Chapter 16 Is Anyone on My Side?
Is Anyone on My Side?
“You know how a suit pocket is sewn shut when you first buy the suit? Before it’s tailored?” asked Kathleen O’Brien. She was an engineer who had a patent on a driving range practice net not unlike the one the country club had purchased and through which I had driven a golf ball.
“I don’t,” I said, wondering why a suit pocket would ever be sewn shut.
It made zero sense. Miss O’Brien was somewhere between my age and my mother’s, with strikingly beautiful dark eyes and the auburn hair of a movie star.
It was late October, and we were in that same conference room in Mr. Barker’s law firm where twice I had been deposed, and she swiveled in her chair so her legs were no longer under the table.
Her stockings were the color of the antique pewter that sat on the breakfront in our dining room.
“Well, they are.”
“It must be to prevent shoplifting,” said my mother. This sounded reasonable. She and my father and my lawyer, Mr. Barker, were all present.
“No, Alexis,” said the engineer to my mother. “A very reasonable guess, but wrong. It’s done to help the jacket keep its shape. It prevents the fabric from stretching or expanding before it’s sold.”
“Okay,” I said, even more curious as to why we were discussing men’s suits.
“When a man purchases the suit, he or the tailor needs to very carefully snip away the stitching that seals the pocket shut or use a seam ripper with precision. If you’re not careful, you’ll tear the pocket or the suit.
Well, that’s what happened with the target on the driving range net at your country club.
Whoever snipped the seams that attached the target to the nylon cut some of the nylon threading, too. ”
“Are you saying the golf ball did not create the hole?” asked Mr. Barker. “Are you saying there was already a hole there?”
“No. And we’ll never know. Let’s face it, a net, by definition, is nothing but holes.
And you would have to be a tailor—or a surgeon, perhaps—to remove the target without weakening the net, because it was attached to the net in twelve spots.
And so it would have taken twelve very careful sets of cuts to remove it without damaging the net. It would have taken a bit of time.”
“How much time?”
“No idea. But some. My sense, however, is that whoever did it didn’t spend a lot of time on the project. Just, well, cut the target off.”
The implication was clear: an adult (or a golf pro) would have been more careful.
This could be used as one more bit of proof if the state’s experts came to the same conclusion, that I was the one who had tampered with the driving range net.
But then the engineer spelled it out: “If this ever goes to trial, a jury—civil or criminal—is more likely to believe you did it, Mira, than a grown man like Harry Fallows.”
“Because grown men are so tidy?” my mother asked sarcastically, and I was a little proud of her.
“And, of course, the target was in your golf bag,” Miss O’Brien added helpfully.
“Which is probably all they need,” I mumbled.
“Frankly, I think having a design on the target was ridiculous, too,” she said.
“I agree with you, Mira. It might make a golfer yank his head up. All you need is the leather pad so a golfer hears that thwack, that thump, that means he drove the ball in the right direction. He hit it clean. You don’t want all those circles or numbers or designs. ”
“Thank you.”
My lawyer turned to me and said, “The idea that the police found the target in your bag is obviously a place where both the net manufacturer and the country club will go hard at you. But, trust me, we will go hard at the club and at the club pro. We will make it clear that there was plenty of reason for Harry Fallows—or even Curt Bolger—to stuff the target in your golf bag after Kenny Foster died. It seems to me, your club pro was gutless and pathetic and scared, and he wanted to make absolutely certain that no one thought he was the one who had snipped off the target. And we will ask them this: Why would you keep the target in your golf bag all this time? Why didn’t you throw it away months ago and make sure it rotted away in a landfill somewhere? ”
“God, if the lawsuit goes to trial, it will be one gigantic Rubik’s Cube,” said my father. “There will be moments when the interests of the manufacturer and the club will be aligned, and moments when everyone will be throwing food at everyone else.”
“Can I ask a question?” I said to my lawyer.
“Of course,” he said.
“Other than you, is anyone on my side?” It wasn’t a serious inquiry. I was just disgusted that with one swing of a driver I had created a legal morass that for months now we had been trying (and failing) to drabble our way through.
“Yes,” he said, answering earnestly. “There will be moments when it will feel like you’re allied with the country club and moments when you’ll see the manufacturer as a friend. Neither, in the end, will be.”
“In a civil suit, that is,” Miss O’Brien added a little ominously.
“I gather Harry Fallows will have to testify in the criminal trial. Will he have to testify in the civil case, too?” I asked.
“Absolutely. In a civil trial, we can be confident that the plaintiffs would call you both as fact witnesses,” said Mr. Barker.
“Because I know so many facts?”
“Because you were there. Because he set up the net.”
“How did I supposedly cut the target away?” I asked. “Scissors? A box cutter? A razor blade? What?”
“Impossible to say,” said the engineer.
“But, like, on Caddy Day I came to the club with scissors and just cut it off?”
“Don’t you have one of those multi-tool kits golfers carry?”
“No! I have a little clip thing to repair divots and a brush for my spikes. Or I had a little clip thing and a brush.”
“The multi-tool kits have those, but also a little knife. A teeny everything blade. They look like Swiss Army knives or Boy Scout knives, but the one blade is only, I don’t know, an inch or so long,” she said.
“I’ve never owned one.”
“And the police didn’t find one in her golf bag when they searched it,” said my lawyer.
The engineer put out her hands in resignation. “Just saying: a little knife like that could have been used, too.”
“I just wish we could prove Harry cut off the target,” said my father. “I’m sure he had a tool like that. And, of course, he had all the tools in the world in his office and the bag room. I just cannot believe that guy is lying so shamelessly.”
And, for the first time since we had arrived at the law firm that day, I found myself smiling.
My father’s remark suggested that he believed me.
He believed that I wasn’t the one who had cut off the target.
This was something pretty damn close to his approval, one of those rare and precious gems I seldom saw.
There would be other possible defense experts at Cleon Barker’s law firm that day, but the only one I met when my team interviewed them was Miss O’Brien.
(Please understand that my use of the possessive is meant to suggest only that they were among the few who, if this ever went to a courtroom, had my back.) The other experts included a physicist discussing the power of a golf ball’s velocity; a brain surgeon on how unlikely it was that Kenny might have had a precondition that increased the likelihood of his death when my golf ball slammed into his skull; and a fellow who had studied these sorts of practice nets and written an article arguing that they were far too dangerous for home use.
And the idea one was used at a country club? Utter madness, in his opinion.
But, by then, everything about this ordeal I had set in motion was going to strike me as insane.
Meanwhile, I continued to write drafts of suicide notes when I was alone, and I wrote one that night when my family and I returned to Tallmadge from Manhattan.
My mother was going to drive me back to Smith the next day.
The temperature fell below freezing after the sun set, but still I sat in my bedroom, a chair by the open window, exhaling my weed through the screen so I didn’t stink up the room, while Harvey slept soundly on my bed, and I thought about some of the female writers who had taken their own lives: Virginia Woolf.
Anne Sexton. Fellow Smithie Sylvia Plath.
(I had walked past Haven House, her dorm, my first week on campus.
It was a pilgrimage of sorts.) But I had an epiphany as I wrote yet another tragic goodbye to the world: if I were to do this, which I still told myself I never would, a note should not be part of the equation.
If I did not want to selfishly inflict yet more pain on the world, my suicide should look like an accidental death.
This is how suicide ideation sometimes works, how it becomes more real.
The more you plan, the more likely it is you’ll give it a shot.
(An awful pun, but irresistible. Forgive me.
Also, just for the record, suicidal women rarely use guns.
We use less violent means. Of the trio I mentioned above, two used gas fumes—one from a stove, one from a car—and one drowned herself.)
I put down my fine-point Bic and the yellow legal pads I loved, and tried to imagine how to accomplish a death that was both guaranteed and sure to seem like a stupid mistake.
Also? It had to be fast and painless, because I was no fan of physical suffering.
If I were a rock climber, I could fall off a cliff.
But I wasn’t. If I were enamored of the right sort of drugs, I could overdose.
But I’d never stuck a needle into my arms or between my toes, and didn’t think I could manage a quaalude dosage that didn’t merely leave me forever in a coma.
A car accident was possible, though even the most cursory glances at suspension bridge guardrails made clear that plowing off the side of a bridge was no easy task.
And hitting a tree? Hardly a sure thing.
If I were a serious cyclist, I could ride in front of an oncoming train (there, once more, was Anna Karenina), but I wasn’t.
And the problem with getting plowed under by a train was the reality I’d be dragging yet another person down with me: If I were so distraught because I had accidentally killed Kenny Foster, why would I want to make some poor train engineer believe he was responsible for killing me and ruin his life?
So, I couldn’t do that, either. I couldn’t and wouldn’t. I still had work to do to solve this puzzle.
I took the latest note and held it above my ashtray on the windowsill. There I used my lighter to burn it, the residue and embers briefly glowing red before becoming weightless gray-and-black slag.
Which was when I felt an odd and unexpected regret that I had destroyed those words.
They were really quite good in my mind, far better than the writing I had shared with Dennis that had led to our breakup.
If creative writing took practice, years of work to hone one’s craft, my hours writing suicide notes were an interesting way to apprentice and put in my time.
(Years later, Malcolm Gladwell would suggest one had to do something for roughly ten thousand hours before becoming really good at it.
Ice hockey. Computer coding. The guitar.
Looking back, perhaps one percent of the ten thousand hours it took me to become a competent novelist were spent writing suicide letters.
That is, I know, pathetic and disturbing and narcissistic.
I share it only to give you a sense of how broken I was.)
That night I slept—or tried to sleep, because it was a fitful seven or eight hours—snuggling against my dog as if I were a bereft child.
But either because of the weed or my epiphany, the despair was not quite as awful or as deep as it had been only hours earlier, when I had been at Cleon Barker’s law firm.