Dry Ice

by Stephen White

  “Moby’s cool,” he said. “In school? Music, yeah. Theater, okay. Some. Classes? No way, no…way. I lived on Ritalin. Lived on it. Bingo.”

  It was impossible for me to know it during the initial moments of that first session with him, but punctuating the end of sentences with the word “bingo” was one of Kol’s peculiarities.

  His description of his early experiences rang reasonably consistent with someone with mild autistic impairment. I was allowing for the possibility that Kol had indeed suffered some degree of childhood autism and that he continued to struggle with the aftermath. While I pondered the range of possible diagnostic sequelae—all the way from residual autism, through Asperger’s, past some personality and mood disorders, to the territory most of us called normal—I gave him a full minute to resume the discussion of his symptoms on his own. He wasn’t inclined to continue. He had withdrawn into an intense focus on the way the upper joint of the index finger of his left hand worked. It was interesting: he could bend his fingertip while keeping the rest of the joints aligned.

  Clinically I was more than a little lost. I retraced my steps and decided to go all the way back to start.

  “So how can I be of help?” It was usually my first line as I sat down with a new patient, but Kol’s premature diagnostic pronouncement had interrupted the natural rhythm of the beginning of that first session.

  At least I recognized that I had some catching up to do.

  EIGHT

  WHILE I waited for Sam and Lauren to arrive at our house I put some of the takeout in the refrigerator, some of it in the oven, fed the dogs, and set the table for dinner.

  I was still thinking about Kol’s explanation for all the blood.

  I was thinking, too, about what he’d said: Was it “I mean it’s not like what happened with—Your dad?” Or had it been: “I mean it’s not like what happened with…your dad.”

  My dad? Or a generic “your dad.” Which? No. It wasn’t possible. How could he?

  A sudden nosebleed, Kol had said. “I get them sometimes. It’s not a big deal. Weak blood vessel or something. Get ’em when I’m on 737’s coming out of the sky. Bingo. Got one on Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland. Did I freak the mice-men out? Double bingo.”

  I didn’t believe the nosebleed story, at least not a hundred percent. The rest of the patter? It felt like noise. I wondered why he’d needed it.

  Diane and I shared a concern about security in our office. We kept a locked door between the unmonitored waiting room—like many psychotherapists we didn’t employ a receptionist—and our clinical offices. Because of the hundred-years-ago architecture of our old building, the locked door had a secondary, unintended impact: it didn’t allow our patients access to the first floor’s only bathroom.

  That simple fact could have explained why Kol hadn’t chosen to wash up in our building’s restroom. But it didn’t explain why Kol hadn’t just gone home. He lived only a couple of blocks away in one of the recently built, multiuse condo/loft buildings south of the Pearl Street Mall near Broadway. If he was having such a vicious nosebleed, why didn’t he rush home, pack his nostrils until the bleeding stopped, clean himself up, and change his clothes before coming to our session? Wouldn’t being a few minutes late for the appointment have been preferable to fouling Diane’s prized fountain with his blood and then showing up for therapy looking like he’d just wandered down Elm Street and done ten rounds with Freddie?

  I couldn’t figure it. I tried to write it off as merely a fresh indication of Kol’s peculiarity. But that didn’t feel right, either.

  “It’s not like what happened with…your dad.” My intestines cramped like a clenched fist as I replayed those words in my head. Does Kol know? Of course not.

  No one knew.

  Grace and the dogs all beat me to the front door to greet Sam. He arrived before Lauren; I’d been expecting them to show up together.

  “Hey, Alan. Long day. Gracie! How’s my favorite little girl?” He threw a heavy shoulder bag on the floor and lifted my daughter into his arms while simultaneously trying to greet both dogs. His comment about the length of the day wasn’t an inquiry about how mine had gone. It was a declaration about his.

  I probably wouldn’t have told him about my patient who had shown up covered in blood. Some things are best not dangled in front of a police detective’s eyes.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Lauren said you guys misplaced a witness. That’s true?”

  “We didn’t lose her, if that’s what you’re asking. The witness might have misplaced herself. More likely, somebody else might have helped misplace her.”

  “That would complicate things?”

  I didn’t really expect him to respond. Finally he mumbled, “Yeah, you could say that.”

  “She’s important?”

  “You could say that, too.” He looked at me as though he were trying to weigh how much I knew about the grand jury case. I kept my face impassive. “Tonight your wife and I are supposed to come up with a viable plan B.”

  “Okay then,” I said.

  He followed me from the entryway to the kitchen, dodging the dancing dogs. Grace was already bored with the adult conversation. She squirmed from his arms, said, “Hi, Sam. Bye, Sam,” and ran back toward the bedrooms where she’d been playing.

  Our kitchen is at the back of a great room that has a wall of western windows that frame a stunning view of Boulder, and beyond. The “beyond” was a hundred-mile-plus section of the central Colorado Rocky Mountains from the hogbacks to the fourteeners of the Continental Divide, and from Pikes Peak to Longs Peak and then some. Sam took a seat at a stool at the counter of the kitchen island. He was facing the remnants of a sunset that was dissolving in the distance, which left me with a view of the back of his abnormally large head.

  I pulled a couple of beers from the refrigerator and handed Sam a Smithwicks. He popped it open and took a long pull before he glanced at the label on the bottle, which I knew he couldn’t read without fumbling to find reading glasses to stick onto his nose. He apparently didn’t recognize the color pattern of the label. “So what is this?” he asked. “Should I be impressed?”

  “You like it?”

  “It’s all right. What is it?”

  “Irish ale. Smithwicks.” I pronounced it “Smith-icks,” with no w, the way a gracious publican did in Kerry after I’d mispronounced it when I’d asked for one after I began to tire of the Irish diet of stout. How many years before was that? I’d lost count. Before Lauren. All the way back to Merideth. Wife uno.

  Sam elevated an eyebrow and said, “I thought they all drank Guinness.”

  “Misconception,” I said. He didn’t really care. Although he was a fan of some local Colorado craft beers, he would have been just as content with a Pabst or a Bud. For me, tasting Smithwicks was like eating fresh soda bread, or seeing thirty shades of green in the same vista. It was a little bit of Ireland, bottled.

  I changed the subject. “How’s Simon?”

  He looked back over his shoulder toward me for a second before he returned his attention to the post-sunset colors over the Divide. “Good. Better than good.” He paused. “Sherry’s started a campaign to convince me that he should be going to private school in Denver. Better fit academically, she says. Better hockey team too. That’s for my benefit. She doesn’t really give a shit about Simon and hockey. If she had her way he would take up swimming, or ballroom dancing, or something. She thinks he’s going to get hurt.”

  Sherry was Sam’s ex. She’d been living in one of Denver’s booming northern suburbs since their split. Sam had stayed in their modest house in Boulder after the divorce. He had Simon during the school year and on weekends during the summer. He liked the arrangement just fine, considering. Although he and Sherry had their share of disagreements I’d always gotten the impression that the divorce was civil.

  “Sounds expensive,” I said, picking the least controversial of what I imagined would be
Sam’s myriad objections to Sherry’s plan.

  “Only about a third of my salary. But Sherry’s new boyfriend is going to pay the tuition, or so she says.” He belched—a short, vibratory thing—after the boyfriend/tuition pronouncement. “The boyfriend’s generosity is supposed to make me feel better.”

  “Does it?”

  He belched again. I gave him points for a failed effort at trying to suppress the second eruption. “Let’s say we put him in private school. Number one, that means he lives with his mom during the week, not with me. That sucks. The boyfriend pays the tuition for a few months. Then Sherry dumps him like she dumped her last three boyfriends, or he dumps her like he probably dumped his last ten girlfriends. Then what? Eh?” He drank some beer. “The new boyfriend? He’s an endodontist. Name’s Kevin. Know what that means? Kevin does root canals all day. Then he does them all day the next day. And then he takes a day off. But the one after that? More root canals. Can you imagine? Kevin may have enough extra money to send my kid to private school, and to have a ski condo in Avon, and to buy himself some big old German car, but every one of my bad days is better than his best day. You asked me what works to make me feel better when I’ve had a crappy day? Well, that’s what’s working right now. That works just fine. Sherry’s Kevin doing root canals.”

  When I didn’t reply Sam looked around. The two dogs were feigning sleep on the kitchen floor, waiting for the imperceptible—to us humans, at least—sound of crumbs falling on hardwood. “Where’s Grace? She close? You know, within earshot?” he asked.

  “She’s probably in her room. Playing or reading. She tends to tune us out this time of day. Decompression. Why?”

  He said, “Remember Michael McClelland?”

  NINE

  IT TOOK me a second to make sense of Sam’s question. Maybe even two seconds passed before the syllables registered in my brain and I matched the sounds with a name and the name with an identity. Only then did the fear—no, not just fear, but fear and guilt—burst up inside me like a just-ignited bottle rocket.

  I don’t need this.

  “What did you say?” I managed. It was partially a “What?” asking for repetition, a need to hear Sam say the blasphemous name one more time so I could be certain I hadn’t been imagining it, and partially a “What?” demanding clarification, a need to hear why the hell he was using that profanity in my house.

  Sam spun 180 degrees on his stool and faced me. His beer was half gone. The sunset’s pastel halo surrounded his head like he’d arranged for some personal aurora borealis. He inhaled before he said, “McClelland’s on the loose.”

  I dropped the knife I’d been using to cut the takeout pizza margherita into appetizer-sized pieces. The big blade ricocheted off the edge of the counter and clattered to the floor, scattering the semi-vigilant dogs. I was so stunned by Sam’s revelation that I didn’t even feel a reflexive instinct to dance out of the way of the bouncing weapon.

  “What do you mean, he’s on the loose? They let him out?”

  “They didn’t release him. He escaped. Actually he just walked away.” He looked toward the floor. “You dropped your knife. Might want to take a second and count your toes. Five on each foot is the target.”

  I had ten questions, one for each toe I’d had before I’d dropped the knife. Since I couldn’t ask all ten questions at once I tried to prioritize. But I failed. The question that had the most energy rushed to the head of the line.

  “What the hell do you mean? He tried to kill my wife. He should never get out.”

  Sam shrugged, the way he does. “He tried to kill you, too. And me, for that matter. But you don’t see me throwing cutlery around the room.”

  McClelland’s violent intrusion into our lives—Lauren’s first, then mine, and later Sam’s—had taken place many years before. The last act had played out in Aspen, where McClelland’s appetite for retribution exploded. All of us were there that night. McClelland ended up in the custody of the Aspen police with a bullet in his chest.

  None of us—Sam, Lauren, me—had forgotten what McClelland had done to us. None of us thought for a moment that McClelland had forgotten what we had done to him. Sam was reminding me of that.

  I said, “How, Sam? How?”

  It was not an important question to have answered at that stage of the discussion, but my prioritizing skills were impaired and the dumb questions were the first ones to escape the pen. I gave Sam credit for not even bothering to try to cajole me into calming down. He was a model of restraint, keeping his voice low and his tone matter-of-fact—probably a wiser course than trying to force me to rein in my indignation.

  “He’s been part of some study at the state hospital. Some neuro-, psycho-, pharmo-ologist from the Health Sciences Center is—oh, hell—I don’t know what she’s doing. A ‘study.’ Anyway, some of the hospital staff were taking a group of…their freaks—excuse my French—to a clinic in Pueblo for some new brain scan to try to find out why crazy-shit-ass people do the crazy-shit-ass shit crazy-shit-ass people do, and somebody screwed up. They let him slip away. Somebody took off his metal restraints so he could get scanned. Somebody else was supposed to put on some plastic restraints, which apparently didn’t happen. At some point one of the guards counts his nutsos and he realizes that he’s short exactly one nutso. Michael McClelland was the missing one.”

  “Just like that?”

  He kept a wary eye on me while he lifted the bottle to his lips and downed another quarter of the beer. “Security camera has him going out the door of the clinic and down the sidewalk in front of the building like he’s heading to the corner to buy a Coke and some Twinkies at 7-Eleven. Then? Nothing. No sign of him.”

  “Where’s Lauren? Does she know about this?” Those should have been among my first questions.

  “The call was routed to me from Aspen. That’s where the Pueblo cops called first. We lost some time because of that confusion. I told Lauren myself this afternoon. She took it better than you, if you’re curious.”

  I glared at him.

  Sam went on. “A sheriff’s deputy is driving her home right now. Or, actually, following her home right now. Your wife refused to let him drive. Sheriff’s already decided she’s going to have security 24/7 until we find McClelland or at least until we know what the hell he’s up to.”

  “A deputy will be here round the clock? What about when she’s at work?”

  He made an equivocal face. “That’s where things get sticky. The sheriff decided that Lauren is probably at more risk than you, so the security will shadow her. It’ll be here when she’s here. At work when she’s there.”

  “The sheriff decided?”

  “He got elected, so he gets to decide shit like this. It’s one of the perks.”

  Sam liked to use the same argument when we disagreed—which we usually did—about whatever the president or the governor was up to.

  “What about Grace?” I asked.

  He raised his chin. “Yeah, Grace. You want the argument?”

  “Sure.” I thought I was showing admirable restraint.

  “Good. The argument is that McClelland doesn’t even know Grace, maybe doesn’t even know she exists, so she’s not a likely target. If she’s not a target, she doesn’t need protection.”

  “What kind of idiotic f—”

  “Who doesn’t know me, Daddy?” Grace was in her stockinged feet scooting down the hardwood hallway toward the kitchen from the direction of the bedrooms. Her fluid motion was more like a cross-country skier than an ice-skater.

  Next winter, I thought, we have to get her up on some cross-country skis.

  Sam, laconically, said, “Knife.”

  Shit! A second before my daughter arrived in the knife’s vicinity I reached down and retrieved the blade from the floor and put it on the counter.

  “Somebody your mom and dad knew before you were born, sweetheart, but that you’ve never met,” I said.

  “Oh,” sh
e said. She reached up and grabbed a square of pizza off the counter and turned to scoot back out of the room. With an adorable wrinkled-up nose she asked, “Is this dinner?”

  “No. It’s an appetizer. A snack.”

  “Good. Is dinner soon?”

  “Soon. Take a napkin, Gracie.”

  She made a cute face. I thought I saw some defiance coming, but she reached for a napkin. Without a word she’d made it clear that she had no intent to use the napkin. But she was carrying it. From a parenting point of view it was a victory. I waited until she was back out of earshot down the hall. “It’s Doctor McClelland, Sam. Not ‘Mister.’”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Your point? You better not be insinuating you want me to start calling you ‘Doctor.’ I think I’ve made it clear that I think Ph.D.s are way overrated.”

  “McClelland may be disturbed, but he’s not stupid.”

  “Disturbed? That’s what, your word of the day?” Sam finished his beer, stood up from the counter, and carried the empty over to the pantry. He knew from experience where we kept the Eco-Cycle bin. In the distance, I could hear the sounds of the Wiggles escaping from Grace’s room. “You made him sound a lot more than ‘disturbed’ when that judge sent him away to mental-health camp instead of to the state pen.”

  Sam hadn’t replied to my reminder about Michael McClelland’s intelligence, so I pushed on, determined to make him remember. “You know what he did for a living?”

  Sam said, “If I recall, he was a weatherman.”

  “He worked at NOAA. He has a Ph.D. in meteorology and his specialty was severe storms. Severe storms. And you know as well as I do that he didn’t just forecast them. He created them.”

  Sam put both hands on the island counter and leaned toward me. “I’m working on this. For me, for Boulder, it’s only a couple of hours old. I’ve been talking to my captain, I’ve been trying to open some lines of communication with the sheriff. Lauren’s been talking to the DA. I know the guy’s a bad actor. You know he’s a bad actor. But most of the people in the department don’t remember him. My captain doesn’t know him. The new chief doesn’t know him. The current sheriff wasn’t around when everything came down with McClelland. That all happened…years ago. And keep in mind that it ended in Pitkin County. It never even went through the courts here.”