Dry Ice

by Stephen White

  She didn’t return my embrace. She kept her arms by her sides, her elbows bent, her hands up near her neck. All in all, it was a fine posture for a woman concerned she was about to be garroted.

  “They’ll catch him,” I said. I was fishing and I knew it.

  She pulled away and looked back over her shoulder. “You think I’m worried about Michael right now, don’t you? The note? That that’s what I’m talking about?” Her eyes tightened into a squint. “You…really don’t know about this…person today?”

  Her face told me that I wasn’t the only one who was baffled. I shook my head. I was feeling as off-balance and uninformed as I’d ever felt in my life. “No, I guess maybe I don’t,” I said. I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. I was pretty confident I wasn’t going to enjoy discovering it, whatever it was.

  “The person hanging in the barn today? The one you’ve been implying was your patient?”

  She seemed to want a response. I said, “He was my patient.”

  “That wasn’t a man, sweets. It was a woman.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” I said, blurting the words, yet knowing in my marrow that my protest was futile. A woman? Kol?

  In a soft I’m-so-sorry-but-there-is-no–Santa Claus voice, Lauren said, “Breasts, vagina. All the usual signs. She was all woman, Alan.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I STARED past Lauren toward the mountains, certain that she could spot the confusion persisting in my eyes. Any cushion was gone from her tone when she added, “If you don’t believe me, go ahead and ask Scott.”

  Scott Truscott was the assistant medical examiner. An old boss of mine. A competent, straight-shooting guy. He was among the second wave of responders to the scene. Most likely he would have been the first to open or remove any of Kol’s clothing. Scott didn’t miss much. He certainly wouldn’t have made an error on Kol’s sex.

  Then I thought, What difference does it make? Other than making me look more incompetent, what difference does it make? So Kol had disguised his, or her, gender with me. It didn’t change anything. Boy or girl, dead was dead.

  I stammered, “His name was—” I stopped myself. Technically, I couldn’t reveal my patient’s name to Lauren.

  Lauren felt no such constraint. She said, “Her name was Nicole Cruz, sweetie. She may not have been the most feminine thing on the planet, but she was a girl.”

  My wife was waiting for me to react. I tried to keep my face impassive, my eyes in therapeutic neutral.

  Lauren said, “You knew your patient’s name, didn’t you?”

  I didn’t reply at first. Hinting at what I knew would inevitably open the door to what I didn’t know. That path didn’t seem likely to ameliorate my disadvantage. “You would think so,” I said, finally.

  What happened next left me reeling.

  Lauren emptied the water from the bong over the deck railing. I followed her inside as she returned the bag of dope to her dressing table. She dug into her purse—the one she carried most days to work—and pulled out a small pump-bottle similar to the one we used for temporary anesthesia when Grace had a sore throat.

  She held it up for me to read the label. I didn’t recognize the bottle. “Sativex,” it read.

  “I’ve been using this,” she said. “For the pain in my legs. It works.”

  This wasn’t an oh-by-the-way moment. I recognized that she was making an admission of some kind—moving something with some serious specific gravity from the category of “secret” back to the category of “private.” I didn’t know if it was an admission of trust on her part, an acknowledgment of a prior mistrust, or—worst of all—a declaration that the issue of trust between us no longer mattered.

  That last thought was the one that left me reeling.

  “What is it?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant. “Something new?”

  She extended her arm. I took the small container from her hand. My eyes found tiny type on the label that read “delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol.” I recognized the “c-a-n-n-a-b-i” part of the chemical name. The rest was gibberish.

  Cannabinol? Cannabis? I asked, “Is this that stuff from Canada? The pharmaceutical marijuana spray?”

  Months before Lauren and I had discussed the fact that the Canadian government had approved the use of cannabis spray for treatment of neuropathic pain in people with MS while the U.S. government, with the same scientific evidence, had not. Lauren’s pain was neuropathic—her legs weren’t damaged, but their nerves were conspiring with her central nervous system to read pain signals when none were being sent.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “How did you get it?” I asked.

  “Teresa has a friend in Vancouver with MS.” Teresa, Lauren’s little sister, lived in Seattle. She had plenty of friends in British Columbia and spent a lot of time in Vancouver. That one of her friends had MS was no big surprise—it’s not a small club. “Her friend tried it—the Sativex—but it didn’t work for her. Teresa asked her friend if I could try whatever she had left. T gave it to me when I visited her in Seattle last month. It worked. I’ve been using it now for a little over a month. I sent her friend some money to keep the prescription…active; she’s been extremely kind about it.”

  I looked at the little container again. The question in my head was “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I shoved it into a cage and bolted the gate shut. Instead I asked, “How do you use it?”

  “I spray it below my tongue, or inside my cheeks. Two sprays are usually good. Sometimes three.”

  “And it works?”

  She nodded. “It’s been great. Remarkable.”

  The other question blew out the lock and escaped the cage. “Why didn’t you tell me before now?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I wasn’t sure it would work, and I’m a little ashamed about doing it, I guess. I didn’t want to draw you into it. By having it in the house I’m actually committing…”

  A federal felony? I handed the small bottle back to her. “This is a lot riskier than taking a couple of hits on your bong.”

  “I know,” she said. She crinkled up her nose and smiled. “It works, Alan. It works. And I’m able to work. Think about that. Think about what that means for me.”

  “That’s great,” I said. But I felt as much anger and confusion as joy. I was angry that she hadn’t trusted me. And I was angry that she’d made a decision that could put our family’s future in jeopardy. And that she’d done it without even consulting me.

  Had she asked me what would I have said? I would have said, “If you think it will help, go for it.” I should have had that vote. She hadn’t concurred, obviously.

  She started to walk away. It was probably best that one of us leave before I said something I would regret. But she stopped after a solitary step. She looked my way for a split second. “The grand jury is on hold,” she said.

  “I’m sorry. I know how much it’s meant to you to be part of that.”

  “Even when it gets going again I probably won’t be involved. The DA may have to give the whole thing over to a special prosecutor from another jurisdiction. The conflict of interest is too great.”

  “Sam told me today that he’s been sidelined, too. Is it all because of me?” I said. The clarification wasn’t necessary. I was filling the air with words. And a small prayer.

  “Yes,” she said. The prayer had been that she would say, “No, because of us. McClelland is ‘us.’” But she wasn’t interested in putting any sugar in the medicine for my benefit. For now she felt her latest travails were because of me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  She took another step. Again, she stopped. She should have come closer to me then, but she didn’t. She had moved farther away. I thought, She’s putting some distance between us.

  “Are you scared?” she asked.

  I silently ticked through the long litany of my current fears before I said, “About? My dead patient? The damn purse? McC
lelland?”

  “Him. Michael.”

  I didn’t like that she called him “Michael.” “Yes, yes. I’m…scared. He’s devious…He’s dangerous. I worry about you and Grace. What he might do. Everything.”

  “Me too,” she said. She was examining the label on the Sativex as she continued, “Since I’m not going to be working anymore—at least for a while—I’ve been thinking about taking Gracie someplace, you know…someplace safe, until it’s clear exactly what…he’s up to.”

  It turned out that I had been right: Lauren had been creating distance. The realization, along with her announcement that she was thinking about leaving Boulder with Grace, made me feel as though my heart was being deprived of blood.

  I reminded myself I’d been considering the same thing. My voice under control, I asked, “Because of McClelland?”

  “Michael’s so unpredictable,” she said. “You said so yourself. We have to be prudent, Alan. As parents.”

  “Yes,” I said. Prudent. Parents.

  “I couldn’t live with myself if he…” She allowed the unspeakable fear to spill onto the floor and puddle between us.

  I said, “He probably knows where everyone in your family lives.” Why I said that, I don’t know. Was it argument? Hardly. Plea? Partly. More words in the air? Probably. But it was no small prayer. The last one had been ignored. Whatever deity was supposed to be taking notes on my need for divine intervention was apparently on a latte break.

  “I was thinking of taking her to…the beach someplace. To decompress. I’m sure she’s picking up our…tension. Concern, whatever. I could use that, too. Since I’m not working…”

  “The beach?” The fucking beach?

  “Maybe Bimini.”

  Bimini? Have you ever spoken the word “Bimini” to me? No, she hadn’t. The Bahamas? Maybe, I thought. Maybe. But then again, maybe not. Hawaii, yes. The Caribbean, Mexico—yes. Other islands, other beaches. But certainly not Bimini.

  “You think that’s necessary, Lauren?”

  “You don’t?” she fired back. The ammo was softened by framing the issue as Grace’s welfare, but there was more explosive power than she’d intended in the shot. The effect was a marshmallow fired from a howitzer. I felt it bruise my bones.

  I knew that with my “You think that’s necessary?” query I’d invited my wife’s retort. But I recognized hers as one of those questions without a correct answer. If I agreed that it was necessary to take my daughter to a faraway island for her safety, I was granting Lauren license. If I disagreed? I was the imprudent parent.

  “Bimini?” I said.

  “The season’s ending. I could probably find someplace cheap.”

  So this is about money? I thought. I was momentarily proud of myself for not saying it aloud. Then I felt a secondary impact from the blow she’d launched a moment or two before. I hadn’t seen it circling above me—it struck hard and suddenly, like a boomerang that arrived from beyond my field of vision.

  She wasn’t asking me to go to Bimini with them. I said, “And I’ll…what? Take care of the dogs, and the house?” Keep an eye out for the bad guy?

  “You have your work still,” she said. “I don’t. I assumed you wouldn’t be able to leave.”

  I was the losing contestant on the game show. The glamorous hostess was pointing out my consolation prize.

  My work? Once news of my latest patient suicide hit the papers, I wasn’t sure how much of my work I would have. I said, “And then, later on, once…it’s clear what’s going on…you’ll come back home?”

  How long is hesitation?

  Hesitation is just long enough. That’s how long she waited before she said, “Sure.” Just long enough that I knew she’d hesitated.

  That’s the moment when I understood that I no longer understood.

  TWENTY-NINE

  BY TWENTY minutes after nine Lauren was asleep, Anvil curled at her knees. Emily stayed in the great room to keep me company as I drank room-temperature vodka and pondered how I could have possibly missed so much in the past month.

  My wife was using pharmaceutical cannabis.

  No problem. I could get my arms around that just fine. The small matter of importing illegal drugs across an international border? Federal policy on Sativex was inane. But she should have told me.

  She was thinking of taking my daughter to Bimini. Hell, she wasn’t just thinking about it. She was planning it.

  I had believed that the patient of mine who had just killed himself in Adrienne’s barn was a man. But he wasn’t. Or she wasn’t. I tried to recall if Kol—Cole? Nicole?—ever said that she was a man, or if it had been a misguided assumption on my part. I’d already replayed everything I could remember about each of the psychotherapy sessions. She’d never said she was a man. She never intentionally misled me. Her maleness was an assumption on my part. My patient was slight. Effeminate? No, not really, but he wasn’t notably masculine either.

  I had considered the issue of sexual orientation during the brief treatment, and had entertained the possibility that it might still be in a fluid state. I would not have been surprised to hear that Kol had acted out more than a solitary preference during his journey toward sexual identity.

  But what I wasn’t actively questioning during the brief psychotherapy was Kol’s gender. Kol had presented himself as a young male—“anthracite, man”—and the Kol-is-a-man assignment I’d made had been a reflexive, though admittedly not reflective, assumption on my part. It hadn’t been a determination about which I recalled feeling any ambivalence. He dressed like a man. He wore no makeup. He had no obvious female sexual characteristics. The patient information form I ask patients to fill out prior to treatment doesn’t even have a M/F option. I never thought I’d be in a circumstance where I couldn’t tell. On the first day I saw him in my office—maybe even the first day I’d spoken with him on the phone—I’d assigned Kol a y chromosome and never felt any imperative to replace it with another x.

  Funny how that works. One of my enduring guiding principles as a therapist has always been: don’t assume. Well, I’d apparently run through the light at that corner as it shined bright red. How surprised could I really be that after I violated that principle, I ended up in a catastrophic wreck in the intersection?

  Nights when I was up much later than my family I kept the portable close by so that the sound of the ringing phone wouldn’t wake Grace or disturb Lauren. They both needed their sleep, Lauren often more desperately than Grace.

  I was thinking about the change of seasons, albeit the wrong seasons, as the phone chirped. I was also thinking of getting more vodka. I’d had enough that the additional vodka seemed like a good idea. I hadn’t quite had enough that I was completely unaware that it was actually a bad idea.

  Seasons? In quasi-temperate zones that enjoy four—like Colorado—the heralds that announce the transitions from one season to the next differ depending on the time of year. There are constants among the changes. Temperature always varies—cool-to-warm, hot-to-cool, whatever. That’s an immutable marker. The length of day is another fixed sign—it reliably stretches or contracts as the sun alters its position in the sky. The dramatic changes that occur with the approach of winter and the approach of summer are mostly about those two universal seasonal harbingers, temperature and light.

  But the shoulder seasons, spring and fall, are different. They are almost always more subtle. Spring, for me, announces with color. Even before the chill of winter tempers, tender shoots emerge among the taupe grasses and the fresh butter and ripe lemon of the first crocuses peek through the snow. Above the ground the lime-flesh green of the first buds poke out on the early leafing trees and on the not-yet-fragrant lilacs.

  The bare cusp of autumn isn’t about color—the tarnished hues come later—it’s about aroma. One unpredictable morning in early to mid-September, a morning before the aspen leaves have begun their golden transformation, I will walk outside before dawn with the
dogs and smell the first floating molecules carrying the musk of decay. It’s a whispered warning that one phase of life is in the process of disintegrating so that another might begin.

  I was aware the night that Kol died that I was out of seasonal sync; I was thinking autumn thoughts during April, not seeing shades of green, but instead smelling the sour harbinger of decay.

  A glance at the caller ID screen revealed two words: PAY PHONE. Had I been home alone I would have ignored the call and let voice-mail do its thing. But the repeated ringing would wake my family and I picked up after half a ring, expecting bad news. No particular bad news. It was late and it had been a bad-news kind of day. A not-autumn day when the aroma was of decay.

  “This’ll be quick, so if anyone asks later on you can say that the call you received was a wrong number. I will deny this ever happened.” The distinctive voice was Sam Purdy’s. The volume wasn’t as robust as usual, but it wasn’t quite a whisper either. When Sam was tired the influence to his accent from his years on Minnesota’s Iron Range tended to grow more pronounced. Sam was tired. Know became a multisyllable word—the vowel sound at the end just went on and on in that inimitable Minnesota way. “You got it?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, already wary. God, what next?

  “If the last thing you said to me this morning on the trail is true, you have to consider the possibility that…someone is setting you up,” Sam said.

  I didn’t know how to reply. Or if I should reply. Sam was taking a big risk by calling me. Cozy and Kirsten would be livid that Sam had called. Almost as livid as they would be that I hadn’t hung up on him.

  I had been considering the possibility that McClelland was setting me up since the moment the bandanna disappeared from the handles on the barn doors. That my best friend was considering the same possibility was heartwarming.

  “Did you hear me?” Sam asked.

  “I did,” I said. “There’s more about today—things you don’t know.”

  Phone lines are never actually silent. Sam and I both listened to the sounds that were accompanying our breathing. “Yeah?” he said. “You gonna tell me or what?”