The Best Revenge

by Stephen White

  “I felt like the little kids in Peter Pan. I was off on an adventure to a land where my mother loved me.”

  I moved my arm into my lap, sat back on my chair, and said, “So when you were little, you liked the eggs?”

  He looked at me as though I were nuts. “What?”

  As my partner Diane would say, I had his attention. In explanation, I walked him through the penultimate scene inAnnie Hall, where Woody Allen’s character is explaining to a psychiatrist that when he was growing up he had a brother who thought he was a chicken, but that the family tolerated the pathology because “We liked the eggs.”

  Tom laughed. “Yeah, when I was little, there were times when I liked the eggs.” He smiled at some memory. “When Mom was ‘feeling good’ we had a lot of fun. I didn’t know she was sick back then. I just knew that this sad, quiet woman would suddenly become the most fun friend I had in the whole world. And I was the one in the center of her universe. Especially on those road trips. We had an old VW station wagon we used to take. I loved those times. I really did. It was so great to be with her—it was like she chose me to be her kid all over again. ‘You’re my best buddy, Tommy—my best buddy in the whole wide world!’ she’d scream out the window of the car.” Suddenly, Tom’s smile diminished. “Yeah, I think you could say that I liked the eggs.”

  I said, “But at some point she would crash?”

  The natural history of bipolar disease is loosely governed by the rules of gravity. What goes up with mania eventually comes down with depression. Usually the descent from euphoria into despair, like the crash of Newton’s apple, leaves someone feeling bruised. Without the cushion of appropriate medication, bipolar phasing isn’t a graceful process for the patient or anyone in close proximity to the patient.

  “At some point she would crash. When I was older—what, sixth grade maybe?—I could feel the crash coming a day or two or three before it happened. Her batteries would start to wear down, the sound around her would get quieter like the tornado was running out of steam, you know, and the frantic energy would slow, and then finally . . . finally she would start to weep, and she would start to see sadness in everything. She wouldn’t talk as much. She’d cry at flowers. At traffic signs. I remember once that a ‘Yield’ sign left her weeping for hours. I thought that was all the sickness was—the sadness and the tears. I never considered that the good times were part of it, too, that everything was all tied up together.

  “I thought that when she was ‘feeling good’ she was her true self. But then she’d crash.

  “We’d get home somehow—but it was always an adventure. Broken-down cars, out of money, skipping on motel bills, caught shoplifting—you name it, it happened to us on those trips. By the time we got home she’d have lost whatever job she had and she’d disappear into her room. One of her sisters or brothers would show up to take care of her. Sometimes my grandfather would come, but not too often. Usually it was one of my aunts.”

  The old house creaked and Tom spun in his chair to track the source of the sound.

  “And you?” I asked.

  He returned his attention to me. “I went back to my life. My life as I knew it stopped when she was ‘feeling good’ and it started up again when we got back home. She got worse as I got older. The manic periods weren’t that different, maybe they were a little shorter and more intense. But the time before and after—the depression times—those were worse. Those were definitely worse.”

  I noted that he had said that the relatives arrived “to take care of her,” not “to take care of me.”

  “Did it get harder for you, too, as you got older?” I asked.

  Tom, I thought, wanted to talk about his mother. I was much more interested in hearing about the little boy who lived with her, but I doubted that was going to happen, at least not that day. I suspected that I was going to lose him soon. He would drift off into some area that was less tender for him than his memories of living with his mother’s mental illness, and given that we were only in our second session, I would be inclined to allow whatever drift he required without attempting to reel him back in.

  That was my supposition on what was about to happen. But that’s not what happened.

  Almost as though he was intent on proving me wrong, Tom said, “She killed herself when I was fourteen.”

  Reflexively, I replied, “I’m sorry.”

  Yes, for his loss. But I was also lamenting my assumption that talking about his mother was misdirection, not direction. I prepared to move from probing mode to some stance that would permit this man who had lost so much to explore whatever residual grief remained from his mother’s suicide.

  But Tom had other ideas. He shrugged and said, “I was relieved when she died. The craziness of living with her ups and downs was really starting to get to me. When she killed herself, it let me get off the roller coaster. The thing about roller coasters is that they’re fun to ride for a while, but it’s no fun when you don’t have any control about getting on and getting off. Imagine living a life where someone can at any second yank you away from whatever you’re doing and plop you into the front seat of the Twister? You know what that’s like?”

  He took a quick glance over his left shoulder to check for a shadow with a shank. Then he looked back at me.

  My face was impassive.

  He said, “I expected you to ask me how she killed herself. Everybody does. Everybody seems to want to know that.”

  “Do you want to tell me?”

  He put an I-don’t-care expression on his face and started picking at a scab on the back of his left hand. “She sliced her own throat, if you can believe it. My mother was really crazy. I think you’d have to be really crazy to slice your own throat. Don’t you agree?”

  I had a question at that point. I asked, “Were you the one who found her after she killed herself, Tom?” The image of a fourteen-year-old boy discovering his mother’s body after she killed herself by cutting her own throat flashed across my consciousness and then vanished in a microsecond, as though someone had quickly changed the channel with a remote control.

  He nodded. “Yeah. What a mess.”

  The scab popped off his hand and the wound began to bleed. A full red drop hovered above where the scab had been. He stared at the blood as he might gaze at an insect that had landed on his hand. He told me, “This is where you should be making the connection between my mother and Ivy Campbell.”

  “Pardon me?” I said.

  “They both had their throats cut. That’s quite a coincidence, or so I’m told. Plenty of people have used it as evidence that my mother’s suicide drove me to repeat the act with Ivy. The shrinks who interviewed me before my trial sure thought it was important. What about you? You don’t find some psychological diamonds to mine in those facts, Doctor?”

  I found the challenge that Tom was making interesting. “I’m more than a little perplexed. The DNA testing says you didn’t have anything to do with Ivy Campbell’s murder, Tom. Right? So how could there be a psychological connection between that and your mother’s suicide?”

  My eyes found the clock that was on a table behind his chair. Our time was almost up.

  He smiled at me in a way that made me uncomfortable. “She was crazy, too. Ivy was. Not like my mom. Ivy had panic attacks. Ever been around somebody while they had a panic attack? It’s not a pretty thing.”

  I didn’t answer his question. Tom had just traversed the ground between telling me that he’d grown up with a mother with a severe mood disorder and telling me that he’d once been romantically drawn to a woman with another serious mental illness, so I encouraged him to keep talking. “Ivy Campbell had panic attacks?”

  “Yeah. Suddenly she’d freak for no reason. She’d actually hide in closets, pull all the clothes around her. She’d yell, she’d cry. She’d think she was dying.”

  “Would she want you around to soothe her?” I already suspected that I knew the answer.

  “Are you kidding? The way I knew th
e panic attacks were coming is that she’d kick me out. She wouldn’t want me around.”

  “What was she like in between panic episodes?”

  “She was terrific. She was exciting. She was a truly passionate girl.” He smiled at some memory. “Ivy always made me want to dance.”

  I pondered my next move for the time it took me to inhale and exhale twice. Then I said, “You suggested that I might be interested in the parallel between how Ivy died and how your mother died. I find that I’m actually interested in a different parallel. It sounds as though, at least in this instance, you found yourself attracted to a woman with a mental disorder.”

  I paused solely for effect. But Tom didn’t wait for me to resume.

  “Like my momma?” he said. I suspected that he’d been waiting for me to say what I did. He pounced on my reflection and whacked it right back over the net like Andre Agassi slamming a perfect overhand.

  “Yes, Tom. Like your mother.”

  His eyes lit up. “Well, that’s something, isn’t it?”

  As I suspected at the beginning of the session, Tom Clone was going to offer me the promise of constant surprise.

  CHAPTER 19

  My best friend was a cop. That was easily as astounding to me as it was to Sam Purdy that his best friend was a shrink.

  Although we’d talked on the phone once, Sam hadn’t seen me in the days since I’d lost the tussle with my poodle. I wasn’t anticipating a whole lot of sympathy from him; it wasn’t his nature to fuss over illness and injury. And the fact that a sixteen-pound miniature poodle was responsible for keeping me from driving my dream car for at least six weeks would amuse him no end.

  He’d come over to our house after dinner. The rationalization for the visit was that Simon, his son, wanted to see Grace, our daughter. I knew that it was a ruse; the truth was that Sam missed me.

  He and I were standing in the open door of the garage. Sam was holding a bottle of Odell’s. I kept his favorite local beer in the house just for him.

  I was admiring the Mini. Sam wasn’t.

  “Lauren was right about this? You really wanted one of these?” he asked. He was leaning over way too far, as though he needed to demonstrate that he couldn’t see inside the diminutive car without almost getting down on his knees.

  “I didn’t know that I did but . . . yeah, I guess I really did want one, Sam. Lauren must have read my mind. I think she may be trying to preempt an incipient midlife crisis.”

  He grunted.

  I took a few moments to explain to Sam about my first car.

  He wasn’t moved by the story of my adolescent fling with a British import named Sadie. He said, “Simon has a skateboard with bigger wheels than this thing. Maybe his scooter has bigger wheels, too. Shoot, you know what, I think I have a suitcase with bigger wheels than this thing.”

  “You’re not an aficionado, I take it?”

  Sam laughed. “My first car was a Pontiac GTO, Alan. Hurst shifter, twin carbs. My current dream car is a Lincoln Town Car or one of those Buick whatever-they’re-calleds. The big ones.” He gestured at the Mini. “If I sneezed inside this thing, I’d blow out the windows.” Sam was a large man. When he was ignoring his diet, which was usually, he outweighed me by most of a hundred pounds.

  “Want to know what’s ironic?” I said. “I haven’t even driven it. I broke my arm the night Lauren gave it to me. It’s been sitting in the garage the whole time.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Sam asked.

  Sam carried Emily’s retractable leash in one hand and a fresh beer in the other as we walked down the dirt lanes that laced the hillsides adjacent to the house. Emily wasn’t attached to the leash; she ran free in the dry grasses, following the scent of the red foxes or some of the other critters that roamed the undeveloped parts of the eastern rim of the Boulder Valley. The night was as dry as the day had been. I’d heard weather reports of thunderstorms full of hail near Pueblo, down south, but a high-pressure ridge that was parked in just the wrong place was still responsible for pushing the main channel of the monsoonal flow into Texas and Oklahoma.

  What that meant in the real world was that it wasn’t going to rain in Boulder County.

  Sam was working on a task force that was trying to reduce the number of assaults that were disrupting the peace on the Hill, the student-dominated neighborhood west of the University of Colorado. Although he wouldn’t say he was seeking my professional opinion—hell, when he was in certain moods, he wouldn’t even acknowledge that what I did for a living constituted a profession—he was seeking my professional opinion. We talked about young kids away from home and drugs and alcohol and how best to influence the mix. I told him what I thought, but the truth was that the conversation didn’t leave me feeling like a wizard.

  After we paused to watch the sun make its final descent behind the Divide, we started back up the hill to the house. Sam wanted to corral Lauren and the kids and go out someplace for ice cream. He thought his wife might drive someplace and meet us.

  We walked a few more steps and Sam said, “Simon told me that his friends say I have a unibrow.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  He leaned toward me and tapped the bridge of his nose. “See, my eyebrows run together above my nose. Simon says it’s called a unibrow. I didn’t even know there was a name for it.”

  “A unibrow, huh? And that’s a bad thing?” I gazed at the shrub of hair that seemed to connect his eyebrows. I’d never noticed it before, but sure enough, there it was.

  “I guess. His friends are telling him he’s going to have one, too. He’s kind of worried about it.”

  “Given the rest of the genetic bounty he’s getting from you, I think it’s a small price to pay.”

  He raised half his unibrow. “That was sarcastic, right?”

  “So what did you tell him, Sam?”

  “I told him that he’d inherited Sherry’s eyebrows, not mine. It seemed to satisfy him for now.”

  “I assume he doesn’t know about plucking?”

  “Nope. He’s blissfully ignorant about plucking.”

  “Well,” I said, “I suppose that’s one of the good things about being under ten.”

  “He asked me if I have a six-pack, too.”

  “Like beer?”

  “No, like abs. He wanted to know whether I’m, you know, buffed.”

  I choked and ended up in a paroxysmal spasm trying to swallow my laughter.

  “What did you tell him?”

  Sam rubbed one hand over his rounded abdomen. His voice grew slightly defensive. “I told him what I have is better than a six-pack.”

  “Yeah? How’s that?”

  “I told him I have a whole keg. He seemed impressed.”

  “You’re quick on your feet, Sam.”

  “That I am. That, I am.”

  We continued walking. I used the ensuing silence as an excuse to change the subject. “What do you guys think about having Tom Clone living in Boulder?”

  Two steps, then, “What guys? Are you talking about me and Sherry? Or me and the rest of the cops?”

  “You and the rest of the cops. I’m wondering how the police feel about having Tom Clone in town.”

  “Why are you asking?” Sam was a detective; he couldn’t keep himself from exploring questions like that. His job, like mine, was one that often left residue after hours.

  “Just wondering.”

  “Yeah, right. You have a broken arm and a brand-new widget of a car that you can’t drive, a gorgeous wife and a daughter who’s cute as they come, and you’re wasting your time wondering about Tom Clone? I’m not stupid. You’re involved with him somehow. Don’t tell me he’s one of your, you know, your—”

  “Sam, stop. Stop right there. Would I tell you if he was?”

  Emily raced to within ten feet of us before plowing back into the fields. I think she just wanted to make certain that we hadn’t been attacked by foxes. Sam shook his head in disdain at my question and s
aid, “I don’t care that Clone is here. I just care that he’s not there.”

  “‘There’? What does that mean?”

  “I don’t care that he’s in Boulder. If he stays out of trouble, he’s just another civilian as far as I’m concerned. I’m just not convinced he should have been let out of the penitentiary in the first place.”

  “I thought you were a proponent of DNA testing. Even if it means going back after conviction. It’s one of your more progressive public-policy positions.”

  He glanced over at me to gauge my intent with the little dig I’d just sent his way before replying. “I am. But leave the DNA out of the case and this guy looks as guilty as they come, Alan. I can’t think of a way he didn’t kill that girl.”

  “So someone else got ahold of the knife after her murder and bled all over it? That’s a stretch, Sam.”

  He eyed me suspiciously. “It’s possible. Why are you defending him? The cops had eyewitnesses that put him there—that’s plural—and they had enough circumstantial evidence to construct a skyscraper. They had motive. It’s all there. The guy was just dripping guilt.”

  “I’m not defending him, Sam. I’m . . . I don’t know what I’m doing. Barry Scheck has a book full of stories about people who were convicted with the same kinds of evidence. They were all wrongly convicted. If it weren’t for DNA, they’d either be dead or still on death row.”

  “I’m trying to enjoy myself here and you want to talk about Barry Scheck? Why don’t I just tell you about the last catheter your friend Adrienne shoved up my . . .”

  Thankfully, he let the image of my urologist neighbor, Adrienne, evaporate in the dry air. I was about to change the subject when he continued. “Well, I can’t explain it. I just can’t find a single hole in the case that they put together against this guy. Some of Scheck’s cases? I’ve read his book. They were flimsy to start with. There were holes. But not this murder they had Clone for. I only know what I’ve heard from other cops, but Clone sure looks guilty to me.”