“I’m going to show you video of Jackie boarding a flight to Steamboat. It’s taken from airport security. I was able to get ahold of it. You’ll be able to see the date, and the time stamp. So this can be the end of this.”
She turned her laptop around, clicked and clacked, turned it back. A grainy image appeared that showed a line of passengers lined up to board. The angle of the video suggested it was taken from a camera embedded on the large monitor behind the gate’s ticket counter. Alex pressed play and the passengers started to board.
“No way,” a voice said.
A petite woman walked past the counter and onto the jet bridge. Her face became unmistakable. It wasn’t Jackie. It was Alex.
The room exploded into chaos.
Jackie stared at Alex and walked to the door.
“Denny warned me,” Alex said. She was tapping on the window of Jackie’s rental. Jackie put the car in reverse. Several of the group’s members stood in the doorway, listening to Alex scream.
“When Denny brought you on, he told me he’d never met anyone like you,” Alex yelled. “He said you could solve any problem. It wasn’t a compliment, Jackie. It was part of a short but pointed explanation about why we needed to limit what we disclosed to you. He didn’t trust you, or what you’d do if you knew everything, Jackie.”
Jackie gripped the steering wheel like a mountain climber holding a rope for dear life.
“He warned me that you were unstable, possibly even insane. That’s why he didn’t tell you everything. He thought, he thought,” Alex repeated, “that somehow he could get the benefit of your abilities without taking on the liabilities.” She stared at Jackie. “It’s worse than that. You’re a sociopath.”
Jackie cracked the window.
“Frankly, Alex, I don’t care about any of your ugly business, except for one thing: You will,” she hissed, “leave Dr. Martin alone.”
She hit the accelerator, screaming backward, gravel crackling beneath the tires.
Thirty-Seven
Minutes later, Lyle leaned against a worn utility pole that leaned slightly to the left. A metaphor for Berkeley itself, he thought, staring at a light-gray-and-white house at the corner of Milvia and Francisco. A steeply angled roof covered the small- to medium-size house with a tall red chimney pointing skyward. Lyle pictured two bedrooms upstairs, one for the boy and one for Melanie. The pockmarked lawn cracked brown with drought. Naturally, Melanie wouldn’t waste water. An interior light showed the back of a couch. It suggested someone was home, a proposition reinforced by a Honda in the driveway. Homey, Lyle thought, and winced. The road not taken. The road sprinted away from.
He walked his bike up a concrete path to the wooden stairs to the porch. He glanced upward at a circular window on the second floor, dark inside; his eyes then diverted almost magnetically to wires that laced the space between the house and the house next to it. In a tangle, the wires connected to Melanie’s house in the back corner and then to the house next door on its roof and so on throughout the block. Lyle followed the wires back to the utility pole and wondered whether these were telephone or Internet or electricity or maybe all of the above. His eyes were so heavenward that he didn’t hear the front door open, nor Melanie walk down the stairs and gawk at him as he gawked at the wires.
“I know that look,” she said.
The sound startled him. He looked up and saw Melanie holding a toy robot. It was in her left hand, a cavity in the red robot’s belly open. In her other hand, a screwdriver.
“Peño?”
“Melanie.”
A red sweater buttoned below her neck hugged her shoulders. The long, plain gray skirt told Lyle she’d probably worked that day. The moment he saw her, he ached.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She dipped her chin and half smiled, eyes widening, her nonverbal way of saying What brings you, Lyle? Say something.
“It’s a beautiful place,” he said.
She laughed out loud. “Peño,” she said again. It was an ice-breaking moment, part of an unspoken language in which she, just by saying his nickname, was calling out the oddity of him showing up, without explanation, and then staring at her electrical wires and commenting on her house. Perfectly Lyle.
“Is this about the text? I thought that was just spam,” she said.
This shook him back to the concrete. “Text?”
Behind Melanie, a face appeared at the screen door. It was a boy, little more than a toddler. “Mommy?” Stout with bangs. Not Lyle’s kid, Lyle thought, and winced. Melanie caught it. “Be right there, sweetie. Can you wash up for dinner?”
“K.”
She turned around and looked for a cue from Lyle. Did he want to talk about the Elephant at the Screen Door?
“Text,” he urged.
“You texted me: Kill your phone before it kills you.”
“What?”
Melanie set down the robot and screwdriver and pulled her phone from her pocket. She scrolled the large-screened device and held up the phone to him.
Kill your phone before it kills you.
“You didn’t send this?”
“When did it come?”
“Ten days or so ago. Middle of the night.”
Lyle gritted his teeth in focus. He hadn’t remembered sending it. Was that when he was in Steamboat? What did it mean?
“There’s another one, shortly after. It’s even weirder.” She handed him the phone.
He read the text: Must find brilliant woman from last UCSF class.
He shook his head. Nonsense. But it tickled in his brain just the way random clues tickled him.
“Why are you here, Lyle?”
He met her eyes and then couldn’t look at her anymore. Her tenderness overcame him. She had a hero’s compassion with a survivor’s backbone. How long had he been blind to this strength? He mustered the courage to say what he wanted to say. He looked down.
“Who is this woman? From your class. Were you having an aff—”
“Me. No way. You have no right—” He stopped. This wasn’t why he’d come, not to fight.
The last class, he remembered, had happened prior to that fateful Africa trip. It lodged painfully in his craw. He’d put Melanie at risk by allowing her to come with him, then humiliated her on the airplane by diagnosing her pregnancy, and, as much as any of that, he well might’ve blown his analysis about what was ailing the small village. He’d said it was man-made. On what basis? Whimsical, cynical half-baked sophistry.
But she’d cheated on him, not the other way around.
“Are you sure you’re okay, Lyle? Are you sick?”
“When did I lose it?” he blurted.
“What?”
He fought himself, his pride, his urge not to ask or delve into his own bullshit. He never tried to make it about him. It was about the patient, disease, pathology. Maybe he was those things now. He made himself ask.
“When did I give up?”
“Wow,” she said, then almost immediately: “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t say that. What’s happened, Lyle?”
He shook his head. I don’t know.
She looked over her shoulder, wanting to make sure they were alone.
She started to say something and then thought better of it. “Do you want to find some other time to talk?”