Blameless

by B. A. Shapiro

  Diana charged up the stairs, sidestepping the toys that littered the landing. “What do you mean,” she demanded. “After what happened before?”

  The woman surveyed Diana, then she smiled slyly. “After his last girlfriend got herself a shotgun and blew off her head,” she said, her voice filled with equal measures of pity and disgust. “Made a hell of a mess in the apartment.” She shook her wild mane of hair. “Hell of a mess,” she repeated.

  Then she kicked the door closed with her foot, leaving Diana standing alone in the silent, toy-strewn hallway.

  Dusk was falling quickly, filling the murky alleys and doorways with ominous shadows. Diana clutched her purse tightly and hurried down the stairs. Ethan’s girlfriend had killed herself with a shotgun blast to the head. It probably meant nothing. But it could also mean everything. It could save her neck legally. Or it could get her killed.

  Right now, she didn’t care much about legal. She was edgy and scared, her nerves like frayed rope, her every sense heightened and painfully alert. All she cared about was getting home.

  And then, as she stepped into the street, she caught a movement along the side of one of the houses. She froze for a moment, like a deer caught in headlights, then whirled around. Nothing. Buttoning her coat, Diana focused on the cross street in front of her. Get off Sunderland Court. Turn left and head west for two blocks. Another left and in two blocks she would be on Mass Ave.

  She rushed down the street, oblivious of the muddy potholes, stepping wherever her long-legged stride placed her boot. Then she saw it again. There was someone near the doorway of the decaying house on her right. Someone hiding in the gloom of the listing porch. A man. A large man in a bomber jacket. Watching her. He slipped back into the shadows, but Diana knew that this time the eyes were for real.

  She began to run and didn’t look back. Hearing the footfalls pounding behind her, she ran even faster. She turned the corner of Sunderland Court and raced to the lights of Prospect Street, her body flying on the adrenaline of pure fear. She felt the darkness of his shadow fall onto her back. She felt the weight of it. The terror. She dashed around the corner on to Prospect, toward the bustle of Central Square.

  25

  DIANA JUMPED INTO HER JEEP AND PUNCHED THE locks on both doors. She rammed the key into the ignition, gunned the engine, and pulled away from the curb. A horn blared in anger, but she didn’t care. All that mattered was that she lost whoever was following her. All that mattered was that she got away.

  Ethan. She knew it was Ethan. She had seen enough before he ducked inside that doorway. Enough of him, and enough of the jacket. James’s leather jacket. The jacket he and Ethan had fought over. The jacket Ethan had never returned.

  Diana slammed on her brakes at a red light, her eyes darting feverishly to the left and then to the right. She looked in her rearview mirror, straining to differentiate among the headlights that followed her, struggling to discern if he was still there. She stared at the light, willing it to turn green. She had to get away. Now. This instant.

  Ethan was capable of anything.

  He was stalking her as she was stalking him. But what did he want? What might he do? The array of possibilities was endless. Frighteningly infinite.

  She darted across the Mass Ave. bridge into Boston, weaving carefully between the lanes of traffic. She managed to twist around a truck making a left turn onto Marlborough Street, but was halted by the light at Boylston. When the light finally changed, she stepped on the gas and glanced behind her. As before, a pair of headlights clung to her tail-lights as if leashed by a powerful magnet. But it didn’t seem possible that a single car could have stuck with her at every intersection. Or did it?

  She moved past the Christian Science Center at a maddeningly slow pace and then turned the jeep sharply onto St. Stephen Street. Checking her rearview mirror again, she saw a line of headlights, paired and strung behind her. But there was no way of knowing whether a set belonged to Ethan.

  Diana didn’t turn into the alley. Instead she stayed on the street, pulling into a spot a few doors down from the house. She kept the engine idling as she scrutinized the cars attached to the headlights she had feared. They streamed benignly by her. She took a deep breath and dropped her head to the steering wheel. She rubbed a muscle in her neck.

  She had either lost him or he had never existed. He had never existed, she told herself. She was running from shadows. Just like last week at the library when she had been so sure Jill was on the other side of the stacks, slinking along the aisle, peering between the volumes. Diana had felt the danger like a physical presence; she smelled it. But when she had marched out to confront Jill, Diana found a redheaded student, at least ten years Jill’s junior, sitting cross-legged on the floor. The girl glanced absently up from her book, then returned to her reading.

  All Diana had smelled was her own fear.

  There was a message from Ethan waiting for her when she went into her office. Diana’s hands trembled as she listened. “I’m in Charlotte,” he said. “North Carolina. At my brother’s. I probably won’t be north for a while—but don’t worry, I’ll keep in touch.” Diana shook her head. She knew exactly where Ethan was—and it wasn’t North Carolina. Ethan was here. Watching her. Following her.

  She snapped the blinds shut and checked the lock on the back door, thinking of the small handgun Craig had ordered. Double-action, he told her when he came home from the store last week, showing her a picture in a catalogue. Some kind of revolver, she remembered, tiny and mean-looking. “Consider it a temporary alarm system,” he said in response to her horror at the idea of having a weapon in the house. “I’ll get rid of it as soon we fix the real system—well before the baby’s old enough to walk.” For the first time since the Brady Bill passed, Diana was sorry there was a waiting period to buy guns.

  Stop it, she told herself as she removed the message tape and dropped it into her desk drawer. She didn’t need a gun. Last week, Detective Levine had asked her to save all of Ethan’s messages for him, so she called the police station and told the dispatcher that she had another tape for Levine to pick up. She was being ridiculous. The episode with Ethan’s landlady had just freaked her, as had her illusionary pursuit. Most likely Ethan was in North Carolina. His taped message did have that long-distance crackle to it, and she thought she remembered a brother somewhere in the South. Most likely it was just the same as the incidents at the library and in the alley: She had imagined the whole thing. There had been no man in a bomber jacket, no footfalls chasing her, no headlights following her. The eyes were not real. She had to stop running from shadows. She had to stop scaring herself with outrageous fantasies. Reality was more than scary enough.

  Diana fiddled with the tape in the open drawer before her, trying to catch an elusive memory that danced away every time she got close to it. She thought she remembered something that might impress Detective Levine. Something Ethan had once said about shotguns. And girlfriends.

  She went over to the file cabinet containing her group session records, trying to recall exactly when Ethan had started. She pulled two files from the drawer and carried them back to her desk, then flipped open the first one. It had been Halloween—just over one year ago—and by Thanksgiving she had known she had made a terrible mistake.

  For months James had been begging her to let Ethan into the group, convinced that she was the only one who could help his friend. “He’s a good guy underneath all the cocaine and bravado,” James had told her. “I know you could really help him.”

  After a couple of phone conversations, she had invited Ethan for a preliminary interview. He came in late one afternoon, a sly I’ve-been-a-bit-naughty aura about him. He was forthcoming about his drinking and drug use, and even admitted to a few petty crimes. “I don’t want to be like this anymore,” he said, his eyes wide and locked onto hers. “I want to change.”

  He told the classic borderline tale of constant abandonment by those closest to him. And he had the major single tra
uma—cringing in the corner of the kitchen as his mother’s boyfriend slit her throat—that Diana was finding so common among her research sample. Although a small voice in the back of her mind told her not to do it—a voice she now wished she had heeded—Diana had agreed to let Ethan in the group for a three-month trial period.

  Diana didn’t need to read her notes to remember that he had shown up for that first session wearing a wide orange tie with skeletons dancing all over it—and flying high on cocaine. Ethan had squirmed in his seat, played with the ring on his finger, and sniffled and swallowed a lot. His pupils were dilated, and he excused himself twice to use the bathroom—presumably to take a few snorts. Had she known him better she might have challenged him or brought it up to the group, asking them what it felt like to have their cohesion upset; but she hadn’t been sure he didn’t suffer from allergies—and she had known the group wasn’t ready. Her notes did remind her that, despite the cocaine, he had been “attentive and sweet,” listening to Sandy’s struggles with her father and even offering a few, quite sensible, solutions.

  But within a month Ethan’s flimsy veneer of charm had worn through. He was edgy and irritable, snapping at Sandy to grow up and for Bruce to get a life. By Christmas he was swaggering around the room, taunting James and Terri for being “wimpy-assed teetotalers” and bragging that he could drink an entire bottle of Jack Daniels and not feel a thing. And then there had been the fistfight over James’s bomber jacket. She had asked him to leave and he had—for almost two months.

  When he returned, all contrite and apologetic, full of resolve to change and willingness to meet all her demands for his reentry into the group, she had allowed him back in. It had been a mistake, but terminating a patient was a ticklish and formidable task, one that Diana had always found extremely difficult. Gail claimed it was because Diana’s heart was too soft—that her patients had survived before they had started seeing her, and that they would survive long after her as well. Diana grimaced, thinking of how long James had survived after she had terminated with him: less than three months.

  With James there had just been no choice. He had gotten completely out of hand. Although he had been on a downward slide the entire last year of his life, this past summer had been a disaster—a disaster for which Diana held herself responsible. “I need you to think of me as much as I think of you,” James had begged one July morning after Diana caught him following her to the library. “Otherwise there’s no purpose to my life.” When she told him that his purpose for living had to come from within himself, he had blamed her for his inability to get his life together, declaring that if she were a better doctor he would be better too. Diana had known his words held more than a grain of truth.

  So she had tried to be a better doctor: talking to her peer supervisory group, consulting an expert on borderline disorders at Harvard, working out her feelings in her journal. But the damage had been done, and James only got worse. “I’m going to kill myself and it’s up to you to see that I don’t,” he warned, trying to use her feelings for him against her. Where before he had pretended to accidentally bump into her at the store or the library, he now blatantly followed her to class, to the parking lot, to the dry cleaner’s. He hid in her car and harassed Craig’s secretary with phony appointments. He also began stealing her things: the hairbrush she left on a shelf in the office, the coral paperweight her parents had brought her from Greece. When she confronted him about his inappropriate behavior, he crossed his arms and said, “If I’m going nowhere, you’ve only yourself to blame.”

  Gail and Craig and her entire peer group argued for termination. “You’re not doing either one of you any good,” Gail told her. “If you really care about him, refer him elsewhere.” Craig was even more adamant—especially after they discovered Diana was pregnant. “I don’t want him around you,” he said. “We don’t know what he’s capable of.”

  With much ambivalence and trepidation, Diana told James she couldn’t be his therapist anymore. Rather than the anger she had expected, James’s face crumpled and tears streamed down his cheeks.

  “Please,” he had begged. “Don’t turn me away. I’ve nowhere to go without you.”

  Although she wanted to take him in her arms and tell him he could stay, Diana remained resolute, explaining what a good doctor Alan Martinson was and how much better off James would be with him. She set up a series of termination sessions, but James never returned. Within the week, he was at Mass General having Seconal pumped from his stomach. Less than three months later, he was dead.

  Diana closed her eyes against the pain and forced herself to return to her search for Ethan’s shotgun reference. After about an hour of fruitless reading, she finally found the reference in the notes from a group the following spring: Ethan had talked about how his mother’s boyfriend had taken him duck hunting and taught him to shoot—before the boyfriend killed the mother, that was. Diana shook her head. Nothing that would impress Levine. Anyone could have been taught to use a shotgun. And the truth was, a person didn’t need lessons to know how to blow someone’s head off.

  Disappointed, Diana put the file back in the cabinet. She called Mitch and briefly summarized her afternoon; he was very interested in Ethan’s girlfriend’s death, and they made an appointment for the next day. She called Craig and asked him to pick up Chinese food on his way home. Then she pulled out her notes and began reviewing for the next day’s lecture.

  When Craig got home they ate in front of the evening news, pressed close together on the couch, open boxes of moo shu chicken and Hunan-spiced shrimp spread on the coffee table in front of them. Diana told him about her visits with Marcel and Ethan’s landlady—omitting her fears of being followed. Craig told her his client in Nashville was concerned about a slip in the construction schedule and that he had to go down there on Wednesday.

  “I worry about you here by yourself for three days,” he said, putting down his chopsticks and looking at her seriously.

  “I’ll be fine.” Diana loaded more moo shu chicken into the empty pancake on her plate and carefully rolled it into the shape of a fat cigar. “Gail stays home alone all the time when Shep travels.” Diana wasn’t nearly as confident as she sounded, but Craig was having enough trouble at work because of her; if he refused to go to Tennessee—which she knew he would if she seemed the least bit afraid—it could make things extremely difficult for him. “It’s not a big deal,” she added, smiling and taking a bite of the sloppy pancake.

  “I’ll be right back,” Craig said, standing up and walking into the hallway. He returned with a large white bag. Slowly he removed the contents: a box of bullets, a Ziploc bag containing some oddly shaped tools, and a black rectangular box that Diana knew contained the gun. “I know you don’t want this in the house,” he said before she could speak, “but it’ll make me feel a lot better if you just let me leave it in my night table drawer.”

  Diana put down her moo shu chicken and pressed herself into the couch. “I don’t like this.”

  “And you think I do?” Craig asked as he snapped open the box and showed her the gun lying on ridges of foam rubber: It was shiny and small and looked more like a toy than a deadly weapon.

  Despite her aversion, Diana reached out and touched it. “I thought it would be a bluish color,” she said.

  “I got a license so it’s all legal and official. I signed up for lessons at a firing range somewhere out in Weston. You should take a few too. This thing doesn’t have a safety—once it’s loaded it’s ready to go.”

  Diana pulled her hand back as if it had been burned. “I’m not learning how to shoot a gun.”

  “Okay, okay,” Craig said, snapping the case shut. “I’ll load it later and put it away—you can forget it’s even here.”

  But Diana knew she wouldn’t forget.

  The next day Diana decided to walk to her appointment with Mitch. Although it would be dark by the time the meeting was over, her path home from his office crossed some of the brightest and busiest
segments of Boston—especially now, as the city was festooned with millions of Christmas lights and what seemed to be almost as many shoppers. She hoped the gaiety would be contagious.

  The late afternoon sky was an unforgiving steel-gray as Diana stood in front of Symphony Hall waiting for the light to change. A cold wind was kicking up off the water, and she wrapped her scarf an extra time around her neck. Across the street, the Christian Science Plaza was blazing with lights and bustling with people, as if defying both the weather and the calendar. But neither the lights nor the people could fool Diana. It was cold, it was bleak, and today was the first day of December.

  As she walked across the plaza, ignoring the Salvation Army Santas and the street merchants hawking Christmas baubles beneath the columns, she reviewed all she had to tell Mitch, and worried about all he had to tell her. She had detected both an edge of excitement and a tinge of despair in his voice when she had called to set up their meeting. “We’ll go over everything tomorrow,” he had promised. “Tomorrow we’ll sort the germane from the irrelevant.” For some reason, Diana found the idea of sorting the germane from the irrelevant quite ominous.

  She was so distracted that she almost tripped over a child turning circles along the side of the reflecting pool. A little boy in a bright purple parka bumped into her, lost his balance, and sat down hard on the concrete. Surprised, he leaned his head backward until his eyes met hers, then began to giggle. His mother ran over to them and scooped the child up in her arms. “Sorry,” she said to Diana, smiling as she nuzzled his neck. “He never watches where he’s going. Do you? Do you?” she demanded in mock seriousness. The little boy continued to giggle. As his mother turned around, he raised a red mittened hand to Diana and waved good-bye.