Karen preferred to chew her pain hard and swallow it quickly, while Obi let it dissolve on his tongue, the bitter flavor stored permanently, he feared, in every taste bud.
At the hotel, he signed the credit-card receipt, guessing Karen hadn’t even looked at the room rate. Five hundred a night. He handed the signed charge slip to the clerk, fighting the urge to offer more, all the cash in his wallet, everything in their checking account. He might have handed over their 401(k)s if he’d known how. The woman, a brunette in a cheap red suit coat and navy blue pants, directed him with a polished finger down the hall. He carried his bag up four flights, suddenly repelled by the thought of elevators.
In the room, undyed hemp drapes framed the bright sky and the insistent mountain. Obi shut the drapes, dimmed the lights, took the coverlet — quilted squares of expanding triangles in rust and turquoise — off the bed, stuffed it in the closet, and turned on CNN, knowing it would sound the same in Phoenix as it did in Toledo. He felt dizzy because he hadn’t drunk anything yet today, so he opened the warm bottle of water he’d bought in New Mexico, drank it in two long gulps, used the bathroom, washed up, and left for Jolly’s place, unwilling to face going to sleep tonight without this part over.
The method: pills. The reason: no one knew. Not her GP, who, when Jolly shattered her leg falling down a flight of stairs, had prescribed the narcotics she overdosed on. Not the medical examiner, who’d looked for evidence of injuries on her body to suggest an abusive relationship or foul play. Not the police, who claimed to have interviewed all her friends and colleagues. Who had supposedly searched her apartment. They claimed there was no note. Obi didn’t believe them. He would find something. They just didn’t know how to look. During the long, quiet days on the highway, he had imagined a dozen types of code she could have used, from food arrangements in the cupboard to highlighted passages in the messy stacks of romance novels she always had around.
On the way from the hotel to her apartment, Obi’s cell rang. Normally he didn’t answer while driving, but he’d just stopped for a red light and the phone lay at hand on the passenger seat.
“How close are you?” Karen asked.
“I checked into the hotel. I’m on my way there right now.”
“You’re in the car?” Karen knew his rules. Obi’s real name was Ken, but in college, where they met, she’d dubbed him Obi after Obi-Wan Kenobi. “You’re just so damn good.”
He’d tutored her in math, dug her car out of snowdrifts, driven her to class when it rained and, that first summer, turned down a chance to camp at Yellowstone in order to volunteer on Habitat houses. Nowadays, only strangers called him Ken.
He explained to Karen he was at a red light. “I can’t talk long.”
“Okay,” she intoned, as if he’d reported disarming one bomb of several.
“I’ll call you later.”
“Yes,” she agreed in that tone again.
He could see her sitting at the kitchen table with the phone in her hand, anxious for the all-clear. “It’ll be a while.”
“I know.”
“He’s looking for a psychologist sympathetic to rapists,” Brian said. It was past six. He sat at the kitchen table, a two-person, glass-topped rattan outfit against the kitchen’s end wall, his back to the apocalyptic Indian upholstery, to the balcony and to the blank, burning sky. The days here stretched past the breaking point. No wonder these Indians never wove a circle. Everything had to imply not the sun, but its rays.
“I don’t know anybody down there,” his father said. “Do you? Any contacts in that world?”
“Not really.”
“Well, that’s what Chris is for.” The lawyer. “How you doing on money?”
Brian thought he could hear his father’s checkbook opening. It touched him. “No, Dad, I’ve got plenty. I save most of every paycheck.”
“Good.”
A pause allowed Brian time to think of the joke. “Except for what I spend on ads.”
“You don’t have an ad in now, do you?”
“I was joking.”
“Yeah, okay, good.”
“Dad, I’m sorry about this.”
“Cool it on the ads, all right. We’ll take care of it, just…” A brief pause, then his father said, “I have to go. I got a call coming in.”
Brian admired his father’s restraint. He’d never asked why Brian had to get his kicks by paying a girl to clean his apartment naked, though Brian felt sure his father’s own sexual yearnings could be satisfied without money changing hands, unless you counted hundred-dollar-a-plate restaurants. In the twenty years since Brian’s mother died, his father had dated several lovely women before marrying Carol, a divorced pediatrician whose two kids he helped get into Loyola. At Christmas her kids bought gifts for Brian’s father at the local mall which were more creative and apt than what Brian picked up on his flights to Paris and London.
He wondered what his father had told his other family about the arrest. That’s how Brian thought of Carol and her son and daughter, even though they had a good relationship with Carol’s ex and had lived with his own father for only a few years of high school.
It was possible, even likely, Brian’s father hadn’t told them anything. In front of Brian, he’d treated the arrest for rape — technically vaginal penetration with a digit, in this case his finger — with a lawyer’s professional indifference. The details — that Brian’s ad had specified if the girl came to the job interview without a bra, he’d give her thirty dollars; without panties, fifty dollars — he’d taken in dispassionately, explaining that what mattered most was contact — Brian touching the girl’s genitalia — vs. penetration — his finger entering, however briefly or shallowly, her vagina.
“So when you’re talking to Chris, this is what you keep in mind. Contact gets you a year. Penetration, you’re looking at five to fourteen.” Guilt or innocence never came up. Maybe his father took one or the other for granted. Brian couldn’t tell.
It was nearly time for the news, so Brian turned on the TV. If Jocelyn was at the desk, he would assume she wanted nothing to do with him and go take the note off her door, saving himself another irrevocable humiliation.
Jolly’s apartment complex wrapped a large asphalt lot. The three buildings had no red-tiled roof or rounded eave; their Spanish style relied entirely on the stucco, painted a dirty yellow and punctuated by metal balconies whose railings reflected the sun in blinding shards like knife blades.
Who kills themselves in the summer? Someone who lives in Phoenix, Obi realized. If she’d lived at home his daughter would be alive. No one kills themselves during July in Toledo, Ohio. There’s January, February, March, and most of April for that. In July there is sun, and such a shame to waste it. But in the desert, no matter how many Targets and Costcos you build, how many fluorocarbons the air conditioners pump into the atmosphere, the biggest star remains a malevolence.
Star. Jolly had seemed like one, smart and beautiful, blond hair from somewhere in the family they couldn’t identify. Blue eyes from grandparents who hadn’t managed to give them to either him or Karen. Jolly majored in journalism at Ohio State, took a job in Columbus, then the promotion to Sun City. Being a newscaster wasn’t the same as acting, though Obi had feared it, too, would deliver an unnatural life, your face known by thousands whose names you never heard. So that was something else he had to do: find out whether things were going well at Jolly’s station.
The other cause Obi planned to investigate was the boyfriend they’d never met, a first-generation Lebanese guy Jolly had been on and off with for a year. Obi and Karen considered Middle Eastern men sexist and authoritarian. They worried Jolly would get taken advantage of. Obi had been able to give only the guy’s first name — Sam — to the police, and realized as he did that even that was most likely just a nickname, some truncated, Americanized version of the truth. They tracked him down anyway, through a coworker at Jolly’s station. Sam claimed he hadn’t seen Jolly for over two months. A hundred witnesses and a paper trail put him in Sonoma at a wedding the day she died.