Conundrum Read online

  I immediately cringed. Should I have been talking about people committing suicide?

  Raff smiled. “Yeah, the lighthouse keeper. An ocean liner crashes because he turned out the wrong light.” He grunted. “Come to think of it, most of those conundrums are about death.”

  That cheery thought actually seemed to lighten his mood. His brain started spinning in familiar fashion. My brilliant brother—who had named every plastic dinosaur and army man—even his houseplants and the rocks he collected from Glass Beach. Boxes and albums full of coins and stamps with not a one missing, even if it meant spending six month’s allowance to get that rare mint coin. His an ordered mind and an even more ordered world. Everything accounted for, nothing missing, no unsolved puzzles. That, as far back as I could remember.

  Raff expounded a litany. “There’s the one about the guy lying facedown in the desert with an unopened package. The guy hanging dead in an empty locked room, next to a puddle of water. The guy found drowned in the ocean with a drinking straw clutched in his hand.”

  They all came barging back into my head: the parachute, the block of ice, the third man who couldn’t fit into the lifeboat and drew the short straw.

  There was always a simple answer, once you figured it out.

  Raff stopped talking and tears filled his eyes. The moment hung in the silence, like a sheet flapping on a clothesline in a vast, empty field. He had run out of steam. I couldn’t begin to imagine the effort it took him to present a normal face to the rest of the world. “There will be time to prepare a face to meet the face that you meet . . .”

  He collapsed on the bed and lay prone, staring at the ceiling.

  “All I want to do is die, Lis. And all I keep thinking is how Kevin and Ashley and Brittany will hate me for leaving them—just as I hated Dad for doing this to me.”

  My breath caught in my throat. His words were filled with venom. Our father had died of leukemia at thirty-three, leaving behind three small children and a bereaved wife. My brother hated him for copping out on life—the coward! We had heard the story throughout our lives: how Dad suffered from depression. How he had later found his real father, a shlub who had abandoned him during the Great Depression. How this shock made him feel unworthy and dirty. He had bad blood, and so gave himself a blood disease—leukemia. So the fairy tale went. Raff was eight when our dad died. I was only four and didn’t remember him at all.

  But Raff remembered. He remembered everything. I cursed his perfect memory.

  “I know this sounds stupid and irrational, but I can’t help it. I can’t outlive my father. How can I do this to my children, cause them this pain—” Raff moaned with agony. Tears filled his eyes and spilled onto his cheeks, as if oozing out of his very being.

  How could I help him? How could anyone help him? Manic depression was not something you could cure with reason. Raff knew he had a great life, that he was supposed to be happy. No one would willingly inflict bereavement on their own children. No doubt, the guilt over his impending appointment with death was almost as debilitating as the pain.

  “The doctors will find you the right meds. Something will work . . .” I knew I shouldn’t have said that. “I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, and I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, and, in short, I was afraid . . .”

  Raff rumbled in fury. “The drugs take weeks to kick in, if they work at all. If they don’t, you start all over and you wait. Do you have a clue what this pain is like? How every damn second is a knife in your heart? You have no idea!”

  No, I didn’t. I clamped my mouth shut. I had to believe in our age of miracle medicine that a drug was out there, one that would give Raff some semblance of a normal life. If he could hang on that long.

  But would that solve everything? Erase the anger and resentment? Wash away the disappointment and feelings of abandonment he’d carried like an albatross around his neck his whole life?

  My mind flashed to that conundrum—where the guy in the restaurant ordered albatross. The truth set him free. Was there a truth to be found out there to solve the most perplexing conundrum of all?

  The one that went like this:

  A man, with a happy marriage and three wonderful children, a great job as a mathematician and physicist for an aerospace company, decides one day he does not want to keep living. He wills himself to die and develops leukemia. Nine months later, he is dead.

  I suddenly understood Raff’s lifetime obsession with categorizing everything neatly in its place. All to make up for the one glaring element that didn’t fit in anywhere—our father’s inexplicable death.

  Was that all there was to the puzzle? Or was there more?

  I sucked in a breath. In all my thirty years of life I had never stopped to ask that question. That was the pat answer we were given and so we believed it. Our mother’s words played like a broken record in my head: “You’re too young to understand. When you grow up, it’ll make sense.”

  But I’d grown up and it didn’t make sense.

  For the first time in my life, that explanation rang false. Could I write my father’s death off as simple manic depression, an illness that obviously ran in the family? A death wish born from a chemical imbalance in the brain?

  But really—could people will themselves into developing leukemia? I knew practically nothing about the disease other than it had to do with blood and bone marrow and white cells. That it wasn’t contagious or genetic, so we kids didn’t need to worry we’d get it. New Age philosophy and holistic medicine might claim you could contract a disease psychosomatically. And I understood that—to a point. You could make yourself sick from stress. But give yourself cancer? My mother always spoke as if it were established medical fact. Want to die? Give yourself the corresponding disease. Feel unworthy as a woman? Give yourself breast cancer. And so the line of reasoning went.

  What if Raff’s real problem was not manic depression? What if it stemmed from the years of pain and anger roiling under the surface of his self-esteem? What if abandonment mixed with misunderstanding had created a poison just as debilitating as depression? What if the truth could be uncovered?

  I dared to imagine . . . what if there was some truth out there that could set him free? Was the freedom in the absolution? Or in knowing the truth? Could I single-handedly solve this one conundrum—the only one that really mattered?

  Our father’s expertise was in something called Boolean algebra. It sounded like some Middle Eastern dance to me. That form of mathematics was a precursor to the developing of computers, something my father worked on in the fifties. A system of logic operators where a question could be answered in one of three ways: and, or, not. Only recently, I had been thumbing through a book of brain teasers and startled at finding a Boolean algebra conundrum, of all things.

  Two guards each stand before a door. Only one is the door leading to enlightenment. One of the guards always lies; the other always tells the truth. You want to open the door to enlightenment, yet you can only ask one question, and only of one guard. What is the only question you can ask that will tell you, with certainty, which door you must choose?

  Well, without going into a lengthy discourse to explain how the algebra figures in, the answer was this: Ask either guard this question: “Will the other guard say he is posted at the door that leads to enlightenment?” If the guard you asked answered yes, the door behind him was the correct door. If he said no, it was the other door. It’s simple, once you saw how the parts all broke down. Boolean algebra reverted to simplicity. In any problem, there was only AND, OR, or NOT. Either “this answer AND that answer are both correct,” or “This answer OR that answer is correct,” or “NOT any of the answers are correct.”

  As I hugged Raff good-bye, leaving him floundering in his pain, venting his anger at me, I thought about finding that door to enlightenment. I thought about the answers we’d been given for our father dying. Maybe we never asked the right question
s that led to the right door.

  I grunted as I started back down the stairs. We never asked any questions, did we? So how did we know whether or not the guard was telling the truth or lying?

  My mother’s face came to mind. Every time we had tried to ask her questions about Dad, she changed the subject. Never once in my entire childhood had she talked about him, or her marriage. The facts I had about my father would barely fill half a page.

  He grew up in New York. Spent years in one foster home after another until that nice couple took him in and raised him. Had a brother who was adopted with him into the Sitteroff family. Married our mother, joined the Merchant Marines near the end of the war, came back to work in LA for the Penwell Corporation. Spoke seven languages, accepted some award in Belgium for physics, took our mother to Paris for their honeymoon. Twelve gloriously happy years of marriage until the day he decided to die—the truth according to Ruth Sitteroff.

  I’d only seen two photographs of him—that’s all our mother had. One of him in his Merchant Marine uniform and the other a family portrait right after Neal was born. Eight months before our father died. A lot of blanks to fill in. And just what happened to that brother of his—my uncle? Was he still alive, and why had we never seen him while growing up?

  Suddenly, I had way too many questions. They overflowed, like lava spewing from a volcano, burning my insides. I rushed out of the hospital into the foggy street, thinking obtusely how the gray swallowing up the streets of San Francisco reflected my mental state. I knew just where to go first to look for answers, but I doubted they would be readily forthcoming. “And should I then presume? And how should I begin?”

  My mind brewed with ideas, and I felt a headache coming on from lack of sleep. After a volatile argument that had dragged on past midnight, I hadn’t been able to konk out until after three a.m. Thinking of finding Jeremy waiting at home flared the ache in my sinuses. But where else was I to go? I had a barnyard of orphans waiting to be fed, and a doe about to kid.

  “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?”

  I couldn’t get the image of the man in the restaurant out of my head.

  I’m free, he said.

  Did the truth really set you free? Or was that too simple? Maybe there were no answers at all. And, or, or not?

  I loved the last lines of Eliot’s brilliant poem. “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea . . . by sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown . . .”

  Those lines tickled my consciousness the whole drive home, over the Golden Gate Bridge, up the corridor through Marin County, even as I bounced along the long rutted dirt road with the brown rolling hills languishing in early summer’s heat a backdrop to my small farmhouse in Petaluma. I pulled up in the circular drive and cut the engine. Buster and Angel, my two rescued mutts, galloped from around the side of the house and panted with excitement at my arrival.

  My mind fell suddenly quiet.

  Jeremy stood by his truck, a bundle of clothes draped over his arm. My eyes took in the load of U-Haul packing boxes neatly stacked in the truck bed. I opened my car door and got out.

  “Lisa . . .” His voice sounded as if it drifted up from the depths of the sea. Faraway, muted. “I wasn’t expecting you back so soon. I thought it would be less painful if—”

  He gestured apologetically to the cowardly scene I had stumbled upon. My nausea returned with a vengeance as I looked with confusion at my husband of ten years, Jeremy, the only man I ever loved, oh, so loved.

  Like waves breaking against a rocky shore, his words slapped me awake from some sleepy stupor I had been lingering in—for the better part of my adult life.

  “Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”

  Chapter 2

  “It’s just for a while—to give me time to clear my head,” Jeremy said. I noticed the tremble in his throat. Shreds of cloud skittered overhead and threw strange patterns on his freckled face as he searched my eyes. “I’ll only be down the way, at Daniel’s place.”

  His store manager’s house. Daniel was in his early twenties, single. I pictured a small spare bed in a cluttered den. A couch with some blankets and a lumpy foam pillow thrown over ratty upholstery. Jeremy, six foot six and hefty, could barely sleep comfortably in our California King. An expensive bed he had picked out and paid for.

  “Don’t do this, Jer, please.” Even though I meant the words, part of me hoped he would get into his truck and drive away. For now. I was too exhausted to go another round. But maybe Jeremy felt the same way. Our marriage was like a gracefully spinning gyroscope, so steady and almost perfect in its spin until decay set in, and with friction threw our shining relationship off balance into a wobble and decline. Toppling was inevitable.

  He offered his hand to me in a conciliatory manner, and I took it as the breeze blew through my hair and cooled my face. His skin was warm and soft, his grip meant to be reassuring.

  “I can’t take any more fighting. It’s making me sick. I can’t concentrate at work.” The edge had left his voice.

  I nodded. My queasiness subsided as he spoke. Buster, a chunky yellow Lab with some Chow in him, licked my hand, demanding attention. I mindlessly scratched the top of his head until he had his fill and trotted over to the front stoop to plop down beside Angel, a border collie mix that couldn’t resist herding all the goats in the pasture at every opportunity.

  “And I can’t take your mother’s ranting. Coming over here and running our lives.” His voice sounded more tired than angry. He squeezed my hand, then let it drop. “I mean it, Lis.”

  I had no answer for him. We’d been over this a thousand times. I understood how frustrated he was. We had spent the last ten years building this house, putting in gardens, and adding a deck, Keystone fencing around the pasture, split-rail fencing along the drive, a complex water system with two one-thousand-gallon tanks, over a hundred old roses. We had reclaimed an orchard back from brambles of blackberry bushes, had even dug a huge pond, landscaped like something out of Sunset magazine. W had invested all our savings, untold hours of manual labor, all our disposable income, but we owned none of it.

  My mother had bought this property for us when we first married. Just as she had supplied the down payment on Raff’s fancy home overlooking the bay before he got his promotion at the bank. She had only wanted to help us get started, get on our feet, when the feed store first opened and we didn’t have any savings. I saw it as an act of love, but Jeremy read it as a noose. Something she could use to lead him around with, make him do her bidding, make him beholden to her. His upbringing in rural Montana—coming from a traditional two-parent home—dictated that men provided for their families. It irked him that I had gone to my mother and asked for help. She even offered to loan us money as starting capital for the store, but that’s where Jeremy drew the line. He buckled, though, when I found this five-acre parcel for sale, reduced in price, the property of my dreams, complete with a babbling creek hugging the foothills. Now Jeremy cursed the day he said yes, letting my mother buy it for us. Keeping the title in her name.

  Jeremy slammed his cab door shut and nodded to the house. “I still have a few more things inside to . . . put in the truck.”

  I couldn’t help myself. A sob tore out of my chest without warning, and tears flooded down my cheeks. Jeremy only hesitated for a second before coming over and gathering me up in his comforting arms. Arms that only last night longed to lash out and smash something.

  Rafferty’s voice poked the back of my mind. “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Which poem was that from?

  “Hey, shh, now. It’ll be okay.” He let me cry for a minute, then lifted my chin and wiped my face with his cuff sleeve. He was wearing the green plaid flannel shirt I bought him for Christmas. The colors made his rusty hair look redder than usual. With his jaw clenched, his smoky eyes caught mine, and I saw my pain reflected back.

  Everything felt skewed, even the way he held me. So
right and so wrong at the same time. I ached for his comfort, but I had to resist the urge to push him away and wiggle out of his arms.

  I let him hold me like that for what I deemed the proper length of time, swatting away the memories of his acerbic attack of last night. The screaming, fist-pounding fury he had unleashed at me made me roil with anger. Why did I find those arguments so hard to let go of? Did I suffer some sick addiction, needing to mull over each hurtful word, relive the sharp barbs until bleeding began again—like pushing Rewind on a tape recorder? More like picking at scabs and poking at wounds. Maybe I thought if I replayed those words over and over, they’d come out differently.

  “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

  Yeats. How could I forget—the famous “Second Coming”? I could hear every word in Raff’s dramatic Shakespearean actor lilt. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” In Raff’s estimation, the former disdained group Yeat’s referred to included most everyone in the world. The latter—most notably himself, and maybe a handful of others. Pitiful, intense, hopeless romantics. The world needed more like him, or so he protested in defiance of Yeats’s declaration.

  “Come, I’ll make you some tea before I head out.” Jeremy started for the front door, when I heard a screeching cry from the barn. “What in blazes is that?” he asked.

  My heart skipped a beat. “Sassy. Maybe she’s kidding.” I did a quick review in my mind. She wasn’t due for another week—at least by my estimation. But goats never kept to a tight schedule when it came to giving birth. At least I had her in the kidding pen with fresh straw and plenty of water—away from the motley menagerie of rescued animals fenced in the pasture.

  “I’ll come with you,” Jeremy said.

  He mostly left tending the animals to me. It was my passion—rescuing farm animals that were abused and abandoned. Over the years I’d gained a reputation. The vets and animal shelter directed people to me who called all hours of the night, or sometimes just dropped lost ducks or sheep on my doorstep. Right now I had sixteen assorted animals, some in bad shape, some pregnant, like Sassy. Jeremy was raised on a ranch—horses and cattle—and with his knowledge of feed and medicines, he never got squeamish when I asked him to hold a struggling animal that needed wounds cleaned and bound, horns disbudded with a hot iron, even castrating with a sharp razor. I sighed and a lump of melancholy sat heavy in my gut. We made a great team—or used to.