Broken Sleep: The Widening Gyre, #1

By Kaimana Wolff

What has happened to Jane?

"All voices sing in unison: get out get out get out escape escape escape…" but violence and death stalk Jane along every bend of every way out….

Can you escape a past you never knew?

Four hardworking professionals live the good life–until one falls into a hole in a Vancouver street. As the world's colors change, each man grapples with shadows of war as Jane tumbles into the abyss of the Disappeared.

Paul and Zack, thrown together by what may be Jane's last testament, are hardly excited about cooperating with each other on any issue, least of all on the disappearance, weeks ago, of their mutual friend and her little daughter.

What did Jane expect of them–if anything? What does her story mean–if anything? And what, if anything, should they do about Matt, Jane's beloved husband, the man each of them suspects?

Caught in an ancient web of caring and enduring, action and restraint, law and healing, Zack and Paul enact the next steps–in Jane's existence as well as their own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stars Above, Stars Below Press
• Release date: May 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386207610

Kaimana Wolff

Kaimana Wolff, novelist, poet and playwright, survives in a small community on the coast of British Columbia with her friend, a beautiful soul housed in a wolfish body. Often Lord Tyee and Wolff can be heard devising new howls, songs and dances on the lawns, in the parks, and in glens of the great forests still permitted to stand.

Book preview

Evening

Today’s last visitor to the office is no patient. He insisted he would state his business only to Zack. Now he slaps a thick, sealed manila envelope onto the reception counter along with a pair of pigskin gloves. It’s your turn to spend a night with this stuff, dammit!

Zack doesn’t care for the language. And why throw down the gloves? The man wants to talk, obviously. About Jane, apparently.

Zack is in no mood to give information—or, for that matter, to take in more information about Jane. He averts his gaze; takes refuge in the scumbled evening sky. What view? he allows the slender slice of his consciousness devoted to business matters to complain for the thousandth time. Nothing to see out there but black rain. Again. Tear-stained windows; blurry city lights. Where’s this great view we pay eight bucks per square foot for?

November is a bad month for crises. The crying season. S.A.D.—Seasonal Affective Disorder, as the psychologists call it—sends in one depressed patient after another. Long ago, moving out to rainy Lotusland from snow-drifted Toronna the Good, he started a journal of observations on the unheard, uncounted members of the Vancouver Crying Club, leaned up against damp-barked trees in the parks, camouflaging their sorrows in the mists and drizzles of this weepy city—when they weren’t lined up in his waiting room. November is the month that seems to go on forever. Just when you think the last patient has left and you can turn off the lights and go home in the deepening dark, here comes someone like this guy.

Not a crier, though—more of a bomb on two feet, about to explode.

Dr. Shaiman! For a doctor, you don’t pay attention worth a damn!

One of the crazies? At least two crazies a month pass through here. Maybe the sound therapy should be turned back on.

Zack dares an oblique look at this human imperative standing exactly where patients usually stand in gentle supplication for appointments with Dr. Shaiman, the healer of whom they have heard so many good things. This one’s too well dressed for a crazy. No nasty smell, either. Clean, square teeth in a military mouth, well set above trench-coat shoulders. A private man who perhaps thinks a little too well of himself.

Diagnosis: anger. For starters. Look at the cheek muscles binding a long, aggressive jaw to the rest of his rather good-looking face (if you like that type), bunched at the temporo-mandibular joint. Look at that clench; hear that bruxism, big-time. Bet General Jump-and-ask-how-high-on-the-way-up pays big bucks to his dentist every year. Zack has manipulated hundreds of TMJs like this guy. Razors of rage stored in the jaws. This perfect stranger harbors rage against him. Against Dr. Zack Shaiman, mild-mannered practitioner who has never hurt a soul. Against someone he has never met until now.

You owe her that much! Whatever you did!

What I did? Zack takes the bait.

The well groomed right hand slips into its glove and pats the envelope again, as if reluctant to leave it behind. You should have been there with me! There were two of these. One with your name on it. One with mine. She must have thought you’d come—you’re in the caring business, aren’t you? Her best friend—the great doctor?

Zack glances at the packet of paper, a ream thick. Sure enough: there’s his name, as elegantly inscribed as on his naturopath’s degree certificate. Jane’s hand, unmistakably. Dread mingles with curiosity: what can the woman possibly have written that needs to be read by him?

Maybe your version is just like mine—I didn’t look.

The ungloved hand extends a business card. When Zack does not take it, the square fingers place it emphatically in the center of the manila package. Call me in the morning. Anger sharpens the serrated voice. "We can have lunch. And discuss how it was for you. He swivels smartly on his heels. I don’t admire cowardice!" He jesses on the other glove and turns to fly.

Memory clicks in. Oh. This is that guy from yesterday. The phone call. Zack looks at the card: Paul Georgos, Barrister & Solicitor. At some firm with a forgettably long name. Lawyers—idiots, starting with their business cards. They stare you down with the brilliant opacity of an eagle and fly off with half your life in their brutal beaks. He hefts the parcel of paper—must be the better part of a ream. There’s no way I can read all this in a night, Mr. Georgos—

The man whirls back, a kendo warrior, armed with sticks of speech. Look here, Dr. Shaiman, if you really are a doctor, which is hard to imagine since you show so little concern for a patient of yours who’s obviously in danger, I was merely ticked off last night when you refused to do your duty and come to her place with me. You think it was easy for me, a lawyer, to break into her place? But now I’m mad. I can guess why you wouldn’t come, and it doesn’t make me like you any better. Or allay my suspicions about what happened, and your part in it! Now listen up: you’ve got a duty, like it or not—whatever happened between you two. And in my view, we don’t have a lot of time. So you just take two aspirin, put your nose in that stuff tonight and call me in the morning!

He slams the door so hard that Leslie, dumbstruck behind the reception desk, quivers visibly on his ergonomic chair.

Zack quiets his heart, riding the galloping breath, concentrating on exhalation. At last the thing slows to a canter. Leslie. How long since we’ve seen Jane?

He doesn’t have to use her surname; for Leslie in particular there is only one Jane, the favorite patient.

I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, but you’ve been so busy. Leslie flips through the calendar. It’s been ten days, and the really weird thing is, she hasn’t called. That’s not like Jane at all, is it? If she loses it and misses, she always calls to apologize. So actually, we’ve all been worried. He waves to include the other support staff, all gone home by this hour.

Zack groans. Why didn’t somebody mention it? He examines the weighty package. Dr. Zack Shaiman on the front, in Jane’s hand. He groans again. Doesn’t the woman ever stop her pesky writing?

When she travels, she sends him long letters—essays, really—assuring him cheerily that it doesn’t matter whether he reads them because what she really needs is someone to write to. Well, thank God for that, he grumbles, giving them the briefest glance before refolding them and slipping them into approximately appropriate books on his shelves. Pages of introspective stuff on love and death and the whole damned thing—who has time?

There have been some wonderful conversations—yes, all right, he revels in those. From time to time she drops a literary novel on his desk, if he asks for a recommendation—he likes that, too, and their book discussion later, sometimes over dinner somewhere.

They have work cases together, too, with the joyous energy of professionals at their best, like trained, high-spirited ponies racing ahead, knowing exactly where and when to put their skilled feet. But he hates written stuff! He is notorious for putting off writing even the briefest medical report. He doesn’t do written stuff, except, well…the journal, sort of. Not even Jane knows about that.

Now she’s written a bloody book. God help us. Books should not be written by people you know. The obligations that fall out from between the pages! The terror of finding yourself written up! No, thanks.

Conversation, cases, book sharing—great. But her letters arrive sealed with auras like old-fashioned crimson wax seals, announcing serious stuff within—diagnoses, judgments, legal stuff. Must she spoil a wild philosophical gallop by memorializing it? Now here it is again, this grave insistence on rendering the lightness of being into permanence, dead as eternity.

With a huge sigh, he yanks her papers out of the envelope. Sure enough: typed manuscript. A single manuscript. What? No tedious essays this time? Day of the Dead. There’s a nice light title for you.

Hell. Should he call Angie and tell her he has to work tonight? Maybe Mr. Super-lawyer is right: he has a duty of some kind to this patient.

He flips the pages, catching a poem and a few phrases, easily hooked by her familiar imagery. Then he catches sight of his name. Not just once, but over and over. There’s a separate page, another one of her letters—only a page this time, thank God.

Damn it! Has she captured him in the sculpted stone of her words? Made it impossible to say, ever again, I was a breath in time, no more? He has better things to do than read this overblown screed. Like catching up on mail and messages. He half rolls the manuscript and jams it deep into his backpack before snatching up a daunting pile of paper, stuffing his lunch pack with mail there was no time to open today.

Last month he asked Leslie to start setting his personal messages aside, in another attempt to eke a few more minutes out of his harried days. Not that he is complaining about his burgeoning practice, but it does make for long hours. He shrugs on the backpack and scoops up a fistful of messages to read in the elevator and at stoplights. Home time.

Oh, no—there’s a message from Jane. Worse than the weight of her manuscript in his backpack is the glimpse of her name on the second to last flimsy pink rectangle. In the parking lot, a cold rain spittle hits his face and Jane’s last message at the same moment. The darker pink stains Leslie’s handwriting: Personal.

Eleven days ago. His patient—admit it: she is his friend—called him eleven days ago. He hasn’t answered. He slumps against the fender of his car, still filthy from its last camping trip. He reads the message again: Personal. Urgent. No details.

He could be sued, he realizes abruptly. By Matt, no less. Oh, that sounds like fun. Just the sort of irony the world adores: the beast responsible for the woman’s injuries sues the doctor who’s trying to heal her.

Well, here’s the excuse he’s been looking for, to bow gracefully out of tonight’s practice intimacy session. He’s weary of this with Angie: my needs, your needs, what is the fair decision, the politically correct compromise this time? Weary of life as a course in negotiation skills. Weary of obsessing over fairness between genders. Treason tempts him: it might be easier, more pleasant, to live with another monk, a recluse. If it had to be a woman, why not someone more like Jane, who spits on the ideal of ‘achieving’ intimacy? How the hell can you do intimacy? she demands scornfully. Jane, who can score offside acts of unforgettable sharings, flashes of insight brilliant enough to melt your flesh away, moments that crouch now, like exquisite works of fused, lit glass, in the half-remembered niches of his soul’s house. Sharings he mostly denies, but which she is refusing to let him forget.

Please! Get out of my life, lady! But she’s in his life, dead or alive. They share that musty European heritage that insists that connection means duty, forever, till death do us part—a kind of moral accounting system. Save people’s lives, and they’ll commit to serving you life-long, or to saving your life in return. No one in the Old Countries ever asks if this is healthy. Or perhaps people do ask, sometimes: didn’t healthy instincts move his parents to the New World after the camps? The desire to get away from all that moral and spiritual accounting, for the post-Holocaust reckoning, however high their credit in the books of God?

If you are foolish enough to catch a gold ring, then, dammit, you must insure the onerous thing every year. In Jane’s eyes he has certainly caught a ring. His disturbingly permanent credit with her makes him long to melt the thing back down to oblivion, to watch it disappear in glistening runnels.

He cannot endure the calcification of moments, the liming of love; has never colluded in memorializing a relationship in poem or story, a shallow grave of words. It’s bad enough when the best moments are already past and paid, half remembered, half missing; worse that Jane dares to preserve his imperfections in her carven stone poems.

Once, he impulsively sent her a postcard, during a brief, snatched holiday in Chichen Itza: Enough mysterious stone writings here to keep scholars busy forever—lots of poets like you! His pen-scratch echoed in the oxygen-starved central chamber of the Mayan pyramid, a pitched apex atop an ever more clenching stone stairway, where the sun staved in through the narrowest aperture imaginable, designed to suggest futures on the blank interior stones.

In that robbed room of sanded stone, absent the flat-faced sages who long ago burned the incense, celebrated the sacrifice, and read the shadowy prophecies, where pilgrims once saw detached wrinkled visages floating above desiccated bodies, monitoring Mesoamerican time, instead of those sages only he stood there, Dr. Zack, in sneakers and Canadian T-shirt, scribbling teasingly to a sometime friend. Lightheaded, he had wanted to leave graffiti: You wrote in stone—so now, who cares?

His heart lightened with every down-step to air, to light, to relative coolness. Tempus fugit, and it doesn’t matter what you say or do or leave undone. Your legacy doesn’t matter. The only legacy is air. Or its absence.

Still, he has never yet managed to junk that thing which loiters near the center of his psyche like a bulky package, clumsily wrapped in recycled brown paper and much-used string. Sporadically he tries to unwrap the persistent presence, dreading its message: those souls whom you have truly met, remain part of you.

He suspects such an agglomeration of obligations and relationships, glued together by memory and emotion, to be nothing more than ego, re-packaged. What makes vacation so wonderful is the chance to step out of the tangle of strings that tie us up in daily life, tie us up so hard that we miss real life altogether as we struggle to master the awkward ego.

He sighs, exasperation hobbling after him across the wet parking lot. Call Angie, park the pesky cell phone; retreat to Pomidoro. No one can reach him there. He’ll order the marinara and a bottle of their decent dry white. One night.

Okay. Janey can have just that much of him.

Day of the Dead, ’95

Dearest Zack,

In times of great trouble, great dreams come. Well, Zack, I must be in great trouble. If you’re reading this, I’ve given it up: my life, my truncated story.

How well you’ve trained me in the fine art of letting go!

Don’t shove this away between your musty books. Read and destroy. We don’t want Matt getting his hands on this.

This is a work of fiction: any resemblance to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental. It is also written, All fiction is autobiography, and all autobiography is fiction.

Everything in this manuscript speaks a truth. I regret nothing.

Zack, for Jilly’s sake, never be taken in again by Matt’s charm—those eyes, stolen from snakes. There’s no room for error! I tried to set affairs in order—this insanity’s too complex even for a lawyer. Hope you can do the right thing by Jilly. Am indescribably tired. Long to come in, but can’t risk it now. I miss your hands so much.

You saved my life, believe it or not. And my purpose in your life? To insist on loving you, you as the hermit, the healer, the hunchbacked soul? Dear Zack, you are so beautiful, you have no idea.... I trust you, absolutely, dearest one. See you one day, on that mountain.

Amor, siempre,

Jane

Day of the Dead

Jane van der Ziel

Evil people hate the light because it reveals themselves to themselves. They hate goodness because it reveals their badness; they hate love because it reveals their laziness. They will destroy the light, the goodness, the love in order to avoid the pain of such self-awareness.

Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Table of Contents

Zack

Paul

Paul and Zack

Paul

Zack

Zack and Paul

Paul

Zack

Zack and Paul

Paul

Paul and Zack

Zack

Letters from Malcolm

Zack and Paul

Zack

Jane’s Mailbox

Paul

Jane’s Messages

Zack and Paul

Zack

Shims

One Kiss

Fly on the Wall

The Dinner Party

Night Terrors

A Garden-shed Moment

Dallas

Merry Marriage

Firemen’s Balls

Where There’s a Will

The Last Happiness

Many Mansions

Fly on the Wall

Happy Damned New Year

The Hearing

Aspects of Utopia

Tom and Flip

Gaslight

Acrylic v Glass

Hate Dates

The Sick Man

Estate Planning for the Battered Spouse

Day of the Dead

La Fortuna

Health Notes

Flamingoes

King Lear

Kristallnacht

For Your Own Good

Matt’s Musings

Paul

Paul and Zack

The Grail

Paul

Zack

Zack and Paul

Fly Ondewal

Sacrifices

Last Day of the Calavera

Paul and Zack

Zack

"She could be…dead."

I swiveled on one heel away from the front desk, where Leslie, the self-appointed office gossip, was all ears. I took refuge in the November sky greying our five o’clock windows.

I’d been avoiding that thought. For several…what—days? Weeks? Maybe she’s dead.

I don’t know where the child is, either.

The child. Strange way of referring to people you know: the child, the spouse, the wife.

I didn’t know this man. Had Jane ever mentioned him?

Leslie had handed me the phone as I emerged from my last consult, with the whispered advice, and his famous raised eyebrows, that this was a lawyer’s office on the line.

A great end to a perfect day! I didn’t like lawyers. Jane was all right—she’d changed. Still, I was just as happy never to talk to another lawyer. Even if this guy really was Jane’s friend, he was probably like all the rest—Mr. Ego, Mr. Logic, Dr. Do-nothing with a Ph.D. in Materialism. I have lawyers in my family—their lives are boring and meaningless.

A missing person was probably this guy’s biggest thrill in years. I needed to know more about him—much more—before saying a word about Jane. So I stalled. What are you suggesting?

I’m suggesting that there may be a suicide, or a murder. Or a murder that looks like suicide. I hope there’s a happier answer, that none of these is true. You’re her doctor—you would know best how high the suicidal ideation was, the level of domestic violence, stuff like that. It seems to me that a duty falls on you and me, Dr. Shaiman, to investigate.

This ambulance chaser would have loved it if Jane were dead. Another juicy case with big fees. Poor Jane had been just so much raw flesh for other lawyers to feed on. Bunch of cannibals.

Me, I was not about to fall in with the legal machinery that had chewed up her life—much less let it make a mess of my life again.

Why? I don’t make a habit of running after my patients. They come regularly for a while; they stop coming for reasons of their own; then they come again. That’s been Jane’s pattern as well.

Leslie was studiously keeping his eyes on the patient files. I flapped an arm at him. Leslie! Hey! Hey! Turkey! I cupped my mouth away from the handset and whispered, When’s the last time Jane came in?

I have her latest will, the voice on the line said. It’s only two months old. You’re the executor.

Dammit! Two months old? Did I have a copy of that one? I know about the executor bit, Mr. Fancy Legal Pants. Been the exec for some years now, since Matt started acting funny. Executor. She’s mine; I’m hers—it’s what friends do for each other. My first reason ever for wishing not to outlive someone. Want Jane to probate my will, instead, one day—I know she’ll do right by my little guy. Bad enough, to have to tie up the material ends of someone else’s life. Helping people die well is part of my work. But just imagine doing battle with Matt…daunting idea, to put it mildly.

How long since you’ve seen her?

Just a minute.

Leslie was gesticulating. Yeah, right, just load on the guilt, Leslie. Just look at that face: How could the good doctor have forgotten? Spare me. I forgot, okay? Scheize happens. Ten fingers he holds up. Okay, I remember now.

Ten days ago. She was lugged into the waiting room by a friend. In horrible pain, after a panic attack big enough to fell an elephant. Suicidal? Yes; I had to admit, she was suicidal on that occasion. She was in enough pain to make the world’s most conservative medics believe in the reality of fibromyalgia. Patients in the waiting room were appalled, horrified by the sight of her—I’d had Leslie put her out of sight, in the back room, on ice, right away.

Nothing since then? She’s missed three appointments? Leslie, shut up. Yes, yes, you’ve said it a thousand times—we should follow up with all suicidal patients, make sure they have a working safety net, provide extra TLC….

I shushed him, finger to the lips, and swiveled back to my window. Ten days.

That’s unusual, isn’t it? Wasn’t she seeing you twice a week?

How did this guy know? Look, I’m not free to say anything about a patient of mine without a release—as a lawyer, you know that.

How the hell do you propose to get that? There’s no answer on her phone or at her door. Anyway, if she’s dead—however she’s dead—you’re the executor and you don’t need a release!

However? I’ve no idea who you are, Mister…what was it? For all I know, her husband could have set you on me.

There fell a silence which, after several seconds, seemed faintly conciliatory. The guy must know Matt. I threw in, I agree…. Shit, I’m going to do my maybe-you’re-right routine here? Maybe there is cause for concern here but I have to be convinced before I break the patient-doctor confidentiality.

Okay. You’ve every right to be cautious.

Whew! The guy’s anger leaked away. What had I said to accomplish that? The comment about Matt—of course this guy knew Matt. These lawyers all knew one another.

You will appreciate that I’m in a similar position, as her lawyer appointed in the will. But until I know the will has kicked in, I’m just her friend. I have some duties as a fellow lawyer, but for now, it boils down to just concern.

We could meet somewhere? Did I just say that?

Good. There is cause for concern. She was going to come in a couple of times last week to review some files but never showed up. Not a phone call, no apology for forgetting, nothing! That’s not like Jane.

No, it’s not. Cold-water fact.

I swiveled back to Leslie, to his silly face, on overtime but still agog for more news. She didn’t call?

Leslie shook his head no, as if it was entirely the doctor’s fault. I loved the guy, but he was too much sometimes.

No, she didn’t call us about missing appointments, either. Oops. There went a bit of confidential information. How about Three Palms, on Broadway, in half an hour?

I thrust the damp handset back to Leslie, who handled it like a dead skunk. Go home, Leslie. Ignored Leslie’s tumble of questions. We don’t pay overtime, remember?

Once he’d gone, I called Jane. No answer. Should I leave a message? Of course. Call me—us. You’ve missed appointments.

What a sodden night! I escaped the blackening rain into the neon refuge of the fake tropical restaurant at almost the same moment as another man. He had to be a lawyer. Suspiciously we looked each other over in that empty cave, its concrete walls muralled in innumerable shades of sun-struck blue by an unknown and inadequate artist with a palpable heimweh for the Mediterranean.

A Greek lawyer and a Jewish doctor, meeting over a Dutch girl married to an American. Typical Vancouver ethnic mishmash. First-fruits of the global diaspora.

The other guy folded a gray umbrella and shook his trench coat like a big dog who hates the wet. Dr. Shaiman? I’m Paul.

Already I regretted agreeing to meet. How out-of-place this other man seemed! Too well off for Three Palms, obviously. I pulled my wet cap off my thick thatch of greyed curls, eased off my Peruvian handknit gloves, and extended a handshake I hoped met lawyerly standards. The guy had a warm, dry strong hand, anyway—she would notice that. She used to say great things about my hands. Wonder what she—sheesh! He’s thinking the same thing I am. I’d bet on it. Terrible night.

In more ways than one. Can’t blame Janey for leaving this weather. If that’s what she’s done.

You think? She did like—does like—to travel. Maybe the guy knew more than he’d said on the phone, something recent, something to dispel the gathering weight in my chest. Anticlimax. I wanted anticlimax, and a big laugh when we’d figured out the hoax, the joke, or the mistake. Jane would forgive us, laugh with us if it turned out we’d over-reacted. Back to old times—what a relief!

Paul shrugged handsome shoulders. Can’t tell. But I’ll tell you this: I’m a little scared. I’m scared of what we might find out. He smoothed back a slightly thinned widow’s peak of remarkably regular black Mediterranean hair.

He’d had a skull job. Hah! What’s to read on that well made face? Are you intimate with Jane? Is there something she hasn’t told me about her life? Would fat put her off? You’re overweight; there must be thirty pounds of paunch tucked into that three-piece suit. Dapper lawyer fighting middle age, but it’s a losing battle in those tedious duds. No ring on your left hand. An old flame of Jane’s, are you? Can’t be current, I’m sure. I would have known. She’d have stopped loving Matt. There would be a different feeling in my treatment room; she’d be more diffident; her flesh would fall away from my touch more quickly….

We were seated by an impossibly slender waiter who appraised us coolly as he set down water glasses and menus. I stared hard at him, briefly. No, Darling, we’re not a couple. Paul, oblivious, flipped out a set of identification cards. You’ll need to know who I am, he said.

I tried not to laugh at the proffered file of cards cascading from Paul’s wallet. Law Society card. Driver’s license. Credit cards, lots of those. Two citizenship cards—sheesh, the man really was Greek—and five years younger than I’d guessed. A late Boomer. I pulled out my wallet and flung down my own collection, like playing cards, childishly making sure my birth certificate showed.

I don’t need to see yours, said Paul. You couldn’t be anybody else. I called you, remember? He handed them back to me after a cursory look. If we need to probate, at that point I need to be certain of your identity. In a formal way.

Leaping to conclusions? Maybe she’s just at home, sick in bed, like any person in her condition. From time to time.

I flicked the waiter back to our table with just my eyes and one finger, hunger suddenly gnawing. If I thought about Jane as just another patient file, I could be normal. I could eat. Eating is good.

Called and called some more. The cell phone, her silent number at home. The cell phone is dead—there’s a message that the number is not in service. I left a message on the home phone at first, but then got worried and thought, if she’s not there, there might be someone who might get scared off by the messages. If she’s taken off, well, then, the longer things look normal, the better her chances of…eluding capture. I even went by her place and buzzed, twice, but no answer. He stroked the perfectly planted hair again; sighed.

You said she stood you up? He knows her private number. I thought I was the only one.

In a manner of speaking. We had a lunch date, to discuss some transferred files. Janey loves our lunch meetings. I always take her out for Greek food. She wouldn’t miss unless she was really sick, and she’d always call if she had to cancel. This time she didn’t show, and she didn’t call.

There must have been more than just a warm collegial friendship going on here.

I remembered lunch dates with Jane, too. And a few breakfasts, and plenty of dinners. Jane liked to cook. She made me a chicken-liver dish so good, once, that I gorged myself on the whole huge pan. Paid the price for two days. She used to leave my fridge full of seafood dishes, pasta, curries, unique dishes she called end-of-history soups, amazing concoctions out of whatever I happened to have around in my disorganized bachelor kitchen.

I asked the waiter, Do you do chicken livers?

"Sikotakia, said Paul. My head jerked up at the faint scent of patronage. Greek dish—one of the best. You know how it is when you’re part of an ethnic community? I know every Greek on Broadway, I think. Keeps my business just rolling along, whether I like it or not." He grinned at me as if we were the best of friends.

I wouldn’t know. My practice does fine without my annoying ethnic community.

I watched Paul pull folded papers from his inner trench coat pocket, careful to leave a second envelope in that damp nest. A blue backing sheet had kept the first packet more or less dry, and the fancy lettering on the textured blue told me what it was. The will. One in a series. How many of her wills did he know about?

Read it. Paul knifed the packet open and shoved it across the tablecloth. If you haven’t already. There he went, searching my face again. He trusted me just about as much as I trusted him.

Take a few minutes and read it, he repeated. It’s amazing.

Paul

Between spoonfuls of avgholemono soup Paul covertly watched Zack struggle through Jane’s will. Jane had used the Plain-English style she was forever championing, but it was still pretty tough going for a layman. Nice gift in there for the quack doctor. All Paul would get out of the will was the so-called gift of doing the probate—well, that, and taking over her practice, what was left of it. He would have to brush up on wills and estates if it came to that.

He tried to imagine what kind of romance Jane could have had with this unremarkable man who now shared his table, but no images arose that didn’t verge on the ridiculous. Physically, anyway. Jane, big-boned, well fleshed, big-breasted, with a creamy blond Dutch-cheese smile and oversized brain that indiscriminately spilled its largesse onto anyone who asked for her knowledge or help, and onto plenty of people who didn’t ask for such treatment, as well. This guy? Your basic, mid-size, traditionally curly-topped, Jewish kid grown middle-aged, fit enough, from the look of him, but painfully reserved—almost haughty. Well, I’d be defensive too if I’d decided to make my living as a quack. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything about the way he was with Jane….

How someone as smart as Jane got into this guy’s clutches he could not fathom. It made no sense. Well, little sense. He guessed the real doctors hadn’t been able to do much for her—that was the usual story with his own clients with her condition—so, like plenty of others, she’d turned to this so-called alternative stuff. Hands-on therapy, etcetera.

Hard to visualize Jane going twice a week to have this man’s hands on her after a life of passion with a big handsome brute like Matt…. Maybe the opposite of Matt was precisely the attraction for Janey? He noticed Zack’s well made hands, the apposite agile thumbs, the tunneling veins, the deft movements despite their generous size. There was, admittedly, a gentleness about the man: he was turning back the pages of her Last Will and Testament like petals of a recalcitrant rose. Well, who could speak for the heart of Woman…? That was unexplored territory.

He’d never been able to judge how sick Janey was. If at all. Clients who developed this fibromyalgia thing, he liked to take them at face value and ship them off to a specialist. Let the docs deal with the problem of whether FMS is a real disease. It was a trial in itself, finding a doc who would clearly say, black on white, The accident caused the fibromyalgia blah blah blah, even if the client had never been sick a day in her life before the accident or the poisoning or whatever Big Stress seemed to kick the illness off. And why was a fibromyalgia client almost always a woman? Try as he might not to judge his clients, he could not for the life of him understand why these women couldn’t simply go back to work—wouldn’t work help with the black depression every one of them fell into?

Janey had been the first plaintiff to cause him to revise his skepticism somewhat. She wouldn’t lie. She wouldn’t dissemble, wouldn’t deceive anyone, not even herself. Not for long, anyway. Maybe there was something to it, this designer disease, as she sometimes called it, laughingly. Trouble was, he could not imagine that the disease caused her enough pain to force her to suicide. And yet, maybe disease and her unaccustomed poverty…. And Matt, of course. Not to forget Matt.

Zack was looking up, eye to eye. So you’re the probate lawyer. And you get her practice, he said thoughtfully.

Whatever’s left of it after Matt gets through pillaging it, snorted Paul. Well, well, no dummy, this Dr. Zack. The guy at least could read a will. Wonder if he’s read this will before. Did he make a few powerful suggestions when she was writing it? Exercise a little undue influence?

Looks as if we’re in this together. Zack’s eyes searched him, twin assessors alert to every detail. Apparently there was something he wanted to know. Why couldn’t the little fake just come out and ask?

That’s what I meant about the duty falling on you and me. Paul refused to drop his gaze. It wouldn’t be beyond her to plan this.

Plan what—her death? Get us all worried and concerned? Zack shook his head. I don’t buy it. She wouldn’t. Couldn’t—she’s in too much pain.

Didn’t mean that, exactly. I meant, plan for you and me to work as a team. Her team. I could see Janey doing that. Just good lawyering, really, putting people in place to take care of business, protect the child, the estate, you know, that kind of thing. This will of hers is a shocker, frankly. Made me think. Makes me think she relied on you and me to get together, anyway, and do certain things. Only…I’m not entirely sure what.

Zack shook his head slowly. I think she was a good wills lawyer. She did several wills for me and she imagined so many versions of a future without me in it, well, I was sort of boggled. I had never thought through any of it. She seemed to like this morbid stuff. Something about death she found very attractive. Very interesting, he corrected, like a witness who hears a mistake fall from his mouth. But if she planned this, then why didn’t she see to it that we met before this? I don’t get that.

Good save, Dr. Shaiman. Paul probed further. Weren’t you at the wedding? The wedding was in law school. Maybe Dr. Zack was not an old friend, like him, but a new liaison.

Paul remembered that wedding clearly through fifteen years or more. A law-student wedding, not very ritzy, but chock full of lawyers and would-be lawyers who couldn’t or wouldn’t acquit themselves on a dance floor, people who since then had gone to politics, the bench, and every kind of perdition. Pathetically few relatives, on either side, he recalled. Small families, both of them, hers from Alberta, his from Texas. Janey radiant in palest gold sari silk. Everyone in handmade stuff masterminded by the bride; even the dog had a blue silk collar and bow.

The memory curved his lips in pleasure and sorrow: poor Janey, who tried too hard from the very beginning, poor Jane’s only marriage, made for each other or so everyone said. Lawyers in Love and all that irony, or oxymoron, or whatever it was to think of lawyers attempting tenderness. Poor Jane’s wonderful marriage gone so horrifically bad…enough to turn anybody off matrimony for good.

Including him. Ever since that meeting six months ago with Jane and Matt—the meeting he himself had engineered, Paul reminded himself ruefully—he hadn’t been able to bring himself even to talk about marriage. He’d half proposed to Georgina, clumsily, the weekend before that fiasco of a mediation meeting with Jane and Matt in his board room. For the first time Jane and Matt had opened for him a storm-slashed window on their long years of covert destruction, a marriage he, and everyone else in their litigious world, had always thought was all of a piece, the framework of Jane and Matt’s private pleasures and public business success. Paul had stepped into his boardroom thinking, Piece of cake—they’re both lawyers, intelligent, know their stuff. The meeting had crashed, leaving him with Janey sobbing in his arms and a broken glass door in Matt’s furious wake.

It had taken him back, that meeting, to their sweet, unique, optimistic wedding day, and he hadn’t been able to tolerate talk of weddings since, much to Georgina’s frustration. Weren’t you talking about marriage? she’d stormed at him lately. Just what was that all about, then? Just easier than finding yourself somebody new? Just keeping me on the hook! He protested that wasn’t what he meant and there were things she couldn’t understand. He would mumble, Sorry, sorry, sorry, a shield against her rain of tears and sometimes, blows. He understood the blows, almost welcomed them; he deserved them. He could take it from such a small, fiery package of humanity.

Janey had been thirty-one at her wedding, he realized with a start. Pretty late to start a marriage, family, the full catastrophe. Back in law school he had thought himself forever young. He’d looked at Jane appraisingly in their first weeks in class together, her earthy practicality, her vivacity, her smile that broke like a clear Greek sky every day, whatever might have occurred the day before. This is attractive, he had thought, sunning himself briefly in her indiscriminate, natural warmth. But I’m not that desperate. I’m too young and anyway, I never date law girls. No way!

Matt had moved in on Jane in the first week of school and two years later Paul was just another guest at their wedding. He didn’t remember any quack doctors as guests—it had been packed solid with law types and family.

Naw. I was out of town in those far off days. China, I think. Acupuncture training.

So Zack did qualify as an old friend.

He slurped his soup a bit, Paul noted. Janey couldn’t have liked that. She would change tables in a restaurant to avoid soup-slurpers. She’d hated bad table manners. Back in law school some wag had penned a note on the suggestion board for improving the ambience of the legal lunchroom: Make Matt Wayne eat outside! Matt had accused Jane of the deed. She’d just laughed, said it was a good idea to make Matt eat out of sight of civilized folk.

The man was a pig at lunch, hunched over a five-inch sandwich, in a daily contest to shovel it down in ever fewer and faster bites than the day before. Not a pretty sight. The girl who’d put up the sign had chosen this way to make a public declaration of Matt’s conduct unbecoming a lawyer. Paul suspected Tamara, a raging feminist both he and Matt had had fun baiting rather than dating. That was long before Matt had stretched the boundaries of the good old Professional Code of Conduct in his practice. Almost prophetic, was Tamara’s little screed on the suggestion board. By now Matt was mildly famous for stretching the envelope of acceptable lawyerly behavior on at least an annual basis. The Law Society was forever after him about something. The Benchers wanted to make Matt Wayne eat outside permanently.

Still, he couldn’t help liking Matt. For one thing, he and Matt were probably the only two hunters in law school. Not that either of them was that hot to kill anything—it was just the male-bonding thing, being in the bush with nothing but yourself and a gun to rely on. Paul went, without fail, every fall, with another guy or alone if no one else could leave the back-to-school hurly-burly. No women. Good for the soul, that was. Several Septembers he’d called Matt up to come with him, but the guy was always obsessed with his firm and the trial season gearing up in September, as if that were his primary, private hunting reserve.

To be honest, Paul always hesitated, reaching for the phone. Could he trust Matt in the bush? With a gun? He was not sure of the man’s level of recklessness. So the golden season passed year upon year without their camaraderie