It was 5:00 p.m. the next day before Sarah heard from Karl Medford.
“How are you?” he asked.
She had no idea how to answer. How were you supposed to be doing in a situation like this? What was the bar? She was at work, her daughter was dressed, fed, at camp; she assumed these were signs that she was okay. Still, she feared that at any second she would collapse to the ground, a scream without end escaping.
“I don’t know,” Sarah admitted. “Did you see Linda?”
“Yes. I went to her house this morning.”
“And?” Her voice was guarded, cautious. What she really wanted to ask was: Is she prettier than me, smarter than me, what was the spell she had on my husband?
“She’s a cool customer, but she is not acting like a woman with something to hide. I pressed her pretty hard and she didn’t waiver on her story. If she knows something she’s not admitting, she’s damn good at hiding it. I believe she is truly convinced Todd is alive. Whether that’s due to some unconscious denial about playing a part in a potential suicide or because she has information she’s not sharing remains to be seen.”
“Did you see the garage where he left his things?”
“Yes. I spent a good deal of time poking around there. Everything looks as if he left abruptly with the idea of returning. His lighter was sitting on the desk, there was a sculpture he was designing laid out on the floor. His CDs, his tools, everything was all there. Whatever happened, it doesn’t look to me like he planned it.”
Sarah listening silently as Medford listed the accoutrements of Todd’s life, all signs that he was putting down a stake there, with Linda, away from her.
“I didn’t see any note, any statement of intent,” Medford continued. His words, his modulated rhythm, remained those of a detective creating a cool distance between himself and the events he was describing.
“What about the drawings?”
“Well, like the police said, one seems to say Lonely Head, Dead and the other Drowned, but I’m not really sure. There appear to be other words scratched out, covered up. Maybe some numbers. It’s hard to tell if they are actual words or just scrawls, some kind of design. I can’t make them out. I don’t know his previous work, so I don’t have a context to put them in. Maybe you’ll have better luck.”
There were times when Sarah had felt Todd’s work echoing within her. Just before Eliza was born, he had made a piece called Sleep, an oblong upside U with tendrils falling and curving down that perfectly captured those few moments of half-reality when thoughts dissipate into dreams. During the first months of Eliza’s life, Sarah would rock her at three, four in the morning, exhausted beyond words, and picture that sculpture, concentrate on it, believing that if she could somehow impart the image into Eliza’s brain, it would lull her into sleep.
There were other instances, though, when she did not comprehend what he was after, could not parse the oblique language of abstraction. Sometimes she admitted that to Todd, sometimes she merely nodded as if she understood.
“I’ll FedEx the drawings to you,” Medford said. “I also have his wallet and his address book. If it’s all right with you, I’ll make photocopies of the address book. I began to go through it and call some of the names, but I still have a way to go. By the way, are you familiar with a Dr. Carlin?”
“No. Who is he?”
“His name was in the address book, so I gave him a call. Turns out he’s a psychiatrist in New York. Todd went to see him about six weeks ago.”
“Todd went to a psychiatrist?” Sarah was shocked. He hated the idea of therapy, and all during the last year when she had been begging him to get help he had refused.
“Carlin said he only saw Todd once and that his presenting complaint was insomnia. He said Todd was blaming himself for the breakup of the marriage.”
“How can he tell you all this? What about doctor-patient confidentiality?”
Medford paused. “Well, when there is the possibility of death…”
“Oh.”
“Carlin did say that he thought Todd was a little manic, a bit of a whirlwind, but he made no mention of suicide. He didn’t show up for his next appointment.”
“Did he talk about Linda?”
“No.”
There was no small satisfaction in this.
“I spoke to a few other people,” Medford said, “just working through the alphabet, but so far no one has heard from him. One good thing came out of my visit with Linda, though.”
“What’s that?”
“I asked if she’d be willing to take a lie detector test and she said yes. Brook is going to give her a voice stress analyzer, which is basically the same thing.”
“I’m surprised she agreed to that.”
“She resents the innuendos. Like I said, she is convinced Todd will return.”
Sarah, alone in her office a thousand miles away, said nothing.
“I don’t know how much information Brook will share about the results,” Medford added.
“Will you call me as soon as you hear?”
“Of course. It might not take place for a couple of days, though. In the meantime, I’ll put all of Todd’s things in the mail. There’s a chance you’ll see something in them that I wouldn’t recognize as a clue.”
When Sarah got home that night, Eliza stuck her head out of her bedroom, stared at her, and then promptly slammed the door shut with all her might. Whenever Sarah tried to touch her, to gently move a strand of hair off her face, to lean over and kiss the soft spot on her forearm just below her elbow, Eliza flinched as if in pain and pushed her mother forcefully away. She would not allow any form of comfort, and Sarah realized as she looked over at the anger contorting her daughter’s face that they had entered a new stage. They did not talk of Medford that night. They lay side by side in the dark until Eliza’s eyes finally fluttered shut. Only then did Sarah gently lean over to kiss her, deeply nostalgic for the little girl she used to be.
The phone rang an hour later, just as Sarah was climbing into bed herself. It was Harry DeVeres, an artist who had shown at the same SoHo gallery as Todd. The two men had been occasional drinking buddies in their heady early days, sharing the exhilaration as well as the discomfort of being the lucky ones who were getting solo shows, racking up important sales, when most of those they had started out with were still putting up Sheetrock and wondering if it would ever happen for them. Harry had married a woman with a sizable inheritance and ten acres of land in Rhinebeck, where they had moved three years ago. Sarah hadn’t thought of him for years; he had only been resurrected by a call from Medford.
Harry was a large man, over six feet tall and stocky, given to great torrents of enthusiasm—for food, for wine, for art, for people. Sarah remembered a night early in her relationship with Todd when they all had dinner in her apartment and the two men argued about the recent Whitney Biennial for hours while Sarah listened, happy to have found the life she had wanted—passion and art and intellect all rolled into one.
“I told him to stop drinking,” Harry said. “I told him ninety percent of all alcoholics die drunk.”
There was frustration in his voice, and heartbreak, but it was laced with self-righteousness.
Harry’s latest enthusiasm was for twelve-step programs; he had recently decided he had adult ADHD, along with incipient alcoholism, and he attended meetings six times a week, steeped in the language of confession and redemption.
“When was the last time you spoke to Todd?” Sarah asked.
“We talked on and off during the last year. I wish he had told me how bad off he really was,” Harry said.
“Did he say anything at all?” she asked.
“He was mentioning this woman in Florida a lot. He seemed to feel a strong attraction to her. At one point, he talked about moving down there, starting over. The last time we spoke he said something about maybe driving cross-country with her.”
Sarah’s heart constricted. What world had she been living in? “What else did he say about her?”
“Just that they talked a lot. That they’d had a real connection when they were younger. He wondered what would have happened if they’d stayed together.”
“Some fucking connection,” Sarah muttered.
“What?”
“Never mind. Go on.”
“He said that she was the only woman who’d ever truly accepted him as he was. I think they both had this romance with being outsiders.”
“That’s why he left Florida the first time. He wanted a different kind of life, a career, a family.”
She was arguing a case, but not with Harry, not really.
“Look, Sarah, he knew that. He was just tired of what it took to keep it all going. With Linda, he didn’t have to hold up any of those balls. She didn’t expect as much from him. I figured it was just something he had to get out of his system, kind of like a vacation from the rest of his life. I wish I knew how bad off he was,” Harry repeated. “I could have helped him.”
Lurking beneath his conviction was an unspoken condemnation—you did not understand him, you did not help him, you did not save him.
Sarah got off the phone as quickly as possible, fury racing through her, crackling, electric, absolute, at Todd, at Harry, at Linda, at all the people who thought they could have helped Todd, changed him when she could not, at her own blindness. All the last year when she had wanted only to reach him, he had been confiding in everyone but her.
One night a few weeks before he moved out, she put Eliza to bed and went into the kitchen where Todd was cooking Caribbean chicken breasts.
“What do you want?” she asked quietly. It wasn’t a demand, she was genuinely curious.
“For you to leave me alone,” he replied, turning only partially to her.
It was the most honest answer he could give. She remembered that when they were first married, he would ring the intercom to her apartment, their apartment now, from downstairs rather than use his key, such a basic part of joining unnatural and fraught for him.
“How can I completely leave you alone? We’re married,” she said as he added more lime juice to the sauce.
“I don’t ask anything of anyone,” he answered. And he didn’t. He seemed to live in an alternate universe, where the most basic obligations of relationships were alien. This is what his childhood had done to him.
“I ask for a damn lot less than any other woman would have,” she replied angrily.
He turned to her with mocking disbelief. “You ask for so little? Are you out of your mind?”
“I got a job so we could survive,” she hissed.
“Who asked you to?” he retorted.
No one, she thought. No one asked me to. And no one told me not to.
They stared at each other with mounting frustration, each feeling righteous, misunderstood, resentful.
Todd slammed the spoon he had been holding down. “I’ve had it,” he said, and stormed out.
Sarah watched the boiling sauce furiously coat the edges of the pan.
“Mommy.” She heard Eliza’s voice calling from bed. “I need a snuggle.”
She took a deep breath and went into Eliza’s darkened room.
“I thought you were asleep.” Sarah lay down beside her. “Did you hear Daddy and me arguing?”
“No.”
The two lay in silence for a while. “Honey, I know it can be upsetting when Daddy and I fight. But you know we both love you.”
“Why do you always have to tell me that?”
“Because it’s true.”
When she felt Eliza’s breath begin to grow heavy and regular, she went back to the kitchen where the ingredients of the uneaten dinner lay about the counters and began wearily to clean up.
Two hours later Todd came home smelling of smoke and beer. His eyes had the glazed, slightly out-of-focus look they got when he was drunk. He found Sarah in bed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I overreacted.” He sat down beside her. “I was out of line. I love you.”
She nodded. “Do you know what I want?” she asked quietly.
“What?”
“For you to get help.” She had never said it so simply, so directly before.
He moved out one month later.
Sarah got up suddenly and stormed down the hall to the front closet where so many of Todd’s things remained, a suit jacket, a raincoat, some random CDs. She gathered them up in heaping armfuls and carried them out to the hallway, jamming them down the trash compactor and letting the metal door slam loudly shut.
She went through his closet, grabbing jeans, a khaki linen shirt he had worn to a dinner party just before they separated, stray papers, tax receipts. An old wool scarf fell from the pile and she tripped on it, landing hard on the parquet floor. Tears burned her eyes as she rose, picked up the pile, and carried it out to the compactor. After each trip she rushed back and searched for anything that he had worn, touched, anything that was his.
The living room was next. Todd had a great love of used book stores, spending hours in them looking for hidden treasures. Sarah tore his books off the shelves, tattered paperbacks of esoteric Greek poets, the collected works of Isaac Bashevis Singer, an oversize book on Louise Bourgeois, his large sampling of South African detective novels, and filled bag after bag.
By two in the morning she had slid eleven bags out to the hallway for dumping.
It was close to dawn when she finally fell into bed, spent.
But she did not feel purged. There were too many things she could not rid herself of: anger, hurt, doubt, love that had grown twisted like the metal pieces of Todd’s sculpture.