The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell, page 28
Michelle made pasta and a salad, but none of us ate much. I called home. Eva did not answer. Her flight had been scheduled to land at the Oakland airport just after 4:00 p.m., which would have put her right in the heart of all the traffic. I would likely go home and find a message on the answering machine telling me she’d decided to stay in a hotel in the East Bay to avoid the mess. Terrific. She and Mr. Sleepy could hold each other through the trauma.
At nine o’clock I made another call and again got my answering machine. I hung up and told Ernie, “I’m going to head home.”
“Did you reach her?” Ernie asked.
I shook my head. “She’s probably staying at a hotel in Oakland rather than fight the traffic.”
2
When I pulled up to my two-story house with the cedar-shake siding, I noticed the porch light was on, as well as another light in the front living room, and was certain Eva was home. I’d given this moment some thought, about what I would say. I’d decided to wait and let Eva speak, give her the chance to at least be honest with me. If she was, I’d tell her thanks, but it was time she moved out. If she wasn’t, well, then, at least I knew who she truly was, and again, I’d ask her to move out.
When I looked to the upstairs windows I did not see a light on in the bedroom. Eva’s car was not parked in the driveway. Strange. When I climbed the front steps to the covered porch, I heard a familiar bark. When I tried to open the door, Bandit pushed his bony head between the door and the jamb, whining and whimpering with excitement. “Okay, okay, Bandit. Back up, buddy. Back up.” I stepped in and looked about the room while squatting to pet Bandit and scratch his sides. I didn’t see any suitcases. Bandit’s tail whipped the air. “Mickie?” I called out. “Eva?”
No one answered. I saw a slip of paper on the tile counter beside the answering machine.
Thought you might need some company.
M
Mickie, checking up on me.
The blinking red light on the answering machine drew my finger toward the button, but I changed my direction to the pantry. “You hungry, Bandit?” His tail whipped vigorously. When Mickie traveled, I watched her boys, which was what she called her dogs. I kept a bag of dog food in the pantry. Eva did not like pets. She reacted to any piece of dog hair on her clothing as if it was radioactive. I wondered if she’d come home but left when she encountered Bandit, but there was no sign she’d been in the house.
Bandit’s whimpering became more pronounced at the sight of the food bag. I filled his metal bowl and barely got it to the floor before he dunked his huge jowls and began crunching. I filled a second bowl with water and set it out of harm’s way; Bandit tended to slide his bowl all over my tile floor seeking every nugget. As I watched the big dog eat, I sensed the red light blinking behind me. When he’d finished, Bandit looked up at me with his dark, expectant eyes. “Sorry, buddy. Mickie says one bowl. You’re getting too fat.”
The skin above his eyes wrinkled in disappointment.
“I know. Women, right?” I opened the back door to the yard. “Okay, time for both of us to take care of our business.”
Bandit bounded out. I left the door open so he could get back in and made my way to the answering machine. When I hit the button, a computerized voice indicated there had been a power failure. Then the machine retrieved the stored messages. The first message was left at 4:12 p.m., before the earthquake. Eva.
“Hey, Sam, just wanted to let you know that my flight landed, and I’m on my way home. Looking forward to seeing you.”
I didn’t have a lot of time to react or analyze the message, because the machine beeped and the second message began playing. Mickie.
“Hey, it’s me. I know you went to the game with Ernie, but I saw that it got canceled, and I’m checking up on you. I left Bandit at the house to keep you company. I hope you’re all right. I’m fine. A couple cracks in my plaster in the living room, but otherwise no damage. Okay, I’m rambling. Call me and let me know you’re okay. Love you.”
The machine beeped a third time. I awaited the next message, the one from Eva calling to tell me that traffic was a bitch, and she’d decided to spend the night at a hotel in the East Bay, but there was no voice, just a hang up. The stilted, computerized voice indicated no further messages. I was about to walk off when the phone rang. Isn’t it always like that? Your ears must have been burning. Or I was just thinking of you. I took a deep breath, cleared my throat, and answered. “Hello?”
“Sam?”
“Eva?”
“No, Sam, I’m sorry, this is Meredith.”
Eva’s mother. “Meredith?” It dawned on me that she would be worried. They lived in Southern California and had obviously heard the news about the earthquake. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t . . . Listen, Eva called and left a message that her flight landed. I’m sure she’s in a hotel somewhere because the roads are a mess here, as you can imagine. The phone lines have been down.”
“Eva’s not in a hotel, Sam.”
“Did she call you?”
Meredith was weeping. She could not continue. I heard someone take the phone.
“Sam?” Eva’s father, Gary Pryor. “We got a call, Sam.” He paused. He, too, was fighting tears. “They found Eva’s car, Sam. They found it underneath the freeway.”
3
Gary Pryor told me he would catch a plane to San Francisco in the morning and asked that I pick him up at the airport. He said someone needed to identify Eva’s body. I wrote his flight information on the back of Mickie’s note because I knew I would not remember any of our conversation. Then I hung up and stumbled to the couch. Bandit’s paws clicked on the tile floor as he trotted in from the backyard, but he did not jump onto the couch or force his head into my hands to be petted. Sensing a mood change, he lowered his head and padded forward, his tail silent. When he got close, he stopped again, waiting for some sign. Did I want his comfort?
I opened my palm, and Bandit stepped forward and rested his head in my lap, looking up at me with a furrowed brow and sad eyes. I lowered my forehead to the bony knob atop his head. I wanted to cry, but I also could not stop a thought swirling in my head. I stood, startling Bandit, who jumped backward, wary. I paced the living room and tried to fill my head with any thought to avoid the one that kept circulating. Eva’s father was coming. He was going to identify her body and fly her ashes back to Los Angeles for a funeral service. Her father was coming. Her father.
I stopped pacing. I remembered Ernie’s two boys racing from their front door to embrace their daddy, gripping his legs.
This was Gary Pryor’s baby girl.
This was something no father should have to do.
“No,” I said aloud. “No.”
I found the paper on which I had written the information and called the number. Gary answered on the first ring. “I’m going over to the morgue tonight,” I said. “I’m going to identify Eva. I’ll have her body transported to a funeral home here in Burlingame, and I’ll ask that she be cremated. We’ll fly her ashes home together.”
Gary did not immediately answer. He sobbed, great gasps and moans that prevented words but that I understood. He’d been bearing up for his wife, for Eva’s sisters, for the entire family. With the details of Eva’s remains taken from him, he could mourn his daughter.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you, Sam.”
I hung up and called Mickie.
“Hey,” she said. “I’ve been trying to reach you. Are you all right? I thought maybe you went to your mom’s, but no one answered.”
“I’m going to bring Bandit back tonight,” I said.
“Keep him. Bandit loves it there. He gets a lot more attention, and you two bachelors deserve each other.”
“Eva’s dead, Mickie.” I said the words because part of me needed to hear them to believe them.
“What?”
“I just got off the phone with her father. The freeway crushed her car. She’s dead.”
“I’m on my way,” Mickie said.
4
We got back to my house at one in the morning. Mickie took the key from my hand and inserted it in the lock when I failed the task twice. I sat on the sofa petting Bandit while she opened the liquor cabinet.
“Going to have to be bourbon,” she said. I had drunk all of Eva’s scotch. “Do you have anything to mix it with?”
“Ice,” I said. I heard her pull open the freezer and take the tray to the counter, the ice tumbling into a glass.
Identifying Eva’s body was worse than I anticipated, and I had entered the makeshift morgue anticipating that nothing I would ever do in my life would be worse than this task. I was glad I did it, though, glad that her father would not have to do it, glad that the search-and-rescue team had been able to reach her car and her body. Further reports throughout the night indicated more cars remained trapped beneath the tons of concrete, people still inside, alive.
Eva’s beautiful face had been spared damage, and that was all the attendee showed me. But as a doctor, I understood from the way the sheet draped her body that much of her torso had been crushed and disfigured, bones broken. She’d likely died instantly.
After the attendee had pulled the sheet back over Eva’s face, she had moved to a second body lying beside Eva. “Are you here to identify the man in the car as well?”
It had felt like a stab to the heart.
Mickie had given me a look, but I did not tell her.
“No,” I said. “I’m not.”
Mickie walked from the kitchen into the family room and handed me my bourbon. She sat close, just as she used to sit when we drove the Falcon. For a long time, we did not speak. I drank my bourbon until only ice remained. Mickie took my glass and poured another drink. I could feel the effects of the alcohol on my already-tired body and weakened mental state. I took another sip. “Thanks for going with me tonight.”
“Not something anyone should have to do alone,” she said. She took a sip of water. “That’s a brave thing you did, so her father wouldn’t have to.”
I blew out a breath. “I can’t cry,” I said. “Why can’t I cry? What the hell is wrong with me?”
“There’s nothing wrong with you.”
“Do you know what my first thought was when I found out? When her father told me?”
“Don’t—”
“Relief.”
“Sam, don’t.”
“I felt relief that I wasn’t going to have to confront her; that I didn’t have to tell her it was over and that she needed to move out. What kind of a person thinks that way?”
“A good person.”
“Nice try.”
“I’m serious. A bad person wouldn’t be that honest. They wouldn’t feel any guilt at all. A bad person never would have done what you just did. A bad person would have punted the responsibility and told her family that he wanted nothing to do with any of it. But I know you. And I know that you’ll go to your grave and never tell another living soul that she cheated on you, and neither will I. Her parents will bury the daughter they loved and get to keep all the memories.”
The tears burst from me with a gasp, like a dam exploding. Now I could not control them, could not stop the flood. I felt Mickie pull me to her and place my head against her chest, stroking my hair, letting me sob. She removed the pillow from behind her and leaned back, holding me until I could hear my breathing slow and I drifted off.
5
Everyone at Eva’s funeral seemed willing to play their part in a tragedy Shakespearean in its magnitude—the young couple about to embark on a life together ripped apart and forever separated by the forces of nature, leaving the future groom to pull together the pieces of his shattered existence.
Ernie and Michelle flew down with Mickie and my mother to be with me for Eva’s funeral in Redondo Beach, and I was grateful they came. Their presence gave me back my identity and validated my existence beyond the role of the unknown grieving boyfriend.
At the end of the service, I followed Eva’s casket out of the church with the rest of her family and watched the hearse depart. They had a town car for the family, but Ernie saved me. “You want a ride to the reception?”
I nearly hugged him.
The reception was held in the backyard of the Pryor home, a beautiful setting with a view of the Pacific Ocean and a light breeze that brought the smell of the salt air. I parked my mother beneath the shade of a table umbrella with a plate of catered food and a Diet Coke. Mickie and Michelle sat and talked with her while Ernie and I made our way to the bar. I noticed a few people from the church approaching and mentally steeled myself for their condolences.
“Excuse me,” one of the men said, “but aren’t you Ernie Cantwell?”
“Yes, I am,” Ernie said.
“We thought so,” the man said. “We saw you in church. Can we get your autograph?”
As Ernie signed the autographs, the men looked to me and introduced themselves. “How do you know Eva?” one of them asked.
“Just a friend,” I said.
Ernie and I picked up our beers and found a corner of the yard.
“How are you holding up?” Ernie asked.
“Like an actor backstage in the green room waiting to go on again.” I felt guilty saying it, but it was the truth. What seemed to be either lost on everyone, or at least unspoken, was the irony that we did not know one another. Except for a dinner at a restaurant in San Francisco that I had shared with Eva’s parents when they came to visit, I had never eaten with them, never shared the holidays with the family, visited over a weekend, or attended family vacations. I had never even met Eva’s sisters.
“We’ve gone through some crazy shit together, but this might be the craziest.” Ernie sipped his beer, surveying the crowd, but I had already begun to realize that there was one more crazy thing I needed to do.
6
The following week Trina Crouch sat in my office. Mickie had taken Daniela down the street for an ice cream while I recounted my whole sordid confrontation with David Bateman the day I told everyone else that I had fallen off my bike. I told her of the meeting with Father Brogan at the OLM rectory that led to Father Brogan expelling David.
“You stood up to him,” Crouch said. “You got him expelled.”
Before our consult I had removed my brown contact lenses in a sign of good faith. “He got himself expelled.”
“He said you told the priest, and the priest kicked him out. He said it humiliated his parents. He said his father . . . He was not a good man, either.”
“I never told the priest, Trina.”
“You didn’t?” she asked, clearly puzzled.
“David’s two friends ratted him out.” I sat back, considering her. “I didn’t have the courage to tell anyone, not the priest and not my parents,” I said. “I didn’t think anyone could help me or protect me. I was afraid. Had it not been for the other two boys’ consciences bothering them, David would have continued to bully me.”
“I don’t have anyone like that,” she said.
“You do,” I said. “You have me. And you have Mickie.”
She looked confused. She wiped her tears. “Why?”
“Because we all need someone.”
“Can you help Daniela?”
“I can only repair Daniela’s eye,” I said.
Tears spilled down Trina’s cheeks at my unspoken meaning. I rolled my chair to the sofa on which she sat and handed her the box of Kleenex.
“The retina is the neurosensory tissue that lines the back inside wall of the eye.” I used a model of the eyeball and socket I pulled off the shelf. “It’s sort of like wallpaper on Sheetrock or the film in a camera. The retina transfers the light coming into our eye into vision. The center of the retina is called the macula, and it is the only part capable of fine, detailed vision—the vision for reading. The remainder of the retina, the peripheral—”
“Daniela can’t read books anymore. She says everything is blurry.”
“When the retina detaches, it separates from the back wall. When it separates it is removed from its blood supply and source of nutrition. The retina will degenerate and lose its ability to function if it remains detached. Daniela will lose her central vision.”
“She’ll go blind.”
I sat back. “Yes, for all intents and purposes she’ll go blind in that eye. Fortunately, over ninety percent of retinal detachments can be repaired with a single procedure. There are three different surgical approaches that we can take—”
“I don’t have any insurance,” she said. “I lost my job three months ago.”
I placed the model on the desk. “What about your ex-husband?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head.
“He’s a police officer. He must have benefits.”
“No,” she said more forcefully.
“Trina—”
“I can’t have any interaction with him,” she said, raising her voice like a frightened child. I gave her a second. She took a deep breath and said, “He took us off his benefits after the divorce, and I agreed to it because I had a job and I just wanted to be rid of him as much as I could.”
I spoke softly, gently. “He has a responsibility to his daughter.”
“He hates me so much for leaving him he’ll do anything to hurt me, even hurt her.”
“You could force him, in court.”
She shook her head and smiled, though it had a sad quality to it. “It would only make him angry. He’d take it out on me and Daniela, and lawyers cost money, Dr. Hill. So do hospitals and funeral parlors. I don’t want to bury my daughter or have her watch him bury me. I don’t want to leave her to him. He’s a monster.”
