Mr Wicker

by Maria Alexander

  “I wish I knew,” he replied. “And I wish I could promise you that it won’t get worse. But I can’t.”

  Rachelle stood. “When you’re ready to discuss this, you know where to find me.” With that, she left without a look back.

  I’m an ass, Dr. Farron thought. A great big jerk who’s about to lose a good friend.

  He had one more visit to make before heading to the Cal library for a bit of research. He sailed up the elevator to the seventh floor and solemnly approached the hospital room of Alicia’s grandmother.

  “James!” Dr. Gregg called. “How’s it going?” Looking like a young, hip ad for a gymnasium franchise, Dr. Gregg was a black neurologist in his late thirties. Even at Bayford he stood out, but in the best possible way, James thought.

  “It’s going,” Dr. Farron answered as they walked into the patient room. “How are you, Mrs. Rains?”

  Alicia’s grandmother sat catatonic in a wheel chair, one eye patched over. The other eye vacantly stared out the window to the deep green Berkeley Hills. Dr. Farron pulled up a chair and sat beside her as Dr. Gregg reviewed her chart.

  No answer. Dr. Farron looked to Dr. Gregg.

  “We’re having a lot of trouble getting her stabilized. She had another stroke yesterday.”

  The child psychiatrist placed his hand on hers. Her wrinkled, spotted skin was so soft it melted away under his warmth. “Good news, Mrs. Rains. Alicia is close to being released.”

  Alicia’s grandmother frowned and continued staring out the window. “Alicia!” she admonished. But she wasn’t talking to Dr. Farron.

  “Alicia!”

  Claudia had taken great care to prepare the portrait area for Samuel. She had vacuumed, dusted, and arranged the prop walls and sheets just so. No, she would do it right and only once. This painting would fetch a few overdue dollars from her father for certain. Why they had ever agreed to take the children was beyond her. When the money was good, she had no objections. But when the money stopped, they had to make ends meet, plain and simple.

  Alicia sat on the wooden stool in a red velvet dress with white frills and white tights, with slick black vinyl Mary Janes binding her china doll feet. Her long blond hair had been curled into long loops. She squirmed like a dog in heat. “I want to play with Lillian.”

  “Be still!” Claudia yelled at Alicia. She half upraised a hand. The child froze. “Are you purposely trying to upset your grandfather? Your grandfather loves you, you know.”

  Alicia shook her head almost imperceptibly.

  Her grandfather smiled with that easy-going cowboy grin. “Now Claudia, just relax and don’t be so hard on the little rose. It’ll be all right. I just need a few more moments and this here paintin’ will be done soon enough.”

  God, how she hated him when he undermined her like that.

  Alicia’s grandmother continued to bark at the hospital room window. “QUIET, I SAY! QUIET!”

  “She’s suffered too much hemorrhaging. I don’t think she even knows what year it is.” Dr. Gregg made another note in the chart and closed it. “Are you okay?”

  Dr. Farron nodded and sighed. “Yeah. I think it’s time to let Alicia know what’s going on.” He looked down at Mrs. Rains’ arms and realized for the first time that they were bare of their shackles of jewelry. Out of curiosity, he took her hand and turned over her wrist.

  It was streaked with glistening scars.

  Chapter 33

  When Dr. Farron returned to his office, he realized he didn’t have time to go to Cal before Alicia’s session. Just parking on campus and getting into the halls of the university library was going to take just under an hour each way, not leaving him much time to sink into the subject he was hoping to uncover.

  Instead, he opened his laptop and stewed a few ideas in his brain juices as his machine awoke from hibernation. What did he want to find exactly? In particular, he wanted to find out what had happened to Alicia’s grandfather. Dr. Farron wasn’t certain he should even be digging into his patient’s history. He’d never been tempted before, nor had he ever needed to burrow into their private lives. That wasn’t how therapy worked.

  But Dr. Farron was not a bad armchair detective. He’d searched for many things online for his friends and colleagues. He took pride on numerous occasions in finding missing china pieces and special musical venues for his wife. He’d even outed her best friend’s boyfriend as a married man and drunk driver. (From the get-go, no one had liked the guy with his vulgar sarcasm and abundant gray chest hairs prancing out of open shirt collar.) He knew his way around online public records, although it sometimes took a while.

  What would he do with this information? He decided at that moment he would share with Alicia anything he found. He already felt guilty for his paternalism about her grandmother. He couldn’t continue that pattern. It wasn’t right. Now he really wondered if there was some pattern of sexual abuse in the family—suicide attempts from one generation to the next. Perhaps her grandfather had attacked her and, as a result, her grandmother finally got up the nerve to have him hauled off? Sometimes what women wouldn’t do for themselves, they’d do for their children. But not often enough.

  Under hypnosis, Alicia had mentioned his name was Sam—Samuel Rains perhaps? And they lived in Simi Valley. As soon as his browser opened, he first tried searching for “Samuel Rains” and got almost four hundred hits. The first few pages of search results yielded nothing interesting. Alicia seemed to have not even remembered his name until the hypnosis session. Was this even the right name? He forced himself to click through every search result page, scanning everything.

  There were lots of guys named “Samuel Rains” who were not only dead—dead was a possibility of course—but also dead too long or dead having lived in the wrong state. There were also lots of living people named “Samuel Rains,” but they mostly seemed too young. The genealogy websites took him to some interesting states—Arkansas, Oklahoma, even Montana. States from whence he might have gotten his cowboy persona. Yet nothing that felt like a definite connection with Alicia. Dr. Farron decided these must be her maternal grandparents. Despite the limited number of results, hunting through them was daunting. Even if Alicia had been curious, she wouldn’t have even had the resources to find him until very recently. And even then. He needed another search term. Something to narrow it down. He typed in “Simi Valley” and clicked “Search” again, but this time he received no results at all.

  Crap.

  He also tried “Samuel Rains” combined with “artist” and even “painter,” but found nothing remotely promising.

  Out of curiosity he entered just “Alicia Baum” and dredged up thousands of hits about her books, stories, interviews, reviews. It was overload and he didn’t like seeing her this way, depersonalized and dispersed in a million electronic droplets. So, he shut down that search and stared at the background of his laptop—a lush full-screen photo of a mauve country house, framed by lapis and ivory flowers, as well as some green foliage he couldn’t name. Very striking. So beautiful it couldn’t be real.

  He mused as to what Simi Valley must be like as he typed in just that name and searched for photos. Not impressive—dry, rocky, rambling. Perhaps if Dr. Farron had been a fan of the desert he would have appreciated what he saw. However, he wasn’t, which is why he set up his life here in the San Francisco Bay Area. He preferred soggy and foggy over sandy and smoggy any day of the week.

  Simi Valley.

  Just searching on “Simi Valley” turned up some solid information pages. Since time was running out, he decided he had nothing to lose just reading up on this place, the early home of Alicia. Nothing about it seemed attractive—not even the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. The city website trumpeted that it was one of the Safest Cities in America. He also noted that this was where the officers who’d beaten Rodney King had been tried and acquitted. A very white population—at least three-quarters Caucasian. Even the city website had a WASPish feeling to it. Sparse, organized, a c
ultural calendar full of old musicals and Elvis impersonators. Nothing the least bit edgy.

  There were links to several banal news articles. Dr. Farron hovered his cursor over them to see the link addresses. They led to a Ventura County newspaper. He clicked and the whole screen gave way to the conservatively designed website for the Ventura County Tribune—“Delivering News Since 1962.” The website could have been a raucous, multi-million dollar tabloid for all Dr. Farron cared because he saw something he hadn’t anticipated: a link named “ARCHIVES.”

  He clicked the link and groaned to see that it cost seventy-five dollars a year to have access to the brand new digital news archives. Just installed within the last year.

  Screw it. He’d pay it, even if there was nothing there.

  He fumbled with his credit card, entered the payment information, and dove in.

  Searching on “Samuel Rains,” he found something he seriously wished that he’d not found at all. But it explained everything.

  And now he’d have to tell Alicia.

  Chapter 34

  Alicia squatted on the floor of Dr. Farron’s office in her freshly laundered sweats and shirt, snipping with a pair of scissors at a piece of folded black paper. A hot shower and good breakfast made all the difference. And she felt better for having apologized to Rachelle. She grinned at Dr. Farron, who sat in his chair, lost in thought. She had just been telling him about her father, the expatriate who lives in Vienna. She hadn’t heard from him in at least five years. She sent him a copy of her last book, but he didn’t reply. She wished that she could know what she’d done to drive him away.

  “I’m sure his emotional and physical distance have nothing to do with you,” Dr. Farron assured her.

  “That’s what every therapist says,” she said, “but I don’t believe it’s true.” For years she was a tremendous troublemaker, she explained. The schools even put her in special education because she was so troublesome they thought she might be mentally handicapped. Perhaps she’d been such a pain that she finally wore thin what little love he had for her—thinner than the paper she was cutting.

  “I challenge you to make better paper dolls.” With a flourish, she drew apart the paper edges to reveal a whole line of Mr. Wickers.

  Dr. Farron stirred. “Oh, yeah?” He lowered himself to the floor and scrambled to her side, snatching a large piece of white paper. As he carefully folded and snipped, he grew around her like a Sendak forest—wild, impelling, distracting. He twisted away dramatically, as if to call attention to the fact that he was hiding something from her.

  “What are you doing there?”

  “Just one...more...cut.” Snip. “Okay.” He turned back to her and pulled apart the paper.

  A row of plain white paper dolls.

  “Um, that’s great,” she said sarcastically. “Paper dolls. Original.”

  “Touch their heads.”

  She tapped the head of the center doll and a split divided its head—that last snip. “Oh! Lobotomies! That’s brilliant!”

  Dr. Farron grinned proudly.

  That’s when she pounced. She merely let the tractor beam pull her toward him. But he dodged her. She landed in a heap of nothing when what she’d wanted were his mouth, hair, cologne, and hands. He rolled away just out of reach onto his knees and pitched himself up off the carpet.

  “Stop it! Now! I won’t have you jeopardizing my practice any more than it has been!”

  Alicia smiled wickedly. “But you want to, right?”

  “Just...stop it! You can’t be under my care any more.”

  “What? That’s ridiculous!”

  “There’s a lot more going on than you realize, Alicia. And it’s dangerous for me professionally to smear these boundaries. It’s absolutely unacceptable and you’ve got to respect that!”

  “But who else can I possibly talk to about Mr. W?” Sitting up, she sank her hands onto her thighs. “Besides, I don’t want to be without you. You’re the only one for me.” Which was not how she’d meant to phrase it.

  “Am I?”

  He snapped the double-entendre at her like a wet towel. She wasn’t even sure of what she’d heard until he looked away as if bitten by some revelation that slithered away into his vast underground network of emotional insecurities. She then recalled the ash that covered her lips when they kissed and she knew exactly what he meant. Or had he heard about what had happened with Dr. Sark? Oh, god. This was messier than eating a Cadbury Easter egg in an earthquake.

  “Yes.”

  This seemed to soothe him. “Just please stay out of trouble tonight. For me and Rachelle, if not for your own good?”

  “Of course I will,” she said. “And if Mindy loses another badge I’ll turn it in to Security ASAP. How’s that?”

  “Perfect. And so you know,” he added, “I had to do some fast talking today to get both of us out of trouble.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. And meant it.

  “Which included trying to get Rachelle on the same page.”

  “What did you tell her?” Alicia asked, nervous.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing that I didn’t tell Dr. Dulac and Dr. Sark. I can’t tell her what really happened, anyway. It would violate patient-doctor confidentiality.”

  “But you had to say something.”

  “I told her I found you in Georgeta’s room and that I walked you back to your room, where I fell asleep in the visitor’s chair. As for everything else, I had no explanation except that someone else blackened us up as a prank.” He leaned forward, determined. “This is the part where, if we were, like, ten years old, we would cut our palms, spit into them and rub our hands together. You understand?”

  “Blood brothers?”

  “Something like that.”

  He then looked haunted as he sat in his chair and spoke. “Alicia, do you want to know what your grandfather did?”

  Alicia drew her legs up in front of her. “You know what happened? How do you know?”

  “Answer my question. Yes or no.”

  Alicia let the question simmer. What the fuck? Her grandfather! She’d told herself over the years that it didn’t matter. He was clearly dead or else he would have contacted her long ago. But he didn’t. He’d just vanished like everyone else in her life. Even her grandmother was now pulling a vanishing act.

  And she was damned tired of it.

  “Okay,” she said. “Yes, I want to know.”

  “Because I know what happened. I checked the newspaper archives online for Simi Valley.”

  “I didn’t think they had such a thing.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so, either, but more and more newspapers who have microfiched their archives are now putting scans online. And not just scans but searchable papers.”

  “Jesus.”

  Dr. Farron gathered up some papers from inside the drawer of his desk and handed them to her.

  With a weird sort of anxiety that felt like ants spreading over her skin, Alicia examined the printouts of the newspaper scans.

  Samuel Rains Charged with Murdering Grandchild

  Alicia frowned. What grandchild? She wasn’t dead. She was very much still –

  Oh fuck. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK –

  She read some more. The tears came in a torrent. Bizarre. Unbelievable. Yet here it was. Her name wasn’t in the news report—she was a minor then—but her grandparents were both named, as well as Lillian.

  Lillian Baum.

  “This can’t be right.”

  “Why not?”

  “It says that he was arrested for killing his grandchild. By strangulation. Not me but—”

  “Lillian.”

  Alicia stared at the news article.

  “You don’t remember having a sister? Maybe a stepsister? Or a cousin?”

  “No,” she croaked.

  “A younger sister. About a year your junior. You have no memory of her.”

  Alicia shook her head. She hated crying. She hated this weak feeling like e
verything was being pulled out of her through her belly button. Dr. Farron brought her the box of tissues and set it beside her. She yanked out a handful as the deluge started.

  “Did you wipe out that memory of her somehow? Did you give every single memory to You Know Who?”

  “This is completely off the hook insane. There has to be a mistake.”

  “There might be. This is what I found with just a couple hours of research online. I don’t have any other information to back it up. You’d have to hire a P.I. and make some family inquiries. Maybe call your father, even if it’s a hard call to make.”

  “But they’re definitely my grandparents. Right here. Claudia Rains of Simi Valley. And...well, I didn’t remember his name until our session, but Sam is right, I think. Samuel Rains. And it’s right around when my grandfather left. I just can’t believe...” She sat there shaking a moment, wondering when the world would swallow her. “He drank. My grandmother made lots of derogatory remarks over the years about him being a drunk.”

  “Why didn’t you ever look him up? Weren’t you ever curious?”

  Alicia thought for another moment. “Grandma told me so often that he was a bad man and a drunk that I gave up any thought of him. Seriously. Between not remembering his first name, not knowing how to find him, and not having the money or the resources to pay someone, that was that. Grandpa exited the theater of my life. Exeunt. Gone.”

  Dr. Farron handed her another printout, this time an article about her grandfather’s conviction. “Is it possible that you witnessed the murder? They hint at it but they never come out and say it.”

  She shrugged. Anything was possible. She’d never seen baby pictures growing up. Just one or two that her grandmother claimed to have salvaged from her father, ostensibly photos of just her but they could have been separate snapshots of either her or Lillian. It would explain her father’s distance. Guilt, bereavement, reminded daily of her absence by the visage of his other child. He must have been a mess.