Now there were definitely tears.
“I’ll find her, Flo. Let’s take a look at her room.”
Flo led me down a corridor, past closed doors to an open one. It was clearly a girl’s room. Brightly colored. Flowered comforter. Stereo in the corner. A few stuffed animals. A desk and bookcase and posters on the walls, four of them, three of recent rock idols with blaring colors and one small one in black and white of a woman from another time and place.
“Who’s that?”
“The woman? Willa Cather. Adele says she was a great writer, wanted to be like her.”
“Anything missing?” I asked, moving to the clean, clear desk.
“A stuffed penguin is all I’m sure of,” Flo said, looking around. “And clothes. She took clothes.”
One of Lonsberg’s books was on the shelf along with a collection of classics we all claim to have read in school but never did or don’t really remember. The Lonsberg book, a paperback, was a bit battered from frequent readings. I opened it to the title page. In a scrawl I had trouble reading was a note in ink: “Adele, you have the talent. Don’t lose it. Don’t compromise.” It was signed. I couldn’t read the name but I could make out the “C” and the “L” at the beginning of each name. It was an autographed first paperback edition.
“Mind if I take this?”
“Take what you need,” Flo said. “I don’t read that stuff. Louis L’Amour and a few others, Frank Roderus, that’s what I read. Lew, I kept hoping she’d just come back but…”
There was no diary, no journal, no short stories or notes by Adele in her desk, drawers, bookshelf, or closet. Flo walked me back through the house giving me directions to Lonsberg’s house.
“You have Lonsberg’s phone number?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Come to think of it I don’t think Adele did either. She never called him. He always called her.”
I touched her shoulder at the door. She gave me a weak smile of courage and out I went. Before I reached the Cutlass, the voice of Tex Ritter blasted through the Zinc house singing of lost dogies.
When I got in the car, I reached for Fool’s Love and flipped it open. Every page was covered with thick black Magic Marker lines. Adele had put in a lot of work making this book unreadable.
I drove away with twenty minutes to make it ‘til my appointment with Ann Horowitz. I found a two-hour parking spot across from Sarasota News amp; Books. A new crowded upscale Italian restaurant had just opened across the street from the bookstore at the corner of Main and Palm. Parking didn’t come easy and two-hour parking meant two-hour parking or a ticket.
I found a pay phone and called Harvey the computer.
“Haven’t had time yet,” he said.
“I’m not calling about Vera Lynn Uliaks,” I said. “I need an unlisted phone number.”
“When?”
“Now,” I said, holding my hand over my ear to blur the sound of a couple in their fifties doing battle as they headed in the general direction of the library.
“Okay,” said Harvey.
“Don’t put me on hold,” I said. “I can’t take the music.”
“Name?”
“Conrad Lonsberg,” I said.
“He doesn’t have a phone,” said Harvey. “That’s an easy one. Tycinker wanted to reach him a few months back about some case. No phone. I can give you an address.”
“I’ve got one. Harve, what do you think about AA?”
Pause and then. “They can help,” he said. “It’s like a religion if it works. I tried it, needed too much support, went cold on my own. So far so good. Why are you asking?”
“I’ve got a friend,” I said.
“Good luck. Talk to you tomorrow.”
He hung up and I checked my watch. I had five minutes, just enough time to stop at Sarasota News amp; Books, pick up two coffees and a biscotti. I paid Ann Horowitz twenty dollars a visit when I could afford it, ten when I couldn’t, and always brought her coffee and a chocolate biscotti.
She was just around the corner on Gulf Stream, a small office with a small waiting room. Ann had no secretary and a select few patients. At the age of eighty-one and with her annuity from Stanford University plus investments she had mentioned from time to time plus the money her husband Melvin still brought in as a successful sculptor, Ann could have retired two decades earlier. But therapy was what she did and enjoyed in addition to conversation, history, odd facts, coffee, biscotti, and opera. Ann and Melvin had chosen Sarasota because their only son lived here with his wife and two grown daughters.
Ann’s inner door was open. I could hear her talking. From the pauses, I figured she was on the phone so I moved to the doorway where she motioned for me to take my usual seat across from her.
Ann is a small woman with a tolerant smile. She likes bright dresses. Her hair is gray, straight, and short enough to show off her colorful earrings.
“No,” she told the person on the phone, “I’ll see you at four… no, you will not kill yourself… I understand… four. Did you read the book?… I gave you a book, Lost Horizon… No, I did not want you to rent the movie. I wanted you to read the book… You’ve got a few hours. Start reading.”
She hung up the phone and accepted the coffee and biscotti from me, placing both on the desk to her right, and looked at me.
I knew what she was looking at.
“I got slapped by a woman I was serving papers,” I explained as she examined the side of my face.
“And what did you do?”
“Do?”
“In response to being slapped. What did you do?”
“I got on my bike and left.”
Ann shook her head.
“What should I have done?” I asked.
“Getting on your bicycle is one thing. Getting angry is another. Saying something to the woman.”
“I wasn’t angry,” I said.
“You should have been. You should let yourself feel, but don’t worry. I’m not commanding you to feel. It doesn’t work that way. Here, take this with you,” she said, handing me a copy of Smithsonian magazine. “Article in there about gargoyles. Fascinating.”
I took the magazine. There was a grinning stone gargoyle on the cover, just the right gift for a depressed client. Ann took the lid off the cup of black coffee and dipped the biscotti.
“Can you do it today?” she asked, looking at me as she lifted the saturated biscotti to her mouth.
“Not today,” I said.
She wanted me to speak the name of my wife. I had done it only twice since she had died, once to Sally and two weeks ago when I managed to say it to Ann. Saying her name aloud had brought back images, memories, pain, the empty feeling in my stomach, the sound of my heart madly pulsing blood through my veins, my neck, my head.
“Feel better?” Ann asked when I had said my wife’s name.
“No,” I answered. “Worse. Much worse.”
“Of course,” she said. “This is therapy, not magic.”
I had gone through this opening session ritual four times since then with Ann asking me to speak the name aloud. I had managed it only that one session.
“Can you do it?” Ann asked, biscotti in hand.
I took a deep breath, felt the beat of my heart, closed my eyes, and softly uttered, “Catherine.”
“And you feel how?” Ann asked, redipping her biscotti.
“Sorry I said it,” I said, reaching for my own coffee, which unlike my therapist’s was strongly fortified with half and half and two packets of Equal.
“Of course you are. You are still in love with your depression and self-pity. You’ve held it around you like a child’s comfort blanket since your wife died. If you give it up, what are you left with?”
