, people with personality disorders often show up in the office of people like me not because they are miserable, but because the people around them are miserable.

  I could well understand how people around Marty might be miserable.

  Thank God it’s not my job, I said to myself.

  I stopped at the door from the deck to the house and opened my mouth with fresh determination to defend my dead friend. I managed, just barely, to control the outburst I was rehearsing in my head.

  Before I was able to close the door behind me, he muttered, “We’re not done, Al.”

  I had taken only two steps inside when an old friend of mine, a social worker, said hello. Her name was Cassandra Poteet. She was married to one of my favorite mental health colleagues in Boulder. I hadn’t been aware that they knew Adrienne.

  Cassandra revealed that a couple of her kids had been urology patients of Adrienne’s. “Is Wallace here?” I asked, wondering about my professional friend.

  She seemed at a loss for words, but finally said, “No, he…Wallace couldn’t come.” She lowered her voice. “He had some issues with Adrienne about Mason’s…care. It’s…awkward.” Mason was one of their children.

  Cassandra had said all that she wanted to say about the topic. We began to talk about Adrienne. Less than a minute into the conversation I heard a voice from behind me say, “Hey. It’s me.”

  My mind translated the melody as familiar, even if the words didn’t register as anything special. Intrigued by the refracted memory fragment, I said, “Would you please excuse me?” to Cassandra.

  I turned to discover that I was looking into the eyes of my first wife, Merideth.

  Me.

  Her.

  Whoa.

  FOUR

  The Canyon

  Jack pulled his digital camera from his pack and powered it up.

  Jules, the woman with the confident voice who’d remembered that the missing woman had curly brown hair and lovely eyes, noticed the stranger eyeing the camera. She said, “That’s Jack. It’s what he does. Ignore him—he’ll stop soon.”

  Jack said, “Not much light. My last battery’s almost dead.”

  Jules was a twenty-five-year-old litigator who had just signed on with a big firm in West L.A. She untied a red kerchief from around her neck and walked over to the shirtless man the way a mother with a washcloth approaches a young child with the detritus of breakfast stuck to his chin. Without asking if he minded being groomed by a stranger, she used the kerchief to flick the dried snot from his nose. She then used her fingers to push his hair back so that it didn’t completely shadow his eyes.

  She said, “That’s better. Tell us your friend’s name.”

  The shirtless man crinkled his nose and rubbed at his nostril. He was baffled as to why the woman had just wiped a bandanna across his face. And why that had made anything better. He had to force himself to refocus in order to ponder her question.

  His apparent distraction and his hesitation in replying were not encouraging signs. Finally he said, “Jaana,” as though he was pleased to have remembered the woman’s name. “Two a’s. Or three, I guess.”

  The shirtless man’s demeanor about the woman’s absence was so low-key and his concern about her whereabouts so off-key that the larger group was losing interest in his dilemma. Most had returned their attention to rechecking their equipment and supplies to finish preparations for their imminent ascent of the canyon wall.

  “She your girlfriend?” Jules asked.

  “We’re…friends. We hang out. We see each other sometimes. I live in Vegas. She brought me down here.”

  The group digested the news.

  “Coming on this…hike, trip…was her idea,” the shirtless man said again. It was as though he was determined to hang any bad-judgment tag on Jaana’s back. “I’m not much of an outdoorsman. Kind of sore this morning. You guys have blisters?” He bent his left leg, raising his foot. An angry red orb the size of a quarter was sprouting on his heel.

  “I can give you something for that. What time did Jaana get up to pee?” Jules asked. “Do you remember?”

  “I was asleep. I don’t know.”

  “About…what time? Was it ten o’clock? One o’clock? Four o’clock?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Early? Late?”

  “Not too late.”

  “Lisa?” Jules said to one of the other women. “Were you able to sleep last night? You see anything?”

  Lisa was one of the group of singles, the high school friend of Jack’s. The heat had been troubling Lisa more than anyone else in the group. She hadn’t been able to sleep for more than an hour or two at a stretch since she reached the canyon floor. She said, “Not much. I was up for a while, like always.” She looked away before she said, “Other people were up too.” She quickly scanned the group. “But I didn’t see her.”

  The shirtless man fixated on the news that others were up. “Anybody see her after dark?”

  Jules pressed Lisa. “You didn’t see this girl? Jaana?”

  Lisa hesitated for a moment. “No.”

  “You’re sure?” Jules asked.

  “No, Jules. Nothing.”

  Jules made eye contact with the other four in the group. “You guys?”

  Head shakes. Shoulder shrugs.

  The shirtless man said, “Okay.”

  Jules’s boyfriend, Eric, paused from a long pull on a water bottle. He made an effort not to sound dismissive as he said, “I’m sure she’s around someplace. She has to be. I mean, where the hell would she go?”

  On a hot black night on the banks of the mighty Colorado River, at the bottom of the deepest gash on the continental surface of the planet, few people went wandering.

  Without a raft or a kayak or a riverboard and a lot of safety equipment, where the hell would someone go? The only places to meander on foot are either up one of the trails that herringbone up one side of the canyon or the other, or down one of the convoluted footpaths that hug the river or curve off into its estuaries or dead-end in the infinite variety of water-carved slot canyons. In the dark, alone, without the aid of a good flashlight, every one of those hikes is reserved for the reckless, depressed, or self-destructive. Or drunk.

  “She wasn’t…upset, was she?” Eric added when no one responded to his earlier remark.

  The shirtless man shook his head while he contorted his face into a puzzled expression, as though he didn’t really understand the question. He said, “No. She was pretty…happy.” He smiled at some thought. “We had a good time last night. I did.”

  A woman who had been standing slightly away from the group, taking it all in, spoke up for the first time. Line the seven of them up—the six friends and the shirtless stranger—and ninety-nine out of a hundred people would select her as the youngest in the bunch. And not just by months, but by a few years. Although she was nineteen, she looked like a high school sophomore.

  Or freshman.

  She was part of the group of singles, a sophomore at Oxy. Her name was Carmel, pronounced like the town on the Monterey Peninsula.

  She was wearing what the others in the group had come to think of as her Grand Canyon uniform: a tight tank top, shorts that barely covered her crotch—and didn’t completely cover her ass—and a canvas hat with a brim the size of a parasol. The narrow backpack she was preparing to lift to her shoulders appeared taller than she was.

  Her smile was almost constant. Her uncomplicated manner and natural beauty earned her a lot of attention in life. She was a girl men tried to separate from the pack when she was out at bars or clubs with her girlfriends.

  She turned to the shirtless man and spoke, her voice carrying the kind of persistent hope that could be mistaken for innocence. “She’s probably someplace waiting to watch the sun rise.” She lifted her eyebrows and smiled again.
“That’s what I did the first night we were here when I couldn’t sleep because it was so hot. I walked down to the river and I sat on a rock and I looked east and I waited. For daybreak. It was soooo peaceful. The waiting. The water rushing in the river. The air so still. And at sunrise, the very first light? It is just amazing down here early, just before dawn.”

  She glanced up toward the rim while she waited for the man to reply. When he didn’t, she said, “You’ll get to see for yourself in a little while. It’s absolutely…I don’t know. Illuminating.” She laughed at herself. “That was dumb. Jeez. But I bet that’s where your friend is right now. She’s on a rock someplace, looking east, waiting for the first light. Letting the sound from the river clear her head. Cleanse her spirit. She’ll be back with you soon, once she’s done taking it in.” She concluded with a fresh, teeth-baring smile aimed directly at the shirtless man. She knew from experience that her big eyes and kind smile were reassuring to people.

  Her girlfriends had often warned her that she was guilty of mistaking men’s interest for men’s interest. Her friends’ well-intended caution had never done the young woman any good. She’d been shocked by bad intentions more often than the cute blonde in teenage horror movies.

  Carmel tugged on the strap hanging at her left hip and turned ninety degrees. “I can never, ever, ever, get it right. Is this thing straight, Jack?”

  “Hello,” replied Kanyn, her female friend from school. Kanyn was a lithe woman who wore her own heavy backpack as comfortably as she would wear a T-shirt to bed. “Jack doesn’t know from straight.”

  Some of the group laughed. Some didn’t. Jack laughed.

  “Where exactly did…Where did you go that morning? To watch the sun rise, I mean?” the shirtless man asked Carmel. “I can go look there. For Jaana.”

  Carmel said, “Down past the beach.” She pointed in the direction of the trail that led from the cabins past the campground, toward the river. “Not the part you see near the path, but downstream a little. Not too far. Past that first set of rocks. That rise? There’s a trail. I know it just looks dark right now, but you’ll see it. You know which one I’m talking about?”