Later on, a little bit braver, or maybe merely masochistic, I stuck a tape recorder under both my parents’ noses, one at a time in private moments, conducting what I called research, and what came out of it was totally unexpected, some of it funny, some of it sad, most of it wildly off topic. I couldn’t make myself make them talk about it for longer than a question or two, and they weren’t prepared to go there on their own. To speak of it with my mother, in particular, seemed a willful act of torture. I had received a very targeted education in the art of making people talk about uncomfortable things, and still I couldn’t do it, not to them. They’d overcome too much. My father had transformed himself from failed farmer to bank vice president; they traveled now, drank nice wine, cultivated a beautiful garden, had a whole new set of late-life friends. How could I justify continuing to poke at the wound? “All families of suicides are alike,” Janet Malcolm has written. “They wear a kind of permanent letter S on their chests. Their guilt is never assuaged. Their anxiety never lifts. They are freaks among families the way prodigies are freaks among individuals.” That about sums it up, except for the prodigy comparison. By definition, prodigies are blessed with a gift. The families of suicides are not blessed.
In the winter of 2002 I undertook a journey I’d been planning and dreading for months, all the while in silence. I knew well my capacity for anger; I knew, in other words, that I had needed some time to chill. Plan some lines of inquiry. Judge what it was I wanted to know. But since I doubted I’d extract a confession, it was less about what I wanted to know and more about what I wanted him to know. Maybe one shred of justice could be wrung from the whole sad affair. He would forever know that I knew.
So I traveled out of my way to see him, in a town better left unnamed. I found him at his workplace—a little flabbier than I remembered him, a bit too falsely jovial, in the manner of an upbeat high school football coach. I hadn’t called ahead to apprise him of my visit. He appeared to be baffled by my coming but he shook my hand, invited me up to his office. I sensed immediately the pride he felt in having an office.
A dear connection of his had died not long before, a woman I had cause to know in my youth, and I used this as the pretext for dropping by. I told him that personal business had brought me to the vicinity, and since I’d found myself with spare time on my hands, I wanted to offer my condolences in person.
He told me about the woman’s final hours, some touching last moments they’d shared, a death with ease and dignity. I nodded my head at all the right moments. He asked about my life in New York. I told him it had been good but was coming to an end. I’d quit my job in journalism. I had no prospects there anymore. I was broke. My candor clearly made him uneasy. People didn’t talk this way where we were from.
Our conversation dwindled to inanities. The moment had arrived to announce my true purpose. I had fantasized about announcing it with a roundhouse to his nose; now that I found myself within arm’s reach of him I felt nervous, even ashamed somehow. I could barely bring myself to look at him. In fact I turned away, looked at the wall. What if I was wrong? What if I had the wrong guy? Or worse, what if my brother had made up a story for sympathy in a moment of vulnerability, when he felt himself to be losing his fiancée? Horrified that I would attribute to my brother such conniving instincts, I forgot the question I’d rehearsed. I nearly rose and left without explanation. Then it returned to me.
You’re a God-fearing man, correct? I said.
He appeared mystified. I go to church, yes, if that’s what you mean.
Have you asked God’s forgiveness for what you did to my brother?
There was a pause. He asked me what I meant, so I told him.
I have no recollection of any such thing, he said.
I pressed the point. He became flustered, sweaty, red of face, but still he denied it. Tellingly, I thought, he never denied doing it; he denied any memory of having done it. I have no recollection of such a thing, he said, over and over. We went around and around, and his story never changed. I didn’t have a leg to stand on—a secondhand piece of news, a rumor whispered from the lips of the dead. There existed no corroborating witness, no one to offer incriminating testimony. I knew it was folly to believe that he’d confess if I persisted in my questioning. Maybe he’d truly convinced himself it hadn’t happened, a strategic lapse of memory that allowed him to avoid succumbing to a crippling guilt. Maybe he really hadn’t done it, and I was crudely bullying an innocent man in an effort to make myself feel like a soldier in the cause of justice, as if our confrontation could possibly balance the scales. I would never know for sure. I could only trust my gut, and my gut told me to pray there had been no other victims, as if prayer could make it so.
I gave him a scrap of paper with my phone number on it, told him to call me if his recollection changed.
Before I left I wished him good luck with his god.
I knew I’d never hear from him.
Try though I might, I could think of nothing more to do with this bit of innuendo, not without inviting a lawsuit for slander. It was a bitter and unsatisfying coda to a story I sometimes thought I’d rather not have unearthed—a story that, despite appearing to offer a perverse absolution to Dan and those of us who loved him, still had about it the odor of a spoiled fruit.
In the coming years I would often think of Wendy, Dan’s last girlfriend, wondering what had become of her. Though I asked around, no one knew how to reach her. No one had seen her since the memorial service in Albuquerque a few weeks after his death. No one even remembered her last name.
Eventually it occurred to me to look more closely at Dan’s balloon pilot log, in which he’d recorded the date and time of his flights, their duration, his launch and landing sites, plus any passengers he’d had on board. For years it had sat unopened in a box I carted with me every time I moved, a box marked ALL THINGS DAN, into which I’d tossed it after a cursory look at its first few pages. She was there, of course. Along with her two children, she’d been a frequent companion on those flights over the last eight months of his life.
Though I now knew her full name, I took it no further. Another year passed, then two, and still I resisted the urge to track her down. I knew some of what she’d been through and I feared my phone call would be greeted as an unwelcome reminder of an episode she’d rather forget.
There were those among our family and friends who’d blamed her for Dan’s death. It had come so soon after their breakup that the impulse was understandable. By this reckoning, she’d carelessly played with his heart; she’d had her fun with a younger man, used him as a plaything, a distraction from the pain of her marital split, and when the novelty had worn off she’d dumped him. Had these speculations ever reached her ears? I hoped not. Had she intuited them nonetheless? Perhaps. The thought of it made me sick—her having to reckon with that sort of guilt. I’d never been seduced by the temptation to blame her. People break up all the time. A certain amount of pain and sadness ensues, but to kill oneself over it seemed to me an act so extreme and vengeful, so blindly self-regarding, as to be monstrous. Despite having tested the idea, I ultimately couldn’t believe my brother to be that sort of monster.
One night I typed her name in a search engine and found she still lived in New Mexico. I called information and procured a number, which I wrote on a scrap of paper and tucked in my wallet. I carried it around for months. As more and more time went by, it seemed less and less likely that I would ever muster the nerve to call. I didn’t know what I could say to her; I couldn’t imagine what she’d say to me. We’d never met. We’d never spoken a word. I’d come across one snapshot of the two of them, in a collection of photos kept by my mother: she was thin and pretty, with blond hair and green eyes, and they were sitting next to each other, turned toward someone out of the frame, both of them laughing, two beers on the table in front of them. I often looked at this photo and tried to imagine what unforeseen trajectory her life had taken in the aftermath of the bullet. I wasn’t sure I
wanted to know the truth. In some matters the truth, when we find it, is worse than our worst imaginings.
After a couple of glasses of whiskey one evening—sixteen years, nine months, and two days after his death—I decided to hell with it. Maybe she’d hate me for calling, maybe not, but there was only one way to find out. I dialed the number. She picked up on the third ring. I told her my name, who I was. She said, Oh, okay, and waited in silence for what would come next.
I said there was one thing I needed to tell her, one thing I felt sure Dan would want me to say on his behalf if he knew we were speaking: I’m sorry.
I waited in silence for what would come next. I figured fifty-fifty she’d tell me off and hang up.
Thank you, she said.
My call was unexpected, to say the least. So much time had passed, and she hadn’t seen or heard from a soul who’d known him since very shortly after his death, though she still thought of him all the time. She remembered him as a very private person, very quiet, but generally happy, smart for his age, good at his job, a skillful balloon pilot, a take-charge kind of guy. His self-confidence was very attractive. When he showed up it was as if a ray of sunshine had come bursting into her life. He’d made her life better during a difficult time. She told me he’d been mature for his age, she’d been immature for hers, and they’d met in the sweet spot in the middle.
They’d spent almost every minute together when he wasn’t working, shared dinner together every night, went out often, usually to a bar in Rio Rancho, a suburb of Albuquerque. They drank and played darts, hung out with friends. They were having fun, smitten with each other’s company, and they indulged—perhaps a little too much, she admitted. He’d lost a fiancée, she’d lost a husband, but they’d found each other, and for a while it felt like he was everything she needed.
He’d melded well with her kids. They liked and respected him. In fact they still talked about him sometimes, all these years later. At the time, though, it was complicated. Her life had felt tangled, too many things unresolved. She and her husband were fighting over custody, over the division of property. The kids thought Dan might be the cause of their parents’ breakup. He talked to them honestly, told them he wasn’t there to replace their father but was open to listening and helping in any way he could. You have to get back in touch with them, she remembered him telling her. They’re hurting. They need you.
She took his words to heart. She decided she needed a break, mostly for the sake of her children. They agreed to put things on hold and revisit their situation when everything cooled down. They both knew this was for the best, though it wasn’t an easy decision.
That same weekend he moved back into his apartment. It was his first time alone there in months; he’d been living with her since not long after they’d met.
He left on a Friday night. By sometime late Sunday he was dead.
It was the strangest thing, she said, but that night I swore I heard his truck drive past. I asked my daughter, Did you hear Dan’s truck just now? Mom, you’re hearing things, she told me. Don’t be silly.
She could still smell and taste things from the day she got the news. First his boss had called and asked if Dan was with her, since no one had heard from him. She said no, they’d had a difficult weekend, talking bad to each other after the split. He’d been drunk when last they spoke. She could only assume he was sleeping off a hangover.
It made us all feel so empty, she said, so sickly sad given all he’d accomplished and all he still had ahead of him. It just didn’t make sense. I tried to come up with an explanation. Was it work stress that left him feeling overwhelmed? Was it depression I hadn’t noticed? Was the breakup the final straw? And if so, how dare he?
She evaded the temptation to assign herself guilt: it was his choice, after all. Besides sadness and shock, she felt anger—a tremendous, devouring anger. He’d had so many friends. He could have reached out to one of them. He had other options. Instead he took the one that could not be undone, a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
That was a turning point in her life, as it would have to be. Afterward, she lost her taste for drinking. The bar they’d hung out in, their special place, closed, and she was glad to see it gone. She couldn’t have gone there without him. It would have been too painful.
She’d never remarried. Her kids had become the focus of her life, in addition to the small business she ran. Her son was a property manager and lived in Seattle. Her daughter lived nearby in New Mexico and had two little kids of her own. She’d never imagined herself a grandma, but now here she was.
I have these déjà vu moments, she said. They bring on a memory and it’s like he’s here again, like he never left. Whenever I notice a hot air balloon, which is pretty often in Albuquerque, I think of him, or when I visit the post office and see the security cameras he installed. They’re still there. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that they’d last. He was so good at everything he did.
We spoke for a bit about ourselves, our work. I wasn’t sure if I should bring the conversation back around to Dan or just let it go. It felt a little unfair to allude to the possibility that he’d been raped—as if this fact might color her memory of him—but it felt even more unfair not to.
She was shocked to hear it. He’d never said anything about it to her, and she’d never suspected such a thing. She didn’t know what to make of it. She’d need some time to think on it.
I told her I hadn’t called her looking for theories or answers; I had all the answers I would ever have, and they would always remain not enough. I’d called her only to connect, one person to another, over the memory of someone we’d both loved.
He was a wonderful man, she said.
I know, I said.
I try not to define our time together by how his life ended. It’s hard. But I think I’ve managed it.
I’m glad of that, I said. And I’m glad to have heard someone speak so sweetly of the man he was. I haven’t had that chance very often.
She accepted my offer to meet for dinner if ever I was in her neck of the woods. It would be nice, we both agreed, to sit down someday, face-to-face, now that a silence had been broken.
When in the course of conversation the subject of siblings arises, I’ve been known to fudge the truth and leave off mention of Dan—heeding the old taboo. I have a sister, I say. She’s a joy to be around, with a ribald sense of humor and a skeptical intelligence. I picked on her mercilessly as a child, but she forgave me for it, even later laughed about it with me. She left home at the age of seventeen, moved in with a boyfriend, attained a GED, worked all sorts of jobs, including, like me, night baker. She’s now a corrections officer in Minnesota, a Harley rider, a lover of camping in the north country in the summertime. She tells fascinating stories about her work in a medium-security state pen, the damaged men, the ethnic gangs, the squalor and the silliness, the desperation. She lives in a little burg of six hundred people, in an immaculately kept house filled with books and cozy places to sit, on the last street in town, where the howling of the winter wind across the open prairie gives her a healthy appreciation for the adversities of life, as if she needed that. Twice divorced, she’s had unfortunate luck with men but never betrayed a worry over her own self-sufficiency. She’s well schooled in the tactics of restraint, even teaches others in her line of work. I know damn well she could hurt me if she needed to. I love her no less for the fact that I talk to her on the phone maybe four or five times a year, maximum. When we do talk, we tell each other the truth unvarnished. We understand we owe each other that much.
I told her once how on the day of Dan’s funeral I spoke with one of his good friends, a fellow farm kid, who told me that back in high school he and Dan would drive out to the farm on summer nights and sit in the yard drinking beer, listening to the crickets in the fields. No matter where their evening had taken them it always ended at the farm. They’d park in the lane and sit on the tailgate of Dan’s truck, looking up at the stars. We’d been go
ne for several years by then, and bit by bit the place was coming undone, first the windows of the house shot out, then chunks of good lumber wrenched free and hauled off, finally whole walls smashed and copper wire stripped. Each time they went back the place looked worse.
It pissed him off, John said. He used to hope we’d find the vandals there when we showed up, so we could catch them in the act and whip their asses.
The worse the place looked, the more Dan talked about the way it was when we were kids. Dan could tell stories for hours, apparently, about us playing kick-the-can with our cousins from Iowa, the way we slid down the stairs in the house inside our sleeping bags, pretending to be bobsledders, or the snow forts we built in the woods behind the chicken coop.
He loved that place, John said. He hated having to leave it. I’m just glad he was gone for New Mexico by the time it burned down.
While he lived I’d never thought to wonder whether he had the same nostalgic yearnings I did, whether he, like me, drove there in later years and walked through the shell of what was once our life. It saddened me to think we had this in common and never knew it, even worse to think it took his death for me to learn it. We’d been told so often we had nothing in common that we came to believe it; this was the first of our misunderstandings, though hardly the last. Unlike me, he never tried to bleed the country boy out of himself, drop by solitary drop. There had been a time in my adolescence when I began to view our failure at farming as a blessing of sorts. It untethered me from a family calling passed down the generations, set me free to make of myself whatever I could dream up—the American way and the way I preferred it. If given the chance, Lisa and I agreed, he’d never have left.
All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found Page 18
