by Jamie Metzl
“Dikranigus, I know you’re busy, but you said yesterday you’d call.”
Yes, I think, then kick myself for thinking, I’m only thirty-nine years old and live half a country away, but of course I should call at least twice a day.
“I know you’re a big boy.”
Mother.
Even in a prerecorded message, she anticipates my response.
“I’m sorry, Dikranigus, you are a man. But even a man can call his mother from time to time.”
I can’t help but be drawn into her monologue. Being a now only child of a widowed mother has for the past seventeen years woven us into a sometimes claustrophobic tapestry with the ever-present ghosts of Astrid and my father.
“The Devedjian girl is back in town for a few days.”
She knows I remember our ill-fated three dates during a college vacation.
“I know you are a big boy, Dikranigus. Oh, I’m sorry. I said it again. But would it kill you to settle down just a little bit?”
She suddenly seems to realize she’s only leaving me a message.
“Oh,” she says. I’m not sure who she’s talking to, herself or me. “You know I love you. I just worry sometimes. Bacheegs.”
The message ends and I’m feeling both love and an almost childlike frustration, the story of my life. I know to my core how much my mother loves me. I know to my core how much I need to be there for her. But I also need to live my own life, to find my own way. The residue is a strange brew of guilt and inadequacy. I fear I am neither supporting my mother enough to be a good son nor making enough progress in finding my own way to justify the cost of my distance.
I pull into my driveway.
In some human form of barn fever, exhaustion takes me as I lumber out of my car and through the back door. The echo of my mother’s voice still in my head, Becker’s reference to Hannah and other biblical mothers springs forward.
“uSearch Hannah,” I mumble to my u.D.
“Text or spoken?” the sexy siren voice I downloaded last year asks.
I know that had I chosen standard male for my u.D voice settings, I’d now be telling the u.D I was too tired to give a fuck, but the female voice somehow soothes me. I take a deep breath, hold it for a few seconds, then exhale. I lift my shoulders and rotate my head in a circle before closing my eyes a few seconds. “Text, please,” I say in a fake Indian accent that for some stupid reason makes me smile.
The words pop up in bold print on the screen embedded in my kitchen table.
“The Apocryphal Gospel of James describes how Hannah and her husband Joachim, who had suffered years of childlessness, received the visitation of an angel of the Lord who told them they would bear a child. In ultimate gratitude, Hannah dedicated the child to God’s service. Joachim and Hannah delivered Mary to the service of the Second Temple in Jerusalem when the girl was three years old. According the church doctrine, Mary was conceived in the normal manner but was protected from the stain of original sin to make her fit to bear Christ.”
The number three pulsates through my head as I slip back through my u.D notes. I find it in the first batch of materials Joseph had sent me. MaryLee Stock, adopted from Romania at the age of three by All Blessings International and placed in a family belonging to Becker’s church in Springfield.
“You awake?” my dictated message to Joseph reads.
“What do you think?” he replies immediately.
I wonder if it’s just my perception or whether Joseph is becoming more of a smart-ass the more reliant on him I become.
“Keep digging on Becker,” I mumble into the u.D and watch it shift to text.
“Roger, boss.”
“We’ll talk in AM. Need you there at seven. Police releasing her name tomorrow.”
I sense his groan in the pause before his text reply appears, “Yes, boss.”
I know I need to be at work early tomorrow, but I lay in bed unable to sleep. My mind swirls with images of Astrid. She’s five years old coming into my room with a plate of sesame cookies she’s baked in her Cozy Kitchen Mini Oven. I feel a twinge of guilt as I remember telling her to just leave them on my bed, not looking up from my Nintendo console. I can’t remember what I was playing, but for the rest of my life not looking up will remain my personal image for how I failed my little sister. I am thirteen and at soccer practice, trying not to notice my five-year-old baby sister riding her bright red bike in loops around the field. I’m seventeen and forced by my parents to attend her Armenian dance recital, anxious to get the hell out but still noticing how joyously Astrid shakes and prances around the stage dancing the Kochari. I’m twenty-two and in a state of shock at the funeral.
The sadness lingers as I start my process of counting backwards in my head from one hundred. It’s supposed to help me calm my mind, but I always seem to find work-arounds.
Ninety-seven, ninety-six, ninety . . .
I’m sure there are many ways that having such an active mind must have once been a blessing. In prehistoric times they probably stationed people like me near the mouth of caves to be the first to sense an approaching saber-toothed tiger. It must have been a useful skill back then and my ancestors surely got laid repeatedly for having it, passing the now useless restlessness gene down to me.
Eighty-four, eighty-three, eighty . . .
My mind wanders back to MaryLee.
Seventy-two, seventy-one, seventy . . .
“Get to bed, you knotty-pated fool,” Occam’s voice declares in my head. “You don’t even know she was pregnant.”
“Oh you, Occam,” my voice in my head replies. “I thought you were out clubbing.”
13
The 5:30 a.m. alarm only partially penetrates my fog.
I think about running but hit snooze twice before drowsily putting on my running clothes and lumbering unconvincingly down Rainbow, around Penn Valley Park, past Clyde Manor, and back to my place.
Distance: 3.2 miles; Pace: 5.8 mph; Sleep quality: poor, the message on my u.D flashes.
“Don’t I know it,” I mumble into my wrist, my head still buzzing as I amble down the stairs to my kitchen, ignoring the alerts flashing on my freezerator door and feeling oppressed by my technology. I grab three eggs and two slices of frozen bread for my Haier Breakfast Deluxe machine. I tap the omelet with toast button then place a plate at the mouth of the machine and head upstairs to the shower. In old romantic movies the sounds coming up from my kitchen would be of the beautiful woman whistling, naked but for my business shirt, as she cooks up an omelet. Now, the Chinese machine has stepped in. How strange that the United States and China have such a tense relationship but we live our lives interacting so intimately with so many of the things they make.
The newsroom somehow looks different to me when I arrive at 6:55. Not many people are here, but the few who are seem to me like modern Don Quixotes fighting an unbeatable foe, or at least bearing an unbearable sorrow, for truth. What a difference a day makes.
Joseph, of course, is already at his desk. He starts speaking mid-sentence when he sees me as if he’s been conversing with me in his head before I’ve arrived.
“—UMKC student health records are strongly protected, but the scheduling software is not.”
“Have you been here all night?” Joseph looks tired on the best of days, but today looks even worse.
He ignores the question. “I’m not seeing any appointments for MaryLee Stock at the university clinic in the last six months.”
“All right.”
“There’s something else. I was working from home last night,” he says without irony, “and I tried to get into her u.M account. I finally got in, and there was nothing there.”
“Maybe she didn’t use the mail account very much or had a different account,” I say.
“Could be,” Joseph says, “but I did find records in some of her other classmates’ accounts showing they’d sent messages to her at this address.”
“Is that odd?”
“Usually when
files get erased there’s still a record. These ones are gone.”
“What do you think that means?”
“I don’t know, boss. It’s not normal.”
“Keep on it, Joseph,” I say, catching Martina Hernandez out of the corner of my eye.
“Martina,” I yell across the newsroom, “I need to speak with you.”
She looks ready to spar but intuits this is not the time. “Come to my office,” she says without her usual edge.
I turn back to Joseph.
“Joseph, if she didn’t visit the university clinic, where else was she? Did she give blood any time before she died? If she was pregnant, there’s got to be an obstetrician or a clinic somewhere in this town that’s treated her. I need you to find out who it is.”
“Got it, boss,” he says softly.
I give him a lot of shit, but there’s no one I’d rather have in my corner. I march across the newsroom to Martina’s office.
“Talk to me,” she says without looking up from the screen covering her desk.
“The police are officially announcing MaryLee Stock’s death later this morning. The autopsy is being completed later today.”
Martina focuses on her screen.
“I’m willing to bet the autopsy will find she was pregnant,” I add.
She looks up.
“And,” I continue, “I’m starting to suspect Cobalt Becker could be the father.”
I wait for the statement to sink in.
“Fuck.” The word seeps from Martina’s mouth.
I’ve rarely seen her so unoriginal.
“Can you prove it?” she asks.
“No.”
“What do you have?”
I lay out my findings.
Martina listens intently, but I can’t tell if I’m convincing her or not. When I’m done, she stares over my head into a middle distance then speaks as if to herself or to no one.
“King is challenging the president of the United States for control of the Republican party, maybe even for control of the country, and you’re telling me that his spiritual advisor and key link to the evangelical community may have gotten a young woman from his church pregnant? Do you have any idea what the implications of this would be? And you think we should just push ahead based on flimflam and conjecture, based on stories made up after stealing a dead woman’s garbage? Do you have any clue what it would mean for the Star if you got this wrong?” She taps her fingers on the side of her reddened face.
Martina’s increasingly agitated response surprises me. After all of the insinuations about what would happen if we didn’t bring back “juicy” stories, I could now be on the heels of something big and she suddenly seems cautious.
I try to slow the speeding train. “The autopsy will be completed by the end of the day. If it was Blue Magic or if she was pregnant, at least we should have confirmation soon.”
“Let’s see what the autopsy says,” she says after a deep breath. “Don’t take a fucking step without checking with me first. The case you’ve presented to me so far is bullshit and guesswork.”
I quickly turn and rush out of the room before she changes her mind.
14
The magic of life is its imprecision, the multiple narratives constantly unfolding before us. Every step we take, every decision we make, reshuffles the deck of our lives and sets a new trajectory of possibility in motion.
But, here in the KCPD briefing room, life and death get boiled down to their bare essentials.
“Good morning,” the public information officer says with a synthetic energy.
The sorry lot of crime reporters doesn’t respond. How many of these briefings have they each attended over the years? I’ve only been at it for three months and am already conditioned to feel disappointed even before the briefing begins.
The officer invites Police Chief Slade Roberts to the podium. Tall and wide, Roberts looks like he had once been an athlete before doughnuts, stakeouts, deskwork, and gravity got the best of him. His expressionless face looks like another victim of glacial melting.
“We announced three days ago that a young woman had been found dead in her apartment at 4704 Oak Street in Kansas City,” Roberts drones. “At that time, we were not able to release the name of the deceased. MaryLee Stock, age twenty-four, was a second year Master’s student at the University of Missouri Kansas City. We are investigating the cause of her death and will release that information in due course. Thank you.”
How much of the poetry of a life is lost in the description Roberts just gave, I wonder.
KCTV9.com’s Walter Heming knocks me from my thought. “Is there any indication this was an unnatural death?”
“We are not able to make that determination at this time.”
“When will the autopsy results be released?” KCWEB’s Barbara Washington asks.
“We are hoping to release them tomorrow or the day after.”
The briefing feels like a rerun of an old show. The chief needs to say as little as possible. The reporters need to ask the questions they know won’t be answered. Everyone seems half dead. Everyone except for Maurice Henderson and me. Maurice stands behind Chief Roberts saying nothing. I catch his eye for a moment and nod. He doesn’t respond.
The chief points at my raised hand.
“Do we know if any evidence of drug use was found in her body?” I ask.
His face remains impassive. “Not that I’m aware of.”
The questions keep coming at Roberts, but it’s clear that the reporters have to justify their jobs by asking the logical questions and that he’s doing his by not budging, raising the question of why the press conference is being held in the first place. After fifteen minutes the chief delivers an inflectionless, “Thank you,” and marches out of the room.
All of us reporters head out to file. I may be critical but also know I’m one of them, pushing copy to justify my role in a shrinking corner of a dying industry, following the death of a young white woman when we know full well that young black and Hispanic women in Kansas City die all the time without much fanfare.
I find an empty bench in Ilus Davis Park, tap my u.D, and start dictating. Scanning the park as I speak, I watch a few Latino kids skateboarding a slalom course through the long line of flagpoles. A homeless man with a long beard counts the cans he takes from his shopping cart as he places them in a clear plastic bag. Surrounded by the decay of downtown Kansas City, the green park with its cascading fountains feels like a canyon at the center of yesterday. Then I see her.
Carol Stock sits motionless on a bench looking down. I approach cautiously.
“Excuse me,” I say in my softest voice, “Mrs. Stock?”
Her vacant eyes focus slowly and hesitantly on my face.
“I am so terribly sorry about your daughter.”
She looks at me with pleading-at-the-universe eyes. Her round body and polyester pantsuit seem wedged into the bench.
“I am Rich Azadian from the Kansas City Star. We met Wednesday.” I feel guilty for transitioning so quickly from concerned human to cog in the death industry.
The expression on her face becomes even more guarded and inward-looking.
“I really can’t talk,” she says. “I hope that’s okay.”
I appreciate her Midwestern graciousness but almost pity her inability to tell me to go to hell.
“I understand, ma’am,” I say.
She looks at me blankly, like a wounded bird unable to fly away.
A part of me feels I should just leave her in peace. “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”
“Please,” she pleads, “just let me be. I’m so sorry.”
Her daughter is dead and she is apologizing to me? “Mrs. Stock, I’ve been assigned to write the story about what happened to your daughter.”
“I don’t know if we’ll ever know,” she says hesitantly. “One minute she is a beautiful child and the next minute, the next minute . . .”
“I’m so sorry.” I
say because I can’t think of anything better. “Do you have any idea what happened?”
“I don’t understand it.” She pauses for a moment then says through her sniffles, “I don’t know how this happened to Lee.”
My mind takes a moment to readjust. “Lee?”
Carol Stock looks at me as if I’m an alien. “Why are you asking me this? Please.”
Constitutionally, I want to leave her alone. Professionally, I can’t.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Stock,” I say the words again, but this time they seem to have a different meaning. I am so sorry to keep pushing when the right thing to do is to stop. “Did you always call her Lee?”
Carol Stock’s Eeyore eyes suggest a lifetime of feeling moved by forces beyond her control. “Yes,” she says quietly, the words falling from her mouth. “We named her after her grandma Leanne.”
“And how did you come up with Mary?”
“The Reverend thought it would be a good name.”
“Reverend Becker?”
She nods.
“Did he say why?”
“He said Lee was three when she came to us and Mother Mary was three when she came to the temple in Jerusalem.”
My heart begins to pound. “Mrs. Stock, do you know if your daughter had a boyfriend?”
Carol Stock freezes. Then her head jerks back. She stares up at me before her head falls forward as if unsupported by her neck. “She was a good girl,” she says softly.
“Mrs. Stock, do you think anyone would want to hurt your daughter, hurt . . . Lee?”
Carol Stock looks at me bewildered. “No, never. Never ever. She was a good person, a kind person. No,” she pleads.
An awkward silence descends as Carol hides her face in her hands. “Do you think that’s what happened?” she asks softly.
“I don’t know, but I promise I will do whatever I can to find out.” I say, not sure if my words are noble or predatory. “I’d like to give you my u.D contacts. If you ever want to talk, I hope you’ll please call me.”
I hold out my u.D. She looks at my hand for a moment then lifts her right arm. I wave my u.D over hers then pause, wrestling with myself whether I should ask my last question.
