The Reach

by Nate Kenyon

  When she had finished, Shelley said, “She’s all right, you know. Evan wanted it stressed, however, that she was in a very dangerous state and that it was touch-and-go for a while. Apparently she’s had seizures before.”

  “Has she been tested for a lesion in the temporal lobe?”

  “I’m sure they would have taken an EEG to rule that out.”

  “Her file had a lot in it about brain wave activity. Maybe they suspected some sort of damage, or tumor.”

  “I suggested it myself, actually, when Sarah was first assigned to state care. Though she was only a little over a year old, the symptoms indicated some physical trauma. We looked for swelling, collections of fluid, anything that might suggest an injury. We thought epilepsy, searched the readings very carefully. But there was nothing.”

  “She thinks she’s in prison,” Jess said. “They’ve got her scared to death.”

  Something must have shown in her eyes. Shelley leaned forward intently. “You’ve done more with her in your visits than that entire staff has in months. She had shut down entirely with me, saw me as some kind of enemy, which is one reason I haven’t gone to see her the past few weeks. But she’s connecting with you, you’re building trust. That’s good. That’s one reason why we decided to bring you into this. Still, you have to be careful to view her as your patient and nothing more. Getting too attached can only be painful. There are bound to be setbacks.”

  Jess nodded. She had read about a case involving a young girl and a home care specialist; the child had been ill with a lengthy terminal disease, the sort that led to many highs and lows and false hopes. The specialist and the child spent most of the day together, and slept near each other at night. By the time she died the specialist had formed such a strong attachment that she refused to return to work, and in fact reported many of the same false symptoms of the disease. She described the death as if her own child had died.

  “I want to ask you something,” Shelley said. “This may be painful too and if you don’t want to talk about it I’ll understand. Earlier you mentioned your younger brother was autistic.”

  The use of past tense did not escape Jess’s notice. Either Shelley had remembered from their previous conversation, or she had taken a guess. “And now you’re wondering whether that has something to do with it. Whether I have some hidden agenda.”

  “The thought crossed my mind.”

  Maybe Shelley was right. She would have been a fool not to realize that her brother’s death had pushed her toward child psychology in the first place.

  Just because I’m interested in Sarah’s case doesn’t mean I’m looking for some kind of payback.

  A familiar memory slipped up on her. Michael, standing on the sidewalk, the sound of the children in the playground, the noise of passing cars. She reached out to him but he did not see her. He did not see anything or hear her screaming.

  “I was supposed to be watching him. We were near the park. My mother was at a pay phone and Michael stepped out into traffic. He was hit and killed instantly.”

  After countless looks of pity and murmurs of sympathy through the years she had learned to keep the whole thing to herself. But Shelley’s reaction was not the one she had expected. Shelley simply looked at her and said, “And you blamed yourself for this.”

  “My mother had put him in my care. I knew what he might do. I should have stopped him.”

  “You were how old?”

  “Nine.”

  “You must see,” Shelley said gently, “how ridiculous that is.”

  “I was old enough for it to matter.”

  “Of course. But not old enough to be blamed for it.”

  Shelley said this as if it were a common truth. And Jess supposed that under normal circumstance it was, but she was not a normal girl. She knew what she was capable of and what she wasn’t, and that was what had made it so difficult. Anyone could say that she had been too young, that her mother should never have left her alone with him. But that didn’t change anything. It only shifted responsibility.

  “And what happened then?”

  “My mother started drinking more heavily, staying out at night. She treated me as if I weren’t there. I suppose she blamed me too, in her way.”

  “Or herself, for leaving you to watch him.”

  “Maybe so.” But now they were getting too far off the subject. She did not want to dig into the past any longer. Suddenly she felt as if there weren’t enough air in the room to breathe.

  “I’ve thought this case over very carefully. I’ve studied the facts and the data at hand and I do not believe Sarah is schizophrenic. She has some obvious adjustment problems and hostility toward the staff, but I won’t know what else she needs until she’s given a better chance to be lucid. I don’t believe she should be locked up alone and I don’t think she’s a danger to anyone.”

  Jess listed off her reasons; Sarah had followed their conversation, been receptive to questions, showed short-term memory recall, scored well on cognitive tests. Her paranoia about the people in white seemed valid given the circumstances. And there were other, less tangible reasons; Jess might have called them gut instincts.

  “Perhaps the antipsychotics are finally having an effect?”

  “I just don’t see it happening all at once like that. According to Dr. Wasserman she’s been having breaks with reality for several years now, and the medications haven’t done a thing. She’s been so withdrawn and then so violent they’ve been forced to confine her to what is basically a cell. But I’ve seen little evidence of any of that.”

  Wasserman’s voice, inside her head: she can be devilishly clever. Sarah playing possum. Could she be doing that again now? But she couldn’t be this clever, Jess thought. How could you be psychotically disturbed and still plan such an elaborate game?

  Instead of dismissing her, Shelley looked troubled. “I feel like I let her down,” she said. “I should have been more involved the past few months, checked in more frequently. When Evan called I was ashamed because I hadn’t looked in on her recently.” She paused and her long, elegant fingers plucked absently at her sleeve.

  “I’ve been distracted,” Shelley said. “But of course that’s no excuse.”

  “You could come with me to see her. It might do her some good.”

  “Sarah may associate me with the people in white coats. She’d see you with me and then in her mind you’d be one of them too.”

  “Maybe that’s a chance we should take.”

  “No.” Shelley shook her head. “That would complicate things. Evan is a capable psychiatrist and the Wasserman Facility is well known. I know from our conversations that he is at the end of his rope. Bringing you into this was quite a gamble. If you don’t get anywhere, he’s still exposed an outsider to an extremely difficult and controversial case. He opens himself up to criticism. And if you do succeed in making a connection with Sarah, he’ll be getting questioned left and right as to why a graduate student could come in and do in a couple of weeks what he’s failed to do in eight years.”

  Because he’s an unimaginative asshole, Jess thought, but resisted saying it in spite of the pleasure the idea gave her. “I have to ask you. You delivered this girl. Was there any indication from the start she wasn’t normal?”

  “The circumstances were unusual. It was a difficult time.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Shelley looked away. For a long time Jess was not sure if she would speak at all. “Sarah was born in the middle of one of the most intense snowstorms I have ever seen. What made matters worse was that somehow the storm turned electrical. I don’t know the physics of it, but when Sarah’s mother went into labor we lost power. Everything happened very quickly We were working under primitive conditions to say the least.

  “She delivered very fast. One moment she was dilated and there was nothing, and then…”

  Shelley became very still and her face grew tight. The professor did not even breathe. And then she seemed to ease, as if
a sharp pain had come and gone.

  “The hospital was hit by lightning. We weren’t sure what had happened at the time. All we knew was that all hell was breaking loose. The world seemed to be caving in. The emergency lights were on but most of the equipment was useless. The noises…it sounded like the earth was splitting at the seams.” Shelley smiled, but her face held no warmth. “We got out but it was close. The hospital burned to the ground.”

  My God. Jess tried to imagine the scene, the frantic cries of the hospital workers, the storm howling all around them as the flames reared up and licked across the building’s innards. “I think Sarah has some sort of memory of it. Could that be possible? When I administered the Rorshach she described something about a building being on fire.”

  “As far as I know no one has ever mentioned it to her. It hasn’t been proven that newborns are even aware of their surroundings, at least in the way you or I might be. Sarah wouldn’t have had any idea what was happening. She wouldn’t even have a working concept of life and death.”

  “Her mother, then. Maybe she picked up on her mother’s feelings.”

  “Sarah’s mother is mentally disturbed,” Shelley said. “I never saw her react to anything.”

  Jess breathed in deeply. Is? She felt a spark of something and fumbled for it. Talking about this case with Shelley was like pulling teeth, and she couldn’t understand why. Wasserman too, for that matter. What were they hiding and why would they feel the need to hide it from her, when they had been the ones responsible for bringing her into this in the first place?

  “You’re wondering why that isn’t in her file,” Shelley said. “Evan and I have been going back and forth on this from the start. The fact is that there are some ethical and legal issues involved. But we all know that one of the most important aspects of diagnosis and treatment of mental disease is a family history, and you’ve been denied that.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Sarah’s grandparents are alive,” Shelley said. “Her mother too. They live in Gilbertsville, New York.”

  —10—

  The Newton Fliers’ Club meets every third Friday of the month in the Jacob’s Field Lounge. Made up of people who don’t have the money to own a plane privately, members contribute to the initial cost and maintenance by paying monthly dues and sign up for use of the aircrafts.

  Jess Chambers had been a member since she moved to the area two years ago. “Before that I logged my hours at a private strip back home,” she explained as she pulled through the gates of the tiny airport. “There was a man in my town who used to fly in air shows, doing tricks in an old single-engine Cessna he kept in his barn. They called him the Flying Frenchman. He ran a small farm with a dirt landing strip in a cornfield. To make more money he would crop-dust during the summers, and give flying lessons. He taught me to fly when I was twelve.”

  It was another thing she had learned to keep to herself. The truth was she had always loved planes and flying was something she had dreamed of doing since she was five years old.

  Most people said something like it was the last thing in the world they expected. Boys grinned and punched her in the arm, as if she were putting them on. Jean Shelley just looked at her from the passenger seat. “Your mother let you go up in a plane with someone called the Flying Frenchman?”

  “She had other things on her mind.”

  Shelley shook her head. “Interesting. And you’re sure there’s a plane available today?”

  “They said there’d been a cancellation. You’re not afraid to fly with me, are you?”

  “Of course not. I’m sure you’re very capable.”

  Jess stole a glance at her professor. She remembered Shelley’s look of surprise when she suggested they fly to Binghamton that afternoon. They could be there and back by supper.

  But this wasn’t just an excuse to log some hours. She needed to meet Sarah’s family. She needed some background on the case. And most importantly, she needed to know just what could be so horrible to make a mother give up her own child.

  “The family had been through too much and it was too painful for them. They agreed to sign a voluntary placement agreement, with me acting as guardian. There was a custody transfer. It was the only way they could deal with what they were doing.”

  “You mean they didn’t want to give her up?”

  “There’s more to it than that. I’d rather just let you see and judge for yourself.”

  She stopped the car in front of the one-room lounge and office and turned off the ignition. The engine ticked in silence. “Could I ask you something? Why did you decide to tell me about Sarah’s family now?”

  “I felt it was essential to your diagnosis and the development of your and Sarah’s relationship. I’d always felt that way, but Evan disagreed. The family had requested anonymity. And there are other reasons that you’ll understand soon enough.

  “I want you to know that ordinarily I wouldn’t agree to something like this. But I think we do owe you this much.”

  Jess nodded. “You’re sure you don’t want to call the family and let them know we’re coming?”

  “I don’t think they’d agree to see you. It will be more difficult for them to refuse when we’re standing on their front step.”

  The plane, a class-four V-tail Beechcraft Bonanza in brown and white, was tethered outside the lone hangar. The Bonanza had a variable pitch propeller, an oil-operated device that rotated on its axis and worked like a gearshift in a car; in high pitch the angle of the blades took a bigger bite out of the air and allowed for a higher cruising speed.

  It was her favorite plane. When she’d first joined the club she trained with a Cessna 150 High Wing. It took her three months to move up to the Bonanza, and that only because she had to find hours between her classes.

  Jess filed a VFR flight plan and prepared herself as she always did, checking the plane by hand, a familiar thrill hastening her step and quickening her fingers. It would be an easy flight and the weather looked clear. Soon they were on the runway and the throb of the engines increased to a steady buzzing pitch as she tipped the throttle, the edges of the ground flashing and blurring and finally slipping away as the plane lumbered into the air.

  Fifteen minutes later they were at a cruising speed of 150 knots. Jean Shelley sat silently by her side and watched out the window as the ground slid by far below their feet. Jess wondered again about her professor; what did she do on her off-hours? The legends continued to grow. When she’d mentioned to a fellow student that she was working with Shelley outside of class, the girl had looked at her as if she’d just sprouted an extra head.

  Some said Shelley belonged to a cult. It was rumored that she had spent a month in the Himalayas, searching for spiritual peace on the back of a donkey. There were stories of strange-looking bag lunches and greenish liquid in thermoses. And yet none of these things seemed to damage her professional reputation. She remained as aloof and unreachable as ever. It was as if her students were afraid to ask, for fear of what she might say.

  They rented a car in Binghamton for the drive to Gilbertsville, passed through narrow, shadowed streets lined with two-story clapboards and Victorians with new plastic gutters and sagging front porches. Dogs napped in long grass. Swing sets moved gently in the afternoon breeze.

  Jess stopped and asked directions at a gas station with two pumps and a sign that said PLEASE PUMP, THEN PAY. The girl behind the counter looked at her for a long moment and then got out a map. She ought to know better, the look said. We protect our own here. But Jess’s clothes and manner of speaking seemed to convince the girl she was up to no harm.

  The Voorsanger family lived in the foothills on land that looked rippled from above, crests of tree-covered forest and valleys with silver streams twisting through the depths.

  On the ground the area looked tired, as if the land were molting. The leaves were changing on the trees, some of them already littering the earth and turning the shoulders of road into bro
wn, soggy resting places.

  A dirt road led through a copse to a wide yard and a farmhouse with a long, narrow barn in back. The house was slowly falling to dust. A station wagon sat listing to one side on the lawn. Pulled off the shoulder was a pickup truck with wooden slats in the bed. Mud caked the wheel wells and spattered across the fenders.

  When they stepped from the car the air was crisp, clear, with a hint of smoke. Jess recognized the scent of burning leaves. Smoke curled up from behind the barn and they moved quickly in that direction.

  Damn but it was cold. Jess wished she’d brought gloves. Stuffing her hands in her pockets would keep her warmer, but she knew it would not look friendly.

  A dog barked from somewhere inside the barn. As they cleared the back of the house a man came into distant view, wearing overalls, a plaid hat with earflaps, and strong leather work gloves. He was throwing leaves and branches onto a fire already piled high and smoking thickly His breath puffed silver in his face. At the sound of the dog he stopped and brushed his hands together and then turned in their direction.

  “Mr. Voorsanger? Excuse me, Mr. Voorsanger.”

  The man stood motionless for a moment, as if deciding something; then he strode toward them. The front of his overalls was stained a dull brown. He was a tall, older man, grim-faced, with deeply lined cheeks and chapped skin. The lines in his flesh were so deep it looked as if someone had carved them with a knife. He looked worn and serious, a man who expected everyone to work as hard as he did.

  When he got near them he stopped; then, looking long and hard at Shelley, he said, “Thought we had a deal. You wasn’t supposed to come back here.”

  “That’s my fault, Mr. Voorsanger,” Jess said. “I’m the one responsible for bringing her here. We’ve come a long way to speak to you. If we could just have a moment?”

  “That ain’t possible,” the man said abruptly. “We don’t want nothing to do with you like we said before. Nothing’s changed. If that’s all, I got a lot to do.”