by Diane Lawson
I let him do it all.
He found my flannel pajama pants and slipped a soft cotton top over my head. He tucked me into my bed, putting an extra pillow next to me, as if it would keep me from falling out. He pulled a chair close and sat.
Each time my eyes shut and I started to drift, the tape started running. Lance’s eyes. The gun barrel. The rifle at attention. The slow motion of his hand to his head and the brains flying and the butterflies swarming and the arcing swing of Lance’s camouflaged half-headed body. And sometimes I’d see Lance hanging there and sometimes it would be my mother’s dog Buddy. And sometimes it would be Lance’s eyes and other times they looked more like my father’s. And sometimes it would be my mother screaming ohmygod, ohmygod and other times it sounded more like me but I couldn’t make a sound no matter how hard I tried. I couldn’t cry though I needed to. I couldn’t sleep for the upside-down hanging bloody mess and all that silent screaming.
An hour passed.
“I need to take something,” I said. “Some kind of a pill.”
I found a bottle of Valium stuck in the back of the medicine cabinet, something Richard had used for a short-lived bout of air travel anxiety. I took two. I looked in the mirror. My hair was a wild mane, still damp from Mike’s shampoo. I stared at myself, bringing my face closer and closer to the mirror until I saw that I was made of dots. The dots began to shrink and—just before the pinpoints of me disappeared—I managed a scream.
Mike was there like a shot.
“I’m dots,” I said, nose to the mirror. “I’m made of dots.”
“You’re just stressed,” he said, switching off the light.
He lifted me and put me back on the bed, this time crawling in beside me. I didn’t have to tell him to hold me. The holding changed to hugging, the comfort kiss to the desperate mouth on mouth. His hands moved across my body with a firm touch. I felt him against me, aroused. I held on to him there, feeling him pulse, needing him inside me, a core to make me solid. He was there on top of me, sheltering me from harm, moving slowly back and forth in me, his rhythm overriding, bringing me back. One might credit the soothing magic to the tranquilizers, and it would be a reasonable thought. But even when we make love now, it’s this way. The taking over. The world fading away. The melting of this wounded man into my wounds that makes us both, if only for a moment, whole. When it was safe for me, he settled me on top, his hands on my hips now, the timing more urgent. His eyes pulled moonlight in from the window. He looked at me in a demanding way, like I was a part of him he’d found and would possess. I came, setting him off too, filling me, gluing me back together, binding me to him in some deep instinctual way. We passed through that night like that, holding each other, making love, using our bodies to anchor us in the good.
Chapter Thirty-Three
What does one do in the wake of trauma? When everything and nothing has changed? The sun comes up the day after you’ve watched your patient take his head off with a bullet, exactly as it did the morning before. The hour or so of sleep that I managed to accumulate before the alarm went off gave the events of the day before a dream-like protective coating—the nightmare of Lance’s suicide, the wish-fulfillment of the love-making. I handed Mike a cup of coffee as he headed out the door early, saying he was off to try to smooth things over with Slaughter and to follow up on some other leads.
Richard brought the kids by on their way to camp for a change of clothes. He settled himself into the lounger in the family room with my newspaper. I sat down on the couch and glared at him.
“Something on your mind?” he said, getting the message. “Of course, you’re upset about Lance Powers’ suicide.” He lowered the paper to half mast. “Would you like to talk about it?”
“No, Richard. I want to talk about why you failed to inform me that you did a custody evaluation on Allison Forsyth.”
“Confidentiality,” he said, adding the hint of a question mark as if he were speaking to an imbecile. “She wouldn’t sign the release. It would have been unethical and illegal for me to say anything to you.”
“Your seeing her at all was a conflict of interest. You killed her. You and your buddy Macon. As sure as if you’d put a gun to her head.”
“Don’t blame me for your incompetence. You won’t look over your shoulder to see pathology when it’s biting you in the ass.” He folded the Arts Section neatly and directed his vision to a point just behind me, like I was a camera with a bright green light in the middle of my forehead. “Allison Forsyth had a classic Borderline Personality Disorder. DSM Code 301.83. Let me refresh you on the criteria for this diagnosis. Unstable relationships. Depression. Anxiety. Inappropriate anger. Emptiness or boredom. Did I mention suicidality and impulsivity?” He dropped his performance airs and resumed eye contact. “And in addition to racking up big positive checkmarks beside every possible symptom, she drank like a UT frat boy at an Aggie game tailgate. Not to mention neglecting her kids. Pushing Travis to the brink with her incessant nagging. Personally, I think the guy deserves sainthood for putting up with her for a decade and a half.” He paused for breath. “And do you know what really impresses me about you, Nora? What really impresses me is that your capacity for denial is equally robust in your personal life. Just look at the sociopath you’ve taken as a bedmate.”
“I don’t need your evaluation of me. I had an analyst.”
“That nincompoop Bernstein?”
“What’s a nincompoop, Dad?” Tamar said, popping up over the back of Richard’s chair. “I snuck up on you guys.”
“A nincompoop is a stupid person. An idiot.” Richard looked at me as he said this.
“Nincompoop! Nincompoop! Alex is a nincompoop!” Tamar sang, skipping off to try out her expanded vocabulary on her brother.
I went on my walk, adding a leg through the Trinity University campus and a lap around the padded track. Incompetence. Let me refresh you. Biting you in the ass. Capacity for denial. My fuming turned to fretting. Where’s John Heyderman? Would Yvette be next? Could he—could whoever—even find her? And what if Richard is behind all this? What if Mike is right? No way. Not Richard. But not random. Who? Now what? Where’s John? Round and round.
Back home, I slipped and nearly fell on the bills, mailers, catalogues and credit card come-ons scattered just inside the front door. I could have so easily overlooked the postcard, stuck as it was in the folds of the Williams and Sonoma Special Edition Barbeque and Picnic Catalogue. If I’d not taken the ten seconds to flip through the pages, looking at the same old wares (the Instant-Read Thermometer Fork with Timer, the Monogrammed Steak Brand, the Nonstick Corncob Grill Basket and the Up-to-400-Degrees Suede Grill Accessories), I’d have missed it altogether. The front of the card had a garish photo of The Strip—Hello from Las Vegas. The backside held my address of course, and on the other half a scribbled Took vacation early. See you Fri. No signature. None needed. John’s yearly pilgrimage was his one extravagance. He drove to Nevada nonstop in his un-air-conditioned van, stayed in a cheap motel on the edge of town and treated himself to an escort service to literally baby him each evening—diapers, bottle-feeding, rocking to sleep, the works.
John was alive. Why was I upset? Why wasn’t I relieved? He wasn’t dead. And that was exactly the problem. I couldn’t make sense of my feelings then, but now I know I was upset because a paranoid needs her paranoia to stay intact. John’s living and breathing was an unwelcome reality, raising doubt as to the existence of the clever unknown killer bent on undoing Dr. Nora Goodman via the obsessively engineered deaths of her patients. I needed to believe a malevolent hand shaped my universe, needed to believe that someone was in control. So I held tight to that belief as to a life-preserver in a heavy sea. Any paranoid will tell you that someone hating you is far preferable to no one caring at all.
I didn’t call Mike about the mail.
I forgot to call Mike.
It slipped my slipping mind to call Mike.
Especially after I shredded the postcar
d.
I wouldn’t have known how to tell him anyway.
As it turned out, I didn’t need to. He brought home his own reasons for doubt along with some tomato basil soup and sandwiches from the W. D. Deli. He paced around the kitchen while I insisted on rescuing the food from styrofoam to china.
“The Arson Investigator gave me his report on Westerman,” he said, waving a piece of paper at me.
“Do I want to know?”
“What’s want got to do with it?” He was serious. “What’s true is true.”
“And?”
“Gas leak.” He pointed at the paper. “Ordinary everyday gas leak. Stroke of a match for the old Bunsen burner. K-whissh. Boom.”
“Someone could have—”
“Nora.”
“Really. Someone could—”
“There’s other stuff.”
“Like?”
“Like—and you might have told me this and saved me the time and trouble of my research—Allison’s family owns the building she jumped from.”
“So? They own half of downtown San Antonio.”
“That’s an exaggeration, but they own this building. And Rudy Hernandez, the janitor of this building, knew her since she was a kid. She sweet-talked him into giving her terrace access for old time’s sake.”
“The police told you that?”
“Naw. Señor Hernandez didn’t let on to Slaughter, pulled the old No-hablo-ingles routine. Too scared he’d be fired from the lousy job he’s had for forty-five years. George could have used his old bilingual compadre. We were a good team. Not that he had anything to do with me getting canned.”
“But, still, four people, Mike,” I said, allowing myself to not remember that I’d heard from John. “Not any four people. My patients. In order of their appointment times.”
He took me by my shoulders. He squeezed too hard. “Nora. Sometimes bad luck happens, and then we make more bad luck.”
“Stop saying it’s my fault!” I heard myself scream.
I saw Mike draw back.
“I’m not saying that. Not exactly.” He let go of my shoulders and rubbed both hands over his head. “Fault is a slippery customer. You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t share a part of whatever blame needs spreading around?” He looked at me without seeing. “I got to get out of here.”
“Yeah, just leave. Like you leave everything. Leave the force. Leave your wife. Your kid. Now me and my kids. There’s a pattern here.” There’s nothing like a personal threat to the analyst to get her psychoanalyzing juices flowing. “You owe it to yourself to try and stop it. You owe it to me.”
“I was fired, Nora. Dumped. I don’t owe you.”
“I love you.”
He looked at me like I’d slapped him in the face. “You’re married. Does that mean nothing to you?”
“Quit using that for an excuse. I’m almost divorced.”
“So what? I can’t handle it, okay?” He did two pacing laps around the kitchen island. “Maybe I don’t want a relationship. Ever think of that? Maybe I don’t want to deal with somebody else’s kids. Maybe I don’t want to deal with you and your money thing. What do I say to your high-end friends? Hey. Nice to meet you. I’m a loser gumshoe. My wife here is a fancy doctor whose patients are all dead. We live in a big mansion off of her child support payment.”
“What about last night?” I said. “Didn’t that mean anything?”
“You were upset. I was upset. We comforted each other. It happens. This won’t fly as a long-term thing.”
“I can see more patients. Do general psychiatry. Forget psychoanalysis. We can live in your house if it will make you feel better.”
I really didn’t mean this last part, but I couldn’t imagine he’d take me up on it. He just seemed too good at acculturation, having so seamlessly slipped right over from bad beer to sparkling wine, from coffee in paper cups to espresso in pre-warmed porcelain, from crank handle LeBaron to push button Lexus. I had more faith in his potential attachment to luxury than in his attachment to me. That’s how good I felt about myself right then.
“No, Nora. Do you know that word? No. No, thank you. No.”
“So we’re done,” I said.
“There’s nothing else I can do,” he said.
“I’ll get your check.”
“Pay me later,” he said, making for the door, going for the clean getaway. He stopped, turned back toward me, closed his eyes and shook his head like he was trying to get the pieces of his brain to fall into place. “No. Forget it. Just don’t pay me.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
I had no reason to be at the office that afternoon until Renee was due at two. Yvette had stopped even bothering to cancel her last few sessions, but when I glanced out the window over the deluxe veggie sandwich I couldn’t stop stuffing myself with despite—or because of—my upset over Mike’s leaving, there sat her baby blue BMW, taking up both spaces in the parking area.
I wiped my mouth, careened out the back door, sprinted up the stairs, pushed through the exit door into the consulting room and smoothed my hair in the mirror in less than thirty seconds. My office clock said I was seven minutes tardy. I took a breath at the door to the waiting room.
Yvette sat wild-eyed on the edge of the chair, hands to her throat. “I can’t breathe. I thought you weren’t coming.”
“Do you have your medication with you?”
She nodded and began rummaging through a new Chanel bag.
“You didn’t call,” I said, handing her the bottle of Fiji Water she’d brought with her.
“You always say it’s my time,” she reminded me between gasps. “Whether I’m here or not. That’s the deal. My parents pay.” She choked down a pill from a little silver case.
She was right, of course.
“I’m sorry,” I said, before anger rolled in to assuage guilt. I haven’t heard from you for a week. How was I to know you’d show up today? “I suppose I’d started to feel like I didn’t matter to you.”
Psychoanalysts debate about the usefulness of such self-disclosure. A classical Freudian would never make such a statement, although Freud in reality revealed all variety of things about himself to his patients. Relational analysts, working at the other end of the theoretical continuum on this issue, say that such interventions make analysis more effective, more alive. To tell you the truth, at that moment, I wasn’t worried about the theory behind my technique. I felt ashamed. Defeated. I was sweating and the itchy dampness made me feel as if little bits of Lance’s brains still stuck to my skin and hair.
Yvette stood holding her sleek bag tight against her chest, like a little girl playing dress-up with momma’s pocketbook.
“But you’re my analyst,” she said. “I need you.”
She walked into my office, her steps wary, and put her purse on the seat of the chair. It tipped over, dumping several tubes of lip-gloss, loose change, pink leather-encased cell phone and a Black American Express Card onto the floor. She seemed not to notice, easing herself down on the couch like she was made of glass.
“Of course, you need me,” I said, my eyes filling, my chest threatening to burst with sadness because all I could see in my mind was the pathetic ball of string I’d put together as a child, scrounging, adding to it with any scrap I came across—my solution to the disappearing mother problem.
The chronic difficulty I had finding my mother during that time made no sense. The possibilities for her whereabouts were quite limited—in one of the four rooms of our tiny rented house or at the convenience store down the street where my father briefly held a job. But by the time I’d search the house and make it to the store, my father would tell me she’d left for home. I’d get back there only to find her gone. My plan was to secure the string to her waist to provide me a trail. My mother found me working on my project one day and insisted on knowing what I was up to. Once informed, she announced that I’d be tying none of my filthy string to her and tossed my handiwork in the trash.
>
Of course, I needed my mother. Why couldn’t she see that? Why didn’t she want to see that? And as soon as I asked myself that question, I knew the answer. She couldn’t see me because I wasn’t in her mind. And I couldn’t find her because there was no nurturing receiver in her head for my needful transmitter.
And I knew then what I’d not truly understood about Yvette.
About Yvette and me.
“You need me so much that you hide it even from yourself,” I said, “and I let myself fall for that even though I know better.”
“Do you think this is why I don’t keep friends?”
“Quite possibly,” I said. “How about we start your analysis now?”
My dread of seeing Renee that day made my between-appointments break simultaneously too short and too long. Fear, I’ll remind you, is an entirely appropriate reaction to someone who enjoys doing you harm. Renee never missed an opportunity to kick me, and I knew full well I was already down.
She avoided eye contact on her way in and lay on the couch in tense silence for several minutes before she said, “I don’t know how to say it.”
“Say what?”
“That it was a bad thing that happened to you.”
“You heard about my patient.”
“I hear about everything,” she said. “You know that.”
“Yes. I do.”
“It’s a pain in the ass hearing about everything, if you want to know the truth.”
“I’m sure it is,” I said.