Pharmakon (25 page)

Her husband came up the stairs slowly and grabbed a sport coat. “I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

“Are we safe?”

“No.” One of the patrol cars stayed parked in front of the house while Friedrich drove off with Sergeant Neutch.

She was still holding Jack. He was getting heavier. Jack yawned and nestled his face into her neck. Nora told the others she was going to go down and make Jack a peanut butter sandwich before she put him down for bed.

Fiona picked up
Charlotte’s Web
where she left off, reading aloud to Willy and Lucy in her most grown-up voice.

By the time she got to the kitchen Nora was feeling a kind of exhausted that scared her and made her dizzy. The weight of Jack suddenly seemed unbearable. It took all her strength to open the refrigerator door. She felt impossibly tired, as if life were a weight pressing in on her on all sides. She forgot why she’d come there, how she’d gotten to this point in time and place. She put Jack down and leaned back against the stove. The pressure increased. Breathing seemed scary. She wished she didn’t have lungs. There was no safety from anything, not even this. She imagined that this was what it felt like if she were a diver on the bottom of the ocean who was getting ready to drown, who had already given up.

It was the same feeling Nora had had the other time, when she’d felt so overwhelmed by the inevitability of disappointment, the pointlessness of enduring, that she could not lift her hands or open her mouth to stop Jack from reaching into the frosting and upending the five-pound bag of sugar onto the floor. She watched him turn and move toward the door. Her eyes were open, but her brain would not tell her what she saw.

As Friedrich and Sergeant Neutch turned up the hill, an ambulance wailed by, lights flashing, sirens on. Three state police cars and a second ambulance were parked haphazardly on the cobblestone circle in front of Winton’s house. Car doors were open. A police radio crackled.

The stepdaughter was in the back of one of the cruisers. Friedrich and Sergeant Neutch heard her scream as they walked beneath the rustle of the blighted elms. The girl kicked and flailed at the doctor who held the hypodermic aloft like a knife.

Neutch filled Friedrich in. The stepdaughter had come home from a tennis lesson and found her father in the front hall, crumpled facedown at the foot of the stairs. She thought he’d fallen, knocked himself unconscious, until she rolled him over.

Thayer’s face was covered with blood. A .22 caliber bullet had entered his head just to the left of his nose and exited through his jaw—Thayer had been in the ambulance that had screamed past them.

“Sorry to see you again under these circumstances.” Neutch was talking, Friedrich wasn’t listening.

“We’ve met?”

“I was there when the parrots showed up.” They shook hands again. Friedrich didn’t know what to say.

A flashbulb exploded in Friedrich’s face as he followed Neutch into the house he once envied. A police photographer was taking pics of the crime scene. Chalk outlined the spot where Thayer had nearly drowned in his own blood. A state cop with a cauliflower ear told Friedrich more than he wanted to know. “He was still here when the daughter came home.”

“Who?” Flashbulbs, blood, and fear disoriented Friedrich.

“Casper Gedsic. The kid on the motorcycle you called about.”

“Oh yeah, right.”

“You think someone else was involved?”

Friedrich stared into the library. The crime photographer was taking pictures of Winton now. She was sprawled back in her chair behind her desk. Her head was tilted to the side, inquisitively. The desk drawers had been rifled. Rating scales were scattered across the floor. One of the state cops was standing on a piece of graph paper that illustrated their success. Winton’s eyes were wide open. She returned Friedrich’s stare. She looked . . . surprised. They didn’t see this coming. There was a bullet hole in her throat.

“Dr. Friedrich, I asked you a question.” The cop with the cauliflower ear was still waiting for an answer.

“What?”

“Do you think someone else had a hand in this?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

The state cop who’d been on the car radio came in and announced, “They just found the motorcycle behind the bus terminal.”

“You have any idea where he might be going, Dr. Friedrich?”

Friedrich shook his head no.

“We talked to the Bouchard kid whose motorcycle he stole. He said Gedsic had a death list. You were number one, Winton was number two. Any idea why he didn’t do this to you first?”

Friedrich was still shaking his head no.

“Well, you’re lucky.” Friedrich did not feel that way.

Neutch drove him home. Gray called out hello as he and the cop walked across the freshly planted tulip beds. The other cop who’d been left watching over the family was in the kitchen, eating canned spaghetti with the kids. Willy was asking to see his gun. Fiona was pestering the officer with questions. “Have you ever killed anyone? Would you kill anyone? What if you shot an innocent bystander?”

Lucy was drawing a picture of the tulip bed in full bloom to cheer Daddy up. Nora had told them their father had gone to help someone who was sick.

As soon as Friedrich made eye contact with his wife he began to weep. Willy burst into tears and ran to him, clutching his leg. Fiona had her arms around his waist. Lucy sat in place, tears streaming down her face, trying to draw a picture that would make everyone stop crying.

Nora’s lower lip trembled. A tear careened down her cheek as she wrapped them all in her embrace. “We’re going to get through this.” Neutch and the other cop averted their eyes from the intimacy of this resolve.

Lucy stared out the window. “There’s a man in our garden.”

Neutch ran to the window. “Where? I don’t see anything.”

“I only saw his shadow behind the pricker bushes.”

Friedrich’s world swirled around him. “Where’s Jack?”

Fiona looked under the table, Lucy checked the bathroom, Nora ran into the backyard. Friedrich was right behind her. He was still calling his son’s name when Nora wailed, “No!”

The birdbath in the heart of the tulip moon had been pulled off its pedestal. It had fallen at a puzzlingly oblique angle. Jack’s face was lifeless in two inches of water. The bruise on his forehead continued to swell and darken even after Jack was pronounced dead.

BOOK II

M
y first distinct memory is looking for myself in the family photo album. It was 1958 and I was four and a half. The album was as thick as a Bible, bound in leather; its leaves were stiff with snapshots pasted on imitation parchment, oversized pages in a fairy tale illustrated by Kodak, waiting for a text.

My hands could barely grasp it. Homer, my father’s older brother, was sitting next to me on the couch. My brother Willy, then nine years old, had twice the vocabulary of Homer, who was forty-two and had a beard that was worthy of a nineteenth-century statesman. Silky and black, it hid the cave in his jaw where the mad doctor had tried to cure him of his simplicity by pulling teeth.

Homer gave himself a one-armed hug as he rocked back and forth, repeating the same phrase over and over again. With his free hand he helped me flip the pages without ripping them: “Careful. If we tear the page, the page will be torn.”

That day I was wearing my favorite shirt—cowboy. It had pearly plastic snaps instead of buttons and Roy Rogers embroidered on the breast pocket, tossing a lasso over my heart. Homer sported a tie and suspenders, his pants coming almost to his armpits. Fiona was thirteen going on fourteen then. The night before, while drying the dishes, she was reprimanded by my father for calling Homer retarded. My father said he was “special.” Back then that word wasn’t thrown around the way it is today.

As it is with all memories, some of this I did not remember but learned later; I embellished it, colored it in with information garnered from undigestible tales regurgitated over family dinners, from conversations and arguments that helped pass the miles on family car trips, and from looking at the snapshots my father was taking of that day as I sat with Homer and Lucy on the couch. The future ferments the past, some memories become more intoxicating with time, others evaporate. It’s hard to separate what you think happened from what you know happened. Especially in our family.

All I know at this first moment of recall is that the couch smells like Homer, scents I will later come to identify as Old Spice and baby powder. A double hernia forced Homer to wear a truss that looked scary and chafed. Lucy sat on the other side of Homer. She looked older than twelve and had told me she had just gotten her first bra. She couldn’t decide whether it was tragic or beautiful that Homer would never know how handsome he was. Homer, at that point in time, did in fact bear an uncanny resemblance to Montgomery Clift in the part of Sigmund Freud released four years later as
Freud: The Secret Passion.

Homer and my grandmother were visiting from Illinois. It was the first time they had ever been east. Ida, as my grandmother liked to be called, had hennaed hair, a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s
The Prophet
in her purse, and a Ouija board in her suitcase. She called my father “Sonny Boy.” And though Ida talked not unlike the farmers who rode wagon trains west on
Million Dollar Movie
(we had a TV now), my grandmother had a homespun, haughty elegance and a habit of holding your face between her thumb and her forefinger to make sure you were looking her in the eye, all the while chain-smoking Pall Malls through a red Bakelite cigarette holder.

As Homer and I flipped through the pages of the photo album, Fiona showed off at our new baby grand piano, Beethoven, “Für Elise.” My mother passed a tray of iced tea. A pair of big liver-and-white ticked pointers stood guard just inside the front door and began to bark as the boy next door approached our door. His name might have been Bud; I definitely remember he wanted Willy to come out and play catch.

Homer laughed when Gray, the parrot who lived on our front porch, called out the dogs’ names in my mother’s voice, “Thistle, Spot: Hush.” The dogs minded the parrot better than my mother. Homer was still helping me flip the pages. They’re crowded with tiny black and white snapshots with crimped edges. There were pictures of everyone but who I was looking for—me.

Homer seemed to sense my anxiety, or perhaps he just got tired of warning me about tearing the page. Whatever, his serious baritone reassured me: “We’ll find you. You’re here, so you’re here.”

Sure enough, when he turned the page there was a photograph bigger than all the rest in the album. I recognized the cowboy shirt I was wearing. Homer tapped the picture with his long, white finger. “There’s Zach.” That was my name: Zachariah Wood Friedrich.

“Look,” I shouted to the room. “There’s me!” Sometimes, when I dial up this first moment of self-awareness, I hear my father’s voice telling me, “That’s not you; that’s your brother Jack.” Other times it’s my mother who gives me my first hint about how much I don’t know about what I think I know. They must have mentioned Jack’s name before, but this was the first time I heard he was my brother.

Homer clasped his head in his hands and wailed, “Sorry!” Even Homer knew more about Jack than I did. I remember being profoundly confused.

“If he’s my brother, why doesn’t he live with us?” Lucy reached over and tried to snatch the album out of my hands, but I wouldn’t let go of it. “Where is Jack?” I asked.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry . . .” Homer wailed the same word over and over again like he was a phonograph record and the needle was stuck in his groove.

My father put his hand on Homer’s shoulder. “It’s not your fault, Homer.” Whose fault was it? I wondered.

Lucy was still tugging on the album, trying to get me to turn the page on Jack. “Look, Zach, here’s a picture of you and me sleigh riding in the snow.”

“Where is Jack?” I demanded, as Willy slipped out the door to play catch—his least favorite activity next to playing with me.

Ida announced, “Jack is in the celestial kingdom on the other side.” Ida was a theosophist—she reached out her hand to make me see eye to eye with her, but my father pushed her away before she could get me in her clutches.

“Stay out of this, Ida.” Even my dad called her Ida.

“Jack!” Gray took up the call from his perch on the front porch. My father slammed the window. It didn’t stop the parrot from calling out the name of the lost son. “Jaaack.”