Her lip shook and scooted forward.
“There’s no need,” she said, “to swear.”
“Sorry. Besides my foul mouth, what do you have against me?”
“Nothing.”
“Baloney, Vicki.”
“There’s really no—”
“You don’t like shrinks,” I said, “and my intuition is you’ve got a good reason.”
She sat back. “That so?”
I nodded. “There are plenty of bad ones out there, happy to take your money without doing anything for you. I happen not to be one of them but I don’t expect you to believe that just because I say so.”
She screwed up her mouth. Relaxed it. Puckers remained above her upper lip. Her face was streaked and smudged and weary and I felt like the Grand Inquisitor.
“On the other hand,” I said, “maybe it’s just me you resent—some sort of turf thing over Cassie, your wanting to be the boss.”
“That’s not it at all!”
“Then what is it, Vicki?”
She didn’t answer. Looked down at her hands. Used a nail to push back a cuticle. Her expression was blank but the tears hadn’t stopped.
“Why not get it out into the open and be done with it?” I said. “If it’s not related to Cassie, it won’t leave this room.”
She sniffed and pinched the tip of her nose.
I moved forward and softened my tone: “Look, this needn’t be a marathon. I’m not out to expose you in any way. All I want to do is clear the air—work out a real truce.”
“Won’t leave this room, huh?” Return of the smug smile. “I’ve heard that before.”
Our eyes met. Hers blinked. Mine didn’t waver.
Suddenly her arms flew upward, hands scissoring. Ripping her cap from her hair, she hurled it across the room. It landed on the floor. She started to get up, but didn’t.
“Damn you!” she said. The top of her head was a bird’s nest.
I’d folded the handkerchief and rested it on one of my knees. Such a neat boy, the Inquisitor.
She put her hands to her temples.
I got up and placed a hand on her shoulder, certain she’d fling it off. But she didn’t.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She sobbed and started to talk, and I had nothing to do but listen.
She told only part of it. Ripping open old wounds while struggling to hold on to some dignity.
The felonious Reggie transformed into an “active boy with school problems.”
“He was smart enough, but he just couldn’t find anything that interested him and his mind used to wander all over the place.”
The boy growing into a “restless” young man who “just couldn’t seem to settle down.”
Years of petty crime reduced to “some problems.”
She sobbed some more. This time she took my handkerchief.
Weeping and whispering the punch line: her only child’s death at nineteen, due to “an accident.”
Relieved of his secret, the Inquisitor held his tongue.
She was silent for a long time, dried her eyes, wiped her face, then began talking again:
Alcoholic husband upgraded to blue-collar hero. Dead at thirty-eight, the victim of “high cholesterol.”
“Thank God we owned the house,” she said. “Besides that, the only other thing Jimmy left us worth anything was an old Harley-Davidson motorcycle—one of those choppers. He was always tinkering with that thing, making a mess. Putting Reggie on the back and racing through the neighborhood. He used to call it his hog. Till Reggie was four he actually thought that’s what a hog was.”
Smiling.
“It was the first thing I sold,” she said. “I didn’t want Reggie getting ideas that it was his birthright to just go out and crack himself up on the freeway. He always liked speed. Just like his dad. So I sold it to one of the doctors where I worked—over at Foothill General. I’d worked there before Reggie was born. After Jimmy died, I had to go back there again.”
I said, “Pediatrics?”
She shook her head. “General ward—they didn’t do peds there. I would have preferred peds, but I needed a place that was close to home, so I could be close to Reggie—he was ten but he still wasn’t good by himself. I wanted to be home when he was. So I worked nights. Used to put him in at nine, wait till he was asleep, grab a nap for an hour, then go off at ten forty-five so I could be on shift by eleven.”
She waited for judgment.
The Inquisitor didn’t oblige.
“He was all alone,” she said. “Every night. But I figured with him sleeping it would be okay. What they call latchkey now, but they didn’t have a name for it back then. There was no choice—I had no one to help me. No family, no such thing as day care back then. You could only get all-night babysitters from an agency and they charged as much as I was making.”
She dabbed at her face. Looked at the poster again, and forced back tears.
“I never stopped worrying about that boy. But after he grew up he accused me of not caring about him, saying I left him because I didn’t care. He even got on me for selling his dad’s bike—making it into a mean thing instead of because I cared.”
I said, “Raising a kid alone,” and shook my head in what I hoped was sympathy.
“I used to race home at seven in the morning, hoping he’d still be asleep and I could wake him up and pretend I’d been there with him all night. In the beginning it worked, but pretty soon he caught on and he’d start to hide from me. Like a game—locking himself in the bathroom …” She mashed the handkerchief and a terrible look came onto her face.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to—”
“You don’t have kids. You don’t understand what it’s like. When he was older—a teenager—he’d stay out all night, never calling in, sometimes for a couple days at a time. When I grounded him, he’d sneak out anyway. Any punishment I tried, he just laughed. When I tried to talk to him about it, he threw it back in my face. My working and leaving him. Tit for tat: you went out—now I go out. He never …”
She shook her head.
“Never got a lick of help,” she said. “Not one single lick … from any of them. Your crowd, the experts. Counselors, special-ed experts, you name it. Everyone was an expert except me. ’Cause I was the problem, right? They were all good at blaming. Real experts at that. Not that any of them could help him—he couldn’t learn a thing in school. It got worse and worse each year and all I got was the runaround. Finally, I took him to … one of you. Private clown. All the way over in Encino. Not that I could afford it.”
She spat out a name I didn’t recognize.
I said, “Never heard of him.”
“Big office,” she said. “View of the mountains and all these little dolls in the bookshelf instead of books. Sixty dollars an hour, which was a lot back then. Still is … specially for a total waste of time. Two years of fakery is what I got.”
“Where’d you find him?”
“He came recommended—highly recommended—from one of the doctors at Foothill. And I thought he was pretty smart myself, at first. He spent a couple of weeks with Reggie, not telling me anything, then called me in for a conference and told me how Reggie had serious problems because of the way he’d grown up. Said it was gonna take a long time to fix it but he would fix it. If. Whole list of ifs. If I didn’t put any pressure on Reggie to perform. If I respected Reggie as a person. Respected his confidentiality. I said what’s my part in all this? He said paying the bills and minding my own business. Reggie had to develop his own responsibility—long as I did it for him he’d never straighten out. Not that he kept what I said to him about Reggie confidential. Two years I paid that faker and at the end of it I got a boy who hated me because of what that man put in his head. It wasn’t till later that I found out he’d repeated everything I’d told him. Blown it way up and made it worse.”
“Did you complain?”
“Why? I was the stupid one. For bel
ieving. You wanna know how stupid? After … after Reggie … after he had his … after he was … gone—a year after, I went to another one. Of your crowd. Because my supervisor thought I should—not that she’d pay for it. And not that I wasn’t doing my job properly, ’cause I was. But I wasn’t sleeping well or eating or enjoying anything. It wasn’t like being alive at all. So she gave me a referral. I figured maybe a woman would be a better judge of character.… This joker was in Beverly Hills. Hundred and twenty an hour. Inflation, right? Not that the value went up. Though in the beginning this one seemed even more on the ball than the first one. Quiet. Polite. A real gentleman. And he seemed to understand. I felt … talking to him made me feel better. In the beginning. I started to be able to work again. Then …”
She stopped, clamping her mouth shut. Shifting her attention from me to the walls to the floor to the handkerchief in her hand. Staring at the sodden cloth with surprise and revulsion.
She dropped it as if it were lice-ridden.
“Forget it,” she said. “Water under the dam.”
I nodded.
She tossed the handkerchief at me and I caught it.
She said, “Baseball Bob,” with reflexive quickness. Laughed. Shut it off.
I put the handkerchief on the table. “Baseball Bob?”
“We used to say that,” she said defensively. “Jimmy and me and Reggie. When Reggie was little. When someone would make a good catch, he was Baseball Bob—it was stupid.”
“In my family it was ‘You can be on my team.’ ”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that one.”
We sat in silence, resigned to each other, like boxers in the thirteenth round.
She said, “That’s it. My secrets. Happy?”
The phone rang. I picked it up. The operator said, “Dr. Delaware, please?”
“Speaking.”
“There’s a call for you from a Dr. Sturgis. He’s been paging you for the last ten minutes.”
Vicki stood.
I motioned her to wait. “Tell him I’ll call him back.”
I hung up. She remained on her feet.
“That second therapist,” I said. “He abused you, didn’t he?”
“Abuse?” The word seemed to amuse her. “What? Like some kind of abused child?”
“It’s pretty much the same thing, isn’t it?” I said. “Breaking a trust?”
“Breaking a trust, huh? How about blowing it up? But that’s okay. I learned from it—it made me stronger. Now I watch myself.”
“You never complained about him either?”
“Nope. Told you I’m stupid.”
“I—”
“Sure,” she said. “That’s all I needed, his word against mine—who’re they gonna believe? He’d get lawyers to go into my life and dig it all up—Reggie. Probably get experts to say I was a liar and a rotten mother …” Tears. “I wanted my boy to rest in peace, okay? Even though …”
She threw up her hands, put her palms together.
“Even though what, Vicki?”
“Even though he never gave me peace.” Her voice soared in pitch, teetering on hysteria.
“He blamed me till the end. Never got rid of those feelings that first faker planted in his head. I was the bad one. I’d never cared about him. I’d made him not learn, not do his homework. I didn’t force him to go to school because I didn’t care a hoot. It was ’cause of me he dropped out and started … running around with bad influences and … I was one hundred percent of it, hundred and five.…”
She let out a laugh that raised the hair on the back of my neck.
“Wanna hear something confidential—kind of stuff you people like to hear? He was the one gave me that book about that bitch from New Jersey. That was his Mother’s Day gift to me, okay? All wrapped up in a little box with ribbons and the word Mom on it. In printing, ’cause he couldn’t do cursive, never mastered it—even his printing was all crooked, like a first-grader’s. He hadn’t given me a present for years, not since he stopped bringing home his shop projects. But there it was, little gift-wrapped package, and inside this little used paperback book on dead babies. I nearly threw up, but I read it anyway. Trying to see if there was something I’d missed. That he was trying to tell me something I wasn’t getting. But there wasn’t. It was just plain ugly. She was a monster. No real nurse. And one thing I know—one thing I’ve worked into my own head, without experts—is that she has nothing to do with me, okay? She and me didn’t even live on the same planet. I make kids feel better. I’m good at that. And I never hurt them, okay? Never. And I’m gonna keep helping them the rest of my natural life.”
18
Can I go now?” she said. “I’d like to wash my face.”
Unable to think of a reason to keep her there, I said, “Sure.”
She righted her cap. “Listen, I don’t need any more grief, okay? The main thing is for Cassie to get better. Not that …” She colored and began walking to the door.
“Not that I can do any good in that department?” I said.
“I meant, not that it’s gonna be easy. If you’re the one ends up diagnosing her, hats off to you.”
“What do you think about the fact that the doctors can’t find anything?”
Her hand rested on the doorknob. “Doctors can’t find lots of things. If patients knew how much guessing goes on, they’d …” She stopped. “I keep on, I’m gonna get myself in trouble again.”
“Why are you so certain it’s organic?”
“Because what else could it be? These aren’t abusers. Cindy’s one of the best mothers I’ve ever seen, and Dr. Jones is a real gentleman. And despite who they are, you’d never know it, because they don’t lord it over anyone, okay? That’s real class, far as I’m concerned. Go out and see for yourself—they love that little girl. It’s just a matter of time.”
“Before what?”
“Before someone figures out what’s wrong. I’ve seen it lots of times. Doctors can’t figure things out so they call it psychosomatic. Then poof, all of a sudden someone finds something that hasn’t been looked for before and you’ve got yourself a new disease. They call that medical progress.”
“What do you call it?”
She stared at me. “I call it progress too.”
She walked away and I stayed behind, thinking. I’d gotten her to talk but had I learned anything?
My thoughts shifted to the cruel gift her son had given her. Pure spite? Or had he been telling her something?
Had she told me about it as part of a game? Told me just what she wanted me to know?
I stayed with it a while and came up with nothing. Cleared my head and walked to 505W.
Cassie sat propped up in bed, wearing red floral pajamas with white collar and cuffs. Her cheeks were raspberry-pink and her hair was gathered in a topknot tied with a white bow. The I.V. had been disconnected and it stood in the corner, like a metal scarecrow. Depleted glucose bags hung from the arms. The only evidence her veins had been punctured was a small round Band-Aid atop one hand and the yellow Betadine stain below it. Her eyes glistened as they followed me.
Cindy sat near her on the bed, spoon-feeding her cereal. She wore a SAVE THE OCEANS T-shirt over a denim skirt and sandals. Dolphins cavorted across her bustline. She and Cassie looked more similar than ever.
As I approached, Cassie opened a mouth full of cereal-mush. A stray speck dotted her upper lip.
Cindy picked it off. “Swallow, honey. Hi, Dr. Delaware. We didn’t expect to see you today.”
I put my briefcase down and sat on the foot of the bed. Cassie looked confused but not fearful.
“Why’s that?” I said.
“It’s the weekend.”
“You’re here, so I’m here.”
“That’s very nice of you. Look, sweetie, Dr. Delaware came all the way to see you on a Saturday.”
Cassie looked at Cindy, then back at me, still muddled.
Wondering about the mental effects of the seizure, I said, “Ho
w’s everything?”
“Oh, fine.”
I touched Cassie’s hand. She didn’t move for a second, then drew away, slowly. When I chucked her chin, she looked down at my hand.
“Hi, Cassie,” I said.
She continued to stare. Some milk dribbled out of her mouth. Cindy wiped it and closed her mouth gently. Cassie started to chew. Then she parted her lips and said, “Hah,” through the mush.
“Right!” said Cindy. “Hi! That’s great, Cass!”
“Hah.”
“We did very well with our food today, Dr. Delaware. Juice and fruit and crackers for breakfast. Then we had our breakfast Krispies for lunch.”
“Great.”
“Real great.” Her voice was tight.
Remembering the short-lived moment of tension last time I’d talked to her—the feeling that she was about to tell me something important—I said, “Is there anything you want to discuss with me?”
She touched Cassie’s hair. Cassie started to play with another drawing. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Dr. Eves tells me you’ll be going home soon.”
“That’s what she says.” She adjusted Cassie’s topknot. “I’m sure looking forward to it.”
“Bet you are,” I said. “No more doctors for a while.”
She looked at me. “The doctors have been great. I know they’re doing their best.”
“You’ve seen some of the best,” I agreed. “Bogner, Torgeson, Macauley, Dawn Herbert.”
No reaction.
“Got anything planned when you get back home?”
“Just getting back to normal.”
Wondering what that meant, I said, “I’d like to come out pretty soon.”
“Oh—of course. You can draw with Cassie at her play table. I’m sure we can find a chair to fit you—can’t we, Cass?”
“Fip.”
“Right! Fit.”
“Fip.”
“Excellent, Cass. Do you want Dr. Delaware to draw with you at your little bear table?” When Cassie didn’t answer she said, “Draw? Draw pictures?” and made scrawling motions with one hand.
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