She waited as the young doctor stood in the doorway briefing himself from the papers in a manila folder on who she was and why she was there. Then he would beam his personal “And how are you this morning, Mrs. Devereaux?” as though they’d known each other for years, while impersonal eyes studied her closely. And she would answer, “Fine.” Because he expected it, so he could start her talking, so he could prove to her she wasn’t fine.
“And how are you this morning, Mrs. Devereaux?”
“Fine.”
“Good. Good. All dressed I see. Good. Good.” He sat in a chair and motioned her into the other, scratching his crew cut with the end of the pencil. “Still no luck in locating your parents. Their vacation seems pretty extended.”
“Dr. Gilcrest, I don’t want my parents. I just want to go home to my son.”
“And your husband?” His eyes were quick to search hers.
“Yes.”
“You really think you’re able to handle the world this time? And I don’t mean the world the way you want it to be, but the way it is?”
“I have to face it some time. Why put it off?”
“You’re not afraid you’ll forget again?”
“It didn’t last long this time.” After the first night here she’d awakened, remembering everything. Everything since last April.
Dr. Gilcrest leaned back in the chair, crossed his legs, and chewed on the eraser end of his pencil, his eyes under sandy lashes never leaving her face. “We can be fairly confident that your memory will return. All of it. Some of it is likely to be unpleasant or you wouldn’t have locked it away to begin with. Wouldn’t you rather be here when that happens?”
“How soon do you think.…”
“Your recent trouble might well be an indication that it will be quite soon. Then again.…” He shrugged.
“I can’t stay here. I have a child to think of.”
“Which is quite a responsibility for someone who can just walk away from life when there’s a crisis,” he said, smiling his open, frank smile.
He’d done it again. Every morning he kicked away the props that she would spend the rest of the day and most of the nights rebuilding. “You think I’m insane?”
“There are many levels of mental illness, Mrs. Devereaux. What we know of your behavior in the last few years is at least peculiar. But no, I don’t consider you insane, dangerous, or even incompetent. Neither do I consider you entirely healthy. Amnesia is an illness of the mind as pneumonia is an illness of the body.
“As I’ve said before, there are no bars on the windows. You have not been legally committed. You are here on a voluntary basis because you need help, but I cannot help you if you won’t let me.”
“I’ve told you everything I know.” And she had, over and over until she had her story memorized in the same words, used them in the same order.
And it hadn’t been as bad as Evan had led her to believe. Dr. Gilcrest had patiently plumbed her fears, held them up for her to examine. He had shown her how her nervous state could have produced that shadow in the courtyard. How, after hearing the story of Michael’s wrecking the nursery, she was ready to see the figure standing at the window with an ax. How, given this line of thought, she was able to construe a dangerous but accidental gas leak as a personal threat, imagine even the look of doubt on the repairman’s face.
He could not explain how she could have foreseen Michael and Harley fighting on the desert. It was a relief to talk to someone and her reasoning side could not dispute his logic. But her instinctive self was not convinced. It had learned since April to trust no one.
The fear that now took precedence over all the others was the fear that she might not be allowed to leave. That the interrogation would go on and on, driving her to real madness. It wouldn’t take long in a place like this.
Dr. Gilcrest leaned forward, tapping the pencil on his knee. “There is a garden here, a lounge where other patients meet; you have a television, and newspapers are delivered daily. But you stay in your room, seldom watch TV, the newspapers leave this room unopened, and the nurses report that whenever they look in you are either sleeping or sitting by the window. You have a great deal of free time here. Now, how would you interpret this behavior?”
“I needed rest and the other patients make me uncomfortable.”
“They frighten you?”
“Yes.” Hollow eyes, sad eyes, crafty eyes … eyes filled with hopelessness, terror … empty eyes.…
Dr Gilcrest narrowed his probing eyes and pointed the pencil at her. “And the newspapers—do they frighten you?”
Laurel stared at the end of the pencil and tried to swallow. She was trapped again. She had avoided newspapers and news in general because it depressed her. He would note it as another example of her inability to face the world. A lot of people didn’t read newspapers for the same reason. She’d be willing to bet that Myra read nothing but the women’s pages. But Myra wasn’t in the hospital.
“Newspapers, Doctor, concentrate the hysteria and horror of the world. Then they’re thrown on your doorstep like a hand grenade. With just a few pages of newsprint you can keep daily tallies on war, super weapons, crime, riots, revolution, starvation, poverty … when I read that my very way of life is destroying the air I breathe and water and wildlife and vegetation, when I read of whole generations of people who can’t even talk to each other … yes … I’m afraid. And I don’t think that’s crazy.”
She’d been sitting straight, her hands folded in her lap, trying to impress him with her calm control. But now she had to get up and move to the window. “When I see a picture of an injured child in the newspaper, I see Jimmy and how I’d feel if … or read of a young man killed in battle, I see Jimmy fifteen years from now and I hurt. I almost bleed myself. I.…”
The pencil scribbled furiously in the manila folder. “Oh, I give up.” She flopped down on the couch.
“Go on. Don’t stop.”
“What’s the use?” Five holes on one side of the square tile and five on the other makes twenty-five. No, count them out. One, two, three.…
“Mrs. Devereaux, this personal involvement with life’s terrors and the consequent avoidance of the news media, which refuses to concern itself with much else, this is more common than you might think and surprisingly frequent among young mothers. But few resort to amnesia. Some have nervous breakdowns.” He rearranged the folder, put it under his arm, and rose. “The amnesia is an overreaction. But I think you are going to work this out for yourself. In fact, I think you are doing so already.”
“Then why am I here? When can I leave?”
“I’ll stop by this afternoon. We’ll talk about it then.” With a glance at his watch, Dr. Gilcrest left her.
That evening Michael made his nightly duty visit. He usually stayed no more than a half hour, uncomfortable half hours in which he assured her that Jimmy was getting along “fine” with Myra and Sherrie, and then he’d fidget in the cramped room until his time was up and he could escape. She didn’t help him much, felt relieved when he left. When they’d exhausted the subject of Jimmy, they had little to say to each other. Or maybe they had a lot to say—but Jimmy was the only safe topic.
Once he’d started to explain that he was on his way home early that day a month ago to apologize for the night before, only to see her in Harley’s truck. He’d thought she was running off with Jimmy and had followed them. But she became upset and he stopped explaining.
Michael was the only visitor they allowed her and she always knew of his arrival because the blond nurse with the bad teeth would stick her head around the door, her face covered with blushing smiles and utter some inanity like, “That gorgeous man is here again. Ready?”
But this time Laurel was at the door to meet him and Michael was visibly startled as she took his hand and drew him into the room.
“Guess what?”
“I can’t imagine,” he said, trying to smile.
“I’m getting out.”
&n
bsp; “Making a break for it?”
“No. Dr. Gilcrest said I can leave in three days. I’m to see him once a week at his office and call him if I feel myself slipping again.”
Michael sat on the couch, the haunted look he’d worn the last month unrelieved by her news.
“You will let me come home … won’t you?” She’d ridden high on relief since her talk with the doctor that afternoon. Now first doubts assailed her. She sank down on the floor in front of him. “Please say I can come home.”
The pale mesmerizing eyes studied her intently down the long slender bridge of his nose. Then he leaned forward and said quietly, “You don’t know me.”
“I don’t know anyone else either. Please?”
He drew a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one, the first time she’d seen him smoke. “Do you want to take Jimmy and go back to Tucson?” he asked.
“No.”
“You’d be more comfortable.”
And more easily watched? “I want to go home to the beige bungalow. I’ll try not to interfere with your life … I promise. Just let me.…”
“You can come home. Now get up off the floor and tell me what the doctor said.”
She repeated what she could remember from her afternoon session with Dr. Gilcrest, but she’d found it hard to concentrate, waiting for him to set a time when she could leave. Something about fear and guilt and an exaggerated aversion to violence, the problem being the fear rather than the things she feared, a tendency to avoid reality (even Michael grimaced at that understatement). “He said he wanted to speak to you.”
“Sounds like I’d better see him. I’ll make an appointment.” He rose and picked up his cap with the silver wings. He wore his dark Air Force blue that she didn’t see often in the desert clime.
“Wait. Don’t go.”
“What do you want now?”
“I want to thank you for coming to see me so often. You didn’t have to.”
Michael just shrugged and stood waiting.
“And I want you to tell me about before … how we met and everything.”
“That’s a long time ago.”
“You’re the only one who can tell me, Michael.”
He sighed, threw his hat down impatiently, and sat beside her. A big man in a crowded room with an unwanted wife he could legally get rid of but under a moral obligation to take care of a nut. It wasn’t the first time Laurel had felt sorry for him.
“We met in a little tourist trap in the mountains of Colorado called Estes Park. I’d been hiking with some friends and you were there with some female teachers in front of a sidewalk stand that sold hot, buttered sweet corn.”
Michael rubbed the creases in his forehead, leaning his head on the back of the couch. “You were rather appealing with melted butter running down your chin. Your friends were the lumpy, giggly types that fluster when a man talks to them, but you were relaxed, natural, soft-spoken.
“Eventually, after a lot of silly chatter, both our groups ended up in the park down the street with sweet corn and hot dogs and that night in Denver with beer and pizza. Rather naturally we paired off and you ended up with me.”
“What was I like?”
“Your hair was shorter, your skirts longer. Quiet, dreamy. I didn’t analyze you. Perhaps I should have.”
“How did we … come to marry?”
“That I don’t know. These things just happen. I was stationed near Denver. We dated fairly often for a few months, enjoyed each other’s company. I decided I wanted you all to myself, so I married you. We rented an apartment near your school and.…”
“Wait … were we in love?”
Michael lit another cigarette and then stared at it instead of smoking it. “‘In love,’ Laurel, is a silly phrase people use to cover for strong emotions or the lack of them. I personally don’t know what it means. I remember feeling proud of you, responsible for you—in some ways you seemed a little … vulnerable … like you needed caring for. I felt comfortable with you, different from what I’d felt around anyone else. I don’t know, perhaps it was the beginning of something that might have grown.”
“Did I love you?”
“You seemed to.” He turned his eyes from the cigarette to the ceiling. Was he counting the holes in the tile to retain his patience? She could sense his desire to get away from her, from the dredging up of things she needed to remember and he wanted to forget.
“I think at first you had a kind of schoolgirl crush on me—you were more of a girl than a woman at twenty-four. This is just the way I remember it now. I don’t know what I thought then.”
“Did I seem … unstable?” Laurel watched the twitching muscle above his jaw. He wouldn’t take much more of this.
“You’d get very depressed at times over hard luck cases at school; you’d get involved with your students and their family problems. I thought it was because you were a good teacher, a sensitive person. You were upset when I left for Vietnam, but that seemed natural. We’d known it was coming. I’d barely arrived there and you discovered you were pregnant; your letters didn’t sound happy about it … You had this crazy idea about not wanting children, not wanting them to have to live in this world or starve or whatever … but you seemed to be adjusting to it. Until the last letter.…”
“Did you keep it?”
“No.” Michael picked up his hat and stood by the door. “I’ve explained all this to the doctor, Laurel.”
“Don’t go before you’ve told me what the letter said.”
He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief and continued, his voice low, controlled, and resonant but restrained, his consonants clipped but precise. “Mail delivery wasn’t always the best over there. The letter was garbled—but you wanted me to come home. You were afraid. I’d written you to get your mother out for when the baby came, but in this last letter you wrote that you hadn’t even told her about it. You just went to pieces on paper.
“The next day I was contacted by the Red Cross wanting to know what to do with Jimmy. I gave them your parents’ address and then wrote the hospital. They said a nurse had seen you walking out under your own steam. Two years later I get a phone call from a motel in Phoenix. It’s my long lost wife. And now … I have to leave, Laurel.” He made his escape before she could ask any more questions.
Laurel sat just where he’d left her, trying to assimilate all he’d said and hadn’t said, until the nurse came to remind her it was bedtime. It began to sound as if she’d told the truth at the hearing after all.
“My, he certainly stayed a long time tonight, didn’t he?” The nurse bustled in, holding the tiny white paper cup with Laurel’s pills—yellow for sleep, pink for happy. Or was it the other way around?
“However did you meet a man like that?”
Why did people with bad teeth have such broad smiles, Laurel wondered as she watched the nurse turn her bed down—a gentle hint.
“With butter on my chin,” she said and closed the bathroom door.
Once in bed, she swallowed the pills and decided to shake up the staff by watching the ten o’clock news. Students fought police at the university in Tempe. (Actually, the police watched while students cavorted for the TV camera.)
There was a giant crackdown along the border called Operation Intercept to slow down the drug traffic from Mexico. It also slowed down auto traffic—long lines of cars were stopped at Nogales, one of the crossing points to Arizona, as officials searched for marijuana, heroin, amphetamines, and barbiturates.
Tourists and hippies were flocking back to the desert now that the hot summer was over. It was rumored that John the Baptist was back in Arizona, hoping to organize students and hippies for a demonstration at Luke Air Force Base to protest the training of “murderers and assassins of the air” and the fact that the President’s troop pullout of Vietnam was only a “token appeasement of the dissatisfied elements of society” and not really meant as an end to United States involvement there.
The still photo on
the screen showed a tall, gangly youth in beard, shoulder-length curly hair, and enormous wire-rimmed glasses that looked ridiculous with his drab monkishlike robes. He didn’t appear capable of organizing anyone.
Inflation still soared and babies in Vietnam with swollen tummies and hollow eyes still starved.
Laurel yawned and then giggled. She wished she could give the dour-faced newsman a happy pill. He had trouble rolling out the pompous words and overlong sentences while taking time to breathe and still hold onto his “this-world-is-no-laughing-matter” expression.
But the weatherman was all smiles, congratulating Arizonans on their marvelous winter season as though the blistering summer had never been.
She rolled over and slept. Toward morning her dreams turned to Jimmy’s swollen tummy, blank eyes, his bony arms held out to her in a plea for food and she looking around the bombed-out shell of the beige bungalow for something to feed him, feeling an agony too real for a dream because there was no food and he didn’t understand. Dawn filled the room when she woke, and she muffled her sobs in the pillow so that they wouldn’t hear, make her stay longer because of depression.
On the morning of her release Laurel dressed carefully, wondering what that long-ago Laurel, with the butter on her chin, had worn the day she met Michael.
It wasn’t Michael who came to get her, and the disappointment must have shown on her face when Myra bustled in.
“The boys are flying today—guess you’ll have to settle for me,” Myra said. And the dimples returned to her plump face, the familiar warmth to her voice. “How are you, Laurel? I’ve missed you and so has Jimmy.”
“Is he with you?” Laurel bent to pick up her suitcases and hide the tears in her eyes.
“No, I left the kids with Colleen. Are you all checked out or … whatever you do?”
“I’m ready.”
Early October and the sun a soft benign warm, the air sweet and delicious with freedom, the streets and sidewalks crowded. Moving slices of shade cut strange patterns on people’s faces as they passed her under the arcade of palm fronds stirring gently overhead.
Michael’s Wife Page 18
