Steal

She breezed by him, planting a three-inch stiletto heel in the middle of the foyer and turning around. Her jade-green eyes shifted to his hand. “What are you drinking?” she asked.

Carter glanced down as if reminding himself. “A gin and tonic.”

“Boring. You have any tequila?”

“That depends. You have a name?”

She shook her head, playfully disappointed. “Do you always ask so many questions?”

“That was only one.”

“One too many,” she chided him. “Besides, Betty told me you like a little mystery.”

“So, you and her are—friends?”

“Something like that. She had to travel somewhere last minute but thought you would like me.” She dropped the mink just enough to expose the curve of her naked breasts, slightly larger than Betty’s. “You do like me, don’t you?”

Um.

“I think you’re very pretty,” said Carter, sounding way more like a schoolboy than he wanted to. He cleared his throat, dropping a half octave. “In fact, I’d say you’re gorgeous.”

“Good,” she said, pulling the mink back over her shoulders. “Now how about that tequila?”

Carter led her into the billiard room and straight to the bar. For sure, he’d impress her with his knowledge of the blue agave aging process. “Reposado or añejo?” he asked.

Or maybe not. “Shut up and pour,” she said.

Carter grabbed a lowball glass, pouring a generous shot of Partida Elegante. No sooner had he handed it to her than she threw it back like a pro, so to speak. Then, without the slightest hesitation, she reached into his gin and tonic for the unused lime, sucking it dry.

Plop. Back into his glass it went.

“Would you like to help me out of my coat, Carter?”

She turned around, the nape of her long neck and everything else about her inviting in Carter a hoard of extremely impure thoughts. Clink, clink, clink went the roller coaster, climbing upward. Were it not for the other sound in Carter’s head, his father’s voice, that mink of hers would’ve already been on the floor, along with the both of them.

“Cigars and women. The two things in life you always take your time with, son.”

That was on Carter’s eleventh birthday.

Slowly, Carter reached around with both hands, feeling his way inside the front of her coat. He hated the music of John Mayer—not to mention John Mayer himself—but for the first time he sort of knew what the guy was getting at with his song “Your Body Is a Wonderland.” This woman felt amazing. Her skin, soft as the mink.

Of course, a young man can only be so patient.

Carter’s hands slid past her navel, his fingers tracing the edge of her lace panties. He would do a drive-by first, a little tour of the perimeter before delving in.

Suddenly, he froze. What the…?

There was a bulge in those panties where there absolutely, positively should not have been a bulge. Unless, of course, Better Than Betty was actually a—Benny?

Carter’s hands snapped back. He nearly tripped over his own feet as he tried to pull away. When she spun around, the first thing he saw was her smile. Then came the second thing.

He’d felt something hard, all right, and for a split second he was relieved to know that it was something other than what he thought. The next split second, he wasn’t so sure.

He could live with The Crying Game. But the snub-nosed, single-action .38 now aimed at his chest?

“Who are you?” asked Carter. “What do you want?”

“Again with the questions,” she said.

Fine, no questions. Just a knee-jerk offer born of sheer panic and an extremely privileged upbringing. “If it’s money, you can have it. As much as you want. I promise. Anything. You can have it.”

She shook her head with mock disgust. “See, now you’re insulting me, Carter. Do I look like I need money?”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“Shut up already. You were better off asking questions.”

She cocked the hammer, the metallic sound—click!—echoing in Carter’s head and jogging loose the one and only question that really mattered now.

“Are you going to kill me?” he asked, his voice cracking.

Surprise, surprise. She shook her head no. But it was the way she did it, as if he’d just asked a tricky question with an even trickier answer.

“No, I’m not going to kill you,” she explained. “You’re going to do it for us.”

I once taught a class with a massive hangover. My head was throbbing and I wanted to throw up. It wasn’t my finest hour, but it wasn’t my worst, either.

During another semester, pre-Covid-19, I’d caught the flu. I had a temperature of 103 degrees and looked paler than a box of chalk. Still another time I was battling a kidney stone that had me keeling over in agony while discussing whether Freud really did have the hots for his mother.

The point being, the postal service has nothing on me. When Dylan Reinhart has an abnormal-psychology lecture to give, he delivers it no matter what.

But for the first time I simply didn’t have it in me.

Still, I couldn’t call in sick. Of all classes, this was one I knew I couldn’t miss.

If his fellow students can show up, I sure as hell can, too.

“Good morning, everyone, although I truly wish it were a good morning,” I began.

Then I just stopped. I knew everything I wanted to say, all the soothing reassurances that the grieving process is actually very healthy and that life—no matter how challenging at times or, more aptly put, how utterly effed-up beyond hope it can all too often feel like—is still always worth living. Nothing is sweeter in death. If it were, the pope wouldn’t have a pope mobile.

Again, though, I just stopped. All I could do was stare helplessly at my students as they stared right back at me. I could see it in their eyes. None of us had this in us.

Suicide isn’t supposed to make sense. I knew that. Hell, I’d even written about it extensively in AJP, the American Journal of Psychology. But this, what Carter had done, truly made no sense at all.

The kid wasn’t born on third base. No, he had it even better. Carter von Oehson was born crossing home plate after hitting the walk-off home run to win the World Series. Game seven, no less. He was the son of a multibillionaire and GQ–model handsome. Literally. Carter had appeared only months ago in the magazine’s September issue for a feature called “The Young Men of the Ivy League.” He was Mr. Yale.

So how does this young man, my student, charismatic as all get-out and with so much going for him, decide it simply isn’t enough? Why did Carter von Oehson take to Instagram a few weeks before Christmas and announce that “everything isn’t as peachy keen as it seems” and that he “no longer has the will”?

Even after that post, people still didn’t believe it. This was Carter being Carter. A cutup. A provocateur. He didn’t shy away from drama—he courted it. Any minute now he’d show up back on campus, all smiles and laughs. That’s what everyone thought.

But then those minutes became days. That’s when the New Haven police were called. That’s when it became news—local, tristate area, and then national. Carter’s roommate explained in a TV interview, while standing in front of the century-old Harkness Tower, that last Tuesday morning Carter had left their second-floor room in the Old Campus dorm, wearing his winter coat. He had his car keys but not his knapsack.

His roommate didn’t think anything of it because Carter didn’t have any Tuesday classes and apparently left campus a lot on those days. Sometimes he came back Tuesday night, sometimes the next morning. But he always came back.

Then Saturday happened.

No one could blame Carter’s parents for not mentioning to detectives that Carter kept a Sunfish at their waterfront Darien home. Who thinks of sailing in December? Besides, it had been months since the boat had been tied to their dock in plain sight, let alone configured. Before Carter left back in August for freshman orientation, he’d disassembled the Sunfish and stored it in the garage.

A maintenance worker at the Tokeneke Club less than a mile from the von Oehson home was the one who first spotted the boat at low tide early Saturday morning. The Sunfish was wedged along the side of a jetty that shielded the club’s beach. It had been washed ashore, fully intact, save for the heavy scratches on the bow. Carter had taken the boat out, but only the boat returned.

The Coast Guard concluded its search after twenty-four hours. Divers scoured the waters around the jetty, although if Carter had accidentally drowned he presumably would’ve either still been floating or washed ashore. By the end of the weekend there was only one logical conclusion, especially given Carter’s Instagram post. There was nothing accidental about his drowning.

“Professor Reinhart?”

I’m not sure which student had spoken up. It was a safe bet there was more than one. I had no idea how long I’d been standing there behind the lectern in a complete daze. “I’m sorry. What?” I asked.

“You stopped talking,” said someone in the front row.

“Yeah, are you sure you’re okay?” came a voice toward the back.

I snapped out of it. The room, my students—and most important—my purpose suddenly came into focus.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “Everybody follow me.”

The Yale professor handbook is decidedly unclear on the topic of spontaneous field trips. Come to think of it, it’s decidedly unclear whether there’s even such a thing as the Yale professor handbook. If so, I certainly haven’t read it.

Besides, it’s not as if I were taking the class rock climbing or bungee jumping. We were merely heading over to Woolsey Rotunda, which serves as the entrance to Woolsey Hall, the largest auditorium on campus. Even as we trudged in from the cold, though, none of my students knew why we were there. That’s how I wanted it.

“Everyone, please spread out,” I said.

There’s a reason the Whiffenpoofs and practically every other a cappella singing group at Yale has performed in Woolsey Rotunda. In a word? Acoustics. Nowhere else on campus does sound carry, echo, reverberate, and resonate as fully and beautifully as it has in this rotunda for more than a century.

I waited in the middle as the students filled out the space around me. Then I began.

“When I was thirteen, I lost my mother to pancreatic cancer,” I said. “There’s no good time to lose a parent, but thirteen was especially tricky. I was obviously old enough to fully understand what had happened, the finality of it. But at the same time I was still only a kid. I hadn’t lived enough to really know how to process death. All I knew was how much it hurt, and here’s the tricky part: all I wanted to do was make that pain go away.

“I remember two things about the guy on the other end of the phone the night I called the suicide hotline. The first was his name—Doug. Doug talked to me for more than an hour, and at no time did he ever tell me that I shouldn’t kill myself. Everyone who calls that number has reasons for doing so, and although I didn’t realize it at the time, the main reason isn’t that you want to kill yourself. It’s that you’re searching for someone, anyone, to give you a reason not to. And simply being told ‘don’t do it’ isn’t reason enough.

“So that was the second thing. Doug never told me that night what I should or shouldn’t do. His job wasn’t to give me a lecture, which is why we’re here instead of back in class. What suddenly dawned on me while looking at all of you, so soon after Carter’s suicide, is that words just aren’t going to cut it today. How can you make sense of something that makes no sense? You can’t. You shouldn’t. So today, I say to hell with saying the right thing. To hell with saying anything at all.”

With that, I gave my class a resounding explanation for why we’d marched across campus. Acoustics. At the top of my lungs, I let go with the loudest, nastiest, most primal scream I’d ever unleashed.

Half of my students were startled. As for the other half, I downright scared the crap out of them. But an amazing and wonderful thing happened as the sound of my scream engulfed the entire rotunda, the echoes seemingly weaving in and out and all around us.

One by one they started to join in. Primal screams from younger lungs, even louder and—yes, angrier—than mine. The angrier the better. Let it all out. That was the idea. Then it can’t eat you up from the inside.

When the echoes finally faded, the rotunda once again returning to silence, I looked around and smiled. Satisfied.

“Class dismissed,” I said. “See you all next week.”