“I’m a vegetarian now,” I lied.
“So? Tofu burgers. Such things exist, I think.” He stepped back and looked me over. “You must be eating healthy. I think you’ve dropped a few.”
I shifted uneasily under his scrutiny. My mouth went dry. I tried a quick internal dialogue, as I often advised clients to do: What have I really got to lose in this situation?
The answer, as concerned Gary Grover, was clear. My ex-partner had been witness and accomplice to my professional downfall. He was romancing my ex-wife. Nothing left to lose. “I think you’ve gained a few,” I said. My tongue still gummy. “So how’s Winnie?”
“She’s in Peru, encephalitis breakout in some Amazon village. You know Winnie. Very dedicated to her work. An inspiration, really.”
“She certainly is.”
“And how are things at the prison,” he said, his voice dropping. “I hear you’re doing just splendid work there.”
“Fascinating. Fascinating client base. I’m loving it.”
“Women’s prison, isn’t it? Yes, I can imagine you’d get some doozy dissociatives. Fun stuff, eh? A nice change?”
“It’s a different crowd.”
“I bet.” He sipped beer from a bottle, leaned one elbow on the bar, and surveyed the crowd. “Park West doesn’t get that variety, no. But the practice has really bounced back. Mostly the same old urban angst crowd, no thrills.” He chuckled. “And that’s just fine by us.”
“Good, good, glad to hear it,” I managed.
“I do have a case now that made me think of your Fehler kid.” He cut his eyes toward me.
I didn’t flinch, though. “Yeah?”
“The parents are class-A pains. I’ve got the kid doped up, but he’s still banging himself around, roughing up the nanny. And he’s a screamer. Jesus, my eardrums get raw. But you know about that.”
He was studying me. “Mmm.” I nodded, plucking a glass of wine from a passing waiter’s tray.
“We learned from history, though. We’ve got Mom and Dad signing releases from here to kingdom come.” He shook his head. “Our malpractice tab is still through the roof. Even though we parted ways with you.” He added quickly, “We did exactly what those goddamn insurers demanded, and they still screw us on the bills. We sure miss you, bud.”
I kept my cool. “How old is he, the kid?”
“Seven. Same age as the Fehler boy when he . . . crashed.”
I badly wanted a peek at my watch. Wasn’t the cocktail hour finished yet? Just then, I saw my father standing nearby, surrounded by a fawning crowd. “You never met my old man, did you, Gary?”
“No,” he said. “I’d be honored.”
I steered him over to the cluster of people surrounding Dad and made the introduction. “We loved practicing with Frank. We miss him, we really miss him, Doc,” I could hear Grover saying as I moved away. “Goddamn insurance crooks,” he was saying. “Goddamn lawyers.”
I FOUND MYSELF A WING CHAIR OUT IN THE LOBBY, WHERE I’D GONE just to regroup, just to get some air. I watched the tour groups milling around, women with powdered-milk skin, bulky purses, and low pumps, waiting to be herded through Midtown to the various theaters. Their faces looked bland and kind. Many had big bosoms and hefty soft arms, and I wished they could just envelop me and pat my head and tell me that everyone makes missteps, everyone fucks up a time or two, everyone comes to the point where they know they are going to hell.
Child of fury. A term I first heard in a play-therapy training course. Mistrusting, impulsive, quick to anger. With such kids, violent, even sadistic behavior in sessions with puppets and dolls is commonplace, said the professor. “A constructive processing of rage,” she said of this extreme acting-out. Play therapists must be prepared, must maintain calm amid the tempest.
At our first session, Zachary Fehler grabbed a toy drumstick and whacked the frog puppet I was manipulating, whacked it hard enough to leave a yellowish-purple contusion on my puppet hand. This is where we began.
By week two, he had cracked my office window, hurling a wooden dollhouse sofa. But we had a breakthrough dialogue. I took up the frog head (proposed, by me, as a stand-in for the adults who’d betrayed him, the mostly absent father, the barely functional alcoholic mom). Asked him to tell Frog what made him angry. “I hate you. You smell bad, you make me think of dog poop. I’m glad when you die.” Constructive processing of rage, I jotted afterward in my notes.
And then, our last session. Week three. I donned the frog, asked how he was feeling that day, and he bit the puppet. Hard. Sharp little child teeth. Caught a nerve in my thumb. Pure reflex: I struck at him with the uncovered hand. Right across the crown. He fell down, gaped at me for a long, excruciating moment. A stripe where his scalp met his forehead, an awful reddening strip. Then he unleashed a piercing, terrifying wail. I was afraid his mother would knock at the door. But we recouped, I was able to stop his screaming, I put the frog puppet on the floor, let him stomp on it for a while. Tire himself. Then I apologized, explained that therapists, too, get mad, lose their tempers, just like their patients do. I make mistakes just like you, Zach. And I’m so sorry.
He said nothing. He continued to weep. He wouldn’t look at me.
But his sobbing gradually faded to snuffling and he seemed to settle down. I thought perhaps it was over. Soon he was back to plucking the limbs off the multicultural family dolls. But he wouldn’t look at me.
I said nothing to his mother about the stripe. She was drunk and I didn’t know if she’d notice.
That very night, Zachary cracked.
And on this July evening, as the shrinks of the world gathered in New York City, little Emily Fehler would have been five and a half. Sleeping by this hour, dreaming, alive. If that play-therapy moment had played out differently.
After the news of the girl’s death reached the office, I confessed the whole incident to Gary Grover. Of course, I can’t blame him for severing ties. I think he tried, in his way, to make it as swift and painless as possible.
I don’t know how long I’d been sitting in that wing chair when I looked up to see Grover’s mustache looming over me. “Frank, they sent me to find you, for chrissakes. The speeches are starting,” he said. I had an impulse to flee. As if he sensed this, Grover put his hammy hand on my arm. “This is a big moment for you, bud,” he said. “Face it, how often have you had a chance to make your dad proud?”
And then, seated beside my father on the dais. Before us, a roiling sea of psychologists, a thousand faces trained to dissect the workings of personality.
“Are you okay?” Dad asked. “I didn’t know where you were. Anything wrong?”
“Not a thing,” I said, mopping my face. “It’s just so warm in here.”
“It’s positively Finnish in here,” said the woman seated next to me. A diminutive blonde, in a bare-shouldered dress. Her emerald stud earrings matched large green eyes. “We haven’t met,” she said, extending a slim, manicured hand. “I’m Lydia Buchanan. I was just elected to the board last month.”
“Frank Lundquist.” I clasped her hand. “Son of.” I gestured toward my father.
“Of course. I know. I wrote my doctorate on the Lundquists. So you can imagine, I’m in heaven.”
My father leaned over me and beamed. “I’d like to read your paper sometime.”
Lydia Buchanan blushed. “That would be such an honor for me, Doctor.” She looked at me. “And you are in the family business as well, I understand.”
I nodded. “Out in Westchester.” Way, way out. Beyond the razor-wire fences.
“I’m in New Jersey. Summit. Eating disorders, primarily.” She threaded a fishbone from between her lips with finesse and said something about body dysphoria, but I barely heard. I had a bizarre sense that someone was watching me. I turned around to meet the gaze of a pair of blank eyes. On a felt-covered stand directly behind me sat the crystal head, transparent, life-size, that was the APA’s Legion of Honor trophy. My father’s name was inscribed o
n the base. Its pupil-less eyes regarded me with antipathy. I turned around again quickly, my face burning.
I deserved the antipathy. I knew this, knew it deep in my marrow, in every red blood cell sloshing around inside that marrow.
Silent, gliding waiters in burgundy dinner jackets spirited away the dinner plates. A piano that had been tinkling continually from somewhere above us suddenly ceased. The president of the APA, short, balding Jerry Stidwell, took to the podium. He spoke, I’m not sure for how long. Time twisted. He occasionally gestured toward my father. Erskine nodded and laughed a lot, dabbing at his forehead from time to time with his folded napkin.
They were lively, loving, caring people, up here on the platform, out there in the room, people who helped others better themselves and their lives. And what had I done?
I had mishandled a seven-year-old client. The client snuffed out his sister. He had twisted the girl’s neck. She didn’t snap back together like a multicultural doll. With poor therapeutic technique and one lost moment, one terrible lapse in clinical detachment, one betrayal of therapeutic trust, I seemed to have nudged furious little Zach over a cliff, into damnation.
And now M. Lovely M. The sweet smart smile. The melancholy autumnal eyes. My classmate. My crush. I hadn’t lifted her up with those weekly chat sessions. I hadn’t been helping her at all. In fact, thinking of her now, she seemed to be sliding down. I had terminated her, I had abandoned my most treasured client.
My back prickled, I could feel that clear head’s gaze. But there is a way to right my wrongs, I thought. I could still better M’s lot, I explained to the head. And I wasn’t talking about a talking cure. Talking had nothing to do with it.
Perhaps I could free her. Free her.
Then a thousand faces turned my way, looking like dapples of sunlight on the surface of a dark pool, like pale petunias turned toward the sun. Jerry Stidwell was calling my name.
I stood. Someone shoved the trophy at me. I took it in both hands, a palm over each ear. How cold and hard it felt. How heavy.
I set it with shaking hands on the podium. It stared back at me. The crowd stared, too. I leaned over the microphone.
“I’m Frank Lundquist.” My voice boomed across the room, too loud. I pulled back a bit. “I was honored to be the first taker of the Lundquist test. I was always proud to be Baby Zero. Even more than that, I was proud to be Erskine Lundquist’s son.”
That sightless glassy gaze. I paused, shifted the trophy around to face the room. Then, again, I bent over the microphone. “My mother worked as a secretary at NIH, and she always said she married my dad because he was the only brilliant scientist she’d ever met there who was kinder than he was smart.” Perspiration stinging my eyes. “My father won the most prestigious grants and fellowships, but he’d always let my brother beat him at Monopoly. And when I got rejected from nearly every Ph.D. program, all he said was, boy did they miss out on a good thing.” My voice wavered. My father looked up at me, blinking hard. I took another deep breath. “The Lundquist test predicted a successful outcome for me, Dad. But the only outcome I’ve ever wanted was to be a little bit more like you.”
I wasn’t really aware of the applause, just a tornado of sound swirling around us as we hugged. “Gol darn it, Frank,” my father said. Then he was holding his crystal head and bulbs were flashing and I was slinking off the podium and out the side door, desperate for a cool swig of water and a quiet place to think.
Think about this: perhaps I’d been focused on the wrong cure for M’s woes. Forget the therapeutic fixes. I needed to give her freedom. Free her.
I had just reached the water fountains when nearby the door to the ladies’ lounge swung open, and out glittered Corinne Masterson, sheathed in midnight-blue sequins, almost unrecognizable as workaday Corinne of the Counseling Center and the commissary. Snapping closed a small evening bag, she looked up, spotted me, and said, “Frank!” in a startled voice. “You look terrible! Shame, this OD, on your father’s big night, and all.”
“What?” I said, baffled. “What OD?”
She pursed her lips, agleam with a fresh coat of paint. “I don’t believe it. She’s your client. They didn’t call you?”
She had been found unconscious, tanked out on a combo of Zoloft and Elavil; they’d rushed her to Hudson Valley Med Center for a pump-out, and this had all happened just an hour or so ago. Her prognosis was fifty-fifty. By the time I thanked Corinne for this news, I had to shout at her. I was already jogging across acres of red paisley wall-to-wall, searching for the exit signs.
8
July 1999
Soaring above snowdrifts.
A girl in flight.
Her clothes flutter like banners, feet white in tights as her shoes drift away.
Ribbons of long hair, mermaidlike, shifting and snaking into fascinating shapes.
Limbs shifting too, at times awkward—akimbo?—but sometimes with delicious grace, in water-ballet arcs and swirls.
And her face: gently smiling. Or was that too much to ask? If so, then maybe just blank, aslumber.
Winter’s pillows, piled deep, are waiting to receive her. In she sinks, creating a girl-shaped cradle.
Sleeping teen with her milk skin and silken hair spread like rays or draped across her face like strands of seaweed.
Yes, some details here are borrowed from a soft-paged book of fairy tales, bought for a quarter at a Pittsburgh yard sale.
Tales to be retold a million times.
In this particular tale, the winter sky has lost its sun, its clasp broken. The snow melt has hardened on the cold bed of the road. A sharp curve, a nervous swerve, perhaps to spare the life of some creature no one but her ever glimpsed. A nervous swerve by a new driver in a muscle car, unharnessed by brakes, riding bareback on a wild steed of machine.
A heedless car from a more reckless time. No shoulder belt to bind her down. Just a simple strap at her slender hips. The girl is free to slip loose and fly.
THE AFTERLIFE HAD A SMELL, APPARENTLY. STRONG, FLOWERY SOAP powder. Rubbing alcohol. Lemon-fresh floor wax.
And it looked different than Miranda expected. Dark with flashes of yellow and cobalt that slowly revolved in front of her eyes. Sometimes a blur of whiteness, something seen through a dozen layers of window screening, shadowy shapes drifting around.
She was surprised to hear television, but she heard it constantly—game shows, soap operas, the portentous chords that announced the nightly news. And even after death she heard the squawk of walkie-talkies and the drawling of COs complaining about their bosses and their lovers. “Why I always have to be the bad guy. She got lips and a tongue, she could speak up. Why am I always the bad guy?”
And then suddenly, the mist lifted. She was awake. She was alive. She began to cry. A bony-armed CO was slouched in a chair next to her bed. “She is up,” he yelled out. A face, gold hair tamed by black bobby pins, appeared at the other side of the bed. “She sure is,” the face said.
Miranda fell in love with this nurse’s dark brown gaze. She fell in love with the high-pitched laughter pouring in from the room next door. In fact, she was instantly in love with every iota of matter in the living universe. The air, the light seemed to wrap her in a silky benediction. I am back, I am back, I will never leave again, she heard her brain singing. So her brain was still working. Rejoice! What a wonderful thing. She had tried to kill it, but it wouldn’t die. What a fine, strong brain it was. She congratulated herself on not dying. You are so cool, she said to herself. You are fucking amazing.
Tear juice was running down into her mouth, and her nose was running. She reached up to wipe away the wetness, when her arm stopped with a clank.
Had she turned to metal, rusted, like the Tin Man? She tried her other arm. It moved an inch, then froze into place. Clank. She tried both arms again. Clank. Clank.
“Don’t try to move, dear,” said the nurse. “You just rest easy.” She had a kind, over-made-up face, with streaks of blusher that made her look lik
e she’d just been slapped. “You want some o.j.?” She held up a plastic cup with a lid on it. Protruding from a lid was a long, curly straw. The nurse bent the straw toward her lips. Miranda raised her head to drink. As she did, she looked down at her arms. Her wrists were circled by lustrous cuffs, which were locked onto bars that ran along the sides of the bed.
“Lemme wipe your nose,” said the nurse. “Lemme get you cleaned up a bit.”
As the nurse dabbed at her nostrils with a tissue, Miranda waggled her legs. They, at least, seemed to be free. “Blow,” said the nurse. Miranda blew.
“I got to say. You are lucky, girl.” The bony CO was speaking with the most lovely Caribbean accent.
“What happened?” Her voice rasped. She realized her throat was raw. God, it sounded good, though. She liked to hear her voice. She took another sip of the sugary, watery elixir.
“There just happened to be a ten P.M. count last night,” said the CO. “On account of someone sparking up matches in her room. Safety violation, so they woke everybody up for a count. And you didn’t rise up out of that bed. Another hour or two, you’d have been long gone, girl. You are lucky.”
Yeah. Miranda smiled at the ceiling tiles. I am lucky.
FOR THE NEXT DAY, SHE DIPPED IN AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS, IN and out of memory. At one point, Amy stood next to her, humming a Top 40 song just under her breath—If you leave me now, you take away the very heart of me—the lyrics winding through Miranda’s head. As always on a Sunday, they had listened to the countdown in the car. Now Amy stood next to her in a navy blue wool coat with electric blue fake fur around the cuffs and collar. Miranda in lace tights and a red coat with big purple buttons. Her knees prickled in the November air. She looked across the parking lot at the big Sears store and wished she was inside of it, instead of shivering up on this flatbed trailer, crowded in with her sister and mom alongside the big speakers. Down at their feet the voters’ breath hung in the late afternoon air like tiny personal clouds. Green signs with white letters waved back and forth above a field of fuzzy pom-pom hats and many types of hair: GREENE FOR CONGRESS, GREENE FOR CONGRESS. A cement-colored sky hardened over bare trees by the highway.
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