Collision by Bill Cotter
The two brothers met by chance near the ice machine in the hallway of the seventh floor of the Marriott Hotel on Liberty Avenue.
Liberty, if followed north for eleven miles, led to a squat stone building, two hundred yards from the main prison campus, in which was contained the chamber, the apparatus, and the drugs used to put prisoners to death. The two-lane road was colored by hardy wildflowers growing through cracks in the median, and was lined with street signs warning travelers not to litter or drive drunk or pick up hitchhikers.
Tomorrow, the two brothers would travel this road, in separate cars, at separate times.
Gerald and Tom Hoefler had not seen each other in five years, since Tom’s marriage to Abigail in 2003, and the brothers were not expecting to see each other until tomorrow, during the viewing, and then only for an hour or so. Running into Tom at the ice machine with the hand-written OUT OF ORDER sign stuck on with a Band-Aid made Gerald feel cheated, as he had no desire to see his brother at all.
“Gerald.”
“Tom.”
They tucked their respective empty ice buckets under their arms, and shook hands.
“No fuckin’ ice,” said Tom. “Huh.”
“Yeah.”
“What you up to these days, Gerry?”
Three minutes of conversation, and it was over. Gerald trudged back to his room. He tried to call Miriam, but cellphone reception was poor in the hotel room, so Gerald was forced to call on the room phone at God knows how many cents a minute.
“He looks like he’s been roughnecking,” said Gerald, sitting on the edge of the queen bed, the polyester rustling as he moved. “Or something like it, anyway, he’s all burnt and leathery and Marlboro Man and full of himself. Miriam?”
“I’m here.”
“He had a crushing handshake,” continued Gerald, studying his right hand in the low light. “The bastard. Nothing like that limp, week-old celery stalk he used to shake with, way back when he was making trillions at Polk & Sons. Do you remember that? Mariam, goddammit, why are you being so quiet?”
“Tomorrow is a lot larger than just seeing your brother, Gerald. You only have to tolerate his company for a little while, then you’ll be on your way home.”
“Wrong, Miriam. I’m having dinner with him tonight, in the lobby restaurant.”
A brief but steep silence, like the sound of space between the stars.
“Why’d you agree to that?”
“I invited him. And I don’t know why.”
Gerald had done it out of guilt. A spasm of compensatory fraternal obligation had taken him over in the hallway by the ice machine. Gerald had been a rotten older brother, a bully and a shamer, before and after Faye had been killed. Something about seeing Tom unexpectedly made him feel an instant of compassion and regret; it was during this instant that he invited Tom to meet him at The Corral, the bar and grill attached to the hotel.
“Gerry,” said Miriam, as if her husband had dozed off at a dinner party.
Gerald stood up, juggling the phone while pulling on a clean pair of jeans and tucking in a button-down shirt. He swallowed two fingers of warm gin from a dented silver flask he’d won in a game of poker in high school, and declared to his wife that they better have goddam steak in the goddam restaurant. And ice.
“And I’m gonna pay for dinner, no matter what.”
“He’ll get the check if he has to stand up and pluck it out of your hand. You know that.”
“Well, listen to this: I’m gonna go down early, give the restaurant my credit card first, tell them to just add 25% to whatever the total is when the meal’s done, run the charge, and bring me my card back. He’ll never even see the check. Ha!”
“You’re behaving like a twelve-year-old.”
“I don’t give a goddam goddamn.”
“Remember, he lost a sister, too.”
Miriam rarely ever referred to Faye, and almost never to her death. It was one of the first things Gerald came to love about Miriam—she always created a place where the tragedy and all its poisons were forbidden. But Gerald slowly came to resent this. He began to interpret her reticence not as a protective shell but as a product of an indifference that had always been there: an indifference whose first and most signal manifestation came as her decision to sleep in different bedrooms, a separation that soon extended to most aspects of their lives. It seemed the only times they ever engaged in a substantive conversation was by telephone while he was away.
“You make me feel like I’m back in family therapy, Mir, for Christ’s sake.”
Gerald listened to the interstellar silence on the other end of the line.
“Miriam?”
Gerald could tell his wife was holding her breath.
“Never mind,” he said. “Call me later. Room 714.”
Tom was already sitting at a table, looking at the plastic stand that contained a list of The Corral’s beers and cocktails.
“What’s it like still being in high school, Gerry?” said Tom, standing up to give his brother another mangle of a handshake. Gerald resisted the urge to roll his brother’s knuckles around and make him yelp. He could do it. He’d always been stronger. But he didn’t want to embarrass the man so openly.
“Well, students don’t change much,” said Gerald.
Tom gave his brother a big smile. He’d gotten his teeth fixed; the old yellow picket fence, almost brown at the gumline, had been rebirthed as a row of Styrofoam-white implants that reminded Gerald of slammed front doors. Tom may have renounced his former, stock-brokering life, but he’d obviously held on to some of the fortune and vanity he’d acquired living it. Hell, let him pay for dinner.
“Nice and stable,” said Tom, returning to his study of the drink menu. “Like you.”
“What can I get for you boys,” said their waitress, a young woman that Gerald thought bore a slight resemblance to what he imagined Faye would have looked like had she been alive the last twenty-nine years. The waitress’ brown hair, like Faye’s, fell in shallow waves to her shoulders where it rested in lazy whorls, and the end of her nose was dimpled with the same tiny pock that would disappear when she smiled. The waitress was half-smiling now, because Tom had asked her if she wanted to come up to his room after her shift to see his etchings.
“I’m up la-a-ate,” Tom said to her, elbowing her on the hip.
Gerald wanted to hit him hard enough to knock all the money out of his mouth, but instead he ordered a double gin and tonic. Tom put his hand near the crook of the waitress’ naked elbow, looked up at her blushing face with what Gerald thought was subtle mockery, and ordered a shot of Bulleit and a Budweiser. She left, not smiling.
Gerald wanted to hit him hard enough to knock all the money out of his mouth, but instead he ordered a double gin and tonic.
Tom, it turned out, was not a roughneck, but a road-construction crew member, working long hours busting asphalt for the Nevada Highway Department.
“I’m the only white guy,” said Tom, inscrutably.
“That right,” said Gerald.
The waitress brought drinks. Tom completely ignored her. There was no steak. Gerald ordered pork tenderloin. The menu offered half a rotisserie chicken. Tom ordered two. Gerald gathered up the menus, handed them back to the waitress, and looked at her with a smile that he hoped was invested with suitable apology for the actions of his brother. She did not return it.
As they ate, Tom told his brother about his life, the deals he’d made, the pussy he’d scored, the jobs he’d had, the adversity he’d beaten, the money he’d squandered. He never mentioned his wife. Faye did not come up, either. She never did.
“What’d you quit Polk for, anyway?” said Gerald.
“You know, to get out there and experience real life, to say adios to that office and the two-thousand-dollar ergonomic chair and Darren Chiu, that waxed prick.”
Gerald suspected there was more to it than that, and that the law might be involved, but he didn’t really want to know what it was, and besides, he was sure his brother would deny any suggestion that anything outside his realm of control could possibly have happened.
He waited till Tom’s mouth was full, then asked a question to which Gerald already knew the precise answer (which was 5:25 PM):
“Any idea what time we’re supposed to be there tomorrow?”
“I don’t know,” Tom said, through a clot of rotisserie chicken. “Around five. Which is a pile a crap, because afterwards I’m gonna have to drive nonstop to get back to work on time. Why can’t they have it at dawn, like in the rest of the fucking country? Everybody knows they put assholes to death at dawn in the United States. It’s the American Way. Anyway, we’re digging up a section of old frontage road off US 9 near Darrow. It’s gonna be 116°F by afternoon, and I gotta—”
“What do you think about tomorrow?” said Gerald.
“—drive all night, so tomorrow’s bullshit better be over within 30 minutes—”
“Tom.”
“—because if I’m not there that bitch Marisol, the only chick on the crew, big, like two kegs stacked up, lots to prove—”
“Jesus.”
“—will be in charge, and she always fucks shit up.”
“Maybe you ought to skip it altogether, then, Tom.”
“Skip what?” said Tom, a greasy knife in one hand, the other clenched like the fist of a newborn.
“Tomorrow, Jesus.”
Tom put his knife down, cracked his knuckles.
“Maybe I will.”
A different waitress came to the table and asked if they needed anything.
“Where’s our waitress?” said Tom, raising his lip like a theater curtain to reveal his teeth; his slur of dentition.
“She’s, um, no longer with us.”
“Serious? said Tom, grinning. “Dead?”
“Coffee, dessert?”
“Peach crumble and a drip,” said Tom.
Gerald ordered another gin and tonic. The waitress brought it, and the check. Tom pinched it right out of her hand, and immediately handed it back along with a black American Express card, even before she could finish saying Thank you for dining with us.
After dinner, Tom went up to his room while Gerald sat at the bar and drank gin until it got close to midnight, then paid his tab and went upstairs.
Miriam hadn’t called. He called her.
“Gerry, Sorry I didn’t call, I fell asleep—”
“No you didn’t, but it’s all right.”
He told his wife about dinner, about how his brother had come early and fucked up his plans to pay the bill.
“What did he say about . . . your sister and everything?”
Gerald could not think of a time his wife had ever spoken Faye’s name aloud. He tried to unscrew the lid on his silver flask of gin without making a sound, but it squeaked in a telltale way that filled the hotel room, the space between his ears, and the air in the phone receiver. Miriam heard it, he knew, he knew.
“Nothing,” said Gerald, almost shouting, to drown out the echoes of the telltale flask. “He didn’t say shit.”
“He never has.”
Neither have you.
It was exactly ten months after five-year-old Faye vanished from her bed one night, that Michael Lee Farris, an unemployed crane operator, confessed to kidnapping Faye and later led investigators to her remains. It was another year, at his trial, that photos were displayed that Farris had taken of Faye after he’d raped and asphyxiated her; photos that Tom was forced to look at—three-foot color enlargements pinned to big rolling bulletin boards—because he was to be called to the witness stand that day; photos that Gerald was spared because his testimony was never needed, as it had been Tom—not fast-asleep Gerald—who had seen a long-haired figure in the yard carrying a bundle into the cone of the streetlight, and who Tom pointed out in court as the man he’d seen.
Alone in their section of the viewing room—other relatives of more of Farris’ victims had their own sections, each separated by mobile partitions of large sheets of plywood painted white—Tom sat in the front row, an arm’s length from the lowered curtain, and Gerald sat in the center of the room.
Tom turned around.
“Gerry, you won’t believe this, but that waitress, the one that was ‘no longer with us,’ you know I was only messing with her at dinner, but I guess she took me seriously because she banged on my door around two in the morning, and I was dead asleep, she was kinda drunk, and she wanted to talk about something, I couldn’t tell what, because she was crying like a whupped child the whole time, but she eventually quit and let me fuck her, saying some incredibly dirty stuff in my ear. She was gone before I woke up.”
Tom turned back around to face the curtain.
Gerald studied the room. He was wondering where his parents would’ve sat, had they not ultimately succumbed to grief in their own ways when the curtain raised, revealing a small beige room, in which were eight people: two men in white coats, three guards, a man and a woman in dark suits, and Michael Lee Farris, who was strapped to a table, one arm stretched out at a 45° angle and battened to a narrow length of greenish-blue Formica attached to the table.
A crackle as a microphone turned on. The woman produced a wrinkled piece of paper and read a summary of the warrant for execution. She asked Farris if he had a brief statement he would like to make. He said nothing. He closed his eyes and turned his head away from the viewing room.
Tom stood up. He said fucking coward, with a low, clenched ferocity. In another section of the viewing area, crying could be heard, and in another, a woman yelled something Gerald couldn’t understand. Tom sat down again. An IV was inserted into a vein in Farris’ arm. One of the technicians injected a liquid into the IV, waited a moment, then injected another. Farris faced the ceiling and opened his eyes. He turned red in the face and opened his mouth, as if for a dentist. He remained in this posture for a full minute, then appeared to shudder, and, finally, to relax. Fourteen minutes passed, and the other technician listened to his heart for a moment, then nodded. The curtain lowered.
Someone came into the viewing area and asked if Tom and Gerald wanted to speak to the media. Tom ignored the question, staying put, his back to the room. Gerald declined an interview and left.
Four years later, during lunchtime in a crowded line at a Korean grocery on Greenwich Street in Manhattan, Gerald found himself standing behind a woman who he realized after a moment was Tom’s wife, whom he hadn’t seen since their wedding nine year earlier. She was examining an array of various slaws in a glass case. She caught Gerry looking at her in the reflection and turned to face him.
“Please keep your eyes to yourself,” she said.
“Uh, Abigail?” said Gerald. “It’s Tom’s brother, Gerry.”
She stared at him for a moment, then smiled, and hugged him unexpectedly.
“Oh, Gerry. Gerry! How are you doing? Still in Chantilly with . . . .”
“Miriam. Yes. I’m in town for a teacher’s conference.”
“You were always so stable,” said Abigail, stepping out of the line, pulling Gerald along by the elbow. “I’m so sorry I never wrote to you or anything, especially when that man’s, um, death, was, you know, happening, but I . . . .”
Something about the timbre of her use of the word “stable” suggested that things with Tom were not. Abigail was so close to his face he could see the ruff of fine wrinkles under her eyes. Gerry had always thought she was attractive, but now even more so. He imparted himself a delectable moment where he imagined she would come to his room at the motel, and he’d tell her everything she’d ever wanted to know about her ex in-laws, about Faye, about Tom, about Miriam, about Michael Lee Farris, about the execution, about himself, and afterwards they would have sex, and more sex, all through the next day, pausing only to feel again what it was like to be falling in love.
He imparted himself a delectable moment where he imagined she would come to his room at the motel.
“That’s okay,” said Gerald, sensitive to Abigail’s hand, still on his elbow.
“Did it give you, you know, a sense of closure?”
Gerald especially hated that phrase.
“Not really.”
“Tom would never talk about it,” said Abigail, letting go of Gerald’s elbow. “He wouldn’t talk about family either.”
“Yeah,” said Gerald, fighting the urge to touch his own elbow, where Abigail’s hand had been.
“We’ve been separated. A long time now. Years. But you probably already knew that.”
“I didn’t.”
“Yeah, well, after he got out of prison for that embezzling thing at Polk, he started taking on these low-paying physical labor jobs to say screw you to the Man, but we ran out of savings, and he moved us back here so he could try brokering again. He figured enough time had passed for him to make a fresh start. Within a couple months he was making tens of thousands a week and sleeping with a floor messenger who evidently had sexual habits he hadn’t encountered before, and which pleased him in ways I never could.”
Embezzling. He should have guessed.
Tom felt absolutely no cold, righteous glee at this news. He just felt empty, like a fresh-dug grave.
Abigail, possibly upset with herself for going into such personal detail with someone she’d met only a couple of times, looked down, then accidentally backed into a shelf of analgesics. Gerald reached out to steady her.
“He’s still here, in Hell’s Kitchen,” she said, holding on to Gerald’s forearms. “Tom, I mean. I never see him. I’m on Chambers, a little spot with a shaft of sunlight for my orchids in the morning. And how long are you in town?”
“Two more nights, early flight out Saturday.”
Gerald had nothing more to say. He tried to think of something, but nothing came to him except his lessons at school, and the words I want to fuck you.
“Where are you?” said Abigail.
“Warrington Inn, at York and 75th.” After a moment he added, “Room 307.”
Abigail reached up and kissed him on the cheek, close to his lips, the corners of their mouths intersecting for an instant.
“It’s nice to see you, Gerry.”
After that day’s round of conference meetings, on the long walk back to the hotel, Gerald picked up two bottles of not-inexpensive wine, an Italian red and a South African white, plus a fifth of Bombay Sapphire. Restless, he wanted to take a walk, but he was afraid he would miss Abigail on the outside chance she chose to come by. He watched the Weather Channel, carefully poured gin into his old poker flask, and sipped it right back out, flask after flask, until early evening, when Miriam was due to call. She did not. He slept, but lightly, starting awake whenever he heard what he thought was a knock, and then falling back to sleep when he realized it was not.
The next day he woke with the sharp, well-defined hangover that attends costlier spirits—a keening, polished awl pushed through his optic nerve. He skipped the conference altogether and stayed in the hotel all day, the bottle of red wine on the luggage counter, the white in a bucket of ice that he renewed every few hours. Miriam again did not call.
It wasn’t until 3:30 in the morning that Gerald gave up the last shred of hope that Abigail would visit, or at least telephone. Around 4:15, Gerald called his wife.
“Gerald, what’s the matter for god’s sake? Are you all right?”
“Why didn’t you call me?” he said. He would not open his flask right now. “Tonight or last night?”
“I wasn’t feeling my best,” she said. Gerald knew she was waiting for him to ask her why, and he also knew that she knew he never would.
“A phone call was going to exacerbate your symptoms?”
“Don’t drink and dial, Gerry,” said Miriam.
“Where did you learn that phrase? And I’m not drinking, goddammit.”
“You’ll never change,” said Miriam.
“Everybody else calls that ‘stability.’”
“Who everybody?”
Gerald—wondering if somehow his wife had intuited his subtle but open invitation to another woman and his desire to make the most of it should that invitation be answered—paused.
“Nobody!”
“Jesus, Gerald,” said Miriam, with what to Gerald sounded like fragile mirth. “Is there someone there with you?”
Gerald laughed, a bitter snort that was really about Abigail’s never showing up, but which he hoped sounded to his wife like an incredulous snigger.
“I’m not even going to answer that.”
Miriam didn’t bother to suppress a sigh this time.
“Oh, Gerry.”
“Oh, Gerry what,” he said.
Miriam hung up.
Three weeks later, on a late Sunday afternoon back in Chantilly, while Miriam was out getting their Subaru inspected, Gerald powered up his Mac, and googled CUNY Law Staff Directory, where he found an email address for Abigail.
Dear Abigail,
I’ve been thinking about you. With apologies for being blunt, I’d like to come back up to New York to see you. Maybe we can get dinner.
Let me know your thoughts. I can come anytime.
Gerry
Gerald hit send. He received an immediate response.
Gerald,
I must have somehow given you the wrong idea. I’m sorry, but I’m not interested. I wish you well.
Abigail
Gerald struggled to compose a response, one in which he seemed outwardly contrite, but between whose lines a careful reader could see that he blamed her for misleading him. Gerald worked at it for hours, but finally just deleted everything.
Miriam was not yet home. Maybe the car had failed inspection, and she was out getting it fixed. Gerald admitted to himself that this was unlikely on a Sunday evening. Gerald thought about calling her, but instead he sat on the couch to watch the Weather Channel and drink gin from his little high-school flask. A few hours later, near midnight, and still no Miriam, Gerald called her. But she didn’t answer, and he left no message. He considered calling around to the hospitals, but in the end did not. As he was falling asleep, he tried to convince himself that he really hoped she would be home sometime soon; that he was worried about her, but he knew the truth.
He woke early the next morning, alone. He wandered through the house to verify that his wife was not home, peeked into the driveway to make certain the car wasn’t there, then thought about calling the police. Instead, he called in sick to work, saying he’d be out for the next few days, poured himself three fingers of gin in a frosted tumbler (the flask had gone missing, like it had run away, a beaten dog finally fed up), and searched for pornography on the internet.
The next day, still alone, he googled old girlfriends, finding Facebook pages for two of them and an email for another. He wrote to all three, one of whom responded with a confession that she still thought about him sometimes, and might like to get together, but that she was living in Los Angeles with a man whom she didn’t want to deceive, and who might react with thorough violence should he discover any shenanigans.
Later in the week, his wife still gone, some of Miriam’s friends began calling. But Gerald didn’t answer, or listen to their messages. On Friday afternoon, the phone rang, and it was with a mixture of despair and fury that he noted it was Miriam herself calling. She left a message less than fifteen seconds long. Gerald did not listen to it.
Early Saturday morning, he gathered what the gist of her message must have been when he noticed through the living room window that a Penske moving truck had backed into his driveway, and that three men, two unknowns in dark blue overalls, and Miriam’s father, Barry, were making their way up the walk.
Gerald stood in his robe, a frosted tumbler of gin in one hand, a remote control in the other, and listened for the clangor of a key in a lock.
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