Dry Ice (26 page)

    The supervisor could tell from watching my face that chemistry wasn't one of my things.

    "Think dry ice," she'd said.

    In the intervening years I had learned that the tricky part about sublimation—whether psychological or chemical—was in that qualifying phrase at the end. The tricky part was in making the change without first melting.

    The capacity of the human animal to survive hardship and trauma has never ceased to generate my awe. Take ten people and let doom and cruelty—violence, incest, loss, trauma, terror— design an episode or two of horror in their childhoods.

    Four or five will refuse to be defined by the assaults and somehow will turn out fine. A couple of others will be damaged. For the fortunate the damage will prove benign, like a dented bumper on an automobile, or manageable, like the impaired vision from a smashed headlight.

    Two more—give or take—of the ten will emerge from the swamp of personal history and beyond all odds make a positive difference in the world.

    A small minority will become lifelong victims.

    One will suffer damage beyond repair.

    One in ten to the tenth will transform tragedy into fuel and do something remarkable.

    And one in ten to the tenth will become Michael McClelland.

    All will have been transformed by their trauma. No one gets away unscathed.

    Most will sublimate.

    I am a point in fact.
Am I any less scarred than Michael Mc
Clelland?
No, I'm not.

    Did I become a vapor without first melting? I didn't know. I didn't even know how to know. But I'd spent the day demonstrating the current status of my personal sublimation and I didn't think that I had melted since breakfast.

    Small steps. For many years I'd been taking small steps.

    If I was lucky I'd take another one when that day ended and the next one began.

    Amy would too.

I EXPLAINED sublimation to Kirsten. She rested her head on my shoulder while I spoke. Both her hands were gripping the one of mine that I'd offered in comfort. She was holding on to me as though she were on the verge of drowning.

    She heard my words as a cause for hope for her daughter. Maybe for herself, too. The hope was a breeze that washed over her and dried her tears.

    I heard Kol speak just then. The sound was so real I almost looked around Kirsten's living room for him. In my imagination he remained a man. Kol's voice—mocking—said,
"I mean it's
not like what happened with . . . your dad."

    The next words I spoke came out of a part of me that I'd been confident was so deeply buried that a psychological deepdrilling rig would be necessary to tap the cisterns that stored the toxins excreted by the memories.

    I said, "The first time was worse."

    Time stopped in the room. I looked at the fireplace to see if the flames were frozen in place.

    The flames danced on. I found that oddly reassuring. Oxygen and carbon were doing their things. Chemistry was still chemistry. Chemistry and physics still trumped psychology.

    I listened to the room for any evidence that the universe had altered in fundamental ways. It hadn't. My words weren't echoing unnaturally. The neighborhood dog had resumed barking.

    Kirsten sensed the change. She lifted her head from my

shoulder and lowered her voice into a range that was somewhere between shocked and sultry. She said, "What?"

    My eyes went wide. Her simple question almost floored me. I realized that I had just opened the door.

    
Did I say that the first time was worse?
I did. I cracked open the damn door.

    My instinct?
Close it. Close it! Slam the thing shut.
Immediately the argument began—
Kick the damn thing open, Alan.
Let the beast out. Let it run.

    "Nothing," I said to Kirsten.
That was close.

    She had turned to face me. When? I didn't remember her moving. I thought I smelled her perfume again. Maybe she really wasn't wearing any; maybe it was an illusion or the olfactory equivalent of an echo. The aroma, real or imagined, made me dizzy, as though it wasn't merely alluring, but sedating.

    The dried tears had left herringbone trails across the high ridges on her cheekbones. She asked, "What first time, Alan? What did you mean?" She wiped at her face, obliterating the zigzag lines.

    I made no conscious decision to answer. But answer I did. I said, "In the rubble that night? He wasn't the first man I shot. The first was . . . worse."

    There had been another time, too, with yet another gun. Another shooting. But that was an accident, absent my volition. I'd never added it to my roster of secrets.

    My acknowledgment to Kirsten was, I knew, a reluctant confession. But she couldn't know that. No one would tell. I wouldn't tell. We were good at secrets.

    Great at secrets.

    That was our thing. It's in the genes.

I was not ready to be absolved. Nor was I eager to be punished.

    I heard my words again, saw myself say them. My mind's little hard drive replayed the scene.
He wasn't the first man I
shot. The first was worse.
I knew I was the one who had spoken the words, but during the replay I experienced the sounds as listener, not as speaker.

    "That night?" Kirsten asked, either confused or, more likely, concerned that I was. "At your house? I think there was only the one man. He shot Carl, remember? He was coming after . . . us."

    "No. Yes," I said. Both words were true. I wasn't confused. But I wanted to run. I had to force myself to stay seated. I convinced myself that I'd said enough. She would be satiated. She would ask no more questions.

    She touched me then. A light touch, her fingertips on the side of my face, her index finger on the lobe of my ear. "You're freezing," she said.

    Her touch was a caress. My defenses, under assault for years, withering for days, cracked and swayed and collapsed into a heap.
Just like the garage,
I thought,
that Sam tugged
down.
The barricade I'd been supporting for so long was gone. As the dust was rising from the ruins the words rushed out of my mouth like Emily taking off after a squirrel. "I shot someone else," I said.

    Four words. One sentence.

    Subject, predicate, object, adverb.

    They hung diagrammed in front of my eyes, translucent like a hologram.

    I had only once ever said anything like them aloud before. The most surprising thing was that I thought they sounded all right.

    When I looked back up I was engulfed by the cloud.

    
Damn.

The intimacy between us fractured. I was relieved.

    Michael McClelland. "Yes," I said.
Kol knew, or McClel
land knows. Maybe both.

    "Who have you told? Anyone?"

    "One person," I said.

    "Lauren?"

    "She doesn't know."

    Kirsten digested that. Or she tried. "Who then?" she asked.

    "It doesn't matter," I said.

    Of course it mattered. I had told Adrienne my secret in the months after her husband's death, when she was drowning in her grief and in the despair she felt from learning things he had kept from her. She had asked me if I had any secrets as serious as the one Peter had hidden. I admitted I did.

    Adrienne physically recoiled from me. She told me she could no longer be my friend if I was keeping an important secret from her.

    "It happened a long, long time ago," I said to Kirsten.

    "The secret, or the telling?"

    "A few years for one. Many years for the other."

    "How hard would it be for someone to find out?" she asked.

    She was thinking about the note on my porch.

    "The court records were sealed," I said.

    "Court records? A crime?"

    I didn't reply. I didn't know the answer.

    She said, "What about newspapers?"

    "My name isn't in them." That's what I'd been told. I'd never checked.

    I could tell Kirsten was editing some other questions before she asked, "Then how does he know what he wrote in the note? This guy, McClelland."

    I shook my head.

She asked, "Does your family know?"

"What's left of it, yes."

"What does that mean, Alan?"

    "My parents were both only children. Three of my four grandparents are dead. The other one has dementia."

    Kirsten folded her arms across her chest and grabbed the opposing biceps. I could tell that my acknowledgment worried her. That concern caused her to miss the obvious. A good interviewer would not have run past the opening I'd just offered.

    "You don't ever talk about it?" she said.

    "Once I did. Not before. Not since."

    "Why?"

    Her question wasn't a challenge. She was genuinely curious. As a friend, and maybe as a lawyer. "I didn't want what happened . . . to define who I am for the rest of my life. I didn't want to be . . . that person. The person who had . . . shot . . . someone. I didn't want everything I did afterward to be viewed through that lens. Not for one day, not for the rest of my life. How do you ever get away from something that . . . big?" I caught her puzzled gaze. "I'm serious. How? Does Amy ever talk about what happened?"

    "No. Never." Her tone became hushed.

    "Do you? When you meet some new guy? Someone asks you out. Do you tell him about the night at Galatoire's? Or the night at my house? About your buddy, Carl?"

    "Of course not. But later maybe, I will, after there's . . . some trust."

    Her voice was so quiet I had to strain to hear her. "Has that happened, Kirsten? In real life? Has it?"

    She was making honesty sound easy. It wasn't. I knew it wasn't.

    She shook her head. "Love . . . has been difficult for me since Robert died. He was a . . . special man. I've had a high standard . . . for that kind of intimacy. For romance."

    "And no one's reached that bar?" My question was intended to reflect my cynicism about her resistance. Therapists called it confrontation. I could be good at it.

    I could also use it to deflect attention from me.

    She heard my words more literally than I'd intended. She said, "One man did." Her face softened at some memory. "Maybe he spoiled me . . . that probably made everything that's come since harder, though, not easier."

    I felt the cloud retreat, relieved that we were no longer talking about me. "What happened?" I asked.
Carl Luppo,
I guessed.

    She put her hands on each side of my face, leaned forward, and touched her lips to mine for two seconds that felt like an hour. She moved back only an inch before she said, "I fell in love with my therapist. His honesty. His kindness. You must know how that goes."

THARON THIBODEAUX knew Michael McClelland but hadn't been directly involved in his inpatient treatment in Pueblo.

    When I'd been sitting in Kaladi with the transplanted Louisiana psychiatrist, I'd had to shake off the distraction I was feeling as a result of the shock of learning that the purpose of the meeting had turned out to be different from the one I'd anticipated. One of the blind alleys I had wandered down was a futile attempt to try to understand the complexities of the clinic and unit structure that Tharon was describing in the inpatient forensic institute, and why the security and clinical architecture meant that he knew Nicole Cruz better than he knew Michael McClelland. I gave up, accepting the alternative proposition that the psychiatrist had some clinical insight into Michael McClelland, but nowhere nearly as much as he had about his own patient, Nicole Cruz.

    From his revelations I began to understand the scope of what I had missed during my few sessions with Nicole. If the simple fact that she had spent seven months at the state hospital—the last four of those under the care of Dr. Thibodeaux—was any indication of her true mental state, my clinical errors of omission and commission were multiple and serious.

    At my patient's urging I'd willingly mistaken her hypomania for ADHD and residual autism. I'd been almost totally blinded to her underlying depression, certainly to its severity. And I'd fallen hook, line, and sinker for her captivating malingering about her family's oil wealth in Mexico.

    My list of transgressions included all the things I had missed by failing to pause long enough to take a formal health history, let alone even a cursory mental-health history. Those omissions meant that I had ended up failing to discover Nicole's adolescent preoccupation with cutting, her infatuation with crystal meth, and her five previous known instances of overt suicidal behavior—including three serious attempts and two gestures. I also had managed to stay oblivious to the fact that she had made ER visits too frequent to enumerate, and had a history of at least seven—count 'em, seven—acute psychiatric hospitalizations at various Colorado facilities prior to her ultimate admission to the state hospital in Pueblo.

    I had never learned that the most common reason for her to lose privileges on the unit while hospitalized in Pueblo was her propensity to turn any length of cord or string she found into a noose.

    I'd also missed the teensy-weensy tidbit that Nicole had a rap sheet with fourteen assorted entries—mostly minor-league infractions having to do with possessing meth or the ingredients to make it, or for stealing to get the money to buy it—and that the litany of legal transgressions included the use of numerous AKAs, including "Cruise," "Crews," "Crus," "Cole," "Kol," "Coal," "Col," and just for a change of pace, "Nicki."