All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found

by Philip Connors

  Ofc. Faerber advised that the decedent was found by a co-worker named George Goodwin. Mr. Goodwin had gone to the apartment to check on the welfare of the decedent because he had failed to show for work. Mr. Goodwin was able to gain access via the pass key provided by the building manager. Ofc. Faerber further advised that Mr. Goodwin had become startled upon discovery of the decedent. Mr. Goodwin then accidentally broke the stair rail from the wall. Mr. Goodwin did not proceed any further than the top of the stairs of the apartment interior. . . .

  George led me back inside, where he retired to his study for the evening. The memories, it seemed, were too painful to explore any further.

  One of the things I wanted to know was what had happened the morning his body was discovered. Six years had passed since that day, but I knew less than I thought I should about the hours surrounding the gunshot. I still believed that if I could tease a comprehensive narrative from those hours, I might be freed at last from the grip of a morbid devotion to the mystery of his death. Now that George was gone, I delicately broached the subject with Barbara. Between what she told me and what I’d read in the police report, the basic story of that morning came into as sharp a focus as it ever would.

  It wasn’t like Dan to be late for work. George tried to call around ten o’clock. He hoped Dan had had too much to drink, was sleeping off a hangover. The phone rang. No answer until the machine picked up. George left a message. He tried to make a joke of it but he couldn’t hide the worry in his voice.

  He left the work site where his crew was installing fiber-optic cable, the crew on which Dan was foreman. On his way home he drove past Dan’s apartment. Dan’s truck was parked in front of his door. George circled through the parking lot and left without stopping.

  When George got home he told his wife that Dan was AWOL.

  Why don’t you go check on him? Barbara asked.

  I went by, he said. His truck’s still there.

  He paused.

  I don’t know. I’ve got a bad feeling.

  What do you mean, a bad feeling?

  He’s never been late. Something must be wrong.

  Did you knock on his door?

  No, George said.

  He’s probably hungover and sleeping in.

  Yeah, George said. I suppose you’re right.

  He dialed Dan’s number again. This time he didn’t leave a message.

  Just drive over and wake him up, Barbara said.

  George loitered around the house. Twenty minutes passed.

  Do you want me to go with you? Barbara said.

  No, that’s all right, George said. I’ll do it.

  He got in his truck. He drove to the apartment and parked in the lot. He waited for several minutes, unsure of what to do. If he hadn’t known Dan so well he might have been less concerned, but the kid was more to him than a hired hand. In the year since his daughter had broken off her engagement to Dan, George had walked a tightrope, honoring Emily’s decision but maintaining his closeness with the young man who was to have been his son-in-law. He worked with him every day. He still respected him. It had been difficult, no doubt about it. His jumbled-up feelings of loyalty to both of them. His hopes for both of them.

  Now he sat paralyzed with dread.

  He thought about driving off, just leaving, waiting at the work site until Dan showed. Finally, though, he worked up the courage to get out of his truck and go to the door.

  He knocked. No answer. He knocked again. No sound of anyone stirring. He tried the door. It was locked.

  He went to the office and found the manager, a guy by the name of Jones. He explained the situation. Jones got his keys. Another employee named Roschevitz joined them. They walked together to No. E43. Jones gave George the key.

  George slipped the key in the lock. The door gave way. Inside, the shades were drawn, the apartment mostly dark, just one lamp on. He saw a figure sitting on the couch. He called Dan’s name, but there was no answer.

  He started into the apartment. He made it a few feet. Then he saw the wound in the side of Dan’s head. He became very afraid. He tried to turn and leave, but in turning he pulled too hard on the handrail along the entryway steps. It gave way, tore from the wall. George stumbled on the stairs, righted himself, got himself out of the apartment. Jones looked at him and said, What is it?

  The cops, George said, call the cops.

  At the kitchen table, Emily and Barbara told more stories. Emily said that toward the end of her relationship with Dan, he’d been drinking a lot.

  It was like there were two sides to him, she said. He was different when he drank. He got angry. One night he threw a glass against the wall and it shattered everywhere. That’s when I started having second thoughts about marriage. I wondered if I really knew him. I couldn’t figure out the source of his anger.

  Barbara said that on the day before Dan killed himself he’d brought his gun to their house and sat at the kitchen table, exactly where we were now, and spent an hour or more cleaning it. This was the day after Wendy—the new woman, the one he’d started seeing after Emily called off the wedding—had broken up with him. Barbara’s mother, who’d been visiting that same day, later said she had an inkling Dan was suicidal, something in his voice and in his eyes, a hint of despair, the tenderness he’d shown the gun, as if preparing it for a moment of truth. She later wished she’d done something for him, something that would have saved him.

  In this she was not alone.

  Emily asked, Did your parents hate me when I called off the wedding? Were they angry with me? Did they blame me for what happened?

  I assured her they did not.

  Barbara left the table, and Emily and I sat there alone. She talked about traveling to Minnesota to meet my family for the first time, not long after she and Dan confirmed their engagement.

  I felt like a queen, she said.

  Everywhere they went people were thrilled to see Dan again, and all were curious about his bride-to-be. The enthusiasm with which they were greeted almost made her want to move to Minnesota. Some of Dan’s antics gave her pause, though, such as the midnight run of sign-stealing he and a friend had made on the lesser-traveled country roads, the sort of thing he and his buddies had done in high school and apparently had yet to grow out of. Emily, still a teenager herself, not even out of high school, didn’t exactly find her fiancé’s behavior indicative of maturity.

  She leaned across the table, and a hush came over her voice.

  I don’t know why, she half whispered, but I feel a strong connection to you. Like you’re my brother in a weird way. I know that makes no sense, since we only saw each other once before, but maybe we went through some of the same things afterward.

  Yes, I told her, no doubt we did.

  There’s something I want to ask you, she said. Dan had a secret. I’m pretty sure I’m the only person he ever told, but I wonder if he told you too.

  I wasn’t sure what she meant but I couldn’t think of any secret.

  I don’t know if I should share it now, she said. I mean, if you agree to keep someone’s secret do you still have to keep it after he’s gone?

  I didn’t want to encourage the notion that she ought to keep his secret but I suspected she required a nuanced response if she was going to give it up. So I improvised.

  I told her that my situation was unique: if I didn’t destroy all my notebooks, people would learn certain things about me after my death that might surprise them, and I had come to accept this. I couldn’t presume to tell her what to do, but I made clear I was curious about anything that could help me better understand my brother, especially since I could no longer ask him directly.

  Just then Barbara walked back in the room.

  You know, it’s getting late, Emily said. I need to get the kids to bed. I should show Phil how to get to his hotel. He can follow me there. I’ll see you guys tomorrow.

  I hugged Barbara and said good night and wished her well, promised to keep in touch.

 
; Emily and I drove to the hotel separately. We stood in the parking lot, in the warm night air of the desert, making more small talk. At last she dropped her bombshell.

  What she wanted to tell me was that my brother had been raped. Dan had shared this with her not long before they broke up, when he knew he was losing her and was drinking hard in an effort to deny it. He’d been just a child when it happened, seven or eight years old, if she remembered correctly. When she told me Dan’s description of the person who’d done it—a certain someone with an identifying characteristic “who Dan said you both hated when you were young”—I knew exactly whom he’d meant.

  I couldn’t bear to sit still with this news roaring inside my cranium, so I canceled my hotel reservation and drove south into the desert, windows rolled down, Satch and Duke’s The Great Summit on the stereo, as loud as I could stand it. I tried to hold my concentration to the lines on the road even as I felt something cold and hard calve inside of me like a glacier. Only past midnight did I finally fall asleep in the back seat of my rental car, alongside a lonely country road near Truth or Consequences, a place name whose bitter irony shadowed my feverish dreams. I had uncovered at last a hidden truth, though the consequences eluded me.

  Into the Wilderness

  Of all the friends I had in the world, M.J. was foremost among those whose company I could tolerate under the circumstances. Temperamentally, we could hardly have been more different. She rolled through the world freestyle, exuding irreverence and mirth, always leading with the heart. Though she’d known darkness, she’d chosen not to hunker down and live inside of it, but its traces could be seen if you looked hard enough, etched in subtle lines on her face. Once she left her little hometown in Nebraska she committed herself to a cosmopolitan life of adventure and travel and refused to look back. She’d spent time in Alaska, Ghana, the Sahara, Costa Rica; she was taking a summer of paid R&R stateside, in her fire tower, before she began a master’s program in Argentina. She evinced a charming lack of guile that disguised a canny mind and allowed her to fit in anywhere, from the streets of Cairo to the cowboy bars of southern New Mexico. She stood five-foot-two and weighed a hundred pounds fully clothed; she chewed Levi Garrett and took her whiskey neat. To a guy like me she easily could have appeared a little too carefree: an impish world traveler in pigtails, a hell of a lot smarter than she let on, and more ambitious than she gave reason to suspect—a chameleon of sorts. Instead she’d drawn me, also a chameleon, irresistibly into her orbit, shown me things about openhearted friendship that I’d not known previously.

  Her first offer to hang out had involved sneaking onto the University of Montana golf course at daybreak and sprinting through a round of speed golf before the clubhouse opened and the groundskeepers nabbed us for failing to pay greens fees. Her dedication to frivolity in all its forms was contagious. Telling her no just wasn’t an option. We’d kept in touch for years by letter, and she never failed to entertain with comic stories from her travels. Hers was just the face—freckled, smiling, blue eyes twinkling with mischief—I needed to see, and there she was, standing outside the Hilltop Café in T or C, New Mexico, suntanned and lean as a mountain lion from hikes to and from her lookout all summer. Also, charmingly, still a little buzzed from a night spent at Elephant Butte Lake with some rowdy, off-duty firefighters.

  We stopped for groceries before we left town, then I followed her by car across the creosote flats toward the rim of the Black Range. We drove through two little foothills villages, relics of the mining boom of the 1870s, into piñon-juniper country, then up into the taller, statelier ponderosa forest with its shaggy-needled, red-barked trees, the road all the while making serpentine curves. At a pass high on the divide we turned onto a dead-end dirt road, where we parked and began a two-hour hoof to her mountain with our packs.

  It was strange country, foreign to my experience, the driest time of a dry season in the driest forest I’d ever known. The grasses were sere and brittle, wildflowers few. The needles of the pines crunched underfoot. In the beginning of the walk, at a little over eight thousand feet above sea level on a south-facing slope, we passed a few alligator junipers, as well as scattered oaks of various types and the occasional yucca in bloom. Higher up the ponderosas predominated, their faint scent of vanilla sweetening the air, and then we’d round a ridge and enter the mixed conifer of the cooler north slopes, dense and dark and fragrant with resins, the bark of the trees draped in lichens. For the last mile I labored, short of breath from cigarettes and sea-level living, until we topped out in an open meadow above ten thousand feet, where a tower rose another fifty feet in the air.

  We dumped our packs against the concrete footers and climbed the sixty-five steps through a staggered series of four landings, each offering a more impressive tease than the last of what awaited on top. The view from the little glass-walled room nearly made me topple from vertigo. The Black Range ran north and south, scored by deep canyons on its east side, the most rugged country I had ever seen. The crest of the divide loomed like a bulwark blocking the view to the northwest, but in every other direction the vistas stretched for sixty, eighty, a hundred miles or more—long, open expanses of desert with scattered ramparts of rock beneath sky-island peaks. I gripped the windowsill and tried to take it all in as M.J. pointed out the distant landmarks, from the dark shoulder of the Manzanos just south of Albuquerque to the Tres Hermanas, three little pyramids marking the gateway to the Mexican border, peeking over the flinty shoulder of Cookes Peak—the Matterhorn of New Mexico, M.J. said, flashing air quotes with her fingers.

  Not a bad view, huh? she said.

  I’ve never seen anything like it. I think I’m already in love.

  Crazy thing is you can watch all day, and it never looks the same for longer than an hour or two.

  And they pay you for this.

  I know. Can you believe it?

  The next afternoon I walked. I felt myself drawn along the trails to the north and west, into the upper headwaters canyons of the Spirit Creek, where pink bluffs rose to chiseled turrets on the ridgetops and vultures circled lazily overhead. I meandered for hours through thickets of oak and massive contiguous stands of pure aspen whose leaves shimmered in the breeze with a sound like muffled applause. I sat and rested beneath ancient firs it would have taken three of me and my wingspan to encircle. Jays chattered and squawked in the canopy. Scat of various types dotted the trail. Muddy wallows showed where bears had recently rolled, and I held in my hands mule deer bones whose edges had been chamfered by the teeth of rodents. I put one such bone in my pocket, not really knowing why.

  Back on the mountain, in the last of the day’s light, we tossed a Frisbee in the meadow below the tower. M.J. cooked dinner in an iron skillet, quesadillas with thick slices of avocado and fresh pico de gallo, heavy on jalapeños and fresh-squeezed lime. At dusk we lit kindling in the bonfire circle, downwind of the cabin, and stoked the fire with limbs gathered from the wooded edges of the meadow. We squatted on the periphery of the fire’s warmth and sipped bourbon out of plastic cups.

  After a couple of drinks, I told her of my time in Albuquerque and what I had learned there. She asked a number of questions, each of which I tried to answer. We spoke quietly. She came near and placed her arm around mine and held my left hand in hers, squeezing gently in the absence of words. For a long time we were silent, our eyes drawn to the mesmerizing leap and dance of the flames, friends joined in touch and tears.

  What will you do now? she asked.

  I told her I didn’t know. I didn’t think I could return to New York and pretend everything was unchanged, but the next move escaped me. I knew almost immediately that Emily’s revelation had put an end to my desire to learn more about his life, at least any more than was locked away in my own memory. I couldn’t bear to think there were other skeletons leering in the closet, waiting to be discovered, if only I managed to find the person with the knowledge of the secret. Perhaps there were no more secrets. One could hope.

&nbs
p; Some of the speculations of those who had loved him had ultimately struck me as sound, or at least plausible. Depression, sure—my aunt Ruth had suspected as much, and she was about as close to him as anyone in the end. Anguish over the breakup with his girlfriend, okay. Been there myself, not good. But a secret he carried with him most of his life, a violation of the most brutal and sadistic sort? I couldn’t wrap my mind around that one. I knew that was a cliché, but that was also it exactly: I couldn’t absorb the thought, even as it leaped out as a probable cause. I couldn’t fathom what had been done to him, how he’d lived with it, how it had changed him, what it had made him. I was already well aware that I hadn’t known him the way a brother should. Now he slipped even further from reach—a failure of imagination on my part, a failure of empathy.

  I knew this much: most of my prior assumptions had been called into doubt. Everything about him became infinitely more complicated. Cracks appeared in my story of who had failed him, and how, and when. The persistent notion that it was my inability to pick up the phone and call him that led to his death—my hold on that idea, already tenuous, became untenable. In the beginning, it had been as if I couldn’t stand the thought that other factors contributed to his suicide, anything other than my failure to call him the day of it. I needed that distinction. I needed to believe I was that important to him. I had clung—far longer than a rational man would have—to the notion that my call would have been answered, and that it would have swayed him. In this way, it was never about him. It was always about me. The mind of the suicide survivor tends to be haunted by the thought that the dead passed judgment on the living, and that whatever else a suicide signifies, it can’t help but contain the message that none of the living were enough of a sustaining connection to temper the allure of self-annihilation. The news that he was raped as a boy—this brought to the surface a series of hidden truths about his death, truths I had failed, somehow, to grasp. That it was, in the end, about no one but him; that it was nothing personal, at least insofar as his family was concerned. That perhaps there was nothing we could have done differently with the knowledge we possessed at the time. That he’d hidden his pain and shame so brilliantly, so capably—an acting job of unbelievable fortitude—that we never could have known him in all his complexity, no matter how hard we may have tried. No wonder he’d become a cipher in death. He’d been in hiding all his life.