The Narcissist's Daughter (19 page)

T
he plan must have begun to find its form (in perhaps only a few mumbled words, a hinted-at image, a vague promise) during that night I spent in the hospital after my beating at the head and feet of Ron. Imagine it—in the darkest hours as I lay bruise-brained and gash-scalped and broken-boned, maybe dying for all they knew, Brigman and Ted finally met. Brigman, with much to be pissed off at but also full of desires and frustrations and a deeper longer burning anger at the way the world had messed him up, and Ted with so many things to manage, and desires of his own. Brigman might have been chilly at first but Ted with his sensitivity to how anyone viewed him would have immediately begun to reverse this. And he knew which buttons to push. I can hear him talking about the Rouge plant, his dad. Brigman perhaps then mentioned the Corps and from there Ted had him. At some point in the course of the night the combination of Ted’s wealth and his prodigious abilities of persuasion and maybe a never-before-recounted version of the story of how he really lost his hand, and Brigman was overwhelmed. Or so I think, at first.

But sitting there in the mud watching Shelley-Jo dig, Lewandowski still at my side, I think again. Brigman, who has never been anyone’s fool, must have realized at some point that he was involved in a negotiation, a strange and subtle and dangerous one, and furthermore that what was at stake was nothing less than the future of all of us. He always liked to play the dumb gearhead, but my guess is that he caught the whiff of fear in Ted—of a lawsuit or of being exposed, of god forbid being disgraced in the papers—and with nothing but his instinct to guide him played it as it came, and negotiated my future.

It would have begun, of course, with Ted filling Brigman in on what was happening between me and Joyce. And how it was Joyce, not him, who’d been paying Ron to harass me. It wouldn’t’ve taken Brigman long to absorb all of this and grasp the full ramifications, understand the possible consequences.

On what, then, did they agree? What did Ted promise him? I can’t be sure, of course. And it would have been couched at that early stage in the vaguest terms—“It has to be stopped between them,” Ted might have said, “whatever that entails.”

“Well,” Brigman could have answered, “shit can happen.”

And then from Ted something like “Syd’s a bright boy. I like him in spite of all this. If things…turn out the right way, I’d be happy to see him get into med school.”

“But the money…”

“Yes, well, that doesn’t have to be an issue. Assuming things work out.”

Whatever. It’s all conjecture. But I think that by the time I came to in the morning, the deal had been made—Joyce and I would be given one more chance to stop, and if we didn’t, then shit would be made to happen. The fact that I’d just been put in the hospital left the perfect cover—Brigman could rage and marshal Donny and all the time I’d believe that Ron was the object of their wrath.

And what of him, of Ron? Did he simply go away when Joyce’s checks stopped coming? Or did Ted track him down and make it worth his while to relocate to some far-off place where he’d never run the risk of my bumping into him by chance or glimpsing him on the street?

Of course the deal would all have been jeopardized when Jessi discovered me at Joyce’s apartment. By the time they knew that I wasn’t going to stop with Joyce, it was too late, the damage Ted feared had already been wrought. And it very nearly ended there, on the bridge. But (unwittingly) I did my part, pulled it out, got her down, so the deal could play out. I wonder if I’d stopped seeing Jessi, let it fall away, if Ted would have carried through with his part of it. He’d’ve had grounds not to. But Brigman would have understood, as I did when I began my own confrontations with Ted, who had more to lose, and might’ve brought some pressure to bear. Who knows? The way things happened, it didn’t matter. We all became family.

What I wonder is who killed her. Did Ted use some undetectable poison? Did Brigman strangle her? Or perhaps did Ted hire someone else to do the actual deed, then have Brigman and Donny clean it up? And now the question is—can I figure it out? And do I want to?

The medics arrive and pick their way down the trail and over to our little party. My b.p.’s slightly elevated. Heart sounds fine. I tell them I have low blood sugar and they seem to buy it. They give me a Hershey bar and leave.

When I step over to look again, to begin my own work of inspecting these remains, of deciding exactly what happened to this victim, this woman, this Joyce of my memory and my life, Detective Lewandowski comes with me, his elbow nearly brushing mine—this is I’m sure only in case I have another dizzy spell, but I can’t help feeling that his old sniffer is telling him that something’s up here.

It is late now. I have only one light on, over the tray that holds the rubberized bag that holds the bones I’ve been idly arranging into some approximation of their original orientation. I am looking at them and at the bits of yellow cloth, that sun dress she was wearing in her new apartment on the last day I saw her, when my wife steps into the lab. Though I’m sitting with her mother, it is her I’ve been thinking about, and what I am going to say. What happened back then has lain like some force, hidden, buried, gone for all appearances from the world. But not vanquished. And now it has been resurrected, at least for me because I have a dilemma—what do I tell her? Anything? Everything? I don’t know.

“Jessi,” I say. She smiles and sits on a stool by the door. Though she spent her time with them when she had to, she’s not in love with the dead. She visits here only rarely, and usually when she can’t help it for some reason.

She says, “It’s very late.”

“Yes.”

“Dennis called me.” They know each other. Lewandowski was a patient of hers for a time after his divorce.

“Ah,” I say. “Making a big deal out of nothing.”

“What happened?” The light filtering in from the hallway illuminates one side of her face, so that I can just make out her expression.

“We had an exhumation down by the river.”

“To you, I mean.”

“Low blood sugar.”

“Right.”

These bones do have an odor, but the human part of it is faint and overwhelmed by the pungent smell of the earth. I pull up the edges of the bag and begin to zip it closed.

“Is that it?”

“Yes. It was there a long time. Several decades.”

“Who is it?”

I’m about to say I don’t know when I look at her and understand that she will know I’m lying. I don’t say anything.

“Is it her?”

It stuns me. And yet it makes sense, a horrible logical sense.

“It hasn’t changed much, really,” I say, “that part of the river. Until now. It’s where they’re putting in those new condos.”

“Then you’ve been there before.”

“A long time ago.”

She is silent for a long moment, and then she says, “Oh, god,” and in it I hear a cracking, a crying that wants to come out but knows it must wait.

“I followed them,” I say, “Brigman and Donny, and watched them dig. It was bundled up, though, so you couldn’t see who. I thought it was him. Ron.”

“The one she hired to beat you up?”

“Yes. How do you know that?”

“Is that what Brigman told you, that it was him?”

“Well, that’s who he was going after. And he told me it was over—”

“What’d you think, that she just left?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Syd, she would never. You were so blind.”

“Apparently.”

I am frightened all over again, not for her now, not at the thought of having to broach this never-before-discussed subject and of having to open those wounds again, but for me. Me, I, Syd Redding, who all along it turns out was the one left in the dark.

“That night,” she says, and I know precisely which one she means, “I drove for a long time. I was insane. I would have killed her if I’d seen her. I would have killed you. I felt like everything had been taken away from me. Or worse, that I’d never even had it. I’d just been fooled, strung along, and by the two people I maybe cared the most about in the world. In the end, though, I had nowhere else to go. So I came home.

“It was dark, but there was a truck in the driveway. I’d never seen it. A blue truck with toolboxes on the sides.

“Inside, it was quiet but I knew someone was there. Dog wasn’t there, which was strange. I went upstairs and heard something in their room, and went back, and that’s when I saw them. My dad and yours, and Donny. Standing together.

“Then I saw her.”

“Her?”

“She was lying on the bed, very still. They were looking at her. And I knew what was happening, and what had happened, and what was going to. It was like the universe opened, and for a horrid moment I saw everything exactly for what it was, and understood it. And I knew they hadn’t done it yet. That she was still alive.”

Ted had sedated her. That’s what it was. It would’ve been easy then—a pillow over the face, a bolus of potassium into a vein, whatever. I won’t be able to tell now.

“What’d you do?”

I can see in the light from the hallway that her face is wet, but her voice is steady. “I left.”

“Did they see you?”

“I don’t think so. No one’s ever said anything. I drove and drove again, through the rest of the night, until by morning I was crazy. I knew what I’d done, what I’d let happen. And then I was sorry. I wanted her back. I wanted you back. But you were gone, everyone was gone…”

She is a handsome woman, Jessi, in the way of her mother, though they do not really look alike. Jenny, I think, will look more like Joyce when she grows up.

My throat feels thick. “From where they buried her,” I say, “there’s a clear view of the bridge. We saw all the lights. I knew it was you.”

She can no longer speak. I slide the drawer closed and snap off my gloves and stand and walk to her. What else am I going to do? What else is there? She takes me in, holds me in a way that I think she has not done ever in our marriage, or in the years leading up to it, not since the times we made love before the bridge, when Joyce was still alive. Then she used to hold me so tightly sometimes that I could not draw breath, as if she was afraid that letting go meant I would never come back.

An SIU tech will call in a few days to say they came up mostly empty on the cans. I will laugh and ask him if that’s a pun. As it happened, they were able to figure that the cans were sold sometime in 1978, but it hasn’t led them anywhere.

“There’s actually a partial on one of them, a smudged thumb it looks like. We managed to pick up three points, ran it through the AFIS, but nothing came.” Which means it wasn’t Brigman’s, because he’s in the system so he’d have come up. The tech says, “We’d have to have something to compare…”

But we don’t, we won’t, because Donny’s never been in and at this point I doubt if he ever will be. I think Chloe knows the truth. I mean I’d never have guessed that but looking back at it, looking at her relationship with Jessi, which has remained close all these years, and at how she never again mentioned anything after that time in our kitchen, I think she figured it out, or Jessi told her. So I might tell Chloe to just make sure that Donny never gets fingerprinted for anything or if he’s going to, to cut his thumbs off first. She’ll understand.

A few days after that I will dig through the boxes of my belongings that have been moldering in our attic for these years, and I will find the note from Joyce that Ted gave me the night of the last day that I ever saw her. I will sit down one day with it when I am home alone and turn to a page in the photo album of some shots of Jessi when she was little, and on which are written a few words in Joyce’s hand, the date, the place, and I will compare the note to it, and realize though I am no expert that the handwriting in the note does not match the handwriting on the photos.

Sometime after that then when I have reason to be at St. V’s (which I do from time to time) I will slip downstairs to where the laboratory still has its home, and I will saunter back to the Chemistry Department, which is still to this day managed by Barb Lancioni. She has held that position now for twenty years. I’ll poke around a little, make small talk with the techs until I see something she’s written, a memo, old and yellowish now, taped up by the door. And I will see that the handwriting looks pretty similar to the note I have.

I will think of confronting Ted and Brigman, will even convince myself at times that I will do it. I’ll think the whole thing through again and again. Who was lying? Did Joyce hire Ron out of selfishness, to keep me to herself? Or was it Ted all along as I thought, and did he just manipulate things at the end to cover up the murder of a wife whose desires had passed from titillating to tiresome to jeopardizing their daughter? And deeper even than that—who of the two of them really needed to play the game? Was it Ted’s compulsion to watch, to see his wife as that kind of object of desire, or was it Joyce’s to be seen in that way? In the end, who was the true narcissist?

In any case, what is certain is that they conspired, all of them, Ted and Brigman and Donny and Jessi and Chloe, in a murder and its coverup. It is a horror almost beyond imagining because it involves everyone I love in the world.

But that’s wrong. There is someone who remains outside it, unsullied. It is an irony but in the same way that Ted saw Joyce as a danger to his daughter, and so betrayed her, I find that I must betray her, too. Because everything, everything, will be jeopardized if I don’t. For that reason, I will not ask. I will see Joyce buried again, unrecognized and unredeemed. In a few more years our Jennifer will graduate from Jessi’s alma mater, and we will buy her a large and expensive gift, as her grandfather did for Jessi. It’ll be a Volvo, I think. I trust, though, that she will not one day sit in it with a boy and tell him that her father gave it to her in lieu of love, because that is not the case and I know that she knows it. Ours is a different world.