They’d fallen all the way to the lower landing. He came with me down the stairs. “How’s your head?” I asked.
He gave the divot a pat. “Couldn’t hurt me with a bazooka. Steel plate.”
“Why did you fall down?”
“The look on your face. I thought you were going to punch me.”
“I almost did. How did you get in here?”
“Shhh.” He wagged his eyebrows. “That’s a secret.” With a giggle, he took off up the stairs.
I sighed. That’s just the way he would have answered a question like that when he was eight years old.
When I got back upstairs, he had his backpack over his shoulder and was holding the food. “Hurry up. I’m starved.”
I took the bag and said, “I need to know how you found this place. I’m not listed in the phone directory, and there’s no property record for me. I do that for my patients—to keep some space from them.”
“I thought so,” he mumbled. “I know a guy who works for the DC government. He can get into the DMV records, car registration. That’s how I got the address.”
“And the door downstairs? How did you manage that?”
“I waited outside until somebody came home. Some lady. She was talking on her phone and didn’t notice that I came in behind her.” He grinned. “Can we eat now?”
I let him in.
The living room in my apartment is a big space with a bay window. I don’t have much furniture, but there’s a long row of bookcases. After he leaned his bicycle against the wall, Scottie started checking out the books. I went into the kitchen to sort out dinner.
“You wrote your name in these,” he called.
“Some of them.” Those were my old textbooks from school, marked so they didn’t get mixed up with friends’ copies.
“I like it—Cal Henderson. Do you want me to call you that?”
“Sure, I guess so. Do you like Scott or Scottie?”
“Scottie. It’s always been that.” He came to stand in the doorway. The book he was holding was Carbone’s Sexual Deviance. He had it open to a set of color photos. “Do you have patients like this?”
“Nobody who’s admitted it. Here, the food’s ready.”
He sat down, putting the book by his plate. I flipped it closed. “Those pictures aren’t too good for the appetite.”
“I’ll say.” He straightened the silverware and squared his chair to the table. I’d seen other obsessive-compulsive signs back at my office. He turned his plate so the rim pattern was at right angles to him, then dished out three equal-sized portions of food, arranged in a neat triangle. He had a lot of trouble getting his paper napkin settled in his lap, trying again and again and becoming more frustrated with each not-quite-right attempt.
Eating can be a particular problem for heavy-duty OCD sufferers, especially in a new place. He kept glancing at the book. He’d been interested in it, but now it was out of place, as big a distraction as a cat sitting next to his plate.
I put the book on the counter.
He kept fidgeting.
I got up and returned it to the bookcase. That did the trick. He was smiling, much more relaxed, when I returned to the table.
He was a slow eater, taking his time with every mouthful. He did seem to enjoy it. We were on our second helping when I said, “We didn’t have much time to talk earlier. Why did you come to see me?”
He swallowed loudly, not looking at me.
“It’s been a lot of years. There must be a special reason.”
He set his fork down and stared stubbornly at his plate.
“OK,” I said. “We’ll finish this and do the dishes, then talk.”
He nodded happily. He only wanted peace and quiet with his meal, another ritual. I was glad to oblige, but we were going to have that talk.
While I put the last of the dishes away, Scottie drifted back into the living room. I thought of offering him a beer, then imagined what he might be like if one beer turned into a six pack. “I’m going to have a Coke,” I called out. “You want one?”
“Nah, I’m good.”
I found him sitting in one of the canvas sling chairs. He’d pulled it into the window bay and brought over another for me. His backpack was at his feet. He’d moved the patient chair in my office like that, too. Shifting the furniture around was a way to control his environment. That might be just a quirk of his, like not wanting to talk during meals. Or it all might be part of something deeper and more unhealthy.
I pulled the tab on the Coke as I sat down. “I’m sorry about the way I acted at my office. You surprised me, that’s all. Things about the old days, my family—sometimes I don’t react too well.”
“Me too. I mean, I don’t react too well to your family.”
That made me smile, even if it was awkwardly put. “What did you want to talk to me about?”
He looked away, a noncommittal gesture I’d seen hundreds of times with my patients. Now that he was here, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to open up.
I could wait him out, but I decided instead to give him a jump start. “A couple of FBI agents showed up at my office looking for you.”
He chewed his lip and picked at his cuticles. This wasn’t a surprise to him.
“They implied that you threatened someone.”
His head snapped up. “I didn’t threaten anybody!”
I shrugged, letting him take it from there.
“They talked to Mrs. Rogansky, too. She owns the house I live in. I sent e-mails to some people. I wanted to talk with them and they kept brushing me off. No threats—I just wanted to show them I wouldn’t give up. I guess I must have made somebody nervous.”
“I guess so.”
His eyes dropped back to his lap. When he looked up, it was to challenge me. “Did you ever wonder why your mother shot me instead of you?”
That was not a question I liked. I moved my hands apart so I wouldn’t start rubbing my scar. “Sure, I wonder about that all the time.”
“And what’s your answer?”
“That it’s not a good thing for me to think about. What’s that got to do with e-mails and the FBI?”
“It’s something I’ve been working on—what I came to talk to you about.” From the backpack, he took out a three-inch-thick stack of papers littered with sticky notes and grimy from having been read so many times. The top page looked like a photocopy of a bank statement.
He pulled the coffee table over and started thumbing through the stack. His mouth moved as he counted the pages. He pulled out a sheet, too quickly, and half the pages fell on the floor.
“Damn it!”
I bent to help him, but he waved me off. “I’ll do it. Everything has to be in the right order.”
“OK,” I said.
He kept tugging at his baseball cap as he tried to figure out where the pages went. The more he worked, the more flustered he became.
I said, “Take it easy, OK? We’ll get it straightened up. Now tell me what’s going on.”
He glanced at the papers and shook his head. “I have this problem, see?”
“You mean being obsessive-compulsive.”
Now I’d offended him. “No, I’m not. My problem . . . it’s different.”
He pulled the cap lower over his eyes. “At your office today, I had to put down why I wanted to see you. I wrote ‘anxiety’ as a joke. Maybe it wasn’t so funny.”
He slumped back. “Sometimes the world just seems to speed up. I try,” he churned his hands through the air, “but I can’t keep up. You can’t imagine how frustrating it is. All at once, I feel short circuited. Everything’s just crazy.”
“Have you talked to anyone about this?”
“You mean like one of your people?”
I laughed. “Right. A therapist.”
“No, I don’t believe in that stuff. Physical therapy when I was a kid was bad enough.”
“Does it happen mainly when you’re stressed?”
“Right. Usually.”
“And you do better when you’re alone, when no one is watching you.”
He became shy with the probing. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
I knew snap diagnoses were dangerous, but I was seeing a strong pattern here. The constant twitching to get comfortable, the rituals at dinner, the way he moved the furniture around, and now his mixed-up papers. It was all about control. He needed to be the guy in charge, the emperor of a one-man empire. Definitely not someone who works and plays well with others. I nearly smiled at that, remembering that our teachers always gave him an “unsatisfactory” in that category. And how much were those twenty-five-year-old memories clouding my judgment now? It wouldn’t matter if what I did next worked out.
I stood up. “Listen, I need to talk to a patient. I owe her fifty minutes, but she usually runs out of steam after half an hour.” I headed for my bedroom where I had my landline phone. “You can put those things back in order.”
“Sure,” he said. He sounded annoyed, but, as I shut the bedroom door, he called, “Thanks. I’ll have everything ready when you’re done.”
Carla Mannetto answered on the first ring. She was a holdover from when Felix ran the office, a financial forecaster with the Small Business Administration. She hated her job and had nothing good to say about Washington in general. Felix had helped her deal with a nasty divorce, and I thought she kept up with the weekly phone therapy only because she didn’t have a husband to complain to anymore. Soon I’d have to start winding down our sessions. I couldn’t continue to take her money when I was only being used as a substitute for a social life.
Tonight she was unhappy that she hadn’t been invited to a coworker’s retirement party and was thinking—once again—about looking for a new job. My mind was mostly on Scottie. What were all those papers about? Who had he been sending messages to? After twenty minutes I prodded Carla with a few gentle questions. She danced around it but finally admitted she didn’t like the coworker and wouldn’t have gone to the party if she had been invited. She was in a much better mood when we hung up. Not my best work, I admit, but it was what she wanted, just to blow off steam.
Scottie was still in the living room. He was halfway through—I spotted the empties on the floor—his third beer. He held it up. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, make yourself at home.”
I went to the kitchen to get one for myself. When I came back, he stared at me all the way to my chair. “I’ve always wanted to ask you something. Did you see her do it? Your mom, I mean. Shoot us.”
I took a long pull on the beer before I answered. “No. I was in their bedroom when that happened.”
“That’s where you saw her shoot herself?”
I nodded.
He looked down at his hands. “My mother kept track of you for a long time afterward. You were in a hospital, weren’t you?”
“I was. I had blackouts, weeks at a time. Even when I was conscious, I wasn’t all there.”
“OK now, though?” he asked.
“Pretty much.”
“Well, if you have a blackout around me—” he glanced up with a wicked grin. “I’ll make sure you look tidy while you’re doing it.”
He was so pleased when I laughed that he stamped his feet.
He picked up the papers. They appeared to be in order the way he wanted, one big stack and a smaller one of a few dozen pages. “This can be a nightmare for me, explaining things to people.”
“Don’t worry about it. We’re all friends here.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” he said, giving me a cold stare. In three sentences he’d gone from happy to hostile. Scottie Glass was one mixed-up package.
He set the smaller stack of papers between us. As I’d thought, the top sheet was a bank account statement, and it was no rich person’s account: opening balance of eleven hundred dollars; closing at three hundred forty. I picked it up, and, for a moment, my mind lost traction.
It was a joint account—my father and mother.
SEVEN
“Where did you get this?” I said.
“It’s real, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Answer my question.”
“There was a woman, a writer. She came to see me when I was a kid, to talk about the shootings. She said she was going to talk to you, too.”
“I know who you mean.”
“I went to visit her three years ago. There was never any book published, and I wanted to find out what happened.” He gave an irritated shrug. “None of that matters. Just let me show you what I found.”
“It matters to me. What about that woman?”
He couldn’t go on until he put the bank statement back where it belonged on the stack. “Her son still lived in their house in Frederick. He told me she died the year after I met her, from cancer. He gave me a box of things she’d collected doing research. Sometimes she paid for information, including from cops. To tell you the truth, the guy seemed happy to get rid of it all.”
I started paging through the pile. Scottie flopped back and gave a loud sigh.
“OK.” I slid the papers over to him. “Tell me what you’ve got.”
He pulled a sheet from the stack. “First, this telephone bill. It’s your home phone. Your mom and dad’s phone, I mean.”
I wondered how a freelance writer had gotten hold of something like that. More than that, I wondered why Scottie was interested in this old stuff. He was waiting for a signal that I understood. “I’m with you.”
“It covers the four weeks up to the night it happened. See these entries?” He’d marked three long distance calls. “The number is in Annapolis. It was the home number for the lawyer for Braeder Design.”
“The FBI asked me about that—Braeder Design Systems.”
“You don’t remember? Your mother worked there.”
That was why it was so familiar to me. It was no wonder I couldn’t place it, given the way I’d tried to forget everything from back then. “So my mom phoned somebody she worked with. What does that mean?”
“The lawyer, Eric Russo, worked for an outside law firm, not—what’s it called—in house. Only the top people at Braeder would have been in touch with him.”
My mother had a degree in physics and worked as a technical writer (I remembered that much). She might have been in touch with anyone on her job, including this Eric Russo. “Let’s cut to the end. Where are you headed with this?”
He sighed again, and I could tell he was getting angry. “All right, go ahead. I’ll shut up.”
Now he grinned, easily appeased. “I’ll go slow for the dummies.”
He pulled out a single page, a poor photocopy that I had to hold close to read.
“Did you know about that?” he said.
It was a form from the Maryland Division of Unemployment Insurance. My mother’s name was written under “Applicant.” Our address. Dated the 9th of July that year.
I read it over twice. “My mother couldn’t have filed for unemployment that summer. She went to work every day. We had papers all over the house from her job. Your mother babysat for us, along with that other woman—”
“Mrs. Cataldo,” Scottie said. “I remember.”
“Then what is this?” I shook the form at him as if any mistakes were his fault.
“Here, look.” He spread out four bank statements from my parents’ account—May, June, July, and August of that year. On the first he’d marked a deposit of $1,966.40. There was a deposit of the same amount in June. They stopped there. No similar amounts for July or August.
He took the Unemployment Division form from me. “This says she was terminated from Braeder on—”
“June 16,” I said. My father worked as a consultant. The money he earned didn’t come in on a regular basis. The nineteen hundred dollar deposits must have been my mother’s last two paychecks.
This was a new picture for me. The work my mother did involved writing patent applications. As a boy, I never understood ex
actly what that meant, but I knew she loved it. She brought work home almost every night and would sit for hours at the dining room table shuffling through papers and blueprints. One of the clearest memories I have of her is coming into the dining room to say good night after taking my bath. I would have been five or six years old. She pulled me onto her lap and showed me what she was working on, some new telescope system. I barely understood a word, but she seemed so happy it didn’t matter.
The unemployment filing, no more paychecks. Without her job, I could only imagine the tailspin she’d gone into. Obviously, with a bank account that slim, she and my father needed the money. And she needed the challenge of the work. Jim and Renee had told me that after college, she’d been accepted into several PhD programs, but she couldn’t afford to go. Drafting patent applications was the best substitute she could find. And when she lost the job, she still got dressed for work every morning, packed her lunch, and went—where? The public library? A museum in the District? I wondered if she even told my father, or if he only found out when he realized her paychecks had stopped. Was that why they fought those last weeks?
It had been a long time since I thought about any of this. Jim and Renee told me only good things about my mother. In their stories, she was always smart and happy and totally devoted to my father and my brothers and me. When I asked why she did it—and I did ask, point-blank—they didn’t really have an answer. “Sometimes people get sick, and the world doesn’t make sense to them anymore,” Renee said. “They do things nobody can understand.”
That was enough to buy me off when I was a teenager. Later, in college, I turned up some old articles from the Washington Post. The reporter had picked up on the Damascus gossip: marriage troubles and depression. One of my great uncles had been a suicide victim. Maybe there was bad blood in the family. I came away not believing any of it.
Gradually I developed an explanation of my own, one that fit my vague memories and the things I was picking up in my psych courses. She had some undiagnosed condition, a hormone imbalance or a tumor that the medical examiner didn’t find. One day it got to be too much. She snapped, went for the gun. It was a clean story, one that left her free of guilt.
The Survivors Page 5
