A Long Way Down

by Randall Silvis

  “Estranged, actually. Four years now.”

  “Children?”

  “Two boys. Eleven and eight.”

  DeMarco nodded. Looked toward his car. Thought, Your boys were seven and four when you left them. He winced, then turned back to Gillespie. “That young woman at your house we talked to? Kaitlin? She said she was doing some cleaning for you?”

  Gillespie blinked. “That’s right. Yes. I like to help out my students whenever I can. Student debt being what it is.”

  “Of course,” DeMarco said. “You might suggest that she dress a little more appropriately, though. Some people might get the wrong impression.”

  “I, uh…I wasn’t there when she arrived. But I will certainly make mention of it to her.”

  “Excellent,” DeMarco said. “We’ll let you continue with your peregrination now.” He turned away, walking briskly.

  Jayme said, “Thanks again for your cooperation,” and followed DeMarco to the car.

  DeMarco climbed inside, started the engine, and turned the air conditioner to its maximum setting. Then he climbed back out and waited beside the open door. Jayme opened her door, then looked over the roof to DeMarco. She took a glance to make certain Gillespie was out of range. He had passed the information board and was striding toward the first turn in the loop, his walking stick clicking even more vehemently now.

  “Did you follow all that?” she asked.

  DeMarco said, “I once heard a guy argue that ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ was about Mary and Jesus and the separation of church and state.”

  “And that is relevant how?”

  “It’s possible to twist just about anything around to make it say what you want it to say.”

  “So you’re not buying his theory?”

  “He’s a pompous ass.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s wrong.”

  “Or right,” DeMarco said.

  “Truth is, the moment I saw that walking stick, he became a kind of joke to me.”

  “It’s not a walking stick. It’s a phallic symbol.”

  “A pretty obvious one.”

  “Isn’t that the point?”

  She chuckled. Then said, “I notice you chose not to mention his library research.”

  “The timing corresponds to the presentation he made at the crime conference. Precedes it. We should be able to tell from the video if he used the research for his presentation.”

  “And in the meantime, let him bask in his own self-importance?”

  DeMarco nodded. “I’ve had academics at number three on my list of narcissistic jerks, right behind politicians and lawyers. But I don’t know. After listening to Gillespie, I might have to bump them up a notch to number two.”

  “He deserves it,” she said. “But be fair. There are some good teachers too. Lots, in fact.”

  “Right again,” he said.

  Mr. Kassis, she thought. Advanced biology. Instead of chewing her out for skipping classes during the dissection unit, he had merely asked, “Was it the frog or the freeze-dried cat?” And she had answered, “Both.” He nodded, asked nothing more, and didn’t count those twenty-five points against her final grade.

  She and DeMarco climbed into the car then and shut the doors. Both sat still for a few moments while the vent breezes dried their skin. Then Jayme thought of something else, and wrinkled her nose. “That thing about using oyster shells to scrape Hypatia’s flesh off her bones? I don’t think I can ever eat oysters again.”

  “When you eat an oyster, you are eating its stomach, intestines, gonads, heart, mouth, digestive gland, and anus. Raw.”

  “God, Ryan.”

  “Just sayin’,” he said. “Let’s grab some lunch.”

  Twenty-Seven

  On the terrace of the little restaurant attached to the park’s visitor center, with a narrow but long view of Lake Glacier framed between two walls of lush greenery, DeMarco alerted Sheriff Brinker of the professor’s forthcoming video attachment, and asked that it be forwarded to Jayme’s account as soon as it arrived. Over club sandwiches, chunks of fresh fruit, and iced tea, they discussed the interview.

  She asked, “Do you trust him?”

  “I do,” he said. “Every bit as much as I trust a TV evangelist with his zipper down and lipstick stains on his underwear.”

  “Well,” she said, and squeezed a lemon wedge over the ice in her glass, “I don’t like him either. Kaitlin said she was studying at his house, but he went with your assertion that she was cleaning. Nice trick, by the way. There’s no doubt he’s a first-class jerk. Too bad that’s not a chargeable offense.”

  DeMarco scowled and juked his head back and forth, which made her laugh.

  “So what do you think of his theory?” she asked.

  “I guess that’s what they call white guilt.”

  “Lucky for us we don’t have any of that.”

  “I have guilt,” he told her. “But I earned it, and not because I’m white. It’s about taking responsibility for our own actions, not our great-great-great-great-grandparents’. We are who we let ourselves be.”

  She was glad to hear him say that. It suggested that maybe he was in the process of reappraising his guilt, deciding what to hold on to and what to let go. Ever since his few days in the Kentucky mountains, he seemed changed in a way she did not yet understand. He was gentler with her than he had been, and teased less often. Even his voice seemed pitched a few degrees softer. He had always been a man of few extraneous movements, but lately she sensed less anger in that control, as if his stillness was genuine and relaxed, and not the stillness of a coiled spring. On the other hand, perhaps the anger had been supplanted by sadness or resignation. Before Kentucky, an urgency had always driven his actions, but any urgency now was barely detectable. More than ever, she found him gazing into the distance. She was afraid to ask where he went at those times, how far his thoughts had moved from her. And so she said nothing. She watched and waited, and prayed he would not disappear from her completely.

  Over the next thirty-five minutes, they ate slowly, smiled at each other, and responded to each other’s remarks, but otherwise seemed content with their own thoughts. Then Jayme’s cell phone beeped to signal a new email.

  She tapped the screen, read the header, and said, dramatically, mocking Gillespie’s opening statement, “The video has arrived!” She clicked the file open. “Looks like it’s…not all that long. You want to take turns with the earbuds?”

  There were only two other tables occupied on the terrace, but the terrace was small. He said, “Let’s do it together in the car. So if it’s boring, I can take a nap.”

  Maybe that’s it, she told herself. Maybe he’s just tired.

  The professor’s nineteen-minute presentation extended beyond boring into sedative. Jayme balanced the laptop on her knees, with the volume turned up high to compete with the car’s air conditioner. DeMarco’s brow wrinkled a half minute into the video, which caused him to lean back in his seat and close his eyes. She hit pause. “You don’t want to watch it?” she asked.

  Without opening his eyes, he said, “I don’t want to watch him. I can listen better this way.”

  His forehead remained pinched all through the presentation. Jayme scribbled notes on her pocket notebook. Only near the end of the brief Q&A, when Gillespie called for security, did DeMarco open his eyes, but too late to see anything other than Gillespie’s triumphant grin. Seconds later, the video ended and the screen went black.

  “What just happened there?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “It seemed to jump from a friendly Q&A to him calling for security. You want to see it?”

  “If you didn’t understand it, I won’t. That’s already, what, twenty minutes of my life I’ll never get back. He said all that stuff in the park, right?”

  “Tha
t might be a bit of a simplification, babe.” She flipped back to the beginning of her notes and read aloud. “Pre-Christian Pagans and Gnostics…do what thou wilt. Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Rabelais. Lord Dashwood and Ben Franklin, the Hellfire Club. Aleister Crowley, founder of Thelema. Sex magic and sexual spirituality. Dionysian indulgences in women and wine. Creation out of destruction, life out of death. Daemons and the Ouroboros.”

  DeMarco said, “What’s he have against Matt Damon?”

  She chuckled. “I might be mispronouncing it. It might be demons. But anyway, in a nutshell, his theory is that most unsolved murders can be traced back to the way Old Testament Christianity screwed up our DNA.”

  DeMarco sat up straight, stretched his back, and shook his head. “This is what kids are being taught these days?”

  “You should watch the part at the end where the camera cuts to the audience for a second. Which wasn’t huge, by the way. Maybe ten or eleven people in all.”

  “What did I miss?”

  “Just a young man standing up. Then it cuts to Gillespie pretending to call for security.”

  “I didn’t hear anybody else’s voice on the video.”

  “There isn’t. Just that awkward jump. Something’s been edited out.”

  “I’ll watch it tonight,” DeMarco told her. He looked out the side window and exhaled through his mouth. “You have that card Olcott gave us at the library? With the other guy’s name and address?”

  “We can do it tomorrow if you’ve had enough for the day.”

  “Do ain’t done,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  He turned to face her; smiled. “Something my mother used to say. Her parents were pretty much hillbillies. One of their sayings probably.”

  “And it means…?”

  “When she wanted me to do something, clean my room or take out the garbage or whatever. If I hadn’t done it, I’d say I plan to do it, or I’ll do it in a while, something like that. And she’d say, ‘Do ain’t done.’ Which meant do it now. Get it over with.”

  Grinning, she removed the card from the back of her notebook. Read what Olcott had written. “Daksh Khatri. #17 Tremont Apartments, 109 Liberty Street, Garrettsville.”

  “Looks like we’re going up the country,” DeMarco said. “I’ll head us north, you check him out on Facebook.”

  “Babe, you sound tired.”

  “Spinning our wheels,” he told her. “It always wears me out.”

  But she knew it was more than that, more than fatigue, more than frustration. He had a weariness that went deeper than muscle and bone. Was she a part of it? When had she first noticed it in him? When she mentioned wanting a baby?

  Another chill ran up her spine, and this time she couldn’t hold back the shiver. Fearing he had noticed it, she turned the air conditioner down.

  Twenty-Eight

  Ryan’s comment about narcissistic academics had started Jayme remembering, and thinking about the many other fine teachers she had known. Dr. Burnette, for example. Susan. Small and blond and pretty, barely thirty, as fine-boned as a sparrow, as delicate as a sigh. Introduction to Sociology. Her perfume was White Diamonds. Her lipstick, Covergirl Cherry Cordial, their palest shade.

  Jayme’s personal sociology was making a big change that year, thanks to the very noticeable changes to her body. They all seemed to occur between leaving home in June and arriving at her grandmother’s place in western Kentucky a day later, though in truth the changes had been happening since she was thirteen, the new fullness in her breasts and hips, the bouncy, awkward stride that now, at seventeen, was smooth and graceful. Her grandmother’s greeting had been, “What a beauty you are! You’re like a whole different person!” Her Aberdeen friends all reacted the same way, especially the boys. They looked at her, spoke to her, treated her differently than they ever had before. It was all very unnerving for Jayme.

  Her grandmother insisted that she enter the Peach Festival Princess competition, which was nothing more than a lineup and Q&A before the mayor and a few women from various agencies and organizations. Jayme was both mortified and thrilled when she won. And ten weeks later, when she returned home and started her first semester as a commuter at the local college, she was still struggling to adjust to the way males behaved around her.

  It was after her second sociology class that Jayme found herself boxed in by three freshman boys, all six feet tall or more, all wearing T-shirts marked Property of the school’s athletic department. What’s your name? they wanted to know. Where you from? What dorm you staying in? Wanna go to a mixer tonight? They peppered her with questions but didn’t allow a chance for her to answer them, each boy speaking louder than the previous one, each trying to crowd closer to her, until she felt as if she were drowning.

  Dr. Burnette, tiny as she was, waded into their midst and pushed them aside. “You boys go lift some weights or something. Ms. Matson and I have a meeting to attend.”

  Alone in the room, Dr. Burnette pulled a chair close to her desk and invited Jayme to sit. “They can be exhausting, can’t they?” she said.

  “The boys back in high school never treated me like that.”

  “And where was that?” From her big canvas bag Dr. Burnette produced two oranges and two paper napkins. She set one of each in front of Jayme, then started to peel her own. Her fingers were thin and long, Jayme thought, for such a small person. Her fingernails were painted the same color as her lips. And the napkin she handed Jayme smelled pleasantly of White Diamonds.

  Within a week they knew nearly everything there was to know about each other. They would sometimes walk the grounds together, or sit in the gazebo if the day was wet. Sometimes on the weekend they would meet for brunch and a movie; sometimes they would take a drive in Dr. Burnette’s yellow Beetle to Rosemont Park, often singing along with the radio all the way there and home again, or to the reservoir spillway to watch the carp crawling over each other for the stale bread visitors tossed into the water.

  When she found out that Jayme was an accounting major and planned to work with Cullen, the youngest of her three brothers and the owner of an insurance company in town, their usual lighthearted mood turned serious. “Why accounting?” the professor asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s easy for me. And Cullen is doing pretty well for himself. He says he needs the help.”

  “Is that something you love, working with numbers?”

  Jayme shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess. Like I said, my brother says he can use my help.”

  Dr. Burnette nodded. Her smile was always soft, always melancholy. “The thing about settling down in the place where you grew up,” she said, “is that you never really do grow up. You will always be the person other people remember you as. Everybody who knows you will know your past, and will maybe even take advantage of you because of that. Your past can box you in. And a person like you, Jayme…my God, you have so much blooming to do. I really can’t envision you sitting behind a desk every day. I would so love to see you do some traveling before you decide to settle down. Europe, Asia, Australia…you should see the world. That’s the best education there is for a person like you.”

  “That would be nice,” Jayme said. “My father hasn’t been well lately, though. There are a lot of bills.”

  “I understand,” the professor said. “I say silly things sometimes. But if the opportunity ever presents itself…please promise me you will grab onto it and run.”

  “Carpe diem,” Jayme said.

  And then came a Saturday morning brunch near the end of the semester when Dr. Burnette did not show up. Nor did she answer her phone the several times Jayme called. Nor appear for class the following Monday. The secretary from the Sociology Department was there to announce that Dr. Burnette had a family emergency that made it necessary for her to return to Houston. A graduate assistant would finish out the semester for her.

&
nbsp; Jayme was stunned, then furious. She couldn’t even call me? She couldn’t even pick up the damn phone?

  At home she was either sullen and silent or short-tempered and brusque. In her classes, she sat with eyes down, never raised her hand to answer or ask a question. After a while she started accepting invitations to socialize, started drinking through the week with people she had known in high school. She got drunk, got high, did things she preferred not to remember the next morning. None of it mattered. All was deceit and betrayal anyway. Nobody could be trusted.

  And then one day during semester break, while doing some filing in Cullen’s office, she caught a scent of White Diamonds. It came out of nowhere as she was slipping a folder into the filing cabinet. She turned, looked at a couple sitting there waiting to talk to her brother. And then, for some reason, her heart started racing, her throat became constricted. But she could not isolate the scent. Throughout the day it would come and go, there but not there. She kept looking toward the door, kept waiting.

  At home that evening, a card-sized white envelope addressed to her lay on the kitchen counter. Again her heart stuttered. The handwriting was feminine and familiar. Inside the envelope was a small sheet of stationery. Jayme unfolded it, saw the neat typing, and breathed in White Diamonds as she read.

  My dearest, dearest Jayme,

  We never used the word love, you and I, although I am sure you know that I felt it. You know too that there are different kinds of love. Any kind, I believe, is good. I hope you can believe that too. Yet I felt it would have been wrong to speak of love with you. Either you would reject my love, and that I could not bear, or you would return it, and that would only cause you grief in the end. So I gave you my love with every breath, but I kept it silent. I have a condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Simply put, my heart can stop at any moment. In fact it has stopped on several occasions, though prompt medical attention has started it again. But each time, damage was done. So I always knew this day would come, but I never knew when. I am with my family and doctor as I write this note to you. We are waiting for a new heart to become available. If it comes in time and the surgery is successful, I have a 94 percent chance of living another seven years or more, in which case you will be receiving a different kind of letter from me. But if you are reading this letter, well then...