The Program

by Stephen White

  Minutes earlier, when she’d first come into his office, she’d had a choice between a sofa and a chair. The chair was closer to Dr. Gregory’s own chair and was upholstered in leather the color of burnt butter. The sofa was farther from him and was covered in chenille. She chose being farther away, and she chose chenille over leather. Now she felt cold. Did it mean something? Dr. Gregory didn’t know. He filed it away.

  She apparently decided that his analogy about dreams wasn’t apt after all. “No. It’s not like a dream. It’s more like when you’re reading a book. When you know that the hero is in danger even though he doesn’t know he’s in danger, and you know how to warn him, to protect him—to save him—but you can’t communicate with him, because he doesn’t even know you’re there. Your heart races and you read faster, and you just want to crawl onto the pages and drag him to safety. Is it ever like that for you when you read?” She looked away from him, as though her admission embarrassed her. “I like books. I really, really like books,” she said, briefly closing her eyes before returning her gaze to meet his. “Does it make sense now?”

  It made perfect sense, but only because he already knew the broad outlines of the story she was about to tell. He could have just said, “Yes,” but his therapeutic instinct was to encourage her to sink, instead, into the crevices that most certainly meandered into caverns below her carefully chosen words. He said, “He was your hero? Robert was? Like in the books?”

  She stretched her eyes open wide. The expression tightened the flesh over her cheekbones. Her tone became mildly defiant. “I don’t want to cry. I’ve been crying for months. It feels like years. I want you to help me stop crying. Can you do that for me? I want to get on with my life.”

  “I don’t think you can choose when to stop crying.”

  She dabbed at her eyes. “At some point I have to. For Landon. She needs a functioning parent, doesn’t she? Am I being selfish with all this? Should she be here instead of me? God, what she’s been through is way too much for a little girl.”

  “You’re wondering if your daughter needs psychotherapy?”

  Peyton nodded. “Yes.”

  “There’s no arguing that she’s been through a lot, Peyton. Are you seeing signs that she might not be coping?”

  “No, no. Yes. Like what? What kind of signs?”

  “Is she sleeping normally?”

  “Yes.”

  “Eating well?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she moody? How’s her activity?”

  “No moodier than usual. And she’s very active, always doing something.”

  “Schoolwork? Friendships?”

  “She did fine in Louisiana. She’s… fine with her friends. That’s when she’s at her best, I think.”

  “Anything else unusual with her health or…?”

  Peyton touched her fingertips to her chin. “Maybe I’m worried that she’s doing too well. Is that possible?”

  Gregory didn’t answer.

  Peyton asked, “So what do you think?”

  He said, “I think your daughter has a mother who is very concerned about her. I also don’t hear any indications that her coping skills are currently failing her. If I do hear anything, I promise I’ll let you know.”

  “But my coping skills are failing me?”

  His eyes allowed her to wonder about her own question. She glanced away from him before looking back. “Can I tell you about that day now? In New Orleans. Is that all right?”

  “Of course, if that’s where you want to start.”

  As she absorbed his simple words he watched her muscles soften and she seemed to sink two inches farther into the contour of the cushions below her and behind her. “It’s where everyone wants me to start. The marshals, especially. They all want to hear either about that day or about that… other day during the trial. You know about that? The day of the sentencing. That’s all anyone seems to want to hear.”

  “Hopefully this will be a little different from your meetings with the marshals. You can choose where to begin when you’re in here,” Dr. Gregory said. “You barely know me. I’m not about to presuppose when or how much you’re going to feel like trusting me yet. Especially since you were hoping for a female therapist.”

  Her next move surprised him. She stood and stepped toward him and resettled herself onto the leather chair. Once her dress was tugged close to her knees, and her long legs were crossed, her feet dangled only eighteen inches from his. “I think I’ll be more comfortable here,” she explained. “Warmer maybe. If I don’t talk about… that day, what will I talk about?”

  He shrugged. “I can only guess what it’s like to be in your shoes. I can imagine a thousand issues. If I guessed ten times what would be most important, though, I think I would be wrong exactly ten times.”

  Peyton said, “I’m scared almost all the time, even when I’m at home. I’m not sleeping well. I’m losing weight. I’m irritable with my daughter. I’m becoming a paranoid monster.”

  “See,” Dr. Gregory said. “Those weren’t even on my top-ten list.”

  Of course, he could have guessed at some of them. But he never would have placed the words in her mouth for her. She did manage to surprise him with what she said next.

  “What’s happened hasn’t just stressed me out. What’s happened has changed me. Each day now, sometimes each and every minute of every day, I find myself waiting for the end to come. A cataclysmic end. That’s not me. I was raised believing in fairy princesses and knights on white horses. I’m someone who has always wanted to believe in infinity. And now I’m always looking for the end.

  “I don’t want to be that way. What I do want is to create something new here in Boulder. Something enduring and valuable for me and for Landon. But I’m too much of a wreck. I need you to help me, Doctor. I don’t have anyone else to help me, and I’m afraid that I’m sinking.”

  AFTER ALAN GREGORY was finished with his session with Peyton, he was meeting his wife, Lauren, for lunch. She’d told him that morning over toast and juice that she wanted to go to Rhumba. One of the managers at Rhumba was a patient of his, however, and he wasn’t comfortable doing business in establishments where his patients worked, so he planned to try to convince his wife to choose another place to eat.

  Even before they were out the front door of the old Victorian, she said, “Was that your patient who just left, or was it Diane’s?”

  The fact that his wife was asking a question about one of his patients caught Alan’s attention. She rarely mentioned his patients. There was little point in pretending that the woman who’d just walked out the door hadn’t been his patient. Diane Estevez, his partner in the building, wasn’t working that day. When he didn’t answer right away, Lauren said, “That’s right, I forgot. Diane’s not here today. She and Raoul are still house-hunting.”

  Alan smiled.

  Lauren said, “I think I recognized her. Your patient. Her hair’s different, she’s lost weight, she’s wearing glasses, but I think I recognized her. Is it who I think it is?”

  Lauren knew the rules about patient confidentiality and wouldn’t press him to actually divulge a patient’s identity. Alan knew he could have dropped the whole issue with a friendly reminder that he couldn’t say anything about any of his patients, but his curiosity prevailed. He asked her, “Who do you think it is? Somebody you know from work or something?”

  “No. It’s that prosecutor who used to be in the news. The one from New Orleans. Kirsten something. Lord. Kirsten Lord. The one who was threatened in court and then her husband was murdered. You remember? We talked about her a lot, you and I, when all that was going on. People in the DA’s office still mention her occasionally. Everybody wonders what happened to her. After her husband was buried it seems she just fell off the face of the earth.” She paused. “Anyway, that’s who your new patient is.” She paused again. “At least now I know what happened to her.”

  Alan felt his stomach flip, but he forced a smile and pressed his open
palm against his wife’s taut abdomen. He asked, “How’s our baby?”

  She was silent for a moment, trying to make sense of the non sequitur.

  Alan stepped away and checked to make sure the door from the waiting room to the back of the house was locked. When he looked back at Lauren again, her eyes were fixed on his face. Finally she said, “She’s your new Witness Protection patient, isn’t she?” It barely qualified as a question, and Lauren certainly didn’t expect him to answer. Alan had already told her that he was scheduled to pick up two new WITSEC patients from Teri Grady.

  He leaned close to Lauren and looked into her violet eyes. “The baby? How’s our little one?”

  She knew he was diverting, that she had gotten as much as she was going to get from him about his patient. “The baby’s good, sweets. An active day.” She gripped his hand tightly as they descended the old stairs on the front porch. Without changing her pace at all, she said, “If I’m right about who she is, I want you to take especially good care of her, okay? This new patient of yours. You promise me you’ll do everything you know how to help her?”

  “I promise,” he said. “You feel like Mexican food? The baby likes Mexican, right?”

  “The baby does fine with Mexican. But I thought we were going to Rhumba. I have a taste for Rhumba.” She did a little quasi-Caribbean dance step to punctuate her pronouncement.

  “I think I feel like Mexican. Do you mind?”

  She repeated the dance step, this time more dramatically. “We want Rhumba. We really, really want Rhumba.”

  “Then,” he said, “I guess it’s Rhumba.”

  DR. GREGORY’S WIFE, Lauren, was a prosecutor in Boulder County. The day after Ernesto Castro threatened Kirsten Lord in the New Orleans courtroom, Lauren had heard the details at work and had told Alan the story over dinner. Not surprisingly, the very-public threat was all the buzz in the Boulder DA’s office and probably in every other prosecutor’s office in the United States.

  A few weeks later, Lauren cried at the breakfast table as she slid the Denver Post across the table toward her husband. On the front page was a photograph of Kirsten stooped over her husband Robert’s inert body on the sidewalk outside a restaurant in New Orleans’ French Quarter.

  “He did it,” she said. “The asshole did it. He took his revenge on her. He did exactly what he threatened to do.”

  For days Lauren seemed to grieve for Kirsten Lord’s loss as though she were grieving for a close colleague who worked right down the hall. Lauren mentally reviewed all the cases she’d prosecuted and recalled all the assholes who’d made oblique or direct threats over the years.

  As they walked down Pearl Street toward Rhumba for lunch, Alan reminded himself that Lauren had a special attachment to what had happened to Kirsten Lord. Lauren had paid particular attention to Kirsten’s tragedies. She had empathized with her losses on a very personal level. That, he told himself, was why she recognized the woman exiting his waiting room as Kirsten Lord, now Peyton Francis.

  Still, Alan fought despair as they made their way toward Ninth Street. How was Peyton going to survive all this?

  If Lauren recognized her this easily, someone else surely would. Peyton was too well known to hide.

  How would she and Landon survive all this?

  ALAN PULLED HIS wife to a stop in front of the Tibetan imports store on Pearl Street and waited for her to look at him. “Lauren, just for the sake of argument, let’s say you were right before. About that patient you saw in my office?”

  She scanned his eyes for some sign of where he was heading with his words. She didn’t find it. She said, “Yes?”

  “Mentioning anything to anyone about who you think she is might put her at tremendous risk.”

  She could hear the tension in his words. She fought a reflex to be offended. “I know that.”

  “Okay,” he said. “That’s all I wanted to say.”

  She laced her fingers in his and they resumed their walk.

  She repeated her little dance.

  4

  THE FOLLOWING MONDAY AT NINE-THIRTY

  “I go to Toledo next week to testify. You know ’bout that?”

  “No. I don’t. Truth is, I still don’t know about much as far as you’re concerned,” Dr. Alan Gregory admitted to the second of his two new WITSEC patients.

  The man laughed and smiled. “Welcome to the fuckin’ club. The testifying? It’s part of the deal. I stay in the program so long as I cooperate and testify when they want me to testify. I refuse to testify, I’m back on my own. This trial in Toledo’s bogus, though, I told ’em that right from the start. I’m basically going to say I saw so-and-so going into such-and-such a meeting. That’s it. I wasn’t in the meeting. I don’t know who said what. Somebody came out later, somebody let’s say I do know, and they told me I might be doing a piece of work in Indianapolis. That’s all I know. Who wanted this guy taken care of? I don’t know that for sure. That’s what I’ll say when they ask me. For that little bedtime story I’ll spend a day being babysat by a couple of marshals barely older than my oldest grandson.”

  From Dr. Gregory’s briefing by Ron Kriciak, he knew that the man sitting across from him in the leather chair was discussing his previous career. “Doing a piece of work” was a euphemism for planning someone’s murder. Dr. Gregory tried to act nonplussed and immediately questioned whether or not that was the right therapeutic move.

  He asked a meaningless question. It was one of the things he did in therapy when he was nervous. He asked, “When you testify at these trials, you fly in and fly out in the same day?”

  “Nah. Fly in the day before. Spend the day in a jail cell somewhere in solitary. Fly back here when the U.S. attorney’s done with me. Marshals hold my hand every step of the way.”

  “You okay with this?”

  The new patient raised his chin a smidgeon as though his tie were too tight. He wasn’t wearing a tie. “You mean the traveling or the squealing? Know why I’m here? In the program? They turned on me after I stayed quiet for twelve years. The people I stayed loyal to turned on me. After I honor my word in the federal pen for twelve years, they turn on me. What do I owe ’em after that? Tell ya, I don’t owe ’em.”

  Dr. Gregory tried to recall the man’s history. Fifty-two years old. Referred originally for depression. Responded well to Zoloft. Secondary diagnosis, PTSD. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Symptoms: sleep disturbance, anxiety. Precipitating events: his previous employment, his years in prison, and loss of contact with his family. Dr. Gregory decided that PTSD could certainly be considered an occupational hazard of being an enforcer in organized crime.

  With another patient, Dr. Gregory would have allowed the silence in the room to spread, like a heavy gas, until it filled the room. Not with this patient. He wasn’t comfortable with this man being anxious. Not yet, anyway. He asked, “Are you okay with the change?”

  “You mean you for Dr. Grady? Too early to tell, you know what I mean. She was a good problem solver. She seemed honestly interested in helping me adjust, if you know what I mean. I liked that. If you’re a good problem solver, you and me we’ll do fine, too.”

  “What kinds of problems did you work on with Dr. Grady?” He knew he wouldn’t have asked another patient the same question. He knew it.

  The man smiled, and to Dr. Gregory his eyes looked older than they had before. “I’m going to treat you like a rookie,” the man said. “But that’s okay. I’ll be teaching you about the program and about the life—you’ll be teaching me about living. Because I’m coming to learn I don’t know shit about that.”

  “What piece of living should we start with?”

  “Right now, I got too much time on my hands. I don’t do these trips to testify very often. Don’t know if Dr. Grady told you, but I did a semester of college already, in Denver at Auraria, but I’m not sure that’s the best thing for me. I think instead I gotta get a job, or start a business, or something. That’s where we should start. Talking ’bout h
ow to do that.”

  “Do you have ideas?”

  “I have lots of ideas on how to make money. I’m a practical man. I see voids, if you know what I mean. You could call it vision—it’s always been one of my things. But I don’t know much about business. Running a business, that is. Dr. Grady kept trying to convince me that the skills I have from my other life don’t translate too well to … this world.”

  “You would need to do this on your own? Find work? Set up a business? The marshals don’t help?”

  Carl Luppo puffed out his cheeks in exasperation. “You know much about fishing? You don’t, do you? I can tell. You don’t seem like the type. Anyway, the point I was going to make is that Witness Protection is basically a catch-and-release program. After they snare you and you agree to cooperate they drop you into a new pond and they give you enough money to get settled and then they basically tell you good luck. Well, me? I haven’t been in a pond that wasn’t behind bars for twelve years. And the pond I was in before that one didn’t have the clearest water around, you know what I mean. So I don’t know much about being effective in this life with the skills I have. The money they gave me at the beginning—that’s your stipend—if that’s all I had, I’d be one dead flounder.”

  Dr. Gregory was reluctant to ask. But he asked. “What are those skills you have?”

  The man raised his chin a centimeter or so before he said, “I was a gorilla.” Then he paused. “And I’m good at it. At least I was.”

  “A gorilla?”

  “I intimidated people. Some a little. Some a little more than that. Usually just needed my eyes. Sometimes my tone of voice. On rare occasions I had to beat on my chest, you know?”

  Dr. Alan Gregory could only imagine.

  5

  THE FOLLOWING THURSDAY AT TEN

  Peyton took the initiative as her second session began with Dr. Gregory. “My memories? They’re like whales. I think of them sometimes as though they’re a pod of whales. Is that weird?”

  Alan Gregory didn’t understand the analogy Peyton Francis was making but assumed she would explain it further. From the look on her face he couldn’t even be certain whether or not she was embarrassed by her admission about how she conceptualized her memories. He waited. He did a lot of waiting while he was doing psychotherapy. Sometimes he considered it the most important and the most difficult thing he did.