Blameless

by B. A. Shapiro

  Sandy stretched out her square fingernails. Some new nail style from France, she had told Diana proudly. Diana had been forced to control her face so that Sandy wouldn’t see how ridiculous she thought they looked. Sandy carefully inspected the nails on her right hand for imperfections in their squareness. Then she checked her left. Apparently finding none, she dropped both hands to her lap and finally said, “I missed you.”

  Diana sat back in her chair. Sandy’s neediness again. “We’re having group on Monday,” she said softly. “That’s only a few days away.”

  “I know,” Sandy whimpered. “But—but we didn’t meet this week. And—and it was just real long for me. You know how I get. How I need to make sure that you’re okay?”

  “It has felt like a long time since we’ve seen each other,” Diana said. “But it’s actually been just three days. Remember you had that extra appointment the day after James’s funeral?” It didn’t seem possible so little time had passed.

  Sandy looked down at her hands again. “I saw you since then,” she mumbled.

  “What do you mean?”

  Sandy sighed and looked up. “I kind of followed you around a couple of times.”

  “Oh?” Diana dropped her hands into her lap so Sandy couldn’t see her clenched fists. Just what she needed right now: an obsessed fan. Then her hands relaxed. Obsessed fans often broke into the homes of those they admired. Stole their possessions … “You followed me around?” she prompted.

  “I, ah, I kind of went to your class yesterday. And—and …”

  “And?” Diana looked at the large purse hanging on the back of Sandy’s chair. An obsessed fan might steal a personal object. And, even more important, an obsessed fan might keep that personal object in her possession. Diana couldn’t take her eyes from the purse. Perhaps her journal was sitting right across from her.

  “And I saw you on Charles Street this morning.” Sandy hung her head like a guilty child. “I followed you to DeMatteo’s.”

  “Did you do anything else? Follow me anywhere else? Or do something …” Diana paused, searching for the right words. “Something that was maybe—maybe a little more wrong?”

  Sandy shook her head, swinging her long hair back and forth, but she didn’t raise her eyes.

  “Are you sure?” Diana asked, hoping against hope that Sandy was lying. “It’s easier to just spill it all now.”

  Sandy checked her nails for squareness again.

  She is lying, Diana thought jubilantly, her eyes once again drawn to Sandy’s purse. She does have the journal. “You can’t do this, Sandy,” Diana said gently. “You frightened me. I understand what you’re feeling, I understand that you worry about me, but that doesn’t make it okay.”

  “You don’t understand anything!” Sandy stood up and began stomping around the office. “How can you?” She marched over to the desk, grabbed Robin’s gift, and waved it under Diana’s nose. “How can you understand what I feel when you have someone who makes something like this for you?” she demanded. Then she seized Craig’s picture with her other hand. “When you have him?”

  Diana silently watched the angry woman, her jubilation dying. That was the thing with borderlines: They adored you, and then they hated you, and there was not much sense to be made of what turned them one way or the other.

  Sandy slammed Craig’s picture to the desk and began raving again. “Even with all this stuff in the paper, with all the things going on that you probably think are so terrible, you—you still have everything. This.” She waved the paper-clip holder in the air, then pointed to Diana’s stomach. “The baby, that nice husband.” She dropped into the chair and burst into tears. “And—and if you stop the group, I won’t be able to afford individual sessions and then I’ll have nothing!”

  Diana nodded. So that was it. “We’re not going to stop the group.”

  Sandy looked up, her huge gray eyes shiny with tears. “But James and Ethan are gone.”

  “James hasn’t been a member of the group for months,” Diana reminded Sandy. Despite her misgivings about Ethan, she added, “Ethan’s called twice in the last few days, so I’m going to assume he’ll show up soon. Bruce and Terri and you are still in. Four’s enough for now. Maybe, after we’ve dealt with the effect of James’s death on us all, we can discuss whether we want to add a new member or two at some later date.”

  Sandy’s face was suddenly radiant. “I know I did the wrong thing when I followed you—and I’m sorry, truly I am. But, but I was so afraid of losing you. Now that Sam and me have broken up, I’ve only got you—my doctor.” She tilted her head and smiled up at Diana. “My good doctor.”

  Diana stood. “We’ll meet on Monday afternoon, as usual,” she said. “We can talk about all of this then.”

  “Sure.” Sandy jumped from her seat and placed the paperclip holder carefully back on the desk. “Sure, that’ll be great!” She swung her purse over her shoulder and just about danced out of the office.

  Diana pressed her fingertips to the desk, as if to balance herself against the barrage of relief that was flooding through her. Sandy had the journal; it had to be. There was no other explanation. It wasn’t Jill. It wasn’t Adrian. And it obviously wasn’t some junkie. So it had to be Sandy. There was no one else.

  She dropped into her chair and smiled. Valerie was going to exonerate her in court, and the journal was going to stay safely hidden in the bowels of Sandy’s purse. Diana touched her stomach lightly. It’s going to be all right, she silently reassured her daughter. It looks like it actually might be all right.

  12

  DlANA SAT IN BED, IDLY WATCHING A BAD SKIT ON “Saturday Night Live.” She was waiting for Craig to come out of the bathroom so they could finish the party postmortem. Once a month Diana and Craig got together for dinner with six other couples; one member of each couple had gone to graduate school with Craig, and the fourteen of them had been close for almost ten years. They rotated houses, made lavish dinners, and usually drank a bit too much—with the exception of whoever was pregnant at the moment. That night Krista had put on a gourmet Mexican feast, and Diana and Linda had abstained from the margaritas. “Why do I always think this show is going to be better than it is?” Diana asked Craig when he finally walked into the bedroom.

  He took off his pants and shirt and climbed into bed next to her. “So you started to tell me what Ann said about Bill losing his job.”

  “I can’t believe Bill didn’t tell you himself,” Diana said. “What were you guys talking about at your end of the table?”

  “The Celtics. Rock and roll.” Craig grinned. “Barry was doing his little old Jewish man bit.”

  Diana shook her head in feigned annoyance, but she smiled.

  “All Bill said was that he’d wanted to get out of Digital for years. That this was the best thing that could happen to him.” Craig propped up his pillow so he could lean against it. “Is Ann worried?”

  “You know Ann.” Diana shrugged. “She worries about everything.”

  Craig nodded. “She’s worried about you.”

  “Seems I’m a hot topic of worry in that group.” Diana moved closer to Craig and rested her cheek against his chest; he put his arm around her. “Everyone seemed so up on the details.” Although she had tried not to show it, Diana had been both surprised and unnerved by how much her friends had known. Even though everyone had been supportive—and careful not to discuss the case too much—the whole thing had made her feel uncomfortably exposed, like the dream she frequently had of glancing down during a lecture and discovering she was wearing only underwear. Except tonight it had felt as if her underwear was dirty.

  Craig gave her an encouraging squeeze. “Tim and Mark both missed the burglary write-up in the paper.”

  “Steve and Carol too,” Diana said, raising her head. “I guess we should be glad for those drive-by shootings Thursday night—they must’ve kept our break-in off the front page.”

  Craig played with a lock of her hair. “Thank God for
urban violence.”

  “Our resident feminists were outraged.”

  “Kathleen and Lisa?”

  Diana nodded. “They went off on a tirade about how the media would be ignoring this whole thing if I were a man and James had been a woman.”

  “Even Kevin said something like that.”

  “I suppose I should take that as a good sign,” Diana said dryly. “No one’s ever accused Kevin of being a feminist.”

  “Don’t worry.” Craig pulled her closer and kissed the top of her head. “Your reputation’s going to be just fine—Sandy’s got your journal and Valerie’s going to put Jill in her place with your treatment notes.” He placed his hand over the curve of her stomach, and Diana covered it with her own. “And we’re going to be a family.”

  “I told Valerie I’m not going to the reading of the will,” Diana said.

  “Was she upset?”

  “She seemed more resigned than angry. She’s going to go as my ‘legal representative.’”

  “Good. The farther you stay from Jill Hutchins the better.” Craig raised the television remote. “Mind?” he asked. When Diana shook her head, he clicked off the television, and they snuggled down into the bed.

  “I think I’m starting to believe this really is going to blow over. That it’s—” Diana stopped mid-sentence and held her breath. She felt something. A movement. A fluttery butterfly of a movement in her stomach. “She kicked,” Diana cried, tears welling in her eyes. “She actually kicked! Feel,” Diana ordered, pressing Craig’s palm to her stomach. They waited in complete silence for a moment and then it came again: a faint, gentle pressure from inside her womb.

  “Yes,” he said softly, almost reverently. Then he burst out laughing. “Damn,” he said. “Do you think this means she is going to have your feet?”

  The following morning the Sunday papers were wonderfully devoid of any mention of the case, and Diana’s optimism continued to grow over the week. The media lost interest in her story as a rash of gang murders hit the city. Sandy was edgy and jittery in therapy group Monday afternoon, refusing to meet Diana’s eyes and reinforcing Diana’s belief that she did indeed have the journal. Even the news that Diana was the sole beneficiary of James’s estate—estimated at five hundred thousand dollars—was less upsetting than Diana would have expected. “We’ll set up a charitable trust,” she told Craig and Valerie. “Invest the principle and give away the income.” Craig nodded—a little glumly, Diana thought—and Valerie warned her not to do anything rash and at least wait to see what, if anything, Jill did about contesting the will. But Diana felt good about the decision.

  “These past couple of weeks have made me realize how lucky we are—and how easily it can all be lost,” Craig said over dinner Tuesday evening. “Let’s get away and revel in what we’ve got.” So Diana booked them the front room with the fireplace at the Echo Lake Lodge for the coming weekend.

  On Wednesday Ticknor voted to allow Diana to keep her teaching position, and even permitted Brad Harris to issue a memorandum of support on university letterhead. And her colleagues all rallied around her. By the end of the week, everyone in her peer supervisory group—with the exception of Adrian Arnold—had given her written statements of support to release at her discretion, as had Brad Harris and three psychiatrists she had worked with at Beth Israel.

  Now that it appeared Sandy planned to keep the journal to herself, the other good news was that Valerie and Ron Engdahl, Jill’s attorney, had petitioned the court for a speedy trial and won. Judge Hershey had been more than happy to set an early trial date as this would give him points with the governor, who was pushing to streamline the court system. And Hershey’s known sympathy for the defense gave Valerie additional confidence about winning the motion to admit Diana’s treatment notes.

  Diana quit working early on Friday afternoon so she could pack for the weekend; Craig was due home at five and their plan was to leave for Vermont by six. Straightening her desk, Diana picked up the file that held the statements of support from her colleagues, increasingly confident that the letters would clear her—as would the mass of notes and articles she was slowly organizing into an unshakable defense. Valerie had explained her four-pronged attack against the substandard treatment charge: Diana’s detailed treatment plan for James’s therapy, substantiated by regular progress reports; Diana’s professional competence and credentials, including degrees, published articles, and professional associations; the seriousness of James’s illness and his propensity for self-mutilation and suicide; and the extreme difficulty of treating people who suffered from borderline personality disorders.

  Valerie had instructed Diana to talk to her colleagues and get their input—in writing—supporting each of the “prongs.” She was then to go through her treatment notes, the psychological literature, and her personal files to find information bolstering Valerie’s positions. Everything from James’s past suicide attempts, to Diana’s prestigious post-doc, to research showing a low cure rate for borderlines was relevant. And everything had to be copied, corroborated, and organized under the correct prong. “While you’re at it,” Valerie had added, “might as well see if you can find whatever it was your weird patient was talking about.” Although Diana knew this to be a tremendous amount of work—and was doubtful she would find what Ethan was talking about—she was confident that she could produce the material Valerie needed.

  Diana dropped the statements into a file drawer and pushed it closed with her hip. It really was going to be okay, she thought as she flicked off the lights. The baby was healthy, the trial would come soon, and her exoneration would be swift. Then she would be able to reclaim her life.

  The doorbell rang. With the sound of the chimes, Diana was filled with a sudden foreboding. Despite her previous optimism, she somehow knew that the news on the other side of the door wasn’t good. She ran up the stairs and peered through the peephole. Valerie was standing on the stoop. Her face was grim.

  “I didn’t want to tell you over the phone,” Valerie said, as soon as Diana pulled the door open. “Your journal has surfaced—and it couldn’t be in worse hands.”

  * * *

  Diana led Valerie up to the great room. She sat on the edge of the couch and listened with a sinking heart as her lawyer told her that twenty-five photocopied pages of her journal had been delivered to Jill’s lawyer’s office that morning. Valerie explained that Ron Engdahl was planning to submit the pages in court as evidence that Diana had indeed had an affair with James Hutchins.

  Diana stared out the front bay window, watching the shadows shift on the translucent window shade across the street, as all her hopes died. The shadows turned one way and then the other. Two shadows, three shadows, seemingly without purpose, crossing and melting into one another, only to emerge as separate entities once again. Diana turned toward Valerie. She ached with disappointment. She was nauseated with fear.

  “Engdahl is a smug bastard in the best of situations—and on the phone this morning he was positively strutting. He told me that the excerpts were ‘very juicy’ and that there was no way any jury would believe you after they had read them,” Valerie said as she kicked off her pumps. “Mind?” she asked Diana, nodding toward her feet.

  Diana shrugged her indifference, and Valerie droned on about admissibility and motions in limine. Although Diana knew she needed to be concerned, that she needed to understand, all she could think of was Craig. Of how hurt he would be. “Motion in limine.” She repeated Valerie’s words in robotic tones. “To keep the journal out of evidence.”

  “That’s right,” Valerie said patiently and then continued. “Turns out my secretary, Katie, has a friend who works in Engdahl’s office. So I had her scout down some info for me.”

  Diana shook her head as if to clear it. “Will it get in the newspapers?”

  Valerie didn’t appear to hear the question as she pulled a legal pad from her briefcase; she flipped through it with the back of a pencil. “Katie found out that the journ
al came without a note, and that it had been sent—and paid for in cash—from the Government Center Federal Express office.”

  “Federal Express from Boston to Boston?” Diana asked, feeling more disoriented by the moment.

  “More importantly, with a fake return address.” Valerie dropped the pad to the coffee table with a loud thump.

  “So much for detective work.”

  “I’m a lawyer, not a detective,” Valerie snapped. “My job is to prevent that journal from being introduced in court. And don’t you worry: I’m going to do just that.” She leaned toward Diana. “I’m going to hit Engdahl with a motion in limine that’s going to wipe that cocky smile right off his alligator-preppy face.”

  “What about the newspapers?” Diana asked again.

  Valerie frowned and tapped her pencil on the table. “What about them?”

  “Do they know about it?” It took all of Diana’s strength to keep from screaming at the woman. She swallowed hard. “Will they print it?” she asked softly.

  “Even if the person sent them copies,” Valerie said, “I doubt any newspaper would risk it.”

  “What’s the risk?” Diana asked, although the blood was pounding so hard in her ears that she knew she would have trouble hearing Valerie’s answer.

  “We don’t have a lot of law on this in Massachusetts,” Valerie said slowly. “And although it wouldn’t be libelous—it is your diary, after all—printing it in a newspaper would be a pretty clear invasion of privacy.” She paused and looked up at the ceiling. “Chapter 214. Right of privacy. If I remember correctly, it protects against something like ‘unreasonable, substantial, or serious’ interference with a person’s privacy …” She shook her head. “A legitimate newspaper printing an unauthorized personal diary sounds pretty unreasonable, substantial, and serious to me.” She shook her head. “I just don’t think they’d pull it.”

  “We could sue them?”

  Valerie nodded emphatically. “In a flash.”

  Diana sighed in relief and leaned back into the couch. Then she bolted up as another thought came to mind. “What about the press if you lose the motion in limine?”