by Ann Packer
Unless James came with us. He sometimes tagged along, and when that happened I kept my eyes on his every move. I was terrified he would fall off the cliff. “I think part of you wished he would fall,” my first therapist said in response to this, and I suppose it’s an indication of how primed I was for psychology that I didn’t spend a lot of time arguing with her. Maybe she was right: it was possible that my maternal feelings toward James began as a reaction formation against an unconscious hatred of him.
Now he was back, and though I was forty-three and he was thirty-eight, I felt it all start up again. I wanted him to get to bed at a reasonable hour; I wanted him to tell me whether or not he’d be home for dinner. Mostly I held my tongue, but one evening I knocked on the guest room door and asked if he had any laundry he wanted me to do.
“You’re kidding,” he said with a smirk.
“I wasn’t.”
“What are we going to do with you?”
“What are we going to do with you?” I said, and a shadow crossed his face, reminding me of how defensive he’d been about having shown up unexpectedly. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll leave you be.”
“No, hang on a sec.” He was sitting cross-legged on the bed, computer open in his lap. “Come in.”
Already the room felt less like my guest room than his bedroom. This was not so much a matter of his dirty clothes in puddles on the floor as a feeling I noticed in myself, of nervous restlessness, as I stood there looking at him.
He said, “I’ve been wanting to ask you something, pick the famous steel-trap brain. I hitchhiked back from Rob’s yesterday, and I—”
“Wait, you hitchhiked?”
“Yes, I hitchhiked. What’s so terrible? It’s two people, one has a car and one doesn’t. Kind of a win-win, right? But no. Don’t hitchhike, the driver may be a serial killer. Or the hitchhiker may be a serial killer. Someone’s going to be a serial killer.”
“James.”
“No, it’s like how people don’t let their kids play outside anymore. The paranoia. This woman I know—” Abruptly, he lowered the cover of his laptop and very deliberately set it off to the side.
“This woman you know?”
“Never mind. I hitchhiked, and the guy who picked me up was going to the hospital, so I got out there and walked the rest of the way. But here’s the thing: seeing the hospital reminded me of this memory. And I can’t make sense of it or even be sure it’s real or—” He paused and stared at me. “God, please don’t go all shrinky on me, okay? I don’t want to hear how whatever I think I’m remembering signifies something whether it happened or not. I want to know, was I ever alone in the hospital?”
I was wondering about this woman he knew, so it took me a moment to respond. “I don’t think so.”
“I have this memory of walking down a hospital corridor by myself. And I looked through an open door and saw an old man with a huge stomach like a pregnant woman.”
This was our father: what James might have done with the information that our father’s abdomen was distended when he was admitted to the hospital just before he died. James wasn’t there, so he could only invent the scene, and distort it. A hypothesis, anyway, if a very shrinky one.
“Dad wouldn’t have taken us on rounds, would he?” James continued. “And I wandered away?”
“Never. But if he had, you wouldn’t have seen an old man. We’d have been on the pediatric ward.”
“It’s really bugging me. I want to go up there,” he added, and for a moment I thought he meant the pediatric ward, though it no longer existed; now there was an entire children’s hospital. “To the house, I mean.”
“You miss it.”
He shrugged.
“It’s a loss. I miss it, too.”
“So where’s that husband of yours, anyway?”
“Work.”
“The honeymoon’s over?”
Walt and I had been married for only a year, but we’d never had a honeymoon of the kind James apparently imagined, spending every possible minute together. For most of our careers we’d both believed that a serious relationship would hamper us professionally, and when we met and began dating we were amused to discover we were both inventing busy calendars to protect our weeknights for work. Early on, we decided that Monday and Tuesday evenings would be spent separately unless arranged otherwise in advance, and this seemed at least partially responsible for how happy we were together.
“He’s a nice guy,” James said. “I’m glad I finally met him.” Quickly, he picked up his laptop, hit a key several times, and pressed the cover closed again.
I said, “Honey, what’s going on?”
He froze and then began nodding and snapping his fingers R&B-style, singing, “What’s goin’ on? What’s goin’ on?”
“James, please. Tell me with the crap cut?”
This was something our father had said when the teenage James, caught one night coming into the house around three a.m., said he’d heard something in the yard as he was going to bed, had stepped outside to investigate, and had fallen asleep on the ground. It usually got a smile out of James, but not this time.
“James?”
“Nothing’s going on.” He looked away and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Things are weird in Eugene, okay?”
Since 1989, when he left school for good, James had lived in so many places even I couldn’t remember them all. He’d moved from Santa Cruz to Tucson to Boulder to Portland to Arcata. He’d spent over a year wandering around South America. He’d odd-jobbed, dishwashed, house-sat; he’d done carpentry and lawn maintenance and telemarketing. He’d driven a cab from midnight to eight a.m. and worked at a bakery from four a.m. till noon. He was itinerant, peripatetic; our father always said he was a seeker who was seeking the identity of his own grail. The stability of his life in Eugene had seemed too good to be true; perhaps it had been.
“Oh, James,” I said.
“ ‘Oh, James,’ ” he repeated bitterly. “ ‘Oh, James.’ That’s the Blair family mantra, isn’t it? ‘What will we do about James?’ It’s like ‘How do you solve a problem like Maria?’ How did they solve a problem like Maria? There she is, Julie Andrews, running through the alpine meadows, just so difficult. What do they do? They make her a governess. Sorry to disappoint you, Rebecca, or do you think maybe I should become a governess? I’d like to go to bed now if you don’t mind.”
“Of course,” I said, taking a step toward the door. I wanted to add that I was available anytime he felt like talking, but I didn’t want to crowd him.
“I know,” he said as if I’d spoken. “Thank you.”
I returned to my office and began writing up notes from the day’s sessions. I saw anywhere from a quarter to a third of my patients at the hospital, children who had cancers or autoimmune diseases and were too sick to come to my office. My first patient of the day had been one of these, a boy who was gravely ill with leukemia. He was eleven, and I’d been treating him for three years, the longest I’d treated any critically ill child. He had gone through hell several times. He hadn’t left the hospital in over four months, and lately it seemed he wouldn’t be able to go home for even a final brief visit. That morning, near the end of our time together, I asked him a question, and he said with the impish quality he still sometimes displayed, “Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca. No more questions. It’s time to say good boy.” He looked embarrassed and said quickly, “Goodbye. I meant goodbye.” But “good boy” stayed with me, and now I thought of how important the word “good” had been to us in the conversations we’d had. Packard was a good hospital, and his oncologist was a good doctor, and his parents were good people. That was always the word: and it could mean anything from mediocre (we used it forgivingly in that case) to excellent (when we used it almost superstitiously, as if to say anything more would be to invite trouble).
He was a good boy. Thinki
ng about him, I did what I always did when I was on the verge of being overcome by grief about a patient, though perhaps in this instance I was also influenced by having heard James’s memory of being in the hospital: I remembered a moment from my early childhood. Or rather, I remembered my memory of the moment, because after so long that’s what memory is: the replaying of filmstrip that’s slightly warped from having gone through the projector so many times. I’ll never know what actually happened and what distortions I added.
It was a Saturday, and we were going somewhere as a family. This was before James was born. Our father needed to look in on a patient, so we stopped at the hospital and he left the three of us kids to wait with our mother in the cafeteria. I didn’t want to sit down, so I stood at her elbow and watched while she drank coffee and the boys drank milk. There was a terrible weight to the place, a heaviness in the way people held themselves, in the way they lifted their skimpy sandwiches to their mouths. Some were in wheelchairs. Others were terrified or grief-stricken, but I didn’t understand: at such a young age I had no knowledge of illness and no awareness that people suffered because they loved. Despite having a doctor for a father, I didn’t really know what hospitals were for, why some people were sick enough to need them and others weren’t. In my family, sick meant it hurt to swallow; it meant aching arms and legs and sleeping during the day.
I told my mother I wanted to leave, and she said we couldn’t leave, but if I promised to be quiet I could go over to the window. On the other side of the glass people were moving quickly: doctors in white coats, nurses in caps, regular people in regular clothes. They were alone or in pairs, talking or not. I didn’t know why or how, but I knew they were different from the people in the cafeteria. And to get closer to them, all I had to do was be quiet.
Was this the moment when the seeds of my vocation were planted? I’ve always thought so. I wanted to be on the other side of the window, away from the sick and the worried. And to get there, I should cease talking. I should listen.
Heavy, James would say. Maybe Robert and Ryan would, too. Walt would nod politely and perhaps ask a question, but his only comment would be something like “Huh” or “Interesting.” He’s a scientist, and for him the mind and its mysteries don’t hold a candle to the brain.
Though now that I think about it: doesn’t the brain hold a candle to the mind? Isn’t that what neuroscience wants it to do—illuminate? This is the kind of idea I would have taken to my father, whose interest in psychology had bloomed as I hit my stride. We handed dense books back and forth long after he’d retired and up until the end of his life. Freud, Klein, Winnicott—especially Winnicott. There was one paper, “The Capacity to Be Alone,” that he asked me to photocopy for him—poignantly, I thought, given his life at that point. In those years I finished work early on Friday afternoons, and I’d go up to the house, where we’d sit and talk until I felt he should, for the sake of his health, get up and move around. “Well, Rebecca,” he’d say, “this has been very interesting, thanks for stopping by,” as if it were an occasional rather than a weekly occurrence. He didn’t want me to think he depended on it.
• • •
“Oh, hallelujah,” James said when I got home the next afternoon, early because of a cancellation. “I’m bored out of my mind. What say we drive up to Skyline? Bet you haven’t been there in a while.”
“Actually, I have. Walt and I hike a lot.”
“Walt and you hike a lot?”
“You didn’t think I was capable of surprising you?”
The October sun hung above the hilltops as we headed west. We took Sand Hill Road up past the turnoff for the freeway, with the mile-long tan barracks of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center off to our left, visible and then invisible behind all the new construction. We passed the fenced-off entrance to Searsville Lake, where we’d swum as children. Soon we were on the winding road to the ridgetop dividing the valley from the Pacific Ocean.
The forest was dense, and I pushed my sunglasses to the top of my head. Every quarter mile or so we passed a small turnoff marked only by a cluster of mailboxes. When we were children, these roads led mostly to undeveloped land, to the occasional cabin. Now they were as likely to lead to locked gates protecting the estates of venture capitalists and billionaire patent holders.
“I know,” James said after we’d been climbing for a few minutes, “let’s go find Neil Young’s ranch.”
“What, and knock on the door?”
“I was thinking a love note in the mailbox. Ryan would.”
Redwood trees soared all around us, making the sky very small. At the intersection of Woodside Road, Skyline, and La Honda, there was a restaurant that was jammed on weekends, but today there were just a few cars and motorcycles and maybe half a dozen bicycles.
I looked at James, with his hollowed-out face and ropy arms. Tell me, I wanted to say. Tell me about Eugene and why things are weird there. Instead I said, “Let’s go in and have a beer.”
“I’ve never had a beer with you in my life. Jeez, Rebecca, hiking and beer, what’s next?”
We sat on the deck with foamy amber pints. Six or seven cyclists coasted to the bike rack and dismounted. They wore tight black shorts and brightly colored shirts festooned with giant logos. James and I talked for a while about the kids; he’d gone to Katya’s preschool at circle time that morning, to be her show-and-tell.
“Do you even like beer?” he said abruptly.
“Not much.”
“So you’re what? Trying to make me feel better?”
“I wish I could. I’m hoping you’ll feel safe telling me what’s going on.”
He looked away; he was having none of it. “Hey, it’s Google,” he said, pointing over my shoulder.
I saw a small blue car with a Google logo on its side and a camera mounted to its roof.
“I’ve never seen that before, have you? That must be how they do the maps. Which— Wow, I didn’t even think of this. I’ll bet Neil Young’s ranch is on Google Maps. What’s to stop someone from looking it up?”
“Conscience?”
“Ha. You’re obviously not going to finish that, are you, so let’s get out of here.”
I asked for the check, and while I waited he strolled over to the colorfully dressed cyclists and began chatting with them, bending over to look more closely at the bicycles. Heading down the mountain a little later, we were silent for so long that I turned on the radio. He reached over and turned it off.
“If you won’t help me find Neil Young can we at least stop at the house?”
“Our house?”
“Of course our house.”
“People live there.”
“Ryan said they won’t mind.”
“We can’t just barge in on them. It’s almost dinnertime.”
“So they’ll probably be home. Please, I really feel like I need to see it. For my, you know, psychological well-being.”
I smiled, and he smiled, too, but only for a moment.
“I’m serious, Rebecca. It’s something I need to do.”
It was dusk when we arrived. Robert had been the point person in our dealings with the tenants, and I’d only ever met the husband—and him just a couple of times, when I was on my way to see Ryan and he was on his way down the driveway in his black Ferrari. His name was Lewis Vincent, and he was home alone and seemed to relish the intrusion, offering us glasses of wine and then beckoning us to see his “brand-new toy.” A muscle-bound five-eight, he was the kind of man who’d transformed a slightly awkward body into an asset—or this was my thought as we followed him to the garage.
“Wow,” James said.
In place of our father’s tools and workbench there were now three floor-to-ceiling steel cabinets with glass fronts, revealing shelving for hundreds of bottles of wine.
“Temperature-controlled, of course,” Lewis said with a
grin. “The installation guys just left. That’s why I’m home—normally I’m at work till seven or later. Isn’t it beautiful? I’ve got my work cut out for me, though, moving bottles from the house. I have at least a couple hundred in various cabinets and closets.”
“Want a hand getting started?” James said.
Lewis looked surprised. “I couldn’t ask you to do that.”
“You didn’t, I offered. That’s what I do.”
Lewis said something about how he hadn’t gotten where he was in life by saying no to people who wanted to help him, and he led the way back, talking about his plan to invest in a winery someday or maybe spend a month in Napa learning how to make the stuff himself. I was only half listening, wondering instead at James saying “That’s what I do” and thinking there was something different about him, though I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
In the kitchen he told me to leave without him—“I can always hitchhike”—but I figured I’d help, and I listened while he and Lewis spent a few minutes talking about the best way to move the wine: packed into roll-aboard suitcases with towels, placed upright in cardboard boxes, or simply carried in our hands. By now James was calling Lewis “Vince,” which seemed to amuse Lewis, even please him. It reminded me of James’s charisma, his way of tunneling through diffidence or reserve, even through indifference, to create a quick if impermanent rapport with a stranger. His talent for this had begun to reveal itself toward the end of his teenage years, as he gained impulse control and recognized the usefulness of being liked.