Midnight Pass: A Lew Fonesca Novel Part 2

"We'll need a credit card," Fred said apologetically.

"Call him," I said. "He'll give you one."

"Not our policy," said Alan.

"Alan, this is Lew Fonesca, a regular client," Fred pleaded. "He's good for it. We know where to find him."

Alan folded his arms across his chest. I tried not to look at my watch.

"All right," he finally said.

"Great," said Fred. "Let's fill out the papers."

"We've got some coffee," Alan said, while his partner moved out of earshot to the rear of the small store, which had once been a gas station.

"How is he?" I asked softly.

Fred had had a heart attack the year before. It ranged, according to Alan, somewhere between medium and not too good. In the time Fred had been gone, Alan had been a different person. He had played Fred's good-guy role, holding the job open for him when he returned a month after his attack and bypa.s.s surgery.

"Doing good," said Alan. "I watch what he eats when he's here. His wife, Dotty, watches him at home. He takes his pills. Likes to stay busy. Business has been slow. When Fred retires, I'm selling out. The land is worth more than we bring in in four years. Fred will have a cushion and I can move back to Dayton."

Fred came hurrying back with the papers and the car keys. I signed and initialed in all the right places.

"Rides like a dream," Fred said, a hand on my shoulder. "A dream."

Car rides in my dreams were not something I thought of as selling points. My dreams were usually b.u.mpy, lost, and dark with bas.e.m.e.nts, which don't exist in Florida, and ghosts who wouldn't accept that they were ghosts.

I was thinking about my wife. There was a reason. I was about to deal with it.

2.

TWENTY-TWO MINUTES LATER, I parked in an open s.p.a.ce right in front of Sarasota News & Books on Main Street. I went in, picked up two coffees and two chocolate croissants, and walked the short block to Gulfstream Avenue.

Traffic whooshed both ways down Tamiami Trail in front of me, and beyond the traffic I could see the narrow Bayfront Park with little anch.o.r.ed pleasure and recreational fishing boats gently bobbing in the water.

Two homeless men made their home in the park across the street. One was an alcoholic, red-faced man with a battered cowboy hat and a guitar. He slept under a bench regardless of the weather and spent the hour or so every night that he wasn't too drunk playing and singing sad country-and-western songs on Palm Avenue or Main Street with his hat on the sidewalk acc.u.mulating coins and an occasional dollar bill until a police car pulled up and a cop leaned out. The cowboy didn't have to be told to amble on. He would nod to the policeman and move on. I had talked to the singing cowboy a few times because he had a look in his eyes I recognized as being very like my own.

We didn't talk about much, not who we were or where we came from. I told him I liked his playing. He told me he liked my baseball cap. I hadn't seen him around for a while.

The other homeless man in the park was black, in his thirties and almost always shirtless. He talked to himself a lot and I had talked to him once on the bench in front of the office where I was now heading. I had given him a cup of coffee. He had nodded something that might have been a thanks and had gone back to talking to himself. He, like I, was a man who preferred his own company.

I entered Ann Horowitz's office ten minutes late. Her inner door was open and I moved to it, holding out a coffee container and the white bag with the chocolate croissants.

She was seated in her leather chair next to her desk. The office was small. Three chairs, three bookcases filled with works on psychology and history. History was Ann Horowitz's pa.s.sion.

She took the coffee and fished into the bag for a croissant, placing it on a napkin she laid out on the desk. I sat in the brown leather recliner across from her and took off the lid of my coffee.

"I thought you were going to bring almond," she said.

"They were out."

She looked at me as she held the croissant in her hand and said, "I'll endure the hardship."

Ann is a psychologist. She took me on as a challenge and charged me twenty dollars a session if I could afford it, ten if I could only manage that, nothing less.

Ann had come to Sarasota with her husband to retire a dozen years earlier, planning to write a book about forgotten Jewish figures in American history. She discovered that she would rather read and talk about them than write, and she also discovered that she missed working with people who challenged her.

She kept looking at me as she bit into her croissant. The ritual had begun. I was uncomfortable with it. Ann said my discomfort indicated that I was making progress.

"Discomfort will turn to return," she had told me during my last visit. "We started with reluctance, got you almost to hostility, and now you have attained discomfort. Progress."

I sipped some coffee, took a deep breath, and softly said, "Catherine."

Ann nodded, put down her croissant, and pulled the lid off of her coffee container.

"Which Catherine? Adele's baby?"

"My wife. Both maybe."

"Time for the question," she said.

I sighed and answered it before she could ask.

"I am not suicidal. I do not want to kill myself."

"You said that the way the police give the Miranda rights on Law & Order."

"Doesn't mean I don't mean it."

"You want to be dead?"

"Numb," I said. "I want to be numb."

"You still want to hold on to your depression?"

"Yes, I want to hold on to my depression."

"Would you be relieved or frightened if you knew you were about to die?

"Die how?" I asked.

"Hit by a car, shot by a bullet, know you have been fatally bitten by a coral snake."

"Relieved maybe. Maybe not. Hard to tell till it happens."

We had been here before and would be here again until the answers changed or she gave up. Ann is not the kind of person who gives up.

"No anger yet?" she asked, finishing the last of her croissant. I had broken off half of mine. The second half lay on a napkin on the little table next to the recliner. A book lay on the table. There was always a book for patients to look at in case Ann had an emergency phone call or an urgent trip to the rest room. The current book was a little one with short paragraphs by William Bennett.

"Lewis?"

"No anger," I said.

"You are not ready to hate the man who killed your wife?"

"Could have been a woman."

"Person," said Ann, accepting the remaining half of my chocolate croissant I handed to her.

"No anger. Nothing I can do with anger."

"But you can try to hide in your depression?"

"I try. It's hard work. You don't make it easier."

"That's why you come to me. Trying to feel nothing," she said, taking a small bite of the croissant to make it last. "Like a religion. Nirvana. Except without a G.o.d."

"Something like that," I said.

"Sleep?"

"I'm down to about fourteen hours a day," I said.

"Progress. Like an Atkins diet for depression," she said. "Lose a little more solitude and isolation each day. Adele, her baby, Flo, Ames, Sally."

"And Dave and you," I finished.

"All people you care about."

I turned my eyes away and shook my head.

"Things happen. People happen. I've been thinking about saving some money and buying a car."

"So you can run away again?"

"Yes."

"But you stay and come to me."

It wasn't a question.

"There's a lot to be said for it, but depression has its downside," I said.

"Why do you like Mildred Pierce so much?" she asked, now working on her coffee. "My husband and I watched it last night."

"You like it?"

"Yes. I have seen it before. What do you like about it?"

"I don't know. What do I like about it?"

"Maybe that bad things happen to Mildred, lots of bad things, but she keeps going. She never gives up."

"Her husband leaves her," I said. "One daughter dies. The other daughter betrays Mildred with her new husband, the husband who...She keeps going."

"But you do not."

"I do not, but maybe I have to."

"Abrupt change of subject," she said, wiping her hands with the paper napkin. "During the Civil War many people in the North still had slaves. There's a new book about it."

I nodded.

"On the other hand," she went on, tossing the crumpled napkin into her half-full wastebasket, "there were many Southerners, prominent Southerners, who fought and even died in the war, who did not believe in slavery and never had any slaves or freed the ones they had before the first shot was fired."

"I didn't know that," I said. "You going to tell me that I'm a slave to my depression, to my refusal to give up my wife's death? That I have to take off the shackles and start to live free?"

She smiled.

"No," she said. "I was simply making a reference to something that came to mind, but you've done a good job of finding something personal in it."

"Maybe I should be a shrink?"

"G.o.d, no. You think you're depressed now?"

"You're not depressed."

"I keep busy," she said. "I have my moments, but I am not chronically depressed. A little occasional depression is normal."

She shook her head and went on, "You are beginning to depress me," she said. "Most of us have suffered terrible losses."

"The Cubs have them every year," I said.

"Your baseball cap," she said, pointing at the cap still on my head. "It's a hopeful sign."

"My cap?"

"You wear it to mask your baldness," she said. "You have some vanity, some will to feel that others view you with approval."

"My head burns if I don't wear it," I said.