I looked at him with what I’m sure was a you’re-an-idiot expression, swerved my hand in a slithering gesture, and said, “Gone.”
He pointed to a bit of tire tread in the road, asking if I had mistaken that for a snake.
I said, “Does that look like a snake to you? It doesn’t look like a snake to me.”
“Ma’am, you seem angry at me. I was just asking.”
He went to his car, came back with one of those Breathalyzer tubes, and asked me to breathe into it. I told him what he could do with his Breathalyzer. That seemed to make him suspicious and a little angry in turn. When the ambulance arrived I heard him talking with the driver about the snake I’d seen. Maybe it was a little green snake, he said. Or maybe it was a little elephant. A pink elephant.
As Carlo and I got into the ambulance I glanced at my Camry and the cactus it had hit. The front of the car was buckled, and the cactus leaned at a forty-degree angle, stopped by a concrete block privacy wall in front of a housing development. I heard somebody say they’d have the car towed to the nearest dealership.
They took us to Oro Valley Hospital on Tangerine and checked us into the emergency room. Carlo and I were put in separate areas. The receptionist held the Pug in her lap. They took blood. From both of us, they said. Routine. Apparently we had both suffered abrasions from the air bags, Carlo had a slight nose fracture, and we needed to be checked out to make sure the impact hadn’t broken any other bones in our faces. We were released with the warning that we were likely to feel sore the next day and that our faces would be black and blue.
Apparently the blood test didn’t show high enough levels of alcohol, but with more than usual pleasure the cop gave me a ticket for killing the saguaro. I asked him how he knew the cactus was dead. He just smiled.
I called Gemma-Kate to come get us in the other car. She asked where we kept the keys, and got directions. All very responsible. She didn’t ask how we were.
“What was that about a snake?” asked Carlo while we sat in the emergency room waiting for Gemma-Kate. They had given him some pain meds, and he had a large bandage across his nose. Later I might joke that the air bags were never engineered for a nose that size, but now was not a good time.
“You didn’t see the snakes?” I asked.
“No, I didn’t. The policeman asked me about it.”
Certainly there had been one snake. It was red. No, that sounds too much like a hallucination. It was reddish brown. But I remembered Carlo turning into a skeleton on the road to Mallory’s, and losing my way in my own house the other night, and didn’t push the issue of the snake.
Sitting there, waiting for Gemma-Kate to arrive, I started to free associate.
Pug, I thought, stroking the dog that draped over my lap. One of the nurses had brought her some water, and she was sleeping off the trauma of bouncing around the inside of the car.
Then, I thought, snakes in the road.
Must have been a hallucination.
Why am I having hallucinations?
Visions. Changes in perception of time.
Then, toad. Hallucinations from smoking toad skin.
Then, poison. Pug poisoned by toad.
Then, Gemma-Kate.
By the time she arrived at the ER waiting room, one can understand my state: agitated, confused, and ready to pick a fight.
There’s a phrase that investigators use: Lock in, lock on, lock out. You develop a likely suspect, lock in. Then you search until you’ve found the evidence to prove your case, lock on. Everything links together and whatever doesn’t link gets eliminated—lock out. It might not be the smartest way to approach an investigation, but it works surprisingly often.
Maybe I could buy that the Pug had been poisoned by accident. Maybe I could even buy that Frank Ganim’s death was a prank gone horribly wrong. But if I was being poisoned, it was no accident. And if Gemma-Kate was purposely poisoning me, then it was difficult to think of any other person spiking the coffee and killing Ganim.
The dominoes fell straight toward Gemma-Kate.
I would be looking for something that looked like powder or dried skin, and I knew where to find it. I kept this to myself on the drive home, simmering in an anger stew. But while Carlo went to lie down for a few minutes, I went into the spare room, where Gemma-Kate had been staying. I hadn’t been there since I’d gone in looking for the Pug.
Gemma-Kate might not have been your typical teenager, but over the days this had morphed into a typical teenager’s dump. Underwear nested in jeans on the floor where she had stepped out of them. A half-empty bag of tortilla chips on a plate where the salsa had dried. A pile of books thrown haphazardly against a wall, including a couple of Carlo’s that I remembered seeing on a bookshelf; that was the only thing that made the room different. I didn’t think kids read actual books anymore. Unmade bed.
“What are you doing in my stuff?” she protested, as I opened drawers in her dresser and scrabbled through T-shirts, underwear, a little makeup. I opened up a container that looked like it should contain blush, and that’s apparently all it contained. I slammed it on the dresser upside down to see if she had hidden something underneath. I knew how to find drugs. But nothing.
I ignored her question, and she followed me into the bathroom she was using, where I looked under the sink and into the medicine cabinet without finding anything. I took off the lid of the water tank in back of the toilet, but there was no plastic bag taped to the inside. Where else might she go where she wouldn’t worry about me finding something?
The kitchen. That took a little more time because I had to go through a dozen or so cabinets. Maybe it was hidden there because as Gemma-Kate cooked more, I went less and less into the pantry and the cabinet where we kept the spices.
Gemma-Kate followed me, watching, but not asking any more questions once I failed to answer her first one.
Spices. I took the little containers out, opened them one at a time, and sniffed. Coriander, oregano, cayenne pepper that made me sneeze. Everything looked and smelled like what I would imagine.
“Where is it?” I finally asked. “Did you mix it in with this stuff? Did you powder it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gemma-Kate said, doing what I took to be a good impression of bewilderment. “I swear I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
I was holding a large plastic jar of dried parsley, and I slammed it on the counter. As I did my hand knocked a ceramic dinner plate onto the tile floor, where it broke into a half-dozen pieces. That made me madder. I picked up one of the larger pieces and turned to Gemma-Kate, who looked at it as if it was a weapon, and looked at me as if I was the one who was crazy.
And that kind of pissed me off.
Apparently the noise of my searching in the kitchen had roused Carlo, who was looking at the ceramic shard in my hand along with Gemma-Kate. Poor Carlo, he had never witnessed my uncontrollable fury before. He came over to calm me down but he didn’t have a chance. I sum this up because it’s too embarrassing to recount what I really said when I let it all out: By the time I was finished, I had accused Gemma-Kate of purposely poisoning my dog. Then I accused her of purposely killing Frank Ganim as some kind of deadly game. Then I accused her of trying to kill me though I hadn’t figured out how or why.
Boy, nothing quiets a room quite like blaming someone for murder. Carlo gasped, not having had the benefit of all my suspicions to this point. Gemma-Kate gasped, too, a very convincing gasp after she saw how well Carlo’s worked. More realistically, the blood drained from her face. I finally had her on the ropes.
Do I sound like I was acting nutso? Dish of crazy with a sprinkle of paranoia? Well, here’s the scoop—at some point in the days preceding that one I had crossed over the edge and had gone, as Mallory might put it, not so quietly mad.
Gemma-Kate regained some composure, left the room, and came back with her cell phone so we would see she was calling—
“Don’t you dare bother your father about this,” I said, instantly wondering what repercussions my outburst might have. Gemma-Kate was totally aware of those repercussions and was counting on them.
When Todd answered she spoke calmly, with no hysterics, but with the little-girl voice that she used to great effect when she needed it.
“Daddy, Aunt Brigid’s tweaking. I think she’s on meth.”
I was powerless to do anything except stand there and listen to her side of the conversation. The only alternative I could see was to grab the phone away from her, and that would only support her accusations that I’d gone bonkers. I put the broken piece of ceramic on the counter without making a sound, in case Todd asked if I was holding something that could be used as a weapon.
“Her dog ate a poison toad and got sick … No … Yes … She says I did it.” She listened, and when she wasn’t listening spoke mechanically. “Uh-huh … Not so much … Daddy … No … Okay, the dog licked it a little. It was an accident.” She listened. “The dog’s in the hospital … No … He’s not going to die. He’s fine.” She listened. “I hid it because I knew Aunt Brigid would go all berserk and blame me for poisoning her dog. And she is … That’s why … She’s even accusing me of poisoning her.” She had the presence of mind to not mention Frank Ganim. Then she listened. “I didn’t do anything and I’m in the middle of a shitstorm here … Sorry. Can you talk to her?”
Gemma-Kate put the phone down faceup on the counter in front of me. From this point Todd would be able to hear anything I said. Then she took her upper lip between her front teeth and smiled. In retrospect it could have been one of those nervous smiles, but I still wanted to connect that smile to my knee.
I’m not the only one in my family who does anger. Except for Gemma-Kate and my mother, all of us do anger pretty good. We learned it from watching Dad. Dad was the sort of father who, when he heard you scraped your knee, yelled at you. “Were you running?” he would yell, as if running was a third-degree felony. If we confessed to running, he would nod, satisfied with another successful interrogation. The greatest challenge in our childhood wasn’t avoiding bloody knees but hiding the scabs from him.
Not realizing that the phone had been resting on the counter for a moment, when I picked it up and pressed it to my ear Todd was already into his harangue. Plus with a three-hour time difference there was little doubt that he was fueled by at least the second of his Johnnie Walkers. In one fairly continuous scream it went something like this:
“—unt, I ask you for a simple favor like when was the last time I ever asked you to do anything for me but no I’m the one who’s left to deal with our fuckin’ parents and a dying wife God rest her soul and a teenager who never had a real childhood while trying to hold down my fuckin’ job and do you have any thought for anybody but yourself there you are living the retired life with a new husband out in Arizona you’ve both probably got great pensions but me no I just got word that the state has cut our fuckin’ pensions in half because of the economy and there’s no fuckin’ way they’re going to give it back now that they took it from me even if the economy improves I had enough put away to send GK to school out there as long as she could use you to establish Arizona residency and now this what’s this about GK poisoning you I never heard such fuckin’ bullshit you should get some help you’re the one who needs help you crazy bitch we always said Dad Ariel everybody that you were the craziest one in the family you crazy bitch.”
At that he seemed to have spent himself.
I’m the person who fights the bad guys. I’m the superhero on the side of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. And here I’m being screamed at by my little brother in a family squabble the likes of which I hadn’t seen since I was sixteen and Mom found my birth control pills. How did I get into this position? And why wasn’t I reacting in kind?
I should have been riled. I should have gone berserk, too, and destroyed something else breakable. And yet I found Todd’s anger had an interesting effect. Without responding to him I looked at Gemma-Kate with her icy demeanor. I looked at Carlo with his the-world-should-be-reasonable attitude. And it felt kind of good, strangely calming actually, when I felt Todd’s anger match or surpass mine. Plus getting beat up by an air bag a couple hours before might have had a lulling effect.
Now, you might not be able to tell from all this that Todd and I are actually close. He’s come to my defense on many occasions, and once even stood between me and Dad. And nobody knew what it was like working in law enforcement better than I, the taut nerves. Added to that the fact that the wife he had nursed for more than seventeen years had just died, and maybe a little guilt over not being the best father, I could understand where he was coming from. So while I didn’t apologize to Todd for what I had said to Gemma-Kate, or everything I suspected, I defused him as best I could, assured him I wasn’t going to renege on our deal to allow her to claim Arizona residency. I didn’t add
unless she went to prison.
With a final parting shot about how crazy I was, he hung up on me without saying good-bye.
I was spent, sucked into a blackness of depression with Gemma-Kate at the source. I felt my face go hot in a way it hadn’t in years, but that was happening more and more often since Gemma-Kate had come to live with us.
Carlo recovered first and took the phone from my hand. Until he did that I didn’t realize I was still holding it. He said to Gemma-Kate, “Please give me a moment alone with my wife.” She obediently went outside (she always seemed to do what Carlo asked) and sat next to the St. Francis statue.
Carlo watched Gemma-Kate from the window for a moment and then turned to me. Now he’d heard for himself the kind of person Gemma-Kate actually was, I thought. So I didn’t expect his tone of voice when he said, “What is
wrong
with you?”
“Didn’t you hear what she said? Did you hear her admit to poisoning our dog? And, and, I’ve been seeing and hearing things and I think she caused it.”
“I was here, I heard what I heard. And the person I’m concerned about right now is you. I just had to hear from your friend that you might be seriously ill. Now I’m hearing that you think you’ve been poisoned. What’s this about seeing and hearing things?”