And now, M’s case was chasing me home at night, keeping me awake, driving me to the library on a summer Saturday when I should have been sweating through my T-shirt launching free throws with my teenage neighbors in the park. But this woman. I knew her, or I had known her. This client evoked the past perfect tense, came bundled with a history. This client changed everything. I couldn’t simply play the games I might’ve been playing on a summer weekend unclouded by the knowledge that she was sitting in a cement box, locked in, alone, in need of my help. I couldn’t simply compartmentalize her plight.
Perhaps the best I can do is paraphrase Bugental, that brilliant shrink to the shrinks, because in this point he hits the nail on the head: the whole idea of “therapeutic detachment,” he says, is an oxymoron, a fib one makes to one’s self. The notion that a therapist can remain detached from his client is, he writes—this is so true—“a seduction for the fainthearted.”
Well, I thought, I may be wrongheaded, but I’m not fainthearted.
I lay my head back on the couch and listened to the singer croak about his famous raincoat. I thought about my mother, Colleen, thought about her fanning a deck of paint chips, pregnant with Clyde, wearing a flowery cotton blouse and a headband in her hair. The starburst of color between us on the guest room bed. She said she thought the new nursery should be Honeydew or Buttercup, but she just couldn’t decide. “How about stripes,” I suggested. “That way you could use both. I could paint them myself,” I added in an offhand way, thirteen, not wanting to seem overenthusiastic.
“Would you?” She smiled at me. Her loose brown curls, the slight gap between her very front teeth. “I think it’s a wonderful idea.”
Colleen often pointed out those stripes when visitors trundled through to see the new baby, once he arrived. “Frank did such a good deed,” she’d say. Of course, she wanted the world to see the best of me, she was my mother. But still, as the visitors gushed over my paint job, I felt grateful to Colleen. She never mentioned how I’d used the leftover Buttercup. How I’d discovered a nest of mice in the corner of the nursery closet. How she picked up the roller pan and saw the stiff yellow-dunked bodies arrayed neatly in a row, embedded, smothered, in the hardening paint. How she dropped the pan right there on the new rug, how she vomited violently and repeatedly, falling to her hands and knees with her pregnant belly bowing out beneath her. This image of her, back arching and sinking as she retched, will never leave me. I’m still grateful that she never breathed a word, to Dad or Clyde or anyone.
I didn’t think there should be vermin in the baby’s room.
She had been gone almost three years now. Acute stroke: it snatched her straight from the living room, with my father and brother on the sofa, a pizza on the coffee table, and 60 Minutes on the TV. I still couldn’t quite grasp that I’d never talk to her again. I still imagined I might bump into her in a crowd in Times Square, where she’d come up to see the shows, or on an airplane, maybe I’d find her in a window seat, le Carré paperback open on her lap. I could confide in her. Tell her about Clyde’s decline. About the Fehler lawsuit, those unendurable days of wrangling over the roots of childhood psychosis and malpractice awards and the dollar equivalent of a toddler’s life. I could tell her about my divorce—given her instincts about Winnie, she wouldn’t be surprised—or about meeting up with M again, which was the kind of story she would appreciate. “Now there’s a fine twist of fate,” she’d say, approvingly.
I was lucky to have had such a foundational figure, I coached myself. Both parents were paragons, in fact. M had gone years without talking to her father, she’d told me in our last session.
“Why?”
“He did something I considered unforgivable,” she’d said.
“To you?”
“No, not to me.”
“You want to elaborate?”
“Not at the moment.”
“But you’re speaking to him now?”
“Yes.”
“Did you forgive him?”
“Not really.”
“So when did you start speaking to him again?”
“When I did something unforgivable.”
Leonard was singing about a bird on a wire and a drunk in a midnight choir when I fell into a dreamless sleep.
ON SUNDAY, I SOUGHT CLYDE. ON WEEKENDS, HE OFTEN WORKED THE tourist trade at Battery Park, so I headed for this southern locale. The day was overcast, blankets of clouds tossed over the city, smoothing out the shadows. The park was jammed by some kind of Rastafarian gathering, and the shaved ice sellers were out in force, pushing their big glassy blocks and tinkling bottles of syrup back and forth. An out-of-tune reggae band sent music booming through the park, and everywhere, people shuffled to their stuttering rhythm. I found Clyde near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, lounging on a bench behind his big pile of socks, immersed in conversation with a bearded man, who sat in a wheelchair beside him, clutching a bunch of glinting zeppelin-shaped balloons. The balloons swayed above their heads like psychedelic thoughts they were having.
Clyde smiled as he saw me walk up. “Look who’s here. Jackson,” he said, turning to his companion. “This here is my brother, Frank.”
“Hey,” said Jackson congenially. “You the shrink?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I keep having this dream, man. I’m riding a motherfucking whale. I never even seen a whale, but in this motherfucking dream I’m sitting on a whale. What do you think, Frank?”
“Well, you know, dream interpretation is a tough nut. There are no easy answers . . .” I shrugged.
“Tough nut. No easy answers. That’s the whole fucking problem. I saw a shrink in Bellevue one time. Said the same goddamn thing. No easy answers.” Jackson grinned at me and shook his head. “Hand it to you, Frank. You got a good fucking game.” He turned his wheelchair suddenly, his balloons bobbling above him in agitation. “No easy answers,” he muttered, smiling. “Yes yes.” He looked at Clyde. “I’m heading on to the Seaport, man. I did supreme business there last week. You ought to blow this mess off and check out the Seaport.”
“Jimmy’s picking me up here. I’m sticking.”
“Later, then.” Jackson looked me up and down again as he started to wheel himself away. “You got yourself some handsome shoes, Frank.” He laughed. “No easy answers. Yes yes.”
Suddenly he stopped and turned toward us again. “How about a balloon for your kids, Frank?” he said.
“Don’t have any kids,” I said apologetically.
“You got a lady, though?” asked Jackson. He rolled a few feet back to me. “Come on, buy one for your lady. She deserves it, right?”
“Gee, I . . .” I looked at Clyde. He nodded and gave me a look that said, Just go ahead. “All right.” I handed Jackson a ten. He presented me with a pair of pink Hindenburgs.
“She is gonna love you good when she sees, man. You will thank me.” He gave a little bow from his waist and grinned and rolled away chortling.
“You did a good thing,” said Clyde. “Balloons are a hard sell these days, he was telling me. Everyone’s buying those windup pigs instead.”
I tied the airships to Clyde’s bench and sat. Kids squirted each other with high-powered water pistols, yowling and yelping like roughhousing predator cubs. I watched them for a while. Knew I had to spill.
Clyde, in his junkie phase, had been serving as sort of a confidant for me. Those of us in the counseling profession often suffer from secret overload: you are the keeper of everyone else’s secrets, and therefore you have no room for your own. I’ll admit it: I’d begun to use my baby brother as an outlet. Talking to him was like talking down a well.
“One of my clients went to Lincoln High,” I said.
He looked at me wide-eyed. “No way.”
“I remember her perfectly.”
“Someone from Lincoln’s in jail?”
“Prison. She doesn’t remember me. I haven’t told her.”
“What’s she in for?”
&n
bsp; “And I should have told her right off, probably. Second-degree murder, armed robbery gone bad. Not unserious. Long sentence.”
“What the hell?”
“It wasn’t premeditated, far as I can tell. A boyfriend involved, of course. Something went very, very wrong.”
“No shit.”
I sighed. “She dated this kid Brian Fuller in school, who was such an ass. Always bragging about how he had to wax his hairy chest for swim team.”
Clyde scrutinized me for a moment. “And she doesn’t recognize you?” he said.
“Nah.” I stood and looked out over the railing, at the bay marbled with froth. Staten Island huddled in on itself, skulking, a dog expecting to be kicked. “I should have said something right off. I guess I was curious, I felt sorry for her, I thought I might embarrass or upset her. She’s clearly been through a hell of a lot.”
“And you wanted to keep seeing her.”
“For treatment. She’s thoughtful, you know? I feel like I can really help her.”
“Sure,” he said. “She good looking?”
I turned to him and rolled my eyes. “Grow up.”
He grinned. “She is.”
“I actually have been helping her,” I said. “I think. She’s in a lot of pain.”
“Committing murder might just do that,” he said with a skeptical little chuckle.
“Hey,” I snapped, “everybody fucks up, right, pal?”
He frowned at me. “Too true,” he said. He turned to restocking the rows of socks laid out on his Whirlpool box, pulling fresh pairs from a ratty woven bag.
“Let me take you to dinner,” I said. “Katz’s. Pastrami.”
He told me Jimmy would be by in a half hour, no way, he had to be there waiting.
“Come sleep at my place,” I pleaded.
“Nah,” Clyde said. “I’d just steal your wallet again.”
I leaned my head back, seeking a little simplicity in the summer sky, but it got all carved up above this corner, so many wires and buildings and airplane contrails, a crosshatched scribble above our heads.
I couldn’t really imagine why she did it. How she arrived at that place. “She’s not a cold-blooded killer,” I said.
“Whatever.” He shrugged.
“I’m just trying to make a small difference in someone’s life. I’m struggling against futility here, Clyde.”
“I hear you.” He was thoughtfully arranging his socks in alternating rows, red stripes then blue stripes then red stripes again. “Futility sucks.”
6
July 1999
The COs shattered her jar of Nivea. They upended her box of Georgia O’Keeffe floral postcards, littering them all over the floor. They broke the spines of her blank-faced prison-library hardbacks—One Hundred Years of Solitude, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Little Dorrit—and shook them so hard that clouds of musty paper dust changed the smell of the air.
A lady (known to them only as Bean) had turned up dead from a crack overdose. A ball of plastic wrap holding four more rocks had been exhumed from a tub of margarine in a refrigerator in D Unit. Banished to the passageway, Miranda listened to the COs toss the rooms all along the passageway and noticed how the plastic grids on the fluorescent fixtures overhead—baffles they were called maybe?—resembled the gridded trays in her grandfather’s old tackle box, each square filled with a cherry bobber or a rubber minnow or a knot of small barbed hooks. She knew they wouldn’t find the two dozen Elavils. Delina had shown her how perfectly the pills slid into the hollow-tube arms of a state-issued plastic clothes hanger.
When the search party moved on, Miranda began to clean up. She wiped up the spill from her plastic water jug. Letters she’d received were scattered, soaked, handwriting and jet-ink smeared. Her Life cereal had been dumped. Her Cup-a-Soup, happily, had been spared.
Beryl Carmona stuck her head into the room. “I don’t make the rules, I just enforce them,” she said.
THE BODY BAG WAS GURNEYED PAST WHILE MIRANDA SAT IN THE kitchen with April, waiting for noodle water to boil. The wheels squeaked savagely; they reminded her that Bean had been six foot three and sturdy. April’s gold-brown eyes glossed over. She rubbed them with the heels of her palms, making Miranda think of early childhood, of Amy, of their stormy girlish games and the way one sister would go solemn while the other had her cry. “I am so afraid of that shit, Miranda. I am so afraid,” said April. Miranda understood. She had heard the difficult history, no, she had absorbed it into her being like a course of radiation, the retellings and rehashings, until it had changed her at a cellular level—just as April had absorbed Miranda’s.
After the First Gulf War, April had reenlisted, landing in Berlin during the drawdown. She headed up a guard detail at U.S. Forces headquarters and fell in love for the first time in her life, scorchingly in love, with a logistics specialist named Karlee. Karlee worked on dismantling the base, shipping out deli slicers from the PX, pinball machines from the rec center, data servers from the secret listening post where intel operators had eavesdropped on the Soviets. Karlee dismantled April’s heart as well. One day she told April she’d taken up with a German postal worker she’d met on the job. “Martina. She was beautiful, a lot more beautiful than me. But I thought Karlee was the one. I was out on that limb.” She’d just been home on a leave, a week before it happened, and had broken the news of her love, of herself, to her parents. “Daddy knocked me straight across the kitchen. Boom.” She’d punctuate this by swatting the air with the back of a hand.
April accepted separation pay and an honorable discharge and moved to New York to work for the Apple Bank. “They have terrible rates there, don’t you ever bank there,” she told Miranda.
One day she had walked out of her job with $14,000 in her pocket. “I was on the pipe, Miranda. Pray I never see the stuff again.” She would shake her neatly shaped head, tufted with soft whorls. “I’m not going back down that way.”
“Of course not,” Miranda would always say.
“You’re my sister,” April would always say. Depending on Miranda’s mood, this could please her deeply or make her hands tremble.
The worst thing that happened during this particular cell toss was that the COs had drenched the handbag Miranda had crocheted for her mother, and on the very day she was supposed to present it to her. It was a sad thing to begin with, goldenrod-yellow yarn, about the size of a slice of sandwich bread, with a long strap and a floppy tassel. Sopping wet, it looked like something you might use to scrub a bathtub. But Miranda was proud of it. A Colombian prison elder named Maria Juana had taught her to crochet. No woman in the Greene family had ever known how to do that, at least not since Great-Grandma Schmidt, on her mother’s side, had come over from Graz.
“HOW SWEET! IT’S SWEET,” MURMURED BARB GREENE, SLINGING THE strap over her shoulder. She didn’t say anything about the purse’s mildew smell, and anyhow, the general aroma of the visiting room may have overpowered it—the place reeked of Cheetos from the vending machine, Cheetos and microwave pizza and the dirty diapers of babies trundled in by sisters and grandmothers for a visit with the women who bore them. It was a weekday afternoon, and so Miranda and her mother were both able to get seats at one of the scarred tables—on the weekends they often had to stand.
“Are you sleeping?”
“Some.”
“Alan wants to see you, Miranda. He really does.”
“That’s not happening, Mom. Sorry.”
Miranda’s mother took her hand away and stared at the grime-spattered floor. Always, during these visits she was on the verge of tears. She clutched a tissue in her hands and had backups, Miranda knew, stuffed in the pocket of her camel-hair blazer.
When Miranda was arrested, her father had persuaded Alan Bloomfield to handle her case. Miranda hadn’t had too much say in the matter—she was locked up in the Oneanta County Jail at the time, acquainting herself with the realities of her new life. After she’d been held for twenty-two hours, Alan showed up with a
change of clothes from her mother and a mini gift basket of expensive soaps and shampoos from her dad, along with a note: “Miranda—They said they’ll let us see you after the arraignment—can’t wait. Thinking of you. Love Edward.”
Miranda stared at the basket with its outburst of cellophane. “Where does he think I am, the Hilton?”
Alan chuckled briefly, a thick-waisted man, with a thin shingle of gray hair and a fleshy brow that seemed to droop under the weight of thoughts undisclosed. “Sweetheart, all things considered, your folks are managing well. Last thing they expected, to be slammed with something like this.”
“Are you going to get me out of here?” asked Miranda.
“Whatever it takes. You’ll be out of here ASAP.” He studied her with his sharp dark eyes. “He must have been some lay, this McCray. I hope it was fucking amazing, hon.”
Miranda should have tried harder to get her parents to hire a new lawyer. She never trusted Alan Bloomfield. But consider what she had been involved in. Things that a month ago—a week ago—would have been unimaginable, to each and every one of them, Miranda included. She knew that she deserved what she got.
And Bloomfield was right—she was out on bail the next day, thanks to Grandma Rosalie Greene’s life savings, which her father had inherited just a few months before, Grandma having finally gained eternal release from her Alzheimer’s, a week after Christmas the previous year.
Alan Bloomfield had not been blamed by any of them for the guilty verdict. He had advised her skillfully, and he’d convinced the prosecution to drop the armed robbery count and to downgrade the murder charge to second-degree. The long sentence? Oneanta County justice, everyone said. Hard country up there. After Miranda was classified to a minimum III custodial level and assigned to Milford Basin, Barb moved from Washington to a high-rise in Riverdale, to be nearby. She joined a small travel-agency group in New Rochelle. She was alone, except for Alan Bloomfield, who lived in the city. He was divorced, she was divorced. “Alan collects Chinese jade, Alan likes my chicken Marbella, Alan gets house seats on Broadway because he litigated for the Shuberts,” she’d said. “Alan and I have history together.”
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