Blameless

by B. A. Shapiro

  “I told him he’d be better off dead.” Jill continued speaking as if Gail didn’t exist, tears running down her cheeks. “But I didn’t mean it,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “I didn’t mean it.”

  One of the aunts came up behind Jill and put her hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay, Jilly, let’s go on in now.”

  “This isn’t your affair, Molly,” Jill snapped, flicking her aunt’s hand from her sleeve. “You haven’t been around. You don’t know the half of it.” She stood back and pointed her finger at Diana. “My James is dead all because of you,” she cried, her voice rising. “And you’re going to pay!”

  Diana backed away and probably would have bumped into the wall if Gail had not been holding her. She was speechless, unable to believe the words coming from Jill.

  “Jilly,” the aunt said softly, trying again. “Nobody killed James but James.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Jill said, her tear-streaked face reddening with anger. “That’s where you’re wrong.” She turned to Diana. “I swear to you, you’ll be sorry you ever laid eyes on my brother. Two days—three days at most—and then you’ll know. Then you’ll be sorry you were ever born!”

  Regaining her composure as Jill’s crumpled, Diana pulled a handkerchief from her purse and placed it in Jill’s hand. “I know you’re angry with me,” she said softly, “but that’s—”

  Jill threw Diana’s handkerchief on the floor. “I won’t take anything from you,” she ranted, stomping on the handkerchief as if it were a poisonous insect. “You’ve already done way too much!”

  Stepping away from Jill, the aunt put her hand on Diana’s sleeve. “Why don’t you just go on home now, dear? It really would be better for everyone concerned if you left.”

  Diana looked from Jill to the aunt. Then, with Gail on her heels, she turned and, head held high, walked from the funeral home.

  4

  DIANA AND CRAIG’S HOUSE WAS FOUR STORIES TALL and only eighteen feet wide. They had scraped the bottom of their bank accounts and borrowed from both sets of parents to buy it. And then, with no cash, but lots of sweat and Craig’s architectural brilliance, they had rearranged the rooms to make the impossible floor plan a little more livable.

  The original kitchen—ground level in the back, but below the street in front—was now Diana’s office. The new kitchen, half of its cabinets still without doors, and the dining room were on the first floor. Their “great room” filled the entire second floor, and three small bedrooms comprised the third.

  It was the kind of house that turned the most impulsive person into a planner. After discovering a book or set of keys forgotten in a bedroom, one quickly learned to stop and think before leaving any floor. Despite the forced planning, the depleting of their savings, and the fraternity house two doors down, Diana loved it.

  Diana came straight home after leaving James’s funeral. She walked into her office and dropped into her chair. It swiveled under her weight and she was turned backward, facing the window. She stared through the mullioned panes and naked tree branches to the fire escape crisscrossing the brick backside of the Chinese restaurant across the alley, trying to comprehend what had just happened.

  Too agitated to sit, she jumped up and began to roam the room. He was sick … We came to you for help … You threw him away … Jill’s words shook her, the hatred and vehemence with which they had been spoken, the truth they contained. My James is dead … All because of you … Because of you … Because of you …

  Diana understood Jill’s anger and pain. The woman had just lost her adored brother—perhaps the only person she had ever truly loved—in the most hurtful way possible. Diana knew Jill needed someone to blame for the guilt she carried within herself. On the other hand, grief-stricken or not, Jill had no right to speak to her that way. Not in public. Not in front of Gail. And Adrian.

  Diana groaned and sat back down in the chair. She fumbled for the key hidden under one of the onyx bookends. Slowly she unlocked her bottom desk drawer and pulled out a thick fabric book covered with aqua and purple paisleys. She held it in her hand for a moment. Her journal The place where she let everything flow, the place where she could be as foolish or as childish or as honest as she wanted. She pulled out a pen.

  James is dead and Jill says I killed him. She shouted it in the middle of the funeral—although I’m sure no one there believed her. Most likely everyone just assumed she was addled by grief.

  Her words echoed off the hard marble walls, and they will always echo in my heart. They will be with me forever. As will be my guilt.

  It hurts. It hurts so much. It hurts because James is gone. And it hurts because Jill spoke the truth.

  Diana put the pen down and absently fingered the watermarked pages. She had started her journal eight years ago on the advice of Adrian Arnold when he was supervising her post-doc. Adrian had suggested it as a way to deal with the powerful countertransference emotions she was experiencing from working with Kara, a young woman so agoraphobic that she had been unable to leave her apartment for two years.

  Diana knew that in order for her patient to progress, Kara had to experience transference—imagining that, and acting as if, her therapist was the mother who had inspired her phobia. And although Diana had read all about countertransference, and understood on a theoretical level how a therapist might begin to respond as the person the patient believed her to be, she had been caught completely off-guard when she fell so deeply into the role of Kara’s mother that she was overtaken by a powerful jolt of maternal fury in response to the young woman’s stubbornness.

  After a dream in which she had scooped a swaddled baby Kara from a grimy sidewalk, brought her home, and placed her in the crib that waited in her own bedroom, Diana went to see Adrian. “It’s okay to have these feelings,” he had told her. “It’s better than okay, it’s necessary if you’re going to help her.” Then Adrian had handed her a spiral notebook. “Don’t act on the feelings,” he had said. “Write them down.”

  Since then she had discovered that most of her colleagues had some vehicle for releasing the pressure: many wrote in a journal; Marc Silverman spoke into a Dictaphone; Alan Martinson talked with his wife. And almost everyone had some type of peer supervisory group where they could vent their inappropriate feelings in a place that was safe and confidential.

  Diana had never kept a journal before Adrian had suggested it, and she had been amazed at its power to soothe. She had filled half a dozen spiral notebooks her first couple years of practice, but had found that as her experience and confidence grew, her use of the journal tapered off. Three years ago Diana had been inspired to buy the aqua-and-purple book that now rested in her lap. She opened it and read the first entry.

  A young man named James Hutchins came for his second session today. He’s even brighter and better-looking than I remembered. And wonderfully perceptive. “I actually don’t like cocaine all that much,” he told me. “But it keeps my mind busy so I can’t feel the pain.” He’s also full of denial. When I asked him to tell me what the pain was all about, he explained that his two lionfishes, the jewels of his tropical fish tank, had inexplicably stopped eating.

  His sister, Jill, brought him to me, terrified that he was on the verge of suicide. Apparently Hutchins was horribly abused at roughly age eight (a disgusting, sordid story about an uncle and a child pornography ring) and has repressed the entire episode. He’s also completely amnesiac about the year preceding the abuse (when the uncle moved in with them) and the two years following, in which the uncle and his partner were arrested, tried, and convicted.

  Hutchins has been acting out since puberty: drugs, alcohol, truancy, petty theft, suicidal threats—the whole bit. Sister thinks his only chance of seeing thirty is for him to remember and confront the abuse. I agree with her.

  There is something about this James Hutchins. About his quick mind, his sense of humor, his self-deprecation, that is immensely appealing. I want desperately to help him.
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br />   Diana looked at her next notation; it too was about James. “Zestful energy. Witty. Charming,” she had scribbled. “Sad in his core.” The words brought back the session as clear as a photograph. James, some of his thick dark hair falling sideways as he tilted his head, was joking about Jill. “The admiral,” he said, referring to his sister, “runs a tight ship named James. It’s been her favorite occupation since we were kids.” He sat back in his chair, crossed his arms, and flashed Diana a dimple. “Unfortunately, I don’t maneuver as well as she would like.”

  It was during the same session, with the same flashing dimple and deep velvety voice, that James had calmly described an incident that had taken place five years earlier. He and Jill had moved up to Cambridge together when he had started at MIT, both glad to be out of Norwich, Connecticut, and to begin a new life. But James found the complexities of his freshman year overwhelming and had decided to drop out of college. When he told Jill, she had pulled a knife on him, threatening to kill him if he didn’t start going to class.

  Despite Jill’s warning, James had quit school anyway. Believing that Jill might really hurt him, he hid out with his drug-dealing pal Dominic for a couple of months. When James finally returned to the apartment, Jill was gone. He found out a year later that she was married and living in Des Moines.

  It was during the knife story that Diana first saw through James’s cheerful nonchalance. When she was first touched by the deep sorrow he couldn’t quite keep from his eyes. She had yearned to help him.

  Diana turned her chair so she was facing the window; she stared into the gray alley. How long ago that day seemed. How young and naive she had been: fascinated by Jill’s engulfing obsession with her brother; drawn into James’s world by his powerful charisma; ensnared by her own egotistical belief that she could help them.

  Flipping through the book, she read an entry she had written about a year and a half later.

  James’s progress is amazing. His job is going well, his cocaine use has stopped, and, for the first time, he actually talked positively about the future. “Perhaps there really is a world out there for me,” he said today.

  I wonder if “cure” is a completely wild concept?

  With his intelligence and charisma—and with the right kind of help—the man can be anything. Maybe not today or tomorrow certainly, but perhaps not too far in the future …

  As his therapist, I must walk a fine line: allowing him enough support so he doesn’t feel abandoned, while giving him enough autonomy so he doesn’t feel closed in. Sticking close, but remaining distant. Can I do this? I think I can.

  Diana shook her head. She had been so foolishly secure in her ability to walk that impossible line. Now she knew that sticking close and remaining distant were mutually exclusive.

  Diana jerked her head up and sat completely still. She swiveled in her chair and stared at the bookshelves that lined two walls of the office. Perverse pleasures … psycho mumbo-jumbo … sicko thing going … She broke into a sweat, and her skin began to prickle. I even have proof, Jill had declared. What proof? There could be no proof. Two days—three days at most—and then you’ll know …

  Diana threw her journal into the drawer, locked it, and wandered upstairs. When she reached the front door she froze. The hallway reeked of James—or, more accurately, of his cologne. Eternity, he had said it was called the day she had complimented him on the scent. “I’ll wear it for all eternity—as a symbol of my eternal love for you.” And he had. Until he got angry with her for going to Cape Cod. Then he adopted a policy of wearing the cologne, far too much for her taste, on the days he was pleased with her and made a point of flaunting its absence when she wasn’t meeting his criteria for perfect therapist.

  The scent seemed to surround her, to be stronger than it could possibly be. Feeling foolish, but unable to stop herself, she cautiously ventured to the middle of the entryway and stuck her head in the dining room, looking through to the kitchen. Nothing. The house was silent. There was nobody here but her.

  She ran her fingers through her hair. “Blue-black like Snow White’s,” James had once said of her hair. “Unbearably shiny and erotic.” Dinner, Diana thought, pushing away thoughts of James. She would make dinner. Change into jeans. Check the mail. She bent down and scooped up the envelopes that lay scattered on the floor in front of the mail slot. Once again she was overwhelmed by the smell of James. Still holding the mail, she opened the front door and slipped outside, letting the door close behind her.

  Feeling better for being out of the house, she took a deep breath and leaned against the wrought-iron railing, watching the narrow, busy street: a man with a ponytail pushing a double stroller; three street people arguing over a shopping cart; two college students, hand in hand, with silly lovesick smiles on their faces; a couple of businesswomen in designer suits. Everyone was hurrying, walking briskly under the gray and threatening autumn sky. “Safety in numbers” kept running through her head. “Safety in numbers.”

  Safety from what? she wondered, shaking her head at her own ridiculousness. Safety from ghosts? Could numbers save a person from ghosts? Perhaps numbers could save you from real ghosts, but not ghosts of the mind. Olfactory hallucinations were not an unheard-of psychological phenomenon.

  Diana began to sift through the mail. But, strangely, this only seemed to make the odor stronger. Suddenly she stopped. In her hand was an envelope that smelled as if it had been soaked in Eternity. An envelope addressed to her. The return address was Anderson Street.

  She ripped it open and pulled out a single sheet of paper. The rest of the mail slipped from her fingers and fluttered to the stoop as she read.

  My darling doctor,

  I am sorry for any unhappiness I may have inadvertently caused you. I hope you can forgive me, as I have forgiven you for forcing upon me no other option than to take this drastic step.

  Perhaps I should also thank you for my final freedom.

  I cannot live without you and have no desire to do so. As promised, I shall love you and be with you for all of eternity.

  In death, as in life, I am,

  Eternally yours,

  J

  5

  DIANA WAS SWIMMING NAKED. SWIMMING IN A SEA of Eternity. It held her buoyantly aloft, flowed through her hair, and slid smoothly behind her cupped palms as she stroked a leisurely crawl. She breathed it in and breathed it out, as if it were gas rather than liquid, air rather than perfume. It tasted delicious. It felt velvety and sensual and all-enveloping.

  She flipped smoothly onto her back, arching her body, stretching her toes, and lifting her hands high above her head. The cologne sustained her, caressed her, tickled between her legs.

  She giggled, and suddenly she felt iron fingers grip her ankles. She tried to kick free, but her legs would not heed; they did not kick, they did not move. Two hands were pulling at her. Pulling her down to a place where she couldn’t breathe, to a place where the sweet perfume that had been her support was now her enemy.

  And she was powerless.

  Powerless to fight the fingers that yanked on her. Powerless to free herself as they tugged harder and harder. As they dragged her, forcing her into a swirling black vortex, into a ghastly, loathsome, and airless place from which she knew she could never return.

  Diana jerked her leg hard and, gasping for breath, opened her eyes. Light was forming around the edges of the drapes and shooting cheerfully onto the ceiling; it was going to be a sunny day. She needed a sunny day, she thought, watching the brightening room and trying to shake the lingering foreboding of the dream.

  It was only a dream. And an uninspired, almost embarrassingly predictable one at that—given what she had been through in the past week. But it was over. It was time to put it all behind her. Time to think of the baby and Craig and their future. Time to move on.

  Craig turned and threw a sleepy arm around her. He pulled her to him, and gradually her ragged breathing became more normal. Her heartbeat began to slow, and the nightm
are receded into the welcome fog of lost dreams. It was over. She put her hand on her stomach, hoping to feel the gentle kick of their child, yet knowing it was probably still too early.

  Craig’s hand closed over hers. “Feel anything?” he asked.

  She shook her head, the last fragments of her dream retreating beyond her reach, leaving just a shadowy touch of unease.

  “Good thing,” Craig mumbled.

  Diana craned her neck toward him. “What are you talking about?”

  Craig looked at her with a serious expression on his face. “It means she doesn’t have your feet,” he said, breaking into a smile. “If she had your size tens, she’d have been pummeling you months ago.”

  Diana jabbed her elbow lightly into his stomach; the size—and, she had to admit it, the ugliness—of her feet was a long-standing joke between them. “Yours ain’t so tiny either, buster,” she said, then snuggled more closely into him, nesting her long lean body into his long bulky one. Craig was a wonderful man, and he was going to be a great father. She had dated a lot before she met him at a party toward the tail end of graduate school, but after that, there had been no one else. It had taken her about six months to convince him that he felt the same way about her. A year later they were married.

  Despite their two demanding careers, the tight money, and the fertility problems that were supposed to drive couples apart, Craig was her best friend. She loved him passionately, but also loved him in a richer, more profound way. She pressed his palm to her stomach, knowing that despite all the craziness of the past week, she was still the luckiest of woman. “How come you’re sleeping in so late?” she asked him.

  “Hard to get up when you’re sleeping with such a beautiful woman.”

  “Bet you say that to all the girls.”

  He gave her a quick hug, then swung away. “True,” he said, standing and stretching. “But it’s easier than admitting I’m just a lazy bastard.”

  “Yeah, right,” Diana said. The last thing Craig Frey was was a lazy bastard. A senior project architect at one of the most prestigious firms in Boston, Craig also had his own business on the side. His dream was to open his own firm: Frey and Associates it was to be called—even if there were no associates for a while.