Question of Trust

by Laura Caldwell

  I hugged him and his boyfriend, Shane. “How are you guys?”

  “We are lovely,” Shane said. “But how are you?”

  Shane was a short guy, shorter than me with the high boots I wore. “I’m fine.”

  “You are?” He peered at me. “Call us if you’re not good. Or even if you are good but you just want some fun. Or anytime. You and I go back a long time.”

  “That’s true. Thanks.”

  “And hey, we met your cool neighbor,” Q said.

  “Kim?” I’d invited her but she already had plans.

  “Yeah, she was on her way out and we said hi.”

  “But I swear we met her before,” Shane said.

  “We did,” Q said, adjusting the gray velvet blazer he wore over a black shirt and pants. “I’ll remember it eventually. My aging brain needs a little time.” He looked over my shoulder. “Or maybe a little champagne.”

  Q led Shane toward the bar and I was about to close the door when I heard someone coming up the stairs.

  I waited, but then the sound stopped. “Hello,” I called down the stairs.

  No answer.

  “C’mon up,” I called.

  Still nothing. Had I misheard the footsteps due to the sounds of the party?

  But right then, I heard someone take a few more steps. For some reason, I held my breath, felt like slamming the door closed. What if the person who had broken in was trotting back into my building now? What if by having a party, I had invited them right back in?

  Two more steps. They were almost on the landing now, where I would see them. I took a breath, got pissed off all over again about the break-in and took a step outside, crossing my arms and looking down. Hell if I was going to be scared in my own house.

  And then I saw who it was. “Eric.”

  Theo’s partner had fair skin and dark hair that was cut close to his head. His hairline was inching back—he’d be one of those guys who lost his hair early—but he had keen green eyes and a chiseled-looking face with a straight jaw and prominent cheekbones. He would be handsome for a long time. Except that now, his face looked more ravaged than when I’d seen him earlier in the week, his skin dry and delicate.

  I’d first been introduced to Eric the same night Lucy and C.R. had met. I understood then how he and Theo had been successful partners. Both were talented programmers and designers, but Theo had the charisma, the ability to explain and to sell. Eric was the more contemplative one who thought long-term about their business and their employees and the day-to-day intricacies of starting and running a company. But was Theo right? Had that contemplativeness turned toward ways to bilk the company of money for his own gain?

  “Hi, Izzy,” he said. “How are you?”

  He took a few more steps and kissed me on the cheek, which struck me as an odd gesture, one you’d expect from someone much older. But then again, Theo said Eric had always been mature.

  “What are you doing here, Eric?” I asked softly.

  He raised his eyebrows, as if asking himself the same thing. Then the expression drifted away, landing again at a seen-too-much look. “I heard everyone was here, and—”

  “And you just thought you could walk in and we’d all be happy to see you?” The voice behind me sounded hurt. And pissed off. Theo.

  I stepped aside to let him next to me.

  “You just left me out there to dry,” Theo said.

  Eric’s mouth opened, then closed.

  “You worked with the government.” Theo’s voice was loud now, incredulous.

  “Only because you made me,” Eric said.

  “I made you?” He was shouting now, and I heard conversations behind him start to wane. “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “You got us into this,” Eric said.

  Silence behind us now. I heard only the sound of a song from my iPod—Bob Schneider singing, I’ve got a long way to get before I get back home.

  Theo took a step closer, and for some reason, as if moved by a deep, deep instinct, I took a step back.

  Thwack!

  I heard the sound before I saw Eric’s head swivel on his neck, before I realized Theo had punched him. Hard.

  33

  With one arm still supporting him over me, Theo put the palm of his other hand lightly on my chest. Then his hand was on my collarbone. He stared into my eyes. His hand moved to my neck. He tightened it minimally. His gaze intensified.

  And right then, I knew what we were both thinking.

  “Can we talk about this?” I asked.

  It was what I had asked him earlier, although on a different topic.

  Eric had left quickly after Theo punched him. And so did everyone else, all the goodwill from HeadFirst employees flowing away. When they were gone, my friends stuck around, asking if there was anything they could do. But with Theo in the bedroom with the door closed and the majority of the guests gone, it was clear the party was over.

  I cleaned up, giving Theo time to calm down. When I went in the bedroom, he was staring at the ceiling, lying flat on his back.

  “We should talk about this,” I said.

  “No,” he responded simply.

  “Theo, we have to.”

  “Okay,” he said, sitting up. “But let’s talk first about Sam and you at that hotel.”

  I hadn’t seen that coming. Since Theo’s arrest, the topic had occurred to me once or twice, but I’d thought it had lost any meaning given the rest of what was going on. Apparently, I was wrong about that.

  “Don’t want to talk about it?” Theo asked, his voice hard.

  “Not really. But I think—”

  “Well, I don’t want to talk about this. The same way you don’t want to talk about that.”

  I paused. Waited. Theo and I stared at each other, and his expression softened, seemed to say, Please.

  “Okay,” I said.

  I got ready for bed and when I climbed in, Theo wrapped his warm self around my back, around my whole body. And he held me, just held me for the longest while. Then one hand moved between my legs and nudged them slightly apart.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Yes, yes.”

  He waited.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Then he was inside me, without warning. It was…exquisite.

  He turned me over so he could see me. From that moment, his gaze never left mine while I sucked in the sight of him lit by a bedside lamp—that hair, those lips, those eyes. The red ribbon on his arm seemed to undulate as we moved. I stared at it, mesmerized, but then I shifted my gaze back to his eyes, always those eyes. He moved faster, watching my reaction, subtly changing to reach me deeper, slowing and halting when he thought I was drifting away on bliss.

  But then that hand on my neck. Squeezing. And then I said, “Can we talk about this?”

  He took his hand away, leaned down and nuzzled my neck, breathing me in. Then he slid out of me and lay at my side, his hand on my belly.

  After her death, it was learned that Jane, the Trial TV anchorwoman who’d introduced me to Theo, had a predilection for infidelity and for occasional autoerotic asphyxiation. Also exposed was the fact that Theo had been one of the men she was unfaithful with.

  Now, here Theo was with his hand on my neck, and I was not so much shocked as nervous, even oddly titillated. And yet I felt the need for some discussion, some definition.

  “How often did you two do that kind of thing?” I asked him.

  “Not often.”

  “Is it good?”

  He raised his eyebrows and nodded his head as if to say, Really good.

  He started kissing me again, moving his body right next to mine, so we were pressed against each other. He twirled my hair, pulling it around his face. Soon we seemed like one person. Soon he was inside of me again.

  One hand moved to my neck, again a little squeeze. “We could do it,” he said, his words lighting my insides. “But only if you want.”

  I got a burst of excitement in my mind, quickly fo
llowed by a flicker of fear. Of what, exactly? I wasn’t sure.

  “Not now,” I said. “Not yet.” I had spoken quickly, as if I wanted the discussion over fast.

  Theo nodded. “No worries, no worries.”

  But the moment was dead.

  34

  And somehow the next morning it got worse.

  “No” was the first word I heard Theo say that morning. I could tell he was in the next room. Then, “No.”

  I mumbled, turned over in bed. Strangely, I had gotten a full night of deep and desperately needed sleep.

  But now this voice. I raised my head. The bedroom door was slightly open, but I couldn’t see outside it.

  “No,” Theo said again. There was something about his voice that sounded very off, almost in pain.

  “What?” I heard him say. Loud. He was rarely loud. “I don’t understand,” he said again. He sounded like that night he’d heard he was turned down for the mortgage, but now anguish laced his voice.

  I got up and wrapped a blanket around myself, took a few steps toward the door.

  “How?” he said. There was a pause, then a strangled sound.

  I hurried through the door and into the living room. He was crouched on the hardwood floor, one hand holding his cell phone to his ear, the other hand in his hair as if he’d been running his fingers through it and they had stuck there. His whole body was frozen like a sculpture, low to the ground. He vaguely reminded me of Rodin’s The Thinker.

  He didn’t look up at me. He kept listening, then he shook his head back and forth, back and forth, holding tight to the phone. The rest of his body didn’t move.

  I heard a moan from low in his chest. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, I’ll do that, but…Mrs. Deringer…I don’t understand.”

  He stood then and turned to me, his eyes wide, shocked. “It’ll be okay,” he said into the phone in an unconvincing way. His face seemed to contort then, as if he couldn’t stand what he was listening to. “It’ll be okay, Mrs. Deringer.” He didn’t sound as if he believed his words. He closed his eyes, listening again as if in pain.

  A minute later when he was off the phone, I took a few steps toward him. “Mrs. Deringer?” I said. “Was that Eric’s mom?”

  He nodded. “Eric tried to kill himself.”

  We stood there in my living room, staring at each other, Theo’s face contorted again in pain. It seemed so long we remained like that. Days.

  Finally, as if in a delayed response, I felt myself flinch. “Suicide?”

  Theo nodded. “That’s what she said. But it doesn’t seem right.”

  “How did he…how did he try?”

  “They said he OD’d.”

  “On what?”

  “I don’t know. Eric doesn’t do drugs. He…” He paused. “He didn’t,” he said, as if testing out the past tense.

  The Cortaderos were a drug cartel family. Allegedly. And they wouldn’t work with us if we represented Theo. But could their reasoning have anything to do with Eric?

  Theo ran his hand through his hair. This time it didn’t get stuck. He kept running it over his head, over and over as if he could rake the worries from his mind. “He doesn’t do drugs.”

  “Well, you might not know. I mean sometimes you don’t always know a person.”

  Why was there a trickle of a thought in my brain that said, Like I don’t always know about you?

  Theo glared at me, as if he could read my mind. “He doesn’t do drugs.”

  “Well, then what happened?”

  More shaking of his head. “His mom said she was surprised he’d been at the party, because she hadn’t heard from him in days, which was strange. They almost always talk on Saturday mornings, so when he didn’t call today, she sent his doorman to his apartment. He was in bed and…” He squinted, like he didn’t want to picture the scene. “He was unconscious. He still is. And…there were some kind of drugs by his bedside.”

  “What kind of drugs?”

  Again, Theo glared. “I said I don’t know, Izzy.”

  “Well, don’t get mad at me.”

  His face softened. “I’m not.”

  I took a step toward him slowly, unsure whether he wanted me near. A few more slow steps and I’d reached him. I put my arms around his waist. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.”

  He fell over me then, willing, it seemed, to let me hold the weight of him.

  “Oh, Jesus, did I make him do this?” he asked, his voice anguished.

  “Of course not.” But I was wondering the same thing. About him. And myself. I thought of how I’d told off Eric in his office earlier in the week. Thought of how after Theo punched him I hadn’t been exactly comforting—just let him walk down the stairs alone.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Theo said again. And then, he cried. I kept holding him.

  Finally he stood straight. “I’m sorry,” he said, his hands to his eyes.

  “Don’t be.”

  “Eric’s mom wants me to go the office and see if there’s anything there.”

  “Like what?”

  He sighed. “I don’t know. I told her I had looked through Eric’s office this week, but now this has happened and I think she wants to see if there are any clues that he was heading this way.”

  “Are the police looking into this?” I wondered if the office would be considered a crime scene. I couldn’t think of how it could be. And I remembered Maggie once saying that if it wasn’t a crime a scene yet, then it wasn’t a crime scene at all.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  35

  Now that I wasn’t at Theo’s office to confront Eric, now that I was going farther than the conference room, I tried to look at it more objectively, to get my mind away from the awful fact—he tried to kill himself.

  The office—in a building on West Fulton that had been developed into four units—had outside walls of exposed brick and inside, heavy-glassed walls surrounding eclectic offices decked out with technology, but also diverse artwork, beautiful rugs and interesting furniture.

  But it was fairly small. Or smaller than what I envisioned Theo’s company to be like. “Your company gets everything done from here?” I asked Theo as we walked the hallway.

  He shook his head. “Just the creative and the business side of it. The manufacturing and packing is done in Malaysia. But we don’t even have to do much of that anymore. Most people just pay for our software online and download it. The legal is all handled by a firm.”

  “Here’s Eric’s office,” Theo said, leading me farther down a hallway and stepping past a glass wall.

  The space was square, about twenty feet around. On top of a massive desk—surrounded by three different office chairs—sat five computer screens, papers, notes.

  We both looked around.

  “I can’t believe he’s in the hospital. I can’t believe he tried to kill himself,” Theo said. “This is just so crazy. God, why did I hit him?”

  “It wasn’t you.” It might have been me.

  I put my arm around him and we stood a little while longer, as if in a moment of silence for Eric.

  Theo looked at his watch, sighing heavily. “I wonder where my dad is.”

  “Why?”

  “I wonder if he’s heard about Eric.”

  “Wouldn’t you have had to tell him?”

  “He’s close with Eric,” he said, “since my dad was like our unofficial founder.”

  I felt my brow furrowing a little. “What do you mean?” I asked Theo. “I mean, I know he has stock in your company, but ‘unofficial founder’?”

  “Since we were just college kids when we started HeadFirst, my dad raised the money and got the lawyers and helped us form a corporation and find offices and all that.”

  “Really?” I thought of Brad in Deluxa, clearly pained when I told him Theo had been arrested. But even though we’d discussed allegations of Theo embezzling funds—funds it now sounded like Brad should know about—he hadn’t mentioned anything.

 
; “Yeah,” Theo said, but his eyes were sweeping the office. “Let’s look around.”

  Picking through Eric’s office, I felt like I was tampering with a grave, a memorial. Each item seemed to ask, Will you throw me away if he dies?

  Theo had talked to Eric’s mother again. Eric was in a coma at Northwestern Hospital, she reported. No one else was allowed to see him yet. In my imagination, Eric seemed to be floating somewhere, not sure whether he would return to this world or join some new one.

  I watched Theo get on Eric’s computer, scanning for who knows what, while I looked at things on his bookshelf. We were mostly silent during this process. An hour or so later, Theo started to look through Eric’s desk drawers. He began to tell me what certain things were—our first lease; the articles of incorporation for HeadFirst; Ha! Eric’s ID for that first building. He turned the ID to face me, and I smiled. In the picture, Eric’s dark hairline had yet to begin its recession. His eyes looked clear and big and happy. He looked carefree.

  Theo looked at the ID again, seeming to see the same difference between the Eric of then and the one we now envisioned in a hospital bed, mute, gone, at least momentarily. The smile bled from Theo’s face.

  He kept searching, occasionally filling me in on the title of another document. When he came to what looked to be a legal document or contract—probably thirty or so pages long—he flipped through it, then stopped for a time, seeming to study a page.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Just some legal stuff. I was thinking Eric’s mom might need it.”

  “That’s a good idea. Should we gather any info about his medical insurance?”

  “Yeah,” Theo said. “Or life insurance.”

  The words life insurance made both of us stop. I wondered if Theo might cry again, but he just shook his head, rolled up the document, then turned to another drawer. He began to search its contents slowly, methodically; moving the way a factory worker might at the end of a long, draining shift.

  36

  I called my dad for help. Eventually.

  When I woke up Sunday morning, the morning after Eric tried to kill himself, I was in a very blue frame of mind.