Authors: Alison Gaylin
“That sucks.”
“Yeah, but I hear they were cash in Europe so maybe somebody bought one there and shipped it out.”
“You’ll go over registration records?”
“I am on it like it was Kim Kardashian’s ass,” he said. “Oh and don’t forget your meeting with Sarah Stoller. Four
P.M.
”
Brenna winced. Sarah Stoller was her newest client—a psychiatrist who lived in a cottage on the grounds of the Cornell Medical Center in White Plains. Brenna was dreading the visit. It might have been the probing gazes she usually got out of them when they found out about her condition—or perhaps it was the way Dr. Lieberman used to pick her brain monthly when she was a kid—but for whatever reason, psychiatrists made Brenna nervous. “I’ll be there.”
After ending the call, she phoned Nelson. She got the answering machine after one ring—of course. Nelson still hadn’t changed it back and she didn’t blame him. Back at the library, she’d checked out a link Trent had sent her—the
New York Post
online—a huge picture of Nelson’s press-conference grin, accompanied by a scathing article about the discovery of the murder weapon, entitled simply, “SCREWED.”
Brenna called again, got the machine, ended the call, tapped the number in again, got the machine . . . “
Pick up, Nelson, please. I have a question for you, please pick up
,” she shouted, as if shouting made a difference with the volume turned all the way down. She was about to end the call yet again when she heard Nelson’s voice, calm and quiet, on the other end of the line. “Yes, Ms. Spector.”
“Nelson,” she said. “I’m so glad you answered. Listen, we have Carol’s cell phone records from the last two weeks.”
“Ms. Spector, I don’t recall ever saying you could call me Nelson. I’m old enough to be your father. Please afford me the simple respect of calling me Mr. Wentz.”
Brenna’s eyebrows went up. “Oookay. Sorry about that.”
“Apology accepted.”
Brenna glared at the phone, as if it were to blame for the strange chill in Nelson’s voice. She would assume he’d had a few more Scotch/rocks since she left—not so diluted this time around—only he wasn’t slurring his words. If anything, he sounded a little too sober.
She pressed on. “I’m calling because I need to know if Carol . . . if Mrs. Wentz ever had an interest in soap operas, especially
The Day’s End
.”
There was a long pause.
Brenna said, “Are you there?”
“Carol never watched soap operas.”
“Okay. I didn’t think she seemed—”
“I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, Ms. Spector.”
Brenna was reaching the end of the condominium complex. She saw the marble sign and pulled over to the side of the road and put the car in park. “Excuse me?”
“I’m not going to be in need of your services anymore.”
“But . . . Ne— Mr. Wentz—”
“Please send me a bill. I will remunerate you in full.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
But he had already hung up.
For a long time, Brenna stayed in her car staring out the window, the conversation replaying in her head again and again and again. It wasn’t what Nelson Wentz had said that bothered her so much, or even the words he had used to say it. It was that tone. Each time the call repeated in her mind, Brenna would hear it again, hear it anew, and it would fill her with the strangest sense of dread. She would hear Nelson Wentz’s voice in her earpiece, so flat, so hollow. It was as though someone were holding a gun to his head.
O
ver and done with
, Nelson thought as he hung up the phone. But the discomfort clung to him, with all its symptoms—sweat pooling and pressing against the back of his neck, sweat trickling under his jaw and down his shirt, beneath his pants legs, sweat crawling all over him until he felt more wet than dry—a man turning to liquid.
Answering the phone when Ms. Spector called had not been easy for Nelson. He hated being abrupt with people. At work, the firings he had to do were few and far between, and even then, he usually let HR handle them alone.
But it was over now. Nelson had fulfilled his end of the deal. As Mr. Klavel had requested during their second phone conversation, he’d called up the defense lawyer, Phil Reznik, and canceled his appointment with him as well. He didn’t need to speak with anyone now—no one at all until 10
P.M.
when Mr. Klavel would do as he promised. He would tell Nelson—and show him—what Carol had known.
Nelson hadn’t told a soul about speaking with Mr. Klavel, even though this had been quite a confessional day for him.
I was in love with Lydia Neff
, he had told Ms. Spector, and it wasn’t until he’d said it out loud that he realized it to be true. But interestingly, saying it out loud—admitting it to another person . . . It was kind of freeing, wasn’t it? To let them go, those feelings—to box them neatly into words and toss them out there for others to see . . . In a way, it took the bite out.
I was in love . . .
Interesting that he’d stuck his love in that safe place—the past tense
—
without even thinking about it first.
Was, not am, Carol. I
was
in love.
Nelson felt a lightness now, a sense of calm.
This must be why people write memoirs.
Nelson recalled Carol in her straw hat, smiling. He pictured her face, her living face as he’d first seen it, turning to look at him. How he’d gasped at his first glance of those huge gray eyes . . .
He didn’t think of the thing in the trunk at all—only his wife, living and young and smiling at him, and he was grateful for that. He was grateful for a lot, now. His strength was coming back. The phone rang again. He checked caller ID to see if it was Unknown Caller—strange that the only two people he wanted to speak to both had blocked phones—but it wasn’t. It was Tarry Ridge Police again, and they could wait. He would speak to them tomorrow when he could really help them, when he’d spoken to Mr. Klavel and had learned about his wife.
“I’m going to know you, Carol,” Nelson said. His voice bounced against the kitchen walls, off the tile and stainless steel and copper and pewter—all those hard, shiny things Carol had picked out herself for this room, this one room she truly loved.
Nelson was about to go back upstairs again and try for another nap, but instead he walked into the living room and up to the painting of Sarasota, Florida. He stood there, gazing at it. For the first time, he noticed the soft flecks of sea foam on the cream-colored sand, and how the sun reflected off the sapphire ocean in glints. He noticed the whispery seagulls in the blue sky and the clouds, thin and harmless as cotton candy, rays of sun streaming through them that looked so real, it made you feel warm.
He imagined Carol, standing where he was, staring up at the picture with that dreamy look on her face. And after all these years, he understood.
“Lovely,” Nelson whispered. “Just lovely.”
B
renna nearly forgot her 4
P.M.
meeting with Dr. Sarah Stoller—and would have missed it entirely if Trent hadn’t programmed it into the electronic calendar he’d given her for Christmas last year—a torturous little device complete with a reminder bell that sounded like a miniature air raid siren.
For Brenna, perfect memory didn’t translate into keeping to a set schedule. She missed appointments if she didn’t have them in writing—especially (and rather ironically) if she happened to be caught up in a particularly detailed memory at the allotted time.
Or if she’d just been fired for no apparent reason.
Best not to think about that now
. Easier said than done, of course, with Nelson’s hollow voice replaying in Brenna’s mind, that whole final phone conversation unspooling start to finish as Brenna drove, much like Sophia DelVechio’s Marcus Garvey report, only so much harder to comprehend.
What is going on with him?
Brenna wondered, though she knew thoughts like that were pointless with the likes of Nelson—
Mr. Wentz
, that is. Best to keep her mind on the road.
Cornell Medical Center, where Dr. Sarah Stoller worked and lived, was one of the more elegant mental health facilities in New York State, with landscaping not unlike the old Waterside Condos, pre–plastic surgery and wealth bloat. Brenna had heard of it, of course, but this was her first time here, and as she drove past rolling green picnic areas and tennis courts, Brenna was a lot less antsy than she’d anticipated. It looked nothing like an insane asylum. The buildings were all Tudor and Georgian brick, and once you got onto the main campus (it actually was called a campus, as the hospital was also a teaching institution), you could have easily fooled yourself into thinking you were on the grounds of an Ivy League college—were it not for the discreet bars on the windows.
Dr. Stoller’s cottage was nestled at the far end of the eighteen-hole golf course—a two-story Tudor with lots of windows and sunny white floorboards and house plants—easily a hundred of them hanging from the high ceiling, sprouting out of cheerfully painted urns, crawling up mini trellises, and filling nearly every available square inch of space in the aptly named sunroom, which was where Sarah Stoller and Brenna were taking their meeting. The room smelled of fresh dirt and moist leaves and pasty stargazer lilies. The couch and chair they were sitting in were of a bright green cloth and soft as spring grass so that they, too, seemed botanical—a whole room more outdoors than in. “So many beautiful plants,” Brenna had said as they walked in, breathing deeply. Sarah Stoller had shrugged. “I like things with roots.”
Like the medical center, Dr. Stoller wasn’t anything like Brenna had expected she’d be. There was none of the probing shrink-stare about her, none of that cocky intensity. On the contrary, Dr. Stoller was tiny and diffident, with a graying Dutch boy haircut and a shy smile. She rarely made eye contact, and when she did, there was a flatness to her gaze, like a bulb had burned out. Brenna couldn’t figure out, though, if this had always been an aspect of her personality or if it was that type of grief she’d seen in so many families of the missing—the type that steals the part of you that lives behind the eyes.
Right now, Brenna was looking at pictures of Dr. Stoller’s mother, Elizabeth—a pretty, seventy-five-year-old woman who suffered from severe Alzheimer’s. Elizabeth had disappeared from her Princeton, New Jersey, assisted-living facility four months earlier, sometime in the middle of a Saturday night. Reported missing by her nurse the following morning, Elizabeth hadn’t been seen or heard from since.
Do you think you could find her?
Dr. Stoller had asked over the phone two weeks ago.
Brenna had given it to her straight: An adult with dementia was the worst type of missing person to track down next to a very young child, and for similar reasons. Like children, their actions were rarely logical. They didn’t use credit cards or check into hotels or join clubs or even make phone calls very often. In fact, the best you could hope was that they’d get arrested somewhere. The worst . . . Brenna hadn’t gone into the worst over the phone, though when Sarah had called again a week later to set up the appointment, she’d said, very pointedly, “I’m not expecting a miracle. Just hoping for one.”
“Mom always liked to go for walks,” Sarah said now.
Brenna flipped through the stack of pictures—Elizabeth smiling broadly in a pink sweat suit with Sarah at her side, Elizabeth and Sarah in her room at the facility, flanked by a young volunteer and a golden retriever. Sarah and Elizabeth on a park bench shaded by peach blossom trees, both of them smiling—such happier pictures than the ones she’d looked at three days earlier in her own office, Morasco flinging open that folder on her desk, tapping pictures of a sad, beige woman Brenna had never seen in her life—a woman on her wedding day, standing alone in front of an office cubicle, clutching a bouquet of carnations bought from a bodega.
“You and your mother seem very close,” Brenna said, careful to use the present tense.
“Mom was the only person I ever really talked to.”
Brenna nodded.
“No, I mean literally the
only person
,” Sarah said. “I’m a Freudian analyst. I spend my whole life listening to people, saying nothing. I’ve never been married, and my friends—well, maybe we talk politics, movies. We might discuss trends in psychiatric care, but I don’t open up to them.” She leaned back into the couch, pulling her thin legs beneath her. “That’s an interesting phrase, isn’t it? Open up. Like you rip yourself open and let others see your insides.”
“It can be nearly that painful,” Brenna said.
The doctor gave her a smile. “You’re not big on analysis.”
“No.”
“Me neither. All psychiatrists have to go through it, of course, but back when I was seeing a therapist, I’d find ways to talk about more general topics . . . My whole life, my mother was the only person I felt comfortable talking to—even after she got sick.”
“Why is that?”
“I think,” Sarah said, “that she’s just a good listener.”
Brenna looked at her.
“Everybody needs that one person, you know? The one person they can talk to.”
Brenna thought about Nelson, falling in love with a woman he barely knew, a woman he commuted into the city with for just a few weeks. Falling in love with her via that simple, rare act of talking and listening. She thought of Jim, whom she hadn’t laid eyes on in seven years, but whom she still needed so much, to read the words she typed on the screen, to see her thoughts, to listen . . . Then she thought of Maya, who last night had let go of the eye rolling and the silence and the contempt and spoken to Brenna, really
spoken
to her for the first time in so long . . . yet much as Brenna knew that need, much as she could feel it, her mind had abandoned Maya. It had abandoned them both.
Brenna swallowed hard. “Every mother should be a good listener, Sarah.”
“Excuse me?”
“What I’m saying . . . is that I’ll do everything I can to find Elizabeth.”