When Tom gets home, Jackie is waiting up for him. She’s upset and wants to talk. Tom sits down next to her in the bed, and holds her while she cries into his armpit.
“How could this have happened?” she asks.
“Seth was a very disturbed person,” says Tom.
“I know, I know. But it’s just … Was he? Really? And in our pool? Why in our pool?” she moans.
Tom pulls his arm away and swings his legs off his side of the bed.
Jackie kneels behind him and rubs his back. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry. It’s not your fault.”
Tom recoils. “I know it’s not my fault!” he snaps, and goes to brush his teeth.
Several days pass and Tom is deteriorating. He can’t sleep and on the rare occasions when he does drift off, Amelia is there, whispering something to him that he can’t decipher, coming to him in dreams and nightmares both.
And so, when he can no longer bear it, he knocks on the door of the Victorian. She is wearing a tight skirt, a silk blouse, and high heels—all of them black. Her straw-blond hair is tied up in the style of an earlier decade, and her eye makeup is heavy and dark. Dangling from her ears are two large turquoise-and-silver earrings. The weight of the jewelry stretches her pierced ears, making the holes look like tiny twin urethras.
“Tom?” she asks, without smiling. She is only vaguely surprised, as if she’d known he would come, but hadn’t expected him before noon.
“Hello, Amelia.”
“Come in,” she says, almost as an order, and pushes back the door.
She leads him into the parlor. There’s a Persian rug, a baroque sofa with matching armchairs, a sculpture of Buddha, Flemish-looking paintings, and African pottery. The coffee table appears to be covered in Turkish tiles.
“I see you’ve been doing some traveling,” Tom observes.
“Here and there.” Amelia gestures to one of the chairs. Tom sits, and she perches nervously on the center cushion of the sofa across from him. Couch and armchair, just like the old days.
Tom tries to find his practiced voice of authority—empathetic, but stern. “Amelia,” he begins.
She winces at the sound of her own name. “Marianne, please. I’m going by my middle name these days. I never did like Amelia, it sounds like the name of a rock.”
“All right, then. Marianne,” Tom continues, as if he’s talking to a child who insists on being treated like a grown-up. “I am not going to pretend that I’m not here for a reason.”
“I assumed as much,” she says. She takes out a cigarette.
“You smoke?” asks Tom accusingly.
As an answer, she lights her cigarette. “Look,” she says, “I knew Seth was seeing a therapist, but I didn’t know it was you, okay? I had to read it in the paper.”
It occurs to Tom that now that she’s gotten this out of the way, she expects him to console her with his professional opinion, You couldn’t have saved him, none of us could have, and all the rest. To her, he is still her doctor.
So he asks questions. He makes her comfortable and earns her trust as he would with any patient. This doesn’t take long. It seems that the minute he walked in the door her trust for him was renewed, on principle alone. He indicates that Seth told him about the nature of their relationship and invites her to talk about it. She is immediately forthcoming. So forthcoming, in fact, that Tom is taken aback. She tells him how it began, about the first time they had sex, about many times after that. She goes into great detail. She tells him how Seth was a virgin and how she made him into the lover she wanted.
With every detail she gives, Tom swallows his jealousy like a sword, one after another. He doesn’t know quite how to respond; it was her reckless honesty that had attracted him to her in the first place—her titillating descriptions of her sexual encounters, and her eventual shameless acknowledgment of the tension between them. It’s okay, she had said. I want it too.
Completely disarmed, Tom falls back on an old therapist standby. “Did you have reason to believe that Seth wanted to hurt himself?”
“No,” she answers unequivocally. “I’m still in shock. I know he was depressed and was seeing someone, but we talked about it and it seemed within the range of reason for a seventeen-year-old boy.”
“So you were comfortable with Seth being seventeen?”
“Yes, of course. I never asked him to be anything he wasn’t,” she says.
Tom is quiet, watching her. The old therapy trick, only she says nothing further. Unlike his patients, she is not bound to him for a full fifty minutes.
At this point, Amelia stands. She looks at Tom and waits for him to stand as well. “Look, Tom—”
“It’s okay,” he cuts her off. Whatever it is, he doesn’t want to hear it.
“You are just the picture of professionalism. That’s all,” says Amelia.
Tom doesn’t take this as a compliment. “I should go.”
Amelia nods, and sees him to the door.
“I am sorry for your loss,” Tom offers awkwardly.
“And I for yours,” says Amelia.
Tom asks if he can come back sometime, to continue the conversation.
Amelia hesitates. “As a friend maybe. I don’t need a therapist. Anymore.” She smiles gamely. He’s seen this look before. Tom wants to say something, but can’t. She closes the door.
Tom stands on her porch and surveys the neighborhood. Children are coming to and from the playground, running ahead of their mothers and babysitters who call out for them to wait when they near a corner.
Reluctantly, he starts down the steps. A young man is mowing the lawn next door. He stops and waves to Tom, but Tom pretends not to see.
Rather than walking by the playground, Tom turns right and takes a shortcut down what the kids of Narbrook Circle call the “secret path” but what is really a short, wood-chipped foot trail between yards that isn’t a secret at all.
From across the stream, Tom can see a black town car parked in front of his house. He hesitates, and contemplates turning around. But where would he go?
Tom crosses the little cement footbridge and starts up the hill to his house. As he draws near, he sees Jackie standing on the front porch. She has the same terrified look on her face she’s worn since she found Seth. All she wants to do is close the pool; drain it, cover it, and forget it all ever happened. The detective on the case won’t let her; he says that for now, it’s still a crime scene. For as long as she looks out the windows of their house and sees the clear blue water collecting leaves and pine needles, as long as the caution tape stays strung around the fence line, she will continue to turn that terrified look on Tom. What pains him most about the look isn’t that she’s afraid he’s capable of doing something awful, she’s afraid he’s incapable of doing something good.
“Hello, sweetheart,” he says when she’s within earshot.
“Did you enjoy your walk?” she asks, softening a little.
“Yes, although I probably should’ve driven out to Wissahickon and gotten some real exercise.”
“Well, anyway,” says Jackie, “it’s good you didn’t. Detective Hendricks is here to see you. He’s waiting inside.”
Jackie sets them up in the living room, each with a cup of coffee.
“Dr. Middleton,” begins the detective. He pauses, presumably waiting for Tom to say, No, call me Tom, but Tom keeps quiet. The detective continues, “I apologize if I am repeating myself, but were you prescribing Seth any medication?”
“No,” answers Tom, “you have his file.”
“Yes, it’s true, we do have his file. It’s been very helpful, thank you. But what I’m wondering, Dr. Middleton,” the detective leans forward on the floral couch cushions, “is if there is any information that didn’t make it into Seth’s file.”
Tom repeats the spiel he gave at the station. “I don’t take notes while I talk to patients. It unnerves them. After they leave, I write down all the important aspects of our conversation. It is not a transcript. Th
ey’re meeting minutes, more like. We even recorded our moves when we played chess, sometimes. You can have those too, if you want.”
“No, that won’t be necessary,” says the detective. “See, the autopsy results have come back, and there was a large amount of Xanax in his system. Did Seth suffer from anxiety?”
“Sure, but not enough for me to give him anything for it, in my professional opinion.”
“Any idea where he might have gotten it?”
“My first guess would be from his mother. I’d be willing to bet she’s had a prescription at some point. Having a depressed son causes a lot of anxiety. If not from her, a friend’s parent, maybe.”
“Thank you, Dr. Middleton,” says the detective.
“Of course,” says Tom, “if there is anything else I can do …” He stands up.
“Actually, there is one other thing,” says Detective Hendricks. He waits for Tom to sit back down. “Now, this is sensitive information, and I’d appreciate it if you kept it confidential.”
Tom agrees.
“You see, in the autopsy, there was no water found in Seth’s lungs.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yes. There’s a thing called ‘dry drowning’ when a victim doesn’t inhale any water and eventually dies of cardiac arrest. One sees this in a very small percent of drowning victims. But normally, even if someone wants to die, there is panic before it actually happens, and they open their mouth and, well, you know the rest. So in the case of a suicide, if someone were to ‘dry drown,’ so to speak, they would have to be, excuse me for saying this, very determined.” Detective Hendricks looks Tom in the eyes, but only to prove a point. He doesn’t invite Tom to respond. “Now, in your notes, there is almost nothing about Seth being suicidal, am I right?”
“That is correct, detective,” Tom answers. “I didn’t perceive it to be a concern. However, Seth was extremely intelligent. And if he was truly determined to end his own life, then he would have deliberately kept that from me.”
“I suppose so,” says Detective Hendricks. This time, the detective stands up first.
Tom puts out his hand, and the man holds on for too long.
As soon as the detective’s car is out of sight, Tom goes down to the unfinished side of the basement. He reaches his hand behind a shelf and pulls out several sheets of white paper. He kept his notes on “Marianne” separate from all else he and Seth talked about. The moral ambiguity of his decision to keep it confidential, and the unique nature of the affair—well, that’s what he’d done anyway. It’s no crime to keep something on a separate sheet of paper.
The night that Seth died, before the police arrived, he’d gone downstairs and removed those pages. He did it almost without thinking—it was a reflex of self-preservation—and now, here they were, stuffed behind a dirty tool shelf.
Tom stands there, reads through every word, and then burns them in the utility sink with a kitchen match.
The answer he gave Detective Hendricks is technically sound. If Seth had taken a lot of Xanax it might have helped him to stay calm through the experience, more so if he’d also been drinking. He might have even passed out and fallen in. Tom should’ve said that.
It’s a decent theory, but he doesn’t want it to be true. As soon as he admits that to himself, the dam breaks, his instincts rush in, and suddenly he is swimming in them. He must see Amelia.
Tom leaves the house out the back door, the one reserved for his patients, and walks directly to Amelia’s house. He resists the urge to run so as not to attract attention.
When Amelia answers the door she is crying. She has changed into a sleeveless red dress that grazes the tops of her knees, paired with the same turquoise earrings, as if she had planned to go out.
Tom touches her face, sensitively, to see if she’ll accept his comfort. She doesn’t pull away.
He steps inside, draws her to him, and they are kissing. He’s surprised by how much he wants her; his desire has its own inertia, like a feverish fit or a drunken tirade. Amelia wants it too, he can tell, but in her own way.
“Don’t stop,” she says.
He holds her tighter. She doesn’t want him to be anything he isn’t, he reminds himself.
After, Tom is getting dressed. There is no postcoital relief. Neither wants to hold the other. Tom goes into the bathroom to wash up and checks her medicine cabinet. Xanax.
In that bazaar of a living room, Amelia is lying on the couch in her bra and panties, smoking a cigarette. Tom looks down at her.
“Did you do it?” asks Tom.
“Do what?” she says.
“Kill him. Fuck him then kill him.”
“No I didn’t kill him. What the hell’s wrong with you?” Amelia stands up and starts collecting her clothes. She touches one ear, feels her earring, and then touches the other and finds a bare lobe.
“Wrong with me?” Tom yells, “Nothing’s wrong with me! How am I supposed to know what you’re capable of?”
“Listen to me,” Amelia says in a tone that indicates that actually, she is capable of a lot. “Seth killed himself. He went to you for help and you didn’t help him. Why the hell else do you think he ended up in your pool, of all places? He wanted you to know you failed him.” Amelia sits down on the sofa, looking at her dress crumpled in her lap. “You know,” she turns to look at Tom, “people always say that this sort of thing isn’t anyone’s fault. But you and I both know the truth. It’s always someone’s fault. Every single time.” At this, Amelia straightens. “Get out of my house.”
Tom is standing over her. He looks at her face, expecting to find either vengeance or guilt, but she is expressionless. He has never known her to lie.
He turns to leave, and in the foyer by the door he sees Amelia’s other turquoise earring lodged in the carpet. He picks it up, slips it in his pocket, and slams the door behind him.
The following day, Detective Hendricks tells the Middletons they’re going to drain the pool. Detective Hendricks comes to supervise a crew of crime scene investigators dressed in navy-blue jumpsuits and latex gloves. It takes half a day for the water to drain, siphoned out onto the street and running down the hill into the gutter. Tom and Jackie watch from the deck as the men sweep the cement and unclog the filter. The last remnants of summer combed together with the early signs of fall give the yard the look of an unvisited cemetery, the diving board marking the head of its only grave. Tom squeezes Jackie’s hand, knowing that after today he will have to deny almost everything, and knowing, too, that she will believe him. Satisfied, Tom watches a young man, not much older than Seth, reach his hand into the drain at the bottom of the pool and pull out a piece of jewelry that catches the light, ever so slightly, through its scummy exterior.
PART III
THE FAKER CITY
FISHTOWN ODYSSEY
BY MEREDITH ANTHONY
Fishtown
Megan stepped out of her fashionable red door in the trendiest part of Fishtown, drinking in the cold, clear afternoon air. She stood on the stoop, locked the door behind her, and turned, putting her keys in her handbag, juggling her Kenneth Cole overnight bag. She walked down the first of the three steps that led to the sidewalk and stepped on a woman’s hand.
Megan shrieked. The woman shrieked. Megan stumbled and, for a moment, thought she might fall.
“I’m so sorry. So sorry,” she said, apologizing reflexively as she righted herself. Luckily, she was wearing snow boots instead of her strappy high heels or she would certainly have fallen. And why she should apologize she didn’t know, since the woman, old and dirty, had no business lounging on Megan’s well-kept steps. She shrugged to settle the Michael Kors cashmere coat on her shoulders, pulling it together against the cold.
“That dress is too young for you. You’re not that young,” snarled the old woman malevolently, rubbing her injured hand, having caught a glimpse beneath the coat of the bronze metallic sheath that Megan had bought for an extravagant price the week before.
“Ex
cuse me,” Meg muttered, losing all sympathy with the old crone. “I’m in a hurry.” She went down the rest of the steps, giving the woman a wide berth.
“You won’t be the prettiest one there. Or the youngest,” the old woman called after her.
“Jesus,” Meg breathed. “What a bitch.” But she shook off her irritation. Nothing was going to spoil her mood. Today was the high point of her year.
The Daggers’ New Year’s Eve extravaganza was, for Megan, the party to end all parties. First, it was a truly great, well-planned gathering. Drinks at seven, buffet dinner at nine, desserts and coffee at eleven for a little jolt of caffeine and sugar, watch the ball drop at midnight, karaoke and drunken dancing after that. The party ended with a hot breakfast the next morning, where bedraggled women avoided meeting the eyes of the friends whose husbands they had made out with in dark corners of the enormous suburban house. Second, it was a social coup to be invited to the best New Year’s eve party on the Main Line. Most important, for Megan, it was a taste of the life she wanted, the life she was working toward, the life she was destined for.
Megan had prepared like an athlete, sleeping in this morning, eating a big lunch, laying down a base. When she jumped on the subway at Girard Avenue and Front Street bound for 30th Street Station and then the Paoli local to Bryn Mawr, she was ready. It was only a one-hour trip but it was a journey to another world.
Megan had inherited her family’s home in Fishtown, a former blue-collar ghetto that was being steadily gentrified. She was renovating it, bit by bit, to improve its value, watching the real-estate market for the right time to sell. Many young professionals would love to live in increasingly fashionable Fishtown, but Megan dreamed only of an address on the Main Line.
Megan was one of Bess Dagger’s best friends. Bess, having spent the day in Bryn Mawr helping her sister Anise prepare, picked Megan up at the Bryn Mawr train station. As they drove through the lovely town to Anise’s large, comfortable house, Bess chattered away about the guest list. Both Anise’s daughters were home. Glamourous Carrie had brought home a girl, a classmate from Yale, while her slightly mousy sister Celia had brought home a boyfriend from law school. Anise wasn’t sure which of her girls she was more worried about. Celia’s boyfriend from Georgetown Law was tall and good looking. Her sister Carrie had already wondered aloud why Celia could get such a prize and she couldn’t. Of course, Celia wasn’t unattractive. She was a Dagger, after all. Beauty was an acknowledged family trait among the Daggers. Beauty and loyalty, Meg mused, really defined them.
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