by Ann Claycomb
Her lover came to kneel on the fresh-piled dirt, long after the others had gone, and snarled, his hands wrist-deep in wet earth, that she should have left the knife for him to use after her. He was very like her, so strong he knew not how to grieve, only to rage and burn. Had the knife lain where it fell when Victoria fell, this man might indeed have claimed and used it to spill his own blood. But it came back to us, following first the tide and then the deep cold current and finally the pull of the spells we had embedded in it when we poured it into the mold.
After that we were not surprised by what happened to the others, to daughter after daughter after daughter. We felt the weight of the curse settle over us as well, as if some shipwreck from Above had cast a great glass dome into the sea that drifted down to our caves and our gardens and settled over the top, invisible but inescapable.
We have studied, and we have learned, a great deal about the nature of curses since Victoria’s time.
A curse spreads through lives like black oil on the surface of the sea, first flowing swiftly out in all directions and gobbling up those it can touch only briefly, shallowly. But eventually even oil will settle into water, stain the heart of every drop with a gleaming black that cannot be filtered out. This man Robin, whose lover was cursed and whose daughter is cursed, can no longer be surprised by the clutch of fear, any more than a fish is surprised, in the end, by the shadow of the circling shark.
He was afraid for Moira, for her black moods and her days of weeping and her insistence that she walk by the water alone. He feared all along that one day she would not turn back to the shore. He has come to know that he could not have saved her, though he does not know why. But he tells himself that he can save Kathleen, that he must save her.
But he cannot. Only she can save herself.
Come home, Kathleen. Come home.
ROBIN
Composer’s Notes
The very ordinariness of a psych ward always threw Robin off. The elevator doors slid open onto an immaculate, overlit lobby dominated by the high counters of a nurses’ station and several impressively generic flower arrangements. The ambient noise was a murmured humming coming from a patient’s room. It rose and fell like a Gregorian chant as Robin approached the nurse on duty.
She took him for a psychiatrist visiting a patient; he could tell instantly from her quick smile and the gesture of accommodation she made, glancing up from writing something in a chart and immediately setting it aside. When they recognized you as just another worried relative, Robin knew, they sometimes looked up only long enough to identify you, and then went right back to whatever it was they were doing, offering the barest minimum of engagement.
“How can I help you?”
“I’m here to see Kathleen Conarn,” Robin said.
“Are you her private physician?”
“I’m her father.”
“Oh.” She shifted modes quickly, turning her back on him to get Kathleen’s chart off the rack on the wall and flipping through it with an air of professional detachment.
“Mr. Conarn? Do you have some identification with you?”
“Driver’s license all right?”
“Yes, of course. Let me make a copy of it.”
Robin waited for her to return his license, then took the clipboard she held out to him and listened to her explanation of why his signature was required to commit Kathleen, what the implications were of committing her, and how such a commitment might be rescinded. Robin did not pick up the pen dangling off the top of the clipboard from frayed string. “I’ll need some more information first,” he said. “What’s her doctor’s name?”
“Dr. Biancini is treating her.”
“Can you page him and tell him that I’m here and I’m not going to sign anything committing my daughter to a hospital for seven to ten days until I’ve spoken to him?”
“Well, I-I think he’s in meetings all morning, but I can page him.”
“Thank you,” Robin said. “What room is Kathleen in?”
The nurse tipped her head in the direction of the hallway to her left. “Room 512,” she said.
During Kathleen’s first hospitalization, she had been heavily sedated for several days and Robin had dozed off in the chair beside her bed, only to wake up, suddenly, to find her racked with choking sobs in her sleep. Tears were coursing down her face and soaking her hair, and her whole body was shuddering and clenching. Robin had tried to wake her up, then pushed the call button for the nurse, and when someone didn’t come, had practically run down the hall, where he stood, frightened and increasingly angry, for nearly fifteen minutes. On the wall above the nurses’ station, he had watched a light from a long row of numbered lights blink on and off, the signal from the call button he had just pushed. When a nurse finally appeared in the doorway to Kathleen’s room, he had turned on her. My daughter is in trouble. She’s crying and she seems like she might be in pain, but she’s not responding to me. Why didn’t someone come to her room immediately?
The nurse’s face had hardened and gone deliberately blank, even as she bent over Kathleen to check her vital signs.
“We’re busy here, sir,” she had said. “We have other patients. Sometimes you just have to wait.”
Robin knew he was not a forceful man by nature, and the idea of shouting or making threats was distasteful to him. Since that first time he had experienced it himself, he had witnessed enough confrontations between the nurses and furious or desperate family members to know that the more out of control you got, the more scornful and superior the nurse grew. The strategy he had developed for hospital staff was simply to make eye contact whenever he could. He was fairly confident now that Dr. Biancini would at least be paged, though whether or not he would decide to come back up to Kathleen’s room before his rounds was another matter entirely.
He saw Harry as soon as he reached the room. She was standing by the bed with her face turned toward the tumble of red hair on the pillow, her arms folded tightly across her chest as if she were cold. As Robin entered, she crossed quickly to the door.
“They just sedated her again a few minutes ago,” she whispered.
Robin felt briefly unsteady on his feet, as if the weight of suitcase and coat had suddenly unbalanced. There had never been anyone else here before. He’d always been the one at the bedside, hurrying people away, speaking softly so Kathleen wouldn’t hear, keeping her friends in the hallway because she wouldn’t want them to see her like this. He set down his bag, shifted his coat to his other arm.
“Why?” he asked. “What happened?”
Harry blinked. She was clearly exhausted, her curly hair rumpled, flatter on one side than the other, the usual rosy undertone missing from her face. There were blue smudges like bruises under her eyes.
“Why what? Oh, the sedation.” She pulled her arms in even tighter across her chest. “She woke up just after I got here and started screaming about her skin burning, wanting a shower. They’d put that thing on her wrist—”
“The restraint. Did they do that last night when you brought her in?”
Harry nodded. “She started yanking at it and a nurse came in and gave her another shot. I’m not sure she even registered that I was here.” She glanced up at him, then quickly away, but Robin felt a shock of empathy at the sight of her face. She looked punished.
“Harry,” he said. “This isn’t your fault. She’ll come out of it.” He did not add details about how long it sometimes took, about the days and weeks of wan listlessness, Kathleen too weak and shaky to dress herself, too drugged to do more than nod when he talked to her, even when he teased her, her usual nimble rejoinders lost in the fog that crept across her eyes and turned them from blue to gray.
Harry hunched her shoulders forward and Robin put a hand out to her. In person, she was smaller and softer than he remembered, perhaps because what he recalled about her was some combination of the strength Kathleen relied on in her and her spacious, resonant voice. He touched her shoulder and she shr
ugged into his hand, a hesitant acknowledgment of his gesture.
“I should have done something sooner,” she said. “There was something wrong in Florida and I knew it right away. I thought at first it was that the seawater didn’t feel good—you know how she says it feels good on her skin? I thought it wasn’t working or something. She was almost reluctant to swim after the first day.”
Definitely something wrong then.
“But you don’t think that’s what it was?”
Harry shook her head. “Twice when I woke up in the morning she was down on the beach by herself, talking to the water. I did ask her once who she was talking to, but she pretty much shut me down.”
Robin went around to the side of Kathleen’s bed and dropped into the chair there. Her right wrist, cuffed to the bedrail, was bruised and swollen, her hand drooping from it like a worn-out flower. She had her mother’s hands, fine-boned, long-fingered, the skin almost translucent across the backs.
“You think she was hearing voices?” he asked.
Harry shrugged miserably. After a moment she said, “I need to use the bathroom, okay? I didn’t know when you’d get here but—”
“Go,” he said. “Get some food, a cup of tea.”
“Can I get you anything?”
“I’m fine.”
He waited for her to leave the room before he leaned over Kathleen. She was so pale that he could see the constellation of freckles on the bridge of her nose. Every hospitalization, every breakdown, when Robin first saw Kathleen, he saw Moira flickering over her, the mother superimposed on the daughter. It was the unexpectedly visible freckles and the stuporous sleep that claimed her. For Moira, those sleeps had come from cold, not drugs, after she’d slipped out of the house in the dead of winter to swim. When she came back, or when he found her struggling into the shallows, her lips would be purple and she would be shivering so hard she could barely walk.
He had a sudden visceral memory of lying in bed with Moira with the fire high and every blanket in the house piled on top of them, her skin so icy cold that he had to force himself to hold her, trying to brace her against the racking, convulsive shudders of cold with the heat and strength of his own body. When she had finally fallen asleep, he’d lain awake beside her a long time, afraid to let her loose.
She’d been pregnant already that night. That had been a piece of his fear when he’d woken and found her gone, that something could happen to the baby. Robin was certain that he had put his hand on Moira’s still-flat stomach, that he had tried to warm Kathleen up too. But that memory—of his fingers splayed across her cold skin—could not be trusted. He might well have invented it to match the protectiveness he felt for Kathleen now.
There was a knock on the open door, an announcement of presence rather than a request for entrance. In this case, they’d been joined by not one but two doctors, a barrel-chested man with curly, graying black hair and a slender Indian man not much taller than Harry. Only the big man wore a white coat. The other man was in a beautifully tailored gray silk suit. The prescription pad protruding from his breast pocket might have been an ostentatious prop, a reassurance that he was a doctor, even if he didn’t look the part. Robin stood up.
“Mr. Conarn?” the big man said, moving forward to shake Robin’s hand. “I’m Dr. Michael Biancini, the attending on call. I’ve been overseeing your daughter’s care.” He did not lower his voice or even glance at Kathleen. Robin instantly disliked him.
“I just flew in this morning,” Robin said. “I understand that you need my signature to admit her for an extended stay. Why is that necessary?”
Biancini’s eyebrows rose above the frames of his glasses. “You don’t think it is?”
“I didn’t say that,” Robin replied. “I just want to know what exactly you can do for her during an extended stay. If you’ve read her full history, you know that we’ve been through this before.”
“Yes.” Biancini glanced quickly over at the other doctor before dropping his head to flip through Kathleen’s chart. “I have her records here. Six hospitalizations in eight years, all following acute psychotic breaks, courses of a number of medications, SNRIs, SSRIs, and tricyclics . . . I see a note that a long-term course of Haldol was tried only once, is that true?” He offered the chart to the Indian man as he spoke, pointing at one of the notations with his index finger.
“Yes,” Robin said. “It made her a zombie.”
Biancini nodded, still focused on the other doctor. His deference was almost comical, given the difference in their physicality—Biancini towered over the other man. But he was clearly waiting for some signal now before he said anything more. The Indian doctor studied the chart without speaking, flipped a page, then another, frowned at a notation, and appeared to reread. Then he flipped back through the pages and handed it back to Biancini, nodding.
“Yes,” he said, an answer to some question Robin hadn’t been privileged to hear. “Mr. Conarn,” he said, looking directly at Robin and speaking with grave courtesy, “was the Haldol effective in controlling the delusions about water, the urge to immerse herself in it, the physical pain she complains of?”
“No.” Robin shook his head. “She could barely follow a conversation when she was on it, but she would still go into the bathroom and try to run a bath, then refuse to get out.” He hesitated before saying more, reluctant to expose Kathleen to either of these men, but tempted, as always, by the hope that they might help her. “I had to drag her out,” he said. “So no, it didn’t help at all.”
The Indian man nodded again, then extended his hand. “Forgive me,” he said, “I’m Dr. Kapoor. Dr. Biancini brought me in as a consult after he reviewed the patient file.”
“Dr. Kapoor is head of the neurology program at Harvard,” Biancini said.
Robin glanced from one of them to the other. “Neurology?”
Biancini frowned. “Mr. Conarn, your daughter has been administered just about every psychotropic medication we have available for the treatment of persistent somatic delusions and psychosis. Given her history, she seems to be running out of options.”
Robin heard a note in the room like a single beat from a bass drum, so low that the listener feels it rather than consciously hearing it, the vibration moving through the body like an intrusive pulse.
“Running out of options,” he said. “What exactly does that mean?”
“Please—” Kapoor gestured at the chair Robin had been sitting in when they entered the room. “I’d like to examine your daughter before we speak further.”
Robin sat reluctantly and Kapoor went around to the other side of the bed to examine Kathleen. He sat down on the edge of the bed and felt her pulse, rubbing his thumb gently over the bruised wrist.
“This is from the restraints?” he asked, and Robin almost answered him, before realizing that the question was directed at Biancini.
“Yes. She put up a pretty good fight.”
“And what is she on now?”
Biancini consulted the chart. “Alprazolam, administered on admission and again this morning, and Haloperidol, just ordered for today.”
Kapoor nodded.
“Haloperidol . . . Haldol?” Robin asked sharply. “No. You can’t give her that. I told you—it made her a zombie. It took her weeks to come back even after they took her off it.”
Biancini kept his gaze fixed on the back of Kapoor’s head.
“We can wait on the Haldol,” Kapoor said. “Tell me—I know you observed the negative behavioral side effects, which are extremely common on that drug, as you must know—and you say she still suffered the delusions. But did it alleviate any of her physical pain?”
Kapoor brushed Kathleen’s hair aside very gently and pressed his fingertips down the length of her neck on either side, then pinched her jaw and opened her mouth to peer inside. Kathleen stiffened and tried to turn her head, but the moment Kapoor released his hold on her jaw her lashes fluttered and she went slack again.
Confirming that the s
ensation of having her tongue cut out is just a phantom pain, Robin thought, and then noted with relief that the neurologist had not bothered to check Kathleen’s ears. Of course, there was nothing in the chart about auditory hallucinations. There might not even have been any voices, Robin reminded himself, but heard beneath his relief the jangling chord of fear.
“It didn’t help with the pain, no,” he said, “just seemed to make it harder for her to articulate what hurt and how much.”
“And has she ever been given a narcotic pain medication?” Kapoor asked. “OxyContin? Dilaudid, any of those?”
Robin nodded. “The first episode with her mouth, when she was sixteen. They gave her something for the pain then, I think.”
Biancini was already flipping through the thick chart. He reached the page he wanted and his thick eyebrows shot up over his glasses. “Percocet on admission, then a later course of morphine,” he read. “Patient reported no pain relief. Unable to eat or drink per sensation of pain in the mouth, reported pain consistent with traumatic injury to the tongue.”
Kapoor tilted his head in acknowledgment but said nothing. He stood up and slid the bedclothes from under Kathleen’s limp arms, folding them down first to her waist, then all the way to her feet. Robin wondered at the elaborate process—why not just pull them off and be done with it?—but then realized that Kapoor had been checking to make sure that Kathleen was covered by her hospital robe before he exposed her below the waist. The gesture of consideration surprised him: usually once Kathleen was sedated this heavily, hospital personnel treated her like a rag doll. He reached out and slid his hand around hers, felt her slender fingers twitch under his. Too late, he turned back to see what the neurologist was doing.
Kapoor had picked up one long white foot to do a standard reflex test, running his pen down the length of the instep.
“No!” Robin said, rising to stop him. “Don’t!”
The pen flicked and Kathleen screamed as though she’d been stabbed, arching off the bed and jerking her foot away from the doctor’s touch.