by M. R. Carey
“There’s Totoro,” Molly muttered, hiding her eyes.
“But he’s a good monster. The monster who’s one of the family.”
Like me, Beth thought, and she had to stop herself from laughing out loud.
At Plum Pan she ordered all their favorites automatically, amazed that she still remembered. Except, of course, that she was remembering two slightly different kids. “Kung po chicken?” Zac asked doubtfully. “I don’t think I’ve ever had that.”
“Give it a shot,” Beth said. “I think you’ll love it.”
He wrangled a small piece of chicken with his chopsticks and brought it, dripping with red sauce, to his mouth. His chewing went from experimental to enthusiastic. “That’s great!” he said. “It’s like spicier sweet and sour.”
“Told you,” Beth said. “You think I don’t know you, Zachary? Moms have eerie powers.”
She ordered jasmine tea for the two of them, diet cola for Moll. She had a hankering to order a large glass of red, but she was mellow enough as it was and she had to drive them home. She wasn’t going to take stupid risks when she’d only just got her life back. There was always tomorrow.
All the tomorrows.
SITTING IN THE WAITING ROOM AT CARROLL WAY, was what Fran had texted Zac in response to his invitation. IT REALLY, REALLY SUCKS ABOUT YOUR DAD, AND I’D LOVE TO COME OVER AND BE WITH YOU GUYS BUT I’M GONNA BE HERE A WHILE. SORRY.
It might be a long while too, because she had come without an appointment. She couldn’t make an appointment without her dad being copied in on the email when the clinic confirmed. It was a legal glitch, something they had to do because she was a minor, and on most days she took it philosophically. Today she wanted a private conversation with Dr. Southern: philosophy could go jump in the lake.
The receptionist was inclined to be snitty when she found out Fran’s name wasn’t on her list. “I can’t guarantee he’ll see you,” she said.
“If you’d please just ask,” Fran said. And then, “Tell him it’s about Bruno Picota.” Dr. Southern had never refused to see her: she probably didn’t need to stack the deck. But she did it anyway.
She sat for half an hour or so while the room emptied out. Soon it was just Fran, an old guy in a motorized wheelchair and a formidable-looking woman with three kids who all sat in a line to the left of her, mousy-quiet and facing front, as if they were soldiers and she was their commanding officer. Fran didn’t know the woman but she thought maybe she had seen the kids around; she kept her eyes on the middle distance and did her best to look like someone else entirely.
She was expecting the receptionist to call her name, but Dr. Southern came out himself and beckoned to her to come. She followed him to his office, where he held the door open for her and then closed it behind the two of them. She sat down.
“It’s good to see you, Frankie,” Dr. Southern said, but his somber face belied the words. “How are you doing with the new dosage?”
“Fine,” Fran said. “Thank you.”
“Any more bad dreams?”
“Just the one. But that’s not what I wanted to see you about.”
“Then what can I do for you?”
“I want to talk about Bruno Picota.”
Southern nodded. “So I was told. But if you’re not dreaming about him …”
“I want to talk about the time when he was your patient.”
Nothing changed in Southern’s face, but his whole body seemed first to be drawn upright with sudden tension and then to sag just a little. This time when he nodded his shoulders were in on it too, almost as though he was bowing his head to something nasty that had become inevitable.
“Ah,” he said. And then he didn’t say anything else for a while. Finally, he crossed to his chair and sat down in it, making it creak and yaw the way he always did. His hands lay in his lap and he shrugged with them, bringing them up and letting them fall again. “Yes,” he said. “Well. That was a long time ago.”
Fran waited him out. She could see that he was unhappy and her instinct was to change the subject, to spare him, but she couldn’t. She needed to push this stone all the way to the top of the hill, even if it bruised Dr. Southern’s toes along the way.
Eventually Southern started to put words together, slowly and haltingly. Fran had the strong sense that he was turning them over in his mind before he spoke, inspecting each one for suspect nuance. “I worked with Picota in the lead-up to the court case. That was a long time before I met you, so I don’t believe there was ever any conflict of interest. And he wasn’t my patient in the strict sense of the word. I was retained—along with a colleague—to assess his mental competence before the trial and to give testimony about it.”
Again, Fran’s instinct was to nod and move along. To just let Dr. Southern off the hook, since he was clearly on one. But what he had just given her was sort of the first half of an explanation, and half measures weren’t good enough. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.
Southern smiled, but the smile came very close to being a wince. “That’s a fair question,” he admitted. “But I didn’t have any sinister motive, I assure you. If you remember, I didn’t inherit you from Dr. Kapoor until 2011. Sometime in the summer.”
“July fifteenth,” Fran supplied. She had started a new notebook, and the first and last dates were on the cover. She could also have told him what time her appointment was, because the fifteenth was a Friday and school would have let out an hour early. On Fridays her appointments were scheduled for 4:30.
“July fifteenth. I’ll take your word for it. By then, Bruno Picota was up in Grove City and I hadn’t seen him in years. I knew from the insurance forms how your treatment was being financed, and—this was very much in my mind—I was the only psychiatrist working at Carroll Way. I couldn’t offer you a reasonable alternative, you see my point? If you didn’t want to sign on with me—well, there wasn’t anyone else here. It was my way or the highway. And I didn’t want to raise a problem for you that I couldn’t solve.”
Fran started to speak, but Dr. Southern wasn’t ready to let her in just yet. “I know, I know. It was wrong. From a professional point of view, it was … I’d have to say dubious. I’m not trying to excuse it, Frankie, just to explain what my thinking was. I’m really sorry you had to find out like this, so long after the fact. And if you feel you need to lodge a complaint with the clinic, or with your insurer, I’ll understand.”
“I’m not interested in complaining,” Fran told him. “I didn’t come here for that.”
Dr. Southern looked relieved. Actually, he looked like a man who was trying not to look relieved, which was sort of comical if she had been in a mood to laugh about it. “Okay. Well, that’s … I’m glad to hear it. What can I do for you, then?”
Fran decided it would be better to start with something small, and work her way up to the bombshell by gradual degrees. “I’d like you to tell me what you know about Picota. I’m trying to figure him out.” She filled Dr. Southern in on the project—how she had set out to neutralize her fears, first of all through her visit to the Perry Friendly and more recently by learning as much as she could about Picota as a man so she’d be able to stop seeing him as a terrifying monster. She left out all the stuff that had to do with the changes, and the eerie echoes in Picota’s transcript relating to her false memories and her hallucinations. She tried to keep it simple, and to make it sound like a project Dr. S could mark in her case file with a big tick and a gold star.
But it didn’t seem to be working. The doctor’s face, which had been hopeful to start with, got glummer with each sentence. “What?” Fran demanded at last. “What’s the matter? This is a good thing to do, right?”
Southern tilted his head, kind of on a diagonal: a movement that was neither a nod nor a shake. “It seems like a really worthwhile project, certainly. But I can’t help you with it, Frankie. Not even a little bit. I’ve got to respect patient confidentiality. I’m not allowed to talk to you about anything we got fr
om Bruno Picota in that room—beyond what went into the court files you already saw. I wouldn’t be allowed to practice again anywhere if I did that.”
Fran felt a twinge of anger, and she didn’t even bother to try to hide it. “So your duty to him trumps your duty to me? We’re both your patients, Dr. Southern.”
Southern grimaced. “No, Frankie,” he said quietly. “You’re wrong. You are and he’s not. My duty to you is … well, it’s a thing that actually exists. Here and now, I don’t owe Picota anything except the general, minimal respect we owe to anyone we share the planet with. But the rules of my profession still apply, and the law of the land still applies. I can’t discuss any insights and impressions I got while I was his therapist. Or nominally his therapist. I’m sorry. I really wish I could, if you think it would help you, but I’m not allowed to do it. Just like I won’t discuss you, or your case, with anyone else after you stop being my patient. If it’s ten years later, or twenty, or I’m on my death bed confessing my sins to God, I still can’t go there.”
His earnestness and unhappiness took some of the wind out of Fran’s sails, but she was so incredulous she forgot for a moment that this wasn’t what she wanted Dr. S to do in any case. All she wanted was for him to broker a meeting. “Wait a second,” she said. “You and me, we talk in private. I get that. But you didn’t talk to Bruno Picota in private. There were lawyers there, and the lawyers hired you, and you turned over all the transcripts and everything so they could use your opinions in court. The whole point was to get Picota off from being tried for attempted murder. So how can there be confidentiality?”
“Because those were the terms of my engagement, Frankie. That was what I agreed to, and what Picota agreed to. It doesn’t mean I can go ahead and talk to third parties without his permission.”
“Even his victims.”
“Even you, yes.”
“Wow,” Fran said. “That’s … I don’t have a word for what that is. What did we ever do in this room, Dr. Southern, besides talk about him? But it doesn’t matter. I didn’t come here for that. What I want you to do is get me in to see him.”
Southern blinked. “See him?”
“Yes.”
“You want to meet with Bruno Picota?” The doctor’s eyebrows had gone all the way up his bald head, joining up in the middle as his forehead went into concertina creases.
“Who else are we talking about? I guess you can arrange that, can’t you? Ask the doctors at Grove City to let me in?”
Southern seemed stunned by the bare notion of it. “No,” he said. “At least … I don’t think so. I mean, obviously I could ask, but I don’t know what kind of argument I could make.”
“The argument is I want to see him,” Fran said. Her tone was testy, she could hear for herself, but at that she was reining herself in. “He messed up my whole life. It’s been ten years and I’m still having nightmares. I’m still seeing things. I may not ever get well, and that’s all his fault. So the argument is they should let me in because I’ve got a right. I’ve got a right to see him.”
“I don’t think that’s true, Frankie,” Southern protested. “Morally, yes, you’ve got a strong case, but there’s no legal requirement. And from a strictly therapeutic standpoint …” He ran out of road and stopped talking very suddenly. Fran waited.
“I can see where it might help,” he admitted at last. “There are precedents, although in a forensic setting rather than a clinical one. Victims confronting their attackers in court to describe the impact of the crime on their lives.” He frowned, thinking so hard it seemed to be causing him actual pain. “I’ve been saying all along we needed a new approach. This … if your symptoms are trauma artifacts … it might …”
Another silence.
“You’re sure?” Southern said. “You’re certain you want to do this?”
“I’m sure. I want to get the truth about what happened to me at the Perry Friendly. All of it. I don’t think there’s anyone else who can tell me.”
“And your dad agrees to this?”
“He’ll agree when I tell him.”
Southern sighed. “Okay then. I’ll do my best to persuade Bruno’s doctors at Grove City to let you in to see him. I’ll suggest that a meeting might be good for him too. Put the main emphasis there.”
“Good for him?” Fran’s voice dripped with disgust.
“That’s the only way they’ll go for it. If they decide there’s a clinical value in it for their patient. Which is Bruno, obviously, not you. You’re my patient, and he’s theirs.”
Fran breathed hard. “Okay,” she said. “Thank you, Dr. Southern.” She got up, very much on her dignity, but she didn’t head for the door. Not straight away. She was thinking about something Southern had said. What we got from Picota in that room. He’d mostly been keeping up his consulting voice, which was neutral except when it peaked into calm, rumbly reassurance, but the last two words there—that room—had been shoved out of his mouth hard and fast as if he wanted to be rid of them.
“What was he like?” she asked him.
“Frankie, I already explained—”
“Not your diagnosis, Dr. Southern. Just your feeling. What was he like as a person?”
Southern didn’t answer for a long time. When he did, it was with another of those hand-shrugs. “What you’d expect. Sick. Troubled. Unhappy. Mostly that—terribly, intensely unhappy. Bruno had his story to tell, and I think he believed it, but he knew how it sounded and by the time I got to meet him it had already started to occur to him that nobody else was going to believe it. That he was out on his own, as it were. He was waving to us from the bottom of a deep, deep pit.”
Fran felt a certain degree of satisfaction when she heard this description. If Picota was unhappy, that was fine by her. Of course, this had been the best part of ten years ago. She hoped he was still in that deep pit right now.
“You know he has a learning disability?” Southern said.
“Of course.” An expression her dad sometimes used came into Fran’s mind. “Slow as a slug in a slump.”
Southern didn’t smile. “Slow is a good word,” he agreed. “That’s very much how he seemed to me. Slow to talk, and slow to think his way through what other people were telling him. The conversations I had with him happened over the course of about two months. In that time, I saw a lot of things sink in for him—in slow motion, if you like. What he’d done. What it meant. What the rest of his life would probably be like.”
“And it made you sorry for him.”
“In some ways. And without trying to mitigate the things he did. Yes.”
“Then there’s your conflict of interest,” Fran said acidly. “If you’re still looking for it.” It was probably the nastiest thing she had ever said to anyone.
But Dr. Southern only nodded. “I suppose you’re right,” he said with a bleak smile. “You had a right to expect complete objectivity. I didn’t see myself as compromised by knowing Bruno and having treated him, but since I didn’t disclose the connection to you that’s beside the point. I understand why you’re angry.”
“I think you’ve given me the best treatment you could,” Fran told him, relenting. “But if you feel bad about not telling me that stuff when you should have, then do this one thing for me.”
“I’ll try my best, Frankie,” Southern said again. “If you’re really sure it’s what you—”
“We already covered that part, Dr. Southern.”
Southern nodded. “So we did.”
Beth had had a lot to eat and a lot to drink, all of it on top of a lot of unfamiliar feelings in a body she had almost forgotten how to use. Perhaps that was why her first night back in the flesh was such a broken one.
She dozed shallowly, fretting and turning for two or three hours before finally coming all the way up out of the well of sleep with a ragged yell. She was convinced for a few moments after that waking that someone was in the room with her.
But it had only been a dream. She was alo
ne in the room and the house was silent. Her shout of alarm didn’t seem to have roused anyone. No one and nothing was stirring.
She got up and checked anyway. Went and made sure the doors and windows were all locked, the family room and kitchen as she had left them. She had taken up the plastic sheeting: her footsteps made no sound on the thick carpet.
Nothing was moving in the colorless void either. Nobody was sneaking up on her from the other side of reality. She would have felt it.
But would she have felt it in time?
Beth poured a stiff brandy and took it out onto the front porch. She sipped the booze slowly, relishing its slow-burn sweetness as she rested her folded arms against the rail and looked out into the damp, fragrant night. The world was so full of sensation it was almost too much to take. The feel of the flaking paint under her elbows and forearms. The mingled scents of flowers and petrol and stepped-on city air. The night’s cool, touching every inch of her.
None of this had meant very much to her before she died. Now, resurrected, she craved it like an addict. The whole world was her habit. She didn’t intend to give it up again, ever.
Which meant she had to be smart. She had to dig herself down into this new life and bed herself in so deep and so strong that nothing could ever uproot her again. Her enemy was gone—both of her enemies, in fact. She had triumphed over Marc and over her other self, although the second of those had hardly been a fight at all.
But suppose some other version of her came roving through the dark, from world to world, and caught her unawares. What she had done to Doormat Liz, some other Beth could do to her.
Beth took another long swig of the brandy and held it in her mouth, letting the hot liquor wend its way down her throat a little at a time.
That would be a stupid way to go, wouldn’t it? Pushed out into the cold again because she dropped her guard and let herself be stabbed in the back like an idiot. She was better than that. She had to indulge her appetites carefully so they didn’t leave her exposed.