But something wasn’t right, something had been lost, and we scrambled for it with increasing panic. We searched coolly at first—an arm adjusted, a shift in the hips—and then hastily, furious in our bafflement and so thorough that any desire turned to exhaustion, though we couldn’t stop. We wouldn’t. We tried positioning Gabe behind me and above me, my ankles on his shoulders or cast to the left. I lay on my back, on my stomach, on my side; I crouched on my knees with my elbows pointing into a pillow and my forehead bumping the bed frame. We sat up, my legs pretzeled around Gabe’s waist, and rocked. The radio music faded; a commercial came on. Gabe braced himself against our comforter, his fists sinking into the down, and thrust with as much determination as I’d ever seen in him. It was no use: he was softening, his face twisted with humiliation.
“I’m sorry,” said Gabe.
He lay back heavily, and our bodies came apart.
“It’s okay,” I said, disentangling my legs from around his waist. My knees popped, the skin rubbed pink.
It must have taken minutes for us to notice that the doorbell was ringing. By the time we scrambled into our clothes and turned off the radio, someone was rapping on the door. Who could it be but Keller? We slipped down the stairs in our sweatpants and socks. Neither of us bothered to look through the peephole before Gabe unlocked the door.
Two police officers stood on the porch. One was a stocky younger man with ruddy skin and a brown mustache, precisely clipped; the other was a tall, lean woman with deep-set eyes and a tight bun, which tugged at her forehead.
“Dane County Police,” said the man.
Both cops pulled out their ID badges and flipped open the leather card cases before putting them away again. The woman took a small notebook from her belt and flicked up the cover.
“Am I looking at Gabe and Sylvie Lennox?”
“I’m Patterson,” I said. “Sylvie Patterson.”
“Gabe Lennox and Syl-vie Patterson.” The woman squinted at her notebook, writing quickly. “Lived here long?”
“Since August,” said Gabe. “What is this about?”
The woman looked up at us. “Is that your car in the driveway?”
“We don’t have to answer these questions,” said Gabe.
I squeezed Gabe’s arm. “It’s our car,” I said.
“Anyone else in the house?”
Gabe and I didn’t flinch, but a current passed between us.
“Is this about Anne?” I asked before I had the sense to stop myself.
“Anne?” asked the man, taking a step forward. He was broad across the chest, and he strained in his belted jacket. He and his colleague exchanged looks, and she scribbled again on the small pad. “Is Anne in the house?”
“No one is in the house,” said Gabe. “No one else is in the house.”
“Mind if we confirm that?”
It was the woman this time, her eyebrows cocked.
“Yeah, I do mind if you confirm that.” Gabe’s face was fixed with tension. “I know my rights. Tell me what this is about and we’ll go from there.”
The two cops exchanged another glance. Then the man sighed, and the woman flipped her notebook closed.
“Listen.” The man inclined his head confidentially. “You want to tell us what you were thinking making all that noise at twelve thirty on a Tuesday night?”
“That’s all this is?” spluttered Gabe. “A—a noise complaint?”
“Hey, buddy, hey.” The cop put his hands up. “We take noise complaints very seriously in this town.”
“I bet you do. And I bet you think you’re really fucking funny.” Gabe’s voice was rising, his neck veined. “Bet you thought it was hilarious, scaring us like that. You know what I think is fucking funny? Cops not doing their jobs. Cops coming to my front door, hassling me about a fucking noise complaint, when people are killing each other out there—”
“Not helping your case, my man,” said the cop, taking another step forward.
“Stop it, Gabe.” I took his wrists in mine, digging my nails into the thin underskin. “Let it go.”
Gabe had stopped shouting, but his face shook. A drop of sweat quivered at the tip of his nose.
“We’ll stop, I promise,” I said, keeping hold of him. “We’ve already turned the music off. We were having fun, that’s all. It was stupid.”
The man crossed his arms. His partner stared at us over the bridge of her nose.
“Understand, you are this close”—she squinted—“from a misdemeanor. We get another call, things get more serious.”
I nodded. Gabe wriggled out of my grasp and watched from the porch as the cops walked back to their car.
“Hey,” he shouted, just before they opened the doors. “Who reported us?”
The man opened the driver’s door and got inside without answering. The woman covered her eyes with one hand, as if trying to see us through the glare of the streetlights.
We didn’t notice that the light in Thom and Janna’s bedroom was also on until it abruptly went out, throwing the policewoman’s face into shadow. She nodded slightly. Then she climbed into the car and yanked the door shut. The car began to move, blinking in the night.
I locked the door. Gabe turned away from me and headed for the stairs. But before he got there, he turned abruptly and slammed the heel of his palm into the living room wall.
“Gabe,” I gasped.
“What kind of fucking business did they have reporting us?”
“Maybe we really were being loud.”
“Bullshit. They were our friends.”
His forehead was dented with anger, the folds around his eyes so deep a penny could have balanced inside them. He glared at me, waiting for a response. But I wanted to be back in our room, jumping on the bed with the radio on and my stomach in my throat. I wanted to see Gabe playing air guitar with as much vigor as any other twenty-four-year-old, his hair streaking the air. I wanted him to be blurry again.
PART THREE
MORNING
16
MARTHA’S VINEYARD, MASSACHUSETTS, 2010
This summer, I’ve had plenty of time to think about my years with Keller and what they meant to me. I could have taken a plane to the Vineyard, but Hannah insisted I drive. See the country, take my time. I’ve saved up a bit of money—enough for a motel room in Cheyenne and another outside Iowa City. The first thing I do, when I get to a new room, is stand in front of the air-conditioning with my arms spread out like plane wings. It’s been a hot summer, and I’ve pitied the animals I’ve seen on the way: the thick-skinned sheep, horses swishing their tails like fans.
It isn’t so awful, being alone, not when you get used to it. Every decision’s my own. Whenever I like, I can stop at a gas station for cheap coffee or Slim Jims. If there’s a fruit stand, I’ll pull to the side of the highway—I keep the bags in the passenger seat, knotted to keep out flies—and sometimes I get out for a roadside attraction: the Angel Museum in Beloit, Wisconsin, or Amarillo’s Cadillac Ranch. Mostly, though, I try to make good time. That way, when I touch down for the night, it feels deserved.
At each motel, after I stand in front of the air-conditioning—or, for the cheaper ones, the fan—I pull on my old Speedo one-piece and go out to the pool. Even the motels without air-conditioning have pools. The color is always the same: a too-bright, mouthwash aqua. Smallish and rectangular, lined by a curved ledge of concrete and rows of beach chairs in various stages of decline, the pools shine like beacons amid the surrounding mediocrity. I ease myself into the deep end—too tall to dive like the children holding life preservers, or too old.
It feels good to be surrounded by families, even if they aren’t my own: the children chicken-fighting with a viciousness reserved for siblings while their wide-set mothers yell for leniency. After I swim, I set up on one of the folding chairs with a hotel towel and chip aw
ay at the twenty-seven books I loaded onto my e-reader before the trip. When I was studying for my preliminary exams, it was more—a hundred and sixty, give or take—but I’m now halfway through my dissertation, and my reading has become more focused.
How different it would have been if e-readers had been around when I worked with Keller! None of the fragrant, heavy books, their pages wilted as old dollar bills. The Kindle was too practical to resist—that sleek little machine, light as a paperback—but I miss the days when books were weighty and tangible. If all goes as planned, I’ll graduate in a year, apply for jobs this fall. I’d hoped this trip would give me time to read the rest of my texts, and I think I’m on track. If I’m honest, it helps to have a distraction—to believe that my mission this summer is to finish my reading, and not something else.
I’ve been on the Vineyard for two days now. I’m staying in a little motel by the water—the most expensive one I’ve visited, but I’ve been frugal enough in the past six years to manage it. It’s located across the island from our old haunts. I wanted to keep my distance, at least until I was ready. In the morning, I have breakfast on the deck: a piece of fruit and one of the boxes of cereal I filched from the continental breakfast in Iowa City. When it gets hot, I read inside my room—I can see the ocean through the window.
I don’t know exactly what I’m waiting for. I guess I’m expecting to drop into a different state, one in which I feel meditative and unflappable. I get frustrated when I snag on things. The silvery color of the motel siding, for example. The fog and its familiar descent.
I planned my route so that I had to drive through Madison; I wanted to prove to myself I could do it. I hit the Wisconsin state line on the afternoon of July 4. I had planned to drive through the capital without stopping, but by evening, the holiday traffic had become unbearable. My muscles were rigid, and the air-conditioning in the car was less effective as the temperature rose outside. At nine o’clock, I pulled into a cul-de-sac on Rutledge and parked. I was ten minutes on foot from the old apartment in Atwood, two minutes by car. Through the window, I heard the high shrieks of the children who had gathered, with their parents, to watch the fireworks.
I unlocked the car door. I only meant to stretch my legs, but I found myself wandering down the stairs between two waterfront houses, which led to a grassy patch of land at the edge of the lake. Families sat on the grass and on the benches by the stairs, waiting.
We were bound by a congenial feeling of mutual anticipation. One of the children began to climb the fence; his father pulled him down, but not before the child pointed over the fence and hollered notice of the first explosion. It was a green shower of lights, shooting up in stalks to our right. The next one—red sparks, flaring and dissolving—came from the opposite direction. The land was so flat that we could see the fireworks of a succession of different towns. They burst one after another in all parts of the sky. The biggest explosions must have come from the closer towns, like Sun Prairie. The smaller ones followed like echoes.
We waited until the last town had sent up its final spark; the coda was a happy face, accidentally upside down. Watching the layered lights of these Wisconsin towns, many of which I’d driven through before, left me with a sore, vacant feeling. As parents collected their children and couples ambled back to the road, I found myself waiting by the fence, as if another show was soon to start or someone was coming to meet me. I could have been any other thirty-year-old woman—a well-lit apartment down the block, a partner at the stove. I look much the same as I did when I lived in Madison: the same slim, compact frame, skin beige and dotted with freckles in summertime. Two years ago, I changed my haircut, adding bangs—the feathery whim of a Berkeley hairdresser. I had hoped to be transformed, but when he spun me around to face the mirrors, it took only seconds for me to register myself. Like a child waking to a bedroom at first fuzzy and strange, the details soon sharpened into familiarity: the mole beneath my left eye, light eyebrows peeking out from behind a fuzzy shelf of hair.
When I’d spent several minutes alone and it was clear that the fireworks were over, I climbed the stairs and walked back to the car. I was already turning my mind to logistics. Accustomed as I was to working through the night, I started driving again. By the time dawn was peeling night from the landscape, returning color to the pastures and wetlands, I was in Ohio.
17
MADISON, WISCONSIN, 2005
In March, Madison shook off its crust of snow. Tree branches and grass blades shivered baldly in the early spring air; the most adventurous undergrads began to wear shorts, their legs defiantly exposed and covered in goose bumps. I lived in a vigilant state of alert. After seeing the bug on our phone line and finding Meredith’s file, I was determined to find out more. And if Gabe wouldn’t help me, I’d do it alone.
I was distant from him, as if preparing myself, as if I already knew how our story would end. He was in charge of recruiting new participants, driving through the state to post flyers at satellite campuses of the university, and I continued the file reorganization project. We needed a success, and soon: our funding for the following year was not guaranteed. But we had no more than two new participants that spring, and I think a part of us had given up. Every morning, we read the San Francisco Chronicle online on separate computers, and at night we fell asleep in our clothes.
By the end of the month, I’d finished organizing Keller’s patient files by case number. But one was missing: no matter how hard I searched, I couldn’t find number 111. I paged through each file, checking to make sure it wasn’t sandwiched inside a different folder. When I found nothing there, I turned on Keller’s computer, but everything in the ancient Dell was protected. What would Keller’s password be? I tried mills, meredith, fortbragg, sanfrancisco. No go. Next, I tried snakehollow, but the password box shuddered, as if shaking its head, and went blank again.
“Come on, Keller,” I said. I pictured a ghost Keller standing inscrutably before me, a Keller hologram—his hands woven daintily together, his slight smile impassive. “Give it up.”
Rolling my neck, I swung back to the keyboard and typed hollowsnake. The computer made a gurgling noise of happiness, and the password box sprang to one side. I laughed; could it really have been so easy? Each e-mail was now readable, each link clickable. But two hours later, I was even more alarmed: in Keller’s documents folder, I found scans of every file but 111.
I could feel a headache coming on as the fluorescent lights flickered in the ceiling. It was three in the afternoon, though you’d never have known from inside the windowless office. I’d propped the office door open with a paperweight so I could hear if someone was coming, but the hallway was silent. It would be easy to lose your mind down there, I thought; maybe the three of us already had. The top of Keller’s desk was devoid of personal items: there were only a couple of Post-its, a tiny dish of paper clips, and a Martha’s Vineyard mug (HAPPY CHAPPY!) full of identical ballpoint pens.
I spun around in his desk chair, rubbing my eyes with the heels of my hands. If Keller wanted to hide something, where would he put it? His own computer was too risky, too obvious. The same went for his hard-copy files: he would never leave a paper trail. As the chair whirled, I passed the cabinets, the propped-open door, the mini refrigerator where Gabe and I kept our dinners. On top of the refrigerator was a slender laptop, closed like a mouth, its battery light blinking green. It was Gabe’s. He often left it here overnight, especially if he decided to walk home from the lab. It was heavy, an early Dell he’d covered in band stickers—Led Zeppelin, Radiohead—and bandaged, over the years, with packing tape.
Gingerly, I opened it. Gabe had a password, too, but I knew that one without thinking: 33173, his dad’s zip code in Florida. It had been the combination for his gym lock back at Mills. In Gabe’s documents, I found electronic files that went back to patient 110: Stuart Cappleman, the dining hall worker at Mills.
It’s strange; I don’t r
emember my body heating up or my heart rate speeding—the marks of my old panic attacks, though they weren’t diagnosed as such for another year—when I finally found file 111. In the storm’s unblinking eye, all the training I’d done leapt to my defense: my practiced, even keel, my ability to stay calm when dealing with the most hysterical patients. I didn’t read it yet. I wanted Gabe to be with me. So I tucked the laptop in my backpack, locked the office door, and drove home.
It was a bare, cool day at the end of March. The smallest leaves had budded with the cautiousness of all plants born in early spring. The heat was on as I came through the door and discarded my layers. A carnation Gabe had given me for Valentine’s Day sat in a narrow vase next to the sink, its neck keeling elegantly toward the counter. I hung my sleeping-bag coat on the peg where it would sit, untouched, until I packed it haphazardly three weeks later. Gabe sat at the kitchen counter with a glass of milk. Abruptly, the heat shut off. The dust motes and down feathers that had been swirling in front of it swooped to the ground.
“You left your laptop at the lab,” I said.
A blank haze came over his eyes like a passing cloud. Then they sharpened again.
“Oh?” he asked, but his voice was too flat, his shoulders too still.
“I found something in it,” I said. “It’s a file, number one eleven. We don’t have it in hard copy—Keller must have destroyed it—and it isn’t on his computer, either. But I found it on yours. I don’t know whose it is, Gabe, but I know something’s off.”
The words spilled out of me with relief. Even as I walked to him, holding his computer in my arms, I was irrationally convinced of his innocence. I wanted to believe that Keller had uploaded the file, that Gabe had never seen it before. After all, if Keller wanted to keep something from me, there was no hiding place more brilliant than Gabe’s computer—Gabe, the person I loved, the person I was least likely to suspect. I could finally prove to him that Keller had kept secrets from us, big ones; that he didn’t trust us and we had no reason to trust him. It would be difficult for Gabe to accept, but I would help him. We could go anywhere in the country: find different jobs, spin ourselves new. I pictured us in the pocked, lunar deserts of Utah or a seaside town in Maine, eating toast with jam at a light-cast kitchen table. There would be moisture in the air. Buoyancy.
The Anatomy of Dreams Page 23
