Look Closer

23 Vicky

After Labor Day, I return to Christian’s office, a four o’clock appointment again. When I’m done reading his proposal, I look up at him. Still rough-shaven and handsome, same basic kind of expensive dark suit with the open collar, still that cocky look about him like someone who knows today’s going to be another “win” for him.

“Water?” I say.

“It’s the next big thing,” says Christian. “Water is becoming a scarcity. That will become truer and truer as the population growth continues to spike. Less than one-tenth of one percent of the world’s water can be used to feed and nourish seven, eight billion people.”

“Wow.”

“Exactly,” he says, pointing his pen at me. “So how do we tap into that possibility? We could invest in water-rich areas and transport the water, but that’s a nonstarter. The barriers to entry are too high.”

“The barriers . . . ?”

“It’s hard to transport water. You need pipelines, which raises all kinds of issues. They’re expensive, they’re politically unpopular, they raise property-rights issues. They disturb ecosystems. And think about it—we’re moving water away from its original source. The ripple effect on the environment—water life, plant life, coastlines—could be catastrophic.”

“So what do you do instead?”

“The way to invest in water is through food. It’s the least contentious, least controversial way to redistribute water. You don’t transport the water. You grow food in water-rich areas and transport it for sale in water-poor areas. You have any idea how much water it takes to produce even small quantities of food? It takes nearly two thousand gallons of water to ultimately produce one pound of beef off a cow. And selling food is profitable, right? So that guarantees sustainable redistribution. Meaning, industry won’t stop doing it.”

“So you’re buying up farmland.”

“Right. You see the returns we’ve already gotten. I’ve already given my investors over a three hundred percent ROI. The next five years are going to be even better. You give me twenty-one million dollars, I’ll give you a hundred million in five years. I promise you, Vicky, I will take you for the ride of your life.”

I take a breath. The ride of my life, indeed. When I was six, I had to tie a shoelace around my left shoe because the sole had come off completely and we couldn’t afford new ones. I walked with a limp that entire year, just to keep my shoe on. When I was eighteen and on my own, I started donating my plasma once a week for the money. When I was twenty, I fucked my landlord to pay the rent.

When I don’t answer, Christian says, “Or, if you’re risk averse, give me ten million and I’ll turn it into fifty. We’ll put your other ten in Asian equities. That’s going to blow sky-high, too, though not as much as water. But the diversification might give you comfort.”

By the time I was twenty-four, sex was the only way I knew how to survive. It was transactional. I was an escort living in Indianapolis. I met a woman early on who taught me that the best way to survive as a prostitute was to have some cops for clients. They’d make sure you never got arrested; they’d stand up for you if someone got rough with you. My clients were mostly married men with money who were looking for a thrill on the side. And cops. And when it wasn’t a direct trade, it was an indirect one. I learned how to make men do things for me. Expensive dinners that ended up in my bedroom or his, but for me it was about having two days of leftovers in the fridge.

The sums of money Christian is talking about, they’re as real to me as flying to Mars.

“Or,” he says, “we don’t do any of that.”

I snap out of my fog and focus on him.

“Listen, Vicky, this isn’t for everybody,” he says. “My investors, they love the upside of my investments and aren’t that concerned with the downside. They can risk twenty million in the market because they have plenty more. You don’t. I get that. And look, twenty million dollars is a lot of money. You could sit on it, invest in low-risk bond funds and some index funds, live mostly off the interest, and cut into the principal slowly. You can be comfortable. Your whole life, you’ll be very, very comfortable. If that’s where your head is—then you should do that. I could put that together for you. Or you could use one of those other financial advisers you interviewed. No hard feelings. This isn’t a hard sell.”

I look up from the proposal. “You’d put together a low-risk portfolio for me?”

“If that’s what you prefer.”

“But you don’t do that. I mean, everything I’ve read about you—that’s not your game.”

“No, it isn’t. Actually, I’ve never done it before.”

“But you’d do it for me.”

He lifts a shoulder. “I would.”

“Why?” I prod.

“I . . . like you,” he says. “I like your style.”

That’s what I thought.

I slowly nod my head. He keeps my eye contact. Finally, I break it, looking over at the leather couch in the corner. Then back at him. He’s still looking at me.

“You have any other appointments today?”

He pauses a beat. “I do not,” he says.

“When does your receptionist leave?”

He looks over toward the door, more confident now that he’s reading this correctly. “Five o’clock,” he says.

“Maybe give her a break today, let her off early,” I suggest.

Now he’s sure, and he knows how to handle it. “I could do that.”

I smirk. “Then do it.”

He pushes a button on his phone. “Emily, I don’t have anything else today. Why don’t you take off a little early?”

I stand up and unbutton my dress, taking my time with each button, watching him watch me. My dress drops to the floor. I step my heels out of it and lean over the table.

“I’m going with option one, Mr. Newsome,” I say. “Take me for the ride of my life.”

24 Vicky

“Maybe you had a point about water,” I say. “Because I need some right now.” I untangle my sweaty body from Christian’s and get off the couch.

“In the fridge by the bar,” he says. “Where are my manners?” He has that smug, self-satisfied look that men have after they think they’ve rocked my world.

He was fine. Not as good as he thought he was, but fine. He knew what he was doing. It’s just that I’ve never gotten to the point that I find intimacy in sex. Brief, raw pleasure is the most I can get from it, on a good day.

I grab a bottle for each of us and return to the couch. He does a sit-up to get to the seated position, allowing him one more opportunity to show me his ripped abdominal muscles. He’s got a great body, I’ll give him that. The guy must spend hours a day in the gym honing it. Whoever compared bodybuilding to masturbation had a point.

Christian takes a drink from the bottle and lets out a satisfied sigh. “Well, Mrs. Dobias, that was . . .”

Don’t say amazing. Please don’t.

“. . . fun.”

“You have a lot of energy,” I say.

“You bring it out in me.”

“I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.” I take a drink of water and find my phone. It’s a quarter to seven. We’ve been going at it for over two hours. I’m going to be sore tomorrow. I’m out of practice. I haven’t had sex for months.

“Can I ask you a question?” he says.

“Shoot.”

“Have you ever done this before?”

I pull on my underwear, hook up my bra. “Do you want me to answer that?”

“I do.”

“Are you sure? You wouldn’t prefer to remain in your male-fantasy bubble, that you’re the only one who can unleash the tigress inside me?”

“Wow,” he says, though he chuckles.

I lean over him, face-to-face. “No, Christian, I have never done anything like this before. I’ve been a very good girl for the last ten years.”

I put my dress back on, a little wrinkled now. As he’s pulling on his trousers, Christian says, “By the way, we never circled back on that trust language.”

“What about it?”

“I’ve never seen language quite like that, but your take on it is accurate. It’s valid and enforceable. You must stay married for ten years before you can touch that money.”

“Tell me about it. But what about my question?”

“Whether you can spend it, without his approval, once you have it.”

I turn and look at him. “That was my question, yes.”

He gives me a poker face for a moment, then winks. “Yes, you can. My lawyer will draw up something just to lock that down and if Simon will sign it, you have no worries. You spend that money however you want. You’re probably okay either way, but best if he signs it.”

“He’ll sign it,” I say. “He trusts me.”

We both pause on the irony of that statement.

“I care about him,” I say. “I don’t want him to get hurt. That’s not my intention.”

“Of course not.” He waves a hand. “With the money I’ll make you, whatever else happens, he’ll be rich beyond his wildest dreams.”

I nod, look away, start gathering my things.

“What happens next?” he says to me.

“Meaning what? I’ll get him to sign whatever form you give me.”

“No,” he says. “I meant . . . this. Us.”

I look at him.

“Whatever you decide is fine,” he says. “No pressure.”

“Doesn’t the girl usually ask that question?”

He laughs. “Maybe so.”

“Well, now the girl’s asking,” I say. “You tell me. Where is this going?”

“I’m . . .” He flips his hand. “I already told you, I like you. I’m bullish if you are.”

This time it’s my turn to wink.

“I’ll be in touch,” I say. Always keep ’em wanting more.

25 Christian

After jackhammering Vicky on my office couch for the last two hours, I make it home near eight o’clock. Sex with a married woman is the best, because you’re their outlet, their Discovery Channel, not their dumpy old husbands they bang out of obligation or gratitude. You should see some of the things I’ve gotten married women to do.

Speaking of couches—Gavin’s already on mine in my apartment, a beer in his hand, tooling around on his laptop. “The fuck?” he says. “You’re late. Hope you at least got laid.” He looks up at me as I walk in. “Oh, you did get laid. Who’s the lucky mental patient?”

I make a motion, a jump shot. “He shoots . . . he scores! The crowd can’t believe it!”

“No shit? Number 7? The one with the twenty mil and the huge rack?”

We don’t use names. He’s never heard Vicky’s name and he never will. Vicky, to Gavin, is just “Number 7.” My seventh target.

That anonymity, that Chinese wall, keeps our friendship out of trouble. I don’t want to know what Gavin’s doing with his financial scams, and he doesn’t want to know what I’m doing with mine. No matter how much I trust Gavin, my friend since childhood, if he ever gets caught in his own scams, he might be tempted to lighten his load by flipping on me. And he has the same thing to fear from me, vice versa. I don’t think he’d ever give me up, and I don’t think I’d ever do that to him if the feds ever nabbed me, but it keeps things light and clean by removing the potential.

No, in this apartment, Vicky Lanier Dobias is just “Number 7.” When Gavin put together the financial plan for her, he left the name blank. I just typed it in and hit “print.”

“I fucking got her, G. Reeled her in like a largemouth bass.”

He puts down his laptop. “Well, Nicky Bag-o-Donuts, good for you.”

I take a grand bow.

“Do tell,” he says. “I need some deets.”

I grab a bottle of Scotch from the bar in my condo. I moved back to Chicago this summer, after finishing my last job. Number 6 lived in Lexington, Kentucky, a fifty-three-year-old woman who left her husband for me and took a million in a lump-sum divorce settlement that she gave to me to invest. I skedaddled, of course, and laid low for a few months before returning for the summer to Chicago, where Gavin lives and not far from where we grew up.

“A gentleman never kisses and tells,” I say.

“Okay, well, let me know if a gentleman shows up. In the meantime, throw me a bone here. You get laid twenty times more than me.”

“Twenty times zero?” I pour a couple fingers of Scotch, raise it in salute, and swallow it, followed by a satisfying smack.

“C’mon, Nick.”

I wag my finger. “Don’t call me that.”

“Oh, sorry. Christian. Why the fuck would you pick a name like that for a cover?”

I swallow another pour of the Scotch. I prefer hard alcohol—no carbs. “Because nobody would pick a name like ‘Christian’ for a cover.”

If I had my druthers, Gavin wouldn’t know my alias. It’s the one flaw in my plan to segregate our friendship from our professional relationship. But he creates my fake identity and everything that comes with it—fake credit and employment history, fake driver’s license and credit cards, fake diplomas and certifications, even those fake news articles from Fortune and Newsweek. He couldn’t do that without knowing the name Christian Newsome.

I drop down in a chair. “I’m telling you, G, this is it. I thought Number 5 was big.”

“Number 5 was the one in Milwaukee? She was big. She was good for a couple mil, right?”

“Yeah. I mean, it was a gold mine at the time. But this one? Number 7? Twenty million dollars? I get this, I’m done. I retire at age thirty-fucking-four. I hit the lottery.”

“She liked the proposal? The water stuff? The Asian equities?”

“Ate it up. It’s real, right? You said it was real.”

“I mean, basically, yeah,” he says. “People are speculating in water right now. But a return like you promised in five years? No freakin’ way. But what does she know?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t care.”

He shakes his head. “Why do you get all the good luck? Me, I’m busting my ass for fifty, maybe a hundred K a pop. You, you’re stealing this sexy broad’s twenty million and you get to bang her on top of that?”

“I’m banging her so I can steal it, G. She initiated it. What am I supposed to do? She unzips her dress, wiggles out of it in the middle of my office, strips down to her bra and panties, and I tell her I’m not interested? She’d be out the door in a heartbeat. I’d never see her again.”

“She unzipped her dress? Like, in the middle of the meeting? Why doesn’t that shit happen to me?”

Because your diet choices have remained stagnant since the fourth grade. Because you don’t do five hundred ab crunches a day and spend two hours daily on free weights and climbs. Because you’re a big, scary motherfucker, even if you’re my best friend.

“Number 7 is different, though,” I say.

“What, you care about her?”

“God, no. I mean, I don’t need her to fall for me, to leave her husband.”

That’s usually how it works. That’s the one unifying theme of every scam I’ve pulled. I need them to divorce their husbands, who don’t even know I exist, much less that I’m banging their wives. Then I can get control of the money and run off with it. It’s the perfect scam, because they keep my existence hush-hush for obvious reasons, and they’re often so ashamed and humiliated afterward that they don’t want to report it. I convince the women to keep their divorce demand low so they can get their husbands to agree to a quick exit. Something in a lump-sum amount that their wealthy husbands are happy to give to be done with the matter in one fell swoop with a discount. The discount is the downside, sure, but it allows me to stay anonymous and allows for an easy adios.

How I do it varies, and that’s purposeful, too. I can’t run the same scam every time or I’ll develop a signature. A couple times, I’ve played the big-shot investor like I’m doing with Vicky, but the last time I did that was years ago with Number 4 in Santa Fe. I can be anything I need to be. A fitness instructor with Number 3 in Naples. A wannabe actor who waits tables with Number 2 in Sacramento. A grad student with Number 6 in Lexington. I find the woman I want—or sometimes she finds me—and I make her want me, I steal her from her husband, I get my hands on the money.

“Number 7 is different,” I say, “because I don’t need her to leave her husband. She’s got her husband wrapped around her finger. She can do whatever she wants with the money. And it sure sounds like she plans to do just that.”

Gavin gets it now, leaning forward, pointing at me. “So you don’t get half, or some fraction in a lump-sum divorce settlement? You get it all?”

“I get all twenty million,” I say. “Twenty-one million, actually.”

“Unbelievable. You are unbelievably lucky.”

“You’re getting your ten percent, pal. You’ll make out okay, too.”

Ten percent to Gavin, because I couldn’t pull off this shit without the identities he creates for me and, in this case, his financial knowledge.

“But the problem is, I have to straddle a line,” I say. “I have to keep things kosher until November, when that money is hers.”

“Oh, that trust language, right.” Gavin went through the trust for me, too—though I blacked out Simon’s name, to keep our firewall of anonymity up, and Vicky’s name never actually appears, only the word “SPOUSE.”

“If she wants to keep screwing you, you do it,” says Gavin. “And if she doesn’t, if you were just a fling and she doesn’t want it to go any further, you have to be okay with that, too. But not just okay with it—you have to make sure she’s comfortable with the whole thing. If she starts feeling guilty about cheating on her husband, and you’re a reminder of that guilt, she might just decide to take her money elsewhere.”

That sums it up perfectly. Between now and November 3, I have to handle this thing perfectly. I have to keep everything smooth and comfortable with Vicky.

“But my money says she doesn’t feel one bit guilty,” I say. “She did exactly what she wanted to do. She wasn’t conflicted. No, Number 7 has paid her dues for the last ten years. Now her payoff is finally coming. She’s not gonna let a little thing like guilt get in the way.”

26 Simon

“My name is Simon Dobias,” I say to the room. Thirteen people. Two of them new—a man with hair sprouting from beneath a baseball cap, and a middle-aged woman dressed in black—and eleven returners, all seated in cheap folding chairs in the church’s dim basement.

“For those who are new, for those who are not—welcome to SOS. The main thing I want to tell you is there are no rules here. You can come and go as you please, obviously. No one’s going to make you feel guilty if you stop coming and then return. No one’s going to assign you a sponsor who hectors you to do things. We don’t have twelve steps or any steps. No one’s going to make you speak. If you’re just here to listen, then just listen. And if you ever want to call me, my number’s up there on the chalkboard.

“I know it’s the ‘in’ thing now to talk about ‘safe spaces.’ I think a lot of that is BS, to be honest, but this really is a safe place. We just want to help. I think we can. We’ve all been through similar experiences.”

I clear my throat and take a breath.

“My mother committed suicide eighteen years ago,” I say. “They called it an accidental overdose. I think my father actually believed that. I can tell you, I wish I did, too. I really do. Because an accident—well, it’s a tragedy, it stinks, it’s awful, but you don’t blame yourself. An accident is just, well, one of those random things. But I know better. Her overdose was deliberate.

“My mother was a brilliant law professor and a marathon runner. She loved life. She loved everything about life. She had a terrible singing voice, but it never stopped her from belting out songs. She had a corny joke or play on words for every situation. She had this laugh like a hyena that was so infectious. And she was the smartest person I’ve ever known.

“But then she had a stroke, a severe one, and she lost so much of what she had. She couldn’t teach any longer. She couldn’t run or even walk. She was confined to a wheelchair. She was on heavy medication for all kinds of things, including drugs for pain. My father—well, my father wasn’t exactly the Florence Nightingale type. He wasn’t a caregiver. He hired someone to take care of Mom, and I tried to help, too, while I was starting college in Chicago.

“Then our financial situation cratered. We had some money, actually a good amount, but my father made some bad financial decisions and we lost it all. We were broke. He was a lawyer, and he could scrap for money, but not enough to afford a full-time caregiver. It was just too expensive. So we had to let the caregiver go.

“My father, well, he said the only realistic thing to do was to put Mom in some facility or nursing home. I didn’t want that. I said I’d stay home from college. Skip a year or two and take care of her until we figured something out.”

I sigh. “My mother overdosed on pain meds. It was probably a combination of reasons. Losing her functionality, losing her ability to do all the things she loved, the thought of not being in our house with us, and it’s probably fair to say that the stroke robbed her of some of her cognitive reasoning. I can’t put a finger on exactly what put her over the edge.”

Actually, I can. But I’m going to leave that part out.

The secrets, the lies. I don’t tell people that part.

I don’t tell them that my father broke my mother’s heart. That he cheated on her. That in her final days, my mother knew that her husband no longer wanted her, that she not only had lost the functionality of her body and part of her brain, but she also had lost the love and loyalty of the man who had promised to devote himself to her through thick and thin, for better or worse, ’til death.

I don’t tell them that I knew my father was cheating, that I caught him, that I didn’t tell my mother because I knew it would crush her, that I was complicit in his betrayal, that I could have tried harder to stop him, that if I had, everything might have turned out differently.

I don’t mention that part because it sounds an awful lot, ahem, like a motive to kill my father. And that investigation in St. Louis remains unsolved. Ain’t no statute of limitations on murder.

“I didn’t know how to handle her death,” I say. “I did some dumb things, got into some trouble. I spent some time in an institution. I’m lucky it wasn’t worse. It wasn’t until I stopped lashing out and started listening that I was able to get my head above water again. I talked to all kinds of therapists, who explained to me that we look at suicide through this prism of control. We think we can control other things and other people. So when someone we love takes their own life, we think we could have stopped it. We think we had control, and we blew it. We are so unwilling to give up this notion that we control things and people around us that we’d rather feel guilt over the suicide than admit that we didn’t have that control in the first place.”

This advice, in my experience working with other survivors, is spot-on. It helps most people. Not me, but most people.

No, the person who healed me was Vicky. And I healed her. This is where we met, here at Survivors of Suicide. Her loss of her sister, Monica, had been much more recent than mine, but when we talked, just the two of us, we helped each other. We got through it. We made a pact.

A plan of attack, Vicky called it, declaring war on our grief.

It happened on a Thursday night. The next day would be my last day working at my dad’s law firm that summer, before I started at U of C as an incoming college freshman. I’d saved up some money I made that summer and bought him a present. It was a little thing, nothing bigger than a small trophy, the scales of justice in gold, the words law offices of theodore dobias engraved in the wooden base.

I waited until the end of the day to pick it up. He thought I’d left for the day and gone home. Instead, I’d stopped at the jewelry store to pick up the order, killed some time downtown waiting for everyone to leave the office, then snuck back up to the office after seven.

It was rare for anyone to be in the office that late. Personal-injury lawyers don’t get paid by the hour, so unlike defense firms that value their associates by the number of billable hours they generate—by how long it takes them to complete a task—P.I. lawyers are more efficient with their written work product and don’t burn the midnight oil unless they’re preparing for trial. Trials aren’t that common anymore, so the odds of anyone being in the office were small.

I used my key card and swiped through. The reception lights were off, and usually the last person to leave turned those off. But then I swiped through the second glass door and could see, instantly, that his office light was on, peeking out from under the closed door. I stopped and thought a moment. My plan had been to put the gift on his desk so he’d find it Friday morning when we arrived at work together. That wasn’t going to happen with him still here, but at least I could sneak into my cubicle and hide it and give it to him in the morning.

I heard a sound. My first reaction, he was in pain. My first mental image, he was moving something heavy. He was moving furniture and hurt himself, something like that. A heart attack, maybe.

Sometimes I chide myself in hindsight for my naivete. But then—maybe it was okay that a teenage boy didn’t immediately leap to the worst conclusions about his father.

I moved slowly toward the door, carefully along the carpet, as the moaning and the grunting continued, then a thumping noise, and a woman’s breathless voice.

We didn’t have locks on the office doors. I remember my father saying that was a kind of statement, some bullshit about an open-door, egalitarian philosophy around the office.

I wish the door had been locked. I wish I hadn’t opened it.

I wish I didn’t have to listen to him grovel and apologize and try to justify to me why he was fucking around on my mother, who was probably being fed her dinner, spoon to mouth, at that moment by our in-home nurse, Edie.

That was the moment. It got worse, after the money was gone, and we could no longer afford Edie, and Mom was headed for a nursing home at the age of forty-nine. But right there in the law firm, on the seventeenth floor of the Chicago Title & Trust Building, with my father chasing after me down the hall as he pulled up his trousers, trying to block me from the elevator while shoving his shirt inside his pants, begging me to listen to reason, not to go home and do something everyone would regret—that was the moment, for me, when everything changed.

I wish I didn’t let him convince me not to say anything to my mother.

I wish I didn’t let him make me a coconspirator in his crime.

Because he didn’t stop. Oh, no, even after I found out, he kept on. He didn’t tell me, but I caught him again. A few months later, just before Thanksgiving, stepping out onto the back patio for some fresh air, I found an empty bottle of champagne and two glasses tucked in the corner of the porch.

Two glasses, not one, even though my mother could no longer drink alcohol. He wasn’t just cheating on my mother; his lady friend was sneaking over to the house at night after my mother was asleep and I was working late at the school.

A stupid bottle of champagne, two red-tinted plastic champagne flutes you’d buy at a convenience store. Those things told me that my father wasn’t just a weak man who succumbed to a moment of temptation—he was a liar. He was a cheat. His carnal needs were more important than his commitment to my mother, to our family.

I didn’t throw them away. I started to. I tossed the bottle of champagne and glasses into an empty garbage bag but, instead of heading to the garbage bin, I took it to my room and placed it inside my closet. I didn’t want to forget. I wanted to look at it every day to remind myself what and who my father was.

The day I found that bottle, the day I realized my father was never going to stop cheating—that was the day that Ted Dobias died.

The night he was found with a knife in his stomach, floating in his pool, was just the moment he stopped breathing.

27

Monday, September 12, 2022

You knew something was wrong tonight. I’d tried to play it off. I greeted you the same way I always did, clutching you in my arms, kissing you in that way we kiss, lifting you off your feet.

But afterward, you could tell. You prodded me. And I’ve made this vow, Lauren, as I’ve said before on these pages, that I will not lie to you, I will not hide from you. So I told you.

“My father cheated on my mother,” I told you. “It destroyed her.”

That surprised you. You knew my father for a short time as your boss, not your immediate supervisor but the big boss, the name on the door, and you probably thought he was a nice enough guy. Or maybe you didn’t. Maybe you thought he was an asshole. Either way, you didn’t know him know him.

Apparently, I didn’t, either. I thought I did. I wasn’t as close to him as I was to Mom. But I thought I knew him. I didn’t see until later how insecure he was, because he was in the same profession, generally speaking, as my mother, but she was smarter, she was better at it, she was more successful.

She taught constitutional law at one of the most prestigious law schools in the country, the University of Chicago. And Dad was a scrapping, lowbrow attorney taking slip-and-falls and DUIs, whatever he could grab.

What he didn’t understand was that Mom didn’t care about that. She didn’t measure people that way. But Dad did. Probably a male thing.

Then Dad hit it big. When that kid he grew up with in Edison Park was working on a construction site, and the boom of a rig he was operating contacted a live overhead electrical power line, sending deadly streaks of electricity through his body and leaving him horribly scarred and disfigured, Dad got the case. A thirty-million-dollar settlement, a third for the Law Offices of Theodore Dobias, meaning nearly ten million in Dad’s pocket.

I thought that would validate him, make him feel like he was in the big leagues now, the equal or roughly the equal to Mom.

But apparently, he needed more. Now he was Mr. Big-Time, a big-shot lawyer with expensive suits and steak dinners and a Porsche, and he had to have a piece of arm candy on his side, too.

I confronted him, more than once, but Dad didn’t stop. He was in love, he said. And there were things that a young man like me might not be able to appreciate, which was code for, he still wanted to get his rocks off and it was hard with a woman bound to a wheelchair. Yeah, I was eighteen, not eight. I knew what he meant. But there were some other things that a boy like me could appreciate, like committing yourself to someone forever, even through something as tragic as her stroke, ESPECIALLY through something as tragic as her stroke.

Dad blew all the money on his newfound swanky lifestyle, making ridiculously bad investments that bombed, spending lavishly on his mistress. And then the money was gone.

Mom was home, requiring extensive care, and Dad was without money to pay for a caregiver.

After the money was gone, Mom learned the truth. Dad confessed to her. She wasn’t the same after her stroke, but there was enough of her left for me to see how much it crushed her to know that her husband had strayed from her.

And I’ll never know this for certain, because my mother was far too proud a woman to ever say it, but I think she knew that I knew, too, and never told her. I can’t even fathom the humiliation she must have felt, the utter devastation.

My mother killed herself because she had nothing left of the life she thought she’d had. She was married to a man she no longer recognized, who no longer loved her.

And now . . . what am I doing?

I’m cheating on my wife.

I have become the man I despise.

28 Christian

I don’t need to know much about Vicky’s husband, Simon. I probably don’t need to know anything other than he’s loaded, and his wife is going to take his money and give it to me. But a little due diligence never hurts.

I didn’t expect this.

Born and raised in Grace Park. Check. Childhood, nothing of interest. Went to Hilltop Elementary, Grace Park Middle School, Grace Consolidated High School. Valedictorian, okay, and apparently quite the cross-country and track star. He finished second in state his junior year in cross-country and broke the school’s record for the two-mile in track. Good for Simon.

But this is more interesting. Simon graduated Grace Consolidated High School in May of 2003. But he didn’t graduate from the University of Chicago undergrad until May of 2010.

Seven years to graduate college, Simon, Mr. Valedictorian? Did you take some time off? What were you doing during that time?

Flag that and move on.

His father, Theodore Dobias, hits it big twenty years ago, in 2002, a thirty-million-dollar verdict in an electrical-injury case, which I assume means someone got electrocuted. Theodore was the guy’s lawyer, and they got a big pot of cash. Hooray for them.

In 2004, Glory Dobias—Simon’s mom, Theodore’s wife—a law professor at the University of Chicago, dies of a painkiller overdose. Suicide? The news reports and the U of C’s press release are vague. Seems she’d had health problems, a stroke, but nothing concrete.

Then Theodore leaves town. He leaves Grace Park and the Chicago area and moves to St. Louis. He works in a law firm in Alton, Illinois, near the Illinois-Missouri border, where he ends up banking serious dough doing asbestos-exposure cases. The bio from his law firm that I was able to drag up from a long time ago said he netted over two hundred million dollars in recoveries for his clients. That’s a lot of money for the lawyer, who gets a third of the recovery usually.

And that explains where Simon’s big-dollar trust fund comes from.

But the really interesting part is twelve years ago, in May 2010. Theodore Dobias, by now a mega-wealthy, well-established attorney in Alton and the St. Louis area, a leading advocate in asbestos litigation, ends up dead. Murdered, found dead in his swimming pool with a stab wound to the stomach. And guess who the police suspected?

They never arrested him, from what I can tell. They brought him in for questioning multiple times and confirmed to the press that a “person of interest” was being interviewed, which the media had no trouble figuring out meant his only child.

“Simon Peter Dobias,” I whisper to myself. “Did you murder your father?”

I remember what Vicky said to me. That insane trust language that kept Simon’s wife away from the trust money until ten years of marriage.

Simon’s father didn’t trust me, she said.

Ol’ Theodore thought you were a moneygrubbing whore, Vicky. And it seems like he was right. How’d that make you feel?

What were you doing, Mrs. Vicky Lanier Dobias, on the night Simon’s dad was murdered?

29 Simon

I leave the law school at a quarter after seven for my ten-mile round-trip run to Wicker Park—to the alley outside Viva Mediterránea—and back. I reach the alley in plenty of time, well before the appointed time of 8:00 p.m. for our text messages. I’m not near the times I used to post when I was younger, but I can run a six-minute mile in my sleep.

I stretch and listen to the partiers out on Viva’s patio. Look at the people in the condos across the alley, grilling out on their back porches or just having cocktails.

I never lived around here or in a neighborhood like this one. I never lived in the city. I never left Grace Park. My father took off not long after my mother died, when I made it clear that I no longer had a father. He moved down to St. Louis and joined up with a firm that handled asbestos litigation—suing any company that had any product that remotely used asbestos, representing people with alleged exposure to that asbestos who later developed mesothelioma. Madison County, Illinois, was a beacon for those “meso” cases, and it made the lawyers rich.

So Dad finally hit it big and had the validation he so dearly craved.

And I stayed in the house in Grace Park and commuted downtown to college. I guess I was unwilling to let the house go, its connection with Mom. So I never did what most young college or law students did, much less postgrad students, and live in the city.

In a neighborhood just like this one, in one of these condos.

Instead, I lived in a suburb, in a big house all by myself.

Not to mention those eighteen months at New Horizons. The nuthouse, if you want to be politically incorrect, a facility for struggling individuals, if you’re speaking in polite company.

It helped. Dr. McMorrow was a good therapist who listened more than she spoke. I was a basket case after my mother’s death, and I tried to continue my sophomore year of college but knew I couldn’t and checked myself in voluntarily. Dr. McMorrow—Anne; she wanted me to call her by her first name—challenged the guilt I felt, preached all those things that I now preach at Survivors of Suicide, about how we can’t control everything or everybody, and we have to acknowledge that fact.

But what really turned me around were these words, so simple and obvious: “Your mother wouldn’t want you to feel this way. She’d want you to go to college and have a good life. So what the hell are you waiting for?”

That’s when I realized it was time to go back to college. And then get a law degree. Anne was right. I was able to move on.

Not heal. But move on.

Move on but remember.

At eight, I put the SIM card into my green phone and power it up. I send this:

Kind of an inside joke, pretending to be talking in code, when anyone who read through all our text messages would obviously see through the ruse. She replies promptly:

Right, good. She replies again quickly:

That could mean a lot of things. It’s deliberately vague.

She responds:

I respond quickly:

30

Tuesday, September 13, 2022

So what the hell was that text message tonight? You’ve been thinking a lot about us, and better we talk in person? Are you going to break up with me, Lauren? Are we done?

I don’t know what I’ll do. The times we see each other each week, the twice a day we text, are the only things that matter in my life now.

Was it because of what I said last night about my father cheating on my mother? How I’d grown up hating infidelity more than just about anything in the world, and now I was doing it, too?

Oh, why did I have to open my mouth? This isn’t the same thing, Lauren. Vicky doesn’t love me anymore. I’m not proud of cheating, but this is different than what my father did to my mother! And your marriage isn’t real, either.

We aren’t cheating, not in that way. We aren’t!

This, this, THIS is what I hate, this weakness, this feeling of vulnerability. I swore I’d never let this happen again, but I did. I kept my guard up for nearly two decades after you laid waste to me, but the moment I saw you on Michigan Avenue, I tore down that wall and exposed myself all over again.

Maybe I’m making too much of this. Maybe all the other crap going on—my job prospects suddenly in the dumpster and my marriage just a friendship—is clouding my brain. Maybe I’m not thinking clearly and everything is fine.

Don’t you realize getting texts like those—we have to talk, better in person—is pure torture? Now I have to wait until tomorrow morning before you even turn on your damn cell phone again. And it’s not like I can just run over there, is it? Thanks, Lauren. Thanks so much for turning me inside out yet again.

I knew this would happen. I knew it.

31 Simon

I met Lauren Lemoyne on my first day working at my father’s law firm.

I’d graduated high school and was getting ready for college. High school had been easy for me academically but difficult socially. I’d had a late growth spurt, shooting up to five feet eleven my senior year, which I realize is not much more than average male height, but when you start as a freshman at five feet two, and people call you “Mini-Me” and things like that, five feet eleven feels like Paul Bunyan.

I spent most of high school a bookish, small, not very confident boy. I ended a bookish, taller, but only slightly confident boy.

I needed some money before college, so Dad said I could be a gofer at his law firm. Times were good financially because Dad had just rung the bell (as he liked to say) with that enormous verdict in the electrical-injury case. The Law Offices of Theodore Dobias had three partners, five associates, ten assistants, and four paralegals.

One of those paralegals was Lauren Lemoyne. I was introduced to everyone by one of the partners (my father didn’t want to do it himself, wanted me to learn my own way), and I first saw Lauren bent over a banker’s box of files, wearing a tight miniskirt and showing a lot of leg. It felt like my own personal porn movie, though she quickly righted herself and pulled down her skirt and greeted me in a friendly but perfunctory fashion.

It wasn’t perfunctory to me, though. I was immediately taken but intimidated. She would be my pinup girl, gorgeous and exotic, whom I could admire from afar, but well beyond my reach, way out of my league. I stammered a return hello, trying to sound easy and cool and pretty sure I had failed miserably.

It wasn’t until the second week of work that our paths crossed again. I was in the firm’s kitchen, or at least that’s what we called it, where there was a sink and fridge and coffee maker. I was washing my hands because I’d just brought back some filings from the courthouse and the box was dirty.

“So you’re Ted’s boy.”

I saw her and tried to act nonchalant but, again, failed miserably. I turned away from the sink, my hands dripping, and straightened my posture.

“I’m Lauren,” she said. “You’ve probably learned a lot of names all at once.”

She was right, I’d had to learn a lot of names right away, which wasn’t my strong suit. But Lauren’s, I hadn’t forgotten.

“Nice to meet you,” I said, even though we’d already met. I’d even managed to steal a few nuggets of information from the office manager—Lauren was from the north side of Chicago, age twenty, still lived at home, saving up money for college, huge Cubs fan. I didn’t want to ask the office manager too many questions and be too obvious, as if he didn’t already know why I was asking. It didn’t need to be spoken. Lauren was that kind of untouchable gorgeous.

“So I hear you’re starting at U of C this fall,” she said. “I also heard you were valedictorian of your high school class. And an all-state cross-country runner.” Her smile lit up my soul. “Your dad likes to brag about you.”

“It was all luck, I swear.”

She laughed, and I felt like I’d won the lottery or something. I’d heard my mother use that line years ago, after she won her land-use case before the United States Supreme Court. It sounded like a deft way to handle a compliment, and I stored it away for future use. And thank God. I’d just made this beautiful creature laugh!

She narrowed her eyes in playful skepticism. “Mmm, smart, handsome, and modest on top of all that,” she said. “Simon Dobias, you are going to break some hearts.”

32

Wednesday, September 14, 2022

I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to see you. I went to your house, instead of texting you, at ten this morning. You were surprised, alarmed even, to see me at your front door. But you had to know, Lauren, you HAD to know that the text you sent me, that we had to talk, but only in person, would keep me in suspense, would be worse than torture banned by the Geneva Convention.

I didn’t sleep one wink last night. I must have looked awful this morning. I didn’t care. Whatever it was, and I’d braced myself for anything, I had to hear it, and I had to hear it now.

“I thought a lot about what you said,” you told me. “How your father cheated on your mother, and you didn’t want to become your father. I don’t want that, either. I don’t want you to be a cheater. I don’t want to be a cheater, either.”

I braced myself, having prepared for this. I knew it might end this morning, and I told myself, Simon, you’re an adult, just handle it, handle it right, no matter how painful. Be proud of how you react.

But I wasn’t prepared, it turns out. I wasn’t prepared for this at all.

“I want us to get married,” you said.