by Alan Russell
Everyone began to back away from this woman with flashing eyes and frenzied speech. Helen waved her hands around, then pointed out to the bay. “Look,” she said, “behold the legacy of Medea. The scattered limbs are everywhere.”
Fearful heads followed the direction of her finger. Her words, her fear, were persuasive. Eyes searched the waters, half expecting to see a bobbing head and human remains.
Helen swiveled her head around, her terrified expression causing a minor panic. Then her eyes alighted on a figure. At first she was confused, uncertain, but then she recognized who she was looking at and started screaming.
“Medea is here. Can’t anyone see?”
The crowd moved farther away, afraid of her irrationality, afraid of her stories. She believed what she was saying, and almost, so did they.
“Call Detective Cheever,” she screamed, “and tell him not to stop for the body parts. They’re only a diversion.”
Then, riding a whale’s back, she sounded, going deeper and deeper until no one could find her, not even herself.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
Rachel didn’t bother to look at the faces of any of those sitting in the waiting room. She knew they weren’t there for her. She was used to getting off airplanes and not being met by family or friends. At airports she just concentrated on getting where she needed to go. As Rachel walked, she employed the same mindset as when she traveled, focusing on getting to the garage where her car was parked. Gradually she became aware of a figure walking alongside her.
“Need a ride?” he asked.
She didn’t say anything. She knew better than to try. She just kept walking.
“Or how about a drink?” he asked.
She didn’t want her eyes to tear, damn it. But her pace slowed a little.
“An offer you can’t refuse,” he said. “A shoulder.”
She finally stopped walking. “Shoulder,” she said, then pressed herself into Cheever’s chest. He held her to him, knew that if he didn’t she would break their contact too soon. A wet spot grew in his shirt while she cried in silence.
“You know,” he said, “I always think of you in terms of firsts. Like the time you first smiled. Getting that out of you was a lot of work. Or the time you told me to call you by your first name. Or now.”
“What first does this qualify me for? The first time I made a fool of myself in public?”
“No,” he said, and held her a little tighter, though he was careful not to press too hard.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she said, but it did, just a little, though it was the best hurt she had felt in a long time. “How did you know?”
“Hygeia,” Cheever said, “and this voice in my own head. Maybe I’m becoming a multiple.” Or maybe, he thought, he was opening up to possibilities.
“What did she say?”
“She popped out while we were having lunch and announced that Antiope was scared and in pain. She said she needed to find you and help you. I had to convince her that I was capable of doing that. And then I had to persuade her to let another alter come out before she started a healing session in the restaurant.”
“I’m surprised you believed her.”
“She spoke to my own doubts. I tried getting in touch with you this morning and I kept encountering walls.”
“So how’d you find me?”
“Besides being a cop, I know something about hiding hurt.”
“Antiope’s trail,” she said, slightly bitter.
“Let’s go somewhere,” he said. “For coffee, or whatever.”
“There’s really not much here besides the hospital cafeteria.”
“Hospital food never sounded so good,” he said.
They let go of one another, but stayed close enough so that their arms kept touching as she led him to the cafeteria. They talked very little. Even after they were seated and he was sipping at his coffee and she was playing with her apple juice, it was hard for them to speak to one another. He kept sneaking glances at her. She looked pale and preoccupied, and he feared the worst. This thing was hanging over them, but he couldn’t just attack it straight on.
“I hate hospitals,” he said.
“Oh?”
“Diane,” he said. “My daughter.”
“Oh.” Same answer but different emphasis, with an understanding and sympathy offered in her tone.
“I remember when she was born,” he said. “For some reason I was given a doctor’s scrubs. In those days men weren’t automatically at their wife’s side during the birthing. It was a long labor, and I went in and out of the delivery room several times. Nurses not involved with the labor kept calling me ‘doctor.’ And when I went to the cafeteria the servers also called me ‘doctor.’ Everyone saw me as this thing I wasn’t. At first I explained, but then it just seemed easier not to say anything even though I felt like I was impersonating a physician.”
“You probably looked dashing,” she said, “and everyone wondered who the handsome new doctor was.”
He sipped at his coffee. Was it bitter or was he? Cheever was hard-pressed to distinguish the difference. “I never thought she would die,” he said. “I didn’t prepare myself. There had been so many critical times before that I thought this was just one more.
“I was working. There was an hour where I could have seen her, but I decided to visit later. I’m still waiting to make that visit. It’s been twenty years and I’m still waiting.”
“What would you have said?”
“I would have told her how much I loved her.”
“I’m sure you told her that many times.”
“I failed her in the end.”
“By not being there for one moment when you were there for so many others?”
“I worked the next day after she died, and the next. I didn’t take any time off.”
“We all deal with our grief in our own ways.”
“My wife thought I was the coldest man that ever walked this planet. She probably still does, that is if she thinks about me at all. She remarried, had a few more kids, went on with her life.”
“Why did she think you were so cold?”
“Because I didn’t sit around the house bawling for days on end like she did.”
“Did you cry?”
“A few times. In the bathroom. By myself.”
“You’re afraid of showing your emotions?”
“I’m a lifetime out of practice. Like you.” He didn’t offer the words as a challenge, but as an observation, and she didn’t take umbrage, or at least not much.
“I’d prefer to think I’m only five or six years into being emotionally challenged,” Rachel said, “but you might be right.”
“Let’s not be sphinxes to one another,” he said. “Let’s not have to figure out riddles. How are you?”
She thought a long time before answering. “If I hadn’t gone through this before,” she said, “I would say I was overreacting. But I did go through it.”
It. Better to say it. Not cancer. Not losing a breast. Not sickness and helplessness and hurt. Just it.
“I should probably be jumping for joy,” Rachel said. “In doctor talk, my mammogram was not suggestive of a malignancy.”
“But?”
“But they just finished sticking a long needle into my breast. I had what’s called a needle aspiration. They’re performing a biopsy of the cyst, so I’ll hold the champagne until I get the results.”
“How long will that be?”
“I’m one of the privileged. When you’re a doctor, and you know how the system works, you can push a lot of buttons. I should hear by tomorrow afternoon.”
“But until then, limbo.”
“I’m used to it,” she said, then contradicted herself by shaking her head. “No, you never get used to it. What I really am is angry. I’m tired of having a victim’s mentality. I want to strike back, but it’s hard to find another target to hit besides myself.”
“Try a windmill.”
“I wish it was. But I do the same dumb thing you do. I beat myself up.”
Rachel let out a long sigh. “When all this attention was being focused on my chest today, with all the lights and cameras and directions, it almost felt like I was being prompted for one of those pictorials in a men’s magazine. I started thinking about their monthly pinups, and then I couldn’t help but wonder how many of those foldout models ultimately got breast cancer. Was it Miss May 1988? Or Miss July 1996? One woman in eleven born in the United States develops breast cancer. Subscribe to one of those magazines for a year and you can do your own lottery. Which displayed woman succumbs? Pick a foldout, any foldout. Only problem is you can’t airbrush breast cancer.
“With those kinds of numbers you’d think women would get mad and organize and rally for answers. But you see more magazine articles about how to avoid sagging and getting rid of stretch marks than you do about breast cancer.
“I had to confront the mortality statistics. I had to learn about my cancer. Did you know that the number one cause of death in American women between the ages of forty and forty-five is breast cancer?”
Cheever shook his head. “I didn’t either,” she said, “until five years ago when I was afraid I would become one of those statistics.”
“You lived.”
“A part of me did, but a whole other part was lost. My marriage broke up not long after I lost my breast. The losses seem interconnected.”
“I am sure there were other factors.”
“There were. But what I remember is my husband refusing to look at the scars. Refusing to look at me. Refusing to touch me. He wanted to remove himself from the pain.”
“He was a fool.”
“He’s a doctor.”
“Dr. Fool then.”
Rachel smiled. “Maybe it was me. I remember feeling so besieged. At first they tried treating the tumor with radiation. They outlined the area with this special indelible red ink. It was like having this hateful tattoo. There’s a reason for the red ink, of course. They want to irradiate as narrow an area as possible, bombard that exact same tissue every day. But I felt like it was my concentration camp tattoo. I couldn’t dress or undress without seeing my cancer spotlighted. It almost glowed in the dark. As a preventive measure, my left breast was also irradiated. In my mind I began to think of one breast as Hiroshima and the other as Nagasaki.”
“No more bombs,” Cheever said.
“What about a time bomb? When they reconstructed the breast they put in a silicone prosthesis. I’m thinking of having it removed and replacing it with a saline prosthesis, but I just don’t want to go through the trouble. I don’t want to face up to everything again. I try and teach my clients to break their avoidance patterns, and yet I’m the worst offender.”
“Do as I say, not as I do.”
“Amen.”
Her cell phone started ringing, as if timed to her invocation. “Excuse me,” she said, and then looked at her phone’s display. “I have to take this. It’s my service.” She moved a few steps from the table; the call was brief.
Rachel clicked off and said, “It’s Helen. She needs us.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
It wasn’t difficult getting Helen released from County Mental Health’s Psychiatric Hospital, although Cheever’s badge and Rachel’s credentials expedited the process. Cheever spoke for both of them when he said, “If we’d waited another fifteen minutes they probably would have released her anyway.” Too many cutbacks had made CMH a revolving door.
Cheever found it hard not to stare at the Helen that had been handed over to them. It was almost as if someone had let the air out of her. She was a body without a personality, had gone from so many to none.
Helen wasn’t talking, and it wasn’t just a case of Pandora being quiet. She was completely mute. Even her body was expressionless. Her large blue eyes were open but unfocused. Though she stood without assistance, her shoulders were slumped and her body appeared to have sunken into itself.
“You ever see her like this before?” Cheever asked.
Rachel shook her head. She was holding one of Helen’s hands, periodically rubbing it. Even though Helen wasn’t responding, Rachel kept talking to her in a low, calm voice.
Where had everyone gone? Cheever wondered. What had caused the personalities to abandon ship?
Rachel caught his eye, brought him out of his own thoughts. “I live near here,” she said.
“So?”
“I want to take Helen to my house.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“You think it’s better that I try and treat her in this parking lot?”
“I think it’s better you treat her somewhere else. By taking her home, your professionalism gets questioned. You could get your...” He almost said, “tit in a wringer,” but changed his wording in midsentence: “...self in trouble.”
She didn’t answer, not directly. “It seems to me I’ve kept turning my back,” she said, “and now I’m having a hard time finding my front.” Then Rachel didn’t say anything, just took up Helen’s right hand and motioned for him to take her left. Cheever reluctantly did so.
When Diane had been young, he and his wife had walked along with her between them like that. Every few steps they had raised their arms in unison and lifted Diane up. She had loved that. But this hand-holding wasn’t like that. There was no playing, no carefree waving of arms.
Helen was content to be led forward by them. Her expression never changed; her only facial movement was an occasional blink. Her chin rested on her chest, and though her eyes were opened they never raised themselves from the ground. Cheever was afraid he’d have to lift Helen to get her into the car, but she followed the prompts of their hands and was able to seat herself.
“Got time to follow me?” Rachel asked.
“I’ll be the disapproving looks in your rearview mirror.”
She gave Cheever her address just in case she lost him along the way and waited until he pulled in behind her Lexus before driving off. Their route took them along Rosecrans. The traffic was heavy. When Cheever had first arrived in San Diego he’d been stationed at the Naval Training Center on Rosecrans, which had been torn down in the nineties for housing and stores. It was while stationed at NTC that Cheever had fallen in love with San Diego.
Rachel turned off Rosecrans onto Talbot and began to do some hill climbing. Cheever watched as she kept talking to Helen, could see her mouth move and her head turn. She kept up a steady patter of conversation, almost looked like a tour guide the way she pointed out things, but as far as Cheever could see Helen remained unresponsive, her head rolling not to Rachel’s words but the motion of the car.
He followed her car up Gage and then Dupont. The higher they climbed, Cheever knew, the more expensive was the real estate, especially those homes with panoramic views of the bay and the city. Rachel turned on Via Flores, and judging by the colorful and lush landscaping, the street more than lived up to its Spanish name: Way of Flowers.
Rachel’s house was the most unprepossessing on the street, a boxy, Frank Lloyd Wrightish structure that blended in well with the hillside. In one of the boxes was a three-car garage. Rachel motioned for Cheever to follow her in and park. He was amazed that the two free spaces were just that, empty berths instead of being loaded with junk.
They entered the house through the garage, leading Helen down some stairs to a den. Cheever’s usefulness seemed to come to an end after helping Helen to the sofa. Rachel sat next to her and started talking, and Cheever drifted to the side of the room. After five minutes of one-way conversation Cheever saw little to suggest that Rachel was getting through to Helen. This, he figured, was going to take a long time. Sunken into the sofa, Helen looked like a human shell.
Wanting to do something more than gawk, Cheever used an imaginary thirst as an excuse to leave the room. Without interrupting the rhythm of her talking,
Rachel told him there was juice, wine, and sparkling water in the refrigerator. He took the circuitous route to her kitchen. Her home was immaculate, looked like it was ready for a photo shoot in one of those slick interior design magazines. There were names to her kind of furniture, not names he knew like sofa and chair and table, but names that belonged to Italian and French designers. Cheever thought of his own house. It could qualify as the “before” in a home improvement show where the expert went around pointing to all the things that needed to be done. For too long Cheever had viewed his place with eyes as oblivious as Helen’s now were. Just as so many single people find it too much bother “cooking for one,” he had found excuses living for one.
Cheever walked out onto the deck and took in the million-dollar-plus expanse. The deck was high above the backyard, giving it a catwalk feel. In less than two hours the sun would set and the view would be spectacular. Hell, it already was spectacular. He could see Tijuana and the Coronado Islands, could make out the tower at the University of San Diego and the entire stretch of the point. Looking southeast to the bay, he picked out some San Diego landmarks and watched as airplanes took off and landed at Lindbergh Field. With this kind of vista Cheever thought it would be easy, perhaps too easy, to lead a vicarious existence. The world would always be flowing by with sights to see, and the pictures would continually be changing. Even the unmoving objects like office buildings and mothballed naval ships offered different looks, with the lighting and shadows acting much like clothes being thrown on and off.
Gradually he stopped looking afar and took in Rachel’s backyard. Everything appeared to be in bloom—roses, bird-of-paradise, jasmine, hibiscus, wisteria, bougainvillea, and honeysuckle. It was November, but it was still San Diego. The days were getting shorter, but the residents and the flora were still in a state of denial. Cheever remembered one of the most famous scenes from the Iliad: Ajax on the battlefield calling to Zeus for more light. The thought of death didn’t bother Ajax, but if he had to die he wanted to do so in the light of day. More light, thought Cheever. It could have been San Diego’s motto.
