Dead Last

by Amanda Lamb

  “Are you okay, kid?” Kojak asked, bringing me back to the present moment, to the sticky bench on a city street corner.

  He was now perched at the far end of the bench, looking at me with concern. In his hand was a bottle of water he must have gotten from a street vendor, although I didn’t remember him leaving.

  “Here, have some water. Do you want me to call someone?”

  “No, I’m good.” I straightened and reached for the bottle of water. I still didn’t have a person to call. Adam was my person. Sure, I had some great girlfriends, but I had never been one to rely on my friends the way I relied on Adam. Maybe I was just too proud. I wanted to be that pillar of strength for others in crisis, but never allowed anyone to be that for me. I was paying for that distance I created between myself and other people now that Adam was gone, and my kids were way too young to come to my rescue. Maybe that’s why I understood Suzanne so well, her need to share her crisis with a perfect stranger because she had no one else to call, just like me.

  I opened the bottle of water, tipped it back, drinking the whole thing in a few gulps. When I was finished, I wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand.

  “You have to help me get to the bottom of this. Promise me you will.”

  “I promise, kid. Now go in there and get your story. There’s a cat looking for her fifteen minutes of fame.”

  O

  Miranda was so confident that sometimes I didn’t know what planet she came from. I liked to think that maybe some of this came from me, but when I thought back to the insecure, skinny little girl I had been, I was sure Miranda had some errant strain of DNA from an extraterrestrial.

  It was impossible to believe that she and Blake had shared a womb with their divergent personalities. It was if they each got one half of a shared brain. He got the sensitive side and she got the practical side.

  Unlike Blake, she preferred that everyone around her have a buck-up attitude, regardless of the situation. Empathy wasn’t her strong suit, but she did have a way of always making me feel less sorry for myself with her frank take on life.

  So it was no surprise to me when I came home that night feeling down about my silly cat story, about Suzanne’s dire situation, and about my inability to be a good single parent, that she put me in my place.

  “Help me prop this up.” She gingerly raised a clay version of Big Ben off the kitchen counter, into an upright position.

  “Bye, Mrs. Arnette. See you tomorrow,” our babysitter, Candace, called out from the front hall.

  Candace was my savior. She was a local college student who had been with us for two years. I could not have handled Adam’s illness without her. Honestly, the summer he was dying, I had no idea where my children were at any given moment. I just knew they were with her and that they were safe.

  “Mom, you promised you would help me with this project, so help,” Miranda said, with the unbridled indignity of a fifty-year-old woman who didn’t care what she sounded like.

  “You’re right, sweetie. I did promise. And I’m sorry I’ve been so distracted lately.”

  I held up my side of Big Ben while she worked on the clock face with a delicate plastic carving tool. For a moment, I forgot about kitty art, Suzanne’s mess, and my parental shortcomings. I was just a mom propping up a little bit of history etched in clay.

  8

  Reckoning

  After I met with Kojak, I had a dream that I was missing something important. It came from something he said, something that reminded me of a piece of information I desperately wanted to remember, but in the fog of early waking it vanished. I was like a scuba diver returning reluctantly to the surface, watching a shell slip from my hands and swirl down into the deep, dark recesses of the ocean. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t reach out and grab it. It was something about Tanner Pope. But what was it? I wrestled with it. Maybe if I stayed in bed just a little bit longer, I would remember.

  “Mom,” Miranda yelled, in an accusatory tone, a tone that seemed to have gained more of an edge every day since Adam’s death. I was back at the surface of the water.

  “Where is my white shirt? I need to wear it today. I have nothing to wear if you don’t find it.”

  “Laundry basket, foot of my bed,” I managed to blurt out, my mouth still partially muffled by my pillow. I didn’t open my eyes as she stomped into my room. I could hear her emptying the laundry onto the floor, the zippers and buttons clanking against the hardwoods. When she perceived she had been wronged, she acted out. The psychologist I hired to work with the kids after Adam’s death, Dr. Jacobs, said the reason she did these things was because she didn’t have the words or the coping skills at her age to deal with the anger she felt about Adam dying. So she expressed it in other ways, like dumping clean laundry all over my bedroom floor.

  Dr. Kincaid had been such a help to me after my mother died that I figured a little therapy might help the twins as well. Before Belle hired Dr. Kincaid, she had me meet with a local priest. He promised my grandmother, after only two meetings with me, that I would be fine because I was too young to remember anything. But he was wrong. I had night terrors and unreasonable phobias. Thunderstorms terrified me; I was sure lightning was going to strike the house at any moment and start a huge fire. I couldn’t separate the fiction in movies from reality, refusing to go into the swimming pool for an entire summer after I saw a rerun of Jaws. After seeing an old documentary about Charles Manson on one of those true crime channels, I was convinced every night that he was going to climb into my window and kill me, even though I knew he was in prison. Eventually Belle realized the priest was wrong, and decided to seek professional help for me.

  “Mommy,” Blake’s sweet voice called. “I can’t open the syrup. Can you help me?”

  I had no option but to get out of bed. I gingerly placed each foot, one at a time, on the floor next to my bed. Running had taken its toll on my knees and hips, and I never stretched enough. Every morning was like this, but as soon as I got moving, I was fine. There was no time to dwell on pain. There was a white shirt to locate, syrup to open, and a carpool to drive.

  “See that blue spot.” Miranda shoved the sleeve of her recovered white shirt into my face to show me a microscopic speck of blue on the sleeve. “It’s ruined. I can’t wear it. I need you to get me a new white shirt right now!”

  This was the way so many mornings started with Miranda. Dr. Jacobs told me to be calm in these situations and try to explain to her logically why her demands were unreasonable. I was so tired. I didn’t have any energy to fight with a ten-year-old. Part of me considered running to Target to get Miranda another shirt to end her temper tantrum. But I could hear Dr. Jacobs voice inside my head. Is that really the right thing to do, Maddie? To give in? What do you think will happen if you keep giving in to her? Will she learn anything from always getting her way?

  I convinced her to wear another shirt. Bribing her with the promise of getting her ears pierced. I was pretty sure Dr. Jacobs wouldn’t approve of this tactic either, but sometimes parents had to do unsavory things on the battlefield to survive.

  It was something Miranda had been begging me to do for months. For some reason I had set the arbitrary age of thirteen as a proper time to pierce her ears, probably because that’s when Belle let me get mine pierced.

  “Macie Barnes had her ears pierced as a baby,” Miranda had said. She had an endless list of friends who’d already had their ears pierced, and constantly invoked them during our ongoing argument on the topic.

  I also managed to calm Blake by lightly toasting his waffle and drowning it in syrup. I supervised the making of their beds, threw in a load of laundry, and braided Miranda’s thick hair. I picked up dirty pajamas, wet towels, empty water bottles, and shepherded dirty breakfast dishes from the sink into the dishwasher. In between slathering peanut butter and jelly on wheat bread with the crusts cut off, and cutting green apples into thin slices and placing them into two plastic baggies, I remembered what I had lost in my dream.<
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  Five years before his death, Adam ripped the extensor tendon in his middle finger on his right hand. I recalled the moment vividly. We were getting ready for church on Christmas Eve, and he was rushing to force his foot into a tight leather loafer. He stuck his finger into the heel of the shoe to stretch it, and then shoved his foot inside, forgetting to remove his finger. When he went to pull his finger out, the tendon snapped. He cried out in pain and yelled for me, two things he had never done in all the years I knew him. I rushed into the bedroom and he held his hand up for me to see it. The tip of his finger looked disconnected from the rest of the finger. It dangled like a fishing line weighed down by a heavy lure. It made me nauseous. I tried to remain calm and act like it was no big deal.

  I wrapped it in a towel with a bag of ice, and we rushed to the emergency room, assuming it was broken. A nurse X-rayed it, and then the doctor came into our little curtained area, where Adam was lying on a gurney, to give us the bad news.

  “It’s much worse than a break,” said the weary, young doctor, who had drawn the short stick on Christmas Eve. He looked down at his clipboard and flipped the page up, shaking his head at whatever was written there. “It’s a ripped tendon. A tendon can take a very long time to heal. They’re very tricky. For now we’ll put a splint on it and hope for the best. If you move it at all, it won’t heal. That’s the tricky part. You’ll need to see an orthopedic doctor after the holidays. Sorry I don’t have better news for you.”

  It wasn’t life-threatening. It was more of an inconvenience. But it was our inconvenience. The young doctor explained that it was a common injury, one that usually occurred when people were performing the most mundane tasks, like tucking sheets beneath the corners of a heavy mattress. Who knew?

  What followed were several unsuccessful months of Adam’s finger encased in a splint. This was then followed by minor outpatient surgery, in which a pin was inserted into his finger to keep the broken tendon straight so it would heal itself. Eventually Adam’s body rejected the pin and his finger became infected. Every time he lightly tapped something with it, he told me it sent a shiver of pain down his spine so severe he couldn’t speak for a few seconds. When he couldn’t stand the pain anymore, they took the pin out, and thankfully his finger was healed by then.

  The whole situation was annoying to Adam, especially when it came to simple things he couldn’t do, like type, button his shirt, and fasten his belt. But looking back on it and comparing it to his battle with brain cancer, it was really nothing at all. It barely registered on my radar of life events, which is probably why I had forgotten about it.

  Last night, sitting under the dim light of the street lamp, Kojak had told me something that jogged my memory. It was before I had my panic attack. When Adam tore his tendon, he was treated by a handsome, affable orthopedic doctor named TJ Pope a.k.a. Tanner Pope.

  O

  I didn’t know what it meant. Could it be a coincidence that I knew Suzanne’s husband? What really confused me was that my vague recollection of the man was positive. He had good energy, from what I remembered. He was open and friendly, not someone who appeared to be hiding a dark side. This memory didn’t jive with him being an abuser, an adulterer, or a killer. These weren’t things I was looking for when I met him. I just wanted Adam’s finger to heal so he could zip his pants, type an email, and unscrew the cap of a water bottle.

  “You have no idea how many things you use your middle finger for until you don’t have it,” Adam told me one day, as he repeatedly failed to buckle his belt. I stopped what I was doing to help him, silently snickering, as I thought about what a lot of people used their middle finger for.

  I remember being annoyed as I threaded the two metal prongs into the holes and tugged the leather strap through the belt loops on his pants. Now I longed to do something that simple for him again, to buckle his belt or put toothpaste on his toothbrush.

  I recalled talking to Adam about Dr. Pope, about how much we liked him and thought he really knew his stuff, about how lucky we felt to have picked him from a quick Internet search of doctors with available appointments just after Christmas. I struggled to picture Tanner’s face now. My memory was fuzzy, but the more I concentrated, an image came to me slowly. His face was angular, youthful, and he sported a well-trimmed, light brown goatee. He looked like a hipster with his heavy tortoise shell glasses and tight pants that tapered at his ankles. I recalled a pastel tie with a small black-checked pattern peeking out of the top of his jacket.

  I recalled that he listened with undivided attention to Adam’s concerns about not healing quickly enough and how this seemingly small injury had complicated his life so much. He didn’t act rushed, like he had to get to the next patient. He put us at ease with his calm demeanor and supportive words. This Tanner Pope, the one that I now remembered, was not at all the man Suzanne had described.

  I decided it was time to finally unburden myself with Suzanne, to tell her what I knew about Maria, and ask her more about Tanner. I wouldn’t confess right away that I knew him, but I would feel her out and try to figure out once and for all what was really going on.

  I worked all this out in my head while I was doing yoga on a mat in my living room, after I had sent the kids off to school, in the carpool. I knew thinking through complex issues was the opposite of what you were supposed to be doing while engaged in a yoga practice. Yoga was about clearing your brain, not filling it. Yet for me, meditation wasn’t about the absence of thoughts, but about having the time and space to unpack them.

  I was in child’s pose when the phone rang. I looked up and reached for it. The phone was just within arm’s reach in front of my yoga mat, not exactly a recipe for relaxation. I could see Janie’s picture and number flash on the screen. In the photograph she was dressed like the Cat in the Hat from some distant Halloween party complete with black whiskers drawn on her face. In her paw was a beer bottle, and she was winking at the camera. I didn’t understand iPhone technology enough to figure out why this was the profile picture chosen for her on my phone, nor did I know how to change it.

  “Maddie,” Janie said, breathlessly. It reminded me of the many times she had called me about breaking news in the past—a missing person, human bones in a dumpster, a murder weapon recovered from a pond, but I had a feeling this time she was calling about another “Amazing Tale.”

  “Hey, Janie. What’s up?” I moved out of my child’s pose into giraffe, sitting back on my heels and arching my back with my left hand on one heel while I used my right hand to put the phone on speaker and set it on the coffee table next to me.

  “Got a great story for you. This lady, Lucinda Bark, she works at a grocery store on the edge of town, Food Stop, and she’s been feeding these ducks. So they basically set up residence on a grassy spot, a little island, in this super-busy shopping center. The owner of the shopping center is trying to have them removed, but this chick, pardon the pun, she started a petition to protect them. Now everyone is feeding them, all the customers. They even built a little habitat for them with a tiny pond, a baby pool. They sent me a picture. It’s super-cute. People are going to love this story.”

  “Wow, that’s something,” I deadpanned as I felt my prima facia stretching in my feet like a rubber band about to snap.

  “And here’s the best part. They cross the lane of traffic all the time, holding up cars. So Bark, the grocery store lady, had a local artist put up a sign that says, Duck Crossing. His name is Larry Boone. He and Lucinda are willing to go on camera. Best time to go is when the shopping center is busiest, maybe around lunch. The owner is an LLC called Best Practice Properties. Jerome Salinger is listed as the primary person on the LLC. I’ve emailed the information to you. Just like old times—a controversy! But it’s perfect for you because it also includes animals. See how everything comes full circle?”

  I sat back down on my mat, with my legs crisscrossed. Without a conflict, most television news stories would not exist. Rarely in these situations was anyone
ever happy with the way a news story turned out. Dex always said that if both sides were mad at you after your story aired, then you did your job. By this standard, I was pretty good at my job.

  The truth was, I was so exhausted by the conflicts in the hard news stories I covered before my animal beat that I simply didn’t care anymore. The negativity had sucked me dry and it was no longer worth my energy. And yet here I was again sticking my foot into the middle of a heated dispute over ducks. I knew Janie would not take no for an answer. I waved my white flag in my head, like I had done with Miranda earlier that morning over the stained shirt, and agreed to do it.

  “Okay, I’ll meet Buster at the station around eleven o’clock.” I strained to get in twenty more seconds of Zen as I eased into a sleeping pigeon pose with my right leg bent awkwardly beneath me on the mat. Make peace with your edge. It was a mantra one of my yoga teachers repeated over and over. Unfortunately I was forced to make peace with my edge just about every day of my life on so many different levels. What if I just wanted to stop short of the edge? What would happen then? I was eager to find out.

  O

  Lucinda Bark was a beautiful African American woman with long braids and a slender neck that reminded me of a swan. She looked to be in her late thirties, but I couldn’t tell for sure. She had a youthful aura about her, but also a look of despair in her magnetic coffee eyes.

  She greeted me at the door of the grocery store, in her green apron with the store’s logo on it in large black block print. She wore it over a white flowing hippie dress that matched my pre-image of her as an animal activist. Even though it was a warm day, she wore tall brown suede lace-up boots. What this lovely creature was doing as a cashier in a grocery store, I had no idea.