Dante's Dilemma (21 page)

“It's all right. That's why I invited you over here. I thought it was better than us going around avoiding one another every time our paths crossed.”

“You're being too gracious. I—”

“Ssshh,” Candace said. “Or I'll reconsider my good intentions. I'd rather have us remain friends, as well as neighbors. Just come over and keep me company now and again, like you have tonight.”

“I will if you'll let me reciprocate.” I made a wry smile. “Not that I'm much of a cook.”

“Then let me teach you. Something tells me you neglect your stomach a good deal of the time.”

“You're not worried about letting me handle your knives?”

“So long as you take them
by
the handle.”

I slept poorly that night, plagued by vivid dreams. For a change, they weren't about Jack or my father. Or at least I didn't think so when my alarm went off. I almost always greet the day with a sense of trepidation that gradually lessens as I go about my morning routines. But today the feeling was worse, a knob of dread that resisted explanation, like someone had installed a pager in my brain that wouldn't stop beeping. Try as I might, I couldn't shut it down, not until after I had showered and was pouring milk on my cereal, when suddenly in the way dreams sometimes have of exploding into our consciousness, I remembered the one I was having just before I woke up.

I was in woods somewhere, deep north woods filled with pines overhung with moss, like the ones I had once camped in as a Boy Scout. Overhead a full moon hung high between the branches, lighting the forest almost as if it were daylight, etching inky shadows in the underbrush. I startled at a branch cracking behind me and turned to find a handsome, dark-haired woman I knew must be Alison. “Hurry,” she said. “There isn't much time.” I looked at her arms and saw that they were empty. “Where's Mika?” I asked. “That's who we have to find,” she replied. “But we have to be careful. There are wolves all around.” She pointed the way and I followed, stepping carefully between the gnarled roots of the path she showed me. Then we reached a clearing of sorts where the moonlight shone so brightly it blinded me. “Hurry!” Alison said from somewhere up ahead where I could no longer see her. “I can't!” I cried. “I'm stuck.” Alison reappeared and scolded me. “No you're not. You only think you are!”

The rest of the dream slipped away then, just as suddenly as it had emerged. I heard something dripping and realized the milk had overflowed the bowl.
Perfect
, I thought, as I scurried to find a paper towel. It was only after I'd mopped up the mess and could consider the dream's meaning that I understood both its source and my anxiety. It didn't require any special psychiatric training. A child could have figured it out.

I hadn't yet done what my lawyer had asked me to do.

Still in my bathrobe, I turned on the television news. According to Tom Skilling, the Windy City's cheery messenger of meteorological calamity, the snowstorm that had started the day before wasn't expected to taper off until midafternoon. In the meantime, conditions were bleak. Schools were closed and all nonessential city, state, and private-sector employees were being urged to stay home. Sadly, nonessential probably applied to me, too. With the Lazarus trial over and my patients still being handled by my colleagues, I no longer had an excuse. If I was going to be snowbound, I might as well put the time to good use.

It was too early to call Yelena to tell her I wouldn't be in. Breakfast forgotten, I went to my small home office and rooted around in the moving crates for a legal pad and a pencil. I still sometimes doodled, a holdover from my sighted days that helped me think through a problem. I put both down on my desk and sat in the chair. I pushed the pencil down hard against the pad and drew harsh lines back and forth until the first sheet of paper was scored through. I tore it off, tossed it in a ball onto the floor, and started on another. I continued in this way through a few more sheets until the pencil point broke off. Another search through the boxes located my electric sharpener, which needed to be plugged in somewhere. The search for an outlet consumed another five minutes.

I was stalling.

I sat back down with the sharpened pencil and refocused. Like soldiers falling into formation, bits and pieces of that harrowing day began coming back to me.

7:00 a.m. Annie, swollen belly bulging beneath her pajamas, telling me Jack was running a fever . . .

9:00 a.m.
Me, stranded in traffic on the Hudson, pulling a journal from my briefcase and flicking on the dashboard light . . .

10:00 a.m. Late to work. Patient meltdown. Rounds, meetings, more patients . . .

Another ball of paper on the floor.

6:45 p.m. Annie calling. Jack's temperature up, crying constantly. “Annie, I've told you over and over. Fevers in young kids, even high ones, are nothing to get upset about.”

7:30 p.m. Dinner.

8:45 p.m. Sex.

10:15 p.m. Waking in confusion . . .

More harsh scribbling. More hurled paper.

10:45 p.m. Dead battery

12:00 a.m. I-95 backed up for miles. Tapping, tapping my fingers on the wheel

12:45 a.m. Home. Annie hysterical.

12:50 a.m. Take the stairs two at a time and . . .

That was as far as I got before I broke down.

Time may dull our sins but it never pardons them.

I had rarely let myself to weep for my lost son, but I did so now, allowing the full weight of my crime to engulf me. Without wanting to, I had been no better than my father, causing irredeemable harm to my own flesh and blood. Perhaps it would have been better if I too had died young, under one of his many beatings. Then Jack wouldn't be dead and I wouldn't be here now, blind, impotent, and torn apart by remorse. Would I ever find a measure of peace?

I allowed the tears to come for a long time while the snow, in frigid counterpoint, continued falling outside.

It was only the thought of the living that eventually pulled me out of it. Louis was my son too and might stay that way if I could put aside my grief and think. Feeling hollow and a bit weak, I wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my robe and went back to the kitchen, noting along the way how much progress I'd made in mastering my new living arrangements. Moving from one room to the other was becoming far less treacherous. I filled a teapot and set it on the range, and circled the kitchen island several times while I waited for the water to boil, letting my mind empty of everything except the task at hand. What was it Alison had said to me on Christmas Day?
Haven't you ever thought about what Annie was doing all that time you were gone?

Sleeping was what I'd always imagined. She was eight months pregnant, worn out from dealing with Jack all day. I had come home to her like that many times before: passed out on the family-room sofa, drained to the point of depletion. Usually I didn't try to rouse her. With the baby pressed up against her diaphragm, deep slumber was hard to come by. I would cover her with an afghan and put a pillow under her head, and she would murmur good night from some faraway place and stay there until morning while I performed guard duty: camped out on the floor of Jack's room so that I could immediately arrest any sound from his crib. When it came to Jack, Annie was like the princess and the pea. His slightest whimper would instantly wake her.

And that's when I realized the flaw in my thinking.

Jack couldn't have rested quietly that night. With the meningitis consuming him, he would have tossed, turned, and at the very least moaned until he fell into the comalike stupor I found him in when I burst through the door. And Annie wasn't sleeping when I came home either. She was pacing the den, red-eyed and strung-out. What else had Alison said?
If it had been me, I would have been screaming for an ambulance long before you returned.
Why hadn't Annie called for help when she couldn't reach me? A memory flooded in on me then, aided by my precision recall. The state of the room when I found her, everything as usual except . . . except for
something
. I put the picture before my mind's eye and scanned it, going from object to object until I saw: the wireless home phone empty of its receiver. Where else had I seen it that night? Damn it, where?

On the nightstand beside Jack's crib.

It didn't necessarily mean anything. I knew that Annie had tried several times to reach me. Later, I could see the calls lined up on my pager like the articles of an indictment. It was only because I had turned it off while sleeping with another woman—and then forgotten to turn it back on—that I failed to heed her frantic summonses. But thinking back on it now, all of her calls to me were before 9:30, a good three hours before I got home. Something had caused her to stop trying. Some
thing
—or was it someone else she had spoken to?

There was a simple way to find out. In theory, anyway, depending on how long the phone company kept records. It was only a few years ago. If I was lucky, they still had them. Whatever the answer, it paid to give them a call. I had written checks to New England Bell often enough, and the 800 number atop the service invoices came back to me easily. I could dial it right now.

If I had the stomach for it.

In a sudden flash of self-recognition, I realized why I had never asked these questions before. It wasn't merely because I was too ashamed of my role in Jack's death. It was also because I couldn't bear to think that Annie—beautiful, bland, and essentially guileless Annie—had kept the truth from me out of spite. If so, it implied a failure of our marriage much worse than I had ever imagined. If she had hated me that much.

But once I had started asking, there was no going back. It took a solid half hour of waiting on hold and the robotic announcement, “Your call may be monitored for quality-control assurance,” repeated over and over before a live human being came on the line.

“Hello. My name is Megan. How can I assist you today?”

“You're talking about CDRs,” she said after I'd explained what I was looking for.

“CDRs?”

“Call Detail Records. Yes, we keep them for five years.”

“If I give you a date, can I get them sent to me?”

“Yes. What is the account number?”

I waited anxiously while she inputted the data into her terminal. It had just occurred to me that Annie might have changed the name on the account after I left.

“Yes,” she said finally. “We have a current account with that number, billed to a D. Mark Angelotti.”

“That's me,” I said, silently thanking my luck.

“I'll need your passcode to activate the request.”

Shit
, I thought. My memory was good, but not that good.

“Or a Social Security number,” she added helpfully.

I listened restlessly while she explained that it would take seven to ten business days for my request to be acted on. “Shall I have the records sent to the address at 850 Maple Lane in Cos Cob, Connecticut?”

Another potential hitch. “Er, would it be possible to forward them to me elsewhere? I'm temporarily based in Chicago.”

“Certainly. I'll just need that address.”

She took it down and informed me that a ten-dollar processing fee would be billed automatically to my account and appear on my next statement. I decided it would be pushing things to offer to pay it by credit card.

“Is there anything else I can help you with today?” Megan asked.

“No, you've been more than helpful.”

I was taking a deep breath to steady myself when my phone started sounding again, to the tune of Jim Croce's “Operator.” Thinking it was Megan calling back to say I had just been discovered in a fraud, I nervously punched the answer button.

But it wasn't the phone company.

It was Michelle Rogers.

NINETEEN

“What was so important that we needed to talk about it here?” I said to Michelle.

“Please. I'll tell you, but we have to keep it down.”

We were in a tavern on West North Avenue appropriately called the Outpost. To get there, I'd had to take the ‘L' to the Loop and the Blue Line to a stop on North Damen, a mere half a mile away from the place Michelle said she wanted to meet. In all, the trip had taken me two hours, not counting the number of times I had to detour around the lawn chairs staking a claim to parking spaces on the street.

I looked around the room—metaphorically speaking. The place was so dark, it could have been a coal mine. That is, if coal mines exuded the odors of perspiration, beer suds, and lard. Scuttling sounds near my feet told me all I needed to know about the booth we were seated in, along with the stuffing jutting out at angles from the Naugahyde bench. If I had to guess, there was more than one video gambling machine on the premises.

“I don't think there's much risk of us being overheard,” I said. Besides the bartender clinking glasses on the opposite side of the room, the only other indication of human life was someone snoring loudly in a corner. “You couldn't have picked a nicer location? Like one of the restrooms at Union Station?”