“I was at my after-school job when my mother called.” I’ve gone through this before, checked the dates, hospital admissions records, and maps. Four nights running, I sat in the dark with the air conditioner blasting, played the movie over and over on the backs of my eyes.
“By the time I got home, they were loading him into an ambulance. His eyes were half-open and wet like he’d been crying and his skin was bright red. I followed them to the hospital but he was dead when they arrived.”
“And what about your mother?” He’s dropped his voice. You can talk to me. I understand.
“She sort of lost steam after my father died and quit pressuring me about college. She had a stroke, a while back.”
“And is that how she passed away?”
“Yeah. I flew home for her funeral. I spent a week helping my sister Emily clean out our mother’s house to put it on the market. She and Jeff—her husband—moved everything into a storage unit.”
“Did your father ever complain of headaches?”
“Yeah. Mostly when I was younger. He took medicine, but I don’t know what.” False. I’m hoping that he’s not completely driven, that he’ll finish my evaluation without checking for Karl Fletcher’s medical history.
“What did your father do for a living?”
John Vincent Senior drank, moved furniture, drove a truck, drank, bought and sold a string of motorcycles, drank, was gone for months and years at a stretch, and drank. Mom said he was helping dig a gold mine. A polished lie to keep his kids from being ashamed of him. Dad called us and sent postcards.
“He was an eye doctor. He did very well, was always getting some award or another from different groups for being a philanthropist and humanitarian.”
Dad looked like the pictures of Chet Baker midway through his aging continuum, dead between the stop-and-stare handsome that made waitresses blush and the later years, after shooting four times his body weight in Mexican brown tar into his veins. Dad never shot anything, but did most everything else. I know Dad was a lady-killer at one time, but he also ate a few pool cues, steering wheels, dashboards and nightsticks in his day. Decades of vodka give you a high pain threshold.
My smile twitches, my story locked and loaded.
“What’s funny?” the Evaluator asks.
“I wanted one of those games where you put the plastic on the television screen and colored along with the cartoon. He wouldn’t get me one. He said they were bad for your eyes. They took ’em off the market, but I was always mad at him for that.” Stop fidgeting, resume eye contact because this is more comfortable territory for me.
“I’ll bet he wouldn’t let you have an air rifle either, would he?” The Evaluator is smiling. His fatigue is showing but, just for a moment, he wants me to see his guard drop.
“Or lawn darts,” I say.
I’ve given him his rapport: a mix of nostalgia and sugar-coated resentment over some bygone childhood toys. He’s content to move on, which is good. I don’t want him pressing for more detail because I don’t improvise as well as I plan. I relax my posture, return my voice to normal volume. I do unconcerned, at ease.
“Okay, what about your mother? Did she work?”
Mom was a coffee-shop waitress. Mom drove a school bus. Mom didn’t drink, or at least didn’t let me or Shelly see it. Mom dated some of the coffee-shop customers while Dad was away. I could tell she was pretty compared to other women her age. She went out on her nights off. Whether she was bored, needed companionship, wanted a decent meal, rent or pocket money, I don’t know. Thinking about it makes my throat hurt, so I don’t think about it.
Sometimes I’d go to the coffee shop after school, when Dad wasn’t home. Mom would give me a meatloaf sandwich and a soda and I was supposed to sit at the end of the counter and do my schoolwork or color. The manager, I never knew his name, was a bloated man with a sopping cigar stump permanently wedged between his teeth, always wore a short-sleeve, pearl-button shirt and bolo tie, had sideburns like two hairy Floridas crawling down his fat jowls. He was tactful to me, and very nice to Mom. I put that together later, too. Mom kept that job, thick and thin, getting progressively more bold with what she filched to bring home for Shelly and me.
I didn’t do any schoolwork, even as little as there was to do in kindergarten. I drew elaborate line doodles on the backs of the children’s placemats, ignoring the coloring or connect-the-dots on the front, and created huge labyrinths or perfect line replicas of the wood-veneer countertop. Or I’d play a game, watching the waitresses pause at the register to add up their checks. I’d read them upside down, add them in my head to see if I could beat their speed at the register, see if my numbers were right. Then Mom would scold me for daydreaming, put my workbooks back in front of me.
“My father made decent money, so my mother could stay home and take care of us,” I tell him, moving in my seat.
“So you were close to her?” And the Evaluator moves with me. A few beats behind, thinks I don’t notice, thinks I trust him. He’s writing more and more quickly, shorthand abbreviations stacked atop one another—PS, HE, HN, arrows pointing up, down or to one side, x’s and circles—confirming some of my conclusions, obliterating others. We do a slow dance of posture changes, eye movement, eyebrow scratching and throat clearing, and I piece together his truncated record of our conversation, one line at a time. I want to go home. I miss Keara. I really wish I could get a line.
“Not really. I wanted out of the house as a kid. I was gone right after my father died. I kept up with her after that, but we never got close.”
“Can you recall the last time you saw either of your parents?
“Not sure. It’s been a long time. My father, it was that morning I went to school. My mother, it was on a visit home after I’d moved away, but I don’t remember exactly when.”
“What about any siblings? You mentioned an ‘Emily.’”
“I’ve got an older brother and sister. Ryan works in banking on the East Coast. Emily’s still in Oregon with her husband. They just had a baby girl.”
“So, you’re the youngest of three. Is that correct?”
“Yeah, I’m the youngest.”
Sometimes a plane will go down and FAA investigators can’t identify any remains. A fuselage explosion at 35,000 feet or 800,000 pounds of flesh and metal hitting the water at four hundred miles an hour makes it hard to check prints or dental work. And sometimes the passenger manifests don’t check out. Names dead-end when they look for next of kin. Illicit lovers on secret vacations, drug couriers, battered wives, and federal witnesses die midair wondering why their oxygen mask doesn’t inflate, and nobody knows it because each one is a walking, breathing John Doe. That’s my family.
“Are you close with your brother and sister?”
“More or less. We live in three different states and don’t have holidays at home anymore. We talk every month or so. I have drinks with Ryan when he’s in town on business, and I went to Emily’s for Christmas, last year.”
I don’t know what it’s like to have a brother, so I’ve got to be careful. I could paint myself into a serious corner if I give him fuel for the abandonment issue.
“How were you as a child?”
Bull’s-eye. He’s not dwelling on the parental death, though it’s going to show up in his report. He’s moved on, looking for a psychiatric history, another indicator of trouble.
“In terms of what?”
“Bed wetter? Sleeping problems? Anything out of the ordinary?”
“Nope.” False. I wasn’t walking until a full year later than normal and didn’t begin speaking until age