Dry Ice (45 page)

    She said, "Here goes. I have already had . . . two children." She watched my eyes for a reaction. All she got was a blink. The "two children" was reproductive calculus that my brain couldn't do.

    Grace was . . . well, one child. Lauren and I had each been married previously, but both had been childless unions. There was no "two."

    She waited a decent interval for me to reply before she went on. "I got pregnant when I was twenty. During my junior year when I was in Amsterdam. The father is Dutch. I decided not . . . to have an abortion."

    Again she paused long enough for me to interject something were I so inclined. I wasn't. Her news was major. But my radar said it wasn't that big a deal. I began to tighten up. I felt a second blow coming.

    "I stayed in Holland and gave the . . . child up for adoption. I never saw her again."

    Huge. But still not enough.
That's not it,
I thought.
There's
more.

   She sighed.
Here it comes.
"After Gracie was born Priscilla told me I couldn't safely carry any more kids . . . because of damage that had occurred with that first delivery."

    Priscilla was Lauren's OB/GYN. Instinctively I argued. I said, "Priscilla never said anything to me about—"

    "I asked her not to tell you I'd had another child."

    
Oh.
Another secret. "Why?"

    She knew I'd ask. She was ready. Her words sounded rehearsed. "When we first met I was expecting you to leave me, so I didn't tell you. I didn't want to be judged. After Grace was born I thought she'd be enough for us, and I wouldn't have to tell you.

    "Mostly? I don't like to think about . . . her. My baby. My teenage daughter. It hurts too much. You would want to talk it to death, Alan. It's who you are. I can't . . . do that."

    "Grace has a . . ."

    "Half-sister."

    I nodded. It was mock understanding, at best. "And you can't have any more . . . children?"

    Lauren said, "My ovaries are okay, but I can't carry any more, no." She began a soliloquy on the gynecological details.

    I stopped her. I said, "I believe you." In my heart I knew this wasn't a new lie—it was the end of an old one. My pulse had slowed to a crawl and I felt as though my blood pressure was insufficient to sustain circulation. The conflicting emotions— sorrow and anger mostly—were canceling each other out and my autonomic nervous system was shutting down. I didn't know what else to say. Silence seemed wise.

    Lauren didn't want to be a woman who could give away her child.
I can accept that,
I thought.
I can.
Dissembling with me? Harder to accept. Did it say more about her, or about her vision of me? I didn't know.

    That's the thing about secrets. They are never really dormant. They are termites; unseen, they eat away at foundations.

    She said, "You had something to tell me."

    Lauren wanted to change the subject. I didn't blame her.

    I blinked the blink of someone coming out of a trance.
One,
two, three.
"I shot my father when I was thirteen. I killed him."

    My wife gasped and shrunk back against the chaise. Her fingertips flew up to cover her lips.

    Dusty Springfield sang,
"You don't have to say you love me/
Just be close at hand."

I THINK they loved each other. My parents. They just never figured out how to be together.

    By the time I was old enough to make sense of what was going on, I saw a father who was jealous and unsatisfied with his fate. A mother who felt neglected and had never learned to fulfill herself. After keeping her fulfilled had stopped being her father's job, my mother was certain that it had become my father's job. When he accepted that assignment they loved each other like they were a couple in the movies. When he resisted that assignment they fought each other like they were a couple in the movies. There wasn't much in between.

    Each was capable of being an enchanting parent. Although circumstances seemed to insist that my memories be more strychnine than honey, the truth is that I had good times with each of them—where nonfamily matters were concerned my father could be a sage, and my mother could be as funny as anyone on
Johnny Carson
. Occasionally the three of us were as sweet as dessert.

    By the time I approached adolescence they were coping inelegantly. My father drank and stayed away. My mother had what she called "friends who happen to be men." I was a kid; I didn't understand why they couldn't get along. During periods when they weren't fighting they seemed almost like other kids' parents. I prayed for those interludes.

    They separated when I was twelve. Reconciled when I was thirteen. Separated again four months later. The second separation was short—only a couple of weeks. My father promised to stop drinking. My mother promised to "clean up her act." We were living in a small house on a nothing block in a bland subdivision on the outer fringe of Thousand Oaks, California, a bedroom far north of L.A. My father was a loud drunk. They were both loud lovers and they were both loud fighters. I was privy to all his recriminations and all her assignations.

    When my parents' friends asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would tell them I wanted to be a referee. Neither my mother nor my father ever spotted the irony.

    Their second reconciliation fractured on a Monday night. I was on summer vacation from school. My father came home an hour late, alcohol seeping from his pores like cheap cologne. They fought.

    The next night was looking like the second half of a double feature. My father didn't come home from work on time. My mother left his supper on the table. It was pot roast and gravy, boiled potatoes and carrots, and an iceberg-lettuce salad slathered with poor man's Thousand Island—ketchup and mayonnaise pebbled with pickle relish. A short stack of Wonder Bread completed the tableau. After chain-smoking and pacing for three hours with her arms folded across her breasts, she left the house.

    "I'm going out," she said to me. "Don't you dare touch that food." She knew that I would have. For her the rotting food was a battle flag being hoisted. I considered it my duty to lower those flags whenever I spotted them.

    A few flies had already claimed the meal like squatters moving into a tenement.

    He came home first. I was up late listening to Vin Scully call the bottom of the eleventh inning of a Dodgers game. They were playing the Giants at Candlestick. He was drunk. My father, not Vin Scully.

"Is your mother out?" he asked.

    I shrugged. I'd learned when it was prudent to be invisible— a good referee needs to know when to swallow the whistle. He left my room. I heard a sequence of noises that let me know he'd grabbed a six-pack and retreated to the patio. If cell phones had existed he would have been harassing my mother on hers. But cells didn't exist so he drank cheap beer until he could simmer in the broth.

    I was asleep when she came home.

    His bellowed call of "You slut" woke me up. The clock by my bed read two thirty-five. I'd heard the yelling before and knew it would last a while. I reached for my pillow to cover my ears.

    "Drunk," she screamed back. They were in the kitchen.

    I knew his next line.

    "Whore," he yelled, proving me correct. As lovers they showed some occasional flair, but they weren't imaginative fighters.

    "Your boyfriend give you that?" my father asked in his most condescending tone. He was a better-than-average bowler, and he could fix things around the house. He could be a sensitive father. People said he was good at work. But his most marked skill? He could do derision as though he held the patent for it. Snidely he said, "You're going to shoot me now?"

    
Shoot?
We didn't own a gun.

    I climbed out of bed at that improvisation.

    "Put that knife down," she warned him. The knife, too, was a new prop.

    She'd later tell me he had the knife in his hand when she walked into the kitchen and that she was lucky she had borrowed the gun from a "friend" "just in case." I didn't believe her. They had abused each other plenty. But until that night they had never used weapons any sharper than their tongues. She'd thrown a few things on occasion, but her aim inevitably sucked.

"Drop it!" she screamed, up two octaves at least.

"You drop it!" he yelled, matching her volume.

    I began to walk down the short hallway wearing nothing but my white briefs. I hadn't had time to put on my striped shirt or grab my whistle.

    I heard more yelling and commotion from the kitchen and then I watched a blue-black revolver with a dark wooden grip— I'd later learn it was a .38—come skittering through the doorway until it stopped inches from my bare feet.

    I picked it up.

    My mother ran toward me and started screaming, "Give me that! Give me that!"

    Giving it to her didn't seem wise. I was as tall as she, and stronger. With one arm I stopped her advance. With the other arm I held the pistol by my side. The damn thing was heavy.

    My father stood beside the dinette set six feet away. He did indeed have one of the kitchen knives in his hand. He held it as though he were preparing to chop some onions.

    "Don't give the slut the gun," he slurred. "That a boy. Give it here." He took a step toward us. My mother reached across me and forcibly raised my arm until the revolver was pointed in the direction of my father. "Stay there!" she shrieked.

    He lunged for the gun. The motion surprised me. His quickness surprised me. She screamed, "Shoot! Shoot!"

    The knife was at his side. His outstretched hand was empty. I still see that moment in my mind as though it had been photographed by a professional and put on the cover of
Life
magazine.

    "Shoot!" she screamed again.

    I closed my eyes. I pulled the trigger.

    Gut shot.

    He died as the ambulance arrived.

I WAS awake on the sofa when the phone erupted a few minutes before three.

    I was sober. The season's first miller moth was flitting above me in the darkness.

    Lauren was asleep. The e-mail from Michael McClelland with the newspaper accounts of the shooting had indeed been in her in-box. Some police records that my mother had promised me would never be unsealed were the last things my wife read before she climbed into bed.

    Perfect.

    Digesting a decade of distrust—mine and hers—kept me awake. The exact same digestive process put her to sleep. We were different in many ways. I'd never considered that a problem and I still didn't.

    We didn't react to each other the way my parents had. That had always been enough for me.

    My cloud was gone. Its absence provided much less relief than I had hoped. Would it stay away? Would the wolves return when exhaustion slowed me? What would replace the cloud? I didn't know.

    I pounced on the call, catching it after half a ring.

    Caller ID read OUT OF AREA. I thought,
Sam. He has bad
news about J. Winter B.

    The voice I heard when I answered was foreign and female. "Alan Gregory?" The woman pronounced my name with accents on unfamiliar syllables.

    "Yes," I said.

    "You are . . . ice? For your . . . For . . . Sorry, sorry. For . . . I don't have . . . Just . . . Uh, one . . . one moment." I heard papers being shuffled. She placed the phone on a hard surface. Picked it back up. "Adrienne? Yes? Her mobile, you are Adrienne's . . . You are ice? Yes? No? A moment please." She moved more papers. I heard loud voices in the background. One of them was hers.

    My ears and my brain weren't cooperating. My ears heard "ice." They heard "eyes." Neither made any sense to my brain. But she'd said "Adrienne." Twice. Hearing my friend's name spoken by a Middle Eastern–sounding woman in the middle of the night caused my pulse to accelerate from its torpor like a sprinter exploding from the blocks. Instinctively, I did the math. It was around noon in Israel.

    
Noon is good,
I thought.
Bad things don't happen at noon.

    "Eye, see, eee," she said. "In case of emergency, yes? You? Alan Gregory?"

    
I-C-E. In case of emergency. Oh dear God.
In Adrienne's cellphone directory she had listed me as her "ICE"—the person whom rescue personnel should contact in case of emergency. I knew I was her ICE. She had shown me the acronym in her cell phone.

    Adrienne didn't keep secrets any more than she permitted them.

    I tried to leash in the panic that was ripping at my heart. "Yes, yes. This is Alan Gregory. I am Adrienne's ICE. Is she okay? What happened? Is Jonas all right?"

    "A moment," she said. Loud voices. Unfamiliar tongues. The woman was doing three things at once. Talking to me was only one of them.

    Lauren appeared at the end of the hall, the comforter from the bed covering her nakedness above her thighs. Her closed fists clasped the duvet in a fat knot between her breasts. I watched her mouth fall open. I watched her squint as she tried to make sense of what was happening in the dark room. She was bewildered. Frightened and bewildered.

    Emily poked her black nose and one pointed ear out from behind the comforter.

    The woman with the accent came back on the line. She began talking quickly. She had a story to tell me and she was in a rush to tell it.