Saving Alice (23 page)

It was too late, so I didn’t, but later that night while I made up the couch for bed, I finally placed Susan’s new guy: He was the man from the courthouse who’d pled guilty to stalking. I picked up the phone and dialed her number, but no answer. Next, I dialed the police, and they promised to follow up. But what could they do? I was operating on a hunch—no crime had yet been committed.

The next morning my stomach threatened to convulse everything I’d eaten in the last twenty-four hours. I sat at the edge of the couch and tried to reclaim my bearings. Memories of last night’s argument with Susan and Paul spun around in my brain. I tried calling Susan again, to no avail.

I attempted to stand, and the room shifted. I sat back down, frozen with inexplicable fear. An hour later I called Alycia and canceled our visit. I expected her to protest, but she didn’t skip a beat. “That’s okay,” she said cheerfully. “Next week?”

The rest of the day was spent coming to grips with my trading mistake. I had plenty of money left—much more than I’d started with—but I couldn’t shake the pervasive worry.

Sure enough, the following week, the market continued to sink. I tried soothing myself with the usual rationalizations: I wasn’t the only one who’d lost money. I was already out, thanks to the miracle of automatic stops. At least I’d done
that
right, although I had yet to access my account to view the damage firsthand. I simply needed time to clear my head, that’s all.

The next Saturday morning, the phone rang. I pried my eyes open and looked up at the digital clock. The numbers were fuzzy. By squinting I could barely make out something elevenish. What day was it anyway?

Saturday?

I answered the phone and my heart was pounding. “Hi, sweetie.”

“Coming, Dad?”

I took a breath, cleared my throat, and put it together. “Sorry, honey, but … I overslept.”

“Are you sick?” she asked, sounding concerned.

“No, I’m fine.”

Her voice was crisper now. “So … you’re not coming?”

“I’ll be there in a few minutes,” I said.

“Okay,” she said and hung up.

I dressed, tossed on a baseball cap, and headed out the door. The winter wind stung my eyes, but the rest of my body felt hot and feverish. When I arrived, Alycia greeted me as if nothing had happened.

“I like the hat,” she said, getting in the car. “You’re a grungerabbit today.”

We stopped by a burger joint, and then took a short drive east. She talked nonstop, catching me up on the previous two weeks. Neither of us mentioned the divorce or our last discussion, but despite her chatty nature, I detected some reservation in her manner. Unspoken between us lurked the suspicion that the past was starting all over again.

When I dropped her off, she wrinkled her nose playfully. “Take a shower!”

I laughed, but a serious expression covered her cherubic face, and then her eyes turned triumphant. “I forgot to tell you. I finally figured it out, Dad.”

I frowned. “Figured what out?”

“Why Alice went back to her car.”

I grinned. “You’re kidding. I thought you’d forgotten all about that.”

“I had, but last week it just came to me. Like, out of nowhere. I told Mom, and she didn’t completely fess up, but she came close.”

“So … what was it?” I asked, playing along. If Donna knew, that would mean she’d lied to me.

Alycia’s smile turned mischievous. “It’s my turn to keep a secret.”

“Oh brother.”

“But at least,
I
give clues,” she said. “It’s in something Mom forgot at the house.”

I was confused.
At the house?

“She wants it back too.” Alycia opened the door. “So … will I see you next week?”

I smiled at her determination to pique my curiosity. “Of course.”

She nodded as if it were a done deal, then headed up the sidewalk.

I called her name, and she turned. I gestured for her to come back, and she did. When she reached the car door, I sighed. “I never apologized, Alycia.”

She smiled graciously. “I forgive you, Dad. Okay? I don’t expect you to be perfect.”

“Actually … I was talking about the divorce.”

She shrugged. “So was I.”

When she reached the door, she turned back and waved again. She blew me a kiss, and a shudder passed through me. It reminded me of Alice’s last gesture to me. I blew her a kiss back, then headed home, and gave no further thought to her little clue.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY - FIVE

I
spent nearly the entire Sunday at Joe’s watching ESPN, eating lunch and then dinner without ever budging from my spot. I kept my back to the door, expecting Paul to walk in as if nothing had happened, wondering if he’d been too drunk to remember our last interchange. Any minute, he would poke my shoulder.
Dude, you got started without me!

I looked for Susan as well, but she didn’t show. Yesterday, I had called her apartment at least five times. By now I figured she’d simply had enough of my interfering.

About eight o’clock, my cell phone buzzed. I didn’t recognize the number and hesitated before answering.

“Stephen?” An older woman’s voice, ragged and desperate.

“Yes?” I answered, and then placed the voice: Clare Thompson, Paul’s mother.

Her voice broke, and I heard the soft clearing of her throat. “Paul’s been taken to the hospital.”

My eyes darted to the empty seat.

“Just come,” she said. “Please come quickly.”

I arrived at St. Luke’s Hospital ten minutes later, and after a moment of indecision and frantic sign reading, ended up in the pediatric ward. The nurses aimed me in the opposite direction toward the emergency room. There I found Mrs. Thompson standing alone in the waiting room, peering outside through the foggy glass windows. She was shaking. When she turned to me, her face was pale, eyes red.

“He was in an accident,” she said, gesturing toward a closed door. Moments later a nurse came rushing out the door, and in the temporary gap, I saw several blue-green coats leaning over a helpless form.

A shudder of dread passed through me. I grabbed Clare’s shoulder and pulled her to me, and whispered what I hoped was true. “He’s in good hands. He’ll be fine.”

She broke down and wept on my shoulder. “They called me at home,” she cried, her voice hitching. “I guess he hit a parked car.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “He’d been…”

She couldn’t finish.

I squeezed her tighter, leading her away from the door, back to the waiting room.

“He’ll be fine,” I assured her again.

After further minutes of tortured waiting, the doctor came out with a poorly composed poker face. He stood in front of us, and Clare looked up at him hopefully.

“He’s stable for the moment…”

Clare nodded, her face suddenly optimistic.

“But he’s showing extremely erratic brain activity…”

Clare put her hand to her mouth.

“We’re going to continue to monitor him, but…”

“Will he… ?” Clare couldn’t finish.

“We don’t know,” the doctor said. He smiled apologetically, then slipped away. Once again, I hugged Clare tightly as she burst into tears.

“You were his only friend, Stephen,” she cried into my shoulder, as if he were already gone.

I didn’t arrive home until early next morning. Clare’s friends had come quickly following the doctor’s urging. Most of them were from her church; others were family members who lived in surrounding rural communities, people I might have met if Paul were a different sort. They scrutinized me carefully, as if suspecting my association with Paul had somehow contributed to this tragedy.

Eventually, we had been allowed to enter the room, where Paul, scratched and bandaged beyond recognition, was attached to an assortment of machines and tubes. The irregular brain wave on the monitor confirmed the doctor’s grim diagnosis. I sat in a chair for hours, surrounded by the usual hospital fare: the obligatory crucifix over the bed. The required pastel scenic painting. The sterile smell of disinfectant, like a thousand Band-Aids. The IV pole. Oxygen tubes. The heart monitor.

Donna called early evening to offer her sympathy. I did my best to explain what happened, but she seemed more concerned with my own personal state.

“You tried to get him to quit, didn’t you?”

I wasn’t up for guilt alleviation. “Not hard enough.”

That evening, I finally reached Susan on her cell phone. She hadn’t heard and became immediately distraught. “Is Paul going to die?”

I wanted to tell her what I believed, that if he didn’t die now, someday we might wish he had. The more we talked, the more dis- tressed she seemed.

“I’ve been trying to reach you,” I said. “You okay?”

She ignored my question. “Which room?”

I told her.

“I’ll meet you there tomorrow,” she said, hanging up.

The next day, Tuesday, I went to the hospital early and found Clare lying on a small couch in the waiting room. I went to peek into Paul’s room, then heard her ragged voice behind me, “No word, Stephen.”

I sat down with her for a while and once again offered my assistance, but she declined. “I’ve got friends staying with me.”

Midmorning, I went to work. When I arrived at the office, I realized I hadn’t even told Larry. He responded with exaggerated shock, his demeanor initially apologetic. But within minutes, he was preoccupied again.

It was one o’clock in the afternoon when Judy, one of Clare’s friends, called me—at the office. The doctors couldn’t agree as to the degree of Paul’s brain activity. Most tests indicated significant and permanent damage, so a follow-up CT scan had been scheduled.

After work I stopped by the hospital again, and once more waited for several hours in the outer room with Clare. Susan showed mid- evening, and the reason for her earlier avoidance was obvious. Her face was a mask of bruises, and a bandage was over her nose.

“Oh, Susan,” I whispered, reaching for her. Her eyes scrunched together, and she seemed to fight the tears but finally gave in. She wept in my arms, whispering, “You were right, you were right.”

I sat her down, and she started from the beginning. At some point, Mr. Right had transformed into Mr. Hyde. What had begun as a silly argument inexplicably transitioned into a fight, and then Mr. Hyde slapped her around, breaking her nose in the process. Frightened for her life, Susan had finally bolted out the front door.

“Did you call the cops?” I asked—a silly question.

She nodded, then shrugged. “They picked him up this morning.”

Together we crept to the edge of Paul’s room. Looking in through the glass, Susan began weeping again. “He looks so peaceful,” she cried, burying her face in my shoulder. I knew what she meant. Under normal circumstances, neither of us would have described Paul as a peaceful person.

Later I followed her home in my car. She stood at my car window and thanked me. I watched her walk up the steps to her house, insert the key, wave once more, and slip inside.

I sat there for a moment longer, suddenly struck by the foolishness of our lives, and if it hadn’t been so tragic, it would have been ironically funny. It’s almost as if the three of us, Susan, Paul and myself, had been cursed somehow, bound and determined to play out a record that had been broken in childhood.

Snap out of it,
Larry would have said ironically, unaware of his own chains to the past. Larry simply plodded along, determined to channel another groove.

I dismissed my pointless conjecture and headed home.

On Wednesday, I went to the office early and received a phone call. While I didn’t recognize the ID, I picked up anyway. I wasn’t in the mood to be yelled at by a former disgruntled customer, but in the glare of recent events, it didn’t seem so daunting anymore. The man identified himself as my online broker, and the room went blurry the moment he spoke. “Do you want to meet your margin call?”

Margin call?

“There must be some mistake,” I said. “What is the value of my account?”

“We’re at five thousand,” he said.

Five thousand?
“You must have the wrong party.”

“Are you Stephen Whitaker?”

The room seemed to spin. “Don’t understand…”

The voice on the phone began the explanation, but his words barely registered.

“But … I set a stop … didn’t I?”

I heard the distant clicking on a keyboard. “We have no record of a stop-loss order.”

Impossible,
I thought. Without a stop, my entire account would have followed the market’s recent decline. A three-percent market drop in itself was nothing, but magnified by the leverage of my account, it was enormous. Not only would I have lost my profit, but I would have lost nearly every cent of my credit-line money. I was worse than broke. I was in debt with nothing to show for it.

Unable to catch my breath, I stammered into the phone, “Please close my position.”

When I hung up, the room began to spin.
How could I possibly have forgotten?

Moments later, without thinking, without pausing to consider the consequences, I picked up the phone and called Donna. Sally answered on the third ring.

“I need to talk to my wife.” I stopped. “I mean, uh…”

“Donna’s not here,” Sally said coldly.

“Will you … have her return my call?”

“Sure—”

“Never mind,” I replied as evenly as I could. “I’ll contact her later.”

I hung up. What was I doing? Calling my ex-wife for comfort? I turned off my own cell phone, removing the temptation, and sat there, allowing the reality to wash over me.

Maybe it’s simply a mistake,
I thought.
Maybe they lost my stop order
.

Of course they hadn’t. There was no mistake. In the moments of self-reproach that followed, the truth slipped into my consciousness, like a snake slithering through the weeds.

Had I
really
forgotten? Why had I been so anxious during the past weeks? The answer was obvious.
Traders are as successful as they want to be
.

My defeat had been inevitable long before I’d opened my first position, and now I was finished. There was no recovery. This was the end of the line. There wasn’t enough money to begin again. There wasn’t even enough equity to repay the debt. Only one option: bankruptcy, the selling off of every asset I owned, the final submission to my failure.