by Ann Claycomb
“Jesus!” Biancini said.
“Shh, shh, it’s okay, it’s done.” Robin put his hands on her shoulders, leaned in close so she could hear his voice. She’d flung her head about so wildly that her hair fell across her face. Robin pushed it back and saw that her eyes were open, pupils dilated until the black blotted out the blue. She looked right through him and her mouth worked in a way he recognized.
“Basin,” he snapped as Kathleen began to retch. Robin sat her up and she vomited clear liquid into her lap, choking and spitting and thrusting her tongue. Behind him, he heard Biancini calling for a nurse and then Kapoor came around the bed and helped him support Kathleen. He had a towel in his hand and used it to gently wipe her chin and neck.
“It’s the pain in her mouth,” Robin explained. “When it gets this bad she can’t keep anything down and she’ll retch like this without any provocation.” He pushed on the bed rail until it gave, then sat down next to Kathleen and held her up with an arm behind her back.
“Shh,” he said, close to her ear. “Shh, it’s all right. Try to take a breath.” A thick hank of her hair was stuck to her cheek and he pulled it free, tucking it behind her ear. She had started to shudder in the aftermath of the vomiting.
“She needs a blanket—” Robin began, and turned to see if a nurse had arrived yet. A nurse hurried in at just that moment, clicking her beeper off as she approached the bed. She had short, curly blond hair and Robin had a moment’s fear that it was Harry before he noted the scrubs, then another wave of relief. This was what Kathleen didn’t want Harry to see, her eyes blank and her lips colorless, a puddle of bile on her thighs. Robin shifted his arm to try to pull the blankets away so the nurse could help change Kathleen’s gown. He jerked, startled, when the neurologist’s fingers touched his own at the nape of Kathleen’s neck.
“Excuse me,” Kapoor murmured. “I’d like to check her glands and her throat if I could. Please, yes,” he continued, turning his head and his attention to the nurse as she hurried to his side. “If you could raise the bed for us. Let me finish here and then you can get her cleaned up.”
Robin ceded his place and the nurse elevated the bed, then got a fresh robe and set of sheets and stood waiting.
Kapoor shone his penlight into Kathleen’s eyes, pinched her chin again, and tried to get her to open her mouth. She tore her head away, moaning.
“Is she able to speak at all when she’s like this?” Biancini asked, coming back to stand behind Kapoor.
“Not clearly.”
“And neither the Haldol nor any pain medication has any effect?”
“No,” Robin said. “Not on the pain itself. As I said”—he did not attempt to soften the edge of his voice—“the drugs you all give her seem to do a lot in terms of dulling her responsiveness, her general affect as you put it, but inside the haze she’s always still in pain.”
Kapoor withdrew from the bed and nodded to the nurse.
“Please,” he said. “Let’s step outside.” Biancini was already out the door.
“I’ll be right back,” Robin said to Kathleen. Her eyes were closed again and she lay limp under the nurse’s quick brusque hands, which were already reaching around to unbutton the gown behind her neck. Robin had that flash of Moira again, Kathleen’s slender arms recalling Moira’s as he peeled her icy, sodden clothes from her. This is worse, he thought, worse than anything Moira ever went through. And even so Moira’s pain killed her.
Out in the hallway, Robin rounded on Kapoor.
“So? What was it he said?” He gestured at Biancini, a quick flick of his hand, a conductor’s sign for silence. “She’s ‘running out of options.’ What exactly does that mean?”
Kapoor clasped his hands behind his back. “Mr. Conarn,” he said. “As Dr. Biancini stated earlier, a review of Kathleen’s file indicates that psychotropic medication is simply not effecting a change. Neither, as you say, is pain medication. I observe peripheral neuropathy in the feet without any visible underlying cause. I observe a pain in the mouth consistent with either a delusion or a very, very rare nerve condition called trigeminal neuralgia, the other symptoms of which she does not display. The pain is a fact, you would agree?”
“I would,” Robin said tightly.
“The pain is a fact and yet the cause is a mystery.” Kapoor actually shrugged. “Sometimes the brain still escapes us. What has been successful when other avenues have failed—to relieve persistent delusions or chronic pain—is electroconvulsive therapy.”
“Shock therapy?” Robin asked. He heard a stifled gasp and glimpsed Harry approaching behind Biancini. She was shaking her head.
“There are many common misconceptions about the treatment,” Biancini said. “People have seen too many movies, don’t understand the science. The treatment today is not your grandmother’s ECT . . .”
He trailed off and Robin realized that he himself had taken a step forward. He had the savage urge to shove the man. He met Harry’s eyes past Biancini’s elbow, and what she saw in his seemed to alarm her more. She took a step toward their little group and Kapoor, noticing her, glanced swiftly at Robin.
“Perhaps we should talk in a private office?”
Robin shook his head. “This is Kathleen’s girlfriend. Harry, these are Kathleen’s doctors.”
He tried to smile at her, but knew he failed utterly. Harry’s answering expression was both anguished and grateful as she stepped into the conversation.
“Please,” she said. “There’s got to be another way.”
“There is,” Robin said. He turned back to Kapoor. “It’s not an option we’re willing to consider,” he said. “Whether it’s my grandmother’s or not.”
“I would not pursue a course of electroconvulsive therapy for any patient without weighing the risks and benefits and making sure that the patient is well-informed about the treatment,” Kapoor said. “But I will tell you, Mr. Conarn, that in this case, having reviewed the file and examined your daughter, it is my only recommendation.”
KATHLEEN DID NOT wake up all day, a fact that led Robin back out to the nurses’ station to confirm that, as he had begun to suspect, at least one dose of Haldol had already been administered before he protested it and Kapoor agreed to hold off on it.
“She’ll be out of it even when she does wake up,” Robin said wearily to Harry when he came back in the room. “We need to go get you out of here, get something to eat.”
She came meekly enough that Robin, glancing at her face, saw that he should have insisted they leave an hour ago. Harry was putting her coat on in slow motion, looking at Kathleen with no expression at all on her face.
THE IRISH BAR near his hotel had changed so little from when Robin had played there at night that when he followed the waitress to their table he almost bumped into her, automatically continuing past the table to the piano in the back corner. He ordered a gin and tonic. Harry ordered tea and clutched the hot mug, still hunched inside her coat. Her curls hung limp around her wan face.
“It’s all right,” Robin said. His drink arrived and he took a healthy swallow. He was not used to lying, any more than he was accustomed to having to make conversation after a day spent in the hospital.
“She’ll get better,” he said. “She always does, after a few days. By the time they discharge her, trust me, we’ll all be irritated with her.” He tried a joke. “You know no one does prima donna like Kathleen.”
“She told me things got bad,” Harry said. “She told me about the pills and the pain—everything. I feel stupid that I didn’t realize—” She broke off. “Have they ever suggested that before?”
Robin’s stomach clenched. He did not ask what “that” was.
“No,” he said. “And I don’t care if it is Kapoor’s ‘only recommendation.’ I won’t consider it.”
The waitress arrived to take their order. Neither of them had even glanced at a menu and Harry looked panicky when the waitress asked her what she wanted.
“I’m fine with
the tea,” she said.
“You need to eat,” Robin said, “and their clam chowder used to be the best in Boston.”
“What are you getting?”
Robin grimaced, caught. “I’m not hungry.”
Harry shook herself and spoke in something close to her usual crisp tone. “If I need to eat so do you.” She turned to the waitress. “I’ll have whatever he’s having.”
Despite himself, Robin smiled. He ordered a basket of bread and chowder for both of them.
“Their clam chowder used to be the best?” Harry asked when the waitress had left. “When was that?”
“Well, let’s see . . .” He did the math in his head. “I worked here for four years when we first got to Boston, and I was twenty-two then, twenty-two to twenty-six, so . . .”
“So it’s been almost twenty years since you had their clam chowder?”
Robin grinned at her. “I bet it’s the same,” he said. “They haven’t changed a single other thing. I bet the piano still has a soft left pedal and the same dead keys it had when I was playing it.”
Harry peered around at once for the piano and seemed to realize as she did so that she still had her coat on. She took it off and draped it over the back of her chair.
“I dare you to go check,” Robin said. Harry smiled slightly, but he could tell by the set of her jaw that she was feeling it too: the sick tightness that had settled in his belly in a way he recognized from Kathleen’s previous hospitalizations.
“Was it always just the two of you?” Harry asked abruptly. “I mean”—she flushed—“I know about Kathleen’s mother, but what about your family?”
“Moira and I were both only children,” he said. “My mother could never get pregnant again after me. They wanted me to leave Kathleen with them when I came to Boston, but I wanted my daughter with me, and anyway, I didn’t want them raising her.” He took another drink, recalling the avidity of his mother’s face when she held baby Kathleen. “My mother died only a few years after we got here, before I was making enough money to afford a trip back, and my father was lost at sea a year later.”
“My God,” Harry breathed. “I’m so sorry. You couldn’t have been very old—they couldn’t have been very old.”
“They weren’t. My mother was forty-five when she died and my father forty-seven.” He caught the horror on Harry’s face and shook his head. “Harry, it wasn’t all that unusual where we grew up. It was a small town, isolated. The nearest hospital was an hour away. People who went to hospital often never came back.”
“You weren’t planning to go back,” Harry said, “when you came to Boston.”
She hadn’t phrased it as a question, he noticed.
“Do you know how many men there died in fishing accidents every year?” he asked. “At least a dozen, some years twenty or more. There used to be crosses along the shoreline just like you see on the highways here, only more of them. And it hasn’t changed much. There’s a school bus now, crofter’s cottages converted into shops full of sweaters. But most of the men still fish, or they run tourist boats out to see the seals. That’s what I would have gone back to.”
He drained his drink, thinking that he wanted another and that he shouldn’t have had even the one. In the mirrored wall over Harry’s shoulder, he saw himself hazily reflected, at once both younger and older than he was, his face softened by memories and alcohol, his blond hair silver in the dim light. The waitress brought their food and Robin leaned back to let her set the bowl in front of him.
“It smells the same as I remember if that’s any recommendation,” he said. “Now eat.”
“Yes, sir,” Harry murmured, picking up her spoon. For a moment they were both silent, though the chowder was nearly too hot to eat. Harry tore pieces of bread off and dipped them in her bowl. Some of the color was returning to her face.
“So did your parents understand why you didn’t come back?” she asked. “Did they ever come here?”
“They were both gone by the time I would have had enough money to bring them over,” Robin said. Harry’s family, he recalled, was both large and supportive, with grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles all vacationing together and—this was how he’d learned about them—weighing in on Harry’s latest girlfriend when Harry brought her to a family picnic.
“My parents and I weren’t close,” he said, and then added, surprising himself, “they didn’t like Moira.”
“Why not?”
“They thought she was ‘trouble’—that was the word my mother used. They refused to come to our wedding.”
“Because you were both so young?”
Robin laughed shortly. “We weren’t young to be getting married. A few of the girls we knew were married before they finished high school.”
“Then what was it?”
Kathleen had never asked him this question. She’d never asked, he’d never told her. He traced a finger in the wet mark his glass left on the table, marked out a time signature absently, as if he were beginning a composition. Hardly an original piece, though, he thought. Transcribing, that’s all this is, transcribing the answers to questions I never wanted to ask, never wanted to answer.
“Moira’s family had some skeletons in the closet,” he said. “Her grandmother Caolinn had gotten pregnant—this was back in the forties, when they still sent girls away to convents to hide their pregnancies—and she couldn’t name the father.”
“Couldn’t or wouldn’t?” Harry asked. “Was he married, or—”
“Caolinn said she’d been raped.” Robin hesitated, realizing belatedly that this piece of the story would be hard for Harry to hear. “Not everyone believed her, or was sympathetic to her, because Caolinn was . . . She had a close friendship with another girl in town—to the point that they were always together, neither one would accept any male callers—”
“She was a lesbian,” Harry said.
“The word would never have been used,” Robin said, “but yes, in retrospect that seems to have been understood. The upshot was that Caolinn wasn’t trusted, then she got pregnant and had a baby girl, Deirdre—Moira’s mother, Kathleen’s grandmother—and she died. With no father named for the baby there was no one to raise Deirdre. She grew up in the church orphanage.”
“Did Caolinn die in childbirth?”
“No.” Robin saw from her face that she was trying to follow the thread of the story as though it would lead somewhere useful or important. It doesn’t go anywhere, he wanted to warn her. It’s like a song cycle, closing in on itself.
“How did she die, then?”
“She killed herself.”
Harry drew in a sharp breath. “How?”
“She took a rotten boat out into open water and drowned.”
“And Deirdre, Moira’s mother?”
Robin flattened his palm on the tabletop, blotting out the music he’d been scribbling, stopping the flow. “Harry,” he said, “this is a terrible story. I’ve never told Kathleen any of it.”
“Did Deirdre kill herself too?”
He nodded. “When Moira was a baby. Her father raised her.”
Harry was shaking, he could feel the tremor through the tabletop. “Did she drown herself?”
“No. She slit her wrists in the bathtub. I know that detail—everyone knew that detail and repeated it so that even children heard—because it didn’t make any sense.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that her husband supposedly found her dead in the bathtub with her arms sliced open to the elbow and no knife anywhere.”
It was how he’d heard the story as a child, the details about the bloody water and mysterious vanishing knife insisted upon with lurid relish by every ten-year-old boy who commanded the tale—but it was an old story to him. Harry, hearing it for the first time, shuddered.
“Did Moira ever talk about it?” she asked.
“Someone at school said something once, I remember that. When we were teenagers it was our version of an urban legend�
�don’t take a bath alone or a mysterious knife-wielding killer will attack you and make it look like suicide.”
“And?”
“When everyone realized that Moira was there—I think we were at the pub; I was playing and she was singing—there was that silence that comes after someone does something inexcusable. Moira walked out. When I followed her, she said that people who thought her mother’s death was mysterious were stupid, that her mother had killed herself and ‘the knife went back to where it came from.’ That’s the only time I remember her talking about it.”
“What did she mean?”
“I have no idea,” he said. “Especially because for a while I thought she had the knife.”
“You saw it?”
“I caught her with it. It was in a box in her dresser drawer where she hid presents for me. She slammed it shut and shoved it back in the drawer when I came in the room.” He frowned at his half-eaten bowl of chowder. There was a betrayal here, his telling Harry these things that he’d never told Kathleen, never told her doctors, but the story was inexorable now. And Harry sat with that concentrated frown on her face as though she was sure she could make sense of it.
“I can’t even remember now why I checked the drawer later, or what I thought she was hiding. I’d like to say I was worried about her but . . . I don’t know. She had a box in there that I’d never seen, made of something very smooth and shining, like mother-of-pearl, and there was a knife inside, or not a knife—” He picked up his bread knife and held it up to Harry. “Not like this, with only one edge. It was double-sided, more like a dagger or a letter opener.”
“Did you ask her about it?”
“No,” Robin said. “I thought about taking it, but I shouldn’t have been poking in that drawer to begin with, and I didn’t think she’d ever—” He replaced his knife on the table. “Moira was terribly, terribly sad but she was also fragile. I don’t think it ever occurred to me that she might use a knife on herself.”
“No,” Harry said, her tone thoughtful. “No, she drowned herself instead, like her grandmother had. And Deirdre, even though she used a knife, did it in the bathtub. But what happened to the knife that Moira had?”