“He flew in Friday morning, so we had dinner at La Scala, our local Italian restaurant near our—my—condo. Then went home to bed,” I say.
“Were you intimate that night?” the detective asks, and looks away, not making eye contact.
“Is this really something you have to know?” I ask, and when she nods, I tell her “Yes, in fact we were.” Then shut my mouth. No one need know what went on between John and me in private. I am not being sentimental when I say I don’t believe I’ll ever see the like of those nights again.
She goes to speak, then hesitates. “Did he . . . did he act differently in any way? Say anything unusual?”
“No,” I say. “But if I’m not mistaken, his mood was tinged with melancholy. Mine was, too.” I remember now that was the week the Meekle boy finally died. “I had lost a patient the morning he arrived. That might account for my associations.”
“I’m sorry,” says the detective, and she sounds like she means it.
“It had been coming for a while,” I say. But these things tend to depress me despite my best efforts. I always analyze cases for anything I could have done differently, anything that might have changed the outcome. It’s a sobering habit, but it keeps me honest. In the Meekle case, however, the poor child wasn’t diagnosed until he was stage 4 and metastatic. Just sixteen. His father was one of the what-won’t-kill-you-makes-you-stronger types and had forced his son to keep playing football despite the dreadful pain he was having in his legs, didn’t take him to a doctor until after the season was over. “I could just kill some of these parents,” I say, and then, “Oh, don’t take me literally. Only an expression.”
“And the rest of that visit?” she asks.
“We had a quiet, if short, weekend,” I tell her. “Typically, John would come down on a Wednesday or Thursday. He taught a seminar that met every third Friday for a full day, and he’d stay until Sunday night. This time we only had Saturday together. He came in Friday to teach his class, and flew back to San Francisco Sunday morning. That was the last time I saw him.”
I remember, although I don’t tell her this, the sense of anticipation, mournful anticipation, that had been building all weekend. I had a feeling he had come down specifically to see me, his seminar notwithstanding, and that he had something important to say, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do so. By Sunday morning we were both somber, the mood having taken a decided downturn for no reason I could put my finger on.
The detective is watching me. She’s sharp, this one. I see her making a mark in her notebook.
“Saturday we went to the Getty. Not for the art, which is wretched, but to wander around the buildings, have coffee in the café,” I say. “That night we stayed in. I cooked a chicken curry, we each had our journals to read, and we did what doctors like us rarely do—nothing.”
She nods but doesn’t say anything.
“I’m not being much help to your investigation,” I say, breaking the silence. Then, “I don’t believe John was murdered. Maybe I don’t want to believe it. He deserved a better end.”
What do I want to believe? I wonder. That I wasn’t such a dupe. All of us, dupes. Each woman thinking we had a man when we only had a piece of him. If that. The most mortifying part is that having just a part of him suited me fine. I suppose I’m easily pleased.
“You said, before, in our first telephone interview, that you hadn’t anticipated such intense emotion—I believe the word was ecstasy—when you got married,” the detective says. I cringe. Did I really say that? I must have been in a state. “Can you explain that further?” she asks.
“You have to understand, I said that right after the . . . incident,” I say. Then more firmly, “Right after John died, I wasn’t completely sane. Not completely myself.”
“What would you say now?”
I think, but all I can come up with is, “Our relationship was cordial.”
The young detective looks disappointed.
“Would John have described your relationship that way?” She seems to be hoping for something, and I’m afraid I disappoint her again when I say. “It was mutually satisfying.” This is even worse than cordial, but I let it stand.
“How do you reconcile your experience with the fact that Dr. Taylor had two other wives?” she asks.
It takes me much longer to answer this one. I frankly don’t have the words. When the silence grows too long, I tell her the truth. “I can’t,” I say. “I’ll never be able to.”
It’s my turn to reach down and pick up the toad. The trilling sounds in the quiet room until I hold it firmly to my chest with both arms like I teach my youngest children. When you hold it to your heart it stops its crying.