The Pink Steering Wheel Chronicles Read online

  “Read it to me.”

  Specks of blood filled my handkerchief. By then, it was pouring from me. A river of blood. I see it coming. And it passes through me: a speeding, blinding light. It carries me to the heavens. Everything changed in a shooting flash.

  We were both thinking the same thing: about how I found Mark holding a handkerchief spotted with blood before it started pouring out of him, too. And how I saw the flash and felt that shooting tunnel lifting us up the attic stairs.

  “Listen to this,” I continued after a moment, reminding him how Mark had fallen and how his face bruised. “‘How long will it take before I collapse of my own weight? My body screams, bruises forming.’ And from there, it’s almost a flash-forward to him describing the CPR. ‘She paused for breath and took another and another. Her breath was my life, but I was slipping, and I knew it.’”

  I continued before he could possibly interrupt. “Did I ever tell you how Mark’s tongue turned black when he died? I don’t mean to be gross, but it did. Mark wrote about that, too.

  ‘In my sleep, my tongue is black,’ he said.”

  The more we discussed his “writings,” the more convinced we became that Mark may have already lived another man’s life, and possibly his own, too.

  The journals explained so much. They helped me to make sense of...everything, really.

  It wasn’t until now—years later—that I realized it didn’t matter how far I traveled or how hard I pushed myself in between, I had to learn to live with the void.

  And while I thought his death was the greatest loss I could ever suffer, I also realized that the greatest loss is what dies inside of us as we continue to live.

  That’s why you can never really say goodbye. It’s why, to this day, I still find myself searching for his face in crowds of people.

  This is my story...

  5

  When Lois Met Clark

  “Today’s my lucky day. She walked in and stood before me, blue eyes looking into mine. I’m not a praying man, but I’d get down on my knee, asking for her love. If she motioned to the floor, there I would lay to be with her.”

  —Excerpted from Mark’s journals

  There once lived a boy named James Mark Pittman, the story begins. His mother was just sixteen when she gave birth to him—the first of three sons—in Kansas City, Kansas.

  Back then, when the knee of your Wrangler jeans wore out, your mom ironed on a denim patch, then sewed it good and tight. You rode your red Schwinn bike to school, mowed your grandmother’s yard or shoveled her driveway on Sundays after church, and always did what your daddy told you.

  Without knowing it, Mark’s journalism career began at around age thirteen. Hiding under his bed covers with a flashlight and pen in hand, he would stay up writing political stories for the school newspaper, stories about Vietnam, napalm bombs, communism, and Watergate.

  Five years of (almost) straight A’s later, Harvard wanted to recruit Mark, but he needed to continue working alongside his father at the Piggly Wiggly grocery store. He eventually transferred from a junior college to Kansas University for in-state tuition, first in the engineering program, but he quickly switched to journalism. His home was an abandoned building where he lived with a few other cash-strapped friends, surviving on beer, Marlboros, Cheerios, and Bob Dylan.

  At one point, he took a part-time job as a ranch hand across the border in Lenapah, Oklahoma. That’s where he wore the cowboy boots I loved so much. And the hat; it’s up on the bookshelf now, resting atop the black box that holds his ashes. It’s dusty, the hat, but I like it all worn out like that.

  Mark would soon discover Hunter Thompson, the legendary writer who branded “Gonzo” journalism, a methodology where reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become the central figures of their stories. “Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs” was possibly his favorite. Thompson spent that writing year riding with the Hell’s Angels, experiencing their lives and hearing their stories first-hand. Both men reveled in a love of freedom and an iconoclastic contempt for authoritarianism.

  “Cool,” I could almost hear Mark say when deciding to turn in his cowboy hat for a motorcycle helmet one college summer while in search of his own gonzo experiences.

  He always went for the underbelly.

  “That’s where the real stories are, not in the ivory towers,” he would say. This was long before he began investigating the U.S. federal government to discover it was hiding one of the biggest secrets in American history.

  First, he did what you’re “supposed to do:” graduate college, get a good job (in his case, at a small regional newspaper, the Coffeyville Journal), marry your college sweetheart, have a beautiful baby. Maybe buy a house someday.

  Problem was, Mark still had Hunter Thompson and motorcycle oil in his blood. He was restless—bored with small town Kansas life. He wanted to break “major ass” stories, not cover village hall meetings. He soon left Kansas for a new job in Rochester, New York, covering the cop beat at the Democrat & Chronicle. Even though he was now in my hometown and we lived close enough to see each other’s roofs (if you stood all the way to the left of my front porch and squeezed your head against the side of the house), it would still be ten years before we would meet.

  I had moved to Boston for my first job as assistant editor of a regional magazine. But within a few years, the bright lights of New York began calling, and I used the last of my paychecks to rent the cheapest apartment I could find in the safest neighborhood I could find—a $450 a month, sixth-floor, 102-step walk-up studio on E. 80th between 2nd and 3rd, complete with a claw foot bathtub in the kitchen and a toilet in the common hallway. After a few months of job hunting while surviving on $4 a day, I got a job. And not just any job, a real journalism job at a real New York City newspaper! Sure, it was answering the news tip phone lines, but it was still at the New York Daily News. It got me in the door, which was all that mattered. Soon after, I was offered the position of crime reporter at the “the cop shop,” better known as police headquarters in lower Manhattan.

  Meanwhile, Mark had left his reporter’s job in Rochester to become metro editor at the Times-Herald Record in Middletown, New York, about sixty miles out of the city. It’s where he stayed for more than a decade: loving his job, enjoying his family, and drinking beer with his buddies after Friday night baseball. Everything was fine...until his wife asked for a divorce.

  Not long after, in walks this girl, a new Sunday features writer. After six years, I had burned out on city life and wanted nothing more than to work at a smaller paper and live in a lakefront cabin.

  It was a move that changed both of our lives.

  It was my first day, and here was this big, tall, incredibly handsome man with worn cowboy boots propped up on a desk, commanding two phones at once while punching notes into the computer keyboard, a line of reporters waiting to talk with him. He was taking it all in, laughing and joking around, even on deadline. This guy was, in three words, larger-than-life.

  When his hand went out to shake mine, everything stopped—including my heart.

  “Hi, I’m Mark Pittman.” He stood up, smiling that incredible smile at me.

  I wasn’t sure what my name was for a moment, but I was sure I wanted him to know it.

  “Laura...Laura Fahrenthold,” I managed, extending my own hand. He held my eyes, never looking away. Neither could I.

  That’s when I knew he would end up being the most important person in my life.

  My first lead story came out of a small Dairy Queen town while covering an extra night shift on the police beat.

  “Hi, it’s the Times-Herald Record. Anything going on tonight?” I had to call up each station on the checklist, looking for news tips. The desk cops’ answers were typically, “Nope. All’s quiet here.”

  But something told me things weren’t quiet when I heard the Village of Maybrook officer suck in his breath. That meant he was holdin
g something back.

  Mark always said cop reporters end up with “big BS detectors” because everyone lies to you. “The cops lie to you, the victims lie to you, the people helping the victims lie to you. And you’ve got to sort through it all,” he’d tell people. “The story that seems a certain way just won’t be—and you know it.”

  Turns out, the officer wasn’t just lying, he was covering up that a twelve-year-old boy, Danny Meyer, had been found stabbed to death in the woods while walking home from Little League practice. At first, police suspected one of the transient carnival workers from the weekend fair. One team worked that angle with state police while another retraced Danny’s day, including his last steps in the woods.

  That’s where a boy, Juan Peinado, was found hanging from a tree with a noose around his neck, bicycle below his feet. The photographer managed to cut him down with a pocketknife, rushing him to the police station where the boy gave a detailed account of being attacked by a man in a black hoodie. At the same time, a police source informed me that Danny had been sodomized in an act of necrophilia. I called it into the newsroom. Was Juan Peinado sodomized, too?

  Within a nanosecond, the sky was filled with a swirl of helicopters as news trucks and reporters surrounded the tiny village, population 2,958. It was like the O.J. Simpson trial; news became entertainment as people camped out on picnic blankets with pizza deliveries to stay on top of the action.

  Mark and I didn’t believe Juan’s story from the start. Eventually, he confessed. He was Danny Meyers’ killer and had faked his own attack in hopes of throwing the police off.

  Night after night, we stayed late in the newsroom or went to the local diner to discuss the case until we discovered, through visitor records, that the only person to visit Juan in jail was a priest. More hunches and a few weeks of leads later, we learned Juan had come to America from Guatemala as a foster child. Not only that, but he was twenty-one, not sixteen as his paperwork stated. More digging led us to believe he was really part of a sex ring and had finally snapped as a result of the abuse. But there was no way to prove it without going to Guatemala.

  Case closed, but never forgotten. To this day, I still worry and pray for Danny’s parents.

  Meanwhile, Mark and I had fallen madly in love. And when he got down on one knee with sunflower in hand to propose that we get married, I was never so sure of anything in my life.

  He always surprised me with sunflowers—in my car, under my pillow, in the blue vase on the table. Whenever I see one now, I go back to the bright summer day when he led me, blindfolded, into a giant field of buttery Kansas sunflowers after taking me home to meet his family. It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen, so many flowers at once. He spread a blanket in a clearing on the ground and we lay in that field, looking up at the tall stalks of yellow leaves overhead in the vast blue sky, knowing that we had found our own special heaven. He would often sing, “You are my sunflower, my only sunflower,” to wake me up in the morning, which annoyed me as often as it made me laugh, but it always filled me with complete love.

  Still, the deepest part of me worried about being responsible for another human being, much less be married to one and possibly having kids with one. What if it all went wrong, the way so many marriages do? Then what? Worse, what if he left me for another woman, like my father had done to my mother?

  Couldn’t we just stay living together? Or better yet, couldn’t we live in separate apartments in the same building? That way, we wouldn’t wear out our relationship. Or, how about a commitment ceremony rather than an official wedding?

  “Relax, babe,” he said with amusement while holding my chin in place, so I would have to look at him in the eyes without squirming away. “My purpose in life—it’s to love you.”

  “You say that now but look at what happens to people. What if it happens to us?”

  “Shh...” he would whisper, cutting me off. “I promise I will never leave you. I promise I will never hurt you or cheat on you or lie to you or abandon you or our children.”

  “What children? You’re pregnant?”

  I liked it that he laughed at my bad jokes.

  “The children we are we are going to have,” he said. “I see girls. Two of them. Maybe we can name one of them Ruth? For some reason, I’ve always felt connected to that name.”

  And I felt connected to Mark. He calmed me in the deepest, most settled of ways. And that made all the difference.

  We excitedly set out with new jobs and a move back to the city. He would now cover the financial markets at Bloomberg News, and I went to work as a features editor at Woman’s World Magazine. We moved to Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

  He wanted to get “properly” married in a church. In a white dress with vows and everything? I thought. Really? We did—we got married in a beautiful, old stone church and held a picnic reception at the Saugerties Lighthouse on the Hudson River.

  Next when he wanted to get started on a family for real, I worried. Me? A mother? I couldn’t imagine being a mother. I didn’t want to be a mother. The thought of it literally terrified me. But just four months later, I was so excited to be pregnant with Nell, and four months after welcoming her to the world, our plan worked. We were pregnant again.

  With our second child on the way, it was time to say goodbye to our tiny apartment and city life. We bought a modest house just north of the city, in Yonkers, and moved just two months before Susannah was born.

  It was hectic and crazy and wonderful. I couldn’t believe how much our love had grown, that there were even deeper layers to the levels. Any honest couple will say the same thing: relationships and marriage can be hard at times, even when you love the person so much you can’t imagine how you lived without them. But it goes way beyond wet towels on the floor or budgeting to replace the cracked driveway. It’s the modern-day problem—two people balancing their careers with home life.

  I was lucky to be able to do both by working at home, raising the girls while earning a living in a career that I loved. It wasn’t that Mark didn’t want to leave work at 5:00 pm to make it home in time for dinner, baths, pajamas, and books; it’s that he often had to work later and longer to cover whatever the big news story was of the day, or produce what’s called an enterprise piece, a story that a reporter digs up on his or her own that goes beyond covering events, news conferences, and press releases. He often spent parts of the weekend working from home, too.

  I’ll admit that it sometimes made me want to run back to my carefree, single life—the one I had before, where I had been free to do what I wanted, when I wanted and how I wanted. No husband, no children, no mortgage; and while I was so in love with him and so proud of him and so happy with our lives, I sometimes found myself resenting him for giving me everything I never knew I wanted.

  But then all that lamenting would fly out of my mind and I’d worry as I watched him sleeping on the couch, exhausted and puffy-eyed. This pace can’t last, a little voice warned me. Whose voice was that? Mine? The doctor’s?

  6

  I’m Fine

  “Emotion. What the hell do I feel? Rage, pain of parting? Nah, just a sort of existential despair that I wake with every morning knowing that the end is one less day away. I hide it well. She knows little of my fears.”

  —Excerpted from Mark’s journals

  A heart attack? Are you kidding me? How is it even possible that a forty-two-year old even have a heart attack? We were so naïve.

  He had gone to a concert with Billy after work but left during intermission. He was having a hard time breathing and blamed it on allergies, despite never having been allergic to anything before. By morning, I knew something was terribly wrong. His face was pale and gray.

  At first, he refused to go to the hospital. No one goes to the ER for a little asthma, especially on Father’s Day.

  “Too bad,” I told him. “We’re going!”

  “Really, I’m fine. Don’t worry!” he said waving me off from the ER waiting room so
I could go home to feed Susannah rather than having a family member bring her to us. She was only two months old. “I’ll be here for hours before they even call my name anyway. Take your time.”

  Just then, the doctor called us into the exam room. An EKG and blood test followed, confirming the doctor’s suspicion that Mark had suffered a heart attack. They could stabilize him with IV medication while I went home to get the baby, but he would be going to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital’s Rusk Heart Institute—by ambulance—for further testing.

  He needed stents—two of them—to open the blockages that caused the lack of blood flow to the heart in the first place.

  His regular doctor was calling it a “mild” heart attack. Routine stuff, really. He needed to eat better. Get more exercise. Sleep more. Blah, blah. What he didn’t say is Mark was twenty-four years younger than the average male heart attack victim and that we should be worried, very worried.

  A few years later, he fell while walking across the street, breaking his ankle in six places. It took four metal plates, eight screws, and a piece of his hip bone to fuse the bones back together, not to mention six weeks recuperation and follow up knee surgery. It didn’t occur to me until later that the doctor should have questioned what caused him to fall on dry pavement in the first place.

  Six more years passed before he was rushed to hospital again for emergency stent surgery. This time, he failed a routine angiogram—the one I insisted he get after noticing his face turning that purple gray color again.

  The hospital surgeon gave me a very different prognosis than the one I had received from Mark’s regular doctor.

  “Mrs. Pittman,” he called out into the waiting room.

  I turned to look for Mark’s mother, until I realized he was speaking to me (I was Mrs. Pittman).

  “I have no other way to say this,” he began. “Your husband needed three more stents, and there is evidence of massive heart disease...” He took a measured pause, placing his hands on my shoulders before delivering the next part. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but he will be lucky to live another two to three years. Four, tops,” he said, pointing to the x-ray pinned to a light box on the wall. It showed a snarl of veins and arteries. You didn’t need to be a doctor to know that it looked bad—very bad. His beautiful heart looked like it had a ball of yarn rewound around it by a two-year-old.