Dry Ice

by Stephen White

  THIRTY-THREE

  KIRSTEN DID get herself some wine, though I declined to join her.

  Going home with alcohol on my breath would have added a level of complication to my already complicated afternoon. I was unwilling to contemplate the house of cards of lies it would take to explain it all to Lauren.

  I did not grab Kirsten’s hand as she stood to get the wine. Nor did I pull her into an embrace. I didn’t bury my fingers in her hair. Or feel her breath on the flesh of my neck. I didn’t do any of what would naturally have come next.

  I wasn’t even on the couch when she returned from the kitchen with the wine. I was standing in front of the fire, looking out a western window at the first pastel stripes on the stratified clouds above the foothills.

  She set the bottle of wine and two glasses on the hibachi. She busied herself popping the cork before she stepped over and joined me by the fire. She said, “Hi.”

  The word felt like a novella.

  She put her arms around me—I could feel her hands spread, her fingers curling onto my shoulder blades—and she gave me a firm hug, the side of her face against my chest. I inhaled a soft scent from her, an olfactory whisper, like yesterday’s perfume.

  “That wasn’t very lawyerly,” she said when she’d pulled away from me. “But I thought you needed it. You haven’t had a very good week.”

  I had needed it, so much so that I allowed myself the discomfiting awareness that the embrace had ended before I was ready.

  The moment she pulled away from me is when the what-happened-next fantasy played out in my head—unbidden, I would argue; undeterred, I would admit. I remained near the fire gazing out the window as I allowed the fantasy to run to credits. Even as the inherent peril caused my pulse to soar I found the prurient daydream oddly comforting.

  When I joined her again on the loveseat I poured three inches of wine for her and turned sideways, handing her the glass. She had one leg curled beneath her and her left arm around a cushion that she was hugging to her breasts.

  I left my glass unfilled. She noticed. “This must be hard for you,” she said.

  “It is,” I said. “I assume you mean being a suspect in the suspicious death of one of my patients?” It was an awkward attempt to be glib.

  “That’s part of it,” she said with a kind grin. “But simply losing your patient to suicide. The way you did, finding the body? The hostility of her killing herself the way she did, and where she did? At your home. At your home, Alan. I mean—oh my God—Grace could have found the body. Plus being cut off from all your usual supports. Lauren. Your best friend. Not being able to talk about this. It must be like being on an island.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.” Bimini.

  “I’m glad if I can help,” she said. “Even a little. And I’m glad you called,” she said, averting her eyes.

  “Me too.” I felt like a sixteen-year-old. Or somebody else as a sixteen-year-old. I’d totally forgotten what my life had been like at sixteen. Psychologically speaking the correct word was “suppressed.” Not “forgotten.” My actual sixteenth year, along with the couple before and the couple after, had disappeared into a cave. I hadn’t been spelunking in those climes since.

  Kirsten said, “I know that part. The island part. I’ve lived it. But the part I know best is how it feels to have a madman after you and your family. There’s nothing worse.”

  She had given my situation a lot of thought. My breath was growing shallow. Partly because her compassion was disarming me. Partly because she was stumbling closer and closer to the truth.

  Kirsten said, “Lauren isn’t well, is she?”

  What? How did she know that?

  “I don’t mean generally,” she said. “I mean lately.”

  “How can you tell?”

  She shrugged. “Coping is exhausting. She seems…especially exhausted. I’ve seen her…during better times. We were close, remember?”

  I did remember. “She’s not doing…great,” I admitted. “Things come, things go. It’s that kind of disease.” It was one or two degrees away from being a platitude. I didn’t like to say much about my wife’s health to others. Lauren didn’t want me to say much about her health to others.

  “That must be a major trial for you. Having a wife who is ill. You have to cope too.”

  “Harder for her,” I said. It didn’t feel right to talk about what it was like for me.

  “My husband’s parents were sick. It tore him up. Sometimes,” she said, “it’s harder to take care of the sick person than it is to be the sick person. Much harder. That’s what I think, anyway.”

  I couldn’t acknowledge that truth. She’s going to Bimini, I thought. She’s taking Grace. It’s prudent. I couldn’t acknowledge that, either. Not aloud. Not with Kirsten.

  Her eyes softened. I feared it was an indication that she was going to try to entice me to cross the bridge she was erecting across the divide between us. She sipped some wine. Looked away before she looked back toward me. “Did I ever really thank you for what you did? To save us, me and Amy? That night, at your house?”

  “You did.” I didn’t remember if she did or if she didn’t. I had been in shock after the night I demolished the front of my house with Adrienne’s car, and I stayed that way for longer than I wanted to admit. Appropriately, Kirsten had never come back to see me for therapy.

  I’d been relieved at her decision. She had moved on. Had she come back to see me I would have had to use my shovel to dig, rather than to fill. And selfishly, what happened that night was a hole I needed to fill as fast as I could.

  For a short while Kirsten and Lauren had become close friends. The bond quickly cooled, though I’d seen her in passing a couple of times in the next year or two. She would pick Lauren up to go shopping or to go to a play.

  I ran into them once while they were having lunch at an outside table at Tom’s near the Mall. I saw her and Amy in the parking lot at King Soopers on 30th. Kirsten was an ex-patient in a small town. I had a lot of ex-patients in Boulder. I had tried to let her become just one of them—someone I ran into around town. My feelings about her? She was there that night. I was there that night. If seeing her caused me to have to deal with any details about what had happened, then she was worth avoiding.

  Occasionally I was unable to stop myself from remembering more. That would happen in the dark in the dead hours when the lucky were asleep.

  I didn’t like the nights that I remembered more.

  Remembering Kirsten meant remembering Carl Luppo. Remembering Kirsten and Carl meant recalling being within arm’s reach of an assassin in the wreckage of the front of my house. Steps away my wife was at risk, my unborn daughter was at risk.

  I had a gun in my hand. A…gun.

  Emily barking and barking and barking.

  The man’s hand around my ankle.

  In recent months, at night when everyone else was sleeping, when I would have preferred to be dreaming uninterpretable dreams, I’d awaken because I felt the pressure of his fingers closing like a vise around my leg. I would sit up startled in the night, trying to yank my leg free. I would look up to see Emily’s orange eyes staring at me.

  Just like that night.

  In a blink I would be back in the rubble with the damn gun in my hand. For three seconds, or four, I would feel the terror I felt that night. Part of me would recognize the pull from the past and I would try to make everything stop. Failing that I would try to get reality to rewind. It never worked. I was never able to do any of it.

  Emily’s eyes would glow with fire, her jaws snapping open and closed as she barked. I don’t remember hearing her barks that night. I do remember closing my eyes.

  I always pulled the trigger right after I closed my eyes.

  Always. That night in the rubble. And every night that I replayed it.

  I always closed my eyes. I always pulled the trigger.

  Shoot.

  During the repl
ays Emily would sense the adrenaline seeping from my pores and she would stare at me in the bedroom or great-room darkness, unblinking. Eventually my pulse would slow and her instincts would tell her that any danger had passed. She’d lie down, sigh, close her eyes, and go back to sleep. Emily wasn’t haunted.

  Not me. I wouldn’t sleep again until daylight filtered into the room. Once the cycle of darkness had been poisoned by those memories it couldn’t be safe for me. If I was lucky I’d get an hour of sleep after dawn but before the alarm went off or before Grace called out her insistence that we all start the day.

  The shot I fired that night with my eyes closed echoed for months that soon stacked up and became years. It echoed because I hadn’t been able to find a way to stop the echoing. God knows I had tried. I’d compartmentalized everything else. The Kirsten part. The Carl Luppo part. The unbelievable danger to my family part.

  But I’d failed to compartmentalize the shooting part. That part was the echo I kept hearing. I felt grateful that the intrusions became less frequent over time. The years had begun to scar over what I couldn’t heal on my own.

  Then I watched my patient’s death on national TV.

  A man with a secret. A bullet from a gun.

  The very night he died I woke to find myself in the dark again. The hand on my ankle. The gun in my hand. Emily’s orange eyes. Her silent barks.

  Everything came back.

  Was it—I didn’t know—about the secret, or the gun?

  “I don’t think so,” Kirsten said. “I’ve never thanked you properly.”

  “What I did that night? Instinct,” I said. “Not courage. It was something that had to be done. I did it because not doing it would have been worse. That’s all.”

  What had I done that night?

  I’d shot a man intent on killing not only my wife and unborn daughter, but also Kirsten and her daughter. I’d shot him before he shot me for no other reason than because he knew I was in his way.

  I’d shot him with a silenced .22 at close range.

  I’d shot him once in the head. With my eyes closed. The one shot had killed him.

  “I’m no hero,” I said.

  “You saved us,” she said.

  Her argument was that since I had saved their lives I was a hero. Ha. I’d been down that road before. Just around the bend there was a fork. Each tine of the fork led to a fresh tragedy. She might not be able to see it. I knew the route. I could.

  “I closed my eyes when I pulled the trigger,” I said. “How heroic is that?”

  I’d never told anyone that fact before. The eyes-closed part. Not Lauren, not Sam.

  Kirsten shrugged. “You were scared. I was crying. Lauren was crying. We were all terrified. Doesn’t change anything. What you did was…heroic.”

  The word left me nauseous. I tasted vomit in my throat. “It wasn’t just fear,” I said. “It was…more than that.”

  “What?” she asked.

  Anyone would have asked—I’d created the opening—but I wasn’t prepared to answer. “It’s over. I don’t talk about it. I don’t think about it.”

  I do lie about it. If you keep asking, I’ll keep lying.

  “It’s not that simple,” she said. “It’s one of those things that has to be difficult for you still. For anyone. Killing a man? My God. I don’t care about the circumstances. It doesn’t just go away.”

  No, it doesn’t. Not soon. Not ever. Eventually I will succeed in pretending that it’s gone away. That might be the best that I can hope for.

  I didn’t want to talk about me, especially about me killing a man. Defensively, I flipped the mirror, pointing it at her. “What about for you?” I asked. “You know about this too. Has that day at Galatoire’s gone away?”

  Kirsten’s husband, Robert, died in her arms outside the famed restaurant in the French Quarter. In front of her eyes an anonymous hitman had put a single slug into his brain. She recoiled from my question and took a quick breath, as though she were recovering from a blow to her gut. Then she shook her head. She said, “Never. Ever.”

  “Some things are hard, too hard. The load is too heavy,” I said. “We do our best. We move on. Not always beyond. Just on.”

  We were quiet for a moment. The neighborhood dog had stopped barking.

  “I worry about Amy,” she said. Her voice dropped to a whisper with the pronouncement, as though she was concerned that she didn’t have right to be concerned about her daughter.

  Of course, I thought. This was about Amy, not about Kirsten. And not about me. I felt a shower of relief. I hadn’t seen the change in direction coming. I should have. I’d been outflanked by an amateur. At the mention of her daughter’s vulnerability I reached over a few inches and took Kirsten’s hand.

  Her focus was on her daughter but her eyes were on the fire. She asked, “Should I? Worry about Amy? What she saw? What she heard? What she felt?”

  What she felt? I thought. Who knows? I knew what I was feeling—I was feeling the cloud resume its rush forward like it was being pushed by a gale. I was exhausted enough that I sniffed for the wolves.

  “You want me to comfort you?” I asked in a tone I tried to make as soothing as a father’s caress. “Is that…where you’re going with this?”

  I could offer comfort. That was easy. I could hold her in my arms. Whisper soft words into her hair. I could be reassuring. I could talk about hope.

  Or I could offer a therapist’s comfort. Understanding. Compassion. Wisdom. If she was lucky and I was having a good day, I could be a dim light in a dark room.

  Or, I could lie.

  “It is,” she said. She looked away from the fire. At me. She then leaned into me, resting her head on my shoulder. “But is comfort what I need?”

  I thought about her question. There was so much trust residing in it. Was she asking me as doctor, or as experienced victim? Or simply as a man? I didn’t know. I was sure that it would have been easier for me to offer comfort than the alternative. The alternative was empathy. Empathy would have required excavating the piece of me that I had buried.

  “We can all…use solace. It’s not easy to find. I advise taking it where you can get it,” I said. I feared that my words were banal. I kept going, trying to find some traction to pull me from the muddy ground to the dry. “But the truth is that you need to be worried about Amy. What happened with those men—in New Orleans, in Slaughter, and in Boulder—changed her. It just did. You can be certain of…that.”

  I watched tears form in both of Kirsten’s eyes and knew that I was out of the mud. Her tears formed all at once, as though my words had caused them to spring from surface wells. Within seconds the drops were sliding down the slopes of her cheekbones.

  It had been a cheap clinical diversion on my part. Every word I’d said was true. But she had been asking for comfort, not for truth. I’d run from the comfort because what was comforting to her was too dangerous for me.

  “How? How has it changed her? What will it do?” she asked.

  She wanted relief from her dread. I swallowed. “I don’t know. You don’t know. For now, she doesn’t know.”

  Well, that’s helpful, doctor.

  She squeezed my hand. “I want you to tell me she can leave it all behind. That’s what I want. I want to bleach that day for her, to disinfect those memories. I don’t want those monsters to have changed her.”

  I knew the truth would cut like broken glass. “Her father was murdered,” I said. “A man chased her down in Slaughter when you were hiding. A hired killer fired a shot into her teddy bear here in Boulder—while she held it in her arms. The man was there to kill you. She saw all that. She knew all that. She felt…all that.”

  Kirsten’s muscles tightened involuntarily, as though she was preparing to absorb a punch. But it was too late. My blows had landed. She cried. She didn’t sob, her body didn’t convulse. She cried with composure. The individual tears melded into streams on her cheeks. Her tongue
darted from her mouth to catch the salty drops tumbling on the left side. The ones she missed slid into the thin air before disappearing into the weave of my sweater.

  “What’s going to happen to her?” she asked.

  Like the smart kid in class with his hand in the air, I knew that one. The clinical word is “sublimate.” If she’s lucky, I thought, Amy will sublimate. To Freud it was an unconscious defense mechanism that involved rerouting potentially destructive psychological urges into impulses that are neutral or even positive.

  For Amy it would mean that she would discover strength that lingers like unspent blessings in ego-restoring reservoirs that are mystifying in their bounty, and she would use that strength to transform the impact of the horrific events that were themselves so transformative and she would end up doing something acceptable, even beneficial, to society.

  She will sublimate.

  Diane had sublimated her captivity in Las Vegas and we had ended up with a waiting room that was more oasis than parlor.

  I had sublimated my failure to change my history to my liking and had become a clinical psychologist, determined to change the history of others.

  How would Amy sublimate? I didn’t know. But she would. I knew she would.

  A clinical supervisor who’d edged too close to understanding my truth pointed out that the chemical meaning of the word sublimate is not too different from the psychological one. To chemists, sublimation is the process by which matter changes from a solid state into a vapor without first melting.

  The supervisor could tell from watching my face that chemistry wasn’t one of my things.

  “Think dry ice,” she’d said.

  In the intervening years I had learned that the tricky part about sublimation—whether psychological or chemical—was in that qualifying phrase at the end. The tricky part was in making the change without first melting.

  The capacity of the human animal to survive hardship and trauma has never ceased to generate my awe. Take ten people and let doom and cruelty—violence, incest, loss, trauma, terror—design an episode or two of horror in their childhoods.