Compulsion

by Keith Ablow

  Maybe it had taken another crisis to start another phase of healing for the Bishops-this one a healing of the divide between Garret and Billy. "I'm glad for you," I said. "Both of you. It would be wonderful if you ended up being close."

  "I told him what you wanted me to do, and he said I should do it. He asked me to do it. For him."

  I would have preferred Billy fully accept that he needed help. But I wasn't going to turn down the gift from Garret. "I'll set it up," I said.

  "Good," he said. He looked away, then back at me, almost shyly.

  "What?" I asked.

  "Would you take me there? To Riggs?" he said. "You know the doctor who runs it. If you were hanging out nearby, he might let you visit me during the first week or two."

  "Sure," I said.

  "That was Garret's idea, too. So if it's asking too much, or…"

  "It's a great idea," I said.

  Monday, July 22, 2002

  By 9:30 a.m., Ed Shapiro had cleared Billy for a July 25 admission to Riggs, cutting the usual four-month waiting list to four days. It pays to have friends in quiet places.

  Garret and Billy actually took a turn making breakfast for Julia, Candace, and me, whipping up waffles and sliced fruit like the pros do. I had to remind myself again of Billy's pathology in order to see past the goodwill filling the house to all the hard work it would take to keep Billy safe.

  We planned to charter a sailboat and spend a lazy day together as a family. I stopped back at the cottage to grab a few things. A large manila envelope was sitting in the woven straw basket that hung next to my door. I picked it up and saw that it had been sent by Dr. Laura Mossberg from Payne Whitney, postmarked July 18.1 figured she had finally sent along one of the old medical records on Billy I had asked her for.

  I opened the envelope on my way into the cottage, then sat down on the couch to read the cover letter:

  Dr. Clevenger:

  Herewith, records of urologic care rendered Mr. Darwin Bishop, which only reached my desk today. I would normally be prohibited from sharing these materials with you, but your visit to the unit was preceded by Mr. and Mrs. Bishop signing our standard (and blanket) release covering all family medical records at Cornell Medical Center/Payne Whitney Clinic. I do not know if the enclosed materials would have had any bearing on your investigation.

  Unfortunately, I have not received prior treatment records for Billy Bishop from other facilities.

  I would be happy to hear from you in the future.

  All good, Laura Mossberg

  P.S. I have also enclosed a copy of I Don't Want to Talk About It, a very good book on men and trauma. I hope you won't take offense (and that you might even take the time to read it).

  I smiled. Talk about not giving up on a patient. And I wasn't even paying her. I started to read through the packet of medical records. Two pages in, I stopped short on a form marked "Screening Assessment Tool." My pulse moved into my temples as I read the first paragraph:

  Mr. Darwin Bishop, a 50-year-old, married, Caucasian male, father of two adopted boys, presents for bilateral vasectomy. The patient informs us that his wife is supportive and that his decision is based on a long-held philosophical position that "it isn't fair to bring children into a world like this one." Mr. Bishop states that his perspective took shape during his experiences in Vietnam, on which he refuses to elaborate. He has held his belief for many years and rates his likelihood of changing his perspective and wishing to father biological children at zero percent.

  The form was signed by Paisley Marshall, MD, and dated April 15, 1999, about two years before Brooke and Tess Bishop were conceived.

  My mind raced from one fact to the next, almost in disbelief. Darwin Bishop was infertile. Brooke and Tess Bishop were not his biological daughters. Julia had had an affair and become pregnant with the twins.

  I flipped page after page, half-expecting to see a note describing Bishop's change of heart about the procedure, but instead stopped on a surgical note dated May 12, 1999:

  Patient reaffirms desire for complete sterilization. All risks described, including infection, allergic reaction to medications, pain, bleeding.

  Patient declines cross-over procedure. Patient received local anesthetic 0.5% Marcaine with epinephrine and Versed to induce calm.

  Vital signs stable at onset of procedure.

  At surgery, normal appearing bilateral spermatic cords and vas deferens were dissected free, segmental resections performed, and the ends ligated with 3-0 vicryl suture and sealed with Hyfrecator.

  Bishop's having declined a cross-over procedure, a more complicated vasectomy that can be reversed, meant his infertility would be permanent.

  Suddenly, Julia's explanation about the letter Claire Buckley had found sounded even more incredible. Her therapist Marion Eisenstadt obviously hadn't been the intended recipient. Julia had written the letter to her lover. The father of her children.

  The investigation into Brooke's murder hadn't simply failed to ferret out a romantic partner of Julia's. We had neglected to interview the twins' biological father-a potential suspect.

  I thought of trying to reach North Anderson, but knew he would be in Paris for the next ten days, spending a seemingly well-earned vacation with Tina. And I wasn't sure I needed his help. I didn't have a shred of evidence, nor any real suspicion, that Darwin Bishop had been wrongly charged with Brooke's murder. My doubts centered on Julia; she had lied to me and left me in the dark. Her character was again in question.

  I had a job to do, but this time it was for me to do alone: to find out exactly who I had fallen in love with.

  I remember the rest of that day in snapshots: the sun-soaked vistas of Vineyard Sound, Julia's surreal beauty, Candace's quiet grace, Billy and Garret working the sails and rudder together, a strong breeze blowing the hair off their foreheads, making them look younger, stronger, more handsome than I had ever seen them. The scenes would have made perfect postcards, which should have made me wonder whether the serenity was real or staged. But my focus was on the big lie-Julia's lie. I turned it around in my mind, trying to find an angle that would allow me to explain it away, to excuse it without further inquiry. I was that in love with her.

  There were parts of the lie I had already accepted. I had no illusion that Julia had been faithful to Darwin Bishop. I had no lingering expectation that she would fill me in on every chapter of her romantic life. And I could even accept a chapter that included her being impregnated by a man other than her husband.

  What I couldn't dismiss was the fact that she had jeopardized the investigation into her daughter's murder by withholding information.

  Something else bothered me. A lot. Why hadn't Darwin Bishop disclosed the fact that the twins were not his biological children? Wouldn't he have wanted the police to worry about another potential suspect? Or did he fear that a jury might more readily believe him capable of killing another man's child?

  After a day chockful of photo ops, Julia, the boys, Candace, and I got back to the house just after seven. I would have waited until the next day to confront Julia, but she called the cottage just after midnight.

  "Come see me," she whispered.

  "In your room?" I said.

  "The boys are sleeping," she said. "We wore them out."

  "Why don't you come over here?" I asked.

  She giggled. "Because I just showered, and my hair is wet, and I have no clothes on, and I'm already in bed."

  "I'll be there," I said.

  I let myself into the main house and walked up to Julia's room. Her door was open, but the lights were out, and the room was almost pitch black.

  "Don't turn on the light," she whispered from bed. "Just close the door."

  I did as she asked. "You like it when I can't see," I said.

  "I'll be your eyes," she said. "I'm on my stomach. I have two pillows under my hips and another one I can bite down on, if I need to. Is that clear?"

  I felt my way toward the bed and sat down on the edge o
f the mattress. I reached out. My hand glided over the velvety smooth skin of Julia's lower back. I sighed. "We have to talk about something," I said.

  "After," she said.

  I let my hand move to the even softer curves of her ass before I summoned the resolve to pull away. "No," I said. "We need to talk first." I felt her pulling the sheet over her and reaching for the bedside lamp.

  "What's going on?" she asked, squinting at me in the lamplight. She was holding the edge of the sheet just below her breasts.

  I looked away, in order to focus my thoughts. The walls of the room were covered with pretty oil paintings of the ocean and marshes and with black-and-white photographs of Julia as a little girl and young woman. "I got some medical records in the mail from New York today," I said.

  "And?" she said.

  I looked back at her. She had drawn the sheet to her chin. I didn't see any reason to be subtle. "I know about the vasectomy," I said. "I know that Darwin didn't father the twins."

  Julia looked at me blankly, as if she hadn't decided whether to respond directly or to be evasive.

  "Why didn't you tell me during the investigation-me, or North Anderson?"

  She nodded to herself, then looked back at me. "This may not make a lot of sense to you, but I didn't say anything because I promised Darwin I never would. I promised him before the twins were born, when he was pressuring me to get an abortion. Keeping what had happened a secret seemed to be the only thing that mattered to him." A bitter smile played across her lips. "I swore on Brooke's and Tess's lives."

  "You should have told us," I said. "And not just so we could interview the twins' biological father. A man like Darwin might feel you forced him into a situation he didn't want to live with. He might have decided to fix things his own way. It goes to his motive."

  "When you bury the truth the way Darwin and I agreed to," Julia said, "it's almost as if it becomes untouchable. Like it doesn't exist, anymore. I didn't even think of it as relevant to what happened. We were all so focused on Billy as the guilty one."

  "When we had lunch together in Boston, at Bomboa," I said, "you asked me whether I thought Darwin was capable of destroying his 'flesh and blood.' Why did you choose those words?"

  " 'Why did I choose those words?' You sound like a detective," she said.

  "I'm no detective. I just want to know. Why those words?"

  "No reason. I didn't mean it literally. It's a cliché. I meant his children." She paused. "They are, legally. I mean, we're married."

  "And you still say the letter that Claire found… was to your therapist, not the man you got pregnant by."

  She looked at me askance. "Now I get it," she said. "You don't believe me anymore. About anything."

  I didn't respond.

  "Because I didn't tell you everything about my sex life?” she half-shouted.

  "Quiet," I said. "The boys."

  "Because I didn't tell you," she said, barely keeping her voice down, "that my husband was so soured on the world and so controlling that he wouldn't give me children? I didn't spill my guts and tell you how it feels being treated like a pretty thing that's fun to fuck, knowing you'll never be a mother?" She shook her head. "This may come as a news flash, Frank, but I've been lonely. And scared. It hasn't been easy living with Darwin. So when I met someone a couple years ago who seemed to care about me, I reached out to him. I thought there was a chance we could have a life together. I got pregnant, and he couldn't handle it. We stopped seeing each other."

  "Who was he?" I asked.

  "I can't say," Julia said. "He's an acquaintance of Darwin's. He's very well known." She paused. "He was at Brooke's funeral. We didn't even speak."

  "I'm supposed to believe you had a sexual relationship with an acquaintance of your husband's, bore his children, and have no contact with him now?"

  "You know what I can't believe?" she said. "Where do you get off thinking that everything that happened to me before you arrived on the scene is your business? Have I asked you for a list of every woman you've fucked?" She looked away. "Leave me alone," she said.

  "Julia…"

  "Get out," she said. "Just get out."

  23

  Garret was standing in his doorway when I stepped into the hall. "Rough night?" he said. He was dressed in blue jeans, no top. He had every bit of the muscular definition Billy did, including a chest like a welterweight fighter and a washboard abdomen. He seemed jumpy-maybe worried, maybe excited.

  I wasn't happy that the heat I had generated with Julia had reached him. "Looks like that's how it's ending up," I said. "Sorry we woke you."

  "I wasn't that tired," he said.

  I nodded toward his room. "Want to talk?"

  "You're probably all talked out," he said.

  I wanted to reassure Garret that things weren't falling completely apart, even though I was worried they were- first with Billy, now with Julia. Both within about twenty-four hours. "Actually, I wouldn't mind a little company," I said. "I won't take much of your time."

  "Cool," he said. He backed into his room.

  I followed him. He hadn't gotten around to organizing his things; boxes overflowed with clothes, photo albums, a few long-lensed cameras, hundreds of film canisters. I took a seat at his desk.

  "It's a total mess in here," he said. "Embarrassing." He started picking up, piling everything into his closet. "This is a hard time for my mother," he said, glancing at me.

  "I would think so," I said.

  "Not just recovering from the beating and all that," he said. He grabbed another overflowing box. "The changes. Darwin not being here, first and foremost. Even though it's a good thing, it's a big thing, you know?"

  That was true. Bishop had occupied a lot of physical and emotional space in the household. His absence opened up a void. Even the loss of negative energy can be dizzying. "I guess it's a little like coming home from a war," I said. "The demons stay with you a while."

  Garret jammed the box into the closet, forced the door closed, then turned and looked at me. "For instance," he said, "without getting shrinky with the shrink, she wanted you to hit her in there."

  "What?" I said.

  "She yelled," Garret said. "Darwin would have gone ballistic. She was testing you to see if you would hit her."

  Garret's insight made some sense. I had asked Julia to trust me, to fully disclose her past. One way to interpret her extreme response was as a way of probing how far she could push me without me pushing back. "You know your mother pretty well," I said.

  He shrugged. "I've noticed the same kind of thing about myself since you've been living with us," he said. "Like this room. I could never have left it this way with Darwin around. Not unless I wanted the strap. I think I've let it get this messy to see if you'd cut me slack."

  "It's really not my place to tell you how to keep your room," I said.

  "You're pretty much the man of the house," he said.

  I wasn't feeling much like the man of the house. I nodded at his desk. "So what are you reading, anyhow?"

  "Poetry," he said.

  "Who?" I asked, looking at the title, The Land of Heart's Desire.

  "Yeats," he said.

  "Is he your favorite?"

  "I don't really have a favorite," he said, easing himself into a beanbag chair in the corner of the room. "I like Emerson and Poe just as much. Maybe better."

  I glanced up at the bookshelves, the only space in the room that was neat and clean. The volumes were arranged alphabetically, by author. I scanned the names. Auden, Beckett, Emerson, Hegel, Hemingway, Locke, Paz, Poe, Shakespeare. Yeats was at the end of the shelf-seven, eight volumes strong by himself. "What do you like about poetry?" I asked.

  "Saying more with less," he said. "People use too many words. They become meaningless."

  "Agreed," I said. "You like to write poetry, too?"

  "Some," he said. "Just for myself."

  That seemed to say I shouldn't expect to read any of Garret's work any time soon. "You're t
he most important audience," I said.

  "Darwin would get pissed if he caught me writing," Garret said. "He said it was for girls. That's one of the reasons he wouldn't let me stay too long in my room."

  "That's ridiculous," I said. "Nobody thought of Hemingway as a girl."

  "His mother did," Garret said.

  I smiled. Hemingway's mother had dressed the budding author in girl's clothes from time to time, one reason he might have become almost hyperbolically male as an adult. "Except her," I said.

  "Maybe I will show you some of my stuff, someday," Garret said tentatively.

  "I'd love to see anything you write," I said.

  He looked out his window, then back at me. "She just needs time-and some space. Maybe it's good you're taking Billy to that Riggs place."

  "I want to thank you for helping him with the decision to go there," I said. "It's the right one. You think you can hold the fort down a couple weeks by yourself?"

  "No problem," he said.

  "I'm sorry to worry you-about your mom and me," I said.

  "Don't be," he said. "I'll never have to worry the way I used to."

  I left Garret's room just before 1:00 a.m. As I walked by Billy's room, his light went out. Had he been eavesdropping, I wondered, or had Garret and I simply been keeping him up by talking too loudly?

  On my way out of the house I paused to look at the toys Candace had arranged in the curio cabinet. A little windup bear with brass cymbals caught my eye. It was the kind of thing that had probably kept Julia entertained for hours as a child. I smiled, thinking how delighted she must have been the first time she wound it up and watched it perform, how simple her pleasures were back then.

  A chill blanketed me. Because in my heart I knew, without knowing exactly why, that everything really had started to unravel, and that she would never be mine.

  My sleep that night was broken into naps. Each time I awakened, it was with another memory of Julia, Darwin, or the boys. I pictured the first time I had met Julia outside the Bishop estate, remembered our lunch at Bomboa Restaurant in Boston. I thought back to my visit with Billy on the locked unit at Payne Whitney, to my verbal altercation with Darwin at Brooke's funeral, to Anderson and me searching Garret's locker at the Brant Point Racket Club. I thought again of Claire Buckley's demeanor when she had turned the mystery letter over to North Anderson and me. And I reviewed what Anderson and I had each said to Julia at Mass General after she had been assaulted, what she had said to us. The sleep between memories became shorter and shorter, the images more and more vivid. It was as if my mind was replaying the last three weeks, looking for a window onto the Bishop family's secret.