“Okay.”
“Diplopia means double vision.”
“Oh.”
Through all of this, the question is still rolling around in my head: How does this tragic tale make the guy into a murder victim?
Unfortunately, I think I know the answer. I wish I didn’t, but I do.
My doctor keeps apologizing, for her lack of experience, for the lightbulbs that have burned out and not been replaced in this emergency room, for the overall shortage of palliative resources. She looks about nine years old, and she has not technically finished her residency. I tell her it’s okay, I understand. Her name is Susan Wilton.
“Dr. Wilton,” I say while she’s drawing the silken thread in and out of my cheek, wincing with each pull, as if she’s stitching her own face, not mine. “Dr. Wilton, would you ever kill yourself?”
“No,” she says. “Well—maybe. If I knew I was going to be miserable the whole rest of the time. But I’m not. I like my life, you know? If I was someone who was really miserable already—you know?—then it would be like, why sit around and wait for it?”
“Right,” I say. “Right.” I keep my face steady while Dr. Wilton sews me up.
There’s only one mystery left. If Toussaint was telling the truth, and I think he was, and Peter was the one who supplied the pills, where did he get them?
That’s the last part of the mystery, and I think I know the solution to that, too.
Sophia Littlejohn looks uncannily like her brother, even peering through the crack between the door and the doorjamb, staring at me under the chain. She’s got the same small chin and large nose and wide forehead, even the same unfashionable style of eyeglasses. Her hair is cut short, too, boyish, sticking out here and there, just like his.
“Yes?” she says. She’s staring at me just like I’m staring at her, and I remember that we’ve never met, and what I must look like: the fat wad of gauze that Dr. Wilton has taped over my eye, the bruise radiating out around it, brown and pink and puffy.
“It’s Detective Henry Palace, ma’am, from the Concord Police Department,” I say. “I’m afraid that we—” but the door is already closing, and then there’s the quiet tinkle of the chain unlatching, and then the door opens again.
“All right,” she says, nodding stoically, as though this day has been coming, she knew it was coming. “Okay.”
She takes my coat and gestures me into the same overstuffed blue easy chair I sat in during my last visit, and I’m getting out my notebook and she’s explaining that her husband isn’t home, he’s working late, one of them is always working late these days. Erik Littlejohn’s semioccasional nondenominational worship service is now happening every night, and so many hospital staff are attending that he closed the little chapel in the basement and took over an auditorium upstairs. Sophia is talking just to talk, that’s clear, one last goal-line effort to avoid this conversation, and what I’m thinking is that these are what Peter’s eyes must have looked like, when he was alive: careful, analytical, calculating, a little sad.
I smile, I shift in the chair, I let her trail off, and then I can ask my question, which is really more of a declarative statement than a question. “You gave him your prescription pad.”
She looks down at the rug, an endless row of small delicate paisleys, then up at me again. “He stole it.”
“Ah,” I say. “Okay.”
I was in the hospital with my injured face, thinking about this question for an hour before the possibility had occurred to me, and I still wasn’t sure. I had to ask my friend Dr. Wilton, who had to look it up: can midwives prescribe?
Turns out, they can.
“I should have told you sooner, and I’m sorry,” she says quietly.
Outside the French door connecting the living room to the outdoors, I can see Kyle with another kid, both of them in snow suits and boots, goofing around with a telescope in the otherworldly brightness of the backyard floodlights. Last spring, with odds of impact in the single digits, there was a vogue for astronomy, everyone suddenly interested in the names of the planets, their orbits, their distances from one another. Like how, after September 11, everybody learned the provinces of Afghanistan, the difference between Shiite and Sunni. Kyle and his buddy have repurposed the telescope as a sword, are taking turns knighting each other, kneeling, giggling in the early-evening moonlight.
“It was June. Early June,” begins Sophia, and I turn back to her. “Peter called me out of the blue, said he’d like to have lunch. I said that sounded nice.”
“You ate in your office.”
“Yes,” she says. “That’s right.”
They ate and caught up and had a wonderful conversation, brother and sister. Talked about movies they’d seen as kids, about their parents, about growing up.
“Just, you know, stuff. Family stuff.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“It all felt really nice. That’s probably what hurt me the most, Detective, when I figured it out, what he had really been up to. We were never very close, Peter and I. Him calling me that way, just out of nowhere? I remember thinking, when this craziness is over, maybe we’ll be friends. Like brothers and sisters are supposed to be.”
She reaches up and dabs a tear from her eye.
“The odds were still really low then. You could still think like that, when this is all over.”
I wait patiently. My blue book is open, balanced on my lap.
“Anyway,” she says. “I write prescriptions only rarely. Our practice is largely holistic, and any drugs that do come into play, it’s during labor and delivery, not by prescription during the course of pregnancy.”
So it was many weeks before Sophia Littlejohn realized that one of her prescription pads had gone missing from the stack in the top-right drawer of her office desk. And more weeks before she pieced it together that her timid brother had stolen it during their pleasant reunion lunch. She pauses during this portion of the story, looks up at the ceiling, shakes her head with self-recrimination; and I am picturing Peter the mild-mannered insurance man in his moment of bravado—he’s made his fateful decision—Maia having crossed the 12.375 threshold—summoning the nerve, his sister gone momentarily from her office, to the bathroom or on some small errand—nervous, a bead of sweat slipping down from his forehead under his glasses—lifting himself from his chair, sliding open the top drawer of the desk—
Kyle and the friend scream with laughter outside. I keep my eyes on Sophia.
“So then, in October, you figured it out.”
“Right,” she says, glances up briefly but doesn’t bother to wonder how I know. “And I was furious. I mean, Jesus Christ, we’re still human beings, aren’t we? We can’t just behave like human beings until it’s over?” There’s real anger in her voice. She shakes her head bitterly. “It sounds ridiculous, I know.”
“No, ma’am,” I say. “Not ridiculous at all.”
“I confronted Peter, and he admitted to taking them, and that was that. I haven’t—I’m sorry to say, I haven’t spoken to him since.”
I’m nodding. I was right. Bully for me. Time to go. But I have to know it all. I have to.
“Why didn’t you tell me all this before, why didn’t you return my calls—”
“Well, it was a… I made a practical decision. I just—decided—” she begins, and then Erik Littlejohn says, “Sweetheart,” from the doorway.
He’s standing on the threshold, has been standing there who knows how long, snow falling gently all around him. “No.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not. Hello, again, Detective.” He steps in, snowflakes melting to water on the leather shoulders of his coat. “I told her to lie. And if there are consequences, they should fall on me.”