Salter, Anna C

by Fault lines

  "Never?" I was mesmerized. She had come for something more than the group, but I wasn't sure what. Maybe just to tell someone her story.

  "Never. We did all right, although it was a hard time that first winter. We got ourselves a house for five hundred dollars." I must have looked surprised because she quickly added, "well a chicken coop, really, but me and the kids fixed it up. And we dug ourselves a well, got it down to close to twenty feet. It was hard going, but the kids helped me. I took in ironing, made twenty-five dollars every other week.

  "But that first winter the day came when I didn't have any money, and the kids were hungry, and there wasn't a thing in the house to feed 'em. I heard he was up at his mother's, and I hadn't asked him for a cent since he left, so I went up to ask him for ten dollars for some food money for the kids.

  "I saw him on the porch, and I walked in the screen door and came up behind him, but afore I got there he turned around and saw me. Right away, he says to me, he says, I'll tell you one thing. Don't you never ask me for no money cause I don't pay for no dead horses.' I turned on my heel and I left, and I never asked him for a thing.

  "We got through that winter, the Lord only knows how, and then the next thing I knowed he was up in Newport jail. We hadn't heard nothing from him for the whole three years, and then he started in writing me, asking me to bring this kids up, telling me how hard it was to be away from his family, telling me how much he missed us."

  "What'd you do?" I was afraid to ask. I'd heard this story before, and I waited for the ending I was used to.

  "I wrote him back," she said. "I told him, I said, 'Let me just tell you one thing. I don't pay for no dead horses.'"

  I was stunned. After she left I sat there for a while. This woman had a "mind of winter," as Wallace Stevens would say. She saw the "nothing that was not there and the nothing that was." What did she have that the others didn't —all the people I had seen who would have been up to Newport jail telling the kids to "be nice, now, Daddy's sorry." Come lie to me and be my love.

  What was it people needed badly enough to buy the tears in his eyes when in their heart of hearts they knew better? Company, sometimes? Money? Sex? And these were folks who hadn't run out of money and out of food in the New England winter with small kids. What did this woman have that the others didn't? What did this woman have that Ginger didn't, who couldn't be alone for two seconds without clutching at someone?

  Was there anything I wanted badly enough to go up to Newport jail? I certainly hoped not. Then again, I'd never tried to dig a twenty-foot well with kids to take care of and winter on the way.

  My hat was off to her. Maybe it was true, as Marge Piercy wrote, that "Nothing is won by endurance/But endurance." But sometimes that is a lot.

  7

  I was still thinking about her when Melissa, my secretary, came in. "FedEx," she said. "I signed for you." I threw it on the desk hardly glancing at it. FedEx was routine: Lawyers never seemed to use the snailmail anymore. My mind was on Katy, and it wasn't until I swung around that I noticed the return address:

  Wilbee Cingu

  Never-Never Land Enterprises 64 Martin Luther King Blvd. Cross Roads Junction, NH

  I looked again. Wilbee Cingu. I didn't know any Wilbee Cingu, and there were law firms that should be called Never-Never Land Enterprises but weren't.

  I looked more closely. Wil-bee-c-ing-u. Uh-oh. I didn't have to worry about finding Willy. He had already found me. Fear pushed its way up in my throat, and I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. Willy had gotten the jump on me, and I hated it as much as I thought I would. I didn't mind walking down a dark alley to meet him —well, I did, actually, but there was nothing I could do about it —but I could not tolerate sitting in one while Willy walked toward me.

  I had a friend who twenty years back had been the first female police officer in her state. She once had to climb a dark stairwell by herself in an apartment building with a man waiting at the top with an ax. Nobody knew how she did it. I did. She was the one doing the climbing.

  I hesitated a second. A letter bomb was feasible. Willy could do it. On the other hand, he wouldn't be there to see the results, so it wouldn't be all that enjoyable for him. If he sent a letter bomb, my diagnosis of sexual sadist was wrong. I almost smiled. I didn't usually have to have that kind of faith in the diagnoses I made.

  I opened the letter. "Free at last," Willy quoted. "Free at last." I'll bet Martin Luther King didn't have Willy in mind when he said that.

  "By now," Willy wrote, "you must be wondering what our role in Never-Never Land will be. After all, reality is the product of the most august imagination.' Show me yours and I'll show you mine." It was signed,

  partytime@postoffice.worldnet.att.net.

  I stared at the letter for a long time. It wasn't a very long communication, but it said a lot. I knew what was in Willy's imagination — fairly horrific ways of torturing people —and if Willy was planning on bringing them to reality, then somebody was in for a bad time.

  I didn't really want to see Willy's imagination brought to life, up close and personal. The only people who saw Willy's imagination brought to reality were the victims. If he was planning on personally showing me "his," then I was the one who was in for a bad time.

  So he'd managed to tell me that, yes, he was up to his old tricks and, guess what, he had plans for me. Worse, he said it without anything he could be prosecuted for. It was a threat that didn't look like a threat, even if I could tie it to Willy, which I doubt very much that anyone could. Willy wouldn't be on any of the main networks with their billing records. Willy would have software that would access the Internet directly, and he could dial up from any phone in the world.

  At least I didn't have to feel bad about not taking it to Adam. What could he do about it?

  What could I do about this was a bigger problem. I tried to think. Jesus, he hadn't been out ten minutes before he got in touch. Had he been planning this?

  All right then, what role did Willy have in mind for me in Never-Never Land? I had no doubts that Willy saw himself as Peter Pan and no doubts too about what his plans were for the "lost boys" he'd inevitably pick up. But what about the females —given that he was talking about my role—where did I fit? There were only two female roles in Peter Pan —Tinker Bell and Wendy —and nothing terrible happened to either of them.

  Well, there was also the Indian Princess. As I remember, her role had something to do with being tied at the stake in a cave while the water rose. That would be a reasonably unappealing prospect.

  One thing was clear: Willy was inviting me to communicate with him via e-mail, and he didn't have the address.

  I didn't really want to play games with him, and if I corresponded with him, he'd have my e-mail address and one more way to worm his way into my privacy. But if I didn't, I wouldn't have any clues at all about what was coming next.

  What a hand to play by myself. Didn't I know anybody I could talk to about this who wouldn't just advise me to move to Afghanistan? No, I did not. Not even Marv.

  The phone rang. I jumped and then took a moment to steady myself before I picked it up. One letter from Willy and I was already spooked. "It's the ED," Melissa said. "The on-call doc wants to talk to you."

  "Who is it?" I asked.

  "She didn't say," Melissa answered.

  "Put her on," I said. In my heart of hearts the ED was still the ER to me, but it was true that the "emergency room" had been a lot more than a room for a long time now: a small city was more like it. "Emergency Department" really was more accurate but still bothered us old-timers. An ER by any other name was still an ER.

  "Michael, this is Suzanne. I'm in the ED, and we have a patient of yours down here, a woman named Camille Robbins."

  Fortunately, Suzanne Stenson was one of the sharpest psychiatric residents Jefferson had ever produced. This was fortunate because dealing with a crazy patient wasn't half as bad as dealing with a crazy psychiatrist.

  "What brought her
in?"

  "Who is more like it. You know Harvey, runs Sweet Tomatoes? He found her hiding in the shrubs this morning outside her house. Her damn dog wouldn't let him near her, and he was getting ready to call the police when she seemed to come out of it and called the dog off. It looks like she was having some kind of flashback.

  "Harvey drove her in. She was disoriented and confused and in and out of flashbacks."

  Oh, Lord. I just hoped Harvey knew something about dogs. I had the feeling he didn't, or he'd have called the police the first time that Rottweiler looked at him.

  "Michael, the problem here is the dog came with her. I hate to say this, but the staff down here are more worried about the dog than your client. Nobody here wants to get within two feet of him, which is a big problem since your client is clutching his lead like it's a lifeline. She says he's a seizure dog. Is that true?"

  "It's a 'she,'" I said, "although I'm not surprised you didn't get close enough to look. Her name is Keeter. As far as I know she is a seizure dog, which means that she can go anywhere. She's also an attack dog so be careful."

  "Look, if people here were being any more careful they'd shoot her."

  "Why don't I come down and see Camille."

  "Why don't you."

  "By the way, she just told you I was her therapist or she asked to see me?"

  "She asked to see you." Good. That meant we had at least some connection, however new and fragile. Suzanne went on, "One more thing, Michael. She needs to be admitted, but we can't admit that dog."

  "Legally, you have to. She's a service dog."

  "Legally we do, so we're not going to recommend admission for Camille because of it. Nobody thinks she would part with her, and we just can't put that dog on the ward. Risk management would go nuts, the other patients would go nuts, and I am well and truly worried the dog would go nuts. Just so you know, it's not an option."

  Great. I had a woman so confused she was hiding in the shrubs having flashbacks, and hospitalization was out. But I couldn't really argue with it. I wouldn't put Keeter on the ward, either. What if Camille did lose control of her and she ate five or six patients? On the other hand, what was I supposed to tell Camille if she wanted to be admitted?

  Probably the truth —which meant I'd have to take the flak for it later. If the higher-ups wouldn't admit Camille because they had no way to manage the dog, they'd never be willing to tell Camille that. That would be admitting she needed hospitalization and they didn't provide it —too much liability if something happened to her later. The administration would want the resident to tell Camille hospitalization wasn't needed.

  Medicine has always had an ambivalent relationship with truth. It has been frequently harder to get medicine to admit the truth than to find it —witness that whole long history of lying to dying people about what was going to happen to them —as if they weren't going to find out, anyway. The good part was the hierarchy already thought of me as a "loose cannon," so I didn't have a lot to lose, reputation-wise —if you could call that a good part.

  I put Willy's letter in the drawer. Unfortunately, the damn thing might be evidence for a future crime, and besides, I wanted to be able to reread it and think about it. There must be some way to figure out more about what Willy had in mind.

  I headed down to the ED. Fred Flintstone had designed the elevators, so I took the stairs like most of the rest of the staff. I walked in the ED and headed for the nurses' station. "I'm looking for Dr. Stenson," I said. I was wearing my hospital ID pin with "Dr. M. Stone" on it, so the nurse, whom I didn't know, merely glanced up before directing me to a room down the hall. The movies didn't always get it wrong. It wouldn't be hard to impersonate a doctor. Great. Willy was already turning me into a complete paranoid. Already, I was thinking about how easy it would be for him to get access to the places I hung out.

  I found Suzanne in the doctors' room writing notes in the chart. The doctors' room had a counter running around the room at sitting height, and docs were scattered around the room writing or making calls. Generally physicians wrote notes every time they saw a patient. This sounded good and it was good except it resulted in charts so thick that, after a while, nobody bothered to read the whole thing. Every once in a while, of course, that caused some sort of Big Problem.

  Suzanne was an exception. She read the charts from cover to cover, no matter how many times the patient had been admitted. Suzanne kept reading for a moment before she looked up.

  When she did, I saw the familiar circles under her eyes that told me she had been up all night. Medicine works its residents dangerously hard, putting them on twenty-four- or even thirty-six-hour shifts routinely. There are only a few states that outlaw it, and unfortunately, Vermont isn't one of them.

  Of course, this is terrible for the patients, who get lousy care, and awful for the residents, who come to hate their lives. There is, too, the minor problem that it is bad for their training since nobody can think when they are that tired.

  Despite all the excuses the hierarchy makes, it is done solely for one reason: money. Hiring people to work all those shifts would cost a ton of money. Residents are cheap, and basically, they have no rights.

  Suzanne was slim—who had time to eat? —with shoulder-length dark hair and bright eyes. I don't know why psychology spends so much energy trying to develop IQ tests. You can make a pretty good guess at how bright people are by their eyes. Anyone who looked at Suzanne's and didn't know she was very, very bright indeed, needed an IQ test themselves.

  "So," I said to Suzanne. "Always glad to have a patient of mine brighten your day. I know how bored you get sitting around with nothing to do."

  "Actually," she said, "we don't see that many of your patients down here. I thought you were losing your touch, but, shucks, I found out you had only seen her once. I guess we can't expect even you to fix people in one visit."

  "I don't know why not!" I replied. "Managed care does. So, what do you have?" I knew Suzanne didn't have a whole lot of time.

  "Not much," she said. "What happened to this woman? She can't seem to tell us, and all we've got is she was crouched in the bushes hiding, going in and out of flashbacks."

  "What's she saying during the flashbacks?"

  Suzanne sighed. "Not much. She just goes into a panic state and curls up in a fetal position. Then we all start looking at the dog and hoping she doesn't think we're the problem."

  "Meds?" I said.

  "Enough Haldol to drop an elephant —assuming she didn't give it to the dog."

  "You hope she gave it to the dog."

  "A thought . . . ," she replied. "The question here," she went on, "is what do we do with her? We've done all the polypharmacy we can. We can't admit her. Does she have any relatives or friends who would look after her?"

  "Not that I know of," I replied.

  "So," she said, leaning back in the chair and crossing her arms, "what do you want us to do with her?"

  "Fix her," I said. "What else?"

  I headed out to see Camille. I would have preferred to read the chart first, but Suzanne still needed it.

  On the way down the hall I fretted. Despite the fashionable view found in any pulp newspaper, good therapists don't tend to make patients worse. I had thought Camille was stabilized when she left my office, so why was she here? If she wasn't a regular visitor here, if this wasn't something she did every day, I'd have to face the fact that the therapy session had caused her to decompensate: It was a little tough believing in coincidence.

  And if therapy was the problem, it meant I had a bigger one. If Camille couldn't talk at all about what happened without falling apart, no matter how long we spent putting things back together, or how indirectly we approached it, how were we supposed to get anywhere? She had to cross some open ground to get to any kind of shelter. What was I supposed to do if she couldn't do it?

  Worse, I had a bad feeling Camille wasn't the only one who was facing open ground. This morning Willy had just been a vague possibility, a may
be-he'11-show-up-maybe-he-won't shadow in my mind. Now, he was setting up obstacle courses on my front lawn and sending me a written invitation.

  8

  The largest of the ED rooms looked like a miniature gymnasium broken into small areas by curtains. Groups of people were scattered through the room in the small areas; each group was separated from the other only by the curtains, partly drawn in some places, totally in others. The curtains didn't do much for the patients. True, nobody could see your mangled body as you lay there having it poked and prodded, but each patient could hear everybody else's business. It didn't help to be lying there with your broken elbow listening to a child crying on one side as they stitched up his face and an elderly woman sobbing on the other as they coded her husband for a heart attack.

  But the ED, like the operating room, is one of the places where the patients' physical needs take precedence over their emotional ones. "Guest relations" —as the policies are called that try to humanize hospitals—tread lightly in the ED. You have to keep someone alive before you can worry about his or her feelings. A big room with everybody together meant staff could get back and forth from one patient to another quickly if they needed to.

  I walked around the room and then realized, what a surprise, they hadn't been willing to put the dog in the common room. I headed back to the nurses' station and asked for Camille. I was directed to a small treatment room with the door shut. I knocked lightly and then poked my head in and asked, "Can I come in?"

  Camille was sitting across from the door facing it with her back to the wall. At first she looked blank, and I realized she didn't recognize me right away. She looked spacey and disoriented and slowed down. I wondered how agitated she would be without the Haldol, which would likely control the flashbacks but was a major tranquilizer and antipsychotic and probably made her feel awful. Nobody who'd had it ever seemed to want to take it again no matter how crazy they felt.