We never talk about how he died.
We take walks in the afternoons, sometimes, back around the garage and the pines into Albion’s garden, sometimes taking longer walks through the neighborhood, but Albion feels conspicuous—passing our neighbors on their front porches, women Albion’s age already three or four kids deep into families, old women and old men on lawn chairs in front yards smoking cigarettes, young girls circling bikes on the street or the teenage girls in cutoffs and tank tops—it’s obvious that Albion doesn’t belong here. Besides, I think most of our neighbors are keen enough to spot a woman in trouble. After our walks, Albion will disappear into her room or lose herself in a charcoal drawing and I’ll head outside to the front porch and voice Gavril—we usually talk at least every other day. After dinner one night, sitting out on the porch, Gavril asks about my psychiatrist.
“Timothy? What about him?”
“No, the other one. The one you had before—”
“Simka?”
“You didn’t hear about him? He was stripped of his credentials—it was in the Post,” he says. “He can’t practice anymore. Some scandal—”
“What scandal? What are you talking about?”
“Selling painkillers to kids,” says Gavril. “You haven’t heard about this? Three or four girls accused him of trading sex for oxy. They were on the same tennis team, came forward together. The whole thing broke open—”
“No. No, that didn’t happen—”
“It’s all over the Post,” says Gavril and I tell him I have to go, to read about what’s happened. I scan DC Local feeds and find something on the Washington Post blog, allegations that Simka sold painkiller medications to teenagers, some of his patients. Cock Doc Writes Oral Prescriptions—cached streams show vids of his arrest, District cops leading him from his office in cuffs, carrying away boxes marked “evidence.” I try to ping Simka, but no answer. I write him an e-mail asking what happened. Details are sketchy—a follow-up post explains Simka’s painkillers led to the deaths of three young women who’d gone missing after nights on the DC club scene, surveillance footage of coke and liquor and pills, overdosing on Simka’s narcotics before disappearing. Some of the victims are underage, but hacks have posted pictures anyway, prep-school blondes in burgundy blazers and plaid skirts, photographs of them in tennis whites. Bullshit. He sold to anarcho club kids who sold on campuses, a drug ring centered on Simka’s office. I can’t believe this. Simka’s lawyer, state-appointed, maintains his innocence, but in the interim the state board has stripped him of his license and has incarcerated him. When Simka finally responds, it’s through e-maiclass="underline" I don’t regret helping you.
I tell Albion while she’s painting and she hugs me, holds me until I stop shaking. She asks if I need anything, if I need to go to DC.
“I don’t think so. I don’t know what good it would do—”
My other e-mails go unanswered, and when I reach out to his family I receive a form e-mail from an unknown sender, signed by their lawyer, requesting not to be contacted. Restless sleep, obsessing over Simka—at night when I’m thinking of him, he’s so present it’s like he’s here with me, like I can smell his aftershave and coffee breath or reach out into the dark of my room and touch his hairy arm, convince myself he’s right here with me, chuckling about some joke he’d heard, ready to dispel my gloominess by asking about the Beatles.
Albion wakes me early, says I was shouting—having nightmares. Over grapefruit, she asks if I want to go camping and we drive to the wildlife refuge. She checks the park guides for different trails to explore, but we’ve hiked them all. We rent a fifteen-dollar site to pitch our tent and stow our gear and walk familiar, light trails. I bring bottles of water, hummus and pita and a bottle of wine. We hold hands as we hike like friends who might someday discover they’re lovers. We take naps in the afternoon and hike again before dinner, coming back to the campsite to cook mushroom burgers and fry potatoes and drink our second bottle of wine.
We stay up around the fire and Albion asks if everything’s all right.
“No,” I tell her. “Everything’s not all right…”
“Tell me,” she says.
“His family doesn’t answer—they don’t want my attention. They don’t respond to me, and I don’t know where he is. I haven’t heard from him since that first night. There’s nothing I can do for him—”
“Simka?”
“He’s married, he has a family,” I tell her. “Simka was one of the best people I’ve ever known—compassionate. There’s no way he’s involved in something like this—”
“You think he’s innocent?”
“I know he’s innocent,” I tell her. “I don’t believe he was selling drugs to kids, not after everything he’s done for me. About my own problems. I don’t believe it. They’re ruining him, his entire family—”
“Sometimes people disappoint us,” she says.
“Enough of that,” I tell her. “Enough. He has two sons who no longer have a father. We’re not just going to keep ignoring the obvious—”
“What’s obvious?” she asks.
Is she going to make me say this? “Someone’s doing this to him,” I tell her. “Someone’s fucking up his life, probably because of what he knows about me. Maybe they lost us and they’re trying to provoke me, to flush me out—”
“Waverly?” she asks, her voice tentative, breathy, like she has trouble forming the word.
“You tell me—”
Albion doesn’t answer and I don’t care if I’ve somehow hurt her, and after a few moments she leaves the fire, dissolving into the outer darkness of the woods. Bruised anger catches in my throat that she’s run away, but I’m more upset at how abstruse she is, at the lines she’s drawn around herself, withholding even when others are suffering. Simka—fuck. That furniture he’d made and his house cradled by the creek and the woods, roughhousing with his sons—gone, gone, and I want to scream but I sit staring at the fire, impotent and cold.
I hear Albion’s tread in the woods and when she comes back into the ring of firelight, she sits next to me instead of across from me. She puts her hand on my knee and leaves it there for a moment before pulling a marshmallow from our pack. She skewers it on a stick, lights it on fire. She holds it up to watch the glowing cube before puffing it out. The air’s filled with the scent of caramelized sugar and Albion holds out the marshmallow until I eat it.
“Dominic, I can help you,” she says.
“Help me? Or help Simka?”
“I don’t know if we’ll be able to help Simka,” she says, “but there’s something I can show you that we might be able to use—”
“Use how? What do you mean?”
“I’ve kept things hidden for far too long,” she says. “I was mistaken, Dominic. I want to face this, I want to help end this suffering—”
Something’s different about her, something opening—a complex comfort grown between us, present in a way that I hadn’t yet felt, less diffuse and fragile, like we’d been describing a relationship to each other these past few months but suddenly find ourselves together in one.