Ann had gotten me to admit that I didn’t want to give up my depression, that giving up my depression meant giving up my grief, my grief over Catherine. I guarded my grief. I had paid a high price for it. I wasn’t ready to give it up, but I was willing to address it. Ann had gotten me to finally speak Catherine’s name, to admit to small links to people in the present, links I resented but couldn’t deny. I didn’t want to invest in someone else who might be taken from me by age or accident or intent.
“Lewis,” Ann said outside the door. “I’ve got coffee, biscotti, an open day till a late lunch with my visiting but not welcome cousin Rachel.”
I didn’t answer.
“I read your note,” she said. “No does not always mean no. And sometimes, but not often, when you put that plastic key in the ignition, the car actually starts. Somewhere we are tickled with the fancy that the car might start this time.”
Not me, I thought. Putting the key in the ignition meant you thought there existed a glimmer of hope. Putting the key in the trash basket meant you weren’t going to be drawn into the game.
I paddled back into the office and opened the door. Sunlight and cool air closed my eyes. When I squinted at her, Ann held out a large paper cup with a plastic top. I took it and stepped back so she could come in.
When she was inside, I closed the door and she handed me a small white paper bag. I carried the coffee and the bag to my desk and sat. Ann sat across from me. She opened the lid of her coffee.
“You have a joke for me?” she asked, taking a sip of her coffee.
I owed her a joke, my assignment from our last session. I was collecting them, telling them to her, part of my therapy. I had not yet found any of the jokes funny.
I drank some coffee. It was warm. I pulled an almond biscotti out of the bag. It was crisp and firm. I shrugged.
“No joke? All right. I’ll tell one. How many psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb?” she asked.
I shrugged again and considered dipping my biscotti. I had a vision of my grandfather doing this with biscotti made by my grandmother. I imagined crumbs wet from coffee dropping onto my grandparents’ mottled Formica kitchen table.
“Just one,” answered Ann, “but the lightbulb really has to be ready,” she said. “Your turn.”
“A new patient comes into the psychologist’s office,” I said. “The psychologist says, ‘Tell me your problem, start at the beginning.’ And the patient says, ‘In the beginning, I created the heavens and the earth.’”
“It’s hazelnut,” Ann said. “The coffee.”
I nodded and drank.
“You think we create our own heaven and earth?” she asked.
“It’s a joke,” I said.
“A joke is never just a joke,” she said, pointing her biscotti at me.
“Freud,” I said.
“Truth,” she answered.
“Three people are dead.”
I drank coffee, hesitated and dunked the biscotti. I knew I looked like my grandfather at that Formica table, beard and all.
“Can you be more specific or do you wish to talk about mortality in general and, if so, why focus on so small a number?”
“I don’t want to talk,” I said, working on my soggy biscotti.
“You let me in,” she said.
“I let you in,” I confirmed.
“Progress,” she said with a smile of satisfaction.
“Look at me,” I said.
She did.
“What do you see?”
“A man concerned with how he appears to someone else,” she said. “Progress.”
“Setback,” I said. “Withdrawal.”
I finished my biscotti, wiped my mouth with the sleeve of my Venice shirt and swirled the coffee, creamy brown, sugared.
“How long will it take?” she asked.
“Take?”
“To tell me about the three dead people.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It depends on where I start.”
“In the beginning you created the heavens and the earth,” she said.
She reached into her canvas purse, pulled out her cell phone and punched in some numbers.
“Rachel,” she said. “Can’t make lunch unless you can hold out till three… You will not be starving. You will probably not even be hungry. Find something in the fridge to tide you over. I’ll call back when I’m ready.”
She flipped the phone closed and returned it to her purse.
“You have my attention and a bonus,” she said, removing another, smaller white paper bag and handing it to me.
I opened it. A chocolate chip cookie. A big one.
“Tell me about dead people,” she said, folding her hands around her coffee cup.
So, I did…
2
In the beginning I was an Episcopalian. At least that’s what my family claimed to be though my mother was the only one I knew who ever went to church services. All our other relatives were Catholics. Some were good Italian Catholics, meaning not that they were necessarily good people but that they made the right moves, attended Mass, went to confession and crossed themselves.
I start my story this way because of how Dorothy Cgnozic, who called me that morning five days ago as I was headed toward the door, began the conversation.
“Mr. Fonseca?”
“Fonesca,” I corrected her, as I had patiently corrected people over the slightly more than forty years of my life.
“Are you a Catholic?”
“No,” I said.
There was a long pause on the line, a raspy breathing sound and then, “It can’t be helped.”
“Guess not,” I said.
“You’ve been recommended. By Sterling Sparkman.”
I had no idea who Sterling Sparkman might be.
“You met him here. Gave him some papers saying he had to go to court.”
“Here?”
“Seaside Assisted Living,” she said. “He said you were polite, talked to him for a while about Chicago, baseball, treated him as if he were alive.”
“I remember,” I said.
Sterling Sparkman’s favorite Cubs of all time were Andy Pafko and Hank Sauer. My favorites had been Ernie Banks and Andre Dawson till the dawn of Sammy Sosa.
“He said I should call you,” she said. “So I’m calling you.”
“You want me to serve papers on someone?”
“No, I want you to find out who’s been murdered,” she said.
Her voice was definitely old, not strong but matter-of-fact, determined.
“Murdered?”
“That’s right. Last night I saw one of the residents being murdered.”
“Who?”
“Don’t know. Didn’t get a good look, but I’m sure. I was walking past the room, couldn’t sleep, pushing my walker. Mine has the yellow tennis balls attached on the feet so they slide better, you know?”
“Yes.”
“She was getting killed.”
“Did you tell someone?”
“Went to the nursing station. Night nurse wasn’t there.”
“Maybe she was murdering the woman,” I said.
“It’s a thought, but the night nurse is Emmie, a small Negro woman with a gold tooth right over here and grandchildren though she is only forty-four years old. Yesterday was her first day here.”
“Such people can commit murder,” I said.
“She’s too small.”
“The killer was big?”
“Big,” Dorothy Cgnozic said. “She, the new nurse, looked in the room where I told her the woman had been murdered, said there was no one in it. She didn’t believe me.”
“I’m sorry…”
“I told the desk nurses in the morning,” Dorothy went on. “They said no one had been murdered during the night. They are wrong.”