The Right Wrong Thing
Page 10
Randy stands, wiping her hands on her pants, and looks at me. “This was a total waste. Why did you think this jerk could help me? He’s a complete idiot. Thanks a lot for nothing.” And before I can respond, she darts through the patio and out the back gate.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
There isn’t a worse day in the entire year to travel than the day before Thanksgiving. I’m late leaving the office and Frank is clearly irritated. He is standing in front of his house, ready to go, cell phone in hand, as I drive up. I pull away from the curb and do a U-turn, tires screeching to emphasize how sorry I am. We scarcely speak for the first fifteen minutes. He keeps looking at his watch as the commute traffic melts into the airport traffic and we creep along at fifteen miles an hour. I have convinced Frank to go to Iowa without me by telling him my mother would be heartbroken if I left her alone for the holiday. The truth is my mother detests most holidays, considering them to be artificial events created to get people to spend time and money on things they don’t need and shouldn’t eat. In this way she shares my father’s endless conspiracy theories about capitalism. It is her habit to go out for dinner and to a movie with her friends on Thanksgiving and Christmas. She is thrilled that I’m going to join in the fun. Frank, on the other hand, has been sulky ever since I told him.
“I’m sorry. I had a very upset client. Her husband just asked her for a divorce. It was a big shock. She fell apart, and I couldn’t stop the session on time. You know—time’s up, quit crying please.”
“Well, I’m gonna cry if I miss my plane.”
“You won’t miss your plane. You have an hour.”
“I still have to go through security. The airport’s going to be mobbed. There’s only one connection to Des Moines. If I miss it, I’m stuck in Chicago overnight.”
“Sorry. I couldn’t help it.”
“Yeah. Well, maybe next time I’ll take a taxi.”
The airport is a mess, cars, people, luggage, and red-faced traffic officers clogging the departure lane. Frank gets out of the car and walks the last few yards to the terminal, we barely have time for a good-bye peck on the cheek. “Happy Turkey Day. Hi to the family,” I say, but he doesn’t hear me.
* * *
My mother lives in a seniors-only community near Morro Bay. It’s the kind of over-controlled, over-manicured development my father would have hated, but it suits her fine. She’s made friends, mostly women—men are a scarce commodity at her age—and her schedule is so full that if I want to see her, I have to go her house because she can’t bear to miss her exercise classes or line dancing. It’s a pleasure to see her happy, although in her own goofy way, she’s never been anything but. I wish I had inherited her perennially sunny, flower-child disposition and not my father’s skeptical, sour view of humanity.
I take Highway 101 south past San Jose into the flat, fallow farmlands and small dusty towns. The air smells of peat and fertilizer. People on the streets of these communities are brown skinned. Old men sit in a corner park wearing cowboy hats and boots. A gray drizzle reflects my mood. There is little traffic. Most travelers have taken the quicker route down Highway 5. I stop for coffee in a fast food restaurant right off the highway. Fast food joints are not happy places to eat or work in on a national holiday. I get my coffee to go. By the time I get to the central valley a weak sun is warming the now barren grapevines that carpet the low hills to the east and west. The sheer volume of plantings reeks of agribusiness, not boutique wineries like the ones Frank and I like to visit in Napa or the Santa Cruz mountains.
By now, Frank and his family are into the traditional hors d’oeuvres, seven-layer bean dip and cheese whiz on Ritz crackers. He’ll be helping his brother-in-law put the extension in the table and bring in extra chairs from the Morton building. I don’t exactly know what a Morton building is, except that’s where all the farm equipment is stored during the winter. The TV in the living room will be tuned to the hunting channel with the sound turned down. His nephews and nieces will be sprawled in front of it, playing with their iPhones and iPads. I remind myself that I didn’t want to go. I was invited and I turned him down. If I feel like crap, it’s my own fault.
* * *
My mother’s manufactured home sits on a low berm surrounded by other manufactured homes. The artificial turf is perpetually shamrock green and never needs mowing. She has a small patio with chairs, a table, a dozen potted plants, and four bird feeders, all different. Off to the left is a community garden, looking forlorn, the way California gardens get in the late fall. Some whirligig things stuck in the ground spin around in a wet breeze. The sun has given up trying.
A small wreath of artificial fall leaves hangs on the front door, the latest enterprise of my mother’s crafts class. Two homemade bushy gray squirrels nestle serenely next to a cluster of acorns. My mother opens the door before I have a chance to ring the bell. She is dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt completely covered with Marc Chagall’s painting of the “Blue Circus.” She twirls around.
“Like it? I got it last month when we all went to The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.”
“You passed right through Kenilworth and didn’t stop to see me?”
“We were a busload. I couldn’t stop.”
“She waved at you through the window. She really did.” I can’t remember all my mother’s friend’s names, but Sophie I never forget. She’s my height with Day-Glo red hair and wide as the two of us laying end to end. She probably needed two bus seats to herself.
“Come in, sweetie. You know everyone, don’t you, and everyone, this is my gorgeous, talented, so-smart daughter—the doctor.” My mother twirls me around so they get a good look, front and back.
“I forget, what kind of doctor is she?” someone asks.
“A head doctor, for the politsey,” Sophie beams, proud to be in the inner circle of my mother’s friends.
“So, let me ask you a question.”
A silver-haired woman holding a glass of white wine steps towards me. My mother pulls me closer and whispers. “That’s Iris. She’s from Berkeley.” This is not news to me. Everyone here is from someplace else, starting over after being widowed, downsized, or underwater on the mortgage. Rents are cheap, you don’t own the land under your home, and the monthly fees are far less than the luxury high-rise senior developments in the Bay Area. Plus, there is open space, groves of eucalyptus, and the smell of the ocean.
“Can I put my suitcase away first? And pee? It’s been a long ride.” I know what’s coming. I have asked my mother just to tell her friends that I’m a psychologist and leave out the part that I work with cops, but she can’t. She gets a social bonus because I do something out of the ordinary and that compensates for the fact that I’m divorced and never gave her any grandchildren.
Iris narrows her eyes. She’s a beautiful woman, stylish, slender, and not to be deterred. “Why didn’t that officer shoot that young women in the leg instead of killing her? She couldn’t have posed much of a threat, being pregnant and armed with a cell phone.” She narrows her gray eyes and stands with one hand on her hip, making sure I don’t mistake her for a harmless old woman who can be brushed off with a facile comment. For all I know she’s a retired attorney or past president of the ACLU.
“That officer works for the same department Dot works for. Isn’t that wonderful?”
Iris dips her head. She’s got me now. No escape. I think about peeing on the floor as a distraction, but that would be gross and wouldn’t stop Iris the Determined from interrogating me after I cleaned up the mess.
.“For one thing, cops are trained to shoot to stop a threat. They aim for central body mass, because, if you shoot someone in the leg, they can still kill you.” A low murmur ruffles through the group.
“But she had a cell phone,” Iris says.
“In the dark it’s hard to tell a shiny metal object like a phone from a gun. If you take the time to examine it, you could be dead.” Iris isn’t buying any of this.
“I thought you were from Berkeley,” my mother says.
“Same thing,” somebody else remarks.
“I don’t know how long it’s been since you lived there, but we have a new police chief, a woman, Jacqueline Reagon, and I think she’s going to turn things around.”
“Well, I hope so,” Iris says.
“Now, girls,” my mother intervenes. She never could tolerate the slightest discord. “Today is a holiday, and we’re going bowling and for Mexican food. We’ll have the restaurant to ourselves. So let’s have another glass of wine and let Dot go to the bathroom and unpack.” She picks up my overnight bag and heads to the guest bedroom.
“And when you come back,” says Sophie, ahead of the others in terms of wine consumption, “tell us about Chester Allen. He’s a very attractive man for a…” She uses the Yiddish word for African American. Everyone laughs but Iris, who doesn’t look Jewish, and me. “He certainly knows how to talk. He had the whole crowd eating from his hand.”
“What crowd?”
“The crowd in front of city hall. You didn’t see? This morning. A Thanksgiving celebration of what’s-her-name’s young life. The whole plaza was filled. They had tables set for Thanksgiving, served food and everything. Where the family sat was an empty chair with a stuffed bear instead of the girl. The mother cried the whole time.”
“Her name is, was, Lakeisha,” I say.
“What kind of name is that?” one of my mother’s friends asks.
“They make them up, you know,” someone answers.
“You could see it on TV. They keep showing it.” Sophie turns to the flat screen TV on the rear wall. It is one of my mother’s few extravagances. “Where’s the remote?”
“Not now, Sophie. We have to go. Later, we’ll see it later,” my mother says. I could kiss her.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Randy’s Thanksgiving was worse than mine, at least that’s how it sounds Monday morning in my office.
“What do I have to be thankful for?”
“That you’re alive?”
“That’s what Rich said. I wasn’t in a celebratory mood. I’d bring everybody down. So I stayed home. Anyhow, all they want to do is talk about it, get me to tell the story over and over. I can’t get away from it no matter where I go. What’s happening now? When are you going back to work? Is the family going to sue?”
“What is happening now, Randy? Any news?”
“Pence gave me his report for an early Thanksgiving present. Lawful shooting. I got five days off with no pay and a letter in my file that goes away in a year if I don’t shoot any more pregnant girls. All I have to do is see some shrink for a fitness for duty. If she passes me, I go back to work. A slap on the wrist. Day shift, so they can keep an eye on me. I heard Tom Rutgers was doing high fives because he won’t have to work with me again.”
I’m happy for Randy that this part, at least, is over. And I’m worried. She wants to be punished, and since the department isn’t going to punish her, I’m going to have to work hard to keep her from punishing herself, because—if and when she does—it won’t be a slap on the wrist.
“You missed the demonstration, I guess. They want me fired. I watched the whole thing on cable TV. Ms. Gibbs rocking that stuffed bear and sobbing. I did that.” She stops for a minute, jaw clenched, hands balled in fists, trying to push back her tears. “So, Doc, can you understand why I didn’t feel much like celebrating? Not to mention Captain Pence had to call in a whole bunch of cops for mandatory overtime to cover the demonstration. If they can’t eat turkey with their families, why should I?”
“Rich watch with you?”
“He wasn’t home. I told him to go without me. Like I said, I’m no fun to be around. No reason he shouldn’t have a good time.”
“Did you at least talk when he got home?”
She pauses for a second. “He spent the weekend at his mom’s. Went straight to work from her place. I haven’t seen him since Thursday morning.”
She laughs, a small gurgle from the back of her throat.
“What’s funny?”
“I’m a nobody and hundreds of people hate me. You should have seen their faces. Black, white; didn’t make a difference.”
And then it hits me. She didn’t watch the demonstration on television, she was there. That’s why she didn’t go to her family’s house or to Rich’s.
“You went to the demonstration.”
“I refuse to answer on the grounds I might incriminate myself.” She spins her baseball cap to the side, crosses her arms, and stretches her legs out, daring me to push.
“That’s pretty provocative. And dangerous. And self-destructive.” I have to play this carefully. If Randy is pushing Rich away, I’m next. I know where this is going—she wants to destroy herself without involving the rest of us. It’s the flawed logic of post-traumatic stress, endless self-blame and relentless reckless behavior.
“I’m not on house arrest. I can go anywhere I want. Unless you commit me to some mental hospital.”
She’s baiting me. Trying to start a fight.
“Randy, you’re being harder on yourself than anyone else. You’re the only one holding yourself responsible.”
“Me and the hundreds of people at that demonstration.”
“You did the best you could at the time. Would a more experienced officer have handled things differently? Maybe. If you hadn’t still been reeling from the incident at the creek, feeling that you had to prove something to everyone, would things have gone differently? That’s another maybe. But there’s no way anyone—not even you—can convince me that you got up that morning intending to kill anyone, let alone a teenage girl with no weapon.”
* * *
Frank and I stop at a little dumpling joint in downtown Kenilworth on our way home from the airport. We’re back to our give-and-take banter, all traces of his tense departure banished by stories about a hilarious trip to pick out the Thanksgiving turkey at his cousin’s farm. He stops himself, a dumpling midflight between the plate and his mouth. “So how are you doing? I saw the demonstration. Made the evening news all the way to Pick City.” I’m surprised and secretly relieved. Now I have extra cover for explaining why I didn’t go to Iowa. Not only do I have an aging mother to care for in California, I have a seriously traumatized officer on my hands.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Attitude is everything and after a warm homecoming reunion with Frank, I’m in a fine mood. A little sleep deprived but nothing that the cappuccino the tattooed barista is making for me won’t fix. Amazing how two middle-aged people—middle aged providing we live to be nearly one hundred—can still stir up some pretty powerful sex. Whoever thinks people over fifty don’t enjoy sex obviously isn’t over fifty.
“Penny for your thoughts, Doc?” Jack Shiller, cub reporter, is smiling more than I am, delighted to catch me off guard. “You look pleased about something. Care to share?”
“Not on your life.” I smile as broadly as my lips can stretch. “Come here often or have you been following me?”
“Not following you, never, but you have been on my mind lately. I was wondering how things are going for Officer Spelling?” He’s on a not-so-subtle fishing expedition.
“I heard the in-house investigation is over and she can come back to work as soon as you clear her as fit for duty.”
He’s got this all wrong. As Randy’s therapist, I can’t do her fitness-for-duty assessment. Industry standard. You can’t expect to create a therapeutic alliance with someone who knows that you could get them fired for being unfit. All you’d hear would be how well they were sleeping and that they have no symptoms to repor
t.
“What about the vote of no confidence?”
This guy has really good sources. I wonder who’s on his payroll. The barista calls my name and shoves my half-caf, half-decaf, wet with nonfat milk cappuccino across the marble counter. I wave good-bye to Jack Shiller and hit the door running. I can see him in my rearview mirror as I pull out of the parking lot heading to my office. He’s standing on the sidewalk, coffee in hand, looking for me.
* * *
I keep notes, like all psychologists, but I’m cautious about writing too much, just in case my records get subpoenaed by the court. This is highly unlikely, unless of course, my client just killed an innocent person and the community is in an uproar. In which case, the less written, the better.
December 2: Preparation for upcoming Fitness-for-Duty evaluation on 12/5. Review of self-soothing grounding exercises and deep-breathing techniques. Client agrees to call with an update on her progress with the examining psychologist.
December 5: First fitness-for-duty session was okay. Client scheduled to see FFD psychologist again on 12/10 and 12/12 requiring her to cancel appointments with me. Returned call, client not home. Husband doesn’t know where she is. He reports that client likes the examining doctor. Client is still hard to live with. Not the same since the shooting. All wrapped up in herself and her problems.
December 13: Appointments canceled per v.m. Examiner requests to meet twice this week with client and her husband.
Dec. 20: Appointment canceled per v.m. Examiner meeting again with client and her husband.
Dec. 24: Appointments canceled per v.m. Client scheduled to receive results of her FFD in the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Her outlook is optimistic and she believes she will pass.
I’ve done several FFD evaluations so I know how long and complex they can be. But this one is a record breaker. I like the fact that the doctor did collateral interviews with Rich to get his perspective on things. And I like that she is going to explain her findings to Randy before she delivers her report to the department. That shows respect for Randy and an appreciation of how stressful these evaluations are. What I don’t like is that she hasn’t called me. I’m an important source of collateral information, too. I wouldn’t think of doing an FFD without talking to an officer’s treating therapist. She should have called me, unless Randy refused to sign a release of information allowing me to share information about her treatment. I can’t imagine why Randy would refuse. On the other hand, I know the doctor can’t force her to sign the release. The only option she has is to report Randy’s refusal to Chief Reagon, who could consider it an act of insubordination. I call Randy. I’m just not buying her cheerful message, not with everything she’s still facing at work along with Christmas and its own nasty brand of stress. There’s no answer. It’s Christmas Eve. I can only hope she’s doing something celebratory.