by A. J. Finn
Did he hear it? Did he see it? I ring his number.
Four tones, long and unhurried, then a generic recorded greeting: “We’re sorry. The person you have called . . .” A woman’s voice—always a woman. Maybe we sound more apologetic.
I press Cancel. Stroke the phone as though it’s a magic lamp and a genie will spout forth, ready to dispense his wisdom, grant my wishes.
Jane screamed. Twice. Her son denied that anything was wrong. I can’t summon the police; if he wouldn’t come clean to me, he certainly won’t say anything to men in uniform.
My nails carve sickles into my palm.
No. I need to speak to him again—or better still, to her. I jab the Recent button on my screen, press the Russells’ number. It rings just once before it’s picked up.
“Yes?” says Alistair in his pleasant tenor.
I catch my breath.
I look up: There he is, in the kitchen, phone at his ear. A hammer in his other hand. He doesn’t see me.
“This is Anna Fox from number two-thirteen. We met last—”
“Yes, I remember. Hello.”
“Hello,” I say, then wish I hadn’t. “I heard a scream just now, so I wanted to check on—”
Turning his back to me, he places the hammer on the counter—the hammer; was that what alarmed her?—and claps his hand to the nape of his neck, as if he’s comforting himself. “Sorry—you heard a what?” he asks.
I hadn’t expected this. “A scream?” I say. No: Make it authoritative. “A scream. A minute ago.”
“A scream?” Like it’s a foreign word. Sprezzatura. Schadenfreude. Scream.
“Yes.”
“From where?”
“From your house.” Turn around. I want to see your face.
“That’s . . . there’s been no scream here, I can promise you that.” I hear him chuckle, watch him lean against the wall.
“But I heard it.” And your son confirmed it, I think, although I won’t tell him that—it might aggravate him, might incense him.
“I think you must have heard something else. Or heard it from somewhere else.”
“No, I distinctly heard it from your house.”
“The only people here are myself and my son. I didn’t scream, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t, either.”
“But I heard—”
“Mrs. Fox, I’m so sorry, but I have to go—I’ve got another call coming in. Everything’s fine here. No scream, I promise you!”
“You—”
“Have a good day. Enjoy the weather.”
I watch him hang up, hear those two tones again. He lifts the hammer from the counter, leaves the room through a far door.
I gawk at my phone in disbelief, as if it might explain things to me.
And just then, as I look back toward the Russell house, I see her on her front stoop. She stands still for a moment, like a meerkat sensing a predator, before descending the steps. Twists her head that way, then this, then that way again; finally she walks west, toward the avenue, the crown of her head a halo in the sunset.
25
He leans in the doorway, shirt dark with sweat, hair matted. An earbud is plugged into one ear.
“What’s that?”
“Did you hear that scream at the Russells’?” I repeat. I heard him return just now, barely thirty minutes after Jane appeared on the stoop. In the meantime my Nikon has veered from window to window at the Russell house, like a dog snouting out foxholes.
“No, I left about a half hour ago,” David says. “Went down to the coffee shop for a sandwich.” He lifts his shirt to his face, mops up the sweat. His stomach is corrugated. “You heard a scream?”
“Two of them. Loud and clear. Around six o’clock?”
He eyes his watch. “I might’ve been there, only I didn’t hear much,” he says, pointing to the earbud; the other swings against his thigh. “Except for Springsteen.”
It’s practically the first personal preference he’s ever expressed, but the timing is off. I steam ahead. “Mr. Russell didn’t say you were there. He said it was just him and his son.”
“Then I’d probably left.”
“I called you.” It sounds like a plea.
He frowns, takes his phone from his pocket, looks at it, frowns deeper, as though the phone has let him down. “Oh. You need something?”
“So you didn’t hear anyone scream.”
“I didn’t hear anyone scream.”
I turn. “You need something?” he says again, but I’m already moving toward the window, camera in hand.
I see him as he sets out. The door opens, and when it closes, there he is. He trips quickly down the steps, turns left, marches along the sidewalk. Toward my house.
When the bell rings a moment later, I’m already waiting by the buzzer. I press it, hear him enter the hall, hear the front door crack shut behind him. I open the hall door to find him standing there in the dark, eyes red and raw, the blood vessels frayed within them.
“I’m sorry,” Ethan says, hovering on the threshold.
“Don’t be. Come in.”
He moves like a kite, feinting first toward the sofa, then to the kitchen. “Do you want something to eat?” I ask him.
“No, I can’t stay.” Shaking his head, tears skittering down his face. Twice this child has set foot in my house, and twice he’s cried.
Of course, I’m accustomed to children in distress: weeping, shouting, pummeling dolls, flaying books. It used to be that Olivia was the only one I could hug. Now I open my arms to Ethan, spread them wide like wings, and he walks into them awkwardly, as though bumping into me.
For an instant, and then for a moment, I’m holding my daughter again—holding her before her first day of school, holding her in the swimming pool on our vacation in Barbados, clutching her amid the silent snowfall. Her heart beating against my own, a beat apart, a continuous drumline, blood surging through us both.
He mutters something indistinct against my shoulder. “What’s that?”
“I said I’m really sorry,” he repeats, prying himself free, skidding his sleeve beneath his nose. “I’m really sorry.”
“It’s fine. Stop saying that. It’s fine.” I brush a lock of hair from my eye, do the same for him. “What’s going on?”
“My dad . . .” He stops, glances through the window at his house. In the dark it glowers like a skull. “My dad was yelling, and I needed to get out of the house.”
“Where’s your mom?”
He sniffles, swipes at his nose again. “I don’t know.” A couple of deep breaths and he looks me in the eye. “Sorry. I don’t know where she is. She’s fine, though.”
“Is she?”
He sneezes, looks down. Punch has slipped between his feet, grating his body against Ethan’s shins. Ethan sneezes again.
“Sorry.” Another sniffle. “Cat.” He looks around, as if surprised to find himself in my kitchen. “I should go back. My dad’ll be angry.”
“Sounds as though he’s already angry.” I tug a chair back from the table, gesture to it.
He considers the chair, then darts his eyes back to the window. “I’ve gotta go. I shouldn’t have come over. I just . . .”
“You needed to get out of the house,” I finish. “I understand. But is it safe to go back?”
To my surprise, he laughs, short and spiky. “He talks big. That’s all. I’m not afraid of him.”
“But your mom is.”
He says nothing.
As far as I can see, Ethan doesn’t display any of the more obvious hallmarks of child abuse: His face and forearms are unmarked, his demeanor bright and outgoing (although he has cried twice, let’s not forget that), his hygiene satisfactory. But this is just an impression, just a glance. And he is, after all, standing here in my kitchen, slinging nervous looks at his home across the park.
I push the chair back into place. “I want you to have my cell number,” I tell him.
He nods—grudgingly, I think, but it’ll
do. “Could you write it down for me?” he asks.
“You don’t have a phone?”
A shake of the head. “He—my dad won’t let me.” He sniffles. “I don’t have email, either.”
Not surprising. I fetch an old receipt from a kitchen drawer, scribble on it. Four digits in, I realize I’m writing out my old work number, the emergency line I reserved for my patients. “1-800-ANNA-NOW,” Ed used to joke.
“Sorry. Wrong number.” I slash a line through it, then jot down the correct one. When I look up again, he’s standing by the kitchen door, looking across the park at his house.
“You don’t have to go back there,” I say.
He turns. Hesitates. Shakes his head. “I’ve gotta head home.”
I nod, offer him the paper. He pockets it.
“You can call me anytime,” I say. “And share that number with your mom too, please.”
“Okay.” He’s moving toward the door, shoulders back, back straight. Bracing for battle, I think.
“Ethan?”
He turns, one hand on the doorknob.
“I mean it. Anytime.”
He nods. Then he opens the door and walks out.
I return to the window, watch him walk past the park, climb the steps, push his key into the lock. He pauses, draws a breath. Then he disappears inside.
26
Two hours later, I sluice the last of the wine down my throat, stand the bottle on the coffee table. I prop myself up, slowly, then tip to the other side, like the second hand of a clock.
No. Haul yourself to your bedroom. To your bathroom.
With the shower gushing, the last few days flood my brain, filling the fissures there, welling up in the hollows: Ethan, crying on the couch; Dr. Fielding and his high-voltage glasses; Bina, her leg braced against my spine; that whirlpool of a night when Jane visited. Ed’s voice in my ear. David with the knife. Alistair—a good man, a good father. Those screams.
I squeeze a slug of shampoo into one hand, smear it absently into my hair. The tide rises at my feet.
And the pills—God, the pills. “These are powerful psychotropics, Anna,” Dr. Fielding advised me at the very beginning, back when I was woolly on painkillers. “Use them responsibly.”
I press my palms against the wall, hang my head beneath the faucet, my face lurking within a dark cave of hair. Something’s happening to me, through me, something dangerous and new. It’s taken root, a poison tree; it’s grown, fanning out, vines winding round my gut, my lungs, my heart. “The pills,” I say, my voice soft and low amid the roar, like I’m speaking underwater.
My hand sketches hieroglyphs on the glass. I clear my eyes and read them. Over and over, across the door, I’ve written Jane Russell’s name.
Thursday, November 4
27
He lies on his back. I run a finger along the fence of dark hair that partitions his torso from navel to chest. “I like your body,” I tell him.
He sighs and smiles. “Don’t,” he says; and then, with my hand idling in the shallows of his neck, he catalogues his every flaw: the dry skin that makes terrazzo of his back; the single mole between his shoulder blades, like an Eskimo marooned on an expanse of flaggy ice; his warped thumbnail; his knobbed wrists; the tiny white scar that hyphenates his nostrils.
I finger the wound. My pinkie dips into his nose; he snorts. “How did it happen?” I ask.
He twists my hair around his thumb. “My cousin.”
“I didn’t know you had a cousin.”
“Two. This was my cousin Robin. He held a razor against my nose and said he’d slit my nostrils so that I only had one. And when I shook my head no, the blade sliced me.”
“God.”
He exhales. “I know. If I’d only nodded okay, it would’ve been fine.”
I smile. “How old were you?”
“Oh, this was last Tuesday.”
Now I laugh, and so does he.
As I surface, the dream drains away like water. The memory, really. I try to scoop it up in my palms, but it’s gone.
I press a hand against my forehead, hoping to smooth away the hangover. Cast the sheets to one side, ditch my nightclothes as I walk to the dresser, check the clock on the wall: 10:10, a waxed mustache on its face. I slept for twelve hours.
Yesterday has faded like a flower, yellow and wilted. A domestic dispute, unpleasant but not uncommon—that’s what I heard. Overheard, really; it’s none of my business. Perhaps Ed is right, I think as I clop down to my study.
Of course he’s right. A lot of stimulation: yes, indeed. Too much. I’m sleeping too much, drinking too much, thinking too much; too much, too much. De trop. Did I involve myself like this with the Millers when they arrived back in August? They never visited me, no, but still I studied their routines, tracked their movements, tagged them like sharks in the wild. So it isn’t that the Russells are particularly interesting. They’re just particularly nearby.
I’m concerned for Jane, naturally. And especially for Ethan. He just lost his temper—that must be a pretty ferocious temper. But I can’t approach, say, Child Protective Services; there’s nothing to go on. At this point it would do more harm than good. That I know.
My phone rings.
This happens so infrequently that for a moment I’m confused. I look outside, as though it’s a birdcall. The phone isn’t in the pockets of my robe; I hear it buzzing somewhere above me. By the time I’ve reached my bedroom and found it in the trough of the sheets, it’s gone mute.
The screen reads Julian Fielding. I hit Redial.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Dr. Fielding. I missed you just now.”
“Anna. Hello.”
“Hello, hi.” Many benedictions all round. My head throbs.
“I’m calling—one minute . . .” His voice shrinks, then returns, hard in my ear. “I’m in an elevator. I’m calling to make sure you filled your prescription.”
What prescript—ah, yes; the pills Jane collected for me at the door. “I did, in fact.”
“Good. I hope you don’t think this patronizing, me checking in on you.”
I do, in fact. “Not at all.”
“You should experience the effects quite quickly.”
The rattan on the stairs scratches at my soles. “Swift results.”
“Well, I’d call them effects rather than results.”
No shower-pisser, he. “I’ll keep you posted,” I assure him, descending to the study.
“I felt concerned after our last session.”
I pause. “I—” No. I don’t know what to say.
“My hope is that this adjustment in your medication will help.”
Still I say nothing.
“Anna?”
“Yes. I hope so, too.”
His voice shrivels again.
“Sorry?”
A second later he’s at full volume. “These pills,” he says, “are not to be taken with alcohol.”
28
In the kitchen, I chase the pills with merlot. I understand Dr. Fielding’s concern, I do; I recognize that alcohol is a depressant, and as such, ill-suited to a depressive. I get it. I’ve written about it—“Juvenile Depression and Alcohol Abuse,” Journal of Pediatric Psychology (volume 37, number 4), Wesley Brill, coauthor. I can quote our conclusions, if necessary. As Bernard Shaw said, I often quote myself; it adds spice to my conversation. As Shaw also said, alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life. Good old Shaw.
So come on, Julian: These aren’t antibiotics. Besides, I’ve been mixing my medicines for almost a year, and take a look at me now.
My laptop sits in a pane of sunlight on the kitchen table. I pry it open, visit the Agora, walk two new recruits through the drill, weigh in on yet another drug debate. (None of them are to be taken with alcohol, I preach.) Once—only once—I cast a quick look at the Russell house. There’s Ethan, tapping away at his desk—playing a game, I suppose, or writing a paper; not surfing the Internet, anyway—and i
n the parlor Alistair sits with a tablet propped in his lap. A twenty-first-century family. No Jane, but that’s fine. None of my business. Too much stimulation.
“Goodbye, Russells,” I say, and turn my attention to the television. Gaslight—Ingrid Bergman, never more luscious, slowly going insane.
29
Sometime after lunch, I’m back at the laptop when I see GrannyLizzie enter the Agora, the little icon beside her name morphing into a smiley face, as though to be present on this forum is a pleasure and a joy. I decide to beat her to the punch.
thedoctorisin: Hello, Lizzie!
GrannyLizzie: Hello Doctor Anna!
thedoctorisin: How’s the weather in Montana?
GrannyLizzie: Rainy outside. Which is OK for an indoor gal like me!
GrannyLizzie: How’s the weather in New York City?
GrannyLizzie: Do I sound like a hillbilly saying that? Should I just say NYC??
thedoctorisin: Both work! It’s sunny here. How are you doing?
GrannyLizzie: Today has been tougher than yesterday, to be honest. So far.
I sip, roll the wine around my tongue.
thedoctorisin: That happens. Progress isn’t always smooth.
GrannyLizzie: I can tell that ! My neighbors are bringing groceries to me at home.
thedoctorisin: How terrific that yo’ve got such suportive people around you.
Two typos. More than two glasses of wine. That’s a pretty decent batting average, I think. “Pretty damn decent,” I say to myself, sipping again.
GrannyLizzie: BUT: The big news is that . . . my sons will be visiting me this weekend. Really want to be able to go outside with them. Really really!
thedoctorisin: Don’t be hard on yourself if its not meant to be this time around.
A pause.
GrannyLizzie: I know this is a harsh word, but it’s difficult for me not to feel like “a freak”.
Harsh indeed, and it needles my heart. I drain my glass, pull back the sleeves of my robe, rush my fingers over the keyboard.