The Dead Student Read online

  It was not until perhaps fifteen minutes into the meeting that Moth began to fidget nervously when there was no sign of his uncle. Something felt misshapen, a note out of tune. While Uncle Ed would sometimes be a few minutes late, if he said he was coming, he always showed up. Moth kept turning his head away from the speaker toward the door, expecting his uncle to make an apologetic entrance at any moment.

  The speaker was talking hesitantly about OxyContin and the warm sensation that it gave him. Moth tried to pay attention. He thought that was a most commonplace description, and differed little whether the speaker was sharing something about morphine-based pharmaceuticals, home-brewed methamphetamine, or store-bought cheap gin. The plummeting, welcoming warmth that permeated head and body seemed to wrap up an addict’s soul. It had been true for him during his few years of addiction, and he suspected his uncle, during his decades, had felt the same.

  Warmth, Moth thought. How crazy is it to live in Miami, where it is always hot, and need some other heat?

  Moth tried to focus on the man talking. He was an engineer—a likeable guy, a middle-aged, slightly dumpy, bald-headed man of tolerances and stresses, employed by one of the larger construction firms in the city. The realist in Moth wondered just how many condo buildings and office skyscrapers might have been constructed down on Brickell Avenue by a man who cared more for the numbers of pills he could obtain each day than the numbers on architectural plans.

  He turned to the door when he heard it open, but it was a woman—an assistant state attorney, probably a dozen years older than he was. Dark-haired, intense, she wore a trim blue business suit and carried a leather portfolio case instead of a designer pocketbook and even at the end of the workday, she looked carefully put together. She was a relative newcomer to Redeemer One. She had attended only a few meetings and said little on each occasion, so she remained largely a mystery to the regulars. Recently divorced. Major crimes. Drug of choice: cocaine. “Hello, I’m Susan and I’m an addict.” She mumbled her apologies to no one and everyone and slid quietly into a chair in the back.

  When it was his turn to share, Moth stammered and declined.

  The meeting ended without a sign of his uncle.

  Moth walked out with the others. In the church parking lot he shared a few perfunctory hugs and exchanged some phone numbers, as was customary following a meeting. The engineer asked him where his uncle was, and Moth told him that Ed had planned to come, but must have gotten hung up with a patient emergency. The engineer, plus a heart surgeon and a philosophy professor who’d been listening in, had all nodded in the special way that recovering addicts have, as if acknowledging that the scenario Moth described was most likely true, but just maybe it wasn’t. Each told him to call if he needed to talk.

  None of the people at the meeting were so rude as to point out that his earlier exercise on the track had resulted in a stale, ripe odor about him. Since he was the youngest regular at Redeemer One, they all cut Moth some slack, probably because he reminded them of themselves—just twenty years or more earlier. And everyone at the meeting was familiar with the foul scents of nausea, waste, and despair that accompanied their addictions, so they had developed tolerances for rank odors that went far beyond the norm.

  Moth stood around, shuffling his feet. He watched the others disappear. It was still warm: a humid, thick blanket that made it seem like the evening had wrapped itself around him, cloaking him in tightening shadow. He could feel himself sweating again.

  He was unsure when he made the decision to go to his uncle’s office. He just looked up and found himself on his bicycle, pedaling fiercely in that direction.

  Cars sliced through the night around him. He had a single flashing red safety light attached to the rear wheel frame, though he doubted that it would do much good. Miami drivers have loose relationships with the rules of the roadway, and sometimes yielding to a person on a bicycle seemed either like a terrible loss of face or a task so difficult it was beyond anyone’s innate ability. He was accustomed to being cut off and nearly sideswiped every hundred yards and secretly enjoyed the ever-present, car-crushing danger.

  His uncle’s office was in a small building ten blocks away from the high-end shops on Miracle Mile in Coral Gables, which was only a mile or two from the university campus. After the shopping district, the road became a four-lane too-fast boulevard, with frequent stoplights, east and west to frustrate the Mercedes-Benz and BMW drivers hurrying home after work. The road was divided by a wide center swath of stately palms and twisted banyan trees. The palms seemed puritan in their upright rigor, while the ancient mangroves were Gordian knots and devilishly misshapen, gnarled with age. Each direction seemed almost encased, tunnels formed by haphazard sweeping branches. Auto headlights carved out arcs of light through the spaces between the trunks.

  Moth pedaled quickly, dodging cars, sometimes ignoring red lights if he thought he could zip safely through the intersection. More than one driver honked at him, sometimes for no reason other than the fact that he was there and using up space that they believed they both needed and deserved for their oversized SUV.

  He was breathing hard, his pulse throbbing, when he arrived at the office building. Moth chained his bike to a tree in front. It was a dull, redbrick building, four squat stories with an old, slightly decrepit feel to it, especially in a city devoted to modern, young, and hip. There were wide windows in the back of the office that overlooked a few side streets and the rear parking lot and a single tall palm tree and not much else. It was, Moth had always thought, a very unprepossessing place for a man so successful in his practice.

  He walked around the back and saw his uncle’s silver Porsche convertible parked in its designated slot.

  Moth did not know what to think. Patient? Emergency?

  He hesitated before going up to the small suite. He told himself that he could simply wait by the Porsche and sooner or later his uncle would emerge.

  Something important must have come up. That appointment he said was going to make him late at Redeemer One. Something far more serious than a new prescription for Zoloft. Maybe mania. Hallucinations. Loss of control. Death threats. Hospital. Something. He wanted to believe the story he’d told a few minutes earlier to his fellow Redeemer One regulars.

  Moth took the elevator up to the top floor. It creaked and jerked a bit on the fourth-floor landing. The building was silent. He guessed that none of the dozen other therapists in the building were working late. Few of them used secretaries—their clientele knew when to arrive and when to leave.

  His uncle’s top-floor office had a small, barely comfortable waiting room with out-of-date magazines in a rack. In an adjacent larger room, Uncle Ed had space for a desk, a chair, and an analyst’s couch, which he used much less frequently than he had a dozen years earlier.

  Moth quietly entered his uncle’s office and reached for the familiar small buzzer just by the door. There was a friendly handwritten sign taped above the buzzer for patients: Ring twice nice and loud to let me know you have arrived, and take a seat.

  That was what Moth intended to do. But his finger hesitated over the ringer when he saw the door to his uncle’s office ajar.

  He moved to the door.

  “Uncle Ed?” he said out loud.

  Then he pushed the door open.

  This is what Moth managed:

  He stopped himself from screaming.

  He tried to touch the body, but the blood and greasy viscous brain matter from a gaping head wound splattered over the desk and staining his uncle’s white shirt and colorful tie made him pull his hand back. Nor did he touch the small semiautomatic pistol dropped to the floor next to the outstretched right hand. His uncle’s fingers seemed frozen into a claw.

  He knew his uncle was dead, but he couldn’t say the word dead to himself.

  He called 911. Shakily.

  He listened to his high-pitched voice asking for help and giving his uncle’s office address, each word sounding like it was some stranger
speaking.

  He looked around, trying to imprint everything in his memory, until all that he absorbed exhausted him. Nothing he saw explained anything to him.

  He slumped to the floor, waiting.

  He furiously held back tears when he gave the policemen who arrived within a few minutes a statement. Then he gave a second statement an hour later, repeating everything he had already said, to first-names-only Susan, the assistant state attorney in the blue suit whom he had seen at Redeemer One that evening. She did not mention that as she passed him her business card.

  He waited until the medical examiner’s half-hearse, half-ambulance arrived and he watched as two white-suited technicians loaded his uncle’s body into a black vinyl body bag, which they placed on a stretcher. This was routine for them, and they handled the body with a practiced nonchalance. He caught a single glance at the red-tinged hole in his uncle’s temple before the body was zipped away. He knew he was not likely to ever forget this.

  He replied “I don’t know” when a tired-sounding police detective asked him, “Why would your uncle kill himself?” And he had added, “He was happy. He was okay. His problems were all behind him. Like way behind him.”

  He had abruptly asked his own question of the detectives: “What do you mean he killed himself? He wouldn’t do that. Absolutely no way.” Despite his insistence, the detective seemed unmoved, and didn’t reply. Moth had looked around wildly, knowing something was telling him he was right.

  He turned down the assistant state attorney’s offer of a ride home. He stood outside in the waiting room while crime scene analysts perfunctorily processed the office. This took several hours. He spent that time trying to make his mind go blank.

  And then, when the last flashing light from all the police cruisers clicked off, he descended into a maelstrom of helplessness and without thinking about what he was doing, or perhaps thinking it was the only thing remaining he could do, Moth went hunting for a drink.

  2

  You’re a killer.

  No I’m not.

  Yes you are. You killed him. Or her. But you did it. No one else. You, all alone, all by yourself. Killer. Murderer.

  I didn’t. I didn’t. I couldn’t. Not really.

  Yes you could. And you did. Killer.

  One week after her abortion, Andy Candy lay in the fetal position, curled up in pink frills and pastel throw pillows on her bed in the small room in the modest home where she had grown up. Candy wasn’t her actual name, but a playground rhyme used since her birth by her once-doting, now-dead father. His name had been Andrew, and she was supposed to be a boy and named after him. Andrea had been the best at-the-hospital compromise her folks could arrive at when presented with a girl baby, but Andy Candy it had been ever since, a constant reminder of her father and the cancer that had stolen him prematurely, a weight that Andy Candy carried permanently.

  Her last name was Martine, pronounced with a slightly frenchified tone to it, a family acknowledgment of ancestors who had come to the USA nearly 150 years earlier. Once Andy Candy had dreams of traveling to Paris as an homage to her ancestry and to see the Eiffel Tower and eat flaky croissants and sweet pastries and maybe have an affair with an older man in a sort of New Wave romance. This was just one of many pleasant fantasies about what she would do as soon as she graduated from the university equipped with her shiny new English Literature degree. There was even a colorful travel poster on the wall of her bedroom showing a quite stunning hand-holding couple walking next to the Seine in October. The poster underscored the simplistic Paris Is for Lovers travel agency vision of the city that Andy Candy believed absolutely had to be true. In reality, she did not speak French, indeed no one she knew spoke French, and other than a high school trip to Montreal for a theater presentation of Waiting for Godot she had never been anywhere special. She had never even heard the language spoken out loud by anyone other than a teacher.

  But, in any tongue, Andy Candy was now in pain, in tears, in utter despair, and she continued to argue with herself, one second a hand-wringing supplicant, forlornly pleading for forgiveness, the next haranguing herself, like something more than a housewife kitchen scold, more even than a zealous prosecutor: a cold-blooded, dark-hooded, and relentless inquisitor.

  I had no choice. None. Really. What could I do?

  Everyone has a choice, killer. Many choices. It was wrong and you know it.

  No it wasn’t. I had no alternative. I did the right thing. I’m sorry sorry sorry, but it was the right thing.

  That’s so easy, murderer. Just so-o-o-o easy. Who was it the right thing for?

  For everyone.

  Really? Everyone? Are you sure? What a lie. Liar. Killer. Liar-killer.

  Andy Candy hugged a worn toy teddy bear. She pulled a handmade quilt decorated with red hearts and yellow flowers over her head, as if she could shut away the fury of the argument. She could feel two parts warring within her, one whiny and apologetic, the other insistent. She wished she could be a child again. She shivered, sobbed, and thought that by hugging a stuffed toy animal she could somehow shed years, travel backward to a time when things were much easier. It was as if she wanted to hide in her past so that her future couldn’t see her and hunt her down.

  Andy Candy buried her head into the toy’s fake fur, and she sobbed, trying to muffle her voice so she couldn’t be heard. Then, gasping slightly, she held the stuffed animal over one ear and cupped her hand over the other, as if trying to block the sound of the argument.

  It wasn’t my fault. I was the victim. Forgive me. Please.

  Never.

  Andy Candy’s mother fingered a crucifix hanging around her neck, then touched middle C on the piano keyboard. She held her fingers out over the ivories in much the same way that Adrien Brody did in her favorite movie, The Pianist, and without making a sound, shut her eyes and played a nocturne from Chopin. She did not actually have to hear the notes to listen to the music. Her hands rolled above the array of glistening keys like whitecaps upon the ocean.

  At the same time, she knew that her daughter was sobbing uncontrollably in the back bedroom. She could not actually hear these sounds either, but just like the Chopin, the notes were crystal clear. She sighed deeply and rested her hands in her lap, as if a recital had finished and she was awaiting applause. The Chopin faded, replaced by the concert of sadness she knew was playing in the back of the house.

  Shrugging briefly, she spun about on the bench. Her next student wasn’t due for at least a half hour, so she knew she had time to go to her daughter’s side and try to comfort her. But she had attempted this many times already over the last week, and all her hugs and back rubs and hair stroking and softly spoken words had merely ended in more tears. She had given up on being rational: “Date rape isn’t your fault …” And sensitive: “You can’t punish yourself …” And finally, practical: “Look, Andy, you can’t hide here. You’ve got to start pulling yourself together and facing life. Bringing an unwanted child into this world is a sin …”

  She didn’t know if she believed this last statement.

  She looked over to the frayed living room couch, where a half-pug, half-poodle, a goofy-looking golden-colored mutt, and a sad-eyed greyhound were all assembled, eagerly watching her. The three dogs had that What’s next? How about a walk? look about them. When she made eye contact, three tails of different shapes and sizes started wagging.

  “No walk,” she said. “Later.”

  The dogs—all rescue dogs adopted before his death by her husband, a softhearted veterinarian—continued to wag, even though she knew they just might understand the reason for the delay. Dogs are like that, she thought. They know when you’re happy. They know when you’re sad.

  It had been some time since anyone would have used the word happy to describe the house.

  “Andrea,” Andy Candy’s mother said out loud, in a tired tone that reflected nothing but futility. “I’m coming.” She said this, but she didn’t budge from the piano bench.

>   The phone rang.

  She thought she should not answer it, although why she could not have said. Instead, she reached out for the receiver and at the same moment looked over at the three dogs and pointed down the hallway to where she knew her daughter was suffering. “Andy Candy’s room. Right now. Try to cheer her up.”

  The three dogs, displaying an obedience that spoke to her late husband’s ability to train animals, jumped from the couch and scrambled down the hallway enthusiastically. She knew if the door was shut, they’d bark and the pug-poodle hybrid would get up on his hind legs and start to paw frantically in Let me in insistence. If it was ajar, the mutt, the biggest of the three, would shoulder the door aside and they would all make a beeline for her bed. Good idea, she thought. Maybe they can make her feel better.

  Andy Candy’s mother spoke into the phone. “Hello?”

  “Mrs. Martine?”

  “Yes. Speaking.”

  The voice on the other end seemed strangely familiar, although a little uncertain and perhaps shaky.

  “This is Timothy Warner …”

  A surge of memory and a little pleasure. “Moth! Why, Moth, what a surprise …”

  A hesitation. “I’m, umm, trying to reach Andrea, and I wondered if you could give me her number at school.”

  A brief silence filled the air when Andy Candy’s mother didn’t instantly reply. She made a mental note that Moth, who wore his own nickname proudly, had often used her daughter’s actual name in past years. Not always, but frequently he had employed the formal Andrea, which had elevated his status in the eyes of Andy Candy’s mother.

  “I heard about Doctor Martine,” he added cautiously. “I sent a card. I should have called, but …”

  She knew he wanted to say something about colon cancer death, but there was nothing really to say. “Yes. We got it. It was very thoughtful of you. He always liked you, Moth. Thank you. But why are you calling now? Moth, we haven’t heard from you in years!”

  “Yes. Four, I think. Maybe a little less.”