“What did she do then?”
“Nothing. She didn’t blink an eye, didn’t move a muscle. When she spoke, her voice was so low and quiet I could barely hear her. ‘You’ll regret that,’ she told me. I’m sure I would have. Christina had no interest in forgiveness.”
Gottlieb strove to keep an even tone. “Was that when you began to think of killing her?”
“I don’t recall exactly. If not then, the next day, or the day after that. I think it came to me gradually. It wasn’t some bright idea”—he snapped his fingers—“that came to me in a flash.”
Shannon looked out the window and took a few deep breaths, as if to settle himself. “It’s important that you understand this, Dr. Gottlieb,” he said when he resumed. “I didn’t kill her for revenge. I’ve never been a vengeful person. I never will be. In fact, it’s hard for me to tell you why I did
it . . . it’s hard to find the words. I think I did it out of something like a sense of duty. What I told you that day I began to talk again, to save the world from her. I didn’t understand her, didn’t have a clue about her, but it no longer mattered. What mattered was, I knew her capabilities. She would hurt people, kill them, as the result of the smallest passing fancy. Without a qualm, without regret. There was something wrong with her, something that went to the very center of her. There always had been, but I couldn’t deny it any longer. Her malice had no limits, and I saw no chance she’d change. Her intelligence made it all the worse; it would have made her all the more dangerous.”
He sat again. “If someone didn’t stop her, she’d spend the rest of her life striking out at others as she pleased. I had to be the one to stop her. No one else could. Besides”—he blinked back tears—“there was something else. I’m ashamed to admit it, but it’s true. I was afraid of her. I was afraid of my own daughter. For two reasons. First, I knew she killed her mother, and now she knew I knew. I had the notebook. My having it posed a threat to her, however slight. To kill me would eliminate that threat.”
“And the second reason?”
“I’d dared to cross her. I’d even dared to slap her. Christina never would have let that pass. She would have retaliated tenfold, a hundred fold. I didn’t know what she’d done to Anita Pierce, not then, but I knew she’d do something similar to me. Something terrible, when I least expected it.”
They fell into a protracted silence as Gottlieb sipped tepid coffee from a nearly empty cup. This had been the most, by far, that Shannon had ever said about his daughter. Let him go on, Gottlieb told himself. Let him say as much about her as he needs to.
But Shannon showed no inclination to talk about her further. Instead, he brought up the competency report. “Brendan told me what you wrote,” he said. “He told me not to get my hopes up, but he said there is a chance I’d go to a hospital instead of a prison. Even a chance I’d get out someday.”
“It’s possible.”
He unclasped his hands and idly tapped the arm of the chair with his right hand. “I assumed I’d spend the rest of my life locked up. I assumed that from the start. I didn’t want to tantalize myself with foolish hopes.” He went on, pensively. “The idea that I might get out someday takes some getting used to.”
“Suppose you did. What do you think it would be like for you?”
“Very strange, I imagine. Especially strange to have some choice again. To be able to go here or there, or do this or that. To take a walk when I pleased, or a shower. To choose the food I ate, to go out for pizza or Kentucky Fried Chicken. Interesting, how quickly a person becomes . . . what’s that word, institutionalized?”
“I think I’d leave Chicago,” he went on. “Go downstate to one of the smaller cities. Springfield or Decatur or Carbondale, some place like that. Some place where Christina’s murder hadn’t been on the top of the news for weeks on end. Where it would be remotely possible that not everyone had heard about me.”
“What would you do?”
“What I did before, if I could. Work in the office supply field, put in my years before retirement. Keep to myself and mind my own business. It wouldn’t be a real exciting life. I don’t want that kind of life. I never did.”
Shannon grew more animated; his speech became almost pressured. “Of course I’d stay active in the church. Become a deacon if they’d let me. I also might do some things I never got around to. Learn about gardening, start a garden of my own. That would be very nice, I think. Putting on old clothes and getting down on my hands and knees and getting my hands dirty. To watch the flowers bloom, maybe grow my own vegetables. And something else, I’d like to go back to school someday. Take a course or two at a community college, just because the subjects caught my interest. I’d like to take a course on different religions. I know about my own but scarcely anything about the others.”
It was the first time Gottlieb had ever heard him talk about the future with any interest, much less enthusiasm. Gottlieb was pleased, but he also felt a certain apprehension. They might refuse to accept his report. The prosecutor might decide to fight it all the way, notwithstanding Christina’s notebook, and the judge might agree with her. If that happened, his patient could become as despairing as before. More so, because he’d dared to begin to hope again, only to have his hopes come crashing down around him.
“There’s a fine line,” said Gottlieb carefully, “between maintaining one’s hopes and counting on them. What I wrote may help you, but that’s not a given. The process will be long and complicated, and none of us can predict the outcome now.”
Shannon looked at him with a hint of a rueful smile. “Have you had many Irish patients, Dr. Gottlieb?”
The question surprised him. “Well, yes, quite a few through the years.”
“Then you’ve probably learned this about us. We tend not to get extravagant about our hopes.”
They moved on to less weighty matters. Shannon asked him if he’d enjoyed the Labor Day weekend, and Gottlieb asked him about his brother’s visit. His sister’s migraine headaches were acting up, so she couldn’t come. He asked Gottlieb to order a laxative for him. Gottlieb went through his standard questions. How was his appetite? His sleep? His concentration and attention? His energy? And then Gottlieb checked his watch. The signal that their time was drawing to a close.
Shannon stood up, said good-bye, and moved slowly towards the corridor. When he got to the door, however, he turned around. “Thank you. Not just for the report, but for everything. You’ve gone to a lot of trouble on my behalf. More than anyone else, except for my family and Brendan.”
Gottlieb stood up and strode over to him. “You’re welcome. I hope things work out all right for you. My hunch is that they will, eventually.” In fact, he felt by no means convinced of this, but he said it anyway.
He laid a hand on Shannon’s shoulder very lightly, very
quickly. Even through the sweatshirt, he could feel the shoulder tighten. Not a man who is used to touch, he thought. But the tightness passed, almost immediately, and Shannon gave what might have been an appreciative nod.
Gottlieb stood in the doorway and watched as Shannon headed down the corridor, walking slowly, at times nearly shuffling, his head bent. His hands were loosely joined behind his back, as if held in place by invisible cuffs.
CHAPTER XXV
G OTTLIEB, LIKE A NUMBER OF PSYCHIATRISTS, had mixed feelings about the Twelve-Step programs. On the one hand, he often sent patients to AA and the NA and the rest of them. Recovering alcoholics and drug addicts and compulsive gamblers, in his view, could provide enormous help to one another. They understood each other as no one else did. Those with years of sobriety or abstinence could demonstrate to newcomers that, yes, it’s possible to break free from an addiction.
On the other hand, he recoiled against the stridor and rigidity of the groups’ more dogmatic members, the AA and NA Nazis with their clichés and one-liners, their rejection of psychiatry in general, and psychiatric medication in particular. Gottlieb failed to see the rationale for
withholding a mood stabilizer from a bipolar patient, or an antipsychotic from a schizophrenic, just because he happened to be a drunk.
But in the balance, he felt the groups did much more good than harm. He liked their simple truths, and the not-so-simple wisdom which lay beneath them. One day at a time. Live and let live. And his personal favorite: This, too, shall pass. More than a tidbit he passed on to his patients, it was an integral part of his personal credo, and it had helped him through the worst times of his life. However bad things seemed to be, they wouldn’t last. Nothing did.
This, too, shall pass. His personal choice for the four most important words in the English language. These words became his mantra in the firestorm that followed the release of his report on James Shannon.
⸎
At GCFI, he, Norma Caldwell, and Dwight Sanderson often had a table to themselves in the canteen, since the rest of the staff tended to keep their distance from him. Some of them looked away from him, refusing to meet his gaze. Dwight tried to cheer him. “I wouldn’t lose no sleep if I were you ’cause a bunch of spineless mo’-fo’s are givin’ you the cold shoulder, Doc.”
Stanley Celinsky and Howard Pincus cajoled and badgered him to change his findings. Celinsky told him bluntly that he’d been duped. Shannon, in his view, had concocted a few delusions and exaggerated his depression in a shrewd attempt to save his life. Gottlieb politely asked him what he based this on, since he’d never interviewed the man himself. More than once, Pincus reminded him that the mayor’s office still followed the case with interest, and alluded to the possibility of “serious ramifications” if Gottlieb stuck to his guns. Gottlieb asked if that was a threat. “I’ll let you draw your own conclusions,” Pincus answered darkly.
The Shannon case, relegated to the media back burner for a month or two, was thrust again into the forefront. SHRINK SAYS MURDERING FATHER SHOULD BE IN HOSPITAL, screeched a typical headline. James Shannon’s face, flat and expressionless, reappeared in the local newscasts, as did Gottlieb’s. One of the Chicago papers carried an editorial about the uses and abuses of psychiatric testimony. The editorialist fretted about the prospects of “our worst criminals avoiding punishment because of the chicanery of expert witnesses, a disturbing trend in high-profile cases.”
The coverage fueled a small but steady stream of hate mail, always anonymous. Gottlieb, ran one letter, you have to be stupidest fucker who ever lived. Or else your just another liberal pansy who thinks taxpayer $$ should be wasted on scum like Shannon who deserves to rot in hell. Either way your disgraceful!
Most of the mail was in this vein, but not all of it. Some of
it lauded him for standing up to the press and politicians, for refusing to join a lynch mob. Some of it—more than he would have expected—expressed sympathy for Shannon, clearly a sick man, since only a sick man could do what he’d done. A brief note arrived from Malcolm Kenyon, hand-written in a meticulous script. It praised Gottlieb’s willingness to take an unpopular position and having shown the fortitude to stick with it. And there was this, a simple message on a postcard, dictated by Anita to her father: My daughter says to say thank you, the old man had written in a shaky scrawl. Sincerely, Richard Pierce.
Away from the sound and fury, Brendan O’Connell met with Robin Aveiro. At times they talked quietly; at times they bellowed at each other as they rehashed the case until they both were sick to death of it. They pored over Christina’s notebook, page by page and line by line, and its contents soon became common knowledge throughout the district attorney’s office.
Occasionally, she came close to expressing a measure of sympathy for her father. “All right, I’ll grant you, Christina may have been the world’s worst child,” she admitted once. “That still gives him no right to bludgeon and strangle her.”
O’Connell ignored her. “Too bad we can’t prosecute the dead for murder, isn’t it? By the way, what do you think of how she waited an hour or so before calling 911 the day her mother died? Cute kid, eh? And what about the way she contemplated setting a fire in a nursing home? I wonder how a jury would take to that.”
In the course of their third meeting, O’Connell told Aveiro about Christina’s summer at Green Lake Camp, including an account of Anita Pierce’s blinding, an ace up his sleeve that he’d been saving. “I don’t want to drag this unfortunate woman into it,” the lawyer concluded, “but I will if I have to.”
“I need to think about this,” Aveiro answered, “and to talk it over with the brass.” Her dark eyes fixed on Christina’s notebook as if it were a pile of maggots.
“You do that,” agreed O’Connell amiably.
The next day she talked at length with her boss, and the day after that he talked with his boss. A few more days passed, and then Ms. Aveiro issued a terse statement to the press. While she herself continued to harbor serious doubts about Mr. Shannon’s incompetence, she had studied his medical records thoroughly, conferred with her colleagues, and reluctantly decided not to contest Dr. Gottlieb’s findings. Mr. Shannon would be remanded to a state hospital for further evaluation and treatment, and the matter of his competence would be reviewed at regular intervals. This did not mean, she emphasized, that the charges against him would be dropped. Nor did it mean that the district attorney’s office would take a softer, more lenient approach towards the perpetrators of heinous crimes. It meant only that Mr. Shannon’s charges would be held in abeyance until his psychiatric evaluation had been completed and his mental state had stabilized. In the brief Q-and-A that followed, she declined to speculate on how the DA’s office might react to an insanity defense or an allegation of diminished capacity.
This, too, shall pass.
⸎
Slowly, week by week and day by day, Gottlieb’s life returned to normal. He evaluated patients at GCFI and attended the usual round of meetings there. The shunning ebbed, and co-workers resumed talking to him. His private practice flourished, the bad press notwithstanding. He continued to teach medical students and residents at the university hospital where he made rounds. He also began to jot down notes for new articles.
In his spare time, he took walks with Sharon after dinner. It was a pleasant way of unwinding from the day, especially as the evenings grew crisper and cooler. He read bedtime stories to Sarah and continued to reach out to Peter. The boy responded to his overtures, at least most of the time. Peter and his cousin Emily made frequent calls to each other, and his mood always brightened after them.
One night, as he and Sharon took their walk, she turned to him. “Peter asked me about inviting your brother and his family to come down and have Thanksgiving with us. I said fine, I didn’t see why not. And then I teased him, I told him I thought he had a crush on Emily. And he smiled, Hal, he actually smiled! It’s so wonderful to see him smile again. I was beginning to wonder if he still knew how . . . I was afraid those muscles might have atrophied.”
“He’ll be all right,” proclaimed his father.
“I’m actually starting to believe that.”
⸎
Gottlieb’s work kept him busier than ever, and family and social life filled up the balance of the time, but often his mind still drifted to Cassandra. Small things might trigger thoughts of her—a reference to the Holocaust in a book or TV show, someone mentioning the Shedd Aquarium, a woman in a store or restaurant with a squarish face framed by shoulder-length blonde hair, or even just a woman of her height and build. But the thoughts might come to him without an obvious trigger, when he shaved or showered, or when he drove between his home and one of his offices. Or as he lay in bed next to Sharon trying to fall asleep, with mixed results.
Several times, he almost called her. Sometimes he dialed the first few digits of her number, but invariably he hung up before he dialed the rest of it. So many things he would have liked to talk about, to ask her. How was the biography of Goebbels coming along? What books had she read, what notable movies had she seen? How was Freitag? When did she plan to leave for Germany (if he’d ever
known the exact date, he had repressed it), and could they maybe have a drink before she went, just a drink? Did she still brood about her Uncle Franz? Did she ever think about their visit to the Shedd? Did she miss him? (He knew he’d never ask her that. The sting would be too sharp if she said no).
What he wanted to ask her, above all else: had she forgiven him for the fiasco in her bedroom, for his flagrant display of ambivalence and guilt? Patients often told him how they’d give anything for Gottlieb to erase their most hateful memories, the way a surgeon might excise a cancer. He understood the futility of such a hope with new empathy.
In spite of himself, he still yearned for her. He could shut his eyes and summon up a vision of her lying naked next to him, before the walls of her bedroom closed in on him, and it made him close to giddy with desire. He followed up these visions by reminding himself of Warren Pasternak’s verdict, too obvious to argue about. Infidelity makes you terribly uncomfortable. He also bore in mind his old therapist’s dictum. There are worse things than staying faithful to a woman you still love.
Perhaps he’d steel himself—take a few deep breaths and maybe a Xanax, and then call her before she left. Assuming that she hadn’t left already. Perhaps.
He thought of her, and he thought about his wife and children, about his private patients and his clientele at GCFI. His thoughts might take him anywhere and to anyone, but most frequently they took him to James Shannon. James Patrick Shannon, with his inherent decency, and his inability to deal with a daughter who altogether lacked it. The man who was reading the book of Job the morning of their first meeting. Surely he must have identified with Job. Shannon, like Job, had managed to hold on to his faith throughout his tribulations. Shortly after they first met, Gottlieb reread the book of Job himself. Among the passages that stayed with him: “This would be my consolation; I would even exult in unrelenting pain; for I have not denied the words of the Holy One.”
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