She forced a smile, and I tried to laugh at the brave joke, but the laugh got tangled up somewhere between my heart and my throat.
“One more thing, while we’re on the subject,” she said. “I see how miserable this Richard Janus thing has made you. You’ve had this cringing, hangdog look ever since the FBI and Fox News made it sound like you’d screwed up. Get over it, Bill. That, or get back into it.”
“I can’t get back into it,” I said. “They’ve shut me out.” I held out my hands, palms up, and gave a shrug.
“See?” The sharpness of her tone startled me. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. What on earth has happened to your backbone?”
In spite of myself — in spite of wanting to be so kind and loving that I could somehow magically keep Kathleen alive and well — I felt a flash of anger. “Gee, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I lost my backbone out there on that mountainside. Or maybe it’s tied to the whipping post.”
“Well, untie it, then,” she snapped. “Or go find it. Or grow another one, if you have to. ’Cause being without it sure doesn’t become you. I’m the one who’s dying, Bill. Quit acting like it’s you that’s nailed to the cross.” I drew back, stunned, but then she reached over and squeezed my hand. “You’ve always made me so proud, Bill. Don’t stop now. Don’t stop when I’m gone. That would just make it sadder, don’t you see?”
We sat a while longer; by now the room was growing dark around us, but something had shifted — eased, at least for a moment — and we sat in a sort of companionable isolation, each absorbed in our own thoughts and feelings.
When the streetlights outside came on, Kathleen leaned over to the end table between us, took a box of matches from the drawer, and lit the thick white candle — her wine-drinking candle, she sometimes called it. “One more thing,” she said. I braced myself for more scolding, but she smiled, her face glowing in the warm light of the flame. “I wouldn’t consider it hovering if you brought me a glass of wine.”
Chapter 32
It wasn’t easy, taking my mind off Kathleen and refocusing it on my work. But she was right, and I owed it to her — and to my own sanity — to try.
I’d been taken off the Janus case by Prescott, cut off from everyone in the FBI’s San Diego field office. It was possible, though, that Mac McCready would still talk to me. I dialed his Quantico number, and he answered on the third ring. “McCready here.”
“Mac, it’s Bill Brockton, in Knoxville. Are you still speaking to me, or is the entire Bureau shunning me?”
“Still speaking, but I’m not sure I’m much of an asset to you. I’m not exactly the golden boy around here, either. Prescott’s pretty pissed at me, too. Hard to blame him — he’s been getting chewed up pretty bad himself, by big dogs with sharp teeth.”
I hadn’t taken time to consider the awkwardness of Prescott’s position — he was, after all, the public face of the troubled case — but whatever compassion I felt for him was offset by my slight resentment of the time pressure he’d applied… and by the powerful sting of feeling like the scapegoat. “Not fun for any of us,” was the best I could muster. “Listen, Mac, I’m still trying to figure out who told Prescott about the teeth. Do you know?”
“It was that reporter. Malloy. Guy’s a prick, but you gotta hand it to him — he was a giant step ahead of us.”
“But how’d he get there, Mac? Who told Malloy the teeth had been pulled? Who knew? I sure didn’t. Not till I cleaned ’em off the other day—after Prescott called to fire me.”
“Had to’ve been somebody who was in on it,” McCready mused. “Maybe it was the guy with the pliers. Hell, maybe it was Janus himself.”
“Why? Why would whoever faked the death — Janus or his DIY dentist — put a bug in a reporter’s ear?”
“Good question, Doc. Figure that one out, and you’re nearly there.”
“You think Janus wanted to embarrass the Bureau?” As soon as I said it, I decided it was highly unlikely, given that the Bureau wouldn’t just be embarrassed; the Bureau would be gunning for vengeance. “Nah, not that,” I said. “Janus would know that the FBI would move heaven and earth to catch him if he’s humiliated y’all. Maybe he promised the dental assistant a big payoff, but stiffed the guy instead.”
“That could work,” he agreed. “Listen, I gotta go — I’m teaching a fresh batch of recruits at the Academy about one of your favorite topics today: bugs. ‘Trust the bugs,’ right? Keep the faith, Doc. It’ll get better.”
As I hung up, I couldn’t help wondering, Will it? How? And when?
Among the many mean surprises that accompanied the Ultimate Mean Surprise — Kathleen’s death-sentence surprise — was the secretarial surprise: the mountain of insurance forms, financial forms, legal forms, and other forms of forms to be scaled. In a perverse corner of my mind, I imagined the grim reaper, twenty-first-century style, no longer mowing down mortals with a scythe, but simply burying them alive beneath truckloads of paper.
In the seven days since our telephone conference with Dr. Spitzer, Kathleen and I had come to an unspoken agreement, an uneasy détente. We distracted ourselves from the bigger issues of mortality and grief by focusing on what we began calling “the business of death and dying.” We dealt with the business — the bureaucracy — at the kitchen table, sorting papers into stacks and categories that sometimes covered every square inch, despite the fact that we’d added a leaf to the table. There was a certain amount of apt irony, Kathleen noted early on, in dealing with death at the kitchen table, where she had almost perished at the hands of Nick Satterfield years before. “Not with a bang, and not with a whimper,” she’d joked, “but with a notarized signature in triplicate.” At moments like that — moments of understated heroism — I admired the hell out of her and wondered how on earth I’d be able to bear losing her.
I was doing a surprisingly good job of not falling apart — even Kathleen commented on it — until she slid me an official-looking form headed with the logo of the Tennessee Department of Health and Environment. “What’s this?” I asked.
“An advance directive. It’s the state’s new version of a living will.” I felt a jolt of fear shoot through me as I scanned down the page. Near the top, directly beneath her own name, Kathleen had designated me as her “Agent”—the person authorized to make health-care decisions for her — but in a series of boxes beneath my name, she had systematically tied my hands, checking the “No” box beside every possible treatment option: No cardiopulmonary resuscitation. No defibrillation. No life support. No surgery, antibiotics, or transfusions. No tube feeding or IV fluids.
I stared at the form — its grim specifics, the litany of life-extending options she was refusing — and then looked up. She was watching me closely; it was all I could do to meet her gaze. “Looks like you’ve got your mind made up,” I said, trying to keep the pain — sadness and also self-pity — out of my voice. “Nothing here for me to do.”
“Yes, there is,” she said. “You make damn sure they abide by this. I’ve heard of too many cases where hospitals ignored these things — jump-starting people’s hearts, putting people on respirators or feeding tubes — even when the patients had living wills on file. If anything like that starts to happen, you fight tooth and nail to stop it, you hear me?” I nodded. “I need you to say it. Out loud. Promise me you won’t let them keep me alive.”