Line of Fire (21 page)

33

I
found out part of the answer to that question an hour later when I met up with Lauren at the farmers’ market downtown. We were wandering the crowded paths hand in hand, lost in the fog of lovely aromas—a poetic pastiche of fresh bread, Palisade peaches, and Rocky Ford melons—when Lauren spoiled the moment by telling me that one of Currie’s old neighbors at her apartment in Boulder had a crappy cell phone photograph of the guy Currie had been dating before she moved to Frederick.

Lauren’s legs grew tired before we made it across the market. She found a bench. I delivered her a cold drink and a toothpick with a hunk of perfect cantaloupe before I headed out to collect the best end-of-summer fruit I could find. I had plenty to choose from. Colorado doesn’t get enough credit for the quality of its late-summer bounty.

While I waited to pay for a bag of peaches, I pondered why the dense crowds at the farmers’ market were so much less aggravating to me than the dense crowds at Whole Foods. I had reached no conclusion when I phoned Sam with the news about the photo.

The photograph Lauren had described was taken outside Currie’s apartment, near the complex’s pool. The view was from behind a couple that was sitting close together at a table beneath an umbrella. The guy was wearing a baseball cap. The photograph was replete with shadows and bad angles. I asked Sam if any of it sounded familiar.

“It’s possible. Does Lauren know it’s me?” Sam asked.

“If she does,” I said, “she’s not letting on.”

“Did she say anything new about the witness? Or what the witness saw?”

“In Boulder or Frederick?”

“In Frederick.”

“Not today.”

“You still think it’s the kid? Tres.”

“Yes.”

“What does he know? How believable is he?” Sam wasn’t asking for my conjecture. I listened to him breathe until he said, “No one can tie you to this, Alan.”

I knew we’d have this conversation at some point. I pressed the phone tight to my ear. I cupped my hand around my mouth. I said, “No, Sam. No.”

“Good,” Sam said. “Then we agree.”

He hung up. When I returned to her bench, Lauren took one look at the distended bags I was lugging and wanted to know what we were going to do with all that fruit.

• • •

I drove to Frederick the next morning. I told Lauren I was going to see a guy about some bike parts he was selling. Few things in this life bored my wife more than listening to her husband discuss bicycle pieces.

Maybe the Broncos. It would have been a close contest.

• • •

My wedding ring was in the coin pocket of my pants.

Izza was working outside when I arrived. She was wearing jeans and cowboy boots and two different strapped tanks layered over a purple bra. The bra straps were more substantial than the straps of either of the tanks. She wore a beat-up baseball cap of the Tulsa Drillers. The cap was almost as well-loved as her boots.

If the look she was going for was cowgirl-femme, she was nailing it. I hoped it was her routine weekend-morning-doing-chores-for-her-dad outfit and that she hadn’t glammed it up for me.

I said hello from ten feet away. She stepped in close to me as she stripped off a pair of leather work gloves. I thought she might be moving in for a hug, but she stopped just shy of invading my comfort zone. She placed her hands on her hips girl-style—her thumbs hooked forward, her fingers extended on her upper butt cheeks.

“Good decision,” she said. “Coming back out here. You won’t regret it. Maybe when we’re done, I’ll introduce you to Daddy. He’s having an okay day.”

She gestured toward the larger of the two residences on the property. I hadn’t noticed when I drove up, but sitting in the shadows of the front porch was a man in a wheelchair. I waved.

He didn’t wave back. “What would you like to see?” Izza asked.

“You said I’d be able to hear the truck traffic on 25 if the winds were different. You were right, I can hear them downshift on that hill.”

“I am,” she said with a smile, “an honest woman. What will it take to sell you?”

I waited for her to end the sentence with another word or two. She didn’t. I said, “I’m more interested in seeing how it feels out here. Just . . . being here. Being in the house.”

“How it feels . . .” She laughed. “Should have guessed—you’re from Boulder.” She planted both her feet. “Well, Mr. Boulder, I have a deposit check in my pocket from a cute young married couple from Cheyenne. Their references are good. Experian says their credit is fair. And they both already know how to drive that tractor.

“So this is it. Love it today, or leave it today.”

My heart soared. “What happened to that student who was so interested?”

“I sent him on his way. He lied to me. That’s all it takes.”

In my head I started singing the chorus to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

My celebration was short-lived. Izza said, “Now he’s interviewing everybody in town about that poor woman who died. I hope he finishes soon. I don’t trust him.”

My phone vibrated in my pocket as Izza led me toward the cottage for my final look around. I asked her for a moment and wrestled the phone from my pocket.

Despite the good news, pessimism remained my companion. I expected the call to be from Comadoe, dropping the other shoe. Upping the ante. Raising the threat level.

But the call was from Amanda. I waited as she left a voicemail, then told Izza I needed to listen to a work message. I stepped down the walkway and turned my back.

“The Buffer just fired me,” Amanda said. The short sentence was followed by so much dead air that I almost stopped listening to the recording. Then she added, “I’m so worried. I hope he’s okay.”

That was it. I continued holding the phone to my ear while I considered how to respond. Amanda hadn’t asked me to return her call. I decided not to do it. Whenever I could, I tried to give patients the message that I believed they could cope with difficult news without my intervention. Her call didn’t constitute an emergency.

I stuffed the phone back into my pocket.

“Ready?” Izza said.

“I am,” I said.

• • •

On the way home I left Sam a voicemail. I told him that the guy wasn’t going to rent that place after all but that he wasn’t done nosing around town.

I ended with a question that I knew Sam couldn’t answer. I asked, “What if he does? Figure it out?”

34

A
manda was traveling the next week. Since the Buffer was out of the picture, I figured there was a good chance she was on the road with George. She and I didn’t have another appointment scheduled until the week prior to Halloween, when we were scheduled to meet twice to make up for lost time.

The days leading up to Halloween were warm and dry. Although the holiday had a well-deserved reputation for attracting winter weather, I was ambivalent about the front that was threatening the state from the northwest. A storm would certainly complicate trick-or-treating for the kids, but a generous dump of snow might mitigate the persistent fire danger.

I didn’t hear from Comadoe during the time Amanda was out of town. I couldn’t decide whether that indicated he’d given up on me, which was potentially good news, or that he was busy plotting his next move against me, which was potentially bad news.

• • •

Amanda didn’t comment on her time away.

She offered no preamble at all before she said, “I never offered him a future. That was never going to be part of what we were doing.”

A patient will sometimes elect the pretense, either as a conscious act or not, that the precise point where a previous psychotherapy session ended has nothing at all to do with where she chooses to begin a subsequent visit. Other times the opposite seems true. She will begin the subsequent visit as though the continuity is as unfractured as a mother’s love. When the latter occurs, the first sentence spoken in the new session can feel like a seamless continuation of the final sentence spoken at the conclusion of the previous hour.

I said, “To be sure we’re on the same page, you are talking now about your brother?” Amanda’s unique ministrations to her brother had been the topic at the very end of the past session, two weeks before.

“My brother. The hundred days.” She shook her head, as though trying to clear a thought, before she said, “The distraction I provided came in the form of sexual arousal.” She raised her chin and looked off into the distance toward some shadow of the complicated past she shared with her older sibling. She bit down on her lower lip before she said, “But there was never any promise beyond that. My sexual involvement with my brother stopped right there.”

I wasn’t sure what she was defending or where she was going. That day’s session was young. I trusted she would find a way to help me understand.

“A few years after he died, when I was in college, I had a psychology professor who gave a lecture on the nature of human communication. He considered himself an Ossorian, if that means anything to you. He maintained that most promises between people in relationships aren’t verbal. His thesis was that promises in relationships, intimate or casual, are often not spoken.

“He believed that the simple act of behaving in relationships—by behaving
,
he meant being
,
acting—constitutes a specific promise to the other person. How we behave in a certain situation in a relationship becomes an unspoken commitment to the other person to—I want to say this part exactly right—to act in a similar way . . . in similar circumstances . . . in the future.” She took a deep breath before she added, “
Unless
.”

I was intrigued. “Please go on.”

Amanda explained that the unless part was what captivated her. She said that her professor presented it as the most powerful of communication qualifiers, because it was never predefined. It was a wild card. The unless could and did change with each new nonverbal commitment between the people in the relationship.

I waited for her to ask me what I thought of the hypothesis. She didn’t.

“I was dumbfounded after that lecture—what he was saying explained everything to me. About my brother, his death, what I did with him, for him—about that whole surreal hundred days. Although I’d never known how to understand it, or how to talk about it with my brother, I knew from the first time I touched his dick that I was making a promise to him, and that an unless was always part of the promise.

“Until I heard that lecture, I didn’t know how to frame it. When I gave him the first handjob I was making a promise to do it again, and again. I knew it wasn’t just once. He knew it wasn’t just once. I was promising to give him handjobs whenever he was in pain. But . . .” Her eyes filled with tears. “There had to be exceptions. Right? Limits. Unlesses
.
That professor helped me understand the unlesses. I would continue to give my brother handjobs to help him . . . unless.

“Unless there was someone else in the room with us. Or about to come into the room to interrupt us. Unless we were caught. Unless, unless, unless. We never talked about it, but all along I felt that we had an understanding—that we both knew about the unlesses. Maybe I wanted to believe that he saw things the same way I did. Maybe I wanted to believe that the promises we were making to each other were mutual.

“But there were moments when I sensed that we didn’t see things the same way.” Amanda smiled at me, the smile reflecting something rueful in what she was thinking or feeling. “I was young. God. He was, too. My big brother, even at the very end, was clinging to hope. There was a part of him that hung on to the belief that he was somehow going to survive. Despite his prognosis. Despite his decline. Despite all the grief that he could see in everyone else’s eyes.

“Part of me came to fear . . . I hate that I felt this . . . that he had another hope that was keeping him going—that he was also hoping that he and I had a future together.”

The room became so quiet I could almost hear her pulse accelerate.

“He never said anything, but I think he had fantasies that he and I could be more than brother and sister. More than friends.” Her shoulders sank. “But that was never part of my promise.” The rueful smile made another brief appearance. “Maybe I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t. I didn’t know much about the power of sex for boys. Especially vulnerable boys.”

Amanda’s eyes glistened. She swallowed away a tear.

I asked, “The unless? That was what you were referring to the last time you were here? At the end of the session? By making the decision to comfort”—I intentionally used her word—“your brother sexually, the commitment, the nonverbal promise, that you were making to him was to provide him that same kind of sexual comfort in those unique ‘similar circumstances’? Do I have that part right?”

She began nodding even before I finished my thought. “Yes,” she said. “Exactly.”

“And the unless? The crucial unless—unspoken—was unless he lived? Unless he survived. Yes?” She nodded. “Amanda, is there some currency to those feelings, something that still resonates in your life? Today?”

She began rejecting my thought even before I finished articulating it. “No one else is dying. Now. In my life. That I know of.”

She had not yet mentioned the voicemail she had left me. The Buffer. Her fear of his suicide. Being fired by him. The dangers of the smitten kitten.

She shifted her weight. She began to smile but bit down gently on her lower lip to contain the breadth of the grin.

I asked, “What was that? What was going on right then?”

Not even a heartbeat later Amanda said, “No one is dying.” She sighed a shallow sigh that felt to me like capitulation. She said, “I don’t know how I’m supposed to look at this. My life. What I do. When I was fourteen, with my brother, was I a slut?”

I weighed her words for facetiousness. No, that wasn’t it.
More distraction?
That felt right. I waited.
The resistance is coming, the resistance is coming.

“Now? I guess I am a prostitute. It’s always seemed to me that adult relationships, romantic relationships, involve a negotiation about sex. Money is part of the negotiation, directly or indirectly. There are studies, right? Or is that a rationalization? I don’t know.”

I felt the therapeutic momentum evaporating. I opened my mouth to interrupt her, to challenge the resistance, but I lacked confidence in my appraisal. I said only, “You’ve given this a lot of thought?”

“I receive money. I engage in sex. So what am I?”

It felt insincere. I tried to bring her back. “You were talking about your brother’s death. About now. About an example of unless.”

“Okay, fine,” she said. “Unless
.
It was the unless that made it possible for me to be generous with him that way—sexually.” Her voice took on a sudden edge. “I was offering him nothing that would endure. My sexual relationship with my brother never existed outside the walls of Ronald McDonald House. Even at fourteen, I knew I was making a commitment to give him handjobs to help with his pain. But that was all.

“His promise to me? His promise to me was . . . to die.”

Her words sucked the oxygen from the room.

“That was our bargain.” Tears flowed down her face, but Amanda didn’t sob. “Even as that kid, that girl
,
I knew that being a sexual partner for my brother was dangerous. Not in the way I might understand it now, but I knew there had to be limits to what I would do for him. Could do. Without . . . damage.”

I risked an inquiry. “Damage?”

She gave no indication that she heard me. “One night, less than a week before he died, I couldn’t get him hard. That had never happened before. His cock was just fat and heavy. I couldn’t help him.” She inhaled deeply and held her breath for an extended moment
.
“He asked me to use my mouth. Not my hand. ‘Try your mouth,’ he said. Just like that. Like he wanted me to hand him the remote.”

Amanda stared toward me, but not at me. Her eyes were focused on a distant place. I guessed Texas. MD Anderson. Ronald McDonald House. The smell of chemo. The texture of cheap hospital sheets.

She said, “My brother wanted me to give him a blowjob.”