by Linda Barnes
I thought about thieves. I thought about garbage. I thought about thieves who steal garbage.
Now, empty trash cans have their uses. Landscapers use them to haul dead leaves and branches. The hawkers who sell soda outside Fenway Park use them to store ice.
But this moron hadn’t tried to dump the trash on my front lawn. He’d sped off with Hefty bags full of juice cartons, catfood cans, and old newspapers smeared with parakeet droppings.
If he’d wanted the cans, why steal the garbage? If he’d wanted my garbage, why steal the cans?
3
What with the garbage thief and insomnia, I didn’t stir until eleven o’clock the next morning. Sam had long since returned to Charles River Park, complaining that he hardly ever felt rested after a night at my place.
As I groggily crossed the hall, listening to a throbbing hum in my head and hoping the shower would ease it, the day’s mail hit the foyer floor with a thud.
Friday. Terrific. Time for another snapshot of little Miss Winchester. Well, she could wait till I’d washed up, eaten breakfast, lunch, or both, depending on the contents of the fridge. She could wait till I’d started my pursuit of the garbage snatcher.
How many light blue, or possible gray, late-model Firebirds had a four and an eight for their final two license-plate numbers? Was I sure it was a Massachusetts plate?
The thought almost drove me back under the covers. Instead I stood in the shower for ten minutes with the temperature at lobster-boil. Then I put in a full two minutes under ice water because somebody told me that cold water is better for rinsing conditioner out of your hair.
Dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a turquoise cotton sweater, I headed downstairs. I pass through the foyer on my way to the kitchen. No harm in stopping to take a peek, I decided. Give me an opportunity to bend over and shake out my wet hair, which I comb as infrequently as possible because it’s too thick and too curly and it hurts. I could view the day’s photo while chugging orange juice. No time wasted.
I sorted through the pile twice to make sure, but there was no blue envelope. I felt curiously deprived, as if I’d come to the end of a novel borrowed from the library and found the final chapter razored out.
The throb of my headache met its match in the smack of a hammer against a nearby nail.
“You like this here?” The voice came from an unlikely height. Perched on a chair, my tenant, Roz, had gained about a foot in stature. She’s short and I’m six-one. Our eyes were now on a level.
I said, “I thought you were going to check with me before you hung any more paintings on my walls.” To contrast with her fright-white hair, which she dyes more often than I shampoo, Roz was wearing skin-tight black pants and a redder-than-red T-shirt emblazoned with NINE OUT OF TEN MEN WHO’VE TRIED CAMELS PREFER WOMEN. I read it twice to make sure I’d gotten it right. I don’t know where Roz finds her enormous wardrobe of bizarre Tshirts. Maybe secret admirers send them. She has a body, particularly in the T-shirt slogan area, that earns much admiration.
She plucked a nail from between her teeth. “I thought you meant just with offensive stuff.”
“This is not offensive?”
“What? You’re with the National Endowment for the Arts?”
“Just because it has vegetables in it doesn’t make it a still life,” I said. “What the hell is that man doing with that carrot?”
“You don’t like it?”
“Roz, this is not only my home, it’s my office. Clients come here. People who might otherwise consider hiring me.”
“Hang it someplace else, huh?”
I nodded my heartfelt agreement.
“Should I yank the other nail out, or try a different painting?”
“Depends on the painting.”
“I’ve got more vegetables. Acrylics really groove with vegetables.”
Whenever Roz needs subject matter, her first target is my refrigerator.
The telephone interrupted a promising aesthetic argument.
“Should I answer it?” she asked.
I nodded. “Stall while I get orange juice.”
I grabbed the carton from the fridge and raced back in time to hear Roz, in the nasal twang she deems secretarial, report that I was currently taking a foreign call on another line.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Geneva hung up.”
She glared at me. “Ms. Carlyle will be right with you.”
“Speaking,” I said crisply.
“Hi. Maybe you remember me. I’m the psychiatrist in the brown triple-decker two doors down.”
“Sure,” I said, “um—”
“Keith Donovan.”
Maybe he’d had his trash stolen too. Maybe he wanted me to trace it for him. “What can I do for you?”
“You’ve been receiving photos in the mail.”
“Baby pictures. Kid pictures. Yes.”
I could hear him breathing. I wondered what he was waiting for. He exhaled again, inhaled. “I have a patient who’s been sending them. I’m sorry. I’d mentioned your name—as someone who wouldn’t be, um, a threatening presence, if she decided to investigate a certain matter …”
“And?”
“She’s having trouble making a decision, and she thought she’d—I don’t know—prepare you in some way, in case she decided to seek your counsel.”
“Is she in your office now?”
“Yes,” he said. “She knows I’m speaking to you.”
“Does she want to see me, make an appointment or something?”
“Can you hang on a minute?”
“Sure.”
I could hear indistinct muffled voices. I couldn’t make out individual words. I tried to remember what he looked like, this Keith Donovan. I remembered the name from some Homeowners Association meeting. Was he the pudgy guy who always complained about the neighborhood dogs? The area I live in, within spitting distance of Harvard Square, is thick with psychiatrists.
“Ms. Carlyle?”
“Yes.”
“She—my patient—wonders if you might see her now? I would come along.”
“I don’t usually have a consulting shrink present.”
“Is it out of the question?”
I reviewed my caseload. Tracking down the garbage thief was not going to earn me a fee.
“Come on by,” I said.
4
He seemed too young. Perhaps I’d misunderstood. Maybe he was a therapist of some sort or other, but hardly the kind entitled to call himself “doctor.” With a haircut fresh off a Marine base and an eager grin, he looked like a big goofy kid. His tweed jacket and muted paisley tie had probably been chosen to make him appear older, and he must have inherited the half-moon reading glasses tucked into his breast pocket. He sure hadn’t aged enough to need them.
She was a willow-thin blonde with nervous hands. It took her ten minutes just to remove her raincoat, fingernails clacking against the buttons. She wasn’t paying attention to the task; her eyes were darting all over the place, noting the water stains on the ceiling, eyeing the furniture as if she were pricing it for an auction gallery.
I was glad I’d made Roz take the painting down.
I did some appraising of my own. The beige suit, piped in a darker shade, maybe six hundred bucks, and I constantly undervalue due to years of Filene’s Basement shopping. Double it to include the shoes, bag, and leather gloves. The raincoat had a plaid lining and a Burberry label. Her slim gold watch and massive solitaire diamond told me she could probably afford both a private eye and a therapist.
The skirt of the fancy suit gapped at the waist and bagged at the hip, as if she’d recently lost weight. Deep purplish-gray shadows tinted the skin under her eyes. A woman who spent megabucks on a precision wedge haircut ought to concentrate more on her makeup, I thought.
Keith Donovan made a ceremony of hanging her raincoat on the coat-tree while she fumbled with her gloves. Clasping her handbag tightly against her chest, she managed the single step down to my living room
with an elbow assist from the therapist.
Normally I invite clients to sit in the chair across from my rolltop desk, but I hadn’t readied a second chair so I motioned them farther into the room. The woman chose my aunt Bea’s favorite rocker, with its needlepoint cushion and faint welcoming creak. Donovan waited for me to take the couch before selecting an easy chair.
The woman absorbed the surroundings with a practiced glance, and I wondered what deceptive conclusions she’d drawn from the antiques and Orientals. The room is exactly as my aunt left it when she died, except for the addition of my desk.
Her eyes fastened on the silver-framed photo centered on the mantelpiece. She mumbled and looked at me expectantly.
“What?”
“Is she your daughter?” she asked in a low urgent tone.
“My little sister.”
“Do you have children?”
“No.”
“Ms. Carlyle,” Keith Donovan said, “I’d like you to meet Mrs. Woodrow, Emily Woodrow.”
She twisted her hands, rubbed them along the length of her thighs, clasped them in her lap. Said nothing.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” I asked.
No response.
“You’ve been sending me pictures of your daughter?” I made it a question only by inflection.
“She looks like me, doesn’t she?” the woman said. On the surface her pale face seemed as passive and calm as an old portrait in an art museum, but I felt uneasy scrutinizing her. She had an odd voice, faint and hoarse.
“She’s beautiful,” I said. “Your daughter.”
The woman lowered her head suddenly. Her hair, falling in wings from a center part, covered her face, so I couldn’t tell if tears came with the wrenching sobs. I had a fix on her hoarseness now. Crying jags roughened vocal cords more quickly than Jack Daniel’s and cigarettes.
Donovan seemed to be studying his knuckles. I wondered if he was billing my time as one of the woman’s treatment sessions.
She did the hand routine again, her fingers rubbing her thighs as if she were searching for something to grasp or tear. Her long fingernails were unpolished and neglected.
“Is there something I can do for you?” I asked.
Color flooded her cheeks. Her chest rose and fell so quickly I thought she might hyperventilate and pass out. I hoped Donovan, young as he was, had some medical experience.
“Doctor,” she muttered to him. “I don’t know where to—”
“Would you like me to provide some background information?” he asked gently.
“Yes,” she said, seizing the words like a lifeline. “But first, I want—I’d like to give her this.”
It was a pale blue rectangle. I was going to get my Friday photo after all.
The envelope seemed identical to the ones underneath my blotter, but the enclosed photograph was a formal study, on thicker stock. The child … well, the girl wore a hat, but the floppy-brimmed straw was no cover for the fact that she’d lost her bouncy curls. I could practically see bones through her papery skin. She was gamely attempting her angelic smile, but it couldn’t make the jump to her sunken eyes.
I swallowed and was glad I hadn’t eaten breakfast.
Centered at the bottom, beneath a black border, elaborate calligraphy spelled out: Rebecca Elizabeth Woodrow. 9/12/85–1/6/92. The newborn in the hand-knitted bunting—funny how the word for the damn thing came back to me—the two-year-old in the pink striped shirt and bib overalls, hadn’t made it to her seventh birthday.
I glanced up. Emily Woodrow stared at my little sister’s photo with an intensity bordering on hunger. I was glad I held her daughter’s picture in my hand. It gave me something to look at, besides her face.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “She was beautiful.”
The woman tried to smile. A mistake. Her lips quivered.
“Mrs. Woodrow has been seeing me since her daughter’s death,” Keith Donovan volunteered, his voice low and soothing.
“Three months ago,” she whispered, as if she were reminding herself. Her hands were working again. The nail on the index finger of her left hand was broken, jagged. “Have you ever had a serious illness?” she asked abruptly.
“No,” I said.
“Then you don’t know what it’s like when a doctor looks at you in that special kindly way, and then he rips your heart out.”
I tried to guess how old she was. Forties by the hands. Thirties by the face.
“Do you want to tell me about it?” I shot Donovan a sidelong glance, but if he’d caught me doing my imitation of a therapist, he didn’t react.
She lowered her eyes and addressed the carpet in a voice as flat and melancholy as a foghorn. “There’s no place to start. No beginning. Becca seemed to get a lot of colds, maybe three times as many as the year before. And the fevers. Scary high fevers, where she’d just go limp, with her face flushed and her hair soaked.”
As she spoke, Emily Woodrow lifted a hand to her own hair, as if she were unconsciously feeling for dampness. She left her hand there, forgotten, suspended, and went on.
“One day I kept her home from school, even though she wasn’t running a fever. Her father says—said—I babied her. But the listlessness; it wasn’t like her. I called our doctor. He said bring her in—no appointment, just bring her in—and I was scared.” She swallowed audibly. “For the first time. I was always scared after that. He gave her a quick exam—eyes, ears, throat, heartbeat—and said she seemed okay. She went back to school, but I could tell she wasn’t right. She cried a lot, cried for no reason, and she’d never been a complainer. And then she got a bruise on the inside of her leg, big as an apple, but she couldn’t remember bumping into anything, and it didn’t go away, so I took her back to the doctor—I remember that day. There was such a wind howling; I held her hand. I thought she might blow away. She’d gotten so thin; she’d stopped eating. I bought her whatever she wanted. Pistachio ice cream …”
“Go on,” said Donovan.
She shrugged and glanced down at her expensive shoes. “Something was wrong with her blood. Platelets. He sent us to a specialist. And another one. They diagnosed Becca with ALL.”
“Which is?” I asked.
“Acute lymphoblastic leukemia. It’s ninety-five percent curable. That’s the cure rate. Ninety-five percent. They kept telling us that, over and over. When she lost her hair, when she couldn’t eat, not even applesauce like a baby, when she’d throw up every five minutes, too weak to turn her head, so I was afraid she’d choke on her own vomit, they always came back to that. Ninety-five percent.”
I didn’t like the way this was going.
“Mrs. Woodrow,” I said as gently as I could, my voice barely above a whisper, “I’m sorry. Believe me, I am sorry for your loss and your pain. But five percent die. If the cure rate is ninety-five percent, then five percent die.”
Emily Woodrow accorded my observation the same polite interest she might have given if I’d commented on the weather. “At first it didn’t matter. Nothing did. My daughter … my only child … There had to be a funeral and people came and people went and brought food and took food away. Casseroles and covered chafing dishes. Bread. Pots that steamed but never smelled. Nothing smelled, except the flowers. I didn’t want any flowers. I hate lilies. The first day, they’re beautiful, especially the star lilies, and by the second day, they reek. I remember I couldn’t go to her bedroom. I stood in the hall by her door, but I couldn’t go inside. I remember that. Her chair is at the kitchen table. I won’t let Harold take it away. I want to move, but Harold, my husband—”
Dammit, I ought to keep a box of Kleenex on my desk. She fumbled for tissues in her handbag.
“I was taking pills, medicine. Pills and water, pills and water. Waking and sleeping, waking and sleeping again. I never ate. There’s an oak outside my window. I watched its branches rustle. Empty branches. An empty tree. Dead, but living. Why should it be dead, but living? I thought I heard God talking to me. Just the once.
He said—or she said—it was a whispery kind of voice: ‘If you don’t believe in me, it’s because you haven’t suffered enough.’ And I felt almost triumphant, as if I must have found some sort of religion—because I had suffered enough. Not like Becca, but enough.”
I glanced at the therapist, tried to send him the silent urgent message that this was his country, not mine.
“The funny thing is,” she went on, “I made phone calls and commitments. Friends would ring and say, ‘Where were you? Why didn’t you meet us for lunch?’ And I wouldn’t know what they were talking about. I had these perfectly sane conversations, talking about books and gardening, and I made plans, and I don’t remember any of it. It was like floating in a fog bank. I never could see or hear anything clearly.
“I spent a lot of time thinking. Brooding. About what I’d done wrong. About why I was being punished. About how I hadn’t listened to her when she first said she wasn’t feeling well, about how I hadn’t taken her to the doctor soon enough, and then about how I must have taken her to the wrong doctor. Keith says I was angry, terribly angry, but I turned my anger inward …”
Keith. Not Dr. Donovan. I glanced at his pleasantly earnest, unlined face, and wondered who would choose a shrink so apparently unscarred by life.
Mrs. Woodrow seemed to have run out of steam. Even her hands lay idle in her lap.
“I’m sorry,” I said, again as gently as I could, forming the words with the care a child takes in trying to blow a large soap bubble, “but I don’t know what you want me to do.”
“I’m getting to it,” she snapped, her voice brittle, her eyes staring deeply into mine. “I can’t just tell you cold.”
I was sorry I’d interrupted. I’d seen the photos: the baby, the toddler, the child, the beautiful girl. I’d watched her grow.
“I have a picture in my mind,” the woman said. “And I can’t make it go away.”
She sat for a time, a statue frozen in her chair. Lines appeared and disappeared in her narrow face. Sometimes they seemed deeply etched; sometimes a superficial shading of the light. At the right side of her jaw, a tiny muscle twitched.