by A. J. Finn
I leave the candle lit, the tiny blob of flame pulsing.
And then, humming the Laura theme, I swipe my phone on and take to the Internet in search of my patients. My former patients. Ten months ago I lost them all: I lost Mary, nine years old, struggling with her parents’ divorce; I lost Justin, eight, whose twin brother had died of melanoma; I lost Anne Marie, at age twelve still afraid of the dark. I lost Rasheed (eleven, transgender) and Emily (nine, bullying); I lost a preternaturally depressed little ten-year-old named, of all things, Joy. I lost their tears and their troubles and their rage and their relief. I lost nineteen children all told. Twenty, if you count my daughter.
I know where Olivia is now, of course. The others I’ve been tracking. Not too often—a psychologist isn’t supposed to investigate her patients, past patients included—but every month or so, swollen with longing, I’ll take to the web. I’ve got a few Internet research tools at my disposal: a phantom Facebook account; a stale LinkedIn profile. With young people, though, only Google will do, really.
After reading of Ava’s spelling-bee championship and Theo’s election to the middle school student council, after scanning the Instagram albums of Grace’s mother and scrolling through Ben’s Twitter feed (he really ought to activate some privacy settings), after wiping the tears from my cheeks and sinking three glasses of red, I find myself back in my bedroom, browsing photos on my phone. And then, once more, I talk to Ed.
“Guess who,” I say, the way I always do.
“You’re pretty tipsy, slugger,” he points out.
“It’s been a long day.” I glance at my empty glass, feel a prickle of guilt. “What’s Livvy up to?”
“Getting ready for tomorrow.”
“Oh. What’s her costume?”
“A ghost,” Ed says.
“You got lucky.”
“What do you mean?”
I laugh. “Last year she was a fire truck.”
“Man, that took days.”
“It took me days.”
I can hear him grin.
Across the park, three stories up, through the window and in the depths of a dark room, there’s the glow of a computer screen. Light dawns, an instant sunrise; I see a desk, a table lamp, and then Ethan, shucking his sweater. Affirmative: Our bedrooms do indeed face each other.
He turns around, eyes cast down, and peels off his shirt. I look away.
Sunday, October 31
10
Weak morning light strains through my bedroom window. I roll over; my hip cracks against my laptop. A late night playing bad chess. My knights stumbled, my rooks crashed.
I drag myself to and from the shower, mop my hair with a towel, skid deodorant under my arms. Fit for fight, as Sally says. Happy Halloween.
I won’t be answering any doors this evening, of course. David will head out at seven—downtown, I think he said. I bet that’s fun.
He suggested earlier that we leave a bowl of candy on the stoop. “Any kid would take it within a minute, bowl and all,” I told him.
He seemed miffed. “I wasn’t a child psychologist,” he said.
“You don’t need to have been a child psychologist. You just need to have been a child.”
So I’m going to switch off the lights and pretend no one’s home.
I visit my film site. Andrew is online; he posted a link to a Pauline Kael essay on Vertigo—“stupid” and “shallow”—and beneath that, he’s making a list: Best noir to hold hands through? (The Third Man. The last shot alone.)
I read the Kael piece, ping him a message. After five minutes, he logs out.
I can’t remember the last time someone held my hand.
11
Whap.
The front door again. This time I’m coiled on the sofa, watching Rififi—the extended heist sequence, half an hour without a syllable of dialogue or a note of music, just diegetic sound and the hum of blood in your ears. Yves had suggested I spend more time with French cinema. Presumably a semi-silent film was not what he had in mind. Quel dommage.
Then that dull whap at the door, a second time.
I peel the blanket from my legs, swing myself to my feet, find the remote, pause the movie.
Twilight sifting down outside. I walk to the door and open it.
Whap.
I step into the hall—the one area of the house I dislike and distrust, the cool gray zone between my realm and the outside world. Right now it’s dim in the dusk, the dark walls like hands about to clap me between them.
Streaks of leaded glass line the front door. I approach one, gaze through it.
A crack, and the window shudders. A tiny missile has struck: an egg, blasted, its guts spangled across the glass. I hear myself gasp. Through the smear of yolk I can see three kids in the street, their faces bright, their grins bold, one of them poised with an egg in his fist.
I sway where I stand, place a hand against the wall.
This is my home. That’s my window.
My throat shrinks. Tears well in my eyes. I feel surprised, then ashamed.
Whap.
Then angry.
I can’t fling wide the door and send them scurrying. I can’t barrel outside and confront them. I rap on the window, sharply—
Whap.
I slap the heel of my hand against the door.
I bash it with my fist.
I growl, then I roar, my voice bounding between the walls, the dark little hall a chamber of echoes.
I’m helpless.
No, you’re not, I can hear Dr. Fielding say.
In, two, three, four.
No, I’m not.
I’m not. I toiled nearly a decade as a graduate student. I spent fifteen months training in inner-city schools. I practiced for seven years. I’m tough, I promised Sally.
Scraping my hair back, I retreat to the living room, yank a breath from the air, stab the intercom with one finger.
“Get away from my house,” I hiss. Surely they’ll hear the squawk outside.
Whap.
My finger is wobbling on the intercom button. “Get away from my house!”
Whap.
I stumble across the room, trip up the stairs, race into my study, to the window. There they are, clustered in the street like marauders, laying siege to my home, their shadows endless in the dying light. I bat at the glass.
One of them points at me, laughs. Winds his arm like a pitcher. Looses another egg.
I knock harder on the glass, hard enough to dislodge a pane. That’s my door. This is my home.
My vision blurs.
And suddenly I’m rushing down the stairs; suddenly I’m back in the dark of the hall, my bare feet on the tiles, my hand on the knob. Anger grips me by the throat; my sight is swimming. I seize a breath, seize another.
In-two-three—
I jolt the door open. Light and air blast me.
For an instant it’s silent, as silent as the film, as slow as the sunset. The houses opposite. The three kids between. The street around them. Quiet and still, a stopped clock.
I could swear I hear a crack, as of a felled tree.
And then—
—and then it bulges toward me, swelling, now rushing, a boulder flung from a catapult; slams me with such force, walloping my gut, that I fold. My mouth opens like a window. Wind whips into it. I’m an empty house, rotten rafters and howling air. My roof collapses with a groan—
—and I’m groaning, sliding, avalanching, one hand scraped along the brick, the other lunging into space. Eyes reel and roll: the lurid red of leaves, then darkness; lights up on a woman in black, vision blanching, bleaching, until molten white swarms my eyes and pools there, thick and deep. I try to cry out, my lips brush grit. I taste concrete. I taste blood. I feel my limbs pinwheeled on the ground. The ground ripples against my body. My body ripples against the air.
Somewhere in the attic of my brain I recall that this happened once before, on these same steps. I remember the low tide of voices, the odd word breach
ing bright and clear: fallen, neighbor, anyone, crazy. This time, nothing.
Arm slung around someone’s neck. Hair, coarser than my own, rubs my face. Feet scuffle feebly on the ground, on the floor; and now I’m inside, in the chill of the hall, in the warmth of the living room.
12
“You took a tumble!”
My vision fills like a Polaroid print. I’m looking at the ceiling, at a single recessed light socket staring back at me, a beady eye.
“I’m getting something for you—one second . . .”
I let my head loll to one side. Velvet fizzes in my ear. The living room chaise—the fainting couch. Ha.
“One second, one second . . .”
At the kitchen sink stands a woman, turned away from me, a rope of dark hair trailing down her back.
I bring my hands to my face, cup them over my nose and mouth, breathe in, breathe out. Calm. Calm. My lip aches.
“I was just headed next door when I saw those little shits chucking eggs,” she explains. “I said to them, ‘What are you up to, little shits?,’ and then you sort of . . . lurched through the door and went down like a sack of . . .” She doesn’t finish the sentence. I wonder if she was going to say shit.
Instead she turns, a glass in each hand, one filled with water, one with something thick and gold. Brandy, I hope, from the liquor cabinet.
“No idea if brandy actually works,” she says. “I feel like I’m in Downton Abbey. I’m your Florence Nightingale!”
“You’re the woman from across the park,” I mumble. The words stagger off my tongue like drunks from a bar. I’m tough. Pathetic.
“What’s that?”
And then, in spite of myself: “You’re Jane Russell.”
She stops, looking at me in wonder, then laughs, her teeth glinting in the half-light. “How do you know that?”
“You said you were going next door?” Trying to enunciate. Irish wristwatch, I think. Unique New York. “Your son came by.”
Through the mesh of my eyelashes I study her. She’s what Ed might call, approvingly, a ripe woman: hips and lips full, bust ample, skin mellow, face merry, eyes a gas-jet blue. She wears indigo jeans and a black sweater, scoop-necked, with a silver pendant resting on her chest. Late thirties, I’d guess. She must have been a baby when she had her baby.
As with her son, I like her on sight.
She moves to the chaise, knocks my knee with her own.
“Sit up. In case you’ve got a concussion.” I oblige, dragging myself into position, as she sets the glasses on the table, then parks herself across from me, where her son sat yesterday. She turns to the television, furrows her brow.
“What are you watching? A black-and-white movie?” Baffled.
I reach for the remote and tap the power button. The screen goes blank.
“Dark in here,” Jane observes.
“Could you get the lights?” I ask. “I’m feeling a little . . .” Can’t finish.
“Sure.” She reaches over the back of the sofa, switches on the floor lamp. The room glows.
I tip my head back, stare at the beveled molding on the ceiling. In, two, three, four. It could use a touch-up. I’ll ask David. Out, two, three, four.
“So,” Jane says, elbows on her knees, scrutinizing me. “What happened out there?”
I shut my eyes. “Panic attack.”
“Oh, honey—what’s your name?”
“Anna. Fox.”
“Anna. They were just some stupid kids.”
“No, that wasn’t it. I can’t go outside.” I look down, grasp for the brandy.
“But you did go outside. Easy does it with that stuff,” she adds as I knock back my drink.
“I shouldn’t have. Gone outside.”
“Why not? You a vampire?”
Practically, I think, appraising my arm—fish-belly white. “I’m agoraphobic?” I say.
She purses her lips. “Is that a question?”
“No, I just wasn’t sure you’d know what it meant.”
“Of course I know. You don’t do open spaces.”
I close my eyes again, nod.
“But I thought agoraphobia means you just can’t, you know, go camping. Outdoorsy stuff.”
“I can’t go anywhere.”
Jane sucks her teeth. “How long has this been going on?”
I drain the last drops of brandy. “Ten months.”
She doesn’t pursue it. I breathe deeply, cough.
“Do you need an inhaler or something?”
I shake my head. “That would only make it worse. Raise my heart rate.”
She considers this. “What about a paper bag?”
I set the glass down, reach for the water. “No. I mean, sometimes, but not now. Thank you for bringing me inside. I’m very embarrassed.”
“Oh, don’t—”
“No, I am. Very. It won’t become a habit, I promise.”
She purses her lips again. Very active mouth, I notice. Possible smoker, although she smells of shea butter. “So it’s happened before? You going outside, and . . . ?”
I grimace. “Back in the spring. Delivery guy left my groceries on the front steps, and I thought I could just . . . grab them.”
“And you couldn’t.”
“I couldn’t. But there were lots of people passing by that time. It took them a minute to decide I wasn’t crazy or homeless.”
Jane looks around the room. “You definitely aren’t homeless. This place is . . . wow.” She takes it in, then pulls her phone from her pocket, checks the screen. “I need to get back to the house,” she says, standing.
I try to rise with her, but my legs won’t cooperate. “Your son is a very nice boy,” I tell her. “He dropped that off. Thank you,” I add.
She eyes the candle on the table, touches the chain at her throat. “He’s a good kid. Always has been.”
“Very nice-looking, too.”
“Always has been!” She slides a thumbnail into the locket; it cracks open, and she leans toward me, the locket swaying in the air. I see she expects me to take it. It’s oddly intimate, this stranger looming over me, my hand on her chain. Or perhaps I’m just so unaccustomed to human contact.
Inside the locket is a tiny photograph, glossy and vivid: a small boy, age four or so, yellow hair in riot, teeth like a picket fence after a hurricane. One eyebrow cleft by a scar. Ethan, unmistakably.
“How old is he here?”
“Five. But he looks younger, don’t you think?”
“I would have guessed four.”
“Exactly.”
“When did he get so tall?” I ask, releasing the locket.
She gently shuts it. “Sometime between then and now!” She laughs. Then, abruptly: “You’re okay for me to leave? You’re not going to hyperventilate?”
“I’m not going to hyperventilate.”
“Do you want some more brandy?” she asks, bending to the coffee table—there’s a photo album there, unfamiliar; she must have brought it with her. She tucks it beneath her arm and points to the empty glass.
“I’ll stick with water,” I lie.
“Okay.” She pauses, her gaze fixed on the window. “Okay,” she repeats. “So a very handsome man just came up the walk.” She looks at me. “Is that your husband?”
“Oh, no. That’s David. He’s my tenant. Downstairs.”
“He’s your tenant?” Jane brays. “I wish he were mine!”
The bell hasn’t chimed this evening, not once. Maybe the dark windows put off any trick-or-treaters. Maybe it was the dried yolk.
I subside into bed early.
Midway through graduate school, I met a seven-year-old boy afflicted with the so-called Cotard delusion, a psychological phenomenon whereby the individual believes that he is dead. A rare disorder, with pediatric instances rarer still; the recommended treatment is an antipsychotic regimen or, in stubborn cases, electroconvulsive therapy. But I managed to talk him out of it. It was my first great success, and it brought me
to Wesley’s attention.
That little boy would be well into his teens now, almost Ethan’s age, not quite half mine. I think of him tonight as I stare at the ceiling, feeling dead myself. Dead but not gone, watching life surge forward around me, powerless to intervene.
Monday, November 1
13
When I come downstairs this morning, sloping into the kitchen, I find a note slipped beneath the basement door. eggs.
I study it, confused. Does David want breakfast? Then I turn it over, see the word Cleaned above the fold. Thank you, David.
Eggs do sound good, come to think of it, so I empty three into a skillet and serve myself sunny-side up. A few minutes later I’m at my desk, sucking the last of the yolk and punching in at the Agora.
Morning is rush hour here—agoraphobes often register acute anxiety after waking up. Sure enough, we’re gridlocked today. I spend two hours offering solace and support; I refer users to assorted medications (imipramine is my drug of choice these days, although Xanax never goes out of style); I mediate a dispute over the (indisputable) benefits of aversion therapy; I watch, at the request of Dimples2016, a video clip in which a cat plays the drums.
I’m about to sign off, zip over to the chess forum, avenge Saturday’s defeats, when a message box blooms on my screen.
DiscoMickey: Thanks again for your help the other day doc.
The panic attack. I’d manned the keyboard for nearly an hour as DiscoMickey, in his words, “freaked out.”
thedoctorisin: Anytime. You better?
DiscoMickey: Much.
DiscoMickey: Writing b/c I’m talking to a lady who’s new and she’s asking if there are any professionals on here. Sent her your FAQs.
A referral. I check the clock.
thedoctorisin: I might not have much time today, but send her my way.
DiscoMickey: Cool.
DiscoMickey has left the chat.