Others of My Kind Read online

  Have to be away an hour or so, I told Mickie. Family.

  I didn’t think you had family, she said. Then when I offered nothing further, she went on: Take as long as you need. Just let me know how it’s going, and if there’s anything I can do.

  Of course I would.

  What did I expect? Danny looked so old and so fragile lying there, this man who once had shaped and cradled the whole of my world with his hands. Illness and hospitals do that. I know. Strip away masks and worldly station, peel veneer back to the cheap wood beneath, turn us from pronoun to adjective. Something from Joyce came to me, Stephen Daedalus with one of his sad charges at the teacher’s desk: “My childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly.”

  Open yourself to it, I reminded myself. Let it flow through. That’s how you live now. Let the patterns make themselves known to you.

  My talent, such as it was, lay in finding connections, nothing more. Give me four hours of random film about rodeo activity, about which I know nothing, and I’ll bulldog it into meaning, I’ll build you a perfect two-minute world. But this time I stood there knowing that the pieces, the patterns, would not coalesce.

  “On the phone, when you called,” I said to Dr. Duhon, thirty-ish, cape of dark hair across her neck, face blotchy with lack of sleep, looking more like a librarian than someone shoulder to shoulder daily with illness, injury, and death, “you called the details disturbing.”

  “I’m not sure I should talk about this.”

  “Danny abducted me when I was eight years old,” I said. “He kept me in a box under his bed.”

  Dr. Duhon’s eyes focused more clearly on me. She’d been at this, what? six, seven years? Encountering, hourly, worlds she could hardly have imagined to exist.

  “You weren’t the only one.”

  “I never thought I was.”

  “Police found evidence of multiple kidnappings. Most of the children were released after a short time. Some he kept longer. At least one was never seen again.”

  I nodded. Her beeper sounded. She went to a phone on the wall to respond, spoke for a moment, and came back.

  “Two months ago he took a child from Chuck E. Cheese. It was a birthday party for the girl, and a late arrival, an uncle, caught a glimpse of her as Mr. Taylor pulled out of the parking lot in a blue Ford pickup. He tried to follow, but traffic was bad.

  “Two days later, this uncle’s getting back in his car at an AM/ PM. He’s just gassed up. And when he looks to the right he sees that same truck and driver at the other line of pumps. He follows him, makes a note of the address. That night around midnight he and some friends pay a visit to Mr. Taylor. Break down the door, break his thumbs. The girl, Missy, is there. One of them takes her home, the others stick around. They’re there a long time.

  “That uncle’s the one who called it in. Gave himself up. So far he’s refused to name anyone else.

  “Mr. Taylor arrived at our ER with multiple broken bones, a pneumothorax from broken ribs, blood in his urine, a concussion, one eye gouged out. Nothing we don’t see every day. But sometimes, especially with trauma patients, this domino thing starts happening. By morning most of the left lung was whited out. The wound site where we’d set a compound fracture of his humerus became infected. He reacted adversely to medications. Another, opportunistic infection, MRSA, took hold. He began having arrhythmias. Then one morning around three he arrested.”

  I looked down at this small, withered thing on the bed, once so huge and godlike in my life. So very little left of him now. We all come to this.

  “Does he know I’m here?” I asked.

  “Probably not. But we can’t ever be sure. It’s possible that, on some level, he may be able to hear you. Would you like some time alone with him?”

  “No. He’s not in pain, right?”

  “No. We can see to that, at least.”

  Turning from the empty buckets of Danny’s eyes, I signed the papers Dr. Duhon tendered. Only such measures as appropriate to keep the aforesaid patient comfortable would be undertaken. There would be no mechanical life support, no attempts at resuscitation.

  Turning back, I took Danny’s cold hand in mine and felt myself grow larger.

  Vice President Courtney-Phillips’s saga continues. The divorce is under way. Her son, Reagan, reversing an earlier decision, has chosen to remain with his mother. Go figure. She’s getting the kind of attention generally awarded Hollywood stars, pop singers, media arbitrators of canned-hate or feel-good shows. On a major website 41 percent of respondents say that, should she run for president, they’d seriously consider voting for her.

  “Still nothing I can do to help?” Mickie asked when I called to plead the rest of the day off.

  “Not really.”

  “Okay. I’m here till ten or eleven, as usual. After that, mostly unable to sleep—also as usual—I’ll be at home.”

  In the car I snagged the last moments of the latest update on Vice President Courtney-Phillips before listening to a review of the newest Henry James film adaptation and a three-minute overview of Sam Cooke’s ten-minute career.

  Then I came home to four messages from Keith. We’d become acquainted on the phone when I called to get a sound bite on Derrida for an interview I was editing, and had since been out a couple of times.

  Jenny, it’s me. Had a great time last week. Hope you did too. Probably we should do it again?

  Miss Rowan? Keith Kelly here. I’d appreciate a call at the earliest opportunity.

  Hello? Hello? Anyone there?

  Okay, I can take a hint. You never want to see me again. That being the case, I plan to throw myself off a cliff…. Could you please call and let me know the location of the nearest suitable cliff?

  I called and set up a rendezvous at Chili’s. A young woman with orange hair and a nose ring escorted me to the table. Keith had a couple of schooners of beer before him, a saucer of lime wedges alongside.

  “With or without?” he said.

  “Without.”

  One of the schooners came my way. We sat silently awhile as levels of beer fell.

  “This the best you could do for a cliff?” he said.

  “I don’t much care for heights.”

  “Or for me.”

  “I’m sorry, Keith.”

  “No problem, in the grand scheme of things. I got the drift. Figure I’ll just drown my sorrows in comfort food. You hungry?”

  “No. But another beer would be good.”

  He went to the bar to get them. I thanked him. We sat nursing the schooners, smiling obliquely at one another.

  “Derrida could do a whole essay on this encounter,” Keith said. “What’s said, what’s not said.”

  So I told him about Danny. The expurgated version, in which Danny became simply an avuncular friend, someone from my childhood.

  “I’m so sorry, Jenny.”

  “Life sucks sometimes.”

  “One of the things it’s good at. But other times it just kind of floats, like a kite, carries you up with it. The ground’s down there but you don’t care.”

  “You’d have been good for me, wouldn’t you, Keith?”

  “Oh dear.” He smiled. A good smile from a good man. Why couldn’t that be enough? “Like my French teacher back in college, the woman has galloped forth onto the terrible ground of tenses that none of us understand. Note also that she has brought up the great mystery of The Good.”

  Keith taught philosophy, a discipline that often seems to put uppercase letters into one’s speech. By day he shadowed the dawn of Western intellect, chalking Greek and Latin on the board, invoking Heraclitus, Thales, Plato’s spin on Socrates. By night he hung out in clubs where the newest music was happening. We’re all such contradictions. Whitman saw that early on. About himself, about all of us. How that was at the core of whatever America was.

  “I apologize,” Keith said as he took in my reaction to his remark. “Irony’s a poor crutch. Never fails to prop one up, though�
��that’s the attraction.”

  We could spend some considerable time talking about attraction, I supposed.

  “Yes. You’re right. We could.”

  “When I was a child, I had these two tiny plastic dogs, one white, the other black.” The memory had bloomed suddenly in my mind. “They were mounted on tiny magnets. Move one of the dogs close, the other would skitter away.”

  Keith drained his beer and stood. “Take care, Jenny.”

  “You as well.”

  Another regret pushed forward in my life? What we do, what we don’t, actions, inactions. So many of them up there waiting for us, hanging out like thugs on tomorrow’s street corners.

  Take care, Keith had said. I took tears instead. They came into my eyes as I sat in the parking lot, engine running, radio on, with no idea what these people were talking about. Some local election. Whether or not the candidates were qualified. Soft money, smoke-filled back rooms, allegations of illegal campaign contributions. What matter, any of it? Life would go on, nothing much would change. Other young women would be abducted, other presidents would plunge us into mad, hopeless wars, the Courtney-Phillipses of this world would soon enough be forgotten, a thousand Keiths and Jennys would fail to connect.

  And my tears? Were they for lost opportunities? For Keith? For Danny?

  For all of us.

  Chapter 7

  “We can go through this stuff, discard a lot of it, I figure, consolidate the rest.”

  “It’s fine. Kind of like being in an igloo, boxes instead of ice blocks.”

  I hadn’t been in the spare bedroom since moving in. Most of this, I had no idea what it was.

  “For that matter, far as I’m concerned, we could just toss it all.”

  “I don’t need much space, Miss Rowan.”

  “Jenny.”

  “For me, this is palatial.”

  Palatial.

  “We can go out later, pick up whatever you need. Clothes, toothbrush, deodorant, personal goods…. Are you hungry?”

  “A little. But if you don’t mind, I’d just like to stay here awhile, enjoy the quiet.”

  “I understand.”

  “Miss Rowan?” she said when I was at the door.

  “Yes?”

  “Did he love you?”

  I turned back.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Yes.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Danny.”

  “Mine was Gus.”

  Our eyes met. For a moment there were only the two of us, alone in the world.

  “No one understands that.”

  “No,” I said. “No reason they should. No way they can.”

  She nodded. Moments later her head peered around the door-jamb. The gravity was gone as quickly as it had come.

  “Be okay if I take a bath?”

  “Honey, this is your home, you can do anything you want.”

  I stood at the kitchen island listening to water run, wondering if there was anything in pantry or fridge that bore a reasonable chance of being transubstantiated into dinner.

  What the hell was I thinking? I hardly knew this girl. “Twenty years old going on twelve,” Jack had said. She was in pain, deep, unacknowledged pain, and would be for some time. She was like water, changing shape continually, at the least disturbance. It would take years for her character to settle and form. And in all my adult life I’d never lived with anyone.

  In the bottom drawer of the refrigerator I found four lemons clinging precariously to life.

  I knocked lightly on the door she’d left ajar. Cheryl was fast asleep. I set the glass of lemonade on the floor alongside the tub.

  She remained asleep—though relocated from tub to bed—the next morning when I left for work. I stuck a note under a salt shaker on the island: Coffeemaker on warm, bagel wrapped in aluminum foil and tucked away in the oven.

  Around nine, Suzie buzzed to say I had a call.

  “The bagel was wonderful. Thank you,” Cheryl said. “I don’t drink coffee, though.”

  “Okay. Give it time. We’re just getting to know one another.”

  “So dinner’s on me.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “What time will you be back?”

  “Sixish?”

  Well past eight, as it turned out. Plate of wilted pickles, olives and salami, bowl of sliced tomatoes and cucumbers drizzled with vinegar and olive oil, cubes of sweating cheddar speared on round toothpicks waiting for me on the kitchen island. Cheryl waiting for me there, too. Bottle of white wine open to breathe. Two glasses. Cheryl poured and handed one to me.

  “Dinner’s in the oven. Staying warm, I hope.”

  “I’m sure it’s fine. And I do apologize. I should have called.”

  This roommate thing was going to take some getting used to, for both of us.

  “I don’t mind.” Her eyes met mine and glanced away. “That’s a great little store.”

  “What store?”

  “On the corner? Two blocks up?”

  “Stephano’s.”

  She nodded.

  “Everyone around here just calls it the Greek’s.”

  “Nice people.”

  Now that was something I hadn’t heard before, surliness being more or less the stock in trade at the Greek’s, right along with some of the best produce and one of the best cheese selections in the city. Nice people? My first intimation of the effect Cheryl had on others.

  “I made a casserole, grits and cheese. Something my mother used to make, back in Texas. That and a salad. Hope it’s okay.”

  “You know I’m vegetarian?”

  “I called Officer Collins, to see if he knew what you like. He told me.”

  Over dinner I explained why I was late, how what everyone spoke of as The Big Story had fallen into our laps. Footage that gave new meaning to the adjective raw arrived in a flood: snapshots of high-school transcripts, blurred copies of high-school yearbooks and marriage certificate, establishing shots of town, school, city hall, city streets, both homes.

  We’re looking at an hour-long special and a probable sale to the networks here, Mickie said.

  While both their wives drove Rolls-Royces and regularly showed up at society parties and civic events, Daniel Cross and Doug Crane seemed to be always away on business.

  A little better than a week ago, around nine in the morning, Helen Cross had pulled into her garage. A neighbor remembered hearing the garage door going up as the Rolls idled on the driveway, waiting. That same neighbor went over around noon, when the two of them generally met for coffee. She knocked at the kitchen door, went on in. No sign of Helen, no coffee. Opening the connecting door she stepped into the garage. Helen was there, still in the driver’s seat. The engine was no longer running, but only because its gas supply had been exhausted. Suits, sport coats, trousers, dresses, and dress shirts fresh from the dry cleaner lay in the back seat. We believe Mrs. Cross passed out as she pulled into the garage, before she could shut the engine off, a spokesman for the ME said, and since there’s no elevation of carbon dioxide level in her blood, she almost certainly stopped breathing at that time. The autopsy disclosed a massive MI.

  The day of the funeral, Daniel Cross disappeared. The front door had been left unlocked. Kitchen cabinets were thick with plates of food brought or sent by friends, and the coffeepot, though unplugged, was half full. There was no sign of struggle, police said.

  With his wife of fifty years, Daniel Cross had fathered three children. One of those children was a lawyer, real estate mostly, the occasional small-business incorporation. Unsettled by the double blow of his mother’s death and his father’s disappearance, he began working his way through the house and his father’s financial records. Two months later he stood on the porch of a pleasantly appointed house twenty miles or so away from his parents’ home. A woman—Melinda Jones—answered the door. In the doorway behind her appeared his father.

  Melinda Jones, it turned out, a professional woman who
chose to keep her own name, had been living for some thirty years in seeming matrimony with one Douglas Crane.

  And Daniel Cross and Douglas Crane were the same person.

  By this time Cheryl and I had finished dinner. We stacked dishes, carried them to the kitchen.

  “I can do these,” Cheryl said.

  “No way. You cooked, I clean. That’s the rule.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m new at this, but yeah, I’m pretty sure.”

  “Okay.”

  She pulled one of the stools up to the island and poured another glass of wine.

  “Gus always served wine with dinner. Make every day a celebration, he said. Sometimes he wanted me to dress up for dinner, and he’d bring me these beautiful dresses. Then for weeks he’d take everything away, insist that I sit at the table naked, do the dishes naked.” She took a delicate sip. “I don’t know how to thank you for taking me in, Jenny.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  In the stainless steel backdrop of the sink I watched my dim, distorted image scrub plates and rinse them, hand them off-frame. Have-tos and shoulds, I thought: how so many of us come to measure out our days.

  “It’s good to have you here,” I said.

  Cheryl smiled. A beautiful smile. No wonder even the folks at Stephano’s treated her kindly. I was almost done with dishes. She refilled my glass.

  So many in the world live this way, of course. They come home to husbands, wives, lovers or family, talk over the day, talk about nothing in particular. Even when everything inside them wants to scream or weep or cry out, they go on talking, voices low, darkness rising like black water at their windows, in their lives.

  Chapter 8

  Some time back, we did a documentary on mothers and daughters. Brief bios of professional women and their offspring, a woman with twelve daughters, photos and read-alouds from letters, a mother-daughter team of bounty hunters down in Tennessee. None of the profiles much over two minutes, but one of the shortest had engraved itself on my memory. A young woman went looking for the mother who’d abandoned her when she was twelve. This is in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. She puts on her best dress, takes care with her makeup, her hair’s freshly washed and conditioned. At the residential hotel to which she’s tracked her mother she’s told to check the bar around the corner. Just outside the bar there’s “a heap” on the sidewalk, and the heap’s wearing what the guy back at the residential hotel described. “I’m Julie, your daughter,” the young woman says. “Can I help you?” The heap slowly opens one eye and takes the young woman in. “You look like a slut,” she says.