Under the Influence (23 page)

I
t was midday and I was helping the caterers carry in the plates and silverware when the snow-making equipment arrived. The idea was to transform Folger Lane into a replica of their Lake Tahoe home in winter, down to a giant snowdrift in front of the house. As the machine spit out the snow, Ava explained to me that because we were doing this for Swift, it would not be enough simply to create a pretty scene of a winter wonderland. Once the snowdrift was complete, there would be a large and prominently positioned squirt of yellow food coloring, to give the appearance that a dog had recently peed there.

As for the real dogs, Ava had sequestered them in her bedroom, with an assortment of dog treats, largely so Rocco—always the high-strung one—wouldn't have to deal with all the people and the frenetic pace of party preparations. Huge faux icicles hung along the eaves of the house, and along the front walk, snow sculptures of penguins. (Not exactly native to the Lake Tahoe habitat, but Ava was taking more than a few liberties.) There were more lights in the trees, and an igloo, which would be lit from within in a way that gave the thing a wonderful and mysterious glow.

Ollie would love this. Ollie, who was probably at the aquarium right about now, checking out a barracuda or a manta ray. Tamer fare than Swift's usual, but I knew that loving Ollie as he did, and knowing how
much Ollie would enjoy it, Swift would get into the whole thing. I suddenly wished I could have been the one introducing Oliver to the aquarium. Or Elliot and me, together.

Elliot
. No more of that.

“I can't wait to see what the igloo looks like in the dark with the lights on,” Ava had said, when the men had finished building it out of pale blue ice bricks. “It reminds me of my little bone china tea light holder.”

Ava had commissioned ice sculptures of the three dogs to go in the living room: One depicted Sammy and Lillian, curled up together on their dog bed; the other was of Rocco on his own. Mouth open, as usual. Barking.

Out behind the house, by the rose arbor, two men wearing jumpsuits with
MELTING MEMORIES
printed on the back were setting up another ice sculpture, in which photographs of Cooper had been embedded—almost as if he were an avalanche victim, buried and frozen, grinning out at the world of the living from some frigid eternity. At the far end of the pool, a plasma screen was set up, with an all-Swift video loop: Swift performing qigong, Swift running, Swift swimming, Swift dancing. Swift in warrior pose, Swift tossing a Frisbee to the dogs, Swift reclining on a floating lounge chair, cigar and drink in hand. The largest of the ice statues had been placed at the center of the garden—the life-size naked ice sculpture of Swift, whose penis contained a tube that dispensed champagne. Another utterly Swift-like concept.

“Someone's going to make the crack that the penis seems out of proportion to the rest of the sculpture,” Ava said. “And Swift will probably feel a need to prove them wrong.”

“Speak of the devil,” I said. “I was just thinking I should call those two. They should be heading home soon.” I was proud of myself for holding out this long before calling to check on Ollie.

No answer. “They probably lost track of time,” Ava said. “I figure they should be rolling in around seven thirty.”

I tried not to worry. Ava was right; the two of them were probably just having so much fun they'd lost track of time, but they'd show up by party time.

The work continued. It was amazing to see Swift and Ava's yard transformed. Among the ice sculptures and lights, Ava had arranged, somewhat incongruously, to install a fire pit, where the fire dancer was set to perform. There would also be a pole dancer, for no reason besides the fact that Swift loved pole dancing. A dozen tables had been set up with the custom-made place mats featuring a grinning image of Swift, biting into an exceptionally long cigar. At every place, wrapped in silver paper and tied with an ice-blue bow, was a copy of the book,
The Man Is a God,
along with an envelope containing a form guests could fill out to accompany a donation check in the honor of the birthday boy and made out to BARK. Suggested contribution: $2,000.

At four o'clock, Ava called Swift, but got no answer. “Those two are probably having such a great time they want to spend every minute they can fooling around together,” she said. “I bet they stopped at this Mexican place Swift loves, for a giant burrito.”

“They've still got plenty of time to get back here by the time the guests arrive,” I said, though I was aware, as I said this, of a small but insistent worry. I was wishing that whatever plan Ava had cooked up to get Swift out of town had not involved my son.

Cooper's fiancée, Virginia, arrived—beautiful though oddly forgettable looking. Virginia had spent the weekend with her parents in Palo Alto, working on wedding plans. Cooper had stayed in New York, she told us, working on some big deal, but his flight to SFO was due to get in that afternoon. He'd rent a car at the airport and drive straight from there.

Virginia went off for a pedicure. Estella took the dogs for a walk. Ava emerged with one of her special collagen-activating masks on her face. “Swift's still not answering his phone,” she said, looking vaguely worried. “Bad cell service, probably.”

Now I got scared. I was trying not to, wanting to give my son the gift of a day with his idol. Why hadn't I bought Ollie one of those cheap disposable cell phones he was always begging for, to stay in touch?

The guests began arriving at seven. Ava was obviously distracted now by her inability to reach Swift, as I was, knowing Ollie was with him.

Virginia had gotten back from the manicurist's long ago with her mother—the two of them now floating around the garden in blue and silver gowns, showing off their matching silver nail polish. But Cooper had yet to arrive.

“You know Cooper,” Ava said. “He's always late.”

Swift's friend Bobby was one of the first guests to show up, with his latest age-inappropriate girlfriend, this one named Cascade. Ernesto arrived early, too, along with the woman who had worked as Swift's personal assistant at his last start-up, Geraldine. I said hello to Ling and Ping, Swift's herbalist and her husband, and a bunch of others I didn't recognize—old business associates, probably. Renata came, without Carol, who had evidently left her recently for another woman. Ava's new protégée, Felicity, came dressed as a snow bunny. Evelyn Couture wore a vintage gown that looked like something Nancy Reagan might have owned during her White House years.

The mariachi band—also a little incongruous, given the winter setting (but Swift loved mariachi music) had started playing “La Bamba.” The pole dancer had set up her apparatus over by the pool, having been instructed to begin her act the minute Swift came through the door. The caterers, assisted by Estella, were circulating the first of the appetizers: raw salmon on thinly sliced rye bread with crème fraîche and caviar. Lillian and Sammy were wearing special birthday collars for the event. Because Rocco was upset by crowds, Ava had him contained upstairs in the master bedroom, with a very large bone to occupy him. “He can't handle the stress of all these people around,” Ava explained. “But he needs to know I'm nearby.”

No sighting of Cooper yet.

“This is so like Cooper,” Ava said, checking her watch. “He wants to make sure everyone's already there when he arrives, so he can make the most dramatic entrance.” But I knew the person whose absence really concerned her now was Swift. For me, of course, it was Ollie.

At half past eight, Ava made her way over to the statue of the naked Swift and held her glass under the champagne-dispensing penis fountain, then tapped it—the glass, not the penis—with a spoon.

“As everyone knows,” she said—the light catching her silver beaded full-length gown—“we're here to celebrate the birth of my amazing husband. This is supposed to be a surprise, though seeing your cars will probably give him a clue when he pulls up, as I know he will any minute now. Until he gets here, I just want to encourage you to take a look at the book our amazing friend Helen and I have put together for you all, commemorating all of Swift's great work on behalf of rescue animals throughout the Bay Area and, soon, all over our nation. Welcome to our home.”

I scanned the grounds. The guests appeared enraptured. All our weeks of planning had paid off, from the look of things.

“So many of you have asked what you could possibly give to a man who has so much,” Ava continued. “The answer is: You can give your support to our foundation, BARK, whose website we're launching tonight. With your help, dogs all over California and across the nation will be able to receive free spay and neuter services.”

“And hump each other to their hearts' content, with no consequences!” Swift's friend Bobby called out. “That's a cause dear to my buddy Swift's heart.”

“So thank you for joining us. And drink up.” Ava raised her glass in the general direction of the ice-sculpture penis. I reached for my mineral water.

The mariachis resumed playing. People had mostly gathered near the pool now to admire the talents of the pole dancer, to whom Ava had
given the instructions that she might as well start. Cooper's fiancée Virginia was checking her phone.

Estella emerged from the kitchen, but not with a tray this time. She was holding Ava's cell phone, wearing an expression I had never seen before. Whatever this was, it wasn't good.

I knew the moment Ava took the phone that it must be about Swift, and that meant it was about Ollie, too. I ran over to her.

She was still holding the phone. Just listening, but shaking her head. The mariachi music was so loud, it was hard to hear anything. I was screaming now.

Tell me. Tell me.

There had been an accident. Not in Monterey, but at Lake Tahoe. That's where my son and Swift had gone, evidently.

Someone was saying something about a boat.

T
he drive from Portola Valley to Lake Tahoe takes four hours and twenty minutes. Three and a half hours, if Swift were driving. We made it in Bobby's car in three and a quarter.

The first details the police had given Ava over the phone had been confusing. Sometime that afternoon, Swift's boat had collided with a Jet Ski out on the lake. All together, four individuals had been involved in the crash—two males, one young woman, and a child. Someone had sustained a life-threatening injury, but the officer who'd spoken to Ava had been unclear about the identity of that person.

“Your husband's at the hospital,” he told Ava. “We suggest that you get here as soon as possible.”

“Ollie!” I said to her. Screamed, more like it. “What about Ollie?”

She didn't seem to hear me. “We need to go now,” she said—not to me or to anyone. She had already begun to wheel her chair toward the door, like a person in a dream. A bad one.

Then Ernesto was lifting her into the front passenger seat of Bobby's car—for once, Ava showed no sign of objection to the help; she just wanted to get going. I dove into the back; Ernesto stowed Ava's chair in the trunk. Some of the guests were asking what had happened, but Ava seemed not to hear, or if she did, had no breath to respond. In the brief moment before the car door closed, Estella had put her arms around me.

“I pray for your boy,” she told me. There was more, but in Spanish.

“Just drive,” Ava told Bobby. He tore out of the driveway so fast the tires screamed. Behind us, the white lights glittered over the fake snow, but we weren't looking back.

What I remember of those three hours and fifteen minutes: Ava dialing her cell phone, not making any sense. Me reaching for mine—only who was I going to call? Not Swift. I dialed the police station in Truckee, California, but when I got a live person, I realized I couldn't hear over the sound of Ava's weeping.

“I'm looking for news about a boy,” I said. “Eight years old. He may have been involved in an accident.”

“Are you the mother?” A woman's voice on the other end of the phone, barely audible over Ava's moaning. “They have him at the hospital. It would be best if you get here as soon as possible.” More calls then. No clear word. Bobby was going ninety, but it still didn't feel fast enough.

We did not speak on the drive up. Bobby, at the wheel, had at first tried to offer a few words, but Ava told him to be quiet, and after that nobody said anything. I was aware, as we sat in the darkness, tearing up the highway, that in a terrible and unavoidable way, each of us must be praying it was the beloved person of the other who had been injured. Not the one belonging to us.

B
obby had driven up to the emergency entrance. I jumped out of the car before it came to a full stop. I didn't consider this at the time—didn't consider anything but whether my son was all right—but afterward it occurred to me that this must have been one of the moments in Ava's life when her inability to use her legs revealed itself most brutally. I could run into the hospital to talk with someone, finally. She had to wait for Bobby to get her chair out of the trunk and unfold it, then lift her onto the seat. Though I think if he'd taken another five seconds she would simply have flung herself on the ground and dragged herself up that ramp through the double doors.

No child by the name of Oliver McCabe had been admitted to the hospital. There was no Swift Havilland, either.

“The accident?” I said. “The boat crash?”

“You'll have to speak to someone else about that,” the woman told me. “I don't know anything about a boat crash. I just came on duty.”

Someone told me to go to the third floor. That's when I found them finally: my son and Swift, sitting with a police officer. Also—here came a shock—Cooper.

Swift and Cooper sat side by side at a table, the officer to one side taking notes. Swift had one Band-Aid on his forehead, nothing more. Cooper's right arm was in a sling.

I ran to Ollie, of course—slumped alone on a couch on the other side of the room. He had no visible injuries, though one look told me that something had happened to him that had left him deeply shaken. He was staring straight ahead. He was wrapped in a blanket, but even so his whole body was trembling.

“I hate that boat,” he said. “I'm never going on any more boats.”

“It's okay now,” I said. “I'm just going to hold you for a while.” Now that I'd seen him, and he was alive, the particulars of what had happened didn't seem that important, though later they would be.

Oliver couldn't stop shivering. I looked over at Swift now, speaking with the police officer. His expression, unlike Ollie's, remained remarkably unchanged from any other day—calm, reasonable, sober—though his trademark grin was absent. He appeared to listen intently to what the officer was saying, though Swift was doing most of the talking, with occasional interjections from Cooper.

What was Cooper doing at Lake Tahoe? (What were any of them doing at Lake Tahoe?) The last I knew, Cooper was supposed to be flying into SFO from New York. (Renting a car. Showing up at the party to meet up with his fiancée and deliver the big birthday toast to his father.) Now he was leaning back just a little on the molded plastic chair, legs spread wide apart in that way a certain kind of man is likely to sit, that always seemed, to me, to announce the presence of their manliness.
Here is my cock. Here are my balls. Any questions?

He had a Coke in one hand, cell phone in the other. He was wearing a pink polo shirt, with the little alligator appliqué on his left chest, his Ray-Bans suspended from his neck on a rubber cord, a two-day growth of beard in no way diminishing his handsomeness. The way he looked reminded me of one of the photographs of Swift I'd included in the
Man and His Dogs
book, taken when Cooper was sixteen or seventeen and had been named Prom King, class of 2000.

I would have expected to have spoken with Swift when I reached the waiting room—or he to me—but strangely, given our many months of
apparently close friendship, he seemed not to acknowledge my arrival, or, stranger still, the presence of my son. We remained on separate sides of the room—he with his son, I with mine. The unspoken message was clear: This was how things were going to stay. If I could have picked Ollie up right then and run away with him, I would have. Through the blanket, I could still feel his whole body trembling, though after those first syllables when I'd taken him in my arms, he had not spoken another word.

I looked back to Swift. Though he was not smiling, for once, his face seemed strangely placid. I thought fleetingly of Elliot, and how when he was anxious or upset he ran his hands through his hair and how crazy it looked. Elliot, who was normally so calm, acted agitated when he was upset. Swift, who was usually so outrageous and loud, seemed chillingly composed, at a moment when you might have supposed he'd be unsettled.

I missed Elliot. I wished he were here.

With my arms wrapped tightly around my son, I watched Swift talking with the policeman. He was gesturing with his hands, but without any hint of distress, as if he were telling the gardener where to plant the tulip bulbs, or recreating for a friend the workings of a particular play enacted by the 49ers at last Sunday's game. Beside him at the table, Cooper looked earnest, thoughtful, concerned. Now and then, as his father spoke, he nodded, and other times he shook his head—not as a person would who takes exception to what the other is saying, but simply by way of conveying how regrettable things were.

“He's just a little kid,” Cooper was saying, his voice level, reasonable. All evidence of the frat boy absent now. “It's not his fault.”

Cooper and Swift exchanged glances then. I had never recognized before how much they resembled each other. It came to me, they were speaking about my son.

“You have any kids, Norman?” Swift was saying now. Somewhere along the line he'd picked up the officer's first name. “You know how they are at that age.”

The police officer looked over at Ollie. Whatever else Swift was saying then, I didn't hear it. All my focus went to Ollie.

Just then, Ava came into the room in her wheelchair. She went immediately to Swift, seeming not to notice me and Ollie. “Finally!” she said. “Nobody could tell me what floor you were on.” She reached her long, thin arm—still in the silver beaded gown—to stroke his chest and smooth his hair. The way she touched him reminded me of how she would pet one of their dogs.

“You're okay,” she kept saying to Swift. “The only thing that matters is you're okay.”

A second officer came into the room. “Please, ma'am,” he said. “I know it's hard, but we need your husband's attention. We're trying to get a statement.”

A doctor entered, wearing surgical scrubs.

“She made it through the surgery,” he said. “But there was a lot of pressure on her brain. The impact was pretty severe. We won't know the extent of the damage for some time.”

“Who is he talking about?” I asked the second police officer, the new one.

“Ms. Hernandez,” he said. “I understand she was employed by the family. Or her mother is? She was thrown off the back of the Jet Ski. That young woman is lucky to be alive.”

Carmen.

L
ater now. I had lost track of the time, but it was early morning and we were at the police station now—my son asleep, at last, on a cot they'd provided, with a blanket over him, and a second blanket because he was shivering so badly, which had nothing to do with the temperature. One of the officers had offered me a cot, too, but I couldn't sleep, so I just sat on the floor next to Ollie, with my arms still locked around him.

Sometime around dawn, the officer came in to say he'd finished his
report—“just the initial findings”—and that he was ready to tell me what appeared to have happened, based on his interviews with Swift and Cooper, neither of whom had spoken to me directly.

“We'll want to have a talk with your son, too, naturally,” he said. “But he's in no shape for that now. We might want to have a child welfare officer present, just to assess how much of this he can handle.”

I didn't want to leave Ollie, but he finally appeared to be sleeping soundly, so I followed the officer into the other room and sat down across from him at his desk.

Reynolds
was the name on his badge. “So,” I said. “What can you tell me?”

“I understand that Mr. Havilland had brought your son Oliver up to the lake to give him a ride in his power boat,” Officer Reynolds offered.

“This wasn't the plan,” I said. “They were supposed to be spending the day in Monterey.”

“According to Mr. Havilland,” Officer Reynolds said, “he'd wanted to surprise your boy. I gather this was something the two of them had talked about for a long time.”

“They were supposed to be going to the aquarium,” I said. For whatever that was worth. Nothing, evidently.

“Unbeknownst to Mr. Havilland, his son Cooper had chosen to pay a visit to the house sometime earlier—the day before—and brought along a friend of his, Ms. Hernandez,” the officer continued.

Described this way—based on his interview with Cooper, I gathered—the whole thing sounded wonderfully uncomplicated. A cookout on the grill. A dip in the lake. A little card game. (A little fooling around, too, no doubt. But that was not a police matter.) Then, on Saturday afternoon they took out the Jet Ski. The younger Mr. Havilland thought he'd show this young woman around the lake.

Sometime in the late afternoon Mr. Havilland, senior, had shown up with Ollie.

Late afternoon? The two of them had set out at six that morning.
What took them so long to make what should have been a four-hour trip? What was Swift thinking, arriving at Lake Tahoe late in the afternoon, with full knowledge that he needed to be home in time for dinner that night?

No answer for any of that. All the police officer had to say was that Mr. Havilland arrived, by his own account, sometime around 4:00 or 5:00
P.M
. He had not been concerned to see another car in the driveway already, because he recognized the vehicle as the yellow Dodge Viper his son Cooper liked to rent whenever he flew home to San Francisco. He figured Cooper had come west to surprise him on his birthday and was taking an extra couple of days to enjoy the lake house. He had his own key, and it was not uncommon, he had said, that he'd use it this way, as a getaway.

“Since there was no sign of the younger Mr. Havilland on the premises, Mr. Havilland, senior, deduced that his son must be out enjoying the lake, as he and your son intended to do,” Officer Reynolds continued.

“This was confirmed when he recognized that one of the two Jet Skis was missing from the boathouse. So he drove down to the landing for the purpose of lowering his speedboat”—he consulted his notes here—“the
Donzi
. . . into the lake.”

I was listening, but only partly. It was hard to focus, knowing Ollie was in the other room. I didn't want to leave him by himself. If he woke up afraid, or had a bad dream, I wanted him to know he wasn't alone. But I was having trouble making sense of the officer's account of the events of that afternoon. Or what Cooper and Swift could possibly have been thinking, heading out onto the lake for a boat ride, and a Jet Ski ride, on the afternoon of the day when they knew they were due back on Folger Lane by seven thirty. At least one of those two—Cooper—knew a big party would be under way at which his presence, not to mention his father's, was expected. Even Swift had to have realized something was up for his wife to have been so insistent
that they make it home no later than eight. We had both known, as he set off on the trip, that he was humoring her when he acted as if there were nothing unusual in Ava's insistence that he go away for the day with Ollie.

“Apparently your son and Mr. Havilland rode around on the boat for no more than fifteen or twenty minutes before the trouble occurred,” the officer continued. “Mr. Havilland explained that this particular model of speedboat is capable of getting up to speeds as high as eighty miles per hour. But he had made it plain to Oliver that they would not be doing that kind of racing. This was meant to be strictly a child's pleasure trip.”

I nodded. More numb than in agreement. The Swift I knew would not be averse to taking a boy on a thrill ride.

“Mr. Havilland has made it plain to us that he is adamant about water safety,” the officer went on. “At first his plan had been only to take Oliver out on the smaller dinghy with the outboard motor, or the kayak, but your son was so insistent about going on this bigger boat that he finally acquiesced.”

They'd driven up there to ride the Donzi. That was the whole point of the trip. Those two didn't travel over four hours for a ride in a dinghy. I didn't say this. I just thought it.

“Unfortunately, your son evidently displayed a strong resistance to wearing his life jacket,” Officer Reynolds continued. “I gather he had been somewhat argumentative and oppositional for much of the day, but Mr. Havilland attributed this to the boy being overtired.”

“He may have been tired,” I said. But none of the rest made any sense. If Ollie hadn't wanted to put on his life jacket, it was hard to picture Swift making an issue of it. It was even harder to imagine Ollie ever being argumentative—or “oppositional”—with Swift. Every time I'd seen those two together, Ollie behaved like the most obedient and loyal puppy.

“As you would expect, Mr. Havilland took a firm position. He
explained to your son that there would be no ride in the boat unless he agreed to wear the life jacket. At this point, Ollie reluctantly complied.”

The crash, I thought. Tell me about the crash
.

“But evidently your son kept giving Mr. Havilland a hard time about the life jacket,” the officer said. “You know how mouthy kids can get.”

Maybe I did. But not Ollie, not to Swift.

According to this police officer, Ollie continued to “mouth off” to Swift about the life jacket. He had used an epithet describing the kind of person who wears life jackets.

“I don't want to repeat this epithet, Ms. McCabe,” he said to me. “Let's leave it that the word begins with ‘P.' Then Ollie starts asking if he could drive the boat. Mr. Havilland says no. Under no circumstances. They were rounding the point just south of Rubicon Bay, if you're familiar with that area.”

I shook my head. “I've only been to Lake Tahoe once before,” I told him.