He should have gotten on the commuter bus back to Gillam and gone to Kate. He should have broken down her door if they wouldn’t let him see her. He should have at least stood on her front lawn and shouted her name.
He stayed to the road’s narrow shoulder, and when he saw car lights approaching he stepped off into the shadows of trees until the car was safely past.
Reaching his dorm room, he slid his key into the lock and turned the doorknob slowly, slowly, just in case Andrew was asleep.
twelve
DR. ABBASI PUT ANNE’S name in for case review at the end of her fourth year at Capital District Psychiatric Hospital.
“What does that mean?” she asked, and heard a harsh edge in her voice that she hadn’t intended. Dr. Abbasi was dark. Indian, maybe. Or Pakistani. He started at CDPH during Anne’s second year there. He had a posh British accent, hooded eyes, and a deadpan wit that surprised Anne the first few times she encountered it. He didn’t seem as tired as the other doctors did. She wondered what he was like at home when he changed into his weekend clothes. What he did for fun. She had never, not once, wondered that about any of her other doctors. None of the other doctors ever made her feel hopeful about herself, about what might happen. He said, once, early on, “When this time in your life is behind you, Anne . . . ,” and she lost track of what he was talking about because no one had ever referenced a time when all this might be behind her. It was as if a wall had been built between her real life and her life in the hospital and that wall just kept growing taller and taller. And then Dr. Abbasi arrived with a catapult to help her over.
“It means we’re going to go over your case, your progress, and talk about whether you might be ready for the next step.”
“Which would be?”
“An environment with more independence, but with support if needed. A residential reentry center seems right to me. To start.”
“A halfway house,” Anne said, and remembered with a pang a petition she’d signed years ago that sought to block the opening of a halfway house in Gillam.
“We’re going to discuss several options.”
“But chances are good that I won’t pass the review.” Right then, she ticked off in her head all the people who had been up for review since her arrival, and were still there stirring powdered eggs around their breakfast plates each morning.
“I wouldn’t say that. I only mention it because I don’t want you to be taken by surprise if you do pass.”
“But I probably won’t. There are people who’ve been here twenty years. More.”
“True, but I have a different perspective than some of my predecessors, and the thinking is changing surrounding this.”
“This?”
“This.” Dr. Abbasi gestured to the walls, the windows, widened his arms to take in the world. “You committed a crime, yes, but you were found not responsible due to your mental state at that time. You weren’t taking your meds consistently, and what you were taking wasn’t right for you. That’s changed, Anne. You’re doing very well. You’d still see a doctor as an outpatient, and your medications would have to be recalibrated from time to time, but it doesn’t make sense that you be here longer than you would have spent in prison if you were found responsible for your actions. You’re a good candidate. Start thinking about it.”
Dr. Abbasi’s arrival coincided with Peter’s visit to the hospital. By the time Dr. Abbasi inherited her case from a doctor who was scaling back, Anne been removed from all group therapy. She’d been moved to the fifth floor. The first time she met Dr. Abbasi, he entered her room tentatively, politely, as if it were up to her to ask him to stay or go.
“I hear you’ve been having some trouble,” he said. He didn’t carry a notebook or a clipboard. His hands were clasped behind his back.
“My son,” Anne said, her voice cracking. She knew they were watching her. She knew she must remain composed. That day, when a social worker came in and told her that her son was downstairs, that she would be allowed to see him if she wished, she felt Peter’s energy move through the pipes that snaked secretly through the floors, made them hum and glow. The air immediately took on glints of silver and gold. She was certain she knew he was there several seconds before she was told.
She hadn’t been brave enough to see him that day, so she’d sent him away. Immediately after, she felt her internal clock speed up, a central agitation that always foretold a bad time. She tried to hide it by keeping her face placid and putting food in her mouth at meals and sitting rigidly in the common space and not saying a single word lest she give herself away, but she knew they were studying her, and the quieter she made herself the closer they looked. It was exhausting work to keep up. So after a few days of this, when a nurse came to escort her to group—always group, endless group, everyone nattering on about every little thing while the planet spun and wars were won and lost and Anne’s own child was out there somewhere, an adult, hoping to see his mother—Anne saw lights, like fireflies, over the nurse’s head. She began swatting at them. The nurse called for backup, claiming to have been attacked. Her history of violence was referenced. But what Anne hated more than being lifted, physically, what she hated more than feeling a stranger’s hot breath near her ear, what she hated more than being drugged or locked in a room, were the smirks on the faces of the other patients.
While every other doctor at the hospital would have asked, Why do you believe they were smirking at you? Dr. Abbasi asked instead: “Why does their smirking bother you? Considering the other things you must know you have to face when they carry you away.”
“So you agree that they were smirking?”
Dr. Abbasi paused to consider his answer. “I agree that human nature allows for that strong possibility, yes.”
* * *
The day Anne learned she passed the review was a Tuesday, more than two years since Peter’s visit, and by Friday morning she was in a van heading to a house on the edge of Saratoga County. She sat ramrod straight on the bench seat behind the driver, swallowing hard against the acid rising in her throat. She didn’t say goodbye to anyone, didn’t have anyone she’d call a friend, except a woman she sometimes sat near at meals.
“Nice day,” the driver said kindly, and glanced at her in the rearview mirror several times in quick succession. The sky was a dazzling blue, but the oily puddles that dotted the shoulder of the highway told her there’d been recent rain. Dr. Abbasi had shaken her hand and when she didn’t let go, he put his other hand over hers, too. He wouldn’t be getting into the van with her. He wouldn’t be showing her around her new home.
Rounding a back road in Malta, she glimpsed a white sail moving among the trees. The ocean was at least two hundred miles away.
“What’s that?” she asked, squinting.
“What’s what?” the driver asked.
“It looks like a sail.”
“Day like today boats are on the water by dawn.”
“What water?”
“Lake Saratoga,” the driver said. “Don’t they tell you anything about where you’re headed?”
* * *
Since addiction had never been part of Anne’s pathology, she was free to look for nursing work again, and if she found a job quickly, she could enter immediately into Phase Two, which meant she could come and go freely, and also get out of mandatory vocational training. Eirene House was just thirty miles north of the hospital, and the driver told her that made her lucky. Some people ended up in Buffalo or all the way downstate. Anne had heard terrible things about halfway houses. Several patients at CDPH had been in and out and told her to watch herself, watch her stuff, the experience was more dehumanizing than the hospital. And arriving at Eirene seemed to match what she’d been warned about. The house itself was a depressed-looking three-story box that sat too close to the sidewalk. The house director, a woman named Margaret, had shown her to her bedroom, which Anne would share with another resident, and when Margaret opened the door, Anne expected to glimpse a family of
cockroaches scurrying every which way. Instead, the room was simple but clean, small but surprisingly bright, despite wall-to-wall carpet the color of moss. Margaret told her to go ahead and freshen up if she liked, her roommate likely wouldn’t be home until dinnertime, and she handed Anne a key before stepping out and closing the door behind herself. A moment later, alone, Anne pushed the button lock on the door and then turned the knob so that it popped open again. Over and over. Every time she pushed the button, she felt a thrill.
She’d been there for only a few days when she got a job offer from an assisted living home for the elderly in Ballston. It was really a job for an aide, she wouldn’t provide any medical care, but when she told her social worker, a wraith-thin woman named Nancy who had hair the color of shoe polish, that she’d decided to take it, Nancy had given her a look over the top of her glasses that told her she was lucky to have gotten it and should never imagine she could do better. She would help the elderly residents get bathed and dressed, bring them plastic cups of water with straws. Nancy said to be on guard for housemates who would figure out she had access to pills, and to immediately tell her or Margaret if any of the other residents of Eirene tried to strike a deal with her. The warning reminded Anne that she had to be careful about what she told people about both her present and her past. It was best not to say anything at all.
Dr. Abbasi had told her that she might feel disoriented when she noticed different things that had changed since 1991, despite only six years having passed, despite having done all the field trips. Twice a year, the patients who were stable enough were brought in small groups to a mall or to a farmers’ market or a beauty salon with an assignment to purchase a dozen tomatoes, or ask for change of a twenty. Even if Anne had been paying close attention on those trips, her doctor warned, she might feel differently once she was really out and had to participate.
* * *
A few days before Anne started at the nursing home, she walked into a bank for the first time in more than six years and faced what little was left after the sale of the house in Gillam.
“There hasn’t been activity on this account since 1991,” said the teller. Brian had long ago sold the house and her car to pay the legal fees, to pay the medical bills, and when it was all over he split the remainder of their assets down the middle and deposited hers in her individual account. If he’d stuck by Peter, it would have been his right to take it, to pay for the things that Peter would need, but he hadn’t stuck by Peter. Still, so many years later, when she stopped for a moment and tried to comprehend that he’d left her child, her boy, in an apartment in Queens with his idiot, alcoholic brother, she felt a physical weight on her rib cage, a striking pain where she knew her heart must be. They’d gotten him into that good high school, at least, and by the time she got to Eirene House he’d have finished at least a few years of college. She knew he was applying because the financial aid office of some college in New Jersey needed all sorts of paperwork to prove that Peter was no longer her dependent, to sever his financial ties to her. An assistant in her lawyer’s office brought it all upstate for her to sign.
After that, Anne liked to daydream about what he’d become one day. President of the United States was not out of the question. CEO of an international company. Brain surgeon. University professor. She’d been told that her thoughts ran grandiose when she was entering a manic cycle, and so she tried to examine each prospect for him honestly, with the evidence at hand. But everything checked out. He was a smart boy. He was going to college.
Brian was still her husband, as far as she knew, though he seemed more like an idea than a person, as removed from her as the family she’d left behind in Ireland so many years before she ever married him. The idea of him still living in the world and doing all the things he used to do—showering, shaving, snaking his belt through the loops of his pants—felt to Anne like a ripple in the space-time continuum. Five thousand two hundred thirty-one dollars was all that remained of their life together. All those years of commuting to Montefiore and rushing to deposit her check on Friday afternoons. All those years of sweeping the front porch, keeping the hedges straight and trim and presentable. She withdrew four thousand to buy a used car. She knew better than to complain. With this, she had a ride to work without having to wait for a bus. She had a place to be by herself. And she’d made her own bed, as her lawyer once said to her. He’d had it with her by then.
* * *
Eirene House was meant to be a one-year arrangement but when the year passed and no one asked her to leave, she’d stayed on. But now, Margaret told her that her bed was needed. They’d taken a look at Anne’s file and said she was more than capable of living on her own. She’d not had any sort of alarming episode in her time at Eirene, and at least part of that was because she no longer had to count out daily pills and tablets that she might choose to take or to push through one of the little holes in the drain of the women’s showers, depending on her mood. Instead, she got a monthly injection, and ever since that change she’d felt steadier, less haunted by the feeling that something bad was always about to happen.
Anne had never lived alone in her life, and when she returned to her room after their meeting, she sat on the edge of her bed, the corners neatly tucked in the military style, and tried to catch hold of the fear she felt rising in her belly. It was all right, it was okay, it was all part of what was supposed to happen. It was all right, it was okay, it was all part of what was supposed to happen. She repeated it to herself fifty times.
The studio apartment she found was small, and the two single-paned windows were no doubt drafty, and the rent would eat sixty percent of her income, but she didn’t need much. A yogurt for breakfast, an apple for lunch. Often, she was able to take food from the nursing home. The cook was always giving away the stale bread, the milk that had reached its date but was perfectly fine. Fruit cups full of sweet syrup that would have to be thrown away after they reached a resident’s tray, even if the resident hadn’t so much as touched the tinfoil tab of the seal. The studio was walking distance to her doctor’s office, though it meant a longer commute to the nursing home. A long commute seemed like something other people would mind, but Anne really didn’t. The drive to and from work gave her something to do, and it was a way of filling more of the day. A television would help but it seemed extravagant. She would wait.
Dr. Oliver was no Dr. Abbasi, but Anne liked him okay, and he said she was doing very well. Since arriving at Eirene she’d been going for a blood draw every week to make sure she wasn’t toxic, and only one single time since being discharged from the hospital, after a brutal stomach virus that left her dehydrated and weak, did she feel the familiar agitation bearing down on her. Margaret found her in the common room at three o’clock in the morning. She’d been watching a game show on TV, and when the players buzzed, Anne slapped the particleboard coffee table and shouted the answers. When Margaret appeared, Anne commanded her to watch closely and tell her if it seemed as if one of the contestants was cheating. Margaret led Anne to her room and said good night, but the next morning, bright and early, she was knocking on Anne’s bedroom door. “Get up,” she said. “Get dressed. You’re going to see the doc.”
Once Anne and Dr. Oliver were alone, something told Anne to keep her lips sealed until she was out of there, to refuse to say a single word. They stared each other down, and then Dr. Oliver told her gently that she’d be admitted to the local hospital for just a few days until the adjustment he was about to make leveled out.
Anne thrust her wrists out to be cuffed.
“No, no cuffs, Anne,” he said. “You haven’t done anything wrong.” She’d keep her job, he promised. She’d be okay. There was no reason they shouldn’t keep this one challenging week private. She’d been doing remarkably well.
* * *
It occurred to her as she jiggled the lock of her new home that somewhere not terribly far away Peter was likely graduating from college. She hadn’t taken comfort in the idea of him liv
ing with George, but at least she knew where he was. When he went to college he felt farther away because he was in a different state, but again, at least she knew where he was. But now that he was graduating—it was May, cherry blossoms coated the sidewalks of Saratoga and felt like velvet underfoot—she imagined him like a top spun loose across a board, zigging and zagging wildly across the contiguous United States, Canada, Mexico. She studied the college students on the streets of town, walking billboards for Colgate and Bucknell and Syracuse, home on break for summer. She studied the boys in particular and tried to make herself understand that Peter was now as old as these boys, these young men. He was the same age as his father had been when Anne met him.
By September 1999, not knowing where he lived felt like an itch she couldn’t scratch. Maybe he’d gone to Dubai or Russia or China. She’d read that a lot of businessmen had to be willing to travel and put in their time in foreign countries these days. Maybe he was somewhere on the other side of the world, speaking Japanese. She could call George. He’d tell her anything she wanted to know.
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