by Jason Starr
“Oh my God,” she said.
Misunderstanding her response, Clements said, “You recognize him?” Starting to back away, she said, “No, I have no idea who he is. Can I go now?
Can I just go?”
When she returned to the living room, Clements wanted to talk to her mom, so she and her dad were left alone.
First he hugged her and assured her things would return to normal soon—yeah, right—then he asked, “So how’d it go in there?”
She didn’t answer right away, then said, “He made me look at the body.” “What?” She could tell he was seriously upset. “Why the hell did he do that?” She didn’t feel like talking to him about it. Things had been tense and awkward between them, well, for years, but since she’d graduated from college their relationship had become even more strained, what with him constantly on her case about getting a job and moving out on her own. Her plan had been to live at home temporarily, until she could support herself, so she’d gotten a part-time job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through a contact from an art history professor. But she didn’t like her boss, and the job had had practically nothing to do with art—her main duty had been renting out tour headphones—and after about a month she couldn’t take it anymore and quit. She’d been sending out résumés and going on interviews, but her father wouldn’t let up about the “big opportunity” she’d blown, and it was hard to even be in the same room with him sometimes.
“He wanted to see if I recognized him,” she said. “Whatever.” She was exhausted and really didn’t feel like talking anymore.
But her dad couldn’t let it go and said, “This is getting ridiculous now. There’s no way he should’ve made you do that, I mean what’s the point of that?” He shook his head, brooding, then asked, “Did he ask you about your bong, too?”
God, Marissa didn’t want to be having this conversation right now, especially not in the middle of the night when she was so exhausted.
“Yeah,” she said, “but it was no big deal.”
“How many times have I told you to get rid of that thing?” “You’ve never told me to get rid of it.”
“I told you I don’t want you smoking in the house.”
“I think I’ve smoked in the house twice since graduation, but if it bothers you so much I’ll stop.”
“And I don’t want you drinking in the house anymore either.” “When do I drink in the house?”
“The other night—when you had Hillary and that guy over.”
“That guy was Hillary’s friend Jared, who’s in med school, and we were drinking wine. I think we had one glass each.”
“Well, I don’t want any drinking in the house anymore. Is that understood?” “This is ridiculous,” Marissa said. “I didn’t do anything wrong. You’re just
taking everything out on me.”
“Excuse me?” he said, raising his voice slightly.
“Like this has anything to do with my bong or drinking wine. This has to do with you and your gun.”
Her father looked at her the way he had so many times lately, like he hated her.
“Just go to bed,” he said.
“See?” she said. “I didn’t do anything wrong and you treat me like I’m ten years old.”
“When you act out like you’re ten I’ll treat you like you’re ten. Just go to bed.”
Realizing there was no point in arguing with her father when he got like this, she left the room. There were still a lot of cops near the front of the house, though it looked like they’d finally removed the body. Avoiding the commotion and, worse, another confrontation with that asshole Clements, she took the back staircase up to her room.
Lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, she suddenly remembered she’d given Detective Clements Darren’s contact info. She called Darren, leaving a frantic message, telling him that the cops had found pot in her room and he had to get all the drugs out of his apartment ASAP.
Back in bed, she put in her iPod earbuds and listened to tracks by Tone Def, this new alternative/punk/postgrunge band she was into. She was still angry at her father for laying into her, and she just prayed that somehow all of this would blow over quickly. Living at home had been difficult enough lately; she couldn’t handle it if things got any worse.
WHEN ADAM woke up he felt much better. He’d gotten several hours of solid sleep, and it was a bright, sunny day; bars of sunlight were coming through the venetian blinds, spreading into the room. He glanced at the clock—9:27. He’d decided to cancel his patient appointments for today, but he felt well enough to work and planned to have a few phone sessions.
He didn’t think about the shooting at all until he went downstairs, passing the spot on the staircase where the body had fallen. He didn’t look very closely, but it seemed like the police technicians or ambulance workers or whoever had done an excellent job cleaning up all the blood and even repairing some of the wall damage. It was almost like it hadn’t even happened.
Dana wasn’t in the kitchen, but there was evidence that she’d been there: a coffee mug in the sink; some crumbs—probably from a bagel—on the countertop; the Times, folded open to the crossword puzzle, on the kitchen table. There was no sign that Marissa had been downstairs yet, not that he expected there to be. On most days she slept until at least eleven o’clock, sometimes past noon. Today she’d probably sleep till one or two.
He poured his own cup of coffee, then opened the newspaper. Although he’d spoken to a Times reporter at some point last night, as well as to reporters from the News and the Post, he knew the story about the robbery and shooting couldn’t have made it into today’s papers. But it would be in all of the major papers tomorrow for sure.
He skimmed the front page, reading about the latest bombings in Israel and Iraq, then went right to the sports section. The Jets were playing the Patriots on Sunday and he read about the game. After finishing his coffee and skimming an article in the Times on a promising new drug to treat schizophrenia, he went online with his BlackBerry and e-mailed a patient, Jane Heller, asking her if she wanted to have a phone session this afternoon at four. He also e-mailed Carol, his colleague, to see if she had time for a session sometime this week.
He didn’t hear any fuss outside and wondered if there were still neighbors in front of the house. He went into the living room and parted the shades. A Fox News truck was parked across the street, but that was it.
As he headed upstairs to shower and get dressed, once again he had to pass the spot where the body had been. What had Clements said his name was, Sanchez? Yeah, Sanchez, Carlos Sanchez. Adam stared at the spot for a while, feeling remorseful until he reminded himself that it was Sanchez who’d made the decision that had led to his death, not Adam. If he’d killed someone for no reason, murdered someone, or even if he’d killed someone accidentally, by a mistake he’d made, he’d have something to feel guilty about. For example, if he’d killed someone in a traffic accident, he would’ve had to accept responsibility. But this situation had been completely different. This hadn’t been an accident; this had been self-defense.
Adam went into the shower, and under the hot spray he was able to relax. He remembered the dream he’d had, about the black rat. He wondered why the dream had begun in his office. Was it really work related, or did his office symbolize a familiar place where he felt comfortable? And what was the significance of the black rat beginning as Jodi Roth or Kathy Stappini? The rat was threatening, but Jodi and Kathy were hardly threatening. He thought it might have to do with the therapist-patient relationship in general. As a therapist he was in a position of control, but then he lost control when he was attacked by the rat. So perhaps the dream was about losing control or, more specifically, being attacked. When had he ever felt attacked? He thought of his overbearing mother, his distant father, the bullies who’d tormented him throughout elementary school and junior high, and how in his marriage he sometimes felt attacked by Dana. Maybe the rat was actually Dana, symbolically attacking him, smothering him.<
br />
He made a mental note to bring all this up in his session with Carol.
When he came out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, Dana was in the bedroom, fully dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved black scoop-neck top. She was looking for something in the top drawer of the dresser.
“Good morning,” he said.
She waited a couple of beats, then said, “Good morning,” and he could tell she was still angry about the gun. He always knew when she was angry and exactly what she was angry about, though she rarely expressed her anger in an appropriate, productive way.
But he didn’t feel like getting into a big discussion with her about her anger so he said, “Looks like they’re pretty much gone, huh?”
“I talked to a couple of reporters this morning,” Dana said. Her voice was a monotone; she was definitely repressing rage.
“Yeah?” Adam asked. “From where?”
“I don’t know.” She was still searching in the drawer. “TV, newspapers, wherever.”
Adam tossed the towel into the hamper and was naked. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and, as usual, sucked in his gut a little. He wasn’t in such bad shape for his age—only about ten, okay, fifteen pounds overweight— but he was self-conscious about the flab in his midsection. He really had to start running again, get a regular tennis game going at the country club. He played golf frequently, but riding around in a golf cart wasn’t doing much for his waistline. He had to do more crunches, get serious about it. In three years he’d turn fifty, and he wanted to be thin in his fifties.
“Well, it seems to be blowing over,” he said distractedly.
She closed the drawer, then turned toward Adam—still avoiding eye contact— and said, “It’s not here.”
Adam was no longer looking in the mirror, but he was still distracted. “What’s not?”
“The paper I wrote the code to the alarm on.”
Now she had Adam’s full attention, and he looked at her and asked, “What’re you talking about?”
“This morning when I woke up I remembered I had the number, the code, whatever, written down on a little piece of paper. Remember, I wrote it down when we first got the alarm because you had the code on that card they gave you, but I didn’t know it?”
“Okay,” Adam said. Actually, he didn’t remember any of this; he was just egging her on.
“So I thought I put it in the drawer in the bureau in the den, you know, where we keep the old bills, but I checked this morning, and it wasn’t there. And now I’ve checked all over and I can’t find it anywhere.”
“Maybe you threw it out.”
“Maybe, but I really thought it was in the drawer downstairs.”
Dana, unlike Adam, was a very organized person and usually didn’t misplace things.
“Did you check thoroughly?”
“Of course I checked thoroughly, but it wasn’t there.” “Okay, calm down.”
“I am calm,” she said, but she obviously wasn’t. She was making eye contact with him for the first time this morning, glaring at him in a very cold, very distant way.
“So where else can it be?” Adam asked.
“Well, obviously, I thought it was in the drawer up here.” “Did you check the kitchen?”
“I definitely didn’t put it in the kitchen.”
“What about under the drawer in the bureau? Sometimes things spill out over the top and fall through the—”
“I already checked and it wasn’t there. Should I call Detective Clements and tell him?”
“I think that’s a little ridiculous.”
“Why is it ridiculous? He thinks somebody had the code to the alarm and a piece of paper with the code’s missing.”
“Okay, fine,” Adam conceded. “If you want to call him, call him. It doesn’t really matter one way or another, but I’d just look around once more before you waste his time, that’s all.”
Adam was pulling on his jeans; his damn back was bothering him again. He wasn’t facing Dana, but he could tell she was still in the room. She was probably looking at him angrily with her hands crossed in front of her chest. He turned around for a moment just to see if he was right. Yep, he was.
“So have you talked to Marissa yet today?” she asked.
“I don’t think she’s up yet. Guess she didn’t have any job interviews this morning,” Adam said, smirking.
“So do you really think one of her friends could’ve been involved?” “That’s ridiculous,” Adam said.
“I think so, too,” Dana said, “but the detective kept asking about it. I don’t think he’d be asking if he didn’t think there was some possibility that—”
“Come on,” Alan said, “the guy’s name was Carlos Sanchez. I’ve never heard her talk about any Carlos Sanchezes, have you? Besides, he was an older guy. No, it definitely has nothing to do with her.”
“Maybe he was her drug dealer or something,” Dana said. “Oh, come on, I really doubt that.”
“Why? She’s smoked pot in her room, and the pot has to be coming from somewhere.”
Adam considered this as he opened the drawer to his dresser, looking through a stack of folded shirts. It wasn’t totally beyond the realm of possibility that the break-in had something to do with Marissa. She’d had friends coming and going in the house since graduation, and occasionally Adam had seen her with people he’d never met before. One guy last week had looked pretty shady— long hair, tattoos up and down his arms. If it didn’t have to do with drugs, it could’ve had something to do with some guy she was dating.
“Last night I told her I don’t want her drinking and smoking in the house anymore,” Adam said. “If this had anything to do with her or not, I think we have to make it clear, if there’re any drugs in this house, she has to move out. That’s it, no bending, no negotiations.”
“And don’t you think that’s just a teensy bit hypocritical?”
They’d had this discussion before, so Adam knew exactly what she was implying: How could he tell his twenty-two-year-old daughter not to smoke pot in the house and have guys up to her room when as a teenager he’d gotten high and had sex with all his girlfriends in this very house, starting when he was sixteen years old?
“That was the seventies,” he said. “It was a different time.”
He was going to add, We know more now than we knew then, but he already felt like he was beating the clichés to death.
“If she was your son I don’t think you’d have a problem with it.”
“That’s not true,” Adam said. He pulled on a navy long-sleeved shirt with a Fresh Meadow Country Club logo, remembering that he had a 7:24 tee-off time on Sunday with his friend Jeff. “I wouldn’t want my son to make the same mistakes I made.”
“Well, I still think there’s a double standard going on here,” Dana said.
Adam recognized that tone in her voice again. He knew that she wasn’t upset about what she pretended she was upset about. She was just looking for the right opening, dying to blame him for the shooting.
“Didn’t you want to call Clements?” he said, not exactly dismissing her, but the implication was there. Now fully dressed except for shoes and socks, he picked up his BlackBerry and checked his e-mail. He’d gotten two new e-mails— one from Carol suggesting Friday at four for a session, and one from his assistant, Lauren, saying that Jane Heller could do the phone session at three today, not four.
Dana, still standing there with her arms crossed, asked, “Aren’t you worried?”
“Worried about?” Adam asked. Darn it, Lauren had also written that his session with Dave Kellerman couldn’t be rescheduled. Dave was a newish patient who was just starting to make substantive progress, and Adam hated to have two weeks between sessions.
“The other guy, or person, whatever,” Dana said. “The one who got away.” “Why would I be worried about him?”
He started typing a message: Hi Lauren, Please tell Kellerman I’ll call him personally to try to sched—then he stopped
punching the keypad when he heard Dana say, “Can you pay attention to me instead of that stupid thing for one second?”
“This is important,” Adam said.
“And what happened last night isn’t?”
Adam rolled his eyes, then said, “What is it?”
“You shot somebody, and his accomplice, partner, whatever you want to call it, obviously knows where we live,” Dana said. “I find that very disturbing.”
Adam stared at her for a moment. She wasn’t exactly blaming him for the shooting yet, but she was oh so close.
“Don’t worry about it,” Adam said. “How can you say that? How do you—”
“Because the cops know the dead guy’s name. These criminals, they’re always repeat offenders. They’re probably wanted for robberies all over the neighborhood. They probably made a list of whatchamacallits—known associates. It’s just a matter of going through the list and arresting the guy. If they didn’t arrest him already, it’s only a matter of time before they do.”
“I didn’t hear Clements mention anything about known associates,” Dana said. “He made it seem like they had no suspects at all.”
“That’s just the way cops are,” Adam said semidistractedly as he typed: ule.
I’ll try him later today, if I can get hold of him at work.
Dana said, “I hope you’re right, but I didn’t get that vibe. I think if he had any suspects he would’ve— Can you please listen to me for God’s sake?”
“I’m sorry,” Adam said, still looking at his phone. “I have important stuff to take care of.”
