“She’s dead. It wouldn’t do any good.”
“She killed herself.”
“Looks like it. The pills and everything.”
“Poor thing.” Stan’s voice broke and he wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Bill’s going to be so upset.”
We were silent for a moment while I worked up the nerve to start calling people. As I was about to reach for the phone Stan groaned and put his hands over his ears.
“That TV noise is freaking me out.”
There were two remotes on the floor by the side of the bed. I picked them both up and hit the power button on one of them. The tray in a DVD player beneath the TV slid out. The hissing electron jumble on the screen went black and quiet. I pressed power on the second remote and turned the TV off.
“Thanks, Johnny. My head was going crazy. She must have been watching a movie.”
Wondering what someone might watch while they killed themselves I checked the disk that sat in the player’s tray, but it had been burned on a computer and there was nothing on its surface to identify it beyond a small smiley-face sticker. I left it where it was.
“Can I go outside, Johnny?”
“Yeah, go wait out front. I’ll be along soon.”
I picked up the phone, called the garden center, got Bill’s cell phone number from them, and called that. When he answered I did it as well as I could, but there was nothing I could say that would make anything any easier for him. He cried out and dropped the phone. I waited a long time but I didn’t hear anything else, so I hung up and called the police. After that I went outside and sat with Stan on a large ornamental rock at the edge of the driveway. He looked pale and stunned. I put my arm around his shoulders.
“I don’t understand how anyone could do that, Johnny. I can’t think how it would even be possible.”
“She must have been very unhappy.”
“Can we go home?”
“Not yet, we have to wait.”
Stan leaned into me and put his head on my shoulder. A few minutes later Bill’s BMW SUV skidded to a halt in front of us. He threw himself out of the car and ran for the house. His face was set and he was shouting as he passed us.
“Where is she? Where is she?”
But he didn’t stop for me to answer and ran on through the front doorway as though by his speed he could somehow turn back what had happened. I let him have five minutes alone, then I went inside to check on him.
As I walked along the corridor to the bedroom it seemed to me that the air was not as silent as it had been, that there was an ambience to it, a sense of space, as though the outdoors could be heard inside.
The door to the bedroom was almost closed now. I knocked, not wanting to walk in without warning. Bill shrieked an obscenity and I heard him move across the floor. The sound in the air stopped.
I wasn’t sure what to do, but I felt obliged to at least offer some sort of support. After hesitating a moment I pushed the door open and went into the room.
I thought I might find Bill with his head bowed over his wife, broken, crying, on the point of collapse. But he was nothing of the sort. He was standing near the TV holding the remotes. His light windbreaker, which had been open as he ran from his car, was now zipped closed. I glanced at the DVD player. The disk with the smiley sticker was gone.
Bill’s face twisted when he saw me and he began screaming. The torrent of abuse shocked me but the man’s wife had just killed herself so I put it down to grief. I took a step forward, intending to comfort him, but he raised his fist and told me to fuck off. It was obvious that he was beyond comfort, at least from any I could offer, and, figuring that maybe I was doing more harm than good by being there, I backed out of the room and left him alone.
An ambulance was pulling into the driveway as I joined Stan outside again. A cruiser from the Oakridge police department had already arrived and two uniformed cops were climbing out of it.
They both had mustaches and one of them wore yellow-lensed sunglasses. They asked us briefly where in the house Pat was and how we came to be there, then the one with the sunglasses and the two ambulance men, who’d just pulled a gurney from the back of their wagon, went inside. The other cop got out a pad and took our details and asked more questions and wrote down our answers. In a little while the ambulance guys came back out and told the cop there was no chance of resuscitation. They got into their truck and started the engine for the air-conditioning and sat in the cab making notes on a clipboard. The cop said he wanted us to walk him through exactly what we’d done inside and took us into the house.
When we got to the bedroom the cop in the yellow glasses was standing with Bill by the writing desk and it looked like they were just finishing up. Bill’s anger seemed to have dissipated and he was reasonably composed, but as I entered the room he shot me a quick hateful glance which neither of the cops caught. Stan and I reenacted what we’d done. When I mentioned turning the DVD player off, the cop with the glasses went over and looked at the machine. When he saw there was no disk, he asked me what I’d done with it.
Bill spoke before I could answer. “I took it out of the machine. I’m sorry, I didn’t think it was important.”
“What did you do with it?” The cop’s tone was only one of mild inquiry. We hadn’t been rushed or cross-examined during their inquiry and as far as I could tell no one here was treating the scene as suspicious.
“I put it on the pile.”
“What was it?”
Bill looked blank for a moment.
“I can’t remember.”
“That’s okay, don’t worry about it. Was it this one here?”
There was a stack of DVDs on a cabinet beside the TV. The cop took the one off the top and held it up. “This it?”
Bill nodded. “It must be. I didn’t look at it.”
The cop took the disk out of its cover and nodded to himself. “Barefoot in the Park. I like that movie.”
The DVD was a commercially recorded rental and certainly not the disk I had seen when Stan and I first found Patricia. Bill was lying. I was pretty sure he had the real disk concealed under his windbreaker. But what difference did it make? If Pat had been watching something more personal than a Hollywood love story-a family video of happier times, perhaps-who was I to interfere if Bill wanted to keep part of this horrible event private? So I said nothing. And Stan, who had paid no attention to the DVD beyond wanting the TV to be quiet, had no idea that there was anything to say nothing about.
Stan and I went outside again, but Bill stayed in the bedroom with his dead wife. We spent another half hour making formal statements which the cops typed into a computer in their car; after that they told us we could go.
When we got home, Stan put on his Captain America suit, jammed his glasses on over the mask, and settled himself in front of the TV. I made him the peanut butter sandwiches he asked for and he sat and munched and focused his attention on some Japanese action cartoon.
“How come you put the costume on?”
“Huh?”
“The costume. Why?”
Stan looked down at himself and smoothed the red, white and blue material over his belly. He turned his attention back to the TV and said without looking at me, “Protection.”
He didn’t answer when I tried to talk to him further, so I went into the kitchen and called my father and told him about Pat. The conversation was not long. I outlined what had happened, he asked for details and then he was silent. He cleared his throat a couple of times but was unable to say anything else. Eventually he thanked me and we hung up.
I went upstairs to my room and lay down on the bed and called Marla on my cell and gave her the same news. After we’d arranged to meet the next day I put the phone down and turned on my side and closed my eyes. The windows were open and a hot, slow breeze moved over me.