None of this Ever Really Happened (16 page)

"Do you know that when you were describing the accident,
you said, 'I pulled around her'?"

"I did?"

"Why is the car stopped? Are you at a light?"

"No. We're right in the middle of a stretch of road," I said.
"Someone's getting out, I think."

"Is it Lisa Kim?"

"No. The other door, other side."

"Can you see who it is?"

"Not very well. It's dark. It's rainy."

"If you had to say, is it a man or a woman?"

"If I had to say, I'd say a man."

"Tall or short?"

"Taller than shorter."

"Fat or thin?"

"Thinner."

"Older or younger?"

"I don't have a read on age, but there's something—"

"What?"

"I don't know. There's something recognizable about the
person."

"Dark or fair?"

"Hard to say. Dark, I think."

"Can you get an emotional read?"

"How do you mean?"

"How would you describe this parting?" Gene asked. "Is
it amicable? Did she slam on the brakes and order him out?
Does he lean over to say good-bye?"

"Hurried is all. He must have heard me screech my brakes.
It's like 'Gotta go. See ya.'"

"Where's he go?" he asked.

"Don't know. I have no sense of that."

"Do you see the black car in your rearview mirror once
you pass it?"

"I don't think so."

"Go back to Sunset Foods and come back down Green
Bay. Could you have been aware of the car before you nearly
hit it?"

"I don't think so."

"How about after you pass it? What then?"

"Well, I have one of those talks you have with yourself
sometimes. I say, 'Listen, asshole, what the hell is wrong with
you? It's Christmastime. It's Friday night. You're going out to
dinner, secretly you like Don's bad jokes, and you just missed
having an accident, so lighten up, for God's sake.'"

"And do you?"

"I do. I cut over to Sheridan Road in Hubbard Woods
even though it's a little slower and take the scenic route. I
switch from NPR to Christmas music. I start singing Christmas
carols. And I'm still doing that when she comes up behind
me with her brights on."

"Back to the car you almost hit, did you see the face of the
person who got out?" he asked.

"Not really."

"Hear his voice?"

"No, no. I don't know what it is . . . something . . . something
. . ."

"You're tired, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"Let's stop for now. Keep your eyes closed."

"Okay."

"I'm going to count from ten to zero. With each number,
you'll emerge a bit more from hypnosis until we get to zero.
Okay?"

"Okay."

Afterward, we just sat there for quite a while. I
was
tired. I closed my eyes again for a long moment, and when
I opened them, Gene was smiling at me. "You found it," he
said. "You found the pebble in your shoe. I was pretty sure it
was there."

"Were you?"

"Yeah. You don't seem nuts enough to be nuts."

"How very clinical."

"You like that?"

"I do." We talked about why I hadn't made the connection
before. Gene thought that I'd been traumatized by the accident
and maybe even suffered mild shock. He didn't think it
surprising. "What you saw was momentous," he said. "What
happened before it was insignificant by comparison. I imagine
you just forgot it. Your conscious mind filled up with the
facts and the feelings of the accident, and there wasn't room
for anything else. Also, there was some time between the two
incidents and, maybe more important, some changes. You
changed routes; you changed moods. Maybe you just didn't
connect the two cars."

"Now that I have, what can I do about it?" I asked.

"I'm not sure. Maybe nothing. I'd sit on it a day or two
and see if your anxiety level goes down. If it does, then maybe
you've done enough just to make the connection."

"If it doesn't?"

"If I were you, I'd wait a while. I think you'll know what
to do when the time is right."

As it happened, my anxiety level did not decrease. In fact,
it increased, but it was not the same, dull, troubled, aimless
nervousness I'd felt before. Now it was keen and focused.
Who was the guy in the car? What was he doing there? Why
did he get out? Why did he allow Lisa Kim to drive away to
her death? And what was there about him that was faintly
familiar? I sat around for the two days Gene recommended
and then picked up the telephone. If I was going to answer
my questions, I'd have to learn more about Lisa Kim. Tanya
had said that Rosalie Belcher Svigos was Lisa's best friend,
so I called her at the Chicago hospital where she was doing
her residency.

At first it didn't seem as if I would learn much from Dr.
Rosalie Svigos. She didn't shake my hand or let me buy her a
blueberry muffin or decaf coffee in the hospital cafeteria. In
fact she was so cool, I wasn't sure why she'd agreed to meet
me at all, yet she had. She was a big, pretty woman with such
a don't-bullshit-me quality about her that I had to remind
myself that she was only a year older than Lisa. She sat there
in the noisy cafeteria and watched me suspiciously as I fairly
babbled. But she
did
sit and watch me even though I was telling
her hardly anything; I was dissembling although I hadn't
intended to—there was something in her demeanor that
made the whole last-guy-to-see-her-alive story sound fanciful
and unlikely.

She interrupted me in mid-sentence. She asked who I
was. A reporter? An investigator? "Did Lisa's father hire you?
Or was it the insurance company?" Confronted, I told her
the whole improbable tale, and I could tell she found it improbable.
I could also tell that she wasn't about to give up
anything on her friend, that she was there to protect Lisa. But
from whom? A bumbling high school English teacher with
a bad conscience? Still, she sat, and there had to be a reason
for that especially after she found out I was no threat to Lisa,
but when I asked for information, she gave me the party line:
Lisa was a brilliant actor. Like any true artist, she challenged
people, made them think about the line between reality and
illusion, the nature of artifice, everything they believed. She
was an intuitive actor who was always practicing her craft.
She was a minimalist who never appeared to be acting. She
was a genius who had little time for fools, who didn't mind
being misunderstood or making enemies.

"Did that cause problems with her career?" I asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Is that why they dropped her from
Gangbusters
before
they took it to New York?"

"They begged her to go to New York," Rosalie said. "
She
was the one who said no."

"Why in the world would she do that? Wasn't it, like, her
big break?"

"Big breaks only matter if you are looking for one. She
was looking for a character. When
Gangbusters
opened in the
back of a bar on Lincoln Avenue, she had a minor role. In the
next two years, they rewrote the whole thing around Lucy
Fantisimo. She became the lead. Her character took over the
play. That was all Lisa. By the time they were ready to go to
New York, the thing had been compromised to death, bastardized.
One thing about Lisa, she was not a compromiser.
She was an absolutist. She said no. She was bored with the
part. She'd given everything to and gotten everything out of
Gangbusters
that she could. She'd moved on."

"Pardon me, but moved on to what? Waiting tables?"

"Let me tell you something," Rosalie bristled. "Lisa Kim
could find more dramatic possibilities in a four-hour shift
than some actors find in a career. But no, she was not just
waiting tables. She did an experimental film that was remarkable,
she did an Off-Off-play that was interesting, and
she wrote a play that Bruce Kaplan is thinking of producing
in the spring. Plus, she'd been cast in a big-time independent
film called
Dream Car
that was shot in New York last spring.
I think it's going to be huge. I think Lisa was about to get a lot
of recognition."

Unlike many doctors I've known who are well trained but
poorly educated, Rosalie Svigos had ideas, and I knew that I'd
found someone who could help me. But now she'd said her
piece, and she was looking at her watch. I needed to act quickly.
I said, "A few minutes before the accident, I saw a man get out
of Lisa's car. Do you know who that might have been?"

Now she was looking at me again, and sharply. "What did
he look like?" she asked.

"It was dark. My impression of him was that he was tall,
thin, and dark haired."

"Where was this?"

"On Green Bay Road in Glencoe."

"Glencoe?" she said to herself.
I took another shot. "At the time of the accident, Lisa was
high on heroin."

"My God," she said, "where'd you get that?"

"There was a private autopsy."

"Do you know what heroin does to you? It makes you
nod. It makes the world go away. It makes you feel nothing.
That was the last thing in the world that Lisa Kim would have
wanted. She wanted to feel everything. She was the most
alive person I ever met. Now if you told me cocaine—something
that would heighten sensation—I might believe you,
but . . . Lisa did not use heroin."

Rosalie got up to go. I couldn't think of a way to keep her.
To my surprise, she fished a business card out of the pocket
of her lab coat and put it on the table. "If you find out who
the man in the car was, I'd like to know." She hesitated, then
spoke again. "You don't find heroin in an autopsy," she said.
"You find opiates—the stuff heroin comes from—but morphine
comes from it, too, and codeine that's in some cough
medicines and in Tylenol 3. She could have taken Tylenol 3
for a toothache and tested positive or eaten a poppy-seed
bagel. Lisa was not using heroin."

I could have run Lydia over the next day, and not even seen
her. I know I had things on my mind, but I should have seen
her, anyway. It happened like this: I was driving and thinking.
I knew that I knew something about the man who got out
of Lisa Kim's car that night, but I did not know what it was.
Something. Could I have met him? Could I have recognized
him? I turned off the radio and let my mind drain. I was driving.
I needed to move in order to think. I had called Lydia to
ask if I could come by for some things. It was time that we
had some contact anyway, although actually I had hoped she
wouldn't be home; I thought the call might be enough. Besides,
I was really just looking for an excuse to be in motion.

Lydia was just leaving for a run, and I wondered momentarily
if her stretching exercises against her car, her expensive
New Balance running shoes and her Lycra outfit were meant
for me. I had always been the one who exercised, and she had
often teased me about being vain. We exchanged a few self-consciously
pleasant words like neighbors meeting in the
supermarket; then she took off and I went upstairs. I poked
around. I had forgotten what I had come for. I was thinking
of that night, trying to re-create it once again as I had with
Gene, but this time, slow it down one more click. I wanted to
capture a detail I had so far missed. Some detail. Any detail.

Absently I stacked some books and CDs, then put them
in a plastic bag. In my mind I was back in the school. I was
locking my classroom. What exactly did I say to Thompson?
I realized that I was closing a door right now, but it was the
apartment door. I realized that I was in a parallel situation at
the moment; I was going down a flight of stairs. I was getting
into my car. Perhaps I could physically re-create what happened.
Did I turn on the radio immediately? Did I leave it
off? I pulled through the alley and stopped at the next street.
I sat there idling; what had I been wrestling with that night?
Something. What in the world could it have been? I had my
foot on the brake; I checked my rearview mirror. Remember.
Remember. What had it been? Now there was someone
in front of my car. Someone was bobbing up and down.
She slapped my hood with the palm of her hand. "Hey!" she
yelled. It was Lydia. She was running in place. I hadn't even
seen her; how long had she been there? She came to my window.

"You okay?"

"Yeah."

"What are you doing? I couldn't get your attention."

"I was thinking. I was just thinking."

She slapped the hood again, waved, and ran off. I watched
her go. I hadn't seen her there. She'd been right in front of me,
and I hadn't seen her. I remembered then that there had been
a time in my life when all I wanted to do was look at her.

When Lydia had gone away that time early on for three
and a half weeks with another guy, I hadn't missed her at first,
and then I had, and then I had terribly. I lay awake in bed
wondering who she was fucking and how and when (right
now?) and where; I imagined it was a wry, long-legged copywriter
with tousled hair she'd once introduced me to at a
party. I tried not to call her at her office, and when I finally
did, our conversation was brief; she was busy, distracted, dismissive,
self-protective in her "none of your damn business"
mode. When she had finally come home, weary and wistful,
I was in love with her, or thought I was. At the very least,
I wanted her in a way that I had not before someone else
wanted her. It was the strongest feeling that I'd ever had for a
woman, and so I called it love, and perhaps it was. I needed
to remember that.

I went back to Carolyn's place and lay on my back on
the floor with my palms to the ground. My anxiety, which
seemed to bloom full after any contact with Lydia, was manifesting
itself in two ways: as something akin to vertigo and
as a form of agoraphobia. I was scared of my own height;
I felt too tall and conspicuous, though I am not very tall. I
wanted to be shorter, lower, smaller, flatter. I also wanted to
be alone. In crowded places I felt panic. Grocery stores with
their fluorescent lights were particularly bad. One day I left a
full grocery cart in the middle of an aisle and fled. The noise
in restaurants sometimes got inside my head. Twice I'd had
to make lame excuses and go out to my car to lie down across
the backseat for a while. Sometimes I held onto the table or
chair with both hands. I was afraid that I might just slowly
topple over or slide under the table. Another antidote to all
this madness was movement. Like a shark, if I kept moving,
I could feed and breathe and stay just ahead of my demons.