by Keith Ablow
"No, you're not," she said. "Far from it. The people you've worked with, the violent ones… can find you so easily."
"That's the best way to let them know I'm not afraid of them."
"Are you, sometimes, though?"
"No," I said. "Never. But that may just mean there's something wrong with me."
She brushed past me, into the living room.
I walked toward the kitchen. "Can I get you anything? A drink? Dinner?"
"I grabbed something at the hospital cafeteria," she said, wandering around the loft. "Please go ahead, though."
I watched her as she checked out the loft, taking in the art, touching some of the furniture. She stopped in front of the plate-glass windows. "This is one of the most beautiful views I've ever seen," she said. "How did you find this place?"
"A friend of mine used to live in this building," I said. "I liked watching the tankers."
"From her place," Julia said. She smiled.
I nodded.
She took off her jacket and walked over to my bed. "I need to sleep for half an hour or so. I'm exhausted. Do you mind?"
"Of course not," I said.
She laid down on the gray linen comforter, curled up like a cat. "Hold me?" she asked.
I walked over and climbed onto the bed, spooning myself against her, my face lost now in her hair, my hand laced into hers, held close to her breast. I could feel her engagement ring against my skin, but that seemed an artifact from a life she had lived before ours intersected.
"A psychiatrist-a woman-came by the intensive care unit to talk with me," she said.
"And…"
"I told her I won't want to go on if Tess doesn't make it," she said. "I couldn't bear to survive, thinking I let this happen to her."
"Dr. Karlstein is fighting like hell for Tess," I said.
"I believe that," she said. "And I believe she'll pull through. Otherwise, I could never have left her, not even for an hour."
We lay together as Julia slept. Before dozing off myself, I let my mind wander three, four months into the future, past the investigation, which I now believed should end with Darwin Bishop's arrest. And I could actually see Julia and myself making a life together, somehow offering Billy and Garret safe harbor from the storms they had weathered. I actually thought I might have the chance to redeem myself for losing my adolescent patient Billy Fisk to suicide.
We awakened at the same moment. Julia rolled over and faced me. "I want to know that we're together," she whispered. "I want you to make love to me."
I propped myself on an elbow and brushed her hair away from her face. "This is a complicated time to start," I said.
"We started the first time you touched my arm," she said. "The day you met me outside the house, with Garret."
"I just…"
"You can't control what you feel for me," she said, glancing at my crotch, full with my excitement. She unbuttoned and unzipped her jeans, guided my hand into her panties and between her legs. She was completely shaved, and her impossibly soft skin was warm and wet. "Not any more than I can control what I feel for you."
Julia's sexual desire in the face of losing Brooke and nearly losing Tess troubled me, but I silently chastised myself for judging her. What textbook reaction, after all, would have satisfied me? Bitter rage? Isolation? Did I want to see her slip deeper and deeper into depression?
My head was swimming. Why resist Julia's needs, I asked myself, when the gods of chance and love might be giving me my one shot at happiness? Why deny my own needs? I looked into Julia's eyes and ran the tip of my finger along the cleft between her delicate folds. She sighed. And as she opened herself to my touch, it seemed a part of my soul, lost a long time, was being returned to me.
Friday, June 28, 2002
I started driving Julia back to Mass General at 1:30 a.m. We had fallen asleep again, after making love. I checked my rearview mirror a few times to make sure we weren't being followed.
"Worried about Win?" Julia asked.
"Shouldn't I be?"
"I've worried about him for so long, I sometimes forget to."
"Why do you think you married him in the first place?" I asked. "You've said you thought you were in love, but why did you fall for him? What attracted you?"
She took a deep breath. "I'm not sure it was about Win," she said. "He was charming, handsome. All that. But it was more about me. I think I was actually using him."
That sounded pretty up-front. "How so?" I asked.
"I come from a large family," she said. "Four brothers and myself. Dad was an attorney, but not a real name in his profession, nothing like that. My mother was quiet. A homemaker. She didn't have any dreams to speak of and she never seemed terribly interested in mine. Darwin was larger than life-certainly larger than my life seemed at the time."
"Your relationship with your father?" I asked. "How was that?"
"I loved him, but he spent most of his time with my brothers-their athletics, their schooling. I started modeling at fourteen, probably to compete for his attention. It grew into a lot more than I expected, but he never really cared about it. And I never developed real self-confidence from it."
"Your marriage provided that?"
"In a way," she said. "Or it seemed to. Being Win's wife meant I didn't have to figure out what else I was. Mrs. Darwin Bishop was a good enough label for my parents and friends. For most people. And for a long while, it was good enough for me, too. I borrowed his success. I even fooled myself into thinking I was contributing to it. The power behind the throne. That kind of thing."
"But you had achieved a good deal of success yourself, in modeling," I said.
"I always understood that was skin-deep, and that it would end." She looked out the window at the Boston skyline as we crossed the Tobin Bridge. "I knew from the first time Darwin hit me that our marriage would end, too. But I was… paralyzed. I never took the time or had the strength to find my own way."
"Yet," I said.
"Yet." She smiled. "Enough about me, already, Dr. Clevenger. How have you happened to stay single?"
"I was with a woman for years who was ill-mentally," I said.
"Who was she?"
"A doctor," I said. "An obstetrician."
"Is that what brought you together?" Julia asked. "Medicine?"
"That was part of it. But, in a certain way, I was using her, too," I said. "She was fragile, so I was the one in control. My being with her gave me the chance to say I was in a relationship when I was really avoiding relationships. Hiding out."
"Why hide?" she said.
"Because I had to hide-emotionally and physically-in the house I grew up in. I guess it got to be a habit."
She looked at me as if she wanted more of an explanation.
"My father used a belt, just like Darwin," I said.
"I'm so sorry, Frank," she said. "I had no idea."
"It was a long time ago," I said.
Julia was silent several seconds, sitting and looking through the windshield. Then she turned to me. "You don't have to hide anything, anymore," she said.
I wanted to believe the heart of what Julia had said- that I could be known and loved at the same time. Because, deep down, I had always suspected the two were mutually exclusive. I glanced at her as she looked at me, with eyes full of acceptance and warmth. And I felt, truly, as though I had arrived at a new and better place.
I parked in the MGH garage and walked Julia the two blocks to the door of the hospital. We played it safe-no parting kiss, no long good-bye. She walked into the lobby, and I turned and started back for the truck. It was just before 2:00 a.m.
The MGH garage is a five-story cement structure, the back of which overlooks the Charles River. The building runs two city blocks, with the wall furthest from the hospital sitting on Cambridge Street and the wall closest to it bordering a darkened alleyway that leads to Storrow Drive. I had just started to walk across that alleyway when someone pushed me, hard, from behind. I lurched forward and
, struggling to stay on my feet, felt a sudden and odd twisting sensation at the bottom of my rib cage, about halfway between my spine and my side. It burned red-hot for the first second or two, then flipped into a penetrating ache so severe it made me double over and fall to the ground. I tried reaching for the Browning Baby in my pocket, but my arm didn't seem to be taking instructions from my brain.
"What could she have done," a husky, peculiar-sounding voice said, "being what she is?"
I struggled to see the figure jogging away from me, but only caught a glimpse of black, army-style boots. I groped for the painful place on my back that was making me see double. I felt something warm and slick. Then everything went black.
"Frank!" Colin Bain called to me. "C'mon, man, stop ignoring me." I felt my sternum being assaulted by Bain's knuckles-a sternal rub, they call it, which is actually more of a brutal sternal raking, designed to wake the unresponsive and separate them from the dead.
"Christ! I'm fine," I muttered, twisting away from him. I opened my eyes and tried to sit up, but a searing pain reached through my back and yanked me down to the mattress by my ribs.
Bain was standing by the bed, wearing his round wire-rimmed glasses. He swept his longish red hair away from his face. "Welcome, friend," he said.
I was naked to the waist. Bandages circled my torso like a half-wrapped mummy. "What the hell happened to me?" I said.
"Someone jumped you in the alleyway near the garage," he said. "Stuck you good. A five-inch blade, so far as I can tell. At least, that's how deep it went." He smiled. "You slept through the best parts. I already explored the wound, cleaned it up, sewed you shut. You were so out of it I didn't even have to use lidocaine."
"The mind is a wonderful thing," I said. "Thanks for the help."
"No problem," he said.
"Did they catch the guy?" I asked.
"Not even close," he said. "They didn't find you for five or ten minutes, judging from the amount of blood you'd lost."
I checked out the space around me and spotted a unit of packed red blood cells hanging from an IV pole. A length of red IV tubing ran into my arm. I shook my head.
"Hospital security said they thought you were some homeless drunk napping on the pavement," Bain said. "They didn't notice the blood all over your jacket until they flipped you onto a gurney to sleep it off in the lobby." He winked. "I do have their names, if you want to catch up with them."
I started to chuckle, but choked on a bolt of pain that shot straight through my abdomen, then up into my throat.
"You're gonna be in a fair amount of discomfort for a couple days," Bain said.
"Discomfort's a nice word for it," I said, catching my breath.
"An MRI showed the blade sliced through the latissimus dorsi and internal oblique," he said. "I threw in about sixty stitches. The tip just missed your portal artery, by the way. If that had been severed, you'd have bled out for sure. You're lucky to be alive."
"Thanks for letting me know."
"It wouldn't be a bad idea to be admitted overnight, for observation. Just to make sure nothing got nicked in there that we don't know about."
"No way," I said. "I don't have the time."
"You were almost out of time-for good," he said. "What's a day or two?"
Now it was a day or two. "I'm in the middle of a forensic case," I said. Saying those words helped my still-foggy brain make the obvious connection between the Bishops and my being stabbed. "This probably has something to do with that."
"So maybe it would be good to lay low for twenty-four, forty-eight hours, you know?"
"I can't," I said.
"Suit yourself," he said. "I'll write you a scrip for some Keflex. Hopefully, that'll prevent any infection. Percocet for the pain. Just let me know when you need more."
The addict in me perked up. Downing three, four Percocet would be like taking a chemical vacation from the whole Bishop mess. I actually caught myself wondering how many refills Bain would write for me. Luckily, I realized what a great excuse he was giving me to fall apart. "I'd better skip anything abusable," I said. "I've had problems with that stuff before."
He took the revelation in stride. "I didn't know. We'll make do with Motrin, then."
"Thanks."
"If you get any fever, chills or swelling, come right back here. Agreed?"
"You got it," I said.
"The external sutures come out in ten days. The internal ones dissolve," he said.
"I'll see you in ten days, then." I gritted my teeth and sat up. My side felt as if it was ripping away from the rest of my body.
"The cops want to talk to you, by the way," Bain said. "Should I let them know you're awake?"
"Sure."
"These guys are Boston cops," he said. "But I did take the liberty to let a friend of yours from Nantucket know your condition. North Anderson? He told me he heard what had happened to you from colleagues of his on the force up here. I hope I didn't step out of line filling him in."
"No," I said. "I'm glad you talked with him."
Bain looked at me with concern. "You're sure you won't stay the night? A couple very pretty nurses on Blake eight."
"Maybe I'll take a rain check after I'm healed up," I said.
I told the Boston patrolmen everything I could remember, which was nothing much. Even the black boots had temporarily slipped my memory, let alone the odd turn of phrase spoken by my assailant. They had no clues, either. There'd been a mugging in the same spot about eight months before, but that didn't amount to much of a pattern, and it didn't do anything to push Darwin Bishop-represented, of course, by one of his thugs-out of my mind as the most likely culprit.
I waited for the rest of the blood to drip into my arm, swallowed three Motrin, and pulled myself together enough to roll off the gurney and maneuver into a big white button-down shirt I borrowed from Bain. I steeled myself for the elevator ride up to the ICU, but every jostling stop made me break out in a cold sweat.
I found Julia seated next to Tess's bed, with a twenty-something male sitter on the opposite side of the mattress, reading what looked like a law school textbook. He and I exchanged the standard greetings.
"What happened?" Julia said. "You look awful."
I told her.
She went pale. "This is my fault," she said. "I should never have taken the chance coming to your place."
"It could have been a random attack," I said, even though I knew better.
"We have to be much more careful," she said, shaking her head. "This is what I was afraid of."
I was feeling more determined than scared, which I probably should have taken as a warning sign that I was losing perspective. "I'm going to the island later today," I said. "I have to finish some work with North Anderson."
"When will you be back?" Her eyes filled up.
"A day. Maybe two."
"Win flies in today," she said. "I'm going to tell him I don't want him to see Tess. If he tries to, I'll file a restraining order with the court."
"I have someone who could help you with that," I said. "Carl Rossetti, a lawyer from the North End." I took her in my arms and held her a moment, trying to keep my breathing steady, despite the searing pain that gripped me whenever I raised my hands above waist-level. "I'll call to check in," I managed. I let go.
She leaned closer. "You know that I love you," she said.
Those words took me by surprise, not because I didn't feel the same way, but because I wasn't used to anyone keeping pace with my emotions. "I love you, too," I said.
I was headed out of the hospital lobby when Caroline Hallissey, the MGH chief resident in psychiatry, caught up with me. Hallissey, a gay activist, was around thirty years old, under five feet tall, and about 250 pounds. Her face might have been pretty at one time, but her features were swollen now. She wore a silver hoop through her right nostril and a silver bolt through the skin over her left eyebrow. I had heard that she and her partner had just adopted a daughter of their own. "Got a minute?" she
said.
"Sure," I said.
I must have looked as bad as I felt. "You okay?" she asked.
"I'm fine. What's up?"
"I did the consult on that woman in the ICU. Julia Bishop? You're involved in that case, right?"
"Right," I said. "What do you think?"
"She's depressed, that's for sure," Hallissey said. "She has numerous neurovegetative signs. Sleep loss. Lack of appetite. Difficulty concentrating. Low self-esteem. The symptoms were even worse just after her twins were born, but she's very resistant to being treated for any of it."
"It's a tough time for her to think clearly about herself," I said.
"Agreed," she said. "I wouldn't force anything on her. She's not suicidal, in the classic sense-just alluding to not wanting to go on if her daughter should die." She paused. "The thing that troubled me more was that I felt a lot of hostility from her."
"Meaning?"
"She asked a lot about my credentials. What undergrad school did I graduate? Where did I go to medical school? Who supervises my work with patients? The whole nine yards."
I wondered if that had anything to do with Hallissey's appearance. "She's in the middle of a homicide investigation," I said. "She doesn't know exactly who to trust."
"That could be part of it," Hallissey said. "But this felt more personal than that. Like she had an issue with me." She looked away, her eyes thinning as she struggled for words to describe her interaction with Julia. "I got the same feeling from her that I used to get from male patients who didn't respect female physicians. The ones who wanted to make sure I knew it."
"Not every psychiatrist-patient interaction is a love match," I said.
Hallissey looked directly at me. "I don't mean to step out of line, but it doesn't sound like you want to hear any of this. Maybe it's not a good time to talk."
I shook my head. Hallissey was right. I was automatically discounting her negative feedback about Julia. "I do want to hear it," I said. "Please. Tell me what else you noticed."
She hesitated.
"I'm listening," I said.
"Maybe it's the way she is with women," Hallissey said. "I mean, I've seen her be very cordial with Dr. Karlstein. And you don't seem to have any problem with her. But a couple of the female nurses in the ICU told me she treats them like she owns them. They definitely get bad vibes." She shrugged. "She supposedly modeled, right? Someone mentioned Elite or something."