“It was Anna’s choice. It was not for me to deny her a natural life.”
“Big of you.”
Walker laughed. “I am not justifying myself. That would be a curious thing to do. You are the intruder here. Anna has been happy here.”
“That was changing,” I said. “You can’t deny that that was changing. She was having schizophrenic episodes, hallucinations.”
Walker frowned. “Schizophrenia is an empty word.”
I was growing angry now. “What do you know about it?”
“Enough. The Home has two medical doctors, three clinical psychologists, one extremely disillusioned psychiatrist. I was around when the neuroleptic drugs were touted as the answer to so-called schizophrenia. There was some discussion, when Anna first came to us, of medications. I didn’t approve. I still don’t approve. Some people have souls that roam considerably. Anna has such a soul. I find it distasteful to call this journeying schizophrenia.”
Walker was speaking in a quiet, reflective voice, studying the blurred lines of the mountains. It was a chilly day; we were both wearing jackets, and now he rubbed his hands together and said, “Come inside and we’ll have a glass of wine.”
He picked the puppy up in his arms and I followed him into the house.
“I don’t drink alcohol,” I told him.
He looked at me and nodded. “Coffee then?”
He fixed the coffee, talking all the while.
“I am something of a connoisseur of wine. An effete vice, but a harmless one.” He waved a hand at a wall glittering with wine bottles. “I’m vain about my wine collection.”
“I don’t have much of a palate myself,” I said. “I once drank a bottle of Listerine. It was okay. Actually, under the circumstances, it was just fine.”
Smiling, Walker nodded his head. “Yes. Yes. Addiction is the larger commitment, certainly. My own interest is less passionate. Perhaps I am a less passionate man than you.”
He told me about himself, about his years as a high school teacher, founding The Home. He smiled, a sly, good-humored smile. “You were right to distrust me then. It was all ego, all grandiosity. I was a fraud.”
I was surprised by these confidences. I assumed he was trying to charm me with candor. He was succeeding.
After we finished the coffee, we walked down to my car, and I glanced over at the lake where I had first seen Anna after thirteen years, miraculously unchanged. Walker caught my look and said, “I want you to bring Anna back here. I want you to understand that she is safe here. She would be protected here.”
“I know.”
“I need her,” he said. He looked older. I got in the car and started the ignition. He waved, a small, bearded man in an oversized sweater with baggy trousers that flapped in the wind. I felt a hollow, empathic pain in my chest.
8
Nurse Mackey was in her element. “I’m sorry,” she said, smiling, spectacles glittering, “but Dr. Parrish said that no one, absolutely no one is to see Miss Shockley. She needs complete rest, complete isolation.”
“I’ll only be a minute,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Nurse Mackey wore a sweet, bland smile on her bloated features. I noticed that her uniform was sorely in need of washing, splotched with odd yellow stains, and strands of her grey hair had sprung loose from under her cap, giving her a disheveled, maniacal air. I knew immediately that I didn’t want to argue with her, that any arguments I embarked on would meet with sanctimonious indifference.
I thought of bolting down the hall, but a hefty black orderly appeared behind Mackey just as this thought surfaced.
“We don’t want no trouble,” the orderly said, with the air of a man who has spoken to too many deaf ears. “We let one person break a rule, and all hell break loose, everybody wanting to break one rule, and soon all kinds of nastiness occurring what with people pissing in the halls or playing with their privates and I don’t know what all.”
The subject of rules looked like a rich one, and I didn’t stay for it to be mined to exhaustion. I turned and walked toward the door. A thin, red-haired woman wearing a rainhat reached for me from a doorway. I avoided her and she hissed, “You cannot deceive me. I been washed in the blood. I been virginized!”
“Shut up,” I told her. She looked shocked and scuttled back into her room. Crazy people can dish it out, but they can’t take it, I thought.
I left the ward and went looking for Diane. I found her at her desk and rushed her into a corner.
“I need your help,” I said.
9
I waited around until I was sure Nurse Mackey was gone for the day. Then I donned the lab coat that Diane had given me. A small patch identified me as an x-ray tech. I grabbed a parked wheelchair and took the elevator to Anna’s floor.
I carried a clipboard, and, as the doors slid open, affected the weary arrogance of a longtime hospital minion. A young, pretty nurse was sitting behind the desk watching a cop show on a portable television. She looked up and blinked. The blink was a question.
“I’m here to get Anna Shockley,” I said. “They need another chest x-ray. Corman isn’t happy with the last one.” Diane had told me that Dr. Corman was the radiologist known for re-shooting, the man with the pain-in-the-ass reputation. Every hospital has its share of perfectionists, dreaded and reviled by the nursing population.
“At this hour?” the girl said.
“Want to tell him it isn’t convenient?”
She didn’t have to think about that. No one wanted to engage in conversations with the difficult Corman unless such conversations were absolutely unavoidable.
“Come on,” she said. I followed her starched, quick-stepping body down the corridor to Anna’s room. Anna was wearing a hospital gown and sitting cross-legged on the bed. For a brief moment, she seemed the old Anna, caught in a characteristic pensive moment. Then she looked up at us, and I saw the frightened eyes, spooked by shadows, and the open, gawking mouth through which some critical spark had fled, leaving a hollow, broken doll.
The pretty nurse matter-of-factly helped me lift Anna into the wheelchair. “You have to get another x-ray,” she told Anna. “This won’t take long at all, honey.” She patted Anna’s shoulder. Anna mumbled. Her hands dropped to her lap and wrestled with each other.
I wheeled Anna into the elevator, punched the button for the first floor, and whispered in her ear. “I’m getting you out of here. We are getting the hell out of here, Anna.” The elevator doors opened and I wheeled Anna out and down the corridor to the emergency room.
I was parked near the emergency room. I realized that I stood a better chance of getting Anna out to my car if I took her through the E.R. My own experience of emergency rooms suggested that the folks who worked in them were too busy—and when not busy simply too fatigued and indifferent—to stop or question someone in a lab coat taking a patient out of the hospital. Happened all the time. The main lobby might have felt differently about it.
For a change, I was right. I wheeled Anna through the doors and out into the evening. The parking lot was brightly lit and the temperature had dropped. The cold felt welcoming, full of tangy freedom. I helped Anna get into the passenger’s side and closed the door after her. “It’s gonna be okay,” I told her.
I drove Anna to Walker’s. There really wasn’t any other place to go. I assumed someone at the hospital would eventually figure out who had taken Anna. If they were interested enough—and I had no idea how interested they might or might not be—it wouldn’t be hard to discover where I had been staying. Besides, I realized—bitterly—that I wasn’t capable of taking care of Anna; there was no wondrous healing in my love. Walker and The Home were the ticket. I remembered those physicians on his staff.
If anyone came looking for Anna at The Home, Walker would handle them. Walker had had years of protecting his orphaned flock from betrayed parents, spouses, lawyers. He would know what to do. I realized that, despite my ambivalent feelings toward the man, I had great c
onfidence in his abilities.
Anna slept as I drove through the darkness. My thoughts ran in circles of recrimination. Anna’s hospital gown rode up over her knees, and I stopped to wrap her in a jacket. She seemed terribly fragile. A blue vein pulsed in her forehead against the white, sheer flesh. I studied her profile, and I felt a great surge of love followed by a second furious swell—of rage. I wanted to kill Dr. Richard Parrish, the arrogant, unfeeling son of a bitch.
I had wanted to kill those glib watchers at my mother’s death, those smug dispensers of drugs and platitudes, but I had never been able to fix a face to that complacent tribe. They seemed as large and anonymous as the world. But Parrish—Parrish was a man I had met. In his blindness, his professional callousness, he had smashed Anna, hadn’t even seen the damage he was inflicting. And I had brought her to him.
This last thought wasn’t good company for a man who had things to do, so I put it away. I drove toward the mountains, toward The Home.
10
Richard Parrish sat in his new office with the door locked. He had given his secretary strict orders that he wasn’t to be disturbed. Not that that meant anything. He was surrounded by incompetence. He had moved swiftly, brilliantly, when Anna had appeared out of nowhere, reeking of scandal, intent on doing him harm. Acting quickly and coolly, he had silenced her, saved his career.
And it had all gone for nothing, that effort. That crazy son of a bitch impersonating an x-ray technician had taken her out of the hospital. It was unsettling. The ward nurse had called Parrish the next morning, and the phone call had filled him with vertiginous fears. He had hardly been able to speak. “I’ll get back to you,” was all he could manage.
He had sat there in the dark, thinking. He reassured himself. Anna Shockley was no threat. There was nothing anyone could prove. He could have walked away from her when he first saw her standing there in the hospital ward, and he hadn’t because … well, he’d been unnerved. It had been like seeing a ghost. But she was no threat, certainly not now. He had been jolting her with massive doses of amphetamines followed by equally massive doses of neuroleptics, effecting a condition of acute schizophrenia, exacerbating the girl’s already unstable condition. The girl was no longer coherent. Girl? He still thought of her as a girl. Anna Shockley was a woman now, not the child of their first encounter. But she still looked so damnably young, a function, perhaps, of her mental disorder, a fountain of youth that sheltered her from the years, kept her a child in body as well as mind.
He had had to shake the image of Anna Shockley from his mind that night. He tried to calm himself by writing in his diary, but that was no solace any more. A full glass of Scotch proved more effective. Then he called the desk back and advised them that he was taking care of the situation, that they were not to mention the incident to any more people, that those already aware of the situation were not to speak of it. A patient disappearing from the hospital wasn’t something he wanted to read about in the papers.
“Let’s say she has signed out on my cognizance,” he said. “I’ll come by in the morning and complete the necessary paperwork.”
It was going to be okay, he told himself. Yet the fear kept whispering. Why did he take her? What has she told him?
David Livingston. That was the name of the man who had spirited Anna away. It took no great deductive powers to fit the description of the bogus x-ray technician with the man who had accosted Parrish in the hall. The man had said he was a friend of the social worker, Diane Nichols. Parrish had lost no time in seeking Nichols out.
The Nichols woman was obviously expecting a visit. She gave him only what she judged he could get elsewhere. Yes, a longtime friend of Anna’s had been staying at her house. Together they had taken Anna to the clinic when they became concerned about her deteriorating mental health. The friend’s name was David Livingston and he wrote children’s books, and he had left to return to Alexandria, Virginia, where he lived. No, Diane Nichols knew nothing about his posing as an x-ray technician and stealing Anna from the hospital.
The woman was a poor liar, and she seemed to know it, not even making a great effort, just stubbornly claiming ignorance. Parrish knew he would learn nothing from her.
David Livingston. The name jogged a memory and Parrish went back to his early notes on Anna and found a David there, someone she had been writing to when she was in Romner the first time. He, David, had been in an army stockade then.
A criminal mentality, Parrish thought with disgust. Parrish had no tolerance for lawbreakers.
It had been a week since Anna was spirited from the hospital. Livingston had dragged her off to Virginia, Parrish supposed. Fine. The guy would discover soon enough that Anna would have to be institutionalized. There were always guys like Livingston, caught by some honey-sexed bitch, ready to dedicate their lives to her recovery. A couple of days or weeks down the road, and they would discover that the little darling wasn’t about to snap out of it, that the cunt had screaming fits, saw monsters, slashed her wrists in the tub, and took a notion to set her lover’s hair on fire with her lighter. The guy would forsake romance, dump pretty Anna in some public mental health program, and slide away, hoping no one had noticed. A few misguided fucks, anybody could make a mistake.
Calm down, Parrish thought. He laughed. Maybe I’m jealous, he thought.
There was no reason to panic. Anna was probably already roaming the halls of some understaffed mental ward, babbling and bumming cigarettes from freaked-out teens. She could tell her story about being screwed by her shrink to other weary shrinks. Maybe that wasn’t the most common story on the wards. If not, it was the runner-up.
11
I woke early in the morning, shuffled out of bed with a ragged quilt wrapped around me, and wrestled a small gas stove into life. I started coffee, tugged on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, then waited for the coffee to perk, studying the battered grey pot with simple-minded intensity: steaming coffee in an earthenware mug the limits of my future.
I got the coffee and walked to the window where I drank it while gazing at the long building that was The Home’s infirmary. Anna was in there, still trapped in whatever hostile environment her mind had fashioned.
Nine days had elapsed since I brought Anna to John Walker’s, and I didn’t see any improvement. Diane had driven out twice, once with Kalso (who was back from the big city looking pale and thin), and once alone. Both Kalso and Diane were determinedly optimistic, but I could see that it was uphill work after they had seen Anna. Anna’s condition didn’t inspire optimism. She was, by turns, locked in catatonic solitude or lashed by violent winds of terror.
Her doctor was a young, freckled boy with a pale mustache that emphasized his youth. He was deadly serious in compensation for his youth and insisted on calling me Mr. Livingston.
“All we can do right now is see that she is quiet, replenish some trace minerals that seem badly depleted, see that she isn’t further traumatized by medications.”
“You don’t agree with Dr. Parrish’s treatment?” I asked.
“I don’t understand it at all,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“We did a thorough physical on Anna when she arrived. Blood, urine, x-rays, EKG, EEG, the works. Parrish was medicating her with amphetamines. That doesn’t make any sense with the sort of disorientation and schizophrenic-like episodes Anna was exhibiting.”
“Why would he medicate her like that?”
“I have no idea.”
I didn’t either, but I knew that my feelings for Dr. Richard Parrish, never warm, had solidified into a massive, immutable hatred.
I stared out the window at the infirmary. It was a brick building, painted white, set down like a vast houseboat in a sea of yellow grass. The morning sun was burning off an autumn mist, and the mountains were coming into existence against a grey sky.
I found I was looking at Anna. The mist had allowed her to appear, quite suddenly, and my mind, slow and swarming with its own ghosts, hadn’
t registered her image. Then I saw her, standing in front of the infirmary. She was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt.
I turned away from the window and ran out the door. My first impulse was to shout her name, but I caught myself at the last moment and ran on silently.
She turned and looked at me.
I stopped running and began walking very slowly, as a child might approach a skittish colt.
“Anna.”
Her eyes jerked away with a pained surprise that I had come to know, and I expected her to bolt, arms spinning, pursued by demons. But she made an effort—I could see the strain in her shoulders—and turned back.
I walked up to her but didn’t touch her. “It’s cold out,” I said. “Perhaps we should go back inside.”
“I don’t mind the cold,” Anna said.
“Everybody will be worried about you.”
Anna sighed. “The baby’s dead, David.”
I reached out and touched her shoulder and she turned and threw her arms around me, almost knocking me over with the violence of her grief. She began to sob. “I couldn’t bring him back. Couldn’t. Couldn’t do it.”
I didn’t say anything, but slowly I steered her toward the infirmary as I saw a nurse and an orderly come out of the building and start down the hill.
Anna’s trembling reverberated in my chest as I held her. A gusty wind licked at us. Anna’s feet were bare—as were my own—and the frosty grass crackled under our feet.
Anna’s sobs subsided, and she stopped walking. She turned to me and said, “You always worry about me, don’t you, David? As long as I can remember, you have been worrying about me. Maybe it’s bad luck. You don’t have to do it any more. I’m going to be fine.” And she patted my hand, a gesture of reassurance that sent an unidentifiable but wild-eyed emotion pounding in my heart.
“I know you are going to be okay.” I felt truth in the words, felt that some psychic fever had broken, that Anna was back again. The orderly and the nurse seemed to sense it too, even at a distance, for they slowed as they approached, and they looked, for a moment, like brother and sister, their faces shaped by the same confusion, the same tentative smiles.
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