Ed Gorman - Blindside

The fire was as appealing as she was. I sat in a leather chair staring into the flames. My mind was so overloaded it refused to deal with any of the problems at hand. It just roamed around image to image, mostly related to other fireplaces that had figured in my life. I thought of my ex-wife and of our daughter, of a girl I’d loved in high school, and of a cabin I’d rented once that had made me feel like a pioneer — until I’d had to use the outhouse in the middle of a snowy night.

‘Here. I’m sorry it took so long.’

She was breathless; a few seconds away from hysteria. I took the saucer and cup she handed me. She went over and parked herself primly on the couch. She folded her hands as if in prayer and then loosed them like fluttering doves.

‘You need to calm down, Mrs Nolan.’

‘I know; I know. This is all my fault. All of it. If I hadn’t been so stupid…’ Her hands returned to prayer. ‘I’m thirty-six years old and I feel like a college slut or something. Really. I even went to Confession. He was one of those new priests who “understands.” I wanted the old-fashioned kind.’ She had a smile that could start wars. ‘You know, some big old monsignor who’d come over to your side and drag you out of the confessional and then start yelling at you in front of everybody else.’

‘Well, if you find a church like that, let me know. I’d like to go there.’

The joke landed about thirty seconds after I sent it.

‘Oh — right. You’re kidding. God, I’m so scattered I can’t think straight. I keep thinking David’s dead.’ Then, ‘I wish I could tell you it wasn’t exciting. It was. He made me feel alive again instead of like some dreary housewife. Jeff’s very good at that. He got me to the point where I’d come to him any time of night or day. I was ashamed of myself but I couldn’t stop. It was so high school. And then one day one of our daughters started screaming about something so I ran downstairs to see what was wrong. Jeff had sent me a kind of sexy letter and I was writing him back sort of a sexy one myself. I thought it was kind of a goof. I didn’t close my computer. And I forgot about it because Chrissie had fallen on the driveway and had a cut on her head. When David found the letter he exploded, even though I told him it didn’t mean anything.’

So Ward was telling poor Nolan that it didn’t mean anything and his wife was telling Nolan that it didn’t mean anything — apparently the only person it meant anything to was Nolan himself.

‘He’s a bender drinker,’ I said. I wasn’t in the mood to play a righteous monsignor. I wanted to find out where the hell her husband was.

‘Yes. He goes to AA meetings twice a month.’

‘So it is a definite possibility he’s trying to drink through this.’

‘Yes. But after what happened to poor Jim-’

‘Does he ever call you when he’s on one of his benders?’

‘Not usually.’

‘Does he tend to go to the same places?’

‘He says not. Sometimes he goes into Chicago. A lot of the time he’s not even sure where he went. He has to reconstruct his trips with credit card receipts.’

We fell into one of those uncomfortable silences that neither of us had the ingenuity to break. The phone rang and she leapt for it with Olympian zeal and prowess. It was on an end table. She probably could have picked up the entire table with her crazed strength.

‘The Nolan residence.’ Then: ‘Oh, God, no, listen — I don’t want to take a survey now and why the hell are you calling me at nine twenty? The cut-off’s supposed to be nine o’clock!’ She slammed the receiver down so hard I thought I heard the phone groan.

She touched long fingers to her perfect right breast. A hint of nipple made her all the more fetching. ‘Now I know how people get heart attacks. Every time the phone rings my mind just explodes. And then my heart does, too.’

She came back and sat down. Her very nice legs were set exquisitely together. ‘What were we saying?’

‘I was wondering why you wanted to call in a missing persons report now?’

‘Oh, yes. Of course. Because I’m having nightmares. I studied medieval English literature in college. Nightmares figured in a lot of the plays. They foreshadowed what was to come. We do some of that today. Look at all the paranormal shows on TV.’

‘So you’ve been having nightmares about your husband.’

‘As soon as I close my eyes they start. He’s usually trapped somewhere — buried alive — or on an elevator — or in the trunk of a car — and he’s always crying out for me to help him. He never talks about how I betrayed him. He doesn’t have to. It’s all I think about. Over and over and over. God, I wish I’d never met Jeff Ward.’

Sometimes the greatest mystery of all is the mystery of ourselves. We do something so out of character that we spend years trying to understand it and never do. Sometimes it’s the liquor and sometimes it’s simply some dark and deranged impulse. We go back and back to it as if to a great library in search of the one book that will explain it. But that book is always checked out.

‘And you know what’s so funny? I’m the jealous one in our marriage. I’m always worried some other woman will steal him away. I cringe every time I see him around Kathy Tomlin, for instance. Even when I know it’s business, when he’s sitting with a reporter talking and she’s wearing a skirt that barely covers her. I even got jealous one day when I saw him having coffee or something with Mrs Burkhart. At least I don’t accuse him as much as I used to. My first true love cheated on me all the time. I’ve never trusted men since.’

Nothing to say to that. She was talking to herself, not me. I checked my watch. Eight minutes to go. ‘We’re in a lot of trouble. Could you at least hold off calling the police for twenty-four hours?’

‘What if he’s lying somewhere half dead?’

‘We don’t know that.’

‘That doesn’t mean it’s not true.’

‘All we can go on is past behavior.’

‘I don’t want him to die without saying he forgives me.’

Selfish, even narcissistic, but understandably human. She loved him and betrayed him and that was bad enough. But for him to pass on without there being some resolution ‘I understand, Mrs Nolan.’ I was a mere human, too, and I did understand the need for absolution, pitiful as that was.

‘Mrs Nolan. I have a first name, for God’s sake.’

‘All right, Bryn. I understand, but I still have to ask you to hold off for at least twenty-four hours.’

‘You’re all the same.’ She shook her head angrily, a quite pretty child feeling sorry for herself. ‘As loving as David is, he can be the same way. So callous when it comes to politics. Winning is everything.’

‘Is it all right if we watch TV now?’

‘What? Oh, right, Sylvia’s on. God, I hate that bitch. She’ll say anything.’

She was up again. ‘Family room,’ she said, and led us to a door with stairs that ended in a voluptuously furnished room complete with bar, gigantic plasma TV, pool table, and carpeting so thick you could lose your shoes in it.

We waited through six thirty-second commercials, two of them for Burkhart, before the local Ken and Barbie came on and sounded as urgent as possible about several of the headline stories.

Then Ken said, ‘But we begin tonight with a visit from somebody who’s frequently in the national news.’ The camera widened out to a two-shot. Sylvia wore a white silk blouse and the same dark chignon that Audrey Hepburn had worn in numerous movies. Subtle sex. Cameras had always lusted after her and tonight was no exception. But what was that in her eyes? The expression I’d expected would have been joy, trashing and thrashing us with Ward’s infidelity and kinky ways. But Sylvia’s dark eyes were furtive; she was scared. And Sylvia was never scared.