The Narcissist's Daughter (18 page)

I felt my fingertips. I felt the damp air playing across my face and found that I could suddenly smell the river again and the dirt and rock and the dampness in the air.

Brigman stepped forward and began to thrust.

“No!” I shouted. It was a tiny sound there on that stone hill, in the brush and mud and all the other detritus of the city. It went out over the river and died.

But even in mid-shout it came to me that Brigman was probably just screwing around, fantasizing what he might have done in a different world. He looked up at me, at where I sat. Both of them did. Then I heard Brigman say, “Shit.” I knew the expression on his face, though I couldn’t quite see it—the tightening of the corners of his mouth into that smirk I’d evoked in him on a fairly regular basis over the years of my later childhood and youth.

It changed nothing, their knowledge of my presence there—it couldn’t at that point. They had to finish. Donny crawled out and then the two of them walked a few paces to some high grass, to something bound there that I had not noticed before—a long something bound in greenish-gray moving quilts and rings of silver duct tape. It was a body, of course, the body they’d been digging the grave for. The body of Ron, whom Brigman had somehow—whether in murderous rage or frigid calculation—rendered threatless forevermore. They carried it between them to the hole. It was no ceremony, I can tell you. They dumped it in and with barely another glance at it began quickly to fill in their work, though not before I could see it in there, the head and the knees sort of floating until the dirt pushed it down.

I turned away and leaned forward and vomited between my legs. I don’t know how much time passed but when I looked over again the hole was gone. Brigman and Donny tamped the dirt with the backs of their shovels, and the smacking sound spread up into the mist.

After they covered the wound in the earth with brush I stood and headed down, my feet sliding in the slag so that as I and the small avalanche I created reached the bottom, the two of them were just coming past. I fell into file behind Donny. As we marched up the narrow muddy path to the road where the borrowed truck was concealed, the skies opened and it began to pour.

It was only then, from the top of the slope, from the copse of trees near the roadside, that we saw the red flashing lights of emergency vehicles tearing up toward the apex of the bridge—cops, I figured, of course coming to get us. We could see them clearly from where we stood, though it was actually quite some distance away. I felt resigned to it almost, that it would end this way in ignominious disgrace and a lifetime of nothing to look forward to ever again. But they stopped, these two vehicles, right there at the top, at the very highest point on the bridge—at precisely the spot where Jessi and I had parked that once to look over.

And then I knew. I cried out and Brigman in his intuition of me seemed to know, too, because he just said, “Get in,” and I did. I squeezed into the center of the seat, the stick shift between my legs, and Donny backed up and turned around, and they sat for just a moment in the trees, waiting for a break in the traffic in case someone should see them and remember the truck (though in that darkness and driving rain I don’t know who would have been paying any attention—they couldn’t have planned it better) and then pulled out and raced toward the eastern foot of the bridge. When we got there it was closed off already, a squad car blocking the way, the cop in the driver’s seat with his window partially opened and him sipping coffee.

Donny stopped. I told Brigman to get out, and I ran through the rain up along the line of commuting cars toward the sidewalk that followed the roadway to the bridge’s crest.

“Hey!” the cop shouted out his window, and got out.

“I know her,” I yelled, pointing.

“What?” He wore a green plastic poncho over his uniform.

“It’s a girl, right?”

He just looked at me, then pulled his radio from his belt.

“I have to go,” I said.

“Stop it!” he said. “Get back!”

But I was running again and it was just him alone, so he couldn’t abandon his post, and probably he was relieved about that anyway because he didn’t have to get too soaked. He must have radioed but they were too busy then, the rescue workers and the cops at the top, trying to talk her down, to bother with me.

And I wonder sometimes what would have happened if I hadn’t gone up, if it would have turned out differently. She was the kind of girl who, having made up her mind, did not wonder much after that.

When I got close enough I could see that it was her, Jessi, and how she stood outside of the railing, reaching back behind so that she could hold on and lean forward, out over the sheer drop to the river. A cop crouched on the sidewalk, speaking to her and holding out a hand as if it would calm her. And up the river then, through the curtains of rain, I saw more flashing lights, these on the water, a boat of some kind, Coast Guard or city police, making its way toward us.

So I could see her and the whole situation laid out there before me, and that was when I called out her name. I don’t know if she heard it and stopped to look, or rather if she just looked one last time to see if anything about the world had suddenly changed. But her eyes locked on mine in that moment, and we froze and regarded each other in the instant that would come to define whatever was left of both our lives. Afterward the cops said nothing about it, did not chastise or criticize me for anything. They simply asked questions—who I was, how I knew her.

But in that moment of the boat racing and the cop talking and me staring and the sun trying to rise through the rain clouds and the summer of that year of 1979 ending and our city awakening and stretching out in its tired sodden beauty beneath us, Jessi seemed to straighten herself, to stand taller for a moment, to pull herself back toward the railing and look out and away, down the river toward the docks and the elevators and toward the answer to a question that would now never be answered: what was it like, that moment of drowning? Then she turned around, faced us, climbed over the railing, and came to me without looking at anyone else there. Came to me and into my arms, and collapsed.

S
he was admitted that morning to the psych unit at St. V’s and so of course I couldn’t see her then. After she got out, though (and began what became years of counseling), I did. I don’t know if it was because of my presence there on the bridge when she came down, or even if I was the reason she came down, but somehow she did not recoil in horror at my face when I came over after she returned home. What drove her to the brink of her death was not discussed by us on that day, or on any day since. It became The Thing That Never Happened. The event itself, the near leap, the cry for help, became simply The Accident.

What happened then was that I couldn’t leave her. Whether it was due to guilt or a sense of responsibility or perhaps the affection I had begun to feel for her, in the aftermath, I kept coming around long after simple decency would have allowed me to stop. Sometimes we just sat and read for hours, neither of us feeling the need to speak.

What allowed this to continue (both my visiting and our never referring to what had happened) was the fact that Joyce did not return. Months passed. I continued to go over nearly every day, and still Joyce didn’t come. As it turned out, she never would. Whatever life she went off to, whatever loves and family she was to find, remained a mystery.

I like to imagine that she knew her presence there would be destructive. She’d said as much in that last note. Still, I confess that I waited for her and did not know what would happen if she showed up. No, that is wrong—I knew. And so did she, I think, and for that reason as much as any other she gave up the chance of seeing her daughter again. I have not communicated with her at all, in any way, though Ted, the few times I asked him about it, long ago, intimated that he had some idea of where she was. Anyway, far too much river finally passed beneath that great bridge for it to matter anymore.

Jessi started that January after The Accident at the U, and in two and a half years earned an honors B.S. in Biology. I finally graduated, too, a year after she started, and smoked the MCATs, but I went to work as a bench tech in Ted’s lab. (I actually took Ray’s spot in Chemistry. He finally had a blowout with Ted that led either to his quitting or getting fired, depending on who you asked, but it was a good thing for him. He went into sales for a laboratory supply company and grew fat and rich.)

In the summer of 1982 Jessi resurrected an old desire, a thing we’d discussed once a long time before, and talked me into accompanying her on a European bum around. And in a small walkup pension almost next door to the Sorbonne sometime on a July afternoon after we’d eaten a nice park-bench lunch of bread and a cheese called L’Edel de Claron and fresh pears and a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé, and then taken a nap, we made love for the first time since The Accident. (I mean, not only to each other, but to anyone—I had remained as chaste as she had. I don’t know why. It wasn’t some noble decision I made or anything. It started that way and then stuck.) We were in France a month, then spent two weeks whipping through Germany and Italy, and a few days in Amsterdam before flying home—not exactly long enough to call it bumming around but enough for a decent look. In addition to satisfying her dream, and allowing finally the re-consummation of our relationship, the trip also served the purpose of steeling us against the grind we were both to begin that fall.

She’d decided after she graduated to apply to med school. She insisted I apply, too. Case accepted us both. I could have qualified for aid and was prepared to take out a pile of loans but Ted floored me by offering to pay my way. The whole nut.

So when we got home we moved together into an apartment off Deering Avenue on Cleveland’s East Side. Jessi was twenty-two; I was twenty-seven. In the summer of the following year we were married. Three years after that we became doctors.

The summer Chloe graduated from high school she married Donny. A few years later she helped him open a body shop and over time he came to be locally famous for his high-end paint jobs. Chloe took some business classes at the U and they opened a second shop, and eventually a third. They live now with their two kids in a big old house in one of the posh little settlements well downriver from the city, where their backyard rolls down a great emerald hill right to the water and they have a huge dock and a couple of boats. Ted and old Masterson, it turned out, had been discussing Chloe’s face from the time they met her. Neither had ever seen a facial nevus flammeus quite that severe, and eventually they hooked her up with a top plastics man in Cincinnati. The first steps, which were a surgery and then sessions with a dermatologic makeup consultant, greatly ameliorated the stain. Eventually with laser surgeries and everything that was to come, the mark, even without makeup, has greatly faded, leaving more the impression of an uneven tan rather than a stain. The funny thing is that I don’t think Donny ever really cared how it looked, anyway. I knew, by the way, that day when he told me he’d never touched Chloe, that he was telling the truth. He was never someone who knew how to lie. So for that, and the fact that he was there for me when my life was at its darkest and most desperate, and mostly his acceptance of my sister’s face for what it was and his lack of any sort of judgment about it, his blindness to it—he earned and will forever have my deepest gratitude.

Jessi and I did our first three years of residency at the Cleveland Clinic, where we began our respective specialties, I in pathology and Jessi in psychiatry. Then she earned a fellowship in Ann Arbor. I was able to hook up (again through some intervention of Ted’s) with the Detroit Receiving Hospital and then the very busy Wayne County Coroner’s Office, and so we moved north to the suburban haven of Livonia from which we commuted in opposite directions. We were there another three years and thought for a time that we might stay in the area but in the end came to see where we belonged and so moved home. Jessi initially joined a group and went into private practice but it wasn’t long before she broke away to found an institute, ultimately a hugely successful one complete with its own campus and a large staff and even a residential facility for in-patients and research as well, all of which she directs. She is only forty-three as of this writing, and has a long career still ahead of her. The money she makes is breathtaking. I tell people that my salary just about pays the taxes on what she brings in, though that is a slight exaggeration of my earnings.

I apologize if I’m rushing this. It is all a continuum to me, though, the gradual evolution of our lives, and seems startling only in the rare moments when I am able to look back upon it as a whole. But each day we wake up and go off into the world and do our jobs and come home at the end like everyone else, and there’s nothing after all very startling about that. Except, of course, that there is.

W
hen I stand, my knees are so stiff I can hardly straighten them. Age comes, I guess, in this way. I look up around me and it is as if the lights and the crowd have just suddenly appeared, as if I am in the pit of an amphitheater, at the center of the action, of attention, a kind of celebrity suddenly, when just moments before it was only me hiding on a pile of cold stone.

This place is no longer a wasteland, or rather it will not be much longer. In the fullness of time, as they say, the city fathers (who were once nearly all blue-collar populists but are now, in the new way of the world, largely business-friendly moralizers) realized the immense value of the riverfront, any riverfront within sight of the downtown, and have issued licenses and permits and contracts so that it will soon all be developed. This particular spot (which still for the time being looks across at a warehouse that says “a ehou e” on its side) is going to be condominiums. The contractor’s men who have been preparing the ground to accept the huge pilings that will hold the buildings up away from the riverbank and the gray river itself when it swells and rises have been digging, of course, and in the process of that digging uncovered the apparent crown of a skull, an especially round and hominoidish-looking one.

The foreman was at first merely angry and impatient, hoping still it was just the top of the head of a large dog or something but, in good conscience and remiss as he was to delay the work, called the authorities to have someone come down and take a look. Who came was a homicide detective I know pretty well, a man named Dennis Lewandowski, who knows his business and was pretty sure when he stood in the deep cut of earth and looked at this white orb sticking out, and pushed his fingers a little further into the dirt and revealed the high forehead and the huge forward-facing eye sockets, that it was the head of an actual human being. Needless to say construction stopped and I was immediately notified.

I am and have been for some years now the deputy coroner and associate medical examiner for Lucas County, this county in which I grew up, so I’m pretty well versed in just such things as human remains that happen to turn up along the riverbank during the process of new construction. In the case of this particular set of remains I am, of course, one of the world’s three leading experts, though no one else at the scene would ever, could ever, imagine my connection to it.

According to the protocol of these things, there aren’t too many people down here. The workers and cops and other curious onlookers are mostly up the slope, above us. This is to avoid any further trampling of possible evidence (which is really moot in this case, since the entire area has been pummeled by workers and their machines and anyway, the river would have washed everything away decades ago, but protocol is what it is). Lewandowski stands beside me. Two of his colleagues, scene investigators, technicians they are, from the Scientific Investigations Unit, are closer to the widening pit, the grave, peering in. They have their tools beside them in important-looking red metal cases, brushes and powders and glassine envelopes and so forth, but they are not doing the pickiest work here. That is left to a woman named Shelley-Jo Janson, Ph.D., a forensic anthropologist and professor at MCOT, the local medical college (where I also teach part time). I called her as soon as I got the call, though I knew immediately what it was. If I hadn’t, it might have suggested some slight peculiarity because in these cases of long-buried corpses she is usually involved—she being better at unearthing old human debris and reading the subtle messages from it than even I. Everyone in the business of exhumation and investigation in this city knows it. My urge, of course, was to control the scene. But it has been twenty-five years since this body was buried and I must trust in the obfuscation that that much time renders on all things organic.

I knew in fact several months ago that this moment was coming. A chill crept through me when I read that these condos had been approved and were moving into the development stage, and again when I drove by and saw the equipment being unloaded. I was amazed frankly that the spot had lain unclaimed and unused for this long, and that the river hadn’t unearthed any bones in the meantime (though Brigman took care to dig it deep).

Several sets of portable halogen lights encircle us now and serve the dual purpose of not only creating an oasis of high daylight in the deepening dusk of this early September evening (strangely within a calendar week or so of when Brigman and Donny dug the hole), but of warming us some, too—the air not only holds a chill now but the sky is drizzling rain as well. It’s a sloppy time and place—not at all unlike the morning when this body was buried—and my feet in the high rubber Wellingtons I wear to such scenes have sunk several inches into the mud. I look up for a moment at the river and the city across it and can see only the silhouette of the skyline now against the fading western sky, and of the great bridge that still stands, of the spot from which Jessi nearly leapt those years ago.

We live in the mansion, strange as that may sound. It hasn’t changed much. The pool’s been upgraded, the driveway repaved, the decor updated, that sort of thing. The trees are bigger, though that old willow had to be taken down a few years ago. I like to say that we bought it from Ted but we didn’t—he gave it to us when we moved back, just signed it over. He went into semiretirement not long after that, at sixty-three, and bought a place in Coconut Grove, Florida, not far from his brother. That was ten years ago. He spends most of his time down there, but comes up for holidays and every summer stays with us for at least a month. He has a reason, you see, beyond us. Her name is Jennifer. She was born in 1989.

We hadn’t planned it, hadn’t even dared to hope really that we’d ever have time for a family. But it happened as these things do, and it has been wonderful for us.

Jessi has talked to Jennifer about her grandmother. I sat with them once several years ago as they thumbed through one of the photo albums Ted left behind (we inherited much of what they’d acquired), when Jennifer asked who that was, and Jessi told her. Jenny of course asked where Joyce was, and Jessi said that Joyce had died when Jenny was very young. I smiled at the lie. She asked me if I knew Joyce and I said I had, and that I thought they’d have liked each other very much.

One of the techs looks up at me. I step forward. They’ve turned up a piece of duct tape. No sign of the quilts, just the tape. Amazing how indestructible the stuff is. It does not give me a good feeling. I have to wonder what else has remained undissolved, unabsorbed, still identifiable after all this time. Shelley-Jo looks up from the hole.

“It’ll be pretty intact,” she says.

I nod and step away again, back a few paces to where Lewandowski smokes a cigar. The homicide guys have this habit at scenes of decomposition. The cigar blocks out much of the stench. But there will be no stench here, the body being buried far too long. Bones, I suspect, and bits of tape are all we will find. Possibly some clothing if he wore synthetics. That frankly is what concerns me most. Did Brigman think to take out the wallet and any other identifying contents of the pockets? Could he have possibly imagined that twenty-five years hence the corpse would come back to the surface to tell some of its tale, with me as its audience? And even if we can identify Ron, will there be anything tying him to us? To Joyce? Was a missing persons report ever filed for the man? I don’t know these things. I kneel again, find my spot and my peace, pull my coat around me, and wait.

He’s sixty-eight now by the way, Brigman is, and looks every day of it. He lives in the same house in the south end. The neighborhood got even worse after I moved out but then began to improve, and has become again the sort of place I remember from when my mother was alive. We’ve had work done on the house to keep the outside looking good, and even persuaded him finally to get rid of some of the debris from his collection.

The tech glances up again, at me and then at Shelley-Jo, and when she gives him the okay he reaches with a thin extendable metal rod into the hole and hooks something out. It is a beer can. I had forgotten that, that they were drinking and tossing the empties into the hole. Even Brigman wasn’t prescient or cynical enough to predict DNA analysis. I’m not worried about that, though—it would have broken down years ago. I’m more concerned about lingering latent prints. It’s a long shot but possible, given that the cans haven’t rusted. I’d have guessed they would, but the aluminum content Budweiser used in 1978 was apparently already high. (Did they wear gloves? I can’t remember.) What the cans really will do is help date the digging. There’ll be BIN numbers or something like that. It’s a big find for us, the authorities, and one that will lie utterly beyond my control. Brigman will have to take his chances with the cans. I always said his drinking would catch up with him.

Another can comes out, and then another. The techs bag each separately and label them and set them side by side on the ground. It feels strange to see these things unearthed, and to remember.

The first hint of bone peeks through now, where the chest plate should be, given the location of the head and assuming the body’s still roughly intact. Could Ron have imagined it’d come to this? What I am especially curious about is how it happened—and that will, of course, be strictly up to me to determine. Was it a blow struck in the heat of conflict, a bash to the head maybe? Or something more coldly planned—a slashed throat, a garroting injury. I’ve always leaned toward the former—I couldn’t quite see Brigman gunning for him in some premeditated way but I can certainly imagine once his anger was engaged what he could have done. Woe to Ron at that point.

When Shelley-Jo sits back on her heels it’s the sign that we have arrived at some moment of significance. But when she looks at me and says, “You can see her now,” I’m confused. Shelley’s never been in the habit of referring to uncategorized corpses in the feminine, as if they’re ships or something. It’s usually not too hard to tell…

I feel something then, a shifting, a simultaneous shrinking and expansion as if I am both fading away from the earth and rocketing back through time, all the time of my life, at once. I walk to the lip of the grave and look in. Yellow is what’s most immediately striking. The midsection of the corpse has been uncovered, from the bottom of the rib cage to the top of the femurs, and you can make out bits of unabsorbed yellow cloth. Still, I am confused. And then I look at this pelvic girdle that Shelley has so carefully laid bare and I can see in an instant, as she could as well, that it is clearly and without doubt the pelvis of a woman, and probably a woman who bore at least one child.

It is not unlike that moment when I found the video camera in Joyce’s upstairs armoire on that long distant afternoon and felt the weight of time cascading down upon me, only this is bigger than that. I stagger, am staggered, actually clutch at my chest because I cannot breathe. I stumble backward and trip and sit down hard in the mud, and I must be gasping like a landed fish because immediately people are at my side bending over me—Lewandowski, the techs. They think I’m having a heart attack, and Lewandowski is on his radio already putting in a call.