Stephen White - Critical Conditions

I headed back to Boulder with some of my own fantasies-that my wife would be home soon, my practice would be mundane soon, and my life would again be my own soon.

Ha.

Adrienne had plastered a big victory for the masses banner across the front door of my house. In my life, I have never even had time to figure out how to get my computer and printer to print envelopes, so I couldn’t imagine how she had been able to master the art of banner-making. Two explanations came to mind. Adrienne didn’t sleep, which gave her more time to putz than me, and she was, conservatively, double-digit IQ points smarter than me, which usually was fine, although sometimes it really pissed me off.

Emily was as happy to see me as I was to see her. I played a long-distance game of kill-the-tennis-ball with her for a while and promised her a long walk at the end of the day. Unfortunately, the future tense doesn’t exist in any known dog lexicon and she was visibly perplexed at being returned to her dog run without the appearance of her leash.

Cozy had left me a long voice-mail message about an unpleasant meeting he had just concluded with Mitchell Crest, the thrust of which was that if I discharged Merritt, the DA’s office wasn’t going to be happy, but they weren’t going to arrest her before we whisked her to DIA.

Cozy added that I had better not be wrong about his client no longer being suicidal. He said, “You have one shot before the buzzer. Make it count.” Cozy’s use of a sports metaphor threw me off balance; I figured it was for my benefit.

I had rescheduled two patients at the end of the day. Their issues were blessedly routine. As the first session became the second, I felt the comforting return of my therapeutic rhythm. It reminded me of the moment when I find a robotic spin on a long bike ride. Once you’re there, instinct is golden. You trust, you fly.

As I had been listening to my second patient describe the nearly daily argument he was having with his wife about what he was absolutely determined was the correct way to load the dishwasher, I had a revelation about Merritt and Madison and Dead Ed.

Ah-ha moments, flashes of insight, although not commonplace, aren’t unexpected in the lives of psychotherapists. Most of the time, though, I apply the brakes of caution and keep the initial glint of percipience to myself. I do this because often I’m plain wrong, and also because there is usually no harm in sitting on the revelations. True insights aren’t perishable; there is no danger in storing them for long periods of time. Sometimes insights even age and improve like good wine. But false insight always injects clutter and misdirection-the construction of an artificial fork in an otherwise meandering but purposeful road.

The truth is that when doing psychotherapy, being right is usually much less important than not being wrong.

I reminded myself of none of these things as I called Miggy Monroe, invited myself over, and asked for directions to her apartment.

I don’t know why I expected a chaotic apartment with ten cats, undusted tchotchkes, and piles of magazines from the Johnson administration, but I did. It’s not what I found.

Miggy Monroe lived in one of the brick midrise buildings on the west end of Arapahoe near Ninth Street. The apartment had a wonderful view of the Flatirons, and Miggy favored contemporary pieces in the colors of the various incarnations of oatmeal: plain, with honey, with milk, with milk and cinnamon.

The only colors in the apartment were the red lines in Miggy’s eyes and the dust-jacketed spines of hundreds of books.

She was surprised I was so young. I was surprised she was so young. I offered my compassion over Madison’s death and she invited me to the funeral to be held two days later. The coroner in Routt County had just released her daughter’s body. Madison’s father was flying in from Humboldt State in California. She thought I would like him. It seemed apparent to me that Miggy still did.

I told her I couldn’t tell her why I needed to know, but I asked if she had yet gone through her daughter’s things.

“Sure, I was hoping for some answers.”

“Find any?”

I thought she hesitated before she shook her head.

I was tempted to dance around my objectives but wasn’t creative enough to find a way to do it. I said, “Did you find any videotapes with her stuff?”

She looked puzzled, said, “No.”

“Is there a collection of tapes the family keeps?”

“There is no family. It was just me and Maddy.”

She wanted me to focus with her on grief. I wanted to find the videotape. I felt like all my compassionate muscles were cramping from overuse. I said, “I’m sorry. Do you have a video camera?”

A hesitant, “Yes. What’s so important about our videos?”

“So you have some tapes, then? Things you’ve recorded over the years-home videos? Maybe some movies you recorded? Prerecorded tapes?”

“Sure. Of course. We used to take lots of videos when she was little. Madison. Not so much lately. Things were difficult lately. She recorded stuff off cable, too. We get HBO.”

“May I see the collection?”

“Of course, I guess. Is this about Merritt? Are you looking for one with Maddy and Merritt on it? I don’t think there are any.” She opened a white lacquer cabinet to reveal a TV and VCR. An interior drawer held about two dozen tapes.

“Yes, it’s about Merritt, but I can’t say any more than that.” I thought about what to do next. I didn’t really want to sit in Miggy’s apartment watching her TV and her VCR while I searched for the videotape of whatever Madison had recorded happening between Merritt and Dead Ed in the rear end of Haldeman.

“May I take these with me, Miggy? Overnight? I need to go through them-I’m looking for something specific-and I don’t want to intrude on you while I do. I’ll return them to you tomorrow, I promise.”

“Even the one you’re looking for?”

“If Madison’s on that one-at all-yes. I’ll return that one, too.”

She was obviously puzzled but too fractured by her grief to press me. She shrugged and said, “Why not? Let me get a shopping bag for you.”

The bag was white, with handles.

Leaving Miggy Monroe’s apartment, I backtracked across Boulder Creek to downtown and picked up a ready-to-bake pizza at Nick-N-Willy’s before I went home. While the oven heated, I salved my guilt and played with Emily without even changing my clothes. I played with her some more while the pizza baked. I knew I was procrastinating. I didn’t want to find the Holiday Rambler tape. I didn’t want to not find the Holiday Rambler tape.

Mostly, I didn’t want to see it.

My theory went like this: Madison’s return trip home to Boulder after she had run away with Brad had been because she had told him about taping Merritt and he was bullying her to retrieve the videotape of Merritt and Robilio, so he could begin his not-too-well-thought-out little extortion scenario with Robilio’s company, MedExcel. Madison, I figured, was having second thoughts about having told him about the blackmail scheme she and Merritt had cooked up and didn’t really want Brad to have the tape, so she had taken a copy of Pretty Woman to him instead, after making him promise not to watch it. But she told Brad it was the one.

Brad, of course, had watched the tape, and found nobody screwing on it but Richard Gere and Julia Roberts. He had beaten Madison viciously for her lie, using the copy of Pretty Woman as a bludgeon.

I shuddered at what might have followed between them, what slight by Madison had caused Brad to turn from batterer to murderer. I suspected that the proximity of Dead Ed’s arsenal made it too convenient for Brad to vent his rage with his finger on a trigger.