Identity Thief Read online

  I went to the hospital one evening, relatively certain Marty would be keeping vigil by Linda’s side. Indeed, the voice message at their home—apparently, he’d moved back in—informed the listener that, “This is Marty, and I am either at work or at my angel wife’s bedside. Please leave a message and send a prayer.” However, to get to Linda’s room, I had to get past the snooty nurse receptionist, who said that only immediate family was allowed to see Mrs. Goldstein.

  “I’m her psychologist.” I showed her my credentials in my wallet. “I want to see how she is, and also how her husband is doing. I understand he’s here.”

  “Are you also Mr. Goldstein’s psychologist?” She held a pencil to her chin, tapping it lightly as if to express her utter control of the situation.

  “No. But I’m here to see Mrs. Goldstein.”

  “Mrs. Goldstein is in a coma, sir.”

  “Well, so are you.”

  She flustered, her head trembling and her chin quivering. “I beg your pardon, sir.”

  “Look, you fucking bitch, I’m fucking here to help.” I pounded my fist on the counter. “I’m going in there or expect a lawsuit from the APA.”

  “Just one moment.” She disappeared behind a cubicle and came out a few minutes later with another woman, though the other woman didn’t say anything. “Okay, you may go in,” said the nurse receptionist, handing me the room number on a slip of paper.

  “What do you want me to do, kiss your ass?” I stormed off to the elevator.

  Through the glass partition where Linda lay motionless, I saw a stumpy middle-aged man with thick glasses and very little hair left, though he insisted on featuring what few remaining tufts he had. He was exactly how Linda described him. I could also see Linda, who, in her state of deep slumber, looked more attractive than when her bizarre personality was in force, which detracted from her appeal. There were machines and tubes everywhere. Marty was holding her hand and sobbing. “Our little girl, Linnie, is home with her grandma,” I heard him say. “Linnie’s a fighter, just like her mommy. She fought to live. You can do it, too.”

  Frankly, I imagined Linda normally fought to remember how to tie her shoe, but I did not think this the opportune time for such sarcasm.

  I tapped sympathetically on the glass and entered. “Mr. Goldstein? I am Dr. Jesse Falcon. I thought it was time we met.” I extended my hand.

  Marty ignored my hand and gave me a hug instead, burying his head in my chest. “Oh, Dr. Falcon, Linda spoke highly of you. I’m so sorry she caused you such unhappiness with her tragic action.”

  Disengaging as quickly as I could from the hug, I could see how Marty would’ve been impossible to live with. Linda may have been way over the top, but at least she had some spirit for living. Marty was one of those utterly nerdy types who took wild guesses at what life was supposed to be like. I’m tempted to say his ability to make money was rather like those autistic people with a genius for music or math, except I don’t wish to insult the autistic, whose achievements are sincere.

  “No need to worry, Mr. Goldstein—”

  “Marty.” He smiled with a melancholy air.

  “Okay, Marty. As I was saying, it is part of one’s training as a psychologist to learn how to cope with these . . . these . . . ” I feigned a mighty grief that I was swallowing back.

  “I know, I know.” He patted my hand. “Please, have a seat.” He gestured to the second chair in the room on the opposite side of the bed.

  “I heard you say your little girl is home, safe and sound.”

  “Yes, she’s beautiful. She looks exactly like her mommy. Our first child. But then, you already knew that, I’m sure.”

  “Oh, I’m sure she has some of her daddy in her, too.”

  Marty permitted himself to chortle. “Let us hope not.” Self-consciously, he touched his balding head.

  “How are you doing, Marty?” I frowned for my supposed concern.

  “Hanging in there, Dr. Falcon. Thank you for asking. It’s been hard going to work every day and then coming here in the evening. I don’t get much R and R. But my mother’s been taking care of the baby. Grandma is also a wonderful cook and housekeeper. So it hasn’t been too bad.”

  God, talk about a man of depth. He thought all I meant was how was he budgeting his time or whatever. I mean, hello? Your wife tried to kill herself and is in an irreversible coma, and you have a daughter who will never know her mother. And though doubtless it was an ordeal to come to the hospital every evening, apparently he never missed a single minute of work. I wondered if the only reason he cried about the situation was because of the time it took away from things he’d rather be doing.

  “How are you feeling, Marty?”

  “Oh, you mean how am I doing like that. Sorry, Doctor. I’ve never been in therapy. I don’t know too much about it. I guess I’m okay. Really, I only want Linda to wake up.”

  “Of course you do.” I nodded my head with understanding. “Have you wondered much about why Linda . . . well, what she did?”

  Marty looked away. “No, why should I? I mean, what she did was wrong. Why would I want to know more about it?”

  “You’ve never even been curious?”

  “I figured you were the expert on that. You’re her doctor. I know from watching TV that you can’t tell me anything she tells you.”

  I took a deep breath, as if taking in the profundity of his words. “You’re absolutely right. But you see, I need to know more about it, too. Linda was doing beautifully. She was so happy to finally be a mother. I know she was having some difficulties with her marriage, but—”

  “Difficulties? What are you talking about? There were no difficulties.” Marty looked honestly perplexed.

  “Well, you were getting a divorce, right? Wouldn’t you call that a difficulty?”

  Marty stood up in disbelief. “Divorce? There was no divorce.” He could tell I was skeptical, so he added, “I swear. I swear on my wonderful wife’s soul. There was never any talk of divorce. Not even separation.”

  I hated to admit it, but I believed him. This made me wonder more than ever what Linda’s suicide note might’ve said, since obviously she’d been lying to the both of us. You could even say she was lying to three different personas, since I was both her psychologist and her occasional fuck. She was even nuttier than I realized, which meant she potentially was even more of a threat to my well-being.

  “Marty, I was only going by what Linda told me.”

  “You mean at like a million bucks an hour she was lying to you?”

  “So it would seem.” We both stared at the comatose Linda, as if wondering what other mysteries were buried in her utter silence.

  “Just out of curiosity, how much did the cops talk to you?”

  “Oh, once or twice. They figured Linda was kind of—well, you know, not all there in the head. One of them wanted to go through all her things, but this other one, an old guy, said it wasn’t necessary.” Marty looked ready to cry. “He said it was an open-and-shut case. Right to my face.”

  Hallelujah, praise Jesus. I could only thank my lucky stars for that shitty old cop. Walking up to Marty, I put my hand on his shoulder. “Look, Marty, I think there’s a lot we still need to know. What if Linda wakes up? We have to know exactly how to handle her.”

  He sighed. “I guess you’re right, Dr. Falcon. What do you suggest?”

  “Let me look through all her things. I’ll see if there’s a note or a journal or anything that gives a clue to why she did what did.”

  “I could do that much for you, Doctor. After all you’ve been through.”

  “Thank you, Marty.”

  I think he was being agreeable because the whole situation utterly perplexed him, and he didn’t know where to begin. But whatever was going through his mind—and it couldn’t have been much—I was grateful for his cooperation.

  Claiming that I would be extremely busy starting the next day, Marty let me follow him to his suburban home that evening. He insisted I m
eet the sleeping baby, whom I studied as much as I could for a resemblance to either Marty or me. I honestly couldn’t tell. Babies all look the same to me. I said, though, that the baby was adorable. I next met Marty’s mother, who was smilingly nice in a way I never trusted. I had to insist several times to Granny Goldstein that I wasn’t hungry and didn’t even want a nice cool glass of water. Marty asked me if I wanted to see the bedroom he shared with Linda. I replied that it was doubtful she’d keep any secrets in there, so instead I was led to the spacious garage.

  “Here it is,” he said grimly. “Linda’s Toyota.” Marty went back in the house, as if leaving me to perform an autopsy on a corpse.

  Linda’s Toyota was a bright yellow on the outside but a dismal chaos of crud on the inside. Empty potato chip bags, old shopping receipts, torn road maps, sweaters, broken flip-flops, plastic supermarket bags. It was like a landfill.

  I did, however, find her purse. It, too, was extremely disorganized. I combed methodically through tons of makeup and things, only to come up empty-handed. No note. I searched through every last greasy Taco Bell wrapper in the car and likewise found nothing.

  The other likely place to look was in what Marty called Linda’s “craft room,” though it might as well have been called her Adult Attention Deficit Disorder room. There were piles of unfinished knitting, three or four unfinished scrapbooks, blank drawing pads, unopened boxes of colored pencils and pastels, a set of glitter tubes (unused), about ten types of glue, dozens of brand new rubber stamps, and a wood carving kit but no wood. The one file cabinet had nothing but chaotic scraps of fabric in either of its two drawers. However, Linda did have a laptop computer in the room, and I anxiously turned it on.

  Although no password was required to enter, she had a file on her desktop called “Private.” She seemed to think that one word would keep people from opening it, though in fairness to Linda she probably never thought anyone except Marty would have reason to be in this room at all. And dimwitted Marty would’ve respected her privacy.

  Inside the file were some extremely bad attempts at poetry that—to make matters worse—were insipidly upbeat. To give one example: “The things I thought were hardest/Turned out to be the easiest/Once I believed in myself.” You read something like that, and it’s all you can do to keep from puking. To say the least, Linda was totally out of touch with her true nature. She believed in herself about as much as John Wilkes Booth believed in Abraham Lincoln. If her insecurities were specks of dust, they could’ve filled the Empire State Building.

  I regret to say that there also was a file called “My Jesse.” In an annoying schoolgirl tone, Linda documented every last secretion of sweat gland that transpired between us.

  “The stallion force of his love, love, love,” she redundantly wrote, “filled my love spot with pure rapture.”

  My online photo from my old professorship was pasted into a creepy pink heart. Fortunately, she seemed to think that the more florid her writing was, the better it was. Oftentimes, the actual facts of a given encounter were obscured.

  “I gave him the flower of my love,” she wrote on the day she told me she was pregnant. “Our love garden will blossom a thousandfold.”

  Finally, though, I read an untitled document dated the day of her fall.

  Jesse, My True, True Love,

  You are the love of my life. You have broken my heart into millions and trillions and zillions of tiny pieces. I carry our love secret in my body. I cannot let a child come into this world of nothing but misery. So with all the joy in the world, I do us all a favor. Someday you will realize how much you love me, which is more than there are clouds in the sky on the cloudiest day of the year. I am nothing more than a cloud now. A rainy, rainy cloud. When you are inside me, I feel nothing but your cruelty. I become your cruelty. Nothing but your cruelty and your great, great love.

  I die proclaiming my eternal love,

  Your Linda

  I could only hope that in her final moments of craziness, she either forgot to print out this suicide note or that the printed copy simply was lost forever. Gone with the wind, as they say. I wondered if I should delete the entire private file. I knew little about computer technology, though I’d heard about deleted files being retrieved by experts.

  It was good-natured Marty who solved my dilemma. He knocked on the door—though this was his own house—and asked if I wanted to take the computer with me.

  “That might be a good idea,” I said. “It will take me a while to go through all the files.”

  I felt so relieved that I let myself think my problems were over. Once I had the computer, I could always say it was stolen or someone dropped it in my swimming pool.

  “Can I interest you in a beer, Doc?” Marty was in a more casual mood, no doubt due to the beer he was drinking himself.

  “I never drink and drive.”

  “Good for you, Doc.” He patted my shoulder as I took my leave.

  I drove around the corner and immediately opened the laptop to give it a password, in case I decided to hang on to it for a while. The password was a random set of characters that I quickly memorized. I drove to my office and put the computer in my safe. Then I decided the hell with it and got the computer back out. I erased all the files, drove to a town dump, ran over the computer with my car a few times, and buried the broken mess into a big pile of garbage. No one but the scavenger birds would find it.

  No sooner had I gotten back home than Marty called me with the joyful news that Linda had come out of her coma.

  “Gee, that’s great,” I managed to say. “What a miracle.”

  “I didn’t know you doctor types believed in miracles,” Marty said. It seemed an ill-timed moment for a debate between reason and faith, so I simply ignored him.

  “As Linda’s psychologist, I’d like to go to the hospital right away to see her.”

  “That’s fine. Mother and I are getting Linnie all gussied up.”

  “Great, maybe we’ll all be there together.”

  I gave Esther a quick peck on the lips and drove as fast as I could to the hospital. I almost fell on my knees in gratitude to God when I got to Linda’s room first. This gave me a chance to try to stop her from saying all kinds of things I didn’t want her to say, though admittedly I had no idea how I’d go about it. The doctor told me she was still quite disoriented and weak. I reassured him when I told him I was her shrink.

  “Oh, by the way,” said the doctor cheerfully, “she has no feeling from the neck down. It may be permanent.”

  I stopped in my tracks. “She’s paralyzed? Why are you smiling?”

  “Oh, was I?” the doctor said. “I’m sorry. I haven’t slept in forty-eight hours.”

  I took a deep breath before entering her room. “Hello, Linda,” I said quietly, for want of knowing what else to say. She was still connected to a monitor that was keeping her alive. Every beep communicated heart activity.

  Linda weakly turned her head to face me; she wore a surprisingly earnest expression. “Why can’t anyone . . . let me die? Everyone is . . . awful.” Her voice was a raspy whisper. “I want to die . . . more than ever. It’s . . . It’s not even about . . . you and me. It never . . . was. I know that now. Now that I can’t move, I guess I really never could.” Failed suicide attempts have a way of sobering people up. Linda obviously still wanted to die, yet she was plainspoken and didn’t seem at all delusional.

  “You have a baby girl, Linda. Your husband loves you. The paralysis may not be permanent. But even if it is, you can still have a life.” Whatever I expected from this conversation, the possibility of being an encouraging therapist never even occurred to me.

  “I . . . never had . . . a life. I never will. That’s what I wanted from you. A life. I know now it’s not to be.” Her voice got a little stronger and so did the expression in her eyes. “I . . . I apologize, Jesse. I never should have put you through this. Not with a baby I don’t want. I told myself . . . I wanted it . . . But I can’t give it life. Bi
rth, but not life. I’m . . . I’m too dead. On the inside. Not being able . . . to move my body . . . is not the worst of it. That’s not what makes me so . . . dead.”

  “Linda, you can get better. You won’t always feel this way. Get a divorce, if you want. Hell, let Marty raise the kid if you can’t. Go to college. Run for president. But live, damn it.”

  With some effort, she took a deep, parched swallow. “Please . . . let me die.” With her eyes, she gestured to the monitor. “I don’t deserve favors. But please, do this one. You’re the only one who can.”

  I was so unaccustomed to crying that it took me a second or two to realize that’s what I was doing. “Linda, I can’t do that.” I should have gotten a doctor to give her a shot, but I couldn’t leave her. The beeping monitor seemed to be mocking me.

  Linda was crying, too. “Oh, please,” she begged. “My daughter . . . is better without me. Everyone is. Especially me. Don’t make me have to see my daughter.” She was breathing heavily, the tears streaming down her cheeks. “Please,” she kept repeating. “You’re smart, you can get away with it. Marty will be here any minute.”

  At first, I emphatically said no, I couldn’t do it. Then I’d look at her and look at the monitor. “I don’t think I can do it,” I heard myself say. I found myself reaching out to touch the monitor switch—only to back down again. I did this four times in a row. Then I asked her again to give life another chance.

  Now she was really crying hard. “Jesse, if anything between us has ever meant anything, please, please, please, give me my right to die.”

  Well, what can I say? You weren’t me in that moment. It got to where it felt like the only sensible thing to do, like turning on a flashlight in the dark.

  I took no chances. With one eye to the glass partition, I wrapped my hand in a Kleenex. I rapidly turned her main monitor off and on and off and on, over and over again, too quickly for a code red to start but jarring her enough to weaken her heartbeat down to nothing. I stared ahead at the monitor, unable to look at Linda, who never made another sound. Finally, with the machine on, there was a loud code red alert. I called out for help, knowing full well it was too late. On my way out of the room, I could hear the doctors pronounce her dead. I went into the men’s room, splashed my face with water, and rubbed my red eyes.