November 5, 2009
I was so totally out of it that I wasn’t even aware there was a hand on my arm much less whose it was. My head felt like I landed on it without a helmet after a grind rail gone horribly wrong. The left side of my rib cage screamed out in protest every time I inhaled. I immediately tried to reconstruct the accident. OK, I said to myself, my head hurts because I wasn’t wearing a seat belt and when the car turned over, I got dumped on the roof. The left side of my ribs hurt probably because it hit the steering wheel or Clarissa’s elbow when we… Clarissa!
I tried to sit up and I felt the pressure on my arm for the first time. I turned to my right and saw Clarissa sitting beside me. I immediately took her face in my hands and kissed her. Her flesh was cool as was her attitude but she still kissed me back.
“Clarissa, babe! Are you OK?” She didn’t say a thing but just continued smiling at me in a sweet but sad way. As my eyes got adjusted I saw that she had a few wounds on her face and hands but what struck me as odd was that none of them were treated. No bandages, no stitches, no nothing.
“I miss you, Adam,” she finally said only she said it in such a soft whisper that I could barely hear her. The present tense also hit me as a little odd. It would’ve made more sense if she said, “I missed you,” past tense. But just seeing her next to my bed was almost more than I could handle. I was just glad she was there and alright.
“What happened?”
“You went back,” she whispered again. “I miss you, babe.”
I reached out to her and held her cold face in my hands again. Maybe it was the light but she seemed to be almost completely drained of color, like a character you see in an old black and white movie.
“Back from where? How long was I out?” Once again, she still refused to answer but her hand moved from my right arm to my face. It was as cool as her own face and it almost felt like she wasn’t touching me at all. When I tried to sit up again, I felt something yanking on my pecker and that’s when I noticed the catheter. I also felt embarrassed beyond words that Clarissa had to see me hooked up to something that was attached to my dick.
“We need you, Adam.”
“Who needs me?” I asked her. I could understand her saying that she needed me but who else? My folks? Yeah, where were Mom and Dad? No way they wouldn’t be here.
“Free us, Adam. Free us.” I looked at her and wondered who “Frias” was. I didn’t know anybody by that name and when I looked for the catheter bag under the bed that’s when I noticed that Clarissa wasn’t sitting next to me, after all. She was standing up, the bottom half of her body buried in the floor. I looked up at her and her wounds began to bleed like crazy. I screamed and that’s when my folks and a few of the nurses came running into the room. When they turned the light on, Clarissa was gone.
My parents and the nurses in my room tried to tell me that it was just a dream, that there was no way Clarissa Feingold could’ve been sitting much less standing next to me, her body buried in the floor up to the waist. It bothered me either way whether I believed my own eyes or their version of what I just saw. I much preferred to think that Clarissa was there even with the creepiness factor. But what bothered me was how they mentioned her name.
“Well, if she wasn’t here, then where is she?” I asked. My parents and the nurses looked at each other with sadness that put ice cubes in my stomach. “Where is she, God damnit?” I yelled.
“Adam,” my mother said as she walked around to where Clarissa may or may not have been, “you were in a coma for four days. You need to rest and let the doctors and nurses take care of you.”
“I was out for four days? Alright, whatever. I just wanna know where my girlfriend is.”
I never referred to Clarissa as my girlfriend and they all looked at eachother again with even more sadness than before. My mother put her hand to her face and took off like a fucking bat out of Hell. My Dad turned to me for a second then took off after my mother.
“Where’s Clarissa?” I asked one of the nurses as she checked some machine. She put her head down before turning to me and sighed.
“She was killed in the accident, Honey. Her family’s funeral was yesterday. I’m so sorry.”
I got to sit in bed for the next day or two, my thoughts occasionally interrupted by Mom and Dad coming in, nurses coming back and forth to give me medicine that I pretended to take before spitting it out in the toilet. Some of it may have been for pain but I didn’t give a shit. I welcomed the pain. It helped clarify my thoughts. I sank into a pit of depression finding out that the girl I love was killed but no one ever told me what happened to her parents and why and how the entire family could’ve been wiped out in two different places on the same night was never explained to me.
Finally, the same nurse who broke to me the horrible news of Clarissa’s death came in and asked both my parents and me if a Boston City homicide detective named Ed Coffey could talk to me. I desperately wanted to talk to him, too, anyone whose name wasn’t Moss or wore crepe shoes carrying medicine I didn’t need. I practically demanded that they bring him in even before my folks said it was OK.
The poor kid looked like an anime doll someone threw out a car window and that got run over by traffic. I pulled up a chair next to him and asked him how he was. He just stared at me, tears standing in his big green eyes and simply asked me what happened. Even though I was there to question him about why Clarissa Feingold took off and led the Braintree police on a high speed pursuit, years of experience interrogating suspects and witnesses taught me that if you want to get a little, you got to give a little. The truth was what the kid needed, in my estimation, although I could see why they’d embargo the flow of information to him considering what the boy had been through.
So I told him in the gentlest way I could about what happened to his girlfriend. However, when you’re informing someone of how a loved one died it’s really no different than using a fucking sledgehammer that’s covered with velvet. The blows are just as crushing.
Considering that the house was still full of a bunch of underaged minors who were obviously under the influence and that there was a party at the Congressman’s house on Halloween night, my guess was that the Feingold girl panicked when she saw the cops there to tell her about her parents’ deaths. Of course, she had no way of knowing that and had assumed they were there just to break up the party and maybe throw her and her friends in jail over the illegal alcohol until they could get bailed out by their folks. I never stopped to consider the pressure that the child of a politician holding national office would have to live under, meeting higher standards than other kids, having to keep up unreasonably perfect appearances.
The Moss kid’s eyes got wider than bed pans when I gave him the basics of what happened to the Feingolds. All things considered, the girl was killed in an almost ordinary, pedestrian way compared to her folks. Her neck was broken instantly when the Range Rover flipped.
“So, why did your girlfriend hit the gas when she saw that cruiser?”
“I dunno, Detective,” he murmured. “She just said she wasn’t going back. She kept saying it over and over.”
I wondered whether she meant going back home into the waiting arms of the police or back to the hospital and the waiting arms of the psychiatric nursing staff. Either way, her refusal to go back made sense.
“So she never knew that her folks were dead?” I rhetorically asked.
“No. How could she? She tried calling them and they never picked up.” That also made sense. When the coroner’s office began picking up the bodies we heard cell phones going off one by one, especially after the news broke of the mass suicide. It was one of the most heartbreaking things I ever heard and it briefly reminded me of the 9/11 firefighters’ locating beacons going off long after they were buried by tons of rubble at Ground Zero.
Strictly speaking, I really had no business talking to this Adam Moss kid because the odds were slim to none that he could shed any light on what happened in Boston. Still, he was the last one to be seen alive with the recently deceased daughter of two of the victims. I was just about to get up and Adam asked me as I flipped my notebook shut, “Then please explain to me how come Clarissa was sitting or standing next to my bed when I came out of my coma?”
I asked the nursing staff if they could call up the surveillance video of Adam Moss at the moment he woke up and they did. The black and white video was a bit grainy but I could see the kid open his eyes and continue lying on his back as he looked at the ceiling, apparently deep in thought. After a minute or so, he turned to his right and reached out with both his hands as if to touch or hold something or somebody that wasn’t there. He then appeared to kiss thin air. Then I could see his lips move, holding a one-sided conversation. Reaching out and kissing thin air again. Eventually, after a few minutes of this tragic pantomime, he looked at something on or near the floor and freaked out just moments before the nursing staff and his parents rushed in. There were a couple of other things in the video that tickled the back of my mind but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I told the nursing staff to tell the security company to save that video in case I needed to see it again.
Before the Mosses gave me their permission to question their son, they took me outside and told me a bit about his history.
“Look, Detective Coffey,” his mother had begun, “Adam has a… history, let’s call it.”
“A history of what?” I asked.
“He claims to have seen ghosts on several occasions.”
Okaaay… “OK,” I said matter-of-factly.
“It goes back several years. When Adam was about 10, my husband and I lost a child during childbirth…”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs. Moss.”
“Thank you. And Adam claimed to have seen his brother standing on top of his own grave. He even said he saw the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck. That’s what killed our baby.”
A chill had gone up my spine. This was already turning into more than I’d bargained for. The few words I’d exchanged with the kid led me to think that he was as lucid as could be expected under the circumstances, especially after finding out that his girlfriend was just killed. But why have a delusion of seeing the ghost of a girlfriend whom you think is still alive? Adam never claimed that he saw her ghost. In fact, no one ever mentioned the word, least of all his parents.
“Our son was obsessed with the spirit world and ghosts and every now and then he’ll insist he’d seen one,” his father said. “Finally, when he was about 15, he made a suicide attempt…”
I wasn’t sure at this point if I wanted to hear more about the family’s most confidential medical issues but all the same, I had to know what I was dealing with when I went to question him, even if he wasn’t a material witness in a homicide investigation that may not be a homicide investigation.
“That’s when he met Clarissa in the psychiatric wing of Newton Wellesley Hospital. The two of them struck up an instant friendship and they seemed to be good for each other. We figured the family’s also Jewish, solid, upstanding citizens, our Congressman, even. We had no problem with them seeing each other. Then, this…” Mr. Moss had raised then helplessly dropped his arm in the direction of his son’s room and looked as if he was about to cry. I closed my notebook, even though I hadn’t written anything into it before getting their permission the question their son. In light of what they’d told me, writing down their disclosures would’ve been redundant. I wasn’t very likely to forget much if any of it.
The kid could’ve been having a dream or a hallucination like they all said, although it’s odd to have a sleepwalking episode right after coming out of a coma. But it wasn’t until I got back to my office and again looked at the autopsy photos of the Feingold girl that I realized the Moss boy had perfectly described Clarissa’s wounds down to their exact locations, wounds that he was never conscious to see. I got this crazy idea that perhaps the people at the Sheraton were frightened to death and barely began to speculate why before dismissing the idea as absurd.
Braintree, MA, November 7, 2009
The night before the hospital turned me loose, I heard Clarissa’s voice in my ear. If she was in bed with me, she would’ve been behind me and I was too scared shitless to turn around and it didn’t matter much if I was dreaming or not. The first, last and only thing I heard her whisper was, “Free us, Adam. We are not pebbles.” I had two blankets and a sheet on top of me and I felt like I was sleeping naked on the tundra of the Antarctic.
One drawback to being a suicide boy is that your parents tend to fucking coddle you and keep shit from you. When you find out about it, they then justify it by saying that it’s all for your own good but that’s horseshit. For instance, I think I had a right to know that I had a near death experience before my four day-long coma. Little omissions like that kind of make me tweak out.
I found out about my being clinically dead after the accident when I heard my Mom talking to my sister Laura on the phone after I got home. It ticked me off a little that she couldn’t make it to be with the rest of the family and even from Mom’s end of the conversation I could almost hear Laura using her secret agent government job as an excuse as to why she couldn’t come up to see me.
Turns out she may have had a good excuse, after all: She was in Baghdad, Iraq doing something for the CIA or NSA or one of those other alphabet spy outfits. She was never very forthcoming about what she did or who she worked for and, given her line of work, who could blame her?
But while Laura wasn’t there for me to tweak out on, Mom and Dad were and I confronted them right away.
“Adam, Honey, try to look at it from our point of view,” Mom said, “You needed to be protected and you weren’t strong enough yet to hear about that, especially after hearing about Clarissa.”
“Protected from what or who, Mom? Did you ever think that maybe I’m a little bit tougher than you and Dad think? That I may not be the same kid who opened up his wrists two years ago? You keep telling me to look it from your point of view. But did either of you ever once try to look at shit from my point of view?”
“Adam, was it really all that important for you to know? The important thing is that you made it back and you’re safe at home here with us.”
Well, yeah, it’s important. Because the more time that went by, the more I was convinced that when they brought me back from the dead at the accident site I didn’t come back alone.
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