The dinner went pretty much the same way dinner went every week. But what happened at the end was one of those tiny moments that seem inconsequential but that end up changing your life.
After my mother finished interrogating the others, she turned back to me. It was obvious that my report on the portfolio was still bothering her.
“Timothy,” she said, “I am going to arrange for you to see Warren. I think he might be able to give you some guidance. At the very least, maybe he can teach you to have a little more respect and concern for your position in this family.”
“Mother, I don’t think Warren is going to have the time right—”
“You’ll take the plane to Omaha tomorrow morning. I think it’s best that you be out there so you’re available when he has a moment.”
I tried again. “Mother, this might not be the best time for me to leave the office. There’s a lot going on in the market right now. I need to be here—”
“You’re going.” The way she said it I knew there was no negotiating with her.
There was only one person who could veto her.
I looked to my father. He sometimes would intercede on money issues since he was the one who had made the bulk of it—in bowling alleys and strip malls and retirement homes. He had the Midas touch when it came to money, if in nothing else.
But today was not one of the days when he was willing to step in. When I looked at him, he just shrugged. “You might as well see what Buffett has to say. It can’t hurt.”
That’s how I ended up going to Omaha first thing Monday morning.
THE INVESTIGATION
VICTIMOLOGY
In the manual Practical Homicide Investigation, it states that victimology is one of the most significant factors in death investigation.
Victimology is “the collection and assessment of all significant information as it relates to the victim and his or her lifestyle” (Geberth, p. 21).
Basically, it boils down to a simple question: who was the victim, and what was going on in his or her life at and before the time of the event?
In the inquiry, every detail is relevant. You never know where you will find the meaning in the minutia that illuminates the whole.
Nora
What Happened After Tammy Left
After Tammy left, I got a burst of energy. I think it was Tammy’s prediction that I was going to be leaving. I don’t know if I believed her, but just the idea of leaving was enough to get me going. I spent the next few hours cleaning the house, scrubbing the black gook off the stove, wiping the food splatter out of the microwave, throwing out all the things in the fridge that were growing mold, vacuuming the huge dust balls that had gathered under tables and in the corners, and wiping the thick layer of dust off the TV and the hall table and the bookshelf.
I didn’t often get the urge to clean, but when I did, I loved the feeling of accomplishment. But this time, when I finished and looked around, instead of feeling satisfaction all I could think about was the fact that it was just going to get dirty again.
It all went downhill from there, and late that night I ended up sitting at the computer doing yet another Google search on the survival rates of patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which was the type of leukemia my mother had. It was a macabre activity, but I couldn’t seem to help it. No matter how often I looked, the survival rates didn’t get any better. For kids, the odds were pretty good: 85 percent survived. For adults it was an even fifty-fifty. I was always trying to find better numbers, as if some words on a screen could change the outcome of my mother’s disease.
I was so absorbed in the computer, I didn’t even notice when my mother came down the stairs behind me. I just heard her voice say, “Honey?”
Even before I turned around, I could hear that the fight of the morning was over.
I had forgotten to turn on the lamp, so I was working by the light of the monitor, and when I turned around, in the darkness, in her white nightgown and her short haircut, she almost looked like a child. I had a strange sense of unreality, as if our positions were switched and I was the mother. At that moment, I felt a surge of feeling flood through me; I think it’s how a mother might love: fiercely, without reason. Love isn’t reasonable; I stopped looking for reason in it long ago.
Then my mother turned on the light, and I noticed that her toenails were freshly painted: small, perfect ovals of pink. There was something about those nails that just killed me, the color against her pale skin. It wasn’t the big things that got me the most—it was these small acts of bravery.
“Honey,” my mother said again, “I was wondering if you could maybe get me some ice cream? And some ginger ale? I think that might help settle my stomach.”
“Of course. Of course I can,” I said. I got up, grabbed my wallet and my jacket, and said, “I’ll be right back.” I knew ice cream and ginger ale weren’t going to fix anything, but the illusion of being able to make things better, even if just for a moment, felt good.
That feeling lasted exactly ten minutes—until I got to the 7-Eleven and saw the blue Camry with the license plate beginning with “CHI” and the dent over the left rear wheel.
I checked my watch. It was past ten o’clock, so the 7-Eleven was the only place in town still open. I could have driven by, made a big loop in the car and doubled back, hoping I would have wasted enough time that he would be gone—that’s the kind of thing I had been doing for the last three years. But suddenly, tonight, the effort of it seemed too much to keep up.
So I parked in the lot and went into the store and picked up a red plastic basket from the stack near the door. I went straight to the wall with the freezers that held the ice cream and picked out a pint of Häagen-Dazs vanilla. Then I headed toward the back of the store where they had the refrigerated cases with the sodas.
Dan was there when I rounded the end of the aisle. And he must have known I was in the store, because when he saw me, there wasn’t even the hint of surprise.
We were together for ten years, engaged for two of them, and it was now almost three years since I had seen him. In front of me stood the object and focus of probably 50 percent of my thoughts since I had been a teenager.
That was ironic, because before I fell for him (during senior year of high school), I couldn’t have been less interested. He seemed to me just another big, blond football player, handsome in an obvious, ordinary way. For most of high school, I imagined myself to be different. I knew I didn’t want the obvious—even if the obvious was good-looking and popular. Dan was a walking caricature of the obvious.
After I fell in love, I couldn’t see him that way. He was just . . . himself. And for almost a decade (Tammy called it “the eternity”), that’s what he was to me. But now, standing in the aisle in the 7-Eleven, after not seeing him for three years, I discovered that the big, blond football player was all I could see. Except that now his good looks were being chipped away by wrinkles, and he was a little soft around the middle where there used to be nothing but skin and muscle.
While avoiding him these past three years, I had worried about how much it would hurt to see him. But the surprise was that it didn’t hurt. It turned out that those three years had turned him into a stranger—a stranger with a baby strapped to his chest. A sleeping baby wearing a pink dress. A girl.
“Nora,” he said.
“Hello, Dan,” I replied.
“It’s been too long,” he said.
If anything, I had the feeling that it wasn’t quite long enough, so I didn’t know what to say.
Then I thought of something.
“How is Stacey?” I asked.
Stacey was his wife—the one he’d broken up with me for, and then married in a shotgun wedding a month later. Six months after that, they had Dan Junior. (And from the little girl strapped to his chest, it was obvious they had decided to give Dan Junior a baby sister.)
His wife, Stacey, had been in high school with us. She had been a cheerleader, and I remember her giggli
ng a lot in the back of the room during the one class I had with her. Dan’s life had ended up exactly like I thought it would before I knew him: football player marries cheerleader and joins his father’s company. But being right about it didn’t give me any comfort, because there was that little detour in the middle where I thought maybe I would marry the football player. When my stereotype turned out to be true, the joke was on me.
“Stacey’s fine,” Dan said. “She’s fine.”
One more fine and I wasn’t going to believe him.
“Good. I’m glad.” I paused. Then, not quite as smoothly as I would have liked, I said, “Well, I wish I could talk, but I need to get going.” I took a step back, because it seemed strange to just turn my back on him.
“Don’t go yet,” he said.
“I’m sorry, maybe we can talk another time,” I said, not meaning it.
When I took another step away, he repeated more urgently, “Don’t go. Please.”
It’s hard to walk away when someone says that to you. I found I couldn’t do it. So I waited, but Dan didn’t say anything else. I shifted my gaze to the baby on his chest. The little girl was sleeping: her head lolled against his chest, her face slack, and her mouth open in that perfect baby pout. Sometimes babies look like strange versions of their parents, but this baby didn’t seem to look like either Stacey or Dan. It just looked like a generic baby, with the small button nose, the pouty lips, long eyelashes, and light downy hair.
The silence went on so long that I started to think I might be able to escape after all. I didn’t realize that the length of the silence was really just an indication of how uncomfortable the topic of conversation was going to be.
Finally, Dan burst out, “Nora, what happened to us? Remember when we thought we’d never be apart? What happened to that?”
It took me a second for my brain to process the words.
“I don’t think this is exactly the time or place, Dan,” I said. It wasn’t my most inspired response; it was trite and cliché, but it was also true. There were Tostitos on one side of us, and cheese in a can on the other.
He wasn’t really listening to me though. “That’s what I always hear. I want to know, when is the time and place? Can you tell me that?” He threw out his arms in a gesture that would have been dramatic if he hadn’t had a sleeping baby strapped to his chest. As he threw his arms out, the baby’s head bobbled—it blinked, and then settled back into sleep.
I glanced down at the baby, I thought quite pointedly, and said, “I can’t tell you. I think maybe you should try talking to your wife about that.”
Dan didn’t seem to notice the glance, and he seemed oblivious to the fact that he might not be talking to the most receptive audience.
He shook his head stubbornly, “But she’s the one who always says it’s not the right time or place. I want to talk to someone who will listen. Someone who knows me.”
He was obviously going to need a bit more of a direct hint I decided.
“Then you definitely have the wrong person,” I told him firmly. “It’s been a long time, Dan. We don’t know each other anymore.”
I thought that would surely do it. But it didn’t.
“You’re wrong,” he insisted. “I know you. And you know me. I’m the same person you knew back when we were together. I haven’t changed.”
I wanted to ask him who that was. Because there was the person I thought I knew, and then I came home one vacation to a man who had cheated on me and was leaving me for another woman. On that day I realized the Dan I thought I knew was gone—had in fact never existed.
“Maybe I have,” I said. “Maybe I’ve changed.” I wanted that to be true.
“No,” he said. “You haven’t. I know you haven’t. What you’re doing for your mother . . .”
I didn’t like the idea of him knowing anything about my life. “How do you know about that?” I asked.
“Nora, come on. It’s not exactly a big town here. Haven’t you noticed?”
“Yes, I’ve noticed,” I said, thinking of all the times over the years I’d seen the dented blue Camry in the parking lot of the Price Chopper, parked in front of the video store, idling outside the hardware store, and I’d kept on driving past what had been my destination.
As if reading my mind, he said, “I don’t understand how I haven’t seen you more. I think about you. I think about us. What we could have had. I feel like nothing in my life has gone right since we broke up.”
How many times had I imagined this moment? I had imagined what hearing those words would give me—not that it would take all the pain away, but I thought it might give me back a sense of not having been so completely and disastrously wrong.
All of a sudden, something in his face tugged out the echo of an old memory—the memory of what I used to feel when I looked at him.
“And?” I asked.
“And I want to spend time with you,” he said earnestly. “Could we do that? I miss having you in my life.”
Then the baby stirred on his chest—a visible reminder of the intervening years, the betrayal, the hurt: the ocean of hurt.
“What’s her name?” I asked him.
“Courtney.” He looked down at the baby, and he smiled. It was involuntary, genuine, real. It was a smile I realized I’d never seen on his face. And without knowing why, my heart started to ache.
“How old is she?” I asked.
“Six weeks.” Dan caught one of her tiny hands between his fingers. He was still in full confessional mode. “Stacey found out she was pregnant . . . and we thought . . . well, things hadn’t been going so well, and we thought it might help. It was so good at the beginning, when we had Dan Junior.”
The ache intensified, I observed, almost dispassionately. Now it had an object; it hurt to hear that he’d been happy when I’d been so miserable.
He went on, “But it didn’t. I mean, it hasn’t . . . helped. At all. Not between me and Stacey. If anything, it’s worse now.”
“When did you decide that you were going to leave Stacey?” I asked.
The moment I said it, I knew something was wrong.
He shifted from one foot to the other and smiled—but it was about as different a smile as you could get from the one I’d just seen when he looked at his baby. This one was nervous, uncomfortable, apologetic.
“I . . . well . . . the thing is, Courtney’s so young. I couldn’t leave. Not just yet anyway. When she gets a little older . . .”
I knew what he was saying, but somehow I couldn’t quite believe it.
“So what exactly did you mean when you said you wanted to spend time with me?” I asked. What’s usually said about cheaters is, “If they do it with you, they’ll do it to you.” He wanted to turn that around. He’d done it to me, and now he wanted to do it with me. He had nerve—that was for sure. And when we were together, I thought it was the one thing he lacked.
“Well . . . I mean . . . I miss you. My marriage is basically over, even if I can’t leave. And I guess I thought you might be lonely too. I haven’t heard that you’ve been dating anyone. It’s been a long time. Maybe you’ve been thinking about me too? I thought maybe you never really got over us.”
“You mean you thought that if I couldn’t be with you, I wouldn’t want to be with anyone?” There should have been emotion in that question. But the emotion had been missing from my life for so long that maybe it was just cleaned out—like someone had taken a big vacuum and sucked it all away.
He said, “I don’t know. Not exactly. But . . . well, you’re not with anyone else, are you?” Then he added, “I think you know that it doesn’t get better than we had.”
This was so ridiculous, that I couldn’t help it—I laughed. Right in his face. And the words just slipped out. I said, “Oh, Lord, I hope to God you’re not right about that. That would be terrible.”
He looked incredibly offended. Finally, something had gotten through to him.
For one moment I could see clearly. I
’d spent so much time imagining him as the one who had it all together—who had a wife and a family and a good job and a life—but there in the store it seemed very clear to me that even though he appeared to have everything, he in fact had no more than I did. And maybe less.
It was one of those rare moments when all the trappings of life drop away and you see the person standing in front of you, almost, it seems, from the inside out rather than the outside in. If only we could all look at each other in that way. The outside wouldn’t even exist. It doesn’t anyway. It’s just a trick of the mind. Like the illusion created by a magician.
I said firmly, but not unkindly, “I’ve got to go. I’ll see you, Dan.”
The ginger ale was just past him, down the aisle. So I slid by, found a bottle, and put it in my basket. Then I circled around and went back to the freezer to put back the pint of ice cream I’d gotten, and which had already started to melt, to change it for a new one. (My mother loved ice cream frozen so hard you practically had to chip it out of the carton. She always kept our freezer on the coldest setting, and it looked like an arctic ice cap with a thick layer of frost and stalactites dripping from the ceiling.) After exchanging the ice cream, I went up to the counter to buy the two items I’d come for. I thought Dan had left the store by then, but I wasn’t sure.
The clerk was a woman in her fifties, with hair that had been badly dyed so the gray somehow showed through the too-bright red. I thought she was looking at me funny as she rang up the two items and put them in a bag. And then, when she gave me back my change, she patted my hand and said, “You did real good.”
I probably should have been horrified that this woman had overheard the conversation. But her words were clearly heartfelt, and in that moment they seemed to be one of those kindnesses—so small, so real, so unnecessary, and at the same time so genuine—like my mother’s painted toenails.
Through the Heart Page 3
