After the second consultation with Thomas Alexander, another even greater wave of destabilizing uncertainty shook me. It was much worse than what I’d felt after realizing the necklace was not Dee’s. This time I sensed I was waking from a spell of unconsciousness. The memories I’d curated so carefully for the previous thirty years became, inexplicably, irredeemably strange to me. I’d spent the decades since we’d lost Dee taking care of my memories the way other people take care of their families, their homes, their bodies. I had sunk all of my energy into remembering the months before Dee went missing. And for the first time since she disappeared, I began to wonder if I had done a bad job. I saw their fabricated nature more clearly. I understood then what Dana had been trying to tell me: She had wanted me to be ready, to be so confident in my story, in my case against Frank, that I could not be destabilized. But, I had not been ready for this version of events. Or for any version that differed from my own.
Because this possibility, that Erik had killed Dee, though it seemed absolutely improbable, had in one morning made clear to me the fickleness and the fragility of all my memories. I felt a different kind of fear then. Certainty is like a drug: a great comfort. When it’s lost, the effect is that of withdrawal: fever, nausea, sweating, headaches, intense, unending pain, and above all else, an ocean’s worth of desire to regain that which will make the pain stop.
I thought about the family from the video I’d watched. How the psychic had disappeared the deadness in those people’s eyes, even though what he had said to make this deadness disappear had probably been wrong. Still, in the moment, it had worked. I went into the bathroom and stared into the mirror. The deadness was still there. It ate light. Maybe mine was more intractable. Maybe mine was permanent. I didn’t know. I wished it would go. I stared at myself for six long minutes, and the hugeness of my pupils brought the photo to mind again.
For the first time in thirty years, I had the urge to call Leif, who, after he left me in Milwaukee, had called me regularly, though I’d often shirked his calls or said nothing on the phone while he talked. When he first left the city, he called once a day, then it became once a week, then once a month, and finally, once a year. I’d answer and let him talk. Let him tell me every little detail about his life that he cared to share. Sometimes I’d hang up if he started in on a topic I couldn’t bear to hear. Other times I’d let him run on and on about his new life: a son (who looked like Erik), a wife he saw every few months in Idaho, the house they were refinishing, the book he was writing (and had always been writing), his inability to find his brother anywhere along his trucking routes. And much later, the admission that Erik had died of cancer. Leif had been invited to his brother’s funeral by Erik’s husband, Lance, a small bustling man who was a professor of botany at the University of California–Davis. They’d lived a quiet life together off campus with two dogs and several overworked bookshelves. Erik had an art studio behind the house, and he’d sold his ceramics at the local farmers’ market. I drank for days after hearing this news. I was overrun with jealousy, and something a notch sharper than grief. I wanted so badly to one day discover that Dee, somehow, had lived this kind of life too—full of wide-open vistas and safe, easy love.
But I never said a word back to Leif, not even when he’d revealed the news of Erik’s life or death. After hanging up the phone, I’d feel as if I were waking from a bender. There was always a thick greasy splotch on my phone’s screen, which made me sick to see. For a long time I believed that withholding my voice from him was a kind of punishment, though it may have hurt only me. I became an open, empty container into which Leif poured all his muck. Maybe I liked it.
I wanted suddenly, though, to tell him what the psychic had said about Erik, or what the psychic claimed Dee had said. I also hoped that Leif might have some kind of evidence that would prove, beyond a doubt, that Erik could not have possibly done this. I needed him to corroborate my case against Frank too.
I called him and the phone rang and rang, and finally, I left a long, barely intelligible message describing the few weeks since the psychic had arrived. When his voicemail cut me off with a long, harsh beep, I couldn’t be sure what had made it in the message and what had been left out. After I put the phone down, I went to the bathroom to throw up.