All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found (20 page)

Almost in spite of myself, in spite of my calculated evasion of the title in my so-called career, I was still for a little while longer a reporter, though one without pretense to worldly concerns, much less objectivity or evenhandedness. I made a date to visit the family who’d known Dan best at the end, thinking they of all people might know something I didn’t: his boss George, George’s wife Barbara, and their daughter Emily, all of whom I’d met on my first visit to New Mexico, when Emily and Dan were still engaged. I hadn’t talked to them since the last time I saw Dan alive. I’d met them only that once. For reasons of distance and logistics, I didn’t make it to Dan’s memorial service in Albuquerque, and they didn’t attend the funeral in Minnesota. It was hard to avoid the feeling that we were strangers communing over the memory of a ghost—a ghost who, seven and a half years earlier, had sat with us one evening after dinner and taken our phony money in a game of Monopoly, laughing as he filled the board with hotels, confident and happy and secure in the love of what he thought were his future in-laws.

Emily and Barbara were at the kitchen table looking through boxes of pictures when I arrived. They wanted to give me some snapshots of Dan. Barbara offered me a beer. Emily talked of her family; less than a year after she’d ended things with Dan, and not long before his death, she’d married someone else and now had two little children. She’d also found God, and this had led her to the belief that everything had worked out according to plan, that the Lord Jesus had known Dan was in trouble, and had sent her a signal to bail before she got caught up in trouble she couldn’t escape.

Our conversation danced around the edge of the reason I’d come there. No one knew how to talk about him for more than a minute or two. I wasn’t surprised; I could count on one hand the number of times I’d found someone willing to talk about him for longer than a minute or two in the six years since his death.

George said, Come here, I want to show you something.

He led me to the dining room. Against one wall stood a china cabinet Dan had made for him, an elegant piece fashioned from oak, with natural stain and a lustrous wax finish. I’d seen similar pieces in other homes, always beautiful and perfectly functional, including in the home of my parents, but no matter how many times I looked at his work it always impressed me with its craftsmanship.

The kid was good, George said. He took care. Not just with woodwork, but everything he did.

Emily took us to the guest bedroom and pointed to another of his pieces, a chest of drawers.

Dan made that for me when we first started dating, she said. I think he even signed it on the back of the bottom drawer.

Sure enough, when we pulled it out we found the words,
To Emily, From Dan, With Love
. We all stood in awkward silence. I turned away from the sight of a tear tracing the curve of Emily’s cheek.

George and I went together to the back yard, where more of Dan’s handiwork awaited: the swimming pool he’d helped George build, the shed they’d put up in which to store Dan’s hot air balloon. George spoke of summer afternoons they’d spent together grilling food, swimming in the pool, drinking beer, telling stories.

Even after Dan and Emily broke up, George said, we remained friends. It wasn’t easy for Emily. It was pretty awkward, if you want to know the truth. She thought of it as taking sides, but I couldn’t cut him out of my life.

George admitted—quietly, seemingly out of the side of his mouth—that he’d sought counseling after Dan’s death. He alone bore the horror of having discovered Dan’s body. I wouldn’t have known this if I hadn’t chased down the police report. But it was right there on the last page:

Ofc. Faerber advised that the decedent was found by a co-worker named George Goodwin. Mr. Goodwin had gone to the apartment to check on the welfare of the decedent because he had failed to show for work. Mr. Goodwin was able to gain access via the pass key provided by the building manager. Ofc. Faerber further advised that Mr. Goodwin had become startled upon discovery of the decedent. Mr. Goodwin then accidentally broke the stair rail from the wall. Mr. Goodwin did not proceed any further than the top of the stairs of the apartment interior. . . .

George led me back inside, where he retired to his study for the evening. The memories, it seemed, were too painful to explore any further.

One of the things I wanted to know was what had happened the morning his body was discovered. Six years had passed since that day, but I knew less than I thought I should about the hours surrounding the gunshot. I still believed that if I could tease a comprehensive narrative from those hours, I might be freed at last from the grip of a morbid devotion to the mystery of his death. Now that George was gone, I delicately broached the subject with Barbara. Between what she told me and what I’d read in the police report, the basic story of that morning came into as sharp a focus as it ever would.

It wasn’t like Dan to be late for work. George tried to call around ten o’clock. He hoped Dan had had too much to drink, was sleeping off a hangover. The phone rang. No answer until the machine picked up. George left a message. He tried to make a joke of it but he couldn’t hide the worry in his voice.

He left the work site where his crew was installing fiber-optic cable, the crew on which Dan was foreman. On his way home he drove past Dan’s apartment. Dan’s truck was parked in front of his door. George circled through the parking lot and left without stopping.

When George got home he told his wife that Dan was AWOL.

Why don’t you go check on him? Barbara asked.

I went by, he said. His truck’s still there.

He paused.

I don’t know. I’ve got a bad feeling.

What do you mean, a bad feeling?

He’s never been late. Something must be wrong.

Did you knock on his door?

No, George said.

He’s probably hungover and sleeping in.

Yeah, George said. I suppose you’re right.

He dialed Dan’s number again. This time he didn’t leave a message.

Just drive over and wake him up, Barbara said.

George loitered around the house. Twenty minutes passed.

Do you want me to go with you? Barbara said.

No, that’s all right, George said. I’ll do it.

He got in his truck. He drove to the apartment and parked in the lot. He waited for several minutes, unsure of what to do. If he hadn’t known Dan so well he might have been less concerned, but the kid was more to him than a hired hand. In the year since his daughter had broken off her engagement to Dan, George had walked a tightrope, honoring Emily’s decision but maintaining his closeness with the young man who was to have been his son-in-law. He worked with him every day. He still respected him. It had been difficult, no doubt about it. His jumbled-up feelings of loyalty to both of them. His hopes for both of them.

Now he sat paralyzed with dread.

He thought about driving off, just leaving, waiting at the work site until Dan showed. Finally, though, he worked up the courage to get out of his truck and go to the door.

He knocked. No answer. He knocked again. No sound of anyone stirring. He tried the door. It was locked.

He went to the office and found the manager, a guy by the name of Jones. He explained the situation. Jones got his keys. Another employee named Roschevitz joined them. They walked together to No. E43. Jones gave George the key.

George slipped the key in the lock. The door gave way. Inside, the shades were drawn, the apartment mostly dark, just one lamp on. He saw a figure sitting on the couch. He called Dan’s name, but there was no answer.

He started into the apartment. He made it a few feet. Then he saw the wound in the side of Dan’s head. He became very afraid. He tried to turn and leave, but in turning he pulled too hard on the handrail along the entryway steps. It gave way, tore from the wall. George stumbled on the stairs, righted himself, got himself out of the apartment. Jones looked at him and said, What is it?

The cops, George said, call the cops.

At the kitchen table, Emily and Barbara told more stories. Emily said that toward the end of her relationship with Dan, he’d been drinking a lot.

It was like there were two sides to him, she said. He was different when he drank. He got angry. One night he threw a glass against the wall and it shattered everywhere. That’s when I started having second thoughts about marriage. I wondered if I really knew him. I couldn’t figure out the source of his anger.

Barbara said that on the day before Dan killed himself he’d brought his gun to their house and sat at the kitchen table, exactly where we were now, and spent an hour or more cleaning it. This was the day after Wendy—the new woman, the one he’d started seeing after Emily called off the wedding—had broken up with him. Barbara’s mother, who’d been visiting that same day, later said she had an inkling Dan was suicidal, something in his voice and in his eyes, a hint of despair, the tenderness he’d shown the gun, as if preparing it for a moment of truth. She later wished she’d done something for him, something that would have saved him.

In this she was not alone.

Emily asked, Did your parents hate me when I called off the wedding? Were they angry with me? Did they blame me for what happened?

I assured her they did not.

Barbara left the table, and Emily and I sat there alone. She talked about traveling to Minnesota to meet my family for the first time, not long after she and Dan confirmed their engagement.

I felt like a queen, she said.

Everywhere they went people were thrilled to see Dan again, and all were curious about his bride-to-be. The enthusiasm with which they were greeted almost made her want to move to Minnesota. Some of Dan’s antics gave her pause, though, such as the midnight run of sign-stealing he and a friend had made on the lesser-traveled country roads, the sort of thing he and his buddies had done in high school and apparently had yet to grow out of. Emily, still a teenager herself, not even out of high school, didn’t exactly find her fiancé’s behavior indicative of maturity.

She leaned across the table, and a hush came over her voice.

I don’t know why, she half whispered, but I feel a strong connection to you. Like you’re my brother in a weird way. I know that makes no sense, since we only saw each other once before, but maybe we went through some of the same things afterward.

Yes, I told her, no doubt we did.

There’s something I want to ask you, she said. Dan had a secret. I’m pretty sure I’m the only person he ever told, but I wonder if he told you too.

I wasn’t sure what she meant but I couldn’t think of any secret.

I don’t know if I should share it now, she said. I mean, if you agree to keep someone’s secret do you still have to keep it after he’s gone?

I didn’t want to encourage the notion that she ought to keep his secret but I suspected she required a nuanced response if she was going to give it up. So I improvised.

I told her that my situation was unique: if I didn’t destroy all my notebooks, people would learn certain things about me after my death that might surprise them, and I had come to accept this. I couldn’t presume to tell her what to do, but I made clear I was curious about anything that could help me better understand my brother, especially since I could no longer ask him directly.

Just then Barbara walked back in the room.

You know, it’s getting late, Emily said. I need to get the kids to bed. I should show Phil how to get to his hotel. He can follow me there. I’ll see you guys tomorrow.

I hugged Barbara and said good night and wished her well, promised to keep in touch.

Emily and I drove to the hotel separately. We stood in the parking lot, in the warm night air of the desert, making more small talk. At last she dropped her bombshell.

What she wanted to tell me was that my brother had been raped. Dan had shared this with her not long before they broke up, when he knew he was losing her and was drinking hard in an effort to deny it. He’d been just a child when it happened, seven or eight years old, if she remembered correctly. When she told me Dan’s description of the person who’d done it—a certain someone with an identifying characteristic “who Dan said you both hated when you were young”—I knew exactly whom he’d meant.

I couldn’t bear to sit still with this news roaring inside my cranium, so I canceled my hotel reservation and drove south into the desert, windows rolled down, Satch and Duke’s
The Great Summit
on the stereo, as loud as I could stand it. I tried to hold my concentration to the lines on the road even as I felt something cold and hard calve inside of me like a glacier. Only past midnight did I finally fall asleep in the back seat of my rental car, alongside a lonely country road near Truth or Consequences, a place name whose bitter irony shadowed my feverish dreams. I had uncovered at last a hidden truth, though the consequences eluded me.

Into the Wilderness

O
f all the friends I had in the world, M.J. was foremost among those whose company I could tolerate under the circumstances. Temperamentally, we could hardly have been more different. She rolled through the world freestyle, exuding irreverence and mirth, always leading with the heart. Though she’d known darkness, she’d chosen not to hunker down and live inside of it, but its traces could be seen if you looked hard enough, etched in subtle lines on her face. Once she left her little hometown in Nebraska she committed herself to a cosmopolitan life of adventure and travel and refused to look back. She’d spent time in Alaska, Ghana, the Sahara, Costa Rica; she was taking a summer of paid R&R stateside, in her fire tower, before she began a master’s program in Argentina. She evinced a charming lack of guile that disguised a canny mind and allowed her to fit in anywhere, from the streets of Cairo to the cowboy bars of southern New Mexico. She stood five-foot-two and weighed a hundred pounds fully clothed; she chewed Levi Garrett and took her whiskey neat. To a guy like me she easily could have appeared a little too carefree: an impish world traveler in pigtails, a hell of a lot smarter than she let on, and more ambitious than she gave reason to suspect—a chameleon of sorts. Instead she’d drawn me, also a chameleon, irresistibly into her orbit, shown me things about openhearted friendship that I’d not known previously.