Anna refused to get an abortion. What she said was, “I’m not going to kill our child.”
Richard didn’t pursue the subject. He saw something ugly and warning in Anna’s eyes at the first mention of such a possibility. She was capable of anything, he realized.
He told her that she couldn’t say anything to anyone for now, that he had to arrange things. A premature announcement could get him in trouble with the hospital. She seemed to understand this, or at least she appreciated—probably enjoyed—the secrecy.
“Our secret,” she said, and leaned over the desk and kissed his cheek.
Sometimes he thought that he could simply ignore her, deny that he had had sexual relations with her. He would not be the first psychiatrist unjustly accused by a female patient. It happened all the time.
This would fail. He was convinced that he would be unable to bluster through the inevitable investigation. And what about Anna herself? He realized that he was afraid of her, that her scorn and fury would be somehow more devastating than an board of inquiry. Absurdly, he didn’t want her to think ill of him.
And, if by some miracle he did brazen it through the whole rotten experience, it might cast just enough of a pall on his career to make Jane and her father shy off. A tide of gossip and scandal would wash him into some stagnant backwater where he would live out his days baby-sitting the brain-damaged. The field had a long memory for tainted histories. His desperate job applications would trigger comments like, “Parrish? Oh yeah, isn’t he the guy who was screwing that sexy little teenager? They never got him, but he looked guilty as hell, I remember that. And I saw the girl once. I got one look at her, an incredible bombshell in a fuzzy, fuck-me sweater, and I thought, ‘Guilty. The poor bastard is guilty.’”
No. He couldn’t just deny his way to freedom.
Could he convince Anna that he couldn’t marry her, that she had to go away and have the baby or his career was doomed? Anna might go for the high drama of being noble.
But there were big problems there. For one thing, Richard Parrish intended to marry Jane Solomon, and there were limits to Anna’s nobility.
Also, Anna silent was no guarantee of Anna silent forever. The girl’s emotional state was erratic and degenerative. Pregnancy would certainly throw new hormonal monkey wrenches into an already malfunctioning psyche. It was only a matter of time before Anna found someone to tell and told.
The only real silence was Anna dead.
That wouldn’t be such an extraordinary thing, would it? She was a self-destructive child.
Anna could die of an overdose. She had been admitted to a hospital once for an overdose.
She could just disappear. Again, the possibility of suicide would be the most logical explanation for a vanished Anna.
She could inhale carbon monoxide, shoot herself through the head, leap from a bridge.
Richard Parrish was still enumerating violent demises—his mind having disassociated from the impetus behind the list and entered into the spirit of list making—when he was paged on the intercom. A patient had run amok on Parrish’s ward and broken another patient’s arm.
“Bobby Starne,” the ward clerk said, and the name didn’t surprise Parrish. “He’s quiet now and James Fiske has already been taken over to Cameron. You’ll want to talk to Nurse Cindar. She’s writing up the incident report.”
There wasn’t much to tell. An orderly had noted that morning that Starne seemed extremely upset. He had run his hands up and down his body and complained of an itching sensation. He had told one of the patients, “Baby Lisa is here.”
Five patients had been in occupational therapy when Bobby Starne attacked James Fiske, a skinny blond boy, a new arrival who had already expressed a fear of Bobby and asked to be moved to another ward.
Starne had screamed and leaped across the room. James Fiske had had his arm broken immediately when he started to push his chair back and Bobby slammed into him. Fiske’s left forearm had been caught between two of the chair slats and neatly snapped. Two orderlies got there before Starne could do any additional damage. Bobby was wailing a terrified wail, as loud as the screams of pain that erupted from his victim.
It had been an exhausting day, and Parrish hadn’t left the hospital until dark. The phone was ringing when he unlocked the door. It was Jane.
“Where have you been?” she asked.
“The hospital, of course.”
“Oh Richard, how could you forget?” The phone magnified a querulous tone in her voice. “It’s Daddy’s birthday.”
“Oh,” Richard said.
“It’s too late for you to come by and pick me up,” Jane said. “I’ll just meet you at Nestor’s. Get dressed—please, not that awful brown suit—and try to get there before nine. Really. I can’t believe—”
“Sweetheart, I’m very tired. I’m sure your father would understand if I didn’t come.”
The line was silent. Then, in slow, articulated tones: “Are you saying you are too tired to come?”
The argument was inevitable, as was its conclusion. Jane hung up. Richard listened to the dial tone, smiled grimly.
“Fuck you,” he said.
Then Anna tapped softly at the door and he let her in. Her hair was still damp from the shower and her eyes contained such oceans of dark adoration that all the Jane Solomons and all the world’s dirty money dissolved in the tidal wave of her embrace.
Richard Parrish did not believe in God, but he believed in the significance of random events. Hadn’t his life been shaped by rough accidents? Didn’t it behoove a man to listen to all the subtle voices of coincidence? The telephone call from Jane, imperious and shrill; the immediate arrival of Anna, gentle and giving … the most insensible of human beings would have to read something into this juxtaposition of Jane’s cold voice and Anna’s warm presence. A man ignores such omens at his own peril.
The next morning, as he drove to work under bright, cloudless skies that might have been ordered up for such revelations, he decided that he would renounce Romner Psychiatric, that damnable harridan Jane, and her megalomaniac sire. He would seek out love where love flourished, in the arms of Anna Shockley. Let the world reel with outrage. Let his mother wail like a professional mourner. He had lost sight of everything but ambition, and where did ambition lead? It led to a loveless marriage and a servile relationship with a bully of a father-in-law.
Parrish felt saved. Certainly he was no murderer. He could not take another life. He could not possibly hurt Anna, exquisite Anna. He could marry her, cherish her.
It was an elated, invigorated Richard Parrish who drove toward the hospital. But omens were not done with him yet. On the previous day, in the midst of a hundred petty obligations, he had added one more: he had agreed to pick up his colleague, John Swayles, whose car was in the shop.
John was a hearty, thickset man with mutton chop whiskers. “Hope you don’t mind,” John said, settling himself into the passenger seat. “I’m fetching a patient on the way in. It slipped my mind. I generally pick the boy up, and I thought I’d have my car by now.”
Parrish assured Swayles that it was no problem. Parrish had just resolved the terrible tangle of his life, and he followed Swayles’s indifferent directions—“whoops, just passed the left we needed”—with good-humored tolerance.
John Swayles counseled troubled children, and it was one such child, a twelve-year-old boy named Sammy Lyons, that they were picking up. He lived with his parents in a mobile home that was as unlovely a dwelling as Richard had ever seen. It was pale green, a squat rectangle with narrow, suspicious windows. The yard was dirt, and as Parrish walked to the house with John, a sour earth smell worked to close his throat. A rusted swing set, bent sideways, looked like a grim sculpture of the apocalypse.
John knocked on the door. A television set could be heard, blaring, rude and banal. A baby was crying. The door was opened and Vivian, a baby in a diaper balanced on her hip, brushed hair from her forehead and blinked at him.
&nbs
p; Parrish stumbled backward.
“This is Viv,” John Swayles said.
Parrish found himself in the house, felt it close around him before he could run. He was back in that apartment, suddenly mugged by every detail of squalor. Her name wasn’t Vivian at all; it was Liz, and that is how John had introduced her. She didn’t even look like Viv, not really. The same eyes, maybe. You could see a headache in those pale, grey eyes, and weariness in the hand that brushed a strand of dirty blonde hair from her forehead. She had that cheerleader prettiness, the face just beginning to bloat and blur.
“Excuse the mess,” she said, her voice as flat as a highway through desert. “Sammy!” she shouted. “Come on out here now. Dr. Swayles is here.” Parrish found his eyes traveling around the room. A hotplate was plugged into the wall, a pan of tomato soup boiling on it. The image on the TV set rolled. Sammy came out—a skinny, boneless boy with a round face—and Liz leaned forward and shook him. “What did I say about cigarettes?” she wanted to know. Sammy looked at the floor and Liz shook him.
“We’ve got to get going,” Swayles said. “Come on, Sammy.”
“Your dad will set your bottom on fire,” Liz shouted after them as they moved toward the car.
Richard Parrish climbed back into the car and started it up. His heart was beating painfully. He had seen it. He had seen where love would send him. How could he have forgotten?
Back in his office, he locked the door and sat behind his desk. What was he going to do? He couldn’t marry Anna. He had just had a glimpse of the reality of living with her. Impossible. She would be unhappy too. They were not equals in the world. She would sense the distance, feel betrayed by it.
Jane was his equal—for all her abrasiveness, she was his equal. And now … was she even speaking to him?
Richard dialed her number.
“Oh Richard,” she began, “I’m so sorry about last night. I was dreadful. And Daddy lit into me too. He says if I am going to be a doctor’s wife I had better start learning what that means. You were exhausted, and I was such a shrew … I mean, not a thought to how you felt. Will you forgive me?”
Richard assured her that she was forgiven. He felt a rush of gratitude, another outpouring of emotion.
This was exhausting stuff. If only Anna would go away. Life held very little for her, really. If she could see the future as he saw it, she would see the pain, the suffering. She would not wish to go on. If only she could be relieved of the burden.
Thinking this, Richard felt a great wave of compassion, of god-clean love, pour out of him. But the feeling was swiftly followed by despair. What could he do?
He could get on with his day. He was, after all, at work. First on the list was an unpleasant task. An interview with Bobby Starne, star psychopath and arm breaker.
“It was Baby Lisa,” Starne told Parrish. “She knows I’m here. I could feel her searching for me all morning. I could feel the light probes.”
Parrish was only half listening to Starne. They had upped the boy’s medication after the incident, and the drugs made the boy appear even duller, a sleepy-eyed, clay-faced giant in a too-tight t-shirt with a silk-screened palm tree on it.
Parrish was convinced that Bobby Starne should have been relegated to another ward or transferred to State long ago. Starne obviously wasn’t in any shape to interact with peers, and Parrish had said as much—several times—and been ignored. Now, this incident would serve to ditch Starne, and that was fine. This interview was just a formality, and Parrish listened distantly, staring at a ghost.
Then Bobby said, “I didn’t get her, though. Baby Lisa jumped out of his body when I caught him. I’m sorry I hurt him, because she wasn’t even there.” The boy’s voice suddenly leaped to a reedy whine, and this change in pitch and volume seemed to underline the words, and an instant connection occurred in Richard Parrish’s mind, a wild, ecstatic jump of genius.
“Tell me where she’s gone,” Bobby whined. “Just tell me where she went. If I can catch her, if I can kill her, then everything will be all right.” Bobby Starnes’s big, brutal body squirmed, and his face looked stony, less human than ever.
Parrish shivered. Oh, such a day of signs and omens. Here was the solution. It may have been the sheer insanity of the boy’s voice; it may have been the alien resolve on the boy’s features. It may have been Parrish’s own voice, when his thoughts locked so effortlessly into the solution and he said, “I think I can help you. I think I know where Baby Lisa is.”
Wherever it came from, it had arrived: the solution.
11
Richard sat in his study, writing in his diary, waiting for Anna to arrive. A memory of Vivian surfaced and he didn’t pull away from it. He had been so young then. He felt a wave of pity and love for the boy of his memory. Love figured much in his thoughts these days. He loved Anna and if he was engineering her death—let us not mince words here—he was doing it as God might do it, letting the great world take her. He would not put his arms around her pale throat and throttle her. He would not touch her. He would set events in motion, and these events, if they so chose, would answer for Anna’s fate. He was no assassin, no blood-soaked, demon killer.
There wasn’t much time left. He was to marry Jane in a quiet, unpublicized ceremony at her father’s mansion on the twenty-eighth of June, a bare two weeks away. Anna was unaware of her lover’s upcoming wedding. Parrish had talked Jane out of a lavish wedding, sold her on the romantic notion that their love was too pure for the carnival convention of a fancy wedding.
Still, Anna might find out, somehow, some way. And Jane could stumble onto these midnight visits of Anna’s. Risky all around, and Parrish found himself reveling in it.
Anna knocked on the door and he let her in. She had parked farther down the quiet, shady street, and stolen to his door. He knew she did not understand his need for secrecy, but she didn’t need to. Something in her responded to secrecy. She liked to sneak.
He lifted her up and carried her into the bedroom.
This was certainly the most foolish aspect of it all, that he continued to make love to her. He told himself that it was his way of reassuring her, of monitoring her, but the truth was he still wanted her, wanted her desperately, and as the time grew shorter she exerted a more powerful erotic force. And he loved her, of course, and could not deny her.
She was lying on top of the sheets on her stomach when he came out of the bathroom. The night light sprayed the room with a thin, silver dust that washed over the sheer lines of her buttocks and shoulders.
Lovely, silky animal, he thought, as he leaned over her and ran his hand down her back. Anna rolled over and smiled. She didn’t say anything, but she caught his hand and pulled it to her mouth. She kissed his hand. Then she bit him.
He screamed. Her teeth had plunged into the fleshy palm, bringing blood. He jerked his hand away.
“Goddam it!” he shouted. He clutched his injured hand. “What are you doing?”
Anna frowned back. She was never intimidated by him. She sat up slowly. “I don’t want to fool around any more. I want to get married. I don’t want any more excuses.”
He might have hit her then, beaten her bloody, but the rush of anger that filled him, stretched his skin, and raised the temperature of his bones, frightened him with its magnitude. Moments before he had been confident of his powers, his control. Now this awesome darkness, this violence from nowhere.
He smiled at Anna. “You didn’t have to bite me,” he said.
“I wanted to get your attention.”
“You have it. We’ll get married next week. Would Friday suit you?”
She laughed then. “Richard,” she said. “Come here.”
He took her in a variety of positions that night. He seemed inexhaustible in his need. He memorized the nape of her neck, her breasts, the sweet narrowing of her waist, the way her eyes would open on an invisible panorama of joy, mouth open, tongue poised on the tip of wonder. He marveled at the way she moved, the sleepy kiss of
her body when they were both wet and slippery and sated. He wanted to remember everything, for this would be the last time.
Fortunately, the conditioning was complete. The plan could fail, of course, but it wouldn’t fail for lack of preparation. He had moved quickly after that first moment of revelation when he had heard Bobby Starne ask where Baby Lisa had gone.
He had realized, then, that he could solve the problem of Anna without raising a hand against her. He would simply speak certain words and cause and effect would do the rest.
“I know where Baby Lisa is,” he told Bobby Starne.
When Bobby Starne’s fate was being decided among the counselors, Richard Parrish surprised everyone by coming to the troubled boy’s defense, arguing that he remain on the ward and receive additional private counseling. Parrish felt strongly on this matter, even offered to work with the boy himself. His colleagues were impressed by this concern and one of them voiced a general sentiment when he said, “I may have been wrong about Parrish. I always thought of him as somewhat cold and aloof, but he’s really a very compassionate man.”
Behind closed doors, Richard Parrish worked long and hard with Bobby Starne.
“Baby Lisa has taken over Anna Shockley,” he warned Bobby. “You must kill her before she destroys everything.”
Bobby understood. He recognized the pictures of Anna, remembered her from when she was in group.
Bobby would nod, stolidly, and swear silence (for the spies of Baby Lisa might be anywhere) but Parrish knew this wasn’t enough. He had to drive the obsession deep. He talked with Dr. Jenner, who was in charge of medication on the ward but who was generally amenable to whatever a particular doctor recommended for his patient. Parrish convinced Jenner that the Starne boy wasn’t going to make any progress unless his dosages were cut down. Jenner had some reservations; the boy was violent and paranoid, but Parrish launched an impassioned speech on the necessity of risk in the practice of psychotherapy, and Jenner quickly demurred.
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