Blameless

by B. A. Shapiro

  When Diana pulled onto St. Stephen Street, a man and a woman were lounging against the streetlamp in front of her house. Despite their superficial nonchalance, the couple was alert, scanning the sidewalk, whispering and pointing at something written on a pad the woman held. Sniffers. Through some incredible stroke of luck, neither noticed Diana as she swung her jeep into the alley.

  How had this happened? she asked herself for about the hundredth time since seeing the Inquirer headline. Valerie had said it couldn’t. Valerie had said until the journal was part of the court record, no newspaper would risk it. It was against the law. But the Inquirer had obviously chosen not to abide by the law; they had weighed the cost of a possible suit against the gain of a juicy story and an expanded readership, and had—just as obviously—decided the risk was worth taking.

  Driving slowly down the alley, Diana looked right and left, peering around the trash cans and the cars and the sagging planks of wood that roughly demarcated property lines. She even checked the deep sinkhole behind the house next to theirs. No sniffers. No neighbors. No street people rifling the Dumpster behind the Chinese restaurant. Either the reporters hadn’t figured out that there was a back entrance, or, more likely, they were far too mindful of the realities of urban life to risk hanging around in a dim alley—no matter how hot the story.

  But despite the stillness, Diana felt the eyes. She felt them on the back of her neck as she pulled into her spot. She felt them watching her from above as she scampered to the house. She felt them poring over her, surrounding her, swallowing her, even as she slipped inside the door.

  Her breath coming fast, Diana leaned against the cool plaster of the hallway, pressing her cheek to the wall. Unfounded paranoia, she had called it just a mere hour ago. Founded paranoia was what it was. The mothers on Charles Street and the businessman in front of Jill’s. The elderly woman and the man with the hammer at the Christian Science mall. It was like the old joke: Just because you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean they aren’t following you.

  Diana wrapped her coat around her—whether to warm or protect herself, she did not know—and walked slowly toward her office. Craig. She had to call Craig. And Valerie. She looked at her watch. Valerie might already be on her way to the hearing. The hearing. Diana barked a harsh laugh containing no humor. The judgment she had looked upon as defining her life had been completely voided of its power.

  She stood in the doorway to her small waiting room and looked through to her office. She could see the red light blinking on the answering machine. Perhaps Craig had called already. He must have seen the paper by now. She pressed her palm to her stomach. Someone would have showed it to him.

  Despite Craig’s unflinching support since James’s death, Diana knew he had never been comfortable with her relationship with James. Even during the first year, before there was any indication of the problems to come, Craig had questioned her involvement. “It seems as if you’re always talking about this Hutchins character,” Craig had said right before James had his memory breakthrough. “Don’t you think you should give your other patients—not to mention your husband—a bit of your time?” he had teased.

  But after she had terminated with James, after James had begun to harass them both, Craig had stopped teasing and become angry. About a week before his death, James had sneaked into the backseat of the jeep, jumping up from his hiding place while Diana was driving to Ticknor. She had been so startled, she had slammed on her brakes and skidded into a parked car. She did little damage to either the jeep or the other car, but she was quite shaken—as was Craig. “Either you get rid of that loser, or I’m calling the police and getting a restraining order,” Craig had told her. “You talk to him or I will.” But before she or Craig could do anything, James had gotten rid of himself.

  Diana was startled from her reverie by the slight kick of a tiny foot beneath her palm. What was Craig going to think of her relationship with James now? Talking about James was one thing; writing about having sex with him was another. “Oh, little one,” she whispered, “let’s hope your daddy understands.”

  She turned and headed up the stairs. On some level, she could appreciate that she was nauseated and terrified and furious. But really, what she felt most was calm. A strange, detached composure, almost as if she were once again acting in a high school play, as if she were both mentally and physically unable to believe that this was really her life.

  She climbed up to the great room and, swinging wide toward the back of the house, approached the front window from the side. She pulled the edge of the drape. The sniffers were still there Straightening a pillow on the sofa, she wondered how long they would stay and then wandered out of the room. Leaning over the stairwell, she looked through the narrow opening between the balustrades and the landings to the floor two stories below. “I’ll be with you always,” James had told her the day she had terminated with him. “Even when you think I’m finally gone.”

  Diana twisted her head and looked up at the clouded, dirty skylight one story above. James’s prescience was definitely spooky. She climbed one more set of stairs, drawn to the small room at the front of the house. To the empty, freshly whitewashed room with three windows at the treetops and a shiny new hardwood floor.

  But when she entered the nursery, Diana was jolted from her cool reverie. She raised one hand to her mouth as a small gasp escaped her lips. For there, standing in the corner of the room, his arms hanging limp at his sides, was Craig.

  “Craig—” Diana started, and then her voice cracked. She wanted to run to him, to bury her head in his chest, but something about the stiff, uncomfortable way he was holding himself stopped her. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, looking at her hands, unable to confront the hurt on his face. A shiver of apprehension ran down her back: The cold eyes she had felt on her in the alley had been Craig’s. “So sorry.”

  “Lionel dropped the paper on my desk as soon as he got in this morning,” Craig said softly. “Then he suggested I take the rest of the day off.” Lionel Lunt was Craig’s boss. He was one of the most powerful architects in the country, and his opinion regularly made—and unmade—people’s reputations.

  The full impact of the situation hit Diana like a punch in the gut. “This whole disaster is all my fault,” she said, taking a step toward Craig.

  “Don’t.” Craig held his hands up, whether to stop her from coming any closer or to stop her from speaking, Diana wasn’t sure. “Don’t blame yourself,” he said, but he didn’t move toward her.

  “They canceled my class without telling me.”

  Craig nodded, his back pressed to the wall. “When did you see the paper?”

  “It—it was in the department office. I went down to find out why the class—why my class was—why it—” She couldn’t speak; she couldn’t get the words past the huge lump in her throat.

  “I know you didn’t do the things you wrote about,” Craig said, still not moving toward her. “But it just seems so—so real, to read it in the paper like that …”

  Diana stood alone and defenseless in the middle of the barren room. She hung her head, thinking of the thousands of people who would read the Inquirer: their friends, their family, her colleagues, a sea of opinionated strangers ready to think the worst. “Everyone’s going to believe it,” she whispered.

  Craig dropped his arms. “No, they won’t,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s too wild to believe. The stuff at Ticknor. In the parking garage. Susan’s ski house …” Then the images seemed to be too much for him; his tenuous control collapsed and his voice rose. “Why did you have to write it?” He lurched forward and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Why did you have to be so graphic?”

  Unable to speak, Diana just stood there.

  “Why, Diana?” he demanded, his fingers digging into her coat. “Why?” His angry words ricocheted harshly off the bare floor and walls. Then as quickly as he had seized her, Craig suddenly let her go.

  Diana staggered backward and then righted he
rself.

  Craig was staring at his hands in horror. “This can’t be happening,” he said, shaking his head as if to shake himself out of a trance. “This can’t be us.” He pressed his hands under his armpits and walked to the window, turning his back to her.

  “It was my journal.” Diana crossed over to Craig and took his arms, forcing him to turn and face her. “Now it may seem stupid—but when I wrote in it I never expected anyone to read it. It was my private journal. And it was stolen,” she added. “I kept the damn thing locked up in my desk, for God’s sake!”

  Craig nodded slowly, but his fists remained stuffed under his arms.

  “I couldn’t help what I thought, the feelings my job caused me to feel,” she tried again.

  “I know that,” he said, letting his arms drop to his sides, but not meeting her eye. “I understand your work. You don’t have to ex—”

  “But I do,” Diana interrupted, terrified that Craig would be so hurt or so angry or so disgusted with her that they would never pick out a crib with bright-colored bumpers and a quilt to match. “I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want our daughter to grow up without a family. I want us to be together …”

  “This is nuts.” Craig threw his arms up in the air and began to pace the perimeter of the room. “Completely nuts.”

  “It may be nuts,” Diana said, “but it’s also the truth. This countertransference stuff is for real. Don’t you remember what happened with Sandy? How I was mothering and overprotecting her? How I had to talk to my peer group and work it out in my journal? She was responding to me as her mother—and that was a good and necessary part of her therapy—but I needed to learn not to respond back from that role.”

  Craig stopped his pacing. He crossed his arms and stood at the far end of the small room.

  “It was the same thing with James,” Diana said softly. “I needed to let him relate to me as someone I wasn’t. I had to be Hank Hutchins for him. He had to make me into a sex object to work through the pain. Don’t you see? Then I needed to work it through on my end—to learn how not to be the sexualized person he made me into.”

  Craig took a step closer and searched her eyes. “So this countertransference thing is pretty powerful …”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” She looked up at him. “You have to believe me. You have to.”

  Although his brow was still slightly furrowed, Craig stepped forward and touched her cheek. Diana dropped her head, her hot tears fell onto his hand, soaking into the gray wool of her coat. They stood like that for a long time in the center of the empty room. “I guess a person has a right to put anything they want in a private journal,” Craig finally said. “I guess you just did what you thought you had to do.” Then he pulled her toward him and held her close.

  When Valerie called to report on the results of the hearing, the irony of the situation was not lost on either Diana or Craig: confidentiality had prevailed over direct relevance. Neither the journal nor Diana’s treatment notes would be admissible in court.

  “But what about your ‘unimpeachable argument’?” Diana demanded. “What about all that ‘in the bag’ business you were handing me last night?”

  “I’m sorry, Diana,” Valerie said, her voice softer than Diana had ever heard it. “Truly I am. The truth is, you never know what’s going to happen in court—with a judge or a jury. I was wrong to be so confident. Wrong to get your hopes up.” The rapid tapping of fingers on a computer keyboard came over the phone lines and then Valerie cleared her throat. “I’m, ah, I’m also real sorry about the Inquirer. You two doing okay?” she asked awkwardly.

  Diana had to swallow the lump in her throat that Valerie’s sympathy had elicited before she could answer the question. “Craig’s being great,” she finally said, turning to smile sadly at him. “A real trouper. I think I’m still numb.”

  “I guess there must’ve been a leak at Engdahl’s.”

  “Or whoever sent it to Engdahl sent it to the Inquirer too.” Diana chuckled without humor and then added, “I just can’t imagine who it might have been.”

  Valerie was silent for a long moment. “If it makes you feel any better,” she finally said, “after reading the paper this morning, we’re lucky that journal isn’t going to be allowed—tough as the loss of the treatment notes is.” She paused again. “Those entries would have crucified us, despite the fact that its obvious most of them aren’t true and there’s no corroboration.”

  “Corroboration?”

  “The only person—besides yourself—who knows if your entries are fact or fantasy is dead.”

  Now it was Diana’s turn to sit in silence. “So what do we do now?” she finally asked.

  “Well,” Valerie said, her voice perking up, “I figure we continue with our four-pronged attack to build up your credibility and tear down James’s. Ultimately proving that no one—not even a top-notch therapist such as yourself—could have stopped a true loony like Hutchins from killing himself.”

  “Can we do that without the treatment notes?”

  “It won’t be as easy, but it can be done,” Valerie assured her. “We put you on the witness stand and have you start to describe what was in the notes, Engdahl objects and, although his objection is sustained, I get the judge to instruct the jury that extensive notes were taken—even if their content is privileged.”

  “That doesn’t sound like enough.”

  “It isn’t,” Valerie agreed. “But we’ve still got your credentials, James’s history, and all those articles you told me about proving that borderlines are impossible to treat. And if a number of your colleagues testify to the existence of your notes—and I can elicit a few pieces of specific information from them before Engdahl objects—we’ll be able to portray you as thorough and competent and always maintaining the highest of professional standards.”

  “I’ve got support letters from almost a dozen professionals in the field.”

  “Fax them to me as soon as we hang up,” Valerie ordered. “We may have to make some changes so that the language emphasizes the right things.”

  “But the stuff in the paper may—”

  “Diana, I know that having your journal in the Inquirer is a terrible personal blow,” Valerie interrupted. “But you’ve got to remember that it’s irrelevant to this suit. All that matters right now is what’s in court.” She then went on to direct Diana to put together a resume as complete and impressive “as if she were going up for tenure at Harvard” and set up a meeting to review Diana’s list of potential witnesses. “I want you to keep organizing your treatment notes as if we were still going to use them—that way I’ll have full knowledge and be able to work what I can into evidence. Oh,” she added, “I also need you to come down to my office to review some hospital records I got from Engdahl—you’ll probably need three or four hours.”

  “Hospital records?” Diana asked.

  “Mass General. Looks like Hutchins was admitted there for a suicide attempt this past summer. You knew that, right?”

  “All too well.”

  “That’s what I thought. Anyway, Engdahl seems to think the records contain proof positive of your incompetence, but I figure we can use them to show how sick Hutchins really was.”

  Diana agreed to check her schedule and hung up the phone. Then she sat back down at the kitchen table where she and Craig had been pretending to eat a late lunch, but had, in actuality, been moving mounds of reheated linguine marinara in circles on their plates. Diana repeated Valerie’s words, although Craig had caught the gist from listening to her side of the conversation.

  “So she’s still optimistic?” Craig asked.

  Diana picked up her fork and twisted some pasta around it, carefully soaking up as much sauce as she could. Then she just as carefully pushed it all from her fork and to the other side of her plate. “I guess.”

  “If she’s still optimistic,” Craig said, “then we should be too.” He put a large scoop of linguine in his mouth and looked
at her thoughtfully as he chewed. “Figure it this way, if you can convince the supposed ‘wronged husband,’ you can convince anybody.”

  Diana went ice-cold. She knew Craig meant for her to be consoled, but the words “wronged husband” and the calmness of his tone terrified her more than any angry outburst could have.

  “If I stand by you,” he said, “everyone will know that it can’t possibly be true—and then they’ll all go away and leave us alone.”

  Diana played with her linguine. If only it was as simple as Craig made it sound. If only he believed what he was saying. If only she believed it. As she lifted the fork to her mouth, the telephone rang. She looked at Craig and shook her head; he jumped up to get it.

  It was their friend Lisa. “Yeah,” Craig said, “the lawyer’s pretty sure we’ve got a good case. Invasion of privacy.” He smiled at Diana and rolled his eyes. “I don’t know about sexual harassment. It seems like a long shot when there’s no proof the Inquirer wouldn’t have done the same thing to a male psychologist. But Valerie Goldman’s the—” He listened for a moment. “She’s doing okay, but she’s not really up to talking to anyone now.” He nodded. “I’ll tell her,” he said and hung up the phone.

  Craig told Diana that Lisa sent her love and resumed eating his lunch.

  “Do you think I should call that reporter at the Globe?” Diana asked after a while. “To get out my side of the story?”

  Craig shook his head. “Forget about the press—let them have their little fun. Then let it die down.”

  “But—”

  “No,” Craig interrupted. “You start trying to refute your own words and you’re just begging for trouble. It’ll prolong the whole thing and turn this into a citywide Globe-Inquirer battle—blow it up into an even bigger circus than it already is.” He took another bite of pasta. “Better to concentrate on the things you can do that’ll help. Like getting all those papers on your desk in order for Valerie. Like getting people to testify for you.”