Limitless

‘One question,’ I said, ‘that client of Vernon’s you mentioned? The one who worked for the pharmaceutical plant? I suppose I should be talking to him? That would make sense, wouldn’t it?’ But I immediately saw from the expression on her face that she wasn’t going to be able to help me out.

‘I only met him once, Eddie – four years ago. I don’t remember his name. Tom something – or Todd. That’s the best I can do. I’m really sorry.’

I began to feel panicky now.

‘What about the police investigation?’ I said, ‘No one ever got back in touch with me after that first day. Did they get in touch with you? I mean – did they find out who killed Vernon, and why?’

‘No, but they knew he’d been a coke-dealer at one point, so I guess they’re working on the assumption that it was … a coke thing.’

I paused here, a little thrown by the phrase, ‘a coke thing’. After a moment of reflection, and with the merest hint of sarcasm in my voice, I repeated it, ‘a coke thing’. This was a phrase Melissa had once used to describe our marriage. She picked up on the reference immediately and seemed to deflate even further.

‘That still rankles, does it?’

‘Not really, but … it wasn’t a coke thing—’

‘I know that. Me making the comment was.’

I could have said a hundred different things in response to that, but all I could come up with was, ‘It was a strange time.’

‘That’s true.’

‘Whenever I look back on it now – I don’t know – it feels …’

‘What?’

‘It’s futile thinking about it, but there’s so much of it that I would do differently.’

The obvious follow-up question – like what? – hung in the air between us for a moment or two. Then Melissa said, ‘So would I.’

She was visibly drained now, and my headache was getting worse, so I decided it was time to extricate us both from the embarrassment and pain of a fraught conversation we’d wandered into carelessly, and which, if we didn’t watch it, could lead us into messy and very complicated territory.

Bracing myself, I then asked her to tell me something about her children. It transpired that she had two daughters, Ally, eight, and Jane, six. They were great, she said, I’d love them – quick-witted, strong-willed tyrants who didn’t miss a trick.

That was it, I thought, enough – I had to get out of there.

We spent a few more minutes chatting and then we brought it to a close. I promised Melissa that I’d keep in touch, that I’d let her know how I was getting on and that maybe I’d even come up someday to see her and the girls in Mahopac. She wrote down her address on a piece of paper, which I looked at and put into the pocket of my shirt.

Seeming to draw on some final reserve of energy, Melissa then held my gaze and said, ‘Eddie, what are you going to do about this?’

I told her I wasn’t sure, but that I’d be OK, that I had quite a few MDT pills left and consequently had plenty of room to manoeuvre. I would cut down gradually and see how that worked out. I’d be fine. Since I hadn’t mentioned anything to her about the blackouts, however, this felt like a lie. But I didn’t think that under the circumstances Melissa would notice.

She nodded. Maybe she had noticed – but again, even if she had, what could she do?

Outside on Spring Street we said goodbye and embraced. Melissa got a taxi to Grand Central Station and I walked back to Tenth Street.

[ 18 ]

THE FIRST THING I DID when I got into the apartment was take a couple of Extra-Strength Excedrin tablets for my headache. Then I lay on the couch and stared up at the ceiling, hoping that the pain – which was concentrated behind my eyes and had got steadily worse on the walk home from Spring Street – would subside quickly and then fade away altogether. I didn’t often get headaches, so I wasn’t sure if this one had come about as a result of my conversation with Melissa, or if it was a symptom of my sudden withdrawal from MDT. Either way – and both explanations seemed plausible at the time – I found it extremely unsettling.

In addition to this, the cracks that had been appearing and multiplying since morning were now being prised apart even wider, and left exposed, like open wounds. Again and again, I went over Melissa’s story, my thoughts vacillating between horror at what had happened to her and fear about what might be happening to me. I was haunted by the notion of how easily and irreversibly a careless decision, a mood, a whim, can change the direction of a person’s life. I thought about Donatella Alvarez and found it harder than before to simply dismiss the idea that I’d been in any way responsible for what had happened to her – for the easy, irreversible way her life had changed. I thought about my time with Melissa, and worried, agonized, about those things I might have done differently.