Текст книги "Trust No One: A Thriller"

Автор книги: Paul Cleave

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

The officer leads Jerry and Eva through the fourth floor of the police department. Most people stop what they’re doing to look over. Jerry wonders if he knows any of them. He seems to remember there was somebody he’d used for the books—a cop, maybe, who he could ask how does this work or how does that work, would a bullet do this, would a cop do that, talk me through the loopholes. If he’s here Jerry doesn’t recognize him, then remembers that it’s not a police officer he got help from, but a friend of his, a guy by the name of Hans. He still has the photograph Eva gave him in his hand, and he can remember when it was taken. Things are coming back to him, but not everything.

Eva has to sign something and then speaks to the officer again while Jerry stares at one of the walls where there’s a flyer for the police rugby team that has six names on it, the last one being Uncle Bad Touch. The officer walks over with Eva and wishes Jerry a nice day, and Jerry wishes for the same thing—he wishes for a lot of nice days, and then they’re riding the elevator down and heading outside.

He has no idea what day it is, let alone the date, but there are daffodils along the riverbank of the Avon, the river that runs through the heart of the city and appeared in some of his books—beautiful in reality, but in his books normally a murder weapon or a person is being thrown into it. The daffodils mean it’s spring, putting the day in early September. People on the street look happy, the way they always do when climbing out of the winter months, though in his books, if he’s remembering correctly, people were always miserable no matter what time of the year. His version of Christchurch was one where the Devil had come to town—no smiles, no pretty flowers, no sunsets, just hell in every direction. He’s wearing a sweater, which is great because it’s not really that warm, and great because it means he must have had an attack of common sense earlier that told him to dress for the conditions. Eva stops next to a car ten yards short of a guy sitting on the sidewalk sniffing glue. She unlocks it.

“New car?” he asks, which is a dumb thing to say, because the moment the words are out of his mouth he knows he’s set himself up for disappointment.

“Something like that,” she says, and she’s probably had it for a few years or more. Maybe Jerry even bought it for her.

They climb inside, and when she puts her hand on the steering wheel he notices again her wedding ring. The guy sniffing glue has approached the car and starts tapping on the side of the window. He has Uncle Bad Touch written on his T-shirt, and Jerry wonders if he’s going to play rugby for the cops, or if he was the inspiration for the comedian who wrote the name on the form upstairs. Eva starts the car and they pull away from the curb just as Uncle Bad Touch asks if they’d like to buy a used sandwich from him. They get twenty yards before having to stop at a red light. Jerry pictures the day being split into three parts; the sun is out towards the west and looks like it’ll be gone in a few hours, making him decide they’re nearing the end of the second act. He’s trying to think about Eva’s husband and is getting close to picturing him when Eva starts talking.

“You were found in the town library,” she says. “You walked in and went to sleep on the floor. When one of the staff woke you up, you started shouting. They called the police.”

“I was asleep?”

“Apparently so,” she says. “How much can you remember?”

“The library, but just a little. I don’t remember walking there. I remember last night. I remember watching TV. And I remember the police station. I kind of . . . switched on, I guess, during what I thought was an interview. I thought I was there because the police figured out what I’d done back when—”

“There is no Suzan,” she says, interrupting him.

The light turns green. He thinks about Suzan and how she doesn’t exist outside the pages of a book he can barely remember writing. He feels tired. He stares out at the buildings that look familiar, and is starting to get an idea of where they are. There is a guy arguing with a parking attendant on the sidewalk, poking his finger into the attendant’s chest. There’s a woman jogging while pushing a stroller and talking on her cell phone. There’s a guy carrying a bunch of flowers with a big smile on his face. He sees a young boy, probably fifteen or sixteen, help an old lady pick up her bag of groceries that has split open.

“Do we have to go back to the nursing home? I want to go home instead. To my real home.”

“There is no real home,” Eva says. “Not anymore.”

“I want to see Sandra,” he says, his wife’s name coming out without any effort, and perhaps that’s the key to tricking the disease—just keep talking and eventually you’ll get there. He turns to Eva. “Please.”

She slows the car a little so she can look over at him. “I’m sorry, Jerry, but I have to take you back. You’re not allowed to be out.”

“Allowed? You make it sound like I should be under lock and key. Please, Eva, I want to go home. I want to see Sandra. Whatever it is I’ve done to be put into a home, I promise I’ll be better. I promise. I won’t be a—”

“The house was sold, Jerry. Nine months ago,” she says, staring ahead at the road. Her bottom lip is quivering.

“Then where’s Sandra?”

“Mom has . . . Mom has moved on.”

“Moved on? Jesus, is she dead?”

She looks over at him, and because of that she nearly rear-ends a car that comes to a quick stop ahead of her. “She’s not dead, but she’s . . . she’s not your wife anymore. I mean, you’re still married, but not for much longer—it’s just a matter of paperwork now.”

“Paperwork? What paperwork?”

“The divorce,” she says, and they start moving forward again. There’s a young girl of six or seven looking out the back window of the car ahead, waving and pulling faces.

“She’s leaving me?”

“Let’s not talk about this now, Jerry. How about I take you to the beach for a bit? You always liked the beach. I have Rick’s jacket in the back, you can put that on—it’ll be cold out there.”

“Is Sandra seeing somebody else? Is she seeing this Rick guy?”

“Rick’s my husband.”

“Is there another guy? Is that why Sandra is leaving me?”

“There is no other guy,” Eva says. “Please, I really don’t want to talk about this now. Maybe later.”

“Why? Because by then I’ll have forgotten?”

“Let’s go to the beach,” she says, “and we’ll discuss it there. The fresh air will do you good. I promise.”

“Okay,” he says, because if he behaves, then maybe Eva will take him back to his home instead. Maybe he can carry on with the life he had and work on getting Sandra back.

“Was the house really sold?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Why do you call me Jerry? Why don’t you call me Dad?”

She shrugs and doesn’t look at him. He lets it go.

They head for the beach. He watches the people and the traffic and stares at the buildings, Christchurch City on a spring day and if there’s a more beautiful city in the world he hasn’t seen it, and he has seen a lot of cities—that’s one thing the writing has given him, it’s given him freedom and . . .

“There was traveling,” he says. “Book tours. Sometimes Sandra came along, and sometimes you came too. I’ve seen a lot of countries. What happened to me? To Sandra?”

“The beach, Dad, let’s wait for the beach.”

He wants to wait for the beach, but more is coming back to him now, things he would much rather forget. “I remember the wedding. And Rick. I remember him now. I’m . . . I’m so sorry,” he tells her. “I’m sorry about what I did.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

The shame and the humiliation come rushing back. “Is that why you stopped calling me Dad?”

She doesn’t look at him. She doesn’t answer. She swipes a finger beneath each of her eyes and wipes away the tears before they fall. He goes back to looking out the window, feelings of shame and embarrassment flooding his thoughts. Up ahead cars are coming to a stop for a family of ducks crossing the road. A camper van pulls over and a pair of young children climb out the side and start taking photos.

“I hate the nursing home,” he says. “I must still have some money. Why can’t I buy myself a home and some private care?”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Why doesn’t it work that way?”

“It just doesn’t, Jerry,” she says, using a tone that lets him know she doesn’t want to discuss it.

They keep driving. It’s crazy that he feels uncomfortable with his own daughter, but he does, this giant wall between them feels unbreakable, this wall he put up by being a bad father and an even worse husband. They get through town and head east, out towards Sumner beach, and when they arrive they find a parking spot near the sand, the ocean ahead of them, a line of cafés and shops and then the hills behind. They get out of the car. He watches a dog rolling itself over a seagull that’s been squashed by a car. Eva gets Rick’s jacket out of the trunk, but he tells her he doesn’t need it. It’s a cool wind, but it’s like she said—it’s refreshing. The sand is golden, but there are lots of pieces of driftwood and seaweed and shells. There are maybe two dozen people, but that’s all, most of them young. He takes his shoes and socks off and carries them. They walk along the waterline, seagulls chirping overhead, people playing, and this—this right now, feels like a normal day. This feels like a normal life.

“What are you thinking about?” Eva asks.

“About when I used to bring you here as a kid,” he tells her. “The seagulls used to scare you. What happened with your mother?”

She sighs, then turns towards him. “It wasn’t really one thing,” she says, “but a combination of things.”

“The wedding?”

“That was a big part of it. She couldn’t forgive you. You also couldn’t forgive yourself.”

“So she left me.”

“Come on,” she says. “It’s a beautiful spring day. Let’s not waste it on sad memories. Let’s walk for another half an hour and then I’ll take you back, okay? I told them I’d have you back by dinner.”

“Will you stay for dinner?”

“I can’t,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

They walk along the beach, they walk and talk, and Jerry looks out over the water, and he wonders how far his body could swim, how far he would make it before the dementia kicked in and he lost all rhythm. Maybe he’d get ten yards out there and drown. Just sink to the bottom and let his lungs fill with water. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

DAY FOUR

No, you haven’t lost day two and day three—in fact you can remember them clearly (though you did misplace your coffee and Sandra found it out by the pool, which is weird because you don’t even have a pool).

Eva came over on the weekend, and there’s big news. She’s getting married. You’ve known for a while it was probably going to happen, but that didn’t make it any less of a surprise. It’s hard to sum up what you felt in that moment. You were excited, of course you were, but you felt a sense of loss, one that’s hard to explain, a sense Eva was moving on with her life and out of yours, and there’s a sense of loss because there will be grandchildren you may not get to meet, or if you do, you may end up forgetting them.

She came over on Sunday morning and popped the news. She and What’s His Name got engaged on Saturday night. There was no way you and Sandra could tell her about the Big A, not then, but you will soon, of course you will. You’ll need some explanation as to why you keep putting your pants on backwards and trying to speak Klingon. Just kidding. Speaking of kidding, you do have a pool, but you sure don’t remember walking down to it, because it’s winter, but hey, there you go.

So day two and three went by, and you’re not really dealing with the news any better. Before we get into what happened on the Day at the Doctor, first let me do what I said I would do on Day One, and that’s tell you how it all began.

It was at Matt’s Christmas party two years ago. Christ, you probably don’t even remember Matt. He’s what you would call a background character, somebody who pops into your life every few months or so, mostly after you’ve run into him at the mall, but he does throw a pretty good Christmas shindig. You and Sandra went along, you socialized, you mingled, it’s what you do, and then it happened—Matt’s brother and sister-in-law showed up and introduced themselves, Hi, I’m James and this is Karen, and then you, Hi, I’m Jerry and this is my wife . . . and that was it. This is your wife. Sandra, of course, filled in the blank. This is your wife, Sandra. She didn’t know it was a blank—she thought it was you trying to be funny. But no, Mr. Memory Banks, from which you’d withdrawn her name thousands of times over the nearly thirty years you’ve loved her, had blocked your account. The moment was so quick, and what was it you put it down to? The alcohol. And why not? Your dad had been a raging drunk back in his day, and it only made sense that was rubbing off on you a little—and after all you were standing there with a G&T in your hand, your third for the night.

Actually, just for the record, your honor, don’t go getting the wrong impression about your past self. You only drink a couple of times a year—your dad used to imbibe more in a day than you would in a year. He drank himself to death—literally. It was awful, and one memory that seems unlikely to ever fade is the one of your mother calling you, sounding so hysterical you couldn’t make out what she was saying down the phone, yet not needing to as her tone was telling you everything you needed to know. It wouldn’t be until you got to their house you found out he had been drinking by the pool. He rolled into it to cool down and couldn’t get himself back out.

So you forgot your wife’s name and why wouldn’t you think it was anything other than the booze? Sure, you were always losing your keys, but if society threw around the Big A label to anybody who didn’t know where their keys were then the whole world would be suffering from Alzheimer’s. Yes—there was the car keys getting lost, but they would get found too, wouldn’t they? Be it in the fridge, or in the pantry, or once (hello, irony) by the pool. Sure, you lost your dad in a pool, you left your coffee there, and your keys, but that’s just carelessness—after all, you do have a world full of people living inside your head looking for a voice, remember? All those characters? Serial killers and rapists and bank robbers, and of course then there’s the bad guys too (that’s a joke). With all that going on inside, of course you’re going to lose your keys. And your wallet. And your jacket. And even your car—well you didn’t lose it, not really—which is a story that had you calling This Is My Wife . . . Sandra, Is It? from the mall and, thankfully, not the police to report it stolen. She came and picked you up, and she spotted it on the way out of the parking lot exactly where you had left it, and you, well, you’d been looking for the car you used to own five years prior to that. You both had a good laugh about it. A concerned kind of laugh. And it reminded you of the time you had forgotten her name, and it reminded you of when you used to renovate houses before the crime writing took off, back when you would paint rooms and put in new kitchens, lay tiles and put in new bathrooms, and through it all you would lose the screwdriver or the hammer (and there was no pool back then to look around). And just where. The hell. Were they? Well sometimes you never did find them.

Sandra thought the solution was to have A Place for Everything. She emptied a shelf near the front door, and when you came inside you would empty your pockets, putting your phone and keys and wallet and watch there—at least that was the plan. The shelf didn’t work for one very simple reason. It wasn’t so much that you couldn’t remember where you were putting these things, it was that you had no memory of even putting them down. It was like when you reach your destination and can’t remember the drive. You can’t use A Place for Everything when you’re not aware of even taking your keys out of your pocket. Then you would forget birthdays. You would forget important dates. So that and that and all that other stuff—then you forgot Sandra’s name again. Just. Like. That. You were filling in passport forms. You were sitting beside each other, and Sandra was filling hers in and you said . . . get this, this will make you laugh or cry, but you said to her Why are you writing down Sandra in the name box? Because that’s what she was doing—of course that’s what she was doing—it’s what any Sandra would do, but you asked because, in that moment, you had no clue. Your wife’s name was . . . what? You didn’t know. You didn’t know you didn’t know that—you just knew it wasn’t Sandra, of course not, it was . . .

It was Sandra. It was the moment. When things changed.

That’s how it started—or at least that’s when it started showing up. Who knows when it started? Birth? In utero? That concussion you got when you were sixteen and you stumbled down a flight of stairs at school? How about twenty years ago when you took Sandra and Eva camping? You were chasing Eva around the campsite, pretending to be a grizzly bear and she was giggling and you were going roar, roar, and your throat was getting raw and your hands were forming claws and you ran right into a branch and knocked yourself out cold. Or maybe it was that time you were fourteen and your dad punched you for the first and only time in his life (he was normally a happy drunk) because he was angry, he was mad, he was what he got sometimes when the normally wasn’t in play and the darkness was creeping in. Kind of like the darkness you’ve got coming and, thinking about it, maybe he wasn’t as drunk as it seemed—maybe your disease was his disease. It could be one of those things, or none of them, or, as you thought in the beginning, just the Universe balancing the scales for giving you the life you wanted.

Soon you won’t remember your favorite TV show, your favorite food. Soon you’re going to start slurring your speech and forgetting people, only you’re not going to know most of this. Your Brain the Vault is going to turn into Your Brain the Sieve, and all those people, all those characters you’ve created, their world and their futures are going to drain away, and soon . . . well, hey, in a hundred years you would have been dead anyway.

That moment when things changed, well, Sandra said you had to go and see Doctor Goodstory. Which led to more doctors. Which led to news of the Big A on Big F—that’s how you think of that Friday now, as the Big F, the Day at the Doctor, and really you think that’s a pretty appropriate name for it, right? You’d been hoping for something simple, something changing your diet and spending more time outside soaking up vitamin D could fix. Instead the Big F brought the exact news you were hoping you wouldn’t hear.

What do you want to know about that day? Do you want to know you cried that night in Sandra’s arms when you got home? Not the Big F day—that was the result day. But the first time, back when all Doctor Goodstory said was We’re going to have to run some tests. Sure, we’ll get to the bottom of it. No, don’t worry about it, Jerry—these were things he didn’t say. He asked if you were depressed. You said sure, what author isn’t after reading some of his reviews? He asked you to be serious, so then you were, and no, you weren’t depressed. How was your appetite? It was good. Were you sleeping much? Not a lot but enough. Diet? How was your diet? It was good, you were getting your vitamins, you were staying healthy and hitting the gym a couple of times a week. Were you drinking much? Maybe the odd gin and tonic or two. He said he’d run some tests, and that’s what he did. Tests, and a referral to a specialist.

Then came the trips to the hospital. There was the MRI scan, there were blood tests, memory tests, there were forms to fill in, not just for you, but for Sandra—she was to observe you, and still you kept this from Eva. Then the Big F, Doctor Goodstory had the results and would you please come in and speak to him, so you did . . . well, you know the news. Just take a look in the mirror. Early onset dementia. Alzheimer’s. Maybe in the future there’s a cure, because there sure as hell isn’t one now, and maybe this journal can be inspiration for your next book—maybe you’ve written fifty books by now and this was just that time in your life, Jerry Grey with his Dark Period, the same way Picasso had his Blue Period and The Beatles had their White.

You have slowly progressive dementia. The Big A. Dementia in people under sixty-five is not common, Goodstory said, which makes you a statistic. There are drugs to take for the anxiety and the depression that is, he assured you, on its way—but there aren’t drugs you can take for the disease itself.

We can’t accurately map the rate at which things are going to change for you, Doctor Goodstory said. The thing is, the brain—the brain still has a lot of mysteries. As your doctor, and as your friend, I’m telling you there might be five or ten okay years ahead for you, or you could be full-blown crazy by Christmas. My advice is to use that gun of yours and blow your brains out while you still know how.

Okay, he didn’t say that, that’s just you reading between the lines. You spent half an hour talking about the future with him. Soon a stranger is going to be living inside your body. You, Future Jerry, may even be that stranger. Bad days are coming, days when you will wander from the house and get lost at the mall, days where you will forget what your parents looked like, days where you’ll no longer be able to drive. Other than the journal, your writing days are over. And that’s only the beginning. The days will get so dark that in the end you won’t know who Sandra is, or that you have a daughter. You may not even know your own name. There will be things you can’t remember, and there will be things you can remember that never actually happened. There will be simple things that no longer make any sense. The day is coming when your world will be without logic, without any kind of sense, without any awareness. You won’t be able to hold Sandra’s hand and watch her smile. You won’t be able to chase Eva and pretend you’re a grizzly bear. That day . . . Doctor Goodstory couldn’t tell you when it would be. Not tomorrow. That’s the good news here. All you have to do is make sure that day will never be tomorrow.