The Trapdoor

  I saw her maybe nine, ten times in the course of a few months. That’s all. But she had those sad, understanding eyes and a sympathetic little tilt to her head when she was listening … and she listened well. My marriage was falling apart, and I’d finally caught on. Constance was going to take my kid away from me. I knew it. I was broken-hearted and desperate, and I didn’t know where to turn.

  One day Chandler was guiding me through a city hospital ward. Past heavy doors, shut tight. Past screened windows. Screaming, cold-turkey faces pressed to the glass. Hands like claws scrabbling. Muffled voices begging for a fix, mad for it. On she went, in that liquid murmur. And I found myself studying her white lips, the shape of them. The shape of her neck when her hair moved away from it. She glanced at me, caught me at it. She held my sorry gaze a moment, then looked away. Went on talking. I felt like an idiot, like an erring husband in a bad movie. One of those fifties jobs where it’s all done without skewing the knot in your tie.

  We came to the end of the hospital corridor. We pushed out into a stairwell. I followed her down until we reached the door to the main floor.

  “Let me buy you a beer,” I said. I cleared my throat.

  She hesitated a minute. Then she nodded once without saying a word.

  So I bought her a beer at a nearby tavern. A little pub, all glittering bottles and gleaming wood. Watered booze in the bottles. Cigarette burns in the wood. We sat at a table by the window and I bought her a beer and I told her everything. Just like the movie. I started out showing her pictures of my little girl. She tilted her head at them, smiled and cooed.

  “And that’s my wife,” I said, pointing to the shot in my wallet.

  She stopped smiling. “She’s very beautiful.”

  That was all it took. I told her how I’d met her, fell for her. About having the kid and what it had done to us. I went on a long time. The beer’s last foam dissolved at the bottom of our glasses. The barkeep eyed us grumpily. I just kept going on.

  “She drifts. She drifts away,” I said. “Like someone on a tide. And I reach for her, and she doesn’t … she just keeps drifting. Staring at me with these angry eyes, never reaching back.” I stared at my empty hand, open on the tabletop. “Just drifting.”

  Chandler didn’t offer me any advice. I hadn’t asked for any. She listened until I ran out of steam. When I was finally done talking, I sat across the table from her, stared at my palm a few seconds longer. I caught myself. I snorted. “Jesus,” I said. “‘My wife doesn’t understand me.’ I guess you’ve never heard that before.”

  I had started to withdraw my hand when she reached out and took hold of it. I looked up at her. I saw her eyes soften as she studied me.

  My fingers folded over her hand. “Let’s get out of here,” I said. I was hoarse when I said it.

  There was a park nearby. Not much. A square of yellow-green grass with streets slashing the corners, traffic slashing the streets. We walked over a concrete path until we were standing under an old sycamore. Its branches sagged, half strangled by the fumes from the cars. We faced each other. She waited. I took her by the waist and brought her to me. I meant to kiss her lightly, but I was surprised by the force of my hunger, and hers. Suddenly she was pressed hard against me and my mouth was over hers and our tongues were together. Her hands were on my shoulders, my neck, my cheeks. Mine caressed her everywhere.

  I pulled back from her, breathless. I opened my mouth, but couldn’t speak. Her eyes went over me, searching me out. I looked away.

  She let me go.

  “Damn,” I said. “Damn.”

  “It’s all right,” she whispered.

  “No. No, it’s not.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Chandler. I have to …”

  She nodded.

  “I have to see it to the end. However it goes, I’ve got to.”

  “I know that.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know.”

  I ran my fingers up through my hair. “I’ll walk you back to your office.”

  “No. Thank you. I can manage.” Now, when she looked at me, I saw what she felt. How much she felt. Just then she couldn’t hide it. She walked away instead.

  That was the last time I saw her.

  It was odd, I guess, as these things go, odd that I had just been thinking of those days. Or maybe it wasn’t so odd. I think of them often. I even think of her from time to time. Not many women have looked at me that way. I knew it was a look that didn’t come easily to her, that wouldn’t pass away quickly. But it was a long time ago, anyhow.

  Now, in the church cellar, I came toward her, extending my hand. Her palm was cool and dry.

  “Strange world,” I said.

  And she echoed my thought of a moment before. She said: “Not so strange really.”

  She gestured me into the lighted room.

  It was a pretty shabby place. Walls of white plaster, warped with the shape of the stone cellar. There was a bulletin board hanging to my right papered with flyers of yellow, blue, pink, and green. As for the rest of the place, it was covered over with newspaper clippings. My gaze passed briefly over the headlines: they were stories of suicide, or of rescues from suicide, or snippets from advice columns dealing with despair, that sort of thing.

  There was a cot against the wall to my right. Against the wall to my left was a desk with a typewriter. It was covered with papers. The central piece of furniture, though, was the long table I’d seen from the door. There were three phones on it and three people sitting in front of the phones, talking into the phones. Two women, one man, all in their twenties. Theirs were the voices I’d heard murmuring upstairs. Now I heard them more distinctly.

  “Why do you say that?” one of them asked.

  “How long have you felt that way?” said another.

  “I’m glad you called. You sound very unhappy,” said the third.

  Even down here it sounded like ghostly prayer.

  Then Chandler said, “Well, John, what brings you here?” I opened my mouth to answer. But before I could, she laughed. It was a quick, nervous laugh, not altogether pleasant. “That’s a silly question,” she said. “A story brings you here. What else?”

  I nodded. “Michelle Thayer.”

  I saw her eyebrows raise a little. “You have a knack for the sad ones, don’t you?”

  “Good news is no news,” I said. “How have you been, Chandler?”

  “Very well, thanks. You?” She could not hold my gaze. Her eyes flitted this way and that. Finally, she glanced off at the typewriter desk.

  “I get by,” I said.

  “Your daughter?”

  I paused. “She died.”

  She looked up quickly. “Oh no, John.” She reached out to touch my arm, but she did not. She grew self-conscious suddenly. Her hand fell away.

  “It was a long time ago,” I said. “She killed herself.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Me too. But … I wanted to talk to you about Michelle. I understand she used to work here.”

  “Yes, she was one of my first volunteers when we started up last year.”

  “This is a hotline? A suicide hotline?”

  “Well … just a place for people to call when they get depressed or … I thought … When I was transferred up to northern Westchester—oh, it’s about five or six years ago now—I began to see the need for something like it in the area. I wanted to get out of the system and work on my own, anyway, so …” That was the way she spoke: diffidently. Her sentences kept trailing off. Her eyes kept slipping away from me. She said: “It took me this long to get funding …. The director … me … I’m the only paid position here.” She laughed a little. “And I just get enough to pay my rent … feed my cat.…” I pictured her alone in her apartment with her cat. She flushed. She knew what I was thinking. “Anyway …” she said.

  “All the recent suicides should help you get funding anyway.”

  She nodded, gulping dryly. “U
h, well, the need is more obvious now. As you can see …” She gestured toward the volunteers at the table. “The lines are always busy.” Her hand wavered in the air. She took hold of it with her other, folded the two on her skirt as if to keep them in place. In her prim, high-collared blouse, she looked just then the very picture of the nervous spinster-woman.

  That moment—that last moment of connection between us so long ago—hung between us now like an unfinished sentence. That’s what was shaking her up, I knew. And the long pause was making it worse.

  “So, uh, what’s your theory about all this?” I said, just to say something. “What makes these kids do it … all together like that?”

  She was grateful. She knew where she was now: Back before that old moment, back to playing the expert to my reporter. Back on safe ground.

  She lifted her shoulders a little, a gesture of relief. “They’re prone to climates … fads, you know. And right now, up here at least, there’s a climate of destruction. But it’s strictly personal too. I mean, we hear them …. They call up here, the kids, and they tell us … Well, when they first call, it’s always something simple, even silly. Their parents won’t let them stay out at night, they have too much homework, or … But sooner or later, they tell us about their difficulties with … with sex or the, the terrible pressures they’re under … or the fact that their parents’ marriage is—” This time her voice didn’t trail off, it stopped abruptly. “You see, each person’s problem is individual … what’s general to them is the attraction toward self-annihilation. A sort of … plague of spiritual emptiness, I think ….” She huffed like a proper New England schoolmarm. “But I don’t suppose that will sell many papers, will it?”

  “Beats me. I get paid no matter how many papers they sell.”

  “Well, there are more … substantial reasons, if you like. Sociological reasons … I suppose that’s what you’d call them.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you want to take notes?”

  I shook my head. “It stunts the imagination.”

  She didn’t even smile. “The people who move up here … well, they move, you know, to get away, mostly … from cities. They move for their children’s sakes. Ironically.” She drew a deep breath. It only trembled slightly coming out. “But, of course, if you want to live in the … in the country, you have to keep it … the country. So they zone their houses for large plots of land, acreage that … poorer people can’t afford. And they—they veto mass transportation plans that might attract those people. Did you try to take a bus here?”

  “No, I have a car.”

  “Most people do. The buses are few and far between. So teenagers too young to drive are left stranded. They have virtually nothing to do but … hang out or … rely on older friends. And older teens who court the attention of younger ones aren’t always the best sort of friends to have. And the girls learn what they … what the older boys want from them. And the boys learn about drinking and taking drugs.” She stopped, eyed me harshly. “So. Anyway. Have you really no better sources these days than aging social workers?”

  A small, embarrassed silence followed. It was filled by the soft murmuring of the three people on the phones.

  “Michelle Thayer didn’t have an older boyfriend,” I said. “Didn’t take drugs.” And then I asked: “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “Yes. I do, actually. I’m sorry. There’s no ventilation down here.”

  I had the cigarette in my hand. I had been tapping it against the face of my watch. I nodded ruefully and stuck it back into my coat pocket.

  “No,” said Chandler, “she didn’t. But then, in other ways, she was a fairly typical case. She had an unhappy home life. Her mother’s something of an alcoholic. Her father deserted them, and so on. She had no way to get away from that environment. What made her really typical, though, is the way her mother … I can’t remember her name …”

  “Janet.”

  “Janet. She put Michelle in the position of an adult … confided in her, expected her to act responsibly while she acted, well, like a child. It happens all the time, a sort of reversal of roles. The burden on the child is intolerable.” She was speaking more fluidly now, easing into her role of expert. Still, she couldn’t look at me for long.

  “But she worked as a volunteer here.”

  “Yes. She called here one day, depressed. I handled the phones alone then. I still do, frequently. We talked. After a while I asked her if she would like to come in and see me.” She smiled slightly. “It was a very radical thing to do, especially with her being so young. But … I had a sense about her.… I put her on the phones, and after just a few trial runs, I could tell she was excellent … absolutely excellent with the clients … with … She was sympathetic, insightful, patient. She was one of the best I’ve had so far.”

  “But you say she was suicidal herself …”

  “Yes … Well, working here helped her a good deal. After a while, in fact, she told me that she thought she’d overcome the impulse, although the depressions still bothered her sometimes. I mean, you shouldn’t be surprised that … I mean, that’s why people enter the helping professions in the first place. Because they know what it is to need help. My mother had a drug problem, so I became a drug counselor … and so on.”

  That “and so on” told me a lot. She had become a drug counselor, and now she counseled the suicidal. It told me a lot about her life in the years since I’d seen her last. Again, she knew what I was thinking. Again, she blushed and looked away.

  “You sound as if you were very close to Michelle,” I said.

  She nodded. “I was.” That was all she said, and she said it firmly.

  “Her mother thinks she was murdered.”

  “Does she? I would suspect that’s denial. It’s very common in these cases.”

  “Yeah. That’s what it sounds like to me too.” I rubbed my chin. It gave my hand—itching for a cigarette—something to do. “But listen. Why was it all so secret? Her coming here, her working the phones, her friendship with you. Why didn’t she tell anyone?”

  “Because it was the only thing she had—coming here, me—the only thing she had that was out of her mother’s reach. She knew instinctively that her mother would be jealous to discover that not only she, but other people were relying on her. Her mother could be very strict when her interests were threatened. She could easily have forbidden Michelle to come … and even made trouble for me. So …”

  “So,” I said.

  She tried for a tone of brightness. “So—you’re with the. Star now. I like that paper.” I looked at her quickly. Quickly, she looked away. “I’ve seen your byline,” she whispered.

  “Yeah,” I said softly. “Yeah, I’m with the Star. Listen. Listen, Chandler, you wouldn’t want—”

  “No,” she said. “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “Coffee or something.”

  “No. Thank you, though, for asking. It’s very … polite of you.”

  I shrugged. “Well …”

  “It’s good to see you again, John.”

  “Yeah, sure. Same here.”

  “I’ll … I’ll watch out for your articles.”

  I nodded.

  “Well …” she said.

  “Well …”

  “Be careful on the stairs on your way out.”

  22 The mist had become a full fog by the time I started my drive back to Grant Valley. As the Artful Dodge descended from the church, the white haze rose up to meet it. It swirled at the windows, pressed against the windshield, danced in the headlights. When I turned onto the road, I could barely see the pavement before me. I could barely see the trees at the edge of the pavement. I kept my speed down to around thirty. I pushed slowly over the twisting highway, leaning forward, straining to see.

  So Cambridge would have to print a retraction. There was that anyway. It wasn’t much but it was something. I trusted Chandler enough to go with her appraisal of Michelle and believe her when she said it was suicide. Hel
l, I should have known that anyway. I did know it. I had simply let this story get to me, that’s all. I had let it get under my skin. I’d let it roil the silt at the bottom of my consciousness. I’d let it open the trapdoor.

  I almost groaned as I drove. I didn’t want to think about that. I lit a cigarette. It didn’t help. I saw Olivia in her wine-dark robe. I saw her ascending the scaffold. I felt the beads of sweat breaking out on my forehead as I thought of her fastening the noose around her neck. I took a long drag of the cigarette. I knew it was coming, any minute now ….

  But it did not come. Instead, the image was obliterated from my mind by a wild roar that came out of the dark behind me. All at once, the fog back there exploded with light. The light grew brighter. The roar grew louder. And then the fog spat out a pair of headlights. A black car bore down on me over the winding road.

  There was no question but that it was after me. I hit the gas pedal without thinking. The Artful Dodge lurched forward. Its tires screamed as it swerved around the bend. The haze was rushing by me on all sides. In my rearview mirror I could see nothing but the two glaring headlamp eyes growing larger and larger as they approached. Through the windshield I could see nothing but my own headlights, diffused on the face of the fog.

  I sped up. For a moment the lights behind me fell back a bit. I gripped the wheel and fought against the next curve. Again the tires shrieked and squealed. The night was filled with the angry roar of the car behind me. It shot forward again. Closer and closer. I was outgunned. I didn’t have a chance.

  The road twisted hard and fast. The Dodge went round. The black car followed. It pulled out beside me and edged forward. I pulled away, but it roared again and caught me at once. Now it nudged my rear fender sharply. The jolt went through the Dodge end to end. I felt it in my teeth as the tires shimmied toward the sloping dirt shoulder. I felt my arms strain as I pulled the old car aright.