Siegel, James - Derailed

“Yes?”

“Did you call Roxman’s this week? About Anna’s insulin?”

“Roxman’s? No. Why?”

“You didn’t call? You’re sure?”

“Yes, Charles . . . woops . . . yes, Larry, I’m sure.”

“It isn’t possible you did and forgot? Isn’t that possible?”

“No. I didn’t call Roxman’s. I would remember. You want me to sign an affidavit? Why?”

“Nothing. Just something they said to me. . . .”

I said good-bye. I hung up.

I stared at my son. He was munching on his last piece of frankfurter. Voices were echoing off the museum walls, a child was screaming bloody murder at another table. He looked up at me.

“Daddy . . . okay?” he said.

FIFTY-ONE

I went on-line.

I went back three years. I went back to the day of the explosion.

There were 173 entries for “Fairfax Hotel.”

Everything from newspaper articles to magazines articles to mentions in TV shows and even Internet jokes.

Did you hear about the new rate policy at the Fairfax? It bombed.

Most of the articles were what you might expect.

Stories of heroic firemen and innocent victims. And among the stories of innocent victims, I saw my name there again — among the missing at first, then onto the list of the dead.

Charles Schine, 45, advertising executive.

And Dexter’s and Sam’s and Didi’s names, too.

And his — placed alphabetically right at the end of the roll call.

I kept reading. There were other stories there, stories about the bomber.

RIGHT-TO-LIFER BOMBER’S HOMETOWN REMEMBERS, one of them was titled. Jack Christmas was born in Enid, Oklahoma. He was a friendly boy who washed blackboards, his third-grade teacher said. Though one school friend remembered him as kind of spooky.

There was an article about the hotel itself.

HOTEL’S UN-FABLED PAST GAVE NO CLUE. It was built in 1949. It originally catered to a mostly business clientele. It fell into disrepair and became a haven for short-rate prostitutes and low-income residents.

There were several entries about domestic terrorism.

An article about an organization called the Children of God. A manifesto from an army of antiabortionists. Several items about survivalists. A recounting of the Oklahoma City bombing and its similarities to the one at the Fairfax Hotel.

And later on, another list of the dead — with brief obituaries this time.

Charles Schine was employed as a creative director at Schuman Advertising. He worked on several major accounts. “Charley was an asset to this company, both as a writer and a human being. He will be greatly missed,” Eliot Firth, president of Schuman Advertising, said. Charles Schine leaves behind a wife and daughter.

Samuel M. Griffen was touted as “a shining star in the world of financial planning.” His brother said, “He was a generous and loving father.”

There was something about Dexter. “He was one of our own,” the holding company for the Fairfax Hotel said. “A dedicated employee.”

Even Didi received an obituary — at least I assumed it was her.

Desdemona Gonzalez, 30. A loving sister to Maria. Daughter to Major Frank Gonzalez of East Texas.

I took a detour. I looked up East Texas newspapers. I knew the hometown papers would have been falling all over themselves to write up the stories of their local victims.

I found her. An article from a Roxham Texas Weekly.

Retired Major Frank Gonzalez sits on his front porch nursing a very private pain for his youngest daughter, killed in the Fairfax Hotel bombing. Desdemona Gonzalez, 30, had lived in New York City for the last ten years, her father said. “She didn’t keep in touch much,” he said, but she’d “call on holidays and things like that.” . . . Family friends admitted that the elder Mr. Gonzalez and his daughter had been estranged for a number of years. . . . There had been a drug arrest when Desdemona was a teenager and allegations of child abuse against her father. A family friend who wishes to remain anonymous added that these charges were all “unsubstantiated.”

I clicked back to the general obituaries.

There was one missing.

I felt something in the small of my back. A trickle of ice water in reverse — it began crawling up my spine.

I went back and clicked each entry again. I reread everything. Nothing. Not one mention.

I logged on to the Daily News Web page. I typed in “Fairfax Hotel.”

Thirty-two articles.

I started with the one written on the day of the explosion. There was a picture of the bomb site. An old woman crying on a corner curb, firemen standing in the middle of the street with their heads down. I scanned the entire article. I went on to the next one.

Pretty much the same stuff I’d read elsewhere, except in chronological order. The bombing, the dead, the heroes, the villain, the investigation, the funerals.

It took me two hours. Still nothing.

I was beginning to think I was wrong. I’d misinterpreted an offhand comment, that’s all. The kind of thing that happened all the time.

I would look at one more week — the week of the last article, four weeks after the actual bombing. That’s it.

Then I would log off and go and kiss my sleeping children good night. I would crawl into bed with Kim and mold myself against her warm body. I would fall asleep and know that everything was okay.

I started with Monday. I went on to Tuesday.

I almost missed it.

It was a small item — buried in an avalanche of the Middle East war, a triple murder committed in Detroit, a marital scandal involving the New York City mayor.

HEROIC SURVIVOR NOT SO HEROIC, it said.

I clicked on it, held my breath, and read.

It was kind of a human-interest story, the kind they start running when they run out of stories about heroes and victims, a story meant to make you shake your head at the sad ironies of life.

Body pulled from wreckage . . . no identification . . . in a coma for several weeks . . . brain surgery . . . fingerprints revealed him to be . . . previously identified as dead . . . his car in hotel parking garage . . . hadn’t shown for sentencing . . . police spokesperson . . . prison infirmary . . .

I read it slowly, from beginning to the end. Then once more, making sure.

Anna’s insulin.

It was made from a pig’s pancreatic cells, which is the way all insulin used to be made. Until they figured out a way to make it synthetically in the laboratory. This was a fairly recent development; Anna had been using pig insulin since she’d gotten diabetes. When she’d tried the synthetic stuff, her numbers had strayed high and stayed there.

That happened sometimes, Dr. Baron had said. Some people responded better to the real stuff. So he’d kept her on it.

Even though they’d begun phasing it out — even though it was becoming very hard to get hold of. But there was no need to worry. There would always be some drugstores that carried it, he said.

I was talking to Jameel Farraday, a guidance counselor, in the school lunchroom.

Once a year, Jameel brought convicts from state prison into the school auditorium in an effort to scare George Washington Carver’s students straight. The convicts, some of whom had even grown up in the neighborhood, would talk about drugs, about the wrong choices they’d made, about life behind bars.

Then they’d take questions from the audience.

Ever kill anyone? one student asked an ex-junkie who had a scar running the entire length of his jawbone.

He said no, and the student body groaned.

“I’m thinking about having my class write letters to men in prison,” I said to Farraday. He was eating milky mashed potatoes and greasy chicken fingers.