“Not her, though. She’s determined to do right by her patients, right up to the end. And believe it or not, there are plenty of new patients. My name is Erik, by the way. Would you care to come inside anyway?”
He looks slightly surprised when I say yes, says, “Oh, okay… great,” steps back into the living room, and gestures me inside. The thing is, I’ve been up and dressed for two hours, waiting to learn more about Peter Zell, and his brother-in-law is bound to know something. Littlejohn leads me inside, takes my coat and hangs it on a hook.
“Can I offer you a cup of tea?”
“No, thanks. I won’t take but a few minutes of your time.”
“Well, good, because that’s about what I have available,” he says, and tips me a friendly little wink, makes sure I know his diffidence is playful. “I need to walk our son to school and myself to the hospital for nine o’clock.”
He gestures me into an armchair and sits down himself, crossing his legs, relaxing. He has a broad gracious face, a wide and friendly mouth. There’s something powerful but unthreatening about the man, like he’s a friendly cartoon lion, the genial overseer of his pride.
“These must be difficult times to be a policeman.”
“Yes, sir. You work at the hospital?”
“Yes. I’ve been there about nine years. I’m the director of Spiritual Services.”
“Oh. And what is that, exactly?”
“Ah.” Littlejohn leans forward, laces his fingers, clearly pleased with the question. “Anyone who walks through the doors of a hospital has needs beyond the strictly physical. I’m referring to the patients, of course, but also family members, friends, and, yes, even the doctors and nurses themselves.” All this he presents in a smooth, confident disquisition, rapid and unfaltering. “It is my job to minister to such needs, however they might manifest themselves. I am, as you can imagine, rather busy these days.”
His warm smile is unwavering, but I can hear the echoes in the single word, busy, see it in the big expressive eyes: the exhaustion, the long nights and wearying hours, trying to offer comfort to the perplexed and the terrified and the ill.
From the corner of my eye I’m catching flashes of my interrupted dream, pretty Alison Koechner as if she were sitting next to me, gazing out the window at the snow-frosted dogwoods and black tupelo.
“But—” Littlejohn clears his throat abruptly, looking significantly at my blue book and pen, which I have out and balanced on my lap. “You’re here to ask about Peter.”
“Yes, sir.”
Before I can pose a specific question, Littlejohn sets in, speaking in the same tone, rapid and composed. He tells me how his wife and her brother had grown up here, in West Concord, not far from where we’re sitting. Their mother is dead of cancer, twelve years ago, and the father is at Pleasant View Retirement with a host of physical problems, plus the early stages of dementia—very sad, very sad, but God’s plans are for God alone to divine.
Peter and Sophia, he explains, have never been terribly close, not even as children. She was tomboyish, outgoing; he was nervous, inward, shy. Now that they both had careers, and Sophia her family, they socialized only rarely.
“We reached out to him once or twice, of course, when all this began, but without much success. He was in rather a bad place.”
I look up, raise one finger to pause Littlejohn’s onrushing tide of narrative.
“What do you mean, ‘a bad place’?”
He takes a deep breath, as if weighing whether it’s fair to say what he’s about to, and I lean forward, pen poised above my book.
“Well, look. I have to tell you that he was extremely disturbed.”
I tilt my head. “He was depressed, or disturbed?”
“What did I say?”
“You said disturbed.”
“I meant depressed,” says Littlejohn. “Would you excuse me a quick second?”
He rises before I can answer and walks to the far side of the room, allowing me a view into a bright and well-loved kitchen: a row of hanging pots, a gleaming refrigerator adorned with alphabet magnets, report cards, and school pictures.
Littlejohn is at the foot of the stairs, gathering together a navy blue backpack and a pair of child-size hockey skates from where they’re slung over the banister. “Are we brushing teeth up there, Kyle?” he shouts. “We’re at T-minus nine minutes, here.”
A hollered “okay, dad” echoes down the steps, followed by the rattle of footsteps, a faucet going on, a door slamming open. The framed picture on Zell’s dresser, the clumsily smiling lad. The Concord School District, I know, has remained open. A feature had run in the Monitor: the dedicated staff, learning for the sake of learning. Even in the newspaper pictures, you could see that the classrooms were half full. A quarter, even.
Littlejohn settles back in his chair, runs a hand through his hair. He’s got the skates cradled in his lap. “Kid can play. He’s ten years old, skates like Messier, no kidding. He’ll play in the NHL one day, make me a millionaire.” He smiles softly. “Alternate universe. Where were we?”
“You were describing your brother-in-law’s mental state.”
“Right, right. I’m thinking of our little summer party. We had a barbecue, you know, hot dogs, beer. The whole drill. And Peter, he was never the most social person, the most outgoing, but it seemed clear that he was sinking into a depression. There but not there, if you can see what I mean.”
Littlejohn takes a deep breath, looks around the room, as if he’s afraid of the eavesdropping ghost of Peter Zell. “You know, to tell you the truth, after that, we weren’t crazy having him around Kyle. All of this, it’s hard enough—on the boy—” His voice breaks, he clears his throat. “Excuse me.”
I nod, writing, my mind moving quickly.
So what do we have, then? We have a man who, at work, appears to be basically disaffected, quiet, head down, registering no reaction to the coming calamity except for that one shocking outburst on Halloween. Then it turns out that he’s squirreled away a massive and comprehensive trove of information on the asteroid, that he’s privately obsessed with what he’s shrugging off in public.
And now it seems that, at least according to his brother-in-law, outside the office he was not only affected but overwhelmed; distraught. The kind of man who would, after all, be inclined to take his own life.
Oh, Peter, I think. What is your story, friend?
“And this mood, this depression, it hadn’t improved lately?”
“Oh, no. Heavens, no. To the contrary. It was much worse since, you know, since January. Since the final determination.”
The final determination. Meaning the Tolkin interview. Tuesday, January 3. A CBS News Special Report. Garnered 1.6 billion viewers worldwide. I wait in silence for a moment, listening to Kyle’s energetic footsteps overhead. Then I decide, what the heck, and I take out the small white pad of paper from my breast pocket and hand it to Erik Littlejohn. “What can you tell me about this?”
I watch while he reads it. Dear Sophia.
“Where did this come from?”
“Is that Peter Zell’s handwriting, as far as you know?”
“Sure. I mean, I think so. As I said—”
“You didn’t know him that well.”
“Right.”
“He was going to write something to your wife, before he died, and he changed his mind. Do you know what that might have been?”
“Well, a suicide note, presumably. An unfinished suicide note.” He looks up, looks in my eyes. “What else would it be?”