“How about yesterday?”
“Yesterday? What happened?”
“Well, he threw me down on the ground by my hair. When I went after him to get my son back, he punched me in the side of the head, knocked me out cold. The entire side of my face is swollen and four of my teeth feel pretty loose.”
“Why are we having this evaluation? If what you’ve just told me is true, he should be in jail on assault and battery charges.”
“I wish. No, he has temporary custody of the children. I went to the school to see my son. My husband had me thrown out of the house. I couldn’t see the children. He won’t let them answer the phone. Anyway, when I tried to talk to my son, I saw Tom coming down the halls. I knew I wouldn’t get a chance to tell him anything about what was going on with his father there, so I did something really dumb. I ran with Tommy and that’s when he caught up with me and hit me.”
“He still can’t haul off and cold cock you, even if you’ve got the child. He can restrain you. This doesn’t sound right.”
After a pause, Serena Tully said, “I bit him. That’s why he hit me. That’s why he’s not in jail. I would be, if he pressed charges. That’s what my lawyer told me.”
“I appreciate your candor, Ms. Tully. I’m going to have to hold to my request that the first part of the meeting be joint. I run a very tight ship. I won’t tolerate any threats or insults. It won’t get close to physical. If Mr. Tully doesn’t accept that, I have no compunctions about calling the police.”
“Okay.”
“First, let me give you directions to my office, it’s in Vienna.” That done, Reece went on to confirm his understanding that the entire retainer was going to be paid by Mr. Tully. “After the joint interview, I’ll ask you to fill out a questionnaire about yourself and the children. To do that you have to bring the names, addresses and phone numbers of the following individuals: any mental health professionals who have ever treated you …”
“Ever?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that a little unfair? I was in therapy and I was hospitalized years ago. What does that have to do with me now?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a lot, maybe nothing at all. That’s what looking at the records will tell me. That and your interviews and testing and my observations of you with your children. Just because you’ve been in therapy or had an emotional disturbance doesn’t make you a bad parent. They’re two separate domains. They may overlap, they may not. You could be pretty crazy and still be a good parent.”
Serena Tully closed her eyes and felt the first wellspring of hope push up from her gut, fountain in her head and run down her cheeks. “Dr. Reece, that’s the best news I’ve had all week. That may be the best news I’ve ever heard.”
“Let me go on and tell you what other information I need. Names and addresses and phone numbers for any physicians currently treating you or the children, the kid’s schools and day-care provider. By the way, what are the children’s names and ages?”
“Thomas Drew Tully, Junior, he’s six. I call him Tommy, his dad calls him Junior; and Tina Nicole Tully, she’s four.”
“Also any Department of Social Service agencies that have worked with the family?”
“What do you mean?”
“Child Protective Services. Any allegations of abuse or neglect filed against either parent?”
“There’s nothing like that. At least not that I know of. I’ll tell you, these days I don’t know what’s real anymore. Wait a minute. I don’t mean that the way it sounds. It’s just that when it comes to my marriage, what my husband and I think is real or right or true or fair seems to be very different.”
“Are there any questions that I can answer at this time?”
“Just one. How good are you at spotting a fake, Dr. Reece? My husband hasn’t had much time for the children. He’s doing this just to punish me, because he knows it’ll kill me to lose the kids. This is his way of killing me, by using them.”
“Ms. Tully, I’m not infallible. I’m sure I can be fooled and probably have been. I do everything I know how to cut down on the chances of being fooled. If what you say is true, the recency of the separation is a factor that might work in your favor. The children won’t change their attitudes and expectations that quickly and Mr. Tully will have to learn an awful lot in a short time.”
“That’s reassuring. Thank you, Dr. Reece.”
“If you don’t hear otherwise from me, I’ll see you tomorrow at nine a.m.”
Morgan Reece tried to reach Tom Tully at home but missed him. He was already on his way to his attorney’s office to tighten the screws another turn.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Tom Tully took a cup of coffee from the receptionist and watched her butt flex and relax as she walked back to her desk. Great legs in a black sheath dress, patterned stockings. The sound of nylons mating quickened his pulse.
“Come in, Tom. You said you found something useful. Sandra, hold my calls.”
Albert Garfield followed Tom across the room, slid behind his desk and reached out for the envelope. He read the poem and the letter.
He looked up at Tully and nodded at his arm. “What happened?”
“Nothing. I was moving some furniture and a dresser fell over and fractured the arm. These new casts are amazing. No plaster. Just slip one on and pump it full of air. I have to wear it about a month.”
“This is excellent. We’ll go with adultery as the grounds for the divorce and we’ll get the name in interrogatories.”
“Don’t we have the guy’s name, St. V. Millay, right there on the poem he wrote her?”
Garfield pursed his lips to mute his mirth. “St. V. Millay is the name of the poet who wrote the poem. Edna St. Vincent Millay. Your wife’s lover copied the sonnet and sent it to her as a gift. It gives us a sample of his handwriting, but that’s about all.”
“What else do we need?”
“You’ve got her kissing somebody else while you were supposed to be out of town and this letter. We’re on our way, but this isn’t enough. We need an admission from her, an eight-by-ten glossy of her sitting on somebody else’s dick, or for Chester Polansky to put her in a motel for a couple of hours with somebody. We don’t have that yet. We’ve got enough to go forward and put more pressure on her, but this isn’t a done deal.”
Garfield dropped the letter and handed Tully the interrogatories and request for documents from Gilbert Stuart. “Read these, write down your answers, not on these forms, and drop them at my office when you’re done. I’ll look them over and call you if I’ve got any questions and send them back to her lawyer. I’m sending him ones of our own. Once we’ve got the names and addresses of her therapists, we’ll depose them all. She can sit in while we go over her pathetic past. Hear what the experts think about her. She’ll find that pretty unnerving.”
“Aren’t all these depositions going to get pretty costly?”
“Yes, but they’re worth it. Litigation is just like war. No, litigation is war. There are two ways to win a war. One is to prevail in a decisive battle. That’s the courtroom. The other is to sap the will of your opponent to fight, so that they sue for peace. Everything we do between now and the court date will be geared to help us in either of those two ways. To position us to prevail before the judge or to crack your wife’s will to fight. That’s why we cut off her money, her supports, her family, the kids, the house. If she had money to fight us with, I’d bleed it out of her with as many motions and appearances as I could. From what you’ve told me about your wife, the two tools that will cause her to abandon the fight are isolation and shame. We’ve done the first, now we focus on the latter.”
“Why don’t we make her an offer now? I think she’s been softened up pretty good. Every day she makes it might give her confidence that she can go on.”
“What do you want to offer her? You started out saying nothing.”
“Can I get away with giving her nothing?”
“Absolutely nothin
g? No, not really. Her lawyer would never agree to it, just to protect himself from malpractice. We can probably get pretty close though. Her lawyer is an idiot. He’s reacting to everything we do. He hasn’t once attempted to put any pressure on us. If she agrees to something and it isn’t absolutely indefensible, he’ll sign off on it. As for making an offer, there really are only two things to consider: money and custody.”
“What’s the least we can give her on custody?”
“You get sole legal custody. You are the one to make all the decisions. You don’t have to consult with her or get her approval. You get primary physical residence. The kids live with you. She gets supervised visitation. She pays for the supervisor. Say four hours every other weekend. Once you’ve got custody and control, there are lots of things that can affect how kids look at the parent that isn’t there any more. You put the kids in therapy. You tell the therapist the kids are real upset when they have to visit, they don’t want to go. You make it more attractive not to go. Pretty soon the kids start to control the issue. You go back and argue that it isn’t in the kids’ best interests to see their mother. It takes a while, but you can remove her completely from their lives and yours.
“Money. With you getting full custody, she’s going to owe you child support. You may get tagged with alimony, since she’s never worked and was home with the kids. That’s likely to be a wash. From what you’ve told me, your assets are your pension, the equity in the house, the household belongings and the two cars. The cars are in your name. Get her car repossessed and sell it as soon as you can. If there are no insurance inventories on file, sell everything in the house you don’t want. Let her prove what was there.
“She’ll probably get a piece of the house. Let me work on that. We’ll have to fight for your pension, argue that it predates the marriage, even though as a coach you continued to feed into that pension and you’ve been married for some of these years.”
“Sounds like keeping custody of the kids is important to keeping her from getting money.”
“That’s absolutely right. Through the kids we argue for the house, and we claim child support. That cuts into whatever monetary claims she might make.”
“Let’s make her a deal. Let’s get this over with. I want that bitch out of my life now.”
“If that’s what you want. We’ll draw one up and send it to her attorney along with a letter stating the grounds for the divorce and a little warning about what she can look forward to if she fights this.”
“I think this is a good time to do it. Thinking about how close she came to going to jail is still going to be fresh in her mind. That and how sore her face is. She won’t be feeling too feisty right now.”
“We’ll get on it today. While you work on these interrogatories I want you to read these books to help prepare yourself for the evaluation. Here’s Dr. Pecorino’s card. Call him if you have any questions.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Morgan Reece finally caught up with Tom Tully around three in the afternoon. After introducing himself he went through the same information that he covered with his wife.
“All these records, is there anything else you want?”
“Not at this time. Are there other things you think I should look at?”
“I don’t know. I was just wondering about whether we could give you things if you didn’t ask for them.”
“Sure. If you send me a lot of stuff, I’ll just ask you to consider how important it is, because it can get pretty expensive to read it all.”
“Fair enough. When can we get started?”
“How about tomorrow? I’ve already spoken to your wife. She can come in at nine.”
“You mean together?”
“Just for the first part where I go over the groundrules. After that, all your interviews will be individual.”
“All right. I just hate being around her. It disgusts me to even look at her.”
“After the joint interview, I’ll ask you both to fill out some questionnaires, and sign consents for records. Then while I interview one of you, I’ll set the other up with some psychological tests. You should expect to be in the office until five o’clock. I prefer to see people for large blocks of time. It’s usually easier to get off from work that way. Do you have any questions I can answer at this time?”
“Yeah, how are you gonna deal with the fact that my wife is a real good actress? She’s on trial here and she can put up a real good show in public. I’m the only one that ever saw her shit. And the kids, but they were too little to remember.”
“Well, Mr. Tully, I’ll look at your wife in as many ways as I can. Her report of things, the reports of others, what she actually does, psychological testing. If her act isn’t perfect, she should slip up somewhere and hopefully I’ll be there to see it. It isn’t perfect and I can be fooled, but I do everything I can to try to prevent that.”
“Well, I just wanted you to be aware. She can look pretty good, but it’s just a show.”
Morgan Reece drove home. He stopped at Bob Kinkead’s Colvin Run Tavern in Tysons Corner for dinner.
Reece finished his meal, said goodnight and walked back to his car under a crisp, cloudless fall sky. It was six-thirty. He’d go over to Borders, pick up the books he had on order, browse, maybe have a coffee and dessert and return the pictures.
Reece wandered through the huge bookstore, browsing in his interest areas: architecture, psychology, literature, mysteries, sports. He went to the new release tables and then checked out the magazines. Empty handed, he went to the checkout registers and picked up his order: two recent polemics from each side of the repressed memory controversy.
Reece went back to the cafe and ordered a coffee. He looked around and found an empty table by the railing. When his coffee came, Reece sipped it and watched the people in the store.
“Hi, Dr. Reece, I’m Lindsay Brinkman,” came a voice from his blindside.
Reece turned and saw the woman from the Metro. He extended his hand and said, “Hi, how are you?”
“Fine. Thanks. Do you have my route maps?”
“Yeah, here they are.” Reece pulled them out of his jacket pocket and handed them to her.
“Great. You wouldn’t believe how much work went into these.”
“What are they? I looked at them for quite a while but I couldn’t come up with anything.”
“They’re routes for climbs. For my next vacation. I went out and lead-climbed these faces to plan the routes. Next time I’m going to free-climb them. One of these has never been done. When I do it, I get to name it. So I didn’t want to have to start over.”
Reece glanced down at her hands, then quickly up her arms to her head. Short nails, venous hands, ropy muscular arms and short hair. It all made sense. Make yourself compact, functional. Don’t carry anything you don’t have to up that rock.
“That’s fascinating. I’m terrified of heights. I can’t even use a glass elevator. What’s it like?”
Lindsay Brinkman looked around the store for a moment as she decided whether to sit or not. She did.
“It’s what I live for. I love it. The challenge, the danger, the thrill of the peak. Just me and the cliff. No ropes. No harness. Just my hands.”
“Whew,” Reece said, shaking his head. “I could never do that.”
“That’s what I thought when I started. I saw these people going up the face like Spiderman. I wanted to be able to do that. It’s very basic. You and the rock. You climb or you fall. The harder the climb, the sweeter the peak. I wish the rest of life could be like that. So clean, so simple.”
“How’d you get into it?”
“My boyfriend was a climber. He got me started. I dropped the boyfriend, but kept the rocks.”
Reece began to relax. Listening to other people talk, drawing them into the space he felt around himself was his life, first by preference, then by training.
“Oh,” she said, and reached into her waist pack. “This is yours.” She pulled out the pag
e from Reece’s manuscript. She winced at its creases and folds.
“Sorry.” She shrugged and handed it to him. “I travel real light. Keep my hands free.”
“That’s okay. It’s just a draft,” Reece said, and slipped it into his jacket.
“Sexual abuse evaluations, pretty intense stuff, huh?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Anything like rock climbing?”
“I think of it like bomb disposal work. The parents have wrapped themselves and the kids in dynamite and they each have their fingers on the detonator. Most of the time I can get everybody out of the building. Every once in the while I can’t. It’s the ‘most of the times’ that keep me going back. That’s my peak, when everybody walks out of the building alive and they can get on with their lives, with better lives.”
Lindsay Brinkman shuddered. “I think I’ll stick to the rocks,” she said, and stood to leave.
“Well, It’s been nice talking to you. Good luck on your trip,” Reece said.
Lindsay Brinkman started to go, then turned back and heard herself say, “If you ever want to work on your fear of heights, call me. You have the number at RMH. I know some real good instructors.”
“Thanks. I’ll think about that.” Reece contemplated her sculpted features, as taut and austere as the rocks she loved. She touched her short, spiky hair and wished it was softer. Reece smiled and wished he was younger.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
At nine o’clock the next morning, Reece arranged his case file, note pad and coffee mug and went out to the waiting room to meet the Tullys. Tom Tully popped up out of the chair, pumped Reece’s hand briskly and, after a nod in greeting, walked into the office. Serena Tully stepped up, her face still lopsided and yellowing, shook hands and preceded Reece into the office.
They stood waiting for Reece to identify his seat, both wanting to sit as far away from the other as possible but not wanting to sit in his chair. Once he indicated where he’d sit, they retired to their corners.
“Good morning,” Reece said. No one agreed. He handed out a three-page form to each parent. “Please read this carefully. It outlines the important parameters that govern the evaluation we’re about to begin. It covers what you need to do for me, how long I estimate the process to take, financial matters, how my report will be distributed, privilege and confidentiality issues. If you understand and agree to these terms, we’ll move on to the interviews.”
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