by C.G. Banks
Chapter 22: Checking Up
Cathryn Skate sat behind her desk, restlessly doodling on a sheet of notebook paper. It was 7:45, much earlier than her usual arrival time of 8:30 or thereabouts, and she didn’t have an appointment until 9:45. But today time didn’t seem to matter because she’d already been up since four. Tossing and turning in bed, up and down, until she’d finally gotten up for good at five-fifteen. And she was never insomniac. Not in childhood, or the long, arduous hours in college where many people claim to have troubled sleeping, eating, adjusting. Not any time. Just last night. Usually it was simply putting her head down on the pillow and lights out. Hardly any dreams either, which seemed strange to her (in a way), since her job was so intimately intertwined with the night-haunting demons of so many troubled strangers.
But at least she knew what had caused it.
The news. Funny, kind of, since she generally didn’t watch the Talking Heads; she usually came to work and spent the first forty-five minutes or so drinking coffee and catching up with the paper. She usually skimmed her way through to the crosswords and (a secret vice) the horoscopes, and that was it. Last night she’d seen the news at ten and she’d not been able to sleep. And it wasn’t out of fear, really, just curiosity. A strange bit on a dead family and a spooked dog catcher. The last had been almost comical, but she had noted the name of the neighborhood. That had been most of it, she guessed, because when she’d finally crawled out of bed and fetched her notes from the briefcase, she’d been right. Her newest patient (if the woman really intended on coming back, that is), Patsy Standish, lived there. Skate had no idea how close the two houses were but neighborhoods were neighborhoods.
Anyway, a strange coincidence.
But since she’d already been up and restless, Skate had taken the time to read back through the notes she’d jotted down from that interview. Single woman, alone. Family killed in a car accident. Hearing voices, seeing things…dangerous children, she’d said. Skate had underlined that bit. It seemed to say a lot, and often the clues weren’t verbalized at all. There were also comments scribbled down about the woman’s appearance, and that had been indicative. Her eyes spoke volumes of sleeplessness. Her fingernails had been bitten down to the quick. Skate had seen all this sort of thing before, countless times in countless situations. The unthreading of a personality, many times too far gone to repair, far too many if a clinician’s history was examined, all those failures. It was something you grew to know, to accept. But it was always worse with the death of a child. From her experience nothing else touched it. People got over missing limbs and blind eyes, the death of spouses and parents, close friends. But never a child; this was gospel. And from the first moment Skate had seen her walk through the office door into her suite she’d known the woman, this Patsy Standish, was heading for a breakdown. Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, it was referred to, in hopes of giving the monster a face. People tended to associate the term with a condition common to veterans of wars or violent natural disasters, but there were plenty of other unfortunates.
Yes, there was no doubt about it, but something didn’t quite ring true with that diagnosis, at least as far as the first impression of Patsy Standish went. It seemed too ‘pat,’ almost contrived. And Skate was usually reserved in judgment until the first few visits were done because many times, once again, the clues were not in plain sight. Many times a person wore another face, even to a person he or she was theoretically seeking professional help from. Instinct was one thing (and many times a right thing), but these were people’s lives she was dealing with. You could never be too careful. There’d been once, early in her practice, when she’d been drawn into an emotional entanglement, and these scars still itched and wailed occasionally in the deep, dark well of her mind. She shook her head and tried to refocus. These things would only cloud her judgment. She knew that; it was in all the textbooks, repeated at all the conferences, engraved on her soul. She had to remind herself of that from time to time, especially when cases involved children, even though she had none herself.
Times like now.
She pushed the notebook aside and turned on the computer, sipping on her third cup of coffee as the machine ran through its mystifying wake-up exercises. She watched the meaningless numbers roll and dodge across her screen, hooking her professional life back into the Grid of the World. It made her feel small and useless if the truth be known. She didn’t want to delve beneath that light-generated surface and see the breakdown of everything into simple algorithms; no, she preferred the sanctuary of human imperfection every time. Oh, and here, finally…the Menu. She grabbed the cursor and scrolled down to her phone file. She missed it the first time and caught herself racing back up the list in search of the name like a cat after a string. Or a mouse that was disappearing into a hole. The image gave her a shuddery pause and she forced her hand off the cursor when she saw it, his name: James Arnold, 10th Precinct, followed by the phone number she hadn’t used in…. She raised her hand and looked at the palm, flexed it slowly a couple of times to make sure it was still real. Her skin was clammy and cold and for a blind, childhood moment she flinched as if half-expecting someone or something to be standing, hunched and slobbering, behind her. Preparing to leap. Then it was gone as fast as she’d perceived it. For a moment she stared at the name (blinking on and off in the rectangle the cursor had described around it), lost as to why she’d sought it out in the first place. She was now of an age when lessons should be learned. Then her eye happened back to the notebook lying beside the keyboard and most everything came back. “Mrs. Standish,” she said and then repeated it, quieter this time, “Mrs. Standish.” She cast a guilty eye toward the door like a teenager caught masturbating, and refocused the clinical part of her mind on the name again.
Because this was business. Regardless how it felt at the moment, this was business. She had a patient in trouble, and what do you know, this same woman’s neighborhood becomes the scene of a tragedy several days later. Coincidence? Almost assuredly, of course. But…. James Arnold was a homicide detective who’d been involved in an accidental shooting when Skate hadn’t been two years out of her residency. A woman had been killed though Arnold had eventually been cleared of any and all wrongdoing by the department. Skate had tried to help him and that had been the one time her professionalism had slipped.
That part still rankled.
“Get over it, bitch,” she whispered and picked up the phone. She was glad she still had to check the number again before dialing. That was good. It didn’t feel real satisfying, but it was good. The phone rang and her mind went blank.
It was picked up on the third ring by a haggard-sounding woman. “Police Department,” she said, as if looking over her shoulder at something infinitely more interesting. Then she coughed like a man, seemed to turn back to the phone. “Fields here,” the voice said, a little more pointedly this time.
“Uh…Detective…uh, Arnold, please,” goddammit she hated how she sounded.
“What? Who’s that?”
“Arnold, Detective James Arnold. I need to speak to him.”
“Yeah, well, he’s out on a call. I can leave a message if I can’t do anything for you. It ain’t an emergency is it?”
“No! No, no emergency. Just have him call,” and she fumbled through her name and number. The person on the other side, the lovely Fields, told her she wrote it down and would leave it on his desk, “so he’d see it first thing,” and the conversation came to an end. For the next thirty minutes Carolyn Skate sat nervously at her desk wondering if her flash of sleepless inspiration would do more harm than good.
And as it turned out, she’d have a hard time believing the truth.