by G. H. Ephron
“Mr. O‘Flanagan, I heard you had a little problem last night.” O’Flanagan frowned. “Do you remember what happened?”
“Happened?” He shook his head. “Nothing happened.”
“Don’t you remember how you got this bruise under your eye?”
“Oh, that,” he said with a shrug. “It’s nothing. You know, you have to watch out for walking into doors around here.”
Just then, Mr. Kootz got up from a sofa on the opposite wall. He was a short, solid man, built like a human fire hydrant. He had a baseball cap jammed on his head. O’Flanagan flinched and cowered as Kootz, mumbling animatedly to himself and punching the air with a clenched fist, stomped out of the room, untied sneaker laces flapping.
“You know, that’s a very bad man,” O’Flanagan said.
“What do you mean?”
“He’s just a bad man. I don’t like him.”
“Why don’t you like him?” I pressed.
“He’s just a bad man,” O’Flanagan repeated, rubbing distractedly at his bruised eye.
“Well, I guess you should avoid bad men if you can. Anything I can get for you? Do you need anything?”
He shook his head.
Down the hall, I asked Suzanne, “What did you notice?”
“The way he got so upset when Mr. Kootz walked by — at some level, he does remember.”
“Good.” I nodded. “You’re right. It’s an example of how there are different kinds of memory. We remember facts one way, but we remember emotions another way. It’s the facts that O’Flanagan has lost. He genuinely has no memory of the fight, but he does have an emotional recall of the pain. And so he knows something happened, something that he associates with Mr. Kootz.”
“I get that. But why does he say he walked into a door?”
“He’s confabulating — backfilling. When you can’t remember something, it leaves a hole in your past, and such holes are intolerable. We tend to want to plug them up. So we fill in with something that happened some other time. Or we make something up. Mr. O’Flanagan isn’t lying. He isn’t aware that he’s doing it. And with his alcoholic past, no doubt he’s walked into plenty of doors.”
6
I GOT home after six to find Annie at my front door. The weather had become clear, crisp, and fall-like. She turned as I pulled the car into the driveway and watched me approach the house. “For you,” she said, holding aloft a fat brown envelope. It was already getting dark and Annie’s curly hair shone like a halo in the glow of the porch light behind her.
As she handed me the envelope, her fingers brushed mine, causing a loud snap of static electricity. Annie laughed. “That was a test to see if you’re alive or just faking it.”
I knew this was banter but the observation hit home. “And?”
“You’re alive. Definitely alive. Good thing, too, because otherwise I’d have to report you to the authorities.”
“For what?”
“For dishonest living.”
That’s just what I’d been doing. Living under false pretenses. As I came alongside, Annie turned and her face moved from shadow to light. I hadn’t noticed before the light sprinkling of freckles on her nose. “Dishonest living, eh? Could I get arrested for that?”
“If you’re living dishonestly, no one has to arrest you because you already are, by definition …”
“Arrested,” I finished the thought. “Hmm. I see.” We hung there, suspended, white puffs of dragon’s breath mingling in the air between us.
Just then, my mother’s door opened and her little white head peered out. She squinted into the dark. “Petey?” The sound was like a fingernail on a chalkboard. “You with someone?”
“Am I with someone?” I repeated the question.
“Hello,” Annie said, coming around so my mother could get a better look. Annie towered over her by nearly a foot.
My mother gazed up at Annie. “You look familiar.” “You have a good memory, Mrs. Zak.”
“Pearl.”
“I’m Annie Squires. I work with Peter from time to time. I came by the house two years ago and we met then.”
“Two years ago,” my mother said, her face clouding as she realized that was for the funeral. “You’re from the hospital?”
“Peter and I do trial work together.”
“I thought we’d met before,” my mother murmured as she put two and two together. Then my mother did this thing where she makes herself smile. It’s as if she sticks her hand inside her own head and turns up the corners of her mouth and eyes. “It’s lovely to see you again.” She stuck her head into her apartment and called out, “It’s Petey!”
An assortment of voices chorused back. “Hi, Petey!” Mah-jongg night. She slipped into her apartment and quietly shut the door behind her.
“Petey?” Annie said.
I shrugged. “According to my mother, that’s my name.” I weighed the envelope in my hand. “Should take a couple of hours to get through.” I looked at the door to my house. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spent two hours reading in my living room, alone. After ten minutes, I usually found an excuse to go work on the car, walk to the store, or look in on my mother.
Annie checked her watch. “I should get going. I’ve got a meeting in Somerville in fifteen minutes.” She started down the steps and hesitated. “I’m free later. We could talk when you’re finished.”
I was grateful for an excuse to get out of the house. “Meet you somewhere? Ten-ish?”
“I was going to Johnny D’s after my meeting. You know the place?”
It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. I’d been thinking somewhere quiet, coffee. Johnny D’s was a club — probably raucous and I’d be drinking beer. I nodded. At least it wasn’t somewhere Kate and I had gone.
“Catch ya later,” Annie said. Then she rubbed her hand on her pant leg, held up an index finger, and waited. I laughed. As I raised my finger to hers, an enormous spark snapped. “It’s cool when you know it’s coming,” Annie commented. “That electrical thing usually happens so fast you don’t get a chance to see the spark.”
I left the reports in the living room and descended to the cellar where there’s a small door that leads to a climate-controlled room. I had to heave my full weight against the door before it gave way with a sigh and a little exhale, like when you pop the seal on a can of peanuts. I turned on the light and breathed the damp cool air. I ducked inside. No one had set foot in here for months. The last time I’d tried to drink any wine, grief had so dulled my sense of taste that the rich red liquid may as well have been water mixed with the dust that now coated the bottles. It had seemed like a terrible waste to drink wine without tasting it. So beer and whiskey had become my beverages of choice. That night, for some reason, I felt ready to risk it. I chose a 1990 Simi Reserve Cabernet.
Back in the kitchen, I wiped the bottle carefully with a clean dishcloth, opened it, and let the wine breathe. Then I poured myself a glass. I closed my eyes and inhaled gingerly. I felt the sharp smell make its way up my nose and come to rest somewhere between my eyes. I took a sip. I felt the bite but not much more. I swirled the wine in the glass and took another sip. Better. Sharp in the front of the mouth, mellow at the back. But it still felt like seeing a color photograph in tints of sepia. No rich purples. No acetic greens. I knocked back the remaining wine, corked the bottle, and left it on the kitchen counter. Then I put up a pot of coffee and left it to drip.
I shuffled into the living room, collapsed into the chair, and shucked my shoes. I wiggled my toes and noticed my big toe poking through a hole that I was sure hadn’t been there this morning.
Three hours later, I was still there, surrounded by police reports and hospital records.
The crime scene reports told me that Sylvia Jackson was found in the Mount Auburn Cemetery, facedown near the base of the stone tower. There were tire tracks beside her body. They found her car a few blocks away, halfway between the cemetery and her house. The red paint on the right fron
t fender was scratched. The car had a single, unidentified thumbprint on the wheel.
After the EMTs took her to the hospital, the police went to her home. There they discovered Tony Ruggiero dead in the living room. The reports described him as six-foot-one, two hundred forty pounds. The file contained grim photographs of his body. In death, he was a large middle-aged man, running to paunch. His teeth were clenched, lips parted in a rictus of pain. He wasn’t tied up but there were rope burns on his wrists. His body was severely bruised and small amounts of coagulated blood surrounded innocuous-looking slits in his upper back and chest. He must have bled profusely from a single gunshot wound to the stomach.
Two kitchen knives, fireplace tongs, and a brass bookend were identified as weapons. All had been wiped clean of prints. The police didn’t find a gun.
The attack must have taken time. Time to tie him up, time to go into the kitchen for knives, time to get the fireplace tongs, time to beat him, stab him, then shoot him. I couldn’t imagine a big guy like Tony Ruggiero rolling over and submitting to a beating, leaving his attacker unbruised, as Stuart had apparently been unbruised a day later.
Sylvia Jackson was admitted to the Mount Auburn Hospital on the morning of March 9. The admitting form listed her as Jane Doe, address unknown, date of birth unknown, everything unknown except the type of accident — gunshot wound. The description made me stop and ponder. “Twenty-five-year-old female with bullet wound to the head.” Twenty-five? That didn’t sound right.
The hospital records described her wound exactly as Stuart Jackson had described it to me: a fronto-temporal penetrating bullet wound. She’d been shot above the right temple. The report said they performed “a bilateral craniectomy with craniotomy with debridement of the wound.” They opened up her head, sucked the blood from the bullet wound, and picked out the bullet fragments. The MRI didn’t paint a pretty picture. The bullet had tracked across the brain and ended up somewhere near the top of her left ear. That meant it first hit the right frontal lobe, then it tracked across the midline and across her left motor strip, probably affecting movement on her right side. Memory would probably be affected as well.
She had surgery to remove bone fragments, but bits of bone remained in the areas of the brain that control executive functions — I wondered if she might be having difficulty controlling her emotions and impulses as a result.
Her recovery had been slow and painful.
The notes quoted her. “I want to spend fifteen hours a day in bed. But when I try to sleep, I wake up all the time. And the only time I feel calm is when Sergeant MacRae is around.”
Who, I wondered, was Sergeant MacRae?
Daily police interviews began shortly after she regained consciousness. Her first recorded words to the detective were, “I just want to know what happened.”
“Do you mean about Tony?”
“Did something happen to Tony?”
Her interrogator told her Tony had been killed. The transcript said simply that she wept upon hearing this.
When the questioning resumed, the detective said to her, “Tell me about Stuart.”
She explained that Stuart was her husband. She didn’t appear to realize that they were divorced. She wondered, “Why hasn’t Stuart been to see me?” The detective didn’t tell her that Stuart had been a nearly constant visitor during her first weeks in the hospital. But by the time Sylvia Jackson woke up, the police were keeping all potential suspects away, including Stuart.
The following day, the recorded questions began: “Do you own a gun?”
She admitted that she did. She couldn’t remember what kind, but it was a little gun. Stuart had gotten it for her and taught her how to shoot.
“Where do you keep it?”
“In my bedroom. By the bed. In a drawer.”
“On what side?”
“On his side.”
“His side?”
“On my husband’s side.”
“Do you keep it loaded?”
“Yes.”
Then the officer shifted his focus. “Do you want to know what happened to you?”
“Who shot me?” she asked.
“We’re not sure.”
Over the weeks that followed, Sylvia Jackson complained of recurring nightmares. And she started to reconstruct her past, the hole in her memory shrinking like any other wound. She realized that she and Stuart were divorced. She remembered her birthday party, a month earlier. Each day she remembered more, got closer and closer, until she started to recall the night of the murder.
“Tony and I went out to dinner. We ate in Chinatown. When we got home, I parked in the driveway and came in through the back door.”
“Was the door locked?”
“I opened it with my key.”
“Did you notice anything unusual about the house?”
“There weren’t any lights on. It was dark.”
“Was that unusual?”
“No, not especially.”
“Where did you keep your keys?”
“In my purse.”
“Were there any other keys? Did you have any hidden around the house?”
“There was one under a rock by the back door.”
“Did Stuart have a key to your house?”
“No. He used the key under the rock when he had to get in.”
I could only imagine the pause that occurred next as Sylvia Jackson wondered about the direction these questions were leading. She asked, “Are you insinuating that Stuart did this?” And although the detective denied it — he was just asking about her keys — from then on, the questions focused on Stuart.
In the middle of an interrogation two weeks later, Sylvia Jackson broke down in tears. The notes describe her staring out the window and weeping.
“Is something wrong?” the detective asked.
“I keep having these nightmares,” she said. “I’m afraid of them.”
“Can you tell me about them?”
“I keep seeing the same thing, over and over.”
“What do you see?”
“A man. He’s driving my car. He has a gun.”
“Are you afraid of the man?”
There was no record of an answer.
“Are you in the car?”
“In the back. He made me get into the backseat of the car. And Tony — Oh God — Tony …”
“Where’s Tony?” the detective asked.
“He’s in the trunk. The man made him get into the trunk.”
“What happens in the nightmare?”
“It’s very cold. I climb up into a tower and I look out from the stairs. I see myself down below, on the grass. There’s someone, a man, in the shadows. He shoots me in the head.”
“Can you see who the man is?”
“I don’t want to believe. It just can’t be.”
“What can’t be?”
“The person I keep seeing. It can’t be him.”
“Who is it?”
“I think it’s Stuart.”
In the days that followed, Sylvia Jackson filled in the details of what she now referred to as a vision. A month after she woke from her coma, she announced that she was sure. Stuart did it.
All of the police interview reports had the same signature. Detective J. MacRae.
Two things struck me. First, Sylvia Jackson had lived through the kind of traumatic head injury that would have killed most people. And second, given the extent of her injuries, I would never have expected her to be able to recall what happened to her an hour, a day, or even a week before she was struck down. I wondered, how disoriented was Sylvia Jackson when she came out of the coma? How susceptible to suggestion as a result? Had she imprinted herself on her daily interrogator like a baby duck on its mama?
I surveyed the wreckage in my study. Papers and manila folders were strewn everywhere. An empty coffee mug rested on the wide, flat arm of my leather-cushioned Morris chair. I leaned back, marveling as I always did at how perfectly the chair suited my oversized
body. I’d acquired the chair years ago at a yard sale, before people knew what Mission furniture was and before furnituremakers started knocking off reproduction pieces like parts of a Model T. Then, when it became an in thing, I haunted furniture auctions. That’s where I met Kate. She was looking at pieces of art pottery that were being made at the same time the Stickley brothers were inventing the Mission style. She showed me a vase at that auction that she didn’t have the money to buy. She thought it was exquisite. I thought it was squat and plain. Over the years, she taught me how to see texture, subtle nuance of color, sinuous curve. I taught her to appreciate the straight, elegant lines of the furniture and how to spot an original.
As I reassembled the stacks of paper and tucked them back into the envelope Annie had brought them in, I realized how engrossed I’d become. I hadn’t once thought about my own pain. The clinical detail and detached tone of the reports allowed me to intellectualize without having to connect emotionally with the horror of the crime. In fact, there was a weird pleasure to it, almost like running your tongue over and over an empty socket where there was once a tooth.
7
AT NINE-THIRTY, I was weaving my way into Somerville, dodging pedestrians and wondering what traffic planning genius had synchronized the lights so it was impossible to go more than three blocks without hitting a red.
I turned off the four-lane boulevard, zigged over one block, and ended up at a messy merge of competing streets. A little later, the road detoured left, then right, then narrowed. As I drove, I registered the changes that mark the transition from Cambridge to Somerville. Brew pubs became Irish bars. Gourmet food stores turned into meat markets and delis. It was possible, once again, to find a parking spot.
Somerville had been my home when I first moved to Boston. I could take the trolley to MIT and I could afford the one-room, third-floor walk-up that overlooked an alley behind a Portuguese restaurant. The apartment smelled perpetually of linguica, potatoes, and grease. I waxed nostalgic as I drove past the spot that had once been home to Steve’s Ice Cream. I yearned for a scoop of their vanilla ice cream, smashed onto a marble board, then sprinkled with chocolate-covered toffee and kneaded with a metal paddle until the two became an entirely new thing, neither ice cream nor candy, but a comfort food in a league of its own. I’d tried to re-create the effect with Breyer’s vanilla, a Heath Bar, an ice cream scoop, and a hammer. But I’d always returned to wait the forty minutes on line so I could fork over a buck fifty and pay homage to Steve’s artistry.
