by Peter Ferry
“Okay.”
“Let’s try something a little different,” he said. “Let’s begin with the accident and work backward. See if we uncover anything backing up.”
“From the moment she hits the lamppost?” I asked.
“Yes. Start there. We can always go forward if we need to.”
“I’m watching. It seems as if I’m watching from back at the light, but I couldn’t be. It’s too far, and people would have been honking, so I’m driving; but she whizzes out in front of me; she hits the curb on the right once, I think, and doesn’t even attempt to turn into the curve, doesn’t even try. Maybe she is passed out already. Who knows.”
“What did you say?”
“When she hit the lamppost? I think I said, ‘Oh sweet Jesus! Oh my God!’ I pulled into someone’s driveway and put on my flashers. I started to run to the house, but someone had already opened the door. I yelled to call the police.”
“Let’s work backward.”
“From the light? Okay. I’m watching her. I know she’s in trouble. I never decide what to do. It’s not as if I had decided, and then she pulled away, and I was too late; I hadn’t decided. But before we get to the light, I’m hoping for the chance. I’m hoping that we both have to stop, and then I’ll be able to do something, but we’re half a block away when the light turns red, so we have to slow down, we have to stop, and it’s a short light, anyway. There just isn’t time.”
“Go back,” he said.
“I’m following her; she’s easy to keep track of because she has a broken taillight. I’m following at a distance because I’m afraid she’ll veer into oncoming traffic and someone will swerve and hit me. I’m desperately looking for a cop. I’m thinking, ‘how do I signal a cop if he’s coming toward me?’”
“What are you feeling?”
“Fear. Butterflies.”
“When do you start feeling afraid?”
“When she hits the curb. She just bounces off the curb, and I know she’s fucked up.”
“What are you feeling before that?”
“Annoyance, I guess. She’s driving fast and recklessly, and it pisses me off. First she’s behind me following too closely, changing lanes, so I slow down, pull over, let her pass, but then she hits that curb . . .”
“When are you first aware of her?”
“She has her brights on in my mirror—”
“Go back before that.”
“Let’s see,” I said. “I’m not . . . I don’t know. I don’t remember before that.”
“Okay. That’s okay. Just keep going back until you do remember something.”
“Well, let’s see. That would probably be all the way back to school.”
“Okay, go there. What time is it?”
“It’s almost six. It’s quarter to six. I can see the clock on my classroom wall. I’m late.”
“What are you late for?”
“We’re supposed to go out to dinner with Lydia’s boss, Don, and I’m cutting it close. I’m trying to grade one last paper, and I just can’t concentrate on it. I finally get it done and look up. It’s quarter to six. I remember our date. I say, ‘Oh, shit.’ I call home and leave a message. ‘Sorry. Change the time if you can.’ I put all the papers I have to grade in my briefcase. I lock the room. I get into my car. It’s dark. It’s cold. Not real cold, but damp cold. It’s rained some. The streets are wet. I’m not sure beyond that.”
“Do you make any stops?”
“Actually, I do. I’m on Green Bay. I pull into Sunset Foods in Highland Park. I buy a bottle of wine because I’m late. Jacob’s Creek Cabernet. I buy something else. Tums. Oh yeah, I’ve got acid. I’ve been burping all afternoon. Terry in the cafeteria made ham salad, so I have it for lunch with a bowl of split-pea soup. Too rich. I’m burping. Then about five, I impulsively eat the sandwich I’d brought for lunch. Now I’m really burping, and I’m mad at myself. I’m not hungry, I have a tension headache, I’m late and I have to go out with Don, who has two beers and starts telling bad wife jokes in front of his wife. God. Traffic’s bad. Oh Jesus. I almost have an accident. That’s right.”
“What happens?”
“I’m still on Green Bay, but in Glencoe now. I’m trying to open the Tums with one hand, you know, work my thumbnail between two tablets through the paper. I look down for a nanosecond and almost hit the stopped car in front of me. I hit my brakes, honk, the guy behind me hits his, almost slides into me. I hold my breath. Pull around her. Then—”
“Your finger’s up,” Gene said.
“What?”
“You’ve raised your finger.”
“Really?” We both look at my finger.
“Go back to the almost accident. Describe it again.” I do. “Okay, what kind of car was it?”
“It’s raining. It’s dark.”
“Try.”
I tilt my head back against the chair. My eyes are as heavy as ball bearings. I let them sink toward the middle of my head. “Small. Black. Japanese. The right taillight is out.” We sit a long time. It is quiet in Gene’s room. “It’s Lisa Kim,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Well, it’s either her or an identical car. Her taillight is out, too.”
“Do you know that when you were describing the accident, you said, ‘I pulled around her’?”
“I did?”
“Why is the car stopped? Are you at a light?”
“No. We’re right in the middle of a stretch of road,” I said. “Someone’s getting out, I think.”
“Is it Lisa Kim?”
“No. The other door, other side.”
“Can you see who it is?”
“Not very well. It’s dark. It’s rainy.”
“If you had to say, is it a man or a woman?”
“If I had to say, I’d say a man.”
“Tall or short?”
“Taller than shorter.”
“Fat or thin?”
“Thinner.”
“Older or younger?”
“I don’t have a read on age, but there’s something—”
“What?”
“I don’t know. There’s something recognizable about the person.”
“Dark or fair?”
“Hard to say. Dark, I think.”
“Can you get an emotional read?”
“How do you mean?”
“How would you describe this parting?” Gene asked. “Is it amicable? Did she slam on the brakes and order him out? Does he lean over to say good-bye?”
“Hurried is all. He must have heard me screech my brakes. It’s like ‘Gotta go. See ya.’”
“Where’s he go?” he asked.
“Don’t know. I have no sense of that.”
“Do you see the black car in your rearview mirror once you pass it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Go back to Sunset Foods and come back down Green Bay. Could you have been aware of the car before you nearly hit it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“How about after you pass it? What then?”
“Well, I have one of those talks you have with yourself sometimes. I say, ‘Listen, asshole, what the hell is wrong with you? It’s Christmastime. It’s Friday night. You’re going out to dinner, secretly you like Don’s bad jokes, and you just missed having an accident, so lighten up, for God’s sake.’”
“And do you?”
“I do. I cut over to Sheridan Road in Hubbard Woods even though it’s a little slower and take the scenic route. I switch from NPR to Christmas music. I start singing Christmas carols. And I’m still doing that when she comes up behind me with her brights on.”
“Back to the car you almost hit, did you see the face of the person who got out?” he asked.
“Not really.”
“Hear his voice?”
“No, no. I don’t know what it is . . . something . . . something . . .”
“You’re tired, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to count from ten to zero. With each number, you’ll emerge a bit more from hypnosis until we get to zero. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Afterward, we just sat there for quite a while. I was tired. I closed my eyes again for a long moment, and when I opened them, Gene was smiling at me. “You found it,” he said. “You found the pebble in your shoe. I was pretty sure it was there.”
“Were you?”
“Yeah. You don’t seem nuts enough to be nuts.”
“How very clinical.”
“You like that?”
“I do.” We talked about why I hadn’t made the connection before. Gene thought that I’d been traumatized by the accident and maybe even suffered mild shock. He didn’t think it surprising. “What you saw was momentous,” he said. “What happened before it was insignificant by comparison. I imagine you just forgot it. Your conscious mind filled up with the facts and the feelings of the accident, and there wasn’t room for anything else. Also, there was some time between the two incidents and, maybe more important, some changes. You changed routes; you changed moods. Maybe you just didn’t connect the two cars.”
“Now that I have, what can I do about it?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. Maybe nothing. I’d sit on it a day or two and see if your anxiety level goes down. If it does, then maybe you’ve done enough just to make the connection.”
“If it doesn’t?”
“If I were you, I’d wait a while. I think you’ll know what to do when the time is right.”
As it happened, my anxiety level did not decrease. In fact, it increased, but it was not the same, dull, troubled, aimless nervousness I’d felt before. Now it was keen and focused. Who was the guy in the car? What was he doing there? Why did he get out? Why did he allow Lisa Kim to drive away to her death? And what was there about him that was faintly familiar? I sat around for the two days Gene recommended and then picked up the telephone. If I was going to answer my questions, I’d have to learn more about Lisa Kim. Tanya had said that Rosalie Belcher Svigos was Lisa’s best friend, so I called her at the Chicago hospital where she was doing her residency.
At first it didn’t seem as if I would learn much from Dr. Rosalie Svigos. She didn’t shake my hand or let me buy her a blueberry muffin or decaf coffee in the hospital cafeteria. In fact she was so cool, I wasn’t sure why she’d agreed to meet me at all, yet she had. She was a big, pretty woman with such a don’t-bullshit-me quality about her that I had to remind myself that she was only a year older than Lisa. She sat there in the noisy cafeteria and watched me suspiciously as I fairly babbled. But she did sit and watch me even though I was telling her hardly anything; I was dissembling although I hadn’t intended to—there was something in her demeanor that made the whole last-guy-to-see-her-alive story sound fanciful and unlikely.
She interrupted me in mid-sentence. She asked who I was. A reporter? An investigator? “Did Lisa’s father hire you? Or was it the insurance company?” Confronted, I told her the whole improbable tale, and I could tell she found it improbable. I could also tell that she wasn’t about to give up anything on her friend, that she was there to protect Lisa. But from whom? A bumbling high school English teacher with a bad conscience? Still, she sat, and there had to be a reason for that especially after she found out I was no threat to Lisa, but when I asked for information, she gave me the party line: Lisa was a brilliant actor. Like any true artist, she challenged people, made them think about the line between reality and illusion, the nature of artifice, everything they believed. She was an intuitive actor who was always practicing her craft. She was a minimalist who never appeared to be acting. She was a genius who had little time for fools, who didn’t mind being misunderstood or making enemies.
“Did that cause problems with her career?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Is that why they dropped her from Gangbusters before they took it to New York?”
“They begged her to go to New York,” Rosalie said. “She was the one who said no.”
“Why in the world would she do that? Wasn’t it, like, her big break?”
“Big breaks only matter if you are looking for one. She was looking for a character. When Gangbusters opened in the back of a bar on Lincoln Avenue, she had a minor role. In the next two years, they rewrote the whole thing around Lucy Fantisimo. She became the lead. Her character took over the play. That was all Lisa. By the time they were ready to go to New York, the thing had been compromised to death, bastardized. One thing about Lisa, she was not a compromiser. She was an absolutist. She said no. She was bored with the part. She’d given everything to and gotten everything out of Gangbusters that she could. She’d moved on.”
“Pardon me, but moved on to what? Waiting tables?”
“Let me tell you something,” Rosalie bristled. “Lisa Kim could find more dramatic possibilities in a four-hour shift than some actors find in a career. But no, she was not just waiting tables. She did an experimental film that was remarkable, she did an Off-Off-play that was interesting, and she wrote a play that Bruce Kaplan is thinking of producing in the spring. Plus, she’d been cast in a big-time independent film called Dream Car that was shot in New York last spring. I think it’s going to be huge. I think Lisa was about to get a lot of recognition.”
Unlike many doctors I’ve known who are well trained but poorly educated, Rosalie Svigos had ideas, and I knew that I’d found someone who could help me. But now she’d said her piece, and she was looking at her watch. I needed to act quickly. I said, “A few minutes before the accident, I saw a man get out of Lisa’s car. Do you know who that might have been?”
Now she was looking at me again, and sharply. “What did he look like?” she asked.
“It was dark. My impression of him was that he was tall, thin, and dark haired.”
“Where was this?”
“On Green Bay Road in Glencoe.”
“Glencoe?” she said to herself.
I took another shot. “At the time of the accident, Lisa was high on heroin.”
“My God,” she said, “where’d you get that?”
“There was a private autopsy.”
“Do you know what heroin does to you? It makes you nod. It makes the world go away. It makes you feel nothing. That was the last thing in the world that Lisa Kim would have wanted. She wanted to feel everything. She was the most alive person I ever met. Now if you told me cocaine—something that would heighten sensation—I might believe you, but . . . Lisa did not use heroin.”
Rosalie got up to go. I couldn’t think of a way to keep her. To my surprise, she fished a business card out of the pocket of her lab coat and put it on the table. “If you find out who the man in the car was, I’d like to know.” She hesitated, then spoke again. “You don’t find heroin in an autopsy,” she said. “You find opiates—the stuff heroin comes from—but morphine comes from it, too, and codeine that’s in some cough medicines and in Tylenol 3. She could have taken Tylenol 3 for a toothache and tested positive or eaten a poppy-seed bagel. Lisa was not using heroin.”
I could have run Lydia over the next day, and not even seen her. I know I had things on my mind, but I should have seen her, anyway. It happened like this: I was driving and thinking. I knew that I knew something about the man who got out of Lisa Kim’s car that night, but I did not know what it was. Something. Could I have met him? Could I have recognized him? I turned off the radio and let my mind drain. I was driving. I needed to move in order to think. I had called Lydia to ask if I could come by for some things. It was time that we had some contact anyway, although actually I had hoped she wouldn’t be home; I thought the call might be enough. Besides, I was really just looking for an excuse to be in motion.
Lydia was just leaving for a run, and I wondered momentarily if her stretching exercises against her car, her expensive New Balance running shoes and her Lycra outf
it were meant for me. I had always been the one who exercised, and she had often teased me about being vain. We exchanged a few self-consciously pleasant words like neighbors meeting in the supermarket; then she took off and I went upstairs. I poked around. I had forgotten what I had come for. I was thinking of that night, trying to re-create it once again as I had with Gene, but this time, slow it down one more click. I wanted to capture a detail I had so far missed. Some detail. Any detail.
Absently I stacked some books and CDs, then put them in a plastic bag. In my mind I was back in the school. I was locking my classroom. What exactly did I say to Thompson? I realized that I was closing a door right now, but it was the apartment door. I realized that I was in a parallel situation at the moment; I was going down a flight of stairs. I was getting into my car. Perhaps I could physically re-create what happened. Did I turn on the radio immediately? Did I leave it off? I pulled through the alley and stopped at the next street. I sat there idling; what had I been wrestling with that night? Something. What in the world could it have been? I had my foot on the brake; I checked my rearview mirror. Remember. Remember. What had it been? Now there was someone in front of my car. Someone was bobbing up and down. She slapped my hood with the palm of her hand. “Hey!” she yelled. It was Lydia. She was running in place. I hadn’t even seen her; how long had she been there? She came to my window. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“What are you doing? I couldn’t get your attention.”
“I was thinking. I was just thinking.”
She slapped the hood again, waved, and ran off. I watched her go. I hadn’t seen her there. She’d been right in front of me, and I hadn’t seen her. I remembered then that there had been a time in my life when all I wanted to do was look at her.
When Lydia had gone away that time early on for three and a half weeks with another guy, I hadn’t missed her at first, and then I had, and then I had terribly. I lay awake in bed wondering who she was fucking and how and when (right now?) and where; I imagined it was a wry, long-legged copywriter with tousled hair she’d once introduced me to at a party. I tried not to call her at her office, and when I finally did, our conversation was brief; she was busy, distracted, dismissive, self-protective in her “none of your damn business” mode. When she had finally come home, weary and wistful, I was in love with her, or thought I was. At the very least, I wanted her in a way that I had not before someone else wanted her. It was the strongest feeling that I’d ever had for a woman, and so I called it love, and perhaps it was. I needed to remember that.
