Free Vigil for a Stranger by Kitty Burns Florey Page A

talking to a psychiatrist—not Dr. Dalziel, the one I saw after my breakdown, but someone else, someone I didn’t know, who said: “Call Charlie, you need to face this.”
    I called the next afternoon—morning, California time—a few days after Christmas, when James and my mother were out at the supermarket and my father was upstairs napping. I didn’t have any other phone number, so I called him at the agency—half wishing he’d be out of town or hadn’t come in yet. But he was there, and I gave my name, and he answered instantly.
    â€œChris! God, it’s great to hear from you. What’s up?”
    We said the usual things: How nice to get his Christmas card, James and I were vegging out at my parents’, he was taking a week off in January to go to Hawaii with his new girlfriend, blah blah. We compared L. A. weather with Jamesville weather, and then we ran out of topics, and I said, “Actually, Charlie, I wanted to tell you about something that happened to me, I wanted to get your opinion.”
    â€œSure,” he said. “Shoot.”
    I told him about the two incidents in New York. As I said them aloud, actually told them to a real person, they didn’t sound crazy and improbable as I’d feared they would: they sounded amazing, convincing, a little scary. I could sense that Charlie, across three thousand miles, was impressed, was being persuaded against his will.
    â€œJesus, Chris,” he said when I was done.
    â€œYes,” I said.
    â€œIt’s weird.”
    I said, “Charlie—what you said on your card, that you still can’t accept his death. Did you really mean that? I mean—have you ever had any doubts about it? Have you ever thought he didn’t really die?”
    He took his time answering, and I imagined him (red hair thinning, sleeves rolled up) in his office (a window framing palm trees and unimaginable sunshine, a cluttered desk piled high with books and movie scripts), frowning into the phone, intent on this bizarre phone call that certainly wasn’t what he’d expected on a Thursday morning. And in his mind would be his own memories of Pierce, and the evening when he climbed my stairs and wept and said, “Pierce is dead.”
    â€œHell, Chris, I don’t know,” he said at last. “I don’t think I ever thought that, not that concretely. I can’t say I meant it literally—just that, I don’t know—” He gave a little laugh. “You get to be middle-aged, and you get thinking, I think about that stuff a lot more now than I did when I was younger. I mean, I really miss Pierce. And you. I miss you both. I guess I’m missing myself, if you know what I mean. Being young. We were all such buddies. You know?”
    His voice had thickened. I had tears in my eyes. Dear old Charlie. It often seemed to me that Pierce and I had underestimated him, that he was the best of the three of us. I remembered the time, when Charlie was being especially stubborn about something, that Pierce (who was rehearsing for Becket ) had murmured, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent Charles?” A joke, but Charlie was horribly hurt, and it had bothered me for years that I did nothing to comfort him. Even now, I wanted to say, “He didn’t mean anything by it, it was just something he tossed off to show how clever he was, it had nothing to do with you personally.”
    I waited a moment and said, “But don’t you ever think he might not have been in that car?”
    â€œOh, Christ, it was his car, Chrissie,” Charlie said, his voice under control. “They found his driver’s license on him—on the body.”
    â€œBut Charlie, you know how Pierce was—the kind of mood he was in that spring. He’d gotten so crazy, and he was always high on something, he’d been dropping a lot of acid. He could have done anything—lent someone his car and