didn’t want anyone to attend? Because you wanted to keep it quiet?”
She gave me the look that said: “don’t be so melodramatic.”
“Or maybe,” she added aloud, “because you couldn’t afford to pay for an announcement.” Well, the card did look a bit on the cheap side. Or perhaps the whole thing had just slipped their minds. You can forget to do a lot of things when someone dies.
She gave me a look that said: “why are you so interested in this Timothy J. Anderson anyway?” I told her that the card had been in one of my dad’s books and then gave her the look that said: “I feel like I don’t know anything about my father or who he was or what he was like, and I’m grasping for any clue, no matter how trivial or far- fetched or even delu-sional.” Well, it was true.
She eyed the card dubiously. “Why are you so sure it’s from a funeral?” she asked.
Because it looked a bit like my dad’s funeral card. And because of Tit’s note, of course, but I was keeping Tit’s note to myself, so I couldn’t mention that. Dr. Hexstrom said she didn’t quite know what to make of the card. Usually, she said, they put more information on them, like the dates of birth and death. The single date was hard to interpret. She also pointed out something about the card that I hadn’t noticed, which was that the left edge didn’t look quite the same as the 233
other edges. It had a slightly different color and was perhaps less evenly cut. I could see what she was getting at, and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it before. Once it was drawn to my attention, however, it really did look like it had been cut off, like it had originally been the front face of a folded-over card. What had been on the other side? Presumably more information, like the dates of birth and death and so forth. And what had happened to it?
She added that they also make cards like that for memorial services or masses that could be held long after the death or funeral, sometimes years later, and that cards of that kind can commemorate other important events that may not even be deaths. I hadn’t realized any of that. So even if it was for a funeral, it was possible that Timothy J. Anderson died earlier, maybe even much earlier than 3/13/63, and that we hadn’t searched early enough for the obituary. Tit’s note had mentioned a funeral, but the date was fake, and it could have been from any time. And it may not have even been a funeral. In which case, Timothy J. Anderson was not the dead bastard.
If not, who the hell was the d. b.? Man, these (devil-head) retrospective investigations into a deceased parent’s personal effects can suck the life right out of you. My brain was starting to hurt. I sighed heavily, and so did Dr. Hexstrom, just a bit, unless I’m mistaken.
“Now (a),” she said evenly, pointing to the note. “I’m still not sure you need that kind of medication.” And I was sure she was right: the kind of medication I would need was not a straightforward issue, and it might take years to figure out.
Maybe that medication hasn’t even been invented yet. Well, let me know when you’ve got it. I’ll be right here.
Then she pointed to (b) and said she had found the suicide song very interesting. I resisted the urge to ask which part she liked best. Maybe we could cover that later. For now, 234
I really wanted to know about my mom’s freak-out. Had she said anything to Dr. Hexstrom to indicate where the hell she had been coming from, or why this, out of all the Chi-Mo freakiness over the last four to six years, had been the thing that finally spurred her to send me to a shrink?
Dr. Hexstrom said nothing but gave me a familiar look, the one that says: “come on, Tom, you know better than to play innocent—you know perfectly well what’s going on here.”
So we were back in slan mode, were we? Okay.
I gave her the look that said: “the fuck?” And her look said: “I’ll ignore the rude choice of words, as you’re clearly under some type of strain, but you can stop pretending you don’t know.”
“What?” my look said. “What? What do I know that I’m pretending not to know?” Except I must have said that last part out loud, because she coughed and said, in words:
“You’re pretending you don’t know that your father committed suicide.”
“The fuck?” I said, out loud I think, standing up. It was a car wreck, murder or manslaughter. The
Hexstrom, too, when the liquid kaleidoscope swallowed the rest of my mind and I kind of lost track of things.
I knew I hadn’t been unconscious for long, because when I came to there was still time on the clock. I had fallen back into the chair, and it was possible that my blackout had been so brief that Dr. Hexstrom hadn’t realized it had even happened. I could tell she was taken aback by my reaction, 235
though, blackout or no. We stared at each other, trying to work out who knew what, who was mistaken about what, and who was lying about what. I concluded she really believed that my dad had killed himself, and had also believed that I had known, and that she was shocked to learn that the idea came as such a spectacular surprise to me.
Was she right? Well, that was really two questions.
Question one: was she right that I ought to have known about the supposed suicide, or that I did know but was pretending not to know? Lying to myself ? I’ve learned I should never be too sure about such things. I hadn’t known about the Catholic thing, though I should have—it was obvious enough that even Amanda had known all about it. If I were to ask Amanda about the suicide thing (which I would never in a million years do, but still), would she look at me like I was dumb as a cup of melting ice and say “no duh?” Well, I can’t speak for Amanda, but a quick, ruthless self-examination indicated that my ignorance was genuine. I truly had not “known” about the suicide, nor even considered it as a possibility.
The second question was, was the suicide story itself true? It didn’t seem possible. I had read all about it in the paper, and even though there had been details missing, the car crash had definitely happened. If my dad had killed himself, he would have had to have done it in the car before the hit-and-run. How likely was that? Maybe someone had intended to murder him and just hadn’t realized that the guy in the car was already dead by his own hand? Or someone had known he had killed himself and had crashed into the car to make it seem like an accident? Or my dad had deliberately placed himself in a position where he knew he’d be crashed into, as a roundabout suicide method? That sounded really crazy. I realized I should probably go back and read those articles again: since I did the
