Adam went into the shower, and under the hot spray he was able to relax. He remembered the dream he’d had, about the black rat. He wondered why the dream had begun in his office. Was it really work related, or did his office symbolize a familiar place where he felt comfortable? And what was the significance of the black rat beginning as Jodi Roth or Kathy Stappini? The rat was threatening, but Jodi and Kathy were hardly threatening. He thought it might have to do with the therapist- patient relationship in general. As a therapist he was in a position of control, but then he lost control when he was attacked by the rat. So perhaps the dream was about losing control or, more specifically, being attacked. When had he ever felt attacked? He thought of his overbearing mother, his distant father, the bullies who’d tormented him throughout elementary school and ju nior high, and how in his marriage he sometimes felt attacked by Dana. Maybe the rat was actually Dana, symbolically attacking him, smothering him.
He made a mental note to bring all this up in his session with Carol. When he came out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, Dana was in the bedroom, fully dressed in jeans and a long- sleeved black scoop- neck top. She was looking for something in the top drawer of the dresser.
“Good morning,” he said. She waited a couple of beats, then said, “Good morning,” and he could tell she was still angry about the gun. He always knew when she was angry and exactly what she was angry about, though she rarely expressed her anger in an appropriate, productive way.
But he didn’t feel like getting into a big discussion with her about her anger so he said, “Looks like they’re pretty much gone, huh?”
“I talked to a couple of reporters this morning,” Dana said. Her voice was a monotone; she was definitely repressing rage.
“Yeah?” Adam asked. “From where?”
“I don’t know.” She was still searching in the drawer. “TV, newspapers, wherever.”
Adam tossed the towel into the hamper and was naked. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and, as usual, sucked in his gut a little. He wasn’t in such bad shape for his age- only about ten, okay, fifteen pounds overweight- but he was self- conscious about the flab in his midsection. He really had to start running again, get a regular tennis game going at the country club. He played golf frequently, but riding around in a golf cart wasn’t doing much for his waistline. He had to do more crunches, get serious about it. In three years he’d turn fifty, and he wanted to be thin in his fifties.
“Well, it seems to be blowing over,” he said distractedly.
She closed the drawer, then turned toward Adam- still avoiding eye contact- and said, “It’s not here.”
Adam was no longer looking in the mirror, but he was still distracted. “What’s not?”
“The paper I wrote the code to the alarm on.”
Now she had Adam’s full attention, and he looked at her and asked, “What’re you talking about?”
“This morning when I woke up I remembered I had the number, the code, whatever, written down on a little piece of paper. Remember, I wrote it down when we first got the alarm because you had the code on that card they gave you, but I didn’t know it?”
“Okay,” Adam said. Actually, he didn’t remember any of this; he was just egging her on.
“So I thought I put it in the drawer in the bureau in the den, you know, where we keep the old bills, but I checked this morning, and it wasn’t there. And now I’ve checked all over and I can’t find it anywhere.”
“Maybe you threw it out.”
“Maybe, but I really thought it was in the drawer downstairs.”
Dana, unlike Adam, was a very or ganized person and usually didn’t misplace things.
“Did you check thoroughly?”
“Of course I checked thoroughly, but it wasn’t there.”
“Okay, calm down.”
“I am calm,” she said, but she obviously wasn’t. She was making eye contact with him for the first time this morning, glaring at him in a very cold, very distant way.
“So where else can it be?” Adam asked.
“Well, obviously, I thought it was in the drawer up here.”
“Did you check the kitchen?”
“I definitely didn’t put it in the kitchen.”
“What about under the drawer in the bureau? Sometimes things spill out over the top and fall through the-”
“I already checked and it wasn’t there. Should I call Detective Clements and tell him?”
“I think that’s a little ridiculous.”
“Why is it ridiculous? He thinks somebody had the code to the alarm and a piece of paper with the code’s missing.”
“Okay, fine,” Adam conceded. “If you want to call him, call him. It doesn’t really matter one way or another, but I’d just look around once more before you waste his time, that’s all.”
Adam was pulling on his jeans; his damn back was bothering him again. He wasn’t facing Dana, but he could tell she was still in the room. She was probably looking at him angrily with her hands crossed in front of her chest. He turned around for a moment just to see if he was right. Yep, he was.
“So have you talked to Marissa yet today?” she asked.
“I don’t think she’s up yet. Guess she didn’t have any job interviews this morning,” Adam said, smirking.
“So do you really think one of her friends could’ve been involved?” “That’s ridiculous,” Adam said.
“I think so too,” Dana said, “but the detective kept asking about it. I don’t think he’d be asking if he didn’t think there was some possibility that-”
“Come on,” Alan said, “the guy’s name was Carlos Sanchez. I’ve never heard her talk about any Carlos Sanchezes, have you? Besides, he was an older guy. No, it definitely has nothing to do with her.”
“Maybe he was her drug dealer or something,” Dana said.
“Oh, come on, I really doubt that.”
“Why? She’s smoked pot in her room, and the pot has to be coming from somewhere.”
Adam considered this as he opened the drawer to his dresser, looking through a stack of folded shirts. It wasn’t totally beyond the realm of possibility that the break- in had something to do with Marissa. She’d had friends coming and going in the house since graduation, and occasionally Adam had seen her with people he’d never met before. One guy last week had looked pretty shady- long hair, tattoos up and down his arms. If it didn’t have to do with drugs, it could’ve had something to do with some guy she was dating.
“Last night I told her I don’t want her drinking and smoking in the house anymore,” Adam said. “If this had anything to do with her or not, I think we have to make it clear, if there’re any drugs in this house, she has to move out. That’s it, no bending, no negotiations.”
“And don’t you think that’s just a teensy bit hypocritical?”
They’d had this discussion before, so Adam knew exactly what she was implying: How could he tell his twenty- two- year- old daughter not to smoke pot in the house and have guys up to her room when as a teenager he’d gotten high and had sex with all his girlfriends in this very house, starting when he was sixteen years old?
“That was the seventies,” he said. “It was a different time.”
He was going to add, We know more now than we knew then, but he already felt like he was beating the clichйs to death.
“If she was your son I don’t think you’d have a problem with it.”
“That’s not true,” Adam said. He pulled on a navy long- sleeved shirt with a Fresh Meadow Country Club logo, remembering that he had a 7:24 tee- off time on Sunday with his friend Jeff. “I wouldn’t want my son to make the same mistakes I made.”
“Well, I still think there’s a double standard going on here,” Dana said.
Adam recognized that tone in her voice again. He knew that she wasn’t upset about what she pretended she was upset about. She was just looking for the right opening, dying to blame him for the shooting.
“Didn’t you want to call Clements?” he said, not exactly dismissing her, but the implication was there. Now fully dressed except for shoes and socks, he picked up his BlackBerry and checked his e-mail. He’d gotten two new e-mails- one from Carol suggesting Friday at four for a session, and one from his assistant, Lauren, saying that
