Duma Key(70)

I did, but first this feels like a confession, and a cowardly one, at that I went online, surfed to that day's Minneapolis StarTribune, and clicked on OBITUARIES. I scrolled through the names quickly and made sure Thomas Riley wasn't one of them, knowing it proved nothing; he might have offed himself too late to make the morning line.

Sometimes she muted the phone and napped in the afternoon, in which case I'd get the answering machine and a little reprieve. Not this afternoon. It was Pam herself, soft but not warm: "Hello."

"It's me, Pam. Returning your call."

"I suppose you were out sunning," she said. "It's snowing here. Snowing and as cold as a well-digger's belt-buckle."

I relaxed a little. Tom wasn't dead. If Tom had been dead, we wouldn't be settling in for a little impromptu bitcharee.

"Actually, it's cold and rainy where I am," I said.

"Good. I hope you catch bronchitis. Tom Riley stormed out of here this morning after calling me a meddlesome cunt and throwing a vase on the floor. I suppose I should be glad he didn't throw it at me." Pam started to cry. She honked, then surprised me by laughing. It was bitter, but also surprisingly good-humored. "When do you suppose your strange ability to induce my tears runs out?"

"Tell me what happened, Panda."

"And no more of that. Call me that again and I'm hanging up. Then you can buzz Tom and ask him what happened. Probably that's what I ought to make you do, anyway. It would serve you right."

I put my hand to my head and began to massage my temples: thumb in the left hollow, first two fingers in the right. It's sort of amazing that one hand can encompass so many dreams and so much pain. Not to mention the potential to hatch so much plain and fancy f**kery.

"Tell me, Pam. Please. I'll listen and not get angry."

"Getting past that, are you? Give me a second." There was a clunk as the phone went down, probably on the kitchen counter. For a moment I heard the distant babble of the TV and then it was gone. When she came back she said, "All right, now I can hear myself think." There was another mighty honk as she blew her nose once more. When she started talking again, she was composed, with no hint of tears in her voice.

"I asked Myra to call me when he got back home Myra Devorkian, who lives across the street from him. I told her I was worried about his state of mind. No reason to keep that much to myself, was there?"

"No."

"And bango! Myra said she'd been worried, too she and Ben both. Said he was drinking too much, for one thing, and sometimes going in to his office with a ten o'clock shadow. Although she said he looked spiffy enough when he went off on his trip. Amazing how much neighbors see, even when they're not really close friends. Ben and Myra didn't know about... us, of course, but they knew damn well that Tom had been depressed."

You think they didn't know, I didn't say.

"Anyway, long story short, I invited him over. There was a look in his eyes when he came in... this look... as if he thought maybe I intended to... you know..."

"Pick up where you left off," I said.

"Am I telling this or are you?"

"Sorry."

"Well, you're right. Of course you're right. I wanted to ask him into the kitchen for coffee, but we never got any farther than the hall. He wanted to kiss me." She said this with a kind of defiant pride. "I let him... once... but when it became obvious that he wanted more, I pushed him back and said I had something to say. He said he knew it was bad from the way I looked, but nothing could hurt the way I hurt him when I said we couldn't see each other any more. That's men for you and they say we're the ones who know how to lay on the guilt.

"I said that just because we couldn't go on seeing each other romantically didn't mean I didn't still care about him. Then I said several people had told me he was acting strange not like himself and I put that together with him not taking his antidepressant pills and began to worry. I said I thought he was planning to kill himself."

She stopped for a moment, then went on.

"Before he came, I never meant to say it right out like that. But it's funny the minute he walked through the door I was almost positive, and when he kissed me I knew for a fact. His lips were cold. And dry. It was like kissing a corpse."

"I'll bet," I said, and tried to scratch my right arm.

"His face tightened up and I mean really. Every line smoothed out, and his mouth almost disappeared. He asked me who put an idea like that in my head. And then, before I could even answer, he said it was bullshit. That's the word he used, and it's not a Tom Riley word at all."

She was right about that. The Tom I'd known in the old days wouldn't have said bullshit if he'd had a mouthful.

"I didn't want to give him any names certainly not yours, because he would have thought I was crazy, and not Illy's, because I didn't know what he might say to her if-"

"I told you, Illy had nothing to do with-"

"Be quiet. I'm almost through. I just said these people who were talking about how funny he was acting didn't even know about the pills he's been taking since the second divorce, and how he quit taking them last May. He calls them stupid-pills. I said if he thought he was keeping everything that was wrong with him under wraps, he was mistaken. Then I said that if he did something to himself, I'd tell his mother and brother it was suicide, and it would break their hearts. That was your idea, Edgar, and it worked. I hope you're proud. That was when he broke my vase and called me a meddlesome cunt, see? He was as white as a sheet. I bet..." She swallowed. I could hear the click in her throat across all the miles. "I bet he had the way he was going to do it all planned out."