by Austin,Robin
In a search for Matilda Davenport, there’s no movie or TV show where Eunice may have plucked the identity. It doesn’t sit well that the woman’s records don’t reference Davenport. Either no one at Ashland is listening to her or Matilda isn’t doing much talking to them.
Two hours later, I’m as clueless about Matilda’s origin as when I started. Unlike Rodham, I don’t think she made up the name just for my benefit. The alter personality is too well developed to have come from random influences. My guess is that someone left a powerful impression over some period of time.
Before accepting a fourth gin and tonic, I order a coffee and head to my room. Roger Cohoon is now a distant memory, unless he haunts me in my nightmares. Still, I consider contacting him one last time to see if he knows anyone named Davenport. Brazened by booze, I kick myself for wimping out today. But if we talk again, it’ll be by phone.
The person who inspired Matilda’s identity could have been a teacher or social worker, someone forced to set foot on that pig farm, one that Roger may remember. Someone who showed Eunice a morsel of kindness before getting scared away by one of her demented kin.
In my room, I spread Eunice’s file out once again. From a sign-in sheet that Rodham provided, Eunice has received visits from Roger, two guardian ad litems, and a couple from the local Methodist church, Bob and Martha Blackwell. Five people in forty one years– six including me and none but myself in the last twenty four years.
Of course, visitations take place in the common areas including the grounds. Anyone could have spoken to Eunice, offered their name while trying to talk to her. Not likely, but I’ll keep in mind that other than the name, Davenport has no connection to the alter personality at all.
According to Ashland’s logs, Eunice has never left the facility– except for the time she slipped into the woods and was missing for almost two hours. Somehow, I doubt she met up with anyone named Davenport there.
I make a note to track down the Blackwell couple through the church. In considering the guardians, I recall how legal representatives and journalists make lousy comrades. My bet is on Christian charity, and I plan a trip to the church for the morning.
Returning to Eunice’s medical file, I search for a trigger to switch Eunice to Matilda. I need easier access to the woman, and I don’t want to push anymore of Eunice’s hot buttons.
Rodham says due to her low intellectual level, Eunice isn’t aware of Matilda– probably the reason he said not to ask to talk to her. The problem is that I don’t have the luxury of waiting for Matilda to surface at her leisure. So despite being told otherwise, I’m going to keep asking for her.
The first recorded entry of Matilda is October 1981, about two years after Dr. Kaufman came to Ashland. Penmanship was not Kaufman’s strength and I can’t read the exact date, but other than doodles, he wrote nothing but Matilda as well as the disturbing beautiful belle comment.
The next entry is November where he wrote, non-verbal and catatonic. Clearly, that session was with Eunice. There’s another entry in November that is illegible followed by one on December 28: Talking and primping. No infection. The infection is not identified or explained.
I flip through the nursing notes, which are barely more legible and find a December 23 record by a Dr. M. Horn or Hall at Ruston Memorial Hospital. From what little I can decipher, Eunice was treated for hypothermia, frostbite to a few fingers, confusion, then there’s something that looks like Xmas. The entry is the day she was found in the woods. Because of the poor copy quality, I nearly missed it.
So despite Ashland’s records to the contrary, Eunice was checked out of the facility at least once to go to the hospital. This event could have been the cause of Eunice’s dissociation, but Kaufman’s October entry would indicate otherwise, if it’s correct.
The man, the rapist, has little credibility to stand on. Kaufman could have been the very reason Eunice escaped to the woods. Entering Matilda in a prior entry may have been nothing more than a convenient cover.
My eyes are crossing trying to read the cryptic writing, and I give up to go fill the bathtub. I should call Rick and tell him I’m staying in town for most of the day tomorrow. Besides a visit to the church, I want to see if I can get Eunice’s complete records from the hospital. There may have been more than the single visit. I also want to go back to Ashland and try again to talk to Matilda.
I dread Friday night traffic, but I’d planned to have more information by now and don’t want to have an even more unpleasant phone conference with Palmer on Monday than already anticipated.
I bring my phone with me and slip into a steamy bathtub. My finger hovers over the speed dial. Even this late, there’s a good chance that Rick won’t be home. I’m not keen on confirming that fact.
While most people have discarded landlines, Rick and I have never discussed the matter. I can easily call his mobile, but there’s no telling what I might hear in the background. I decide to call him at his office in the morning and start to toss my phone to the floor when I notice a voice message. I listen then call my mother.
“Mom, what’s happened?” My voice is shaky. I always sound like a child when I talk to either of my parents.
“Relax, Jan. I should have called you back. Your father’s fine. They’re just doing a few more tests before releasing him.”
“What happen? Was he in an accident? Oh, God. A heart attack?” I’m frantic, sopping wet, wrapping a towel around me as I go to the bed. I don’t even recall stepping out of the bathtub.
“No, calm down. He… well, he got lost.”
“Lost? Where? What does that even mean?”
“He went out, for a walk, I guess. He got confused is all. Thankfully, one of the neighbors helped him get home. I just thought he should get checked out.”
“Confused?”
“Yes, I didn’t want to worry you dear, but your dad’s been forgetting things lately—”
“Since when?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a month or so.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? Has he seen Dr. Jamison?”
“Jan, calm down. You sound like you’re hyperventilating. And you’re slurring your words. Have you been drinking again?”
“Again? Mother don’t change the subject. I’m coming home. How long until they release him?”
“Don’t you dare drive in your condition—”
“Condition? What are you talking about? I had a drink after a very difficult day.”
“Sounds like you had more than a drink.”
“Mother, please—”
“Jan, honey, relax. We’ll be out of here in the next thirty minutes or so. Then we’ll be home and in bed long before you could get here. Do you want to wake us up?”
“Of course not. I just—”
“Good. I don’t want you to wake us either so come home tomorrow like you planned. It’s okay, really. I just thought you should know in case you tried to reach us at home.”
“That doesn’t make sense. We’re talking on your cell phone”
“I know, dear.”
I take a couple of breaths, feel my heartbeat slowing.
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Call me in the morning. Now get some rest.” Her voice is too calm to be so weak.
“Mom?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Did you try calling Rick?” I can hear the hospital’s paging system in the background. My mother’s waiting too long to answer my question.
“No, dear. I’ve got to go. Call me in the morning, okay?”
“I will.”
Confused? What does that mean? My father’s one of the sharpest people I know. A steel trap memory. A month? I talked to him last week and he was fine.
I dry off, slip on my nightgown, and hug my knees to my chest after pulling the blankets over me. I want to call my mother back and tell her she’s mistaken, ask her what’s really wrong. Instead, I replay my last conversation with my father in my head and realize it was all about me, about work.
<
br /> My father’s the reason I became a news reporter in the first place. He ran the town’s only paper when I was a kid, The Stratton Star.
I used to pretend I was Mary Richards and my dad was Lou Grant– an old TV show from the ‘70’s. I’d read the news that he wrote while pretending a camera was in front of his desk. Just me and dad in the news biz.
Funny, I can’t remember when I stopped going to his office. It must have been in high school. It probably wasn’t very cool by then.
I laugh at the memory, get a chill, and feel sick all over. Confused? Nothing ever got by my dad, not a single thing. He called himself a gumshoe reporter. He knew everyone in town. Stories came to him or at least he didn’t have to go far to find them.
“Shoot for the real story, kiddo,” he used to tell me. “Get the story if you want to be a good reporter, get the story behind the story if you want to be a great one.”
I’m trying dad, I really am, but I’m wondering if great might be overrated in some cases.
When I was seventeen, a syndicated paper gave him the option of selling The Star or being driven out of business. “I sold out, kiddo,” he’d said. By then I was busy thinking about college and boys, one boy, Rick. I didn’t hear those words then in the same way I’m hearing them now.
My phone is still in my hand and my finger hovers again. It’s almost eleven and I don’t want to wake Rick, nearly as much as I don’t want to find out that he isn’t asleep or even at home. I toss my phone to the nightstand and turn out the light.
Chapter Eight
§
I received my journalism degree from UCLA. Los Angeles, sun, surf, movie stars, dreams, promises. I went thinking I’d be the next Katie Couric or Diane Sawyer. Rick went too, to get his MBA. There was nothing we couldn’t be, no challenge we wouldn’t accept.
By the end of the first month, I hated LA. To me, it was nothing but wall-to-wall people, noise, traffic, and crime.
I wasn’t impressed with the dreams or the promises. Rick loved it and thrived. I persevered and in four years, I learned to be a journalist, learned just a little more than my father had already taught me. I also learned to rush and worry and distrust strangers, friends, and even Rick.
Coming home was like coming back to life after being in a coma or maybe being dug up from a grave I’d been put in by mistake. But it wasn’t those trying four years that was the source of my deep despair.
Right after graduation, I’d fallen down the stairs when moving out of my dorm room– according to what everyone told me. I spent over a week in the hospital and recalled nothing about why I was there or any events that had occurred weeks before my injury.
Rick said he’d taken boxes to the car and found me unconscious on the first landing when he returned. My frantic parents flew back to LA. Rick stayed at my bedside.
The diagnosis was coup contrecoup. A head injury, an impact so forceful it slammed my brain into the opposite side of my skull. The doctors insisted it was, as head injuries go, relatively minor. It didn’t feel minor, but after a couple of months I seemed fine, almost.
You’re young and healthy, my doctor said. He assured me the auras I saw around everyone and everything would soon resolve. The missing pieces of my memory would likely return. That didn’t happen.
Instead of fewer symptoms, I started seeing the shadows. At first, that’s all they were: dark spots out of the corner of my eye or when I moved my head too fast. I had my vision checked, told it was fine, told to give it more time.
Time didn’t heal and my life went on, sometimes without me.
Rick had stayed in Los Angeles to finish an internship. I got a job at The Stratton Herald, the company that had bought The Star. My dad’s old office had been torn down and replaced with a strip mall. My parents sold our home and bought a house half its size overlooking the ocean.
I tried hard to get back on track. Back in synch with friendly people, a slower pace, the wicked pretty landscape, chilly salted air, and strawberry rhubarb pie. Those New England staples were all still there. It was me who had gone and not come back, not the same me anyway.
The Herald had high expectations for me. The polished UCLA grad with such potential. I tried, I really did, but things were falling apart, then I did the same.
For reasons we didn’t discuss, my father called Rick and Rick came home. His internship had long since ended, his life in LA had moved on. Home was no longer home for him, and I was no longer the girl he’d once loved.
A year later, my father gave my hand to Rick, the man I vowed to love until death do us part. Rick was already dying by then. I was still trying to get out of the coffin; it takes more than being out of the grave to rise from the dead.
When I call the next morning, my father sounds as he always sounds. “Don’t worry about me. Just low blood sugar was all. Got put on a new diet. Guess I need to lose a few pounds,” he said. I knew he was lying.
Dr. Rodham’s agreed to meet with me. I need to make amends, push the reset button, and get a medical release signed so Ruston Memorial Hospital will release Eunice’s records.
At the front desk, a nurse nods her head in the direction of Rodham’s office after I sign in. I’m told Eunice will join me outside afterwards. “Aljala will help you with her,” she says. My new companion, although I agree that isn’t such a bad idea.
I climb the three flights of stairs, walk down the narrow hallway, pass the four plastic chairs, and knock on Rodham’s door.
“Ms. Abbott… Jan. Nice to see you again.”
Rodham is back to his consummate charming self, and apparently, ready to make amends too. Ashland wants this article as much as Palmer. One does what one must.
“I understand there was a problem with Eunice yesterday,” he says.
“That’s a tactful way of putting it.” I smile and even feel relaxed, even while sitting on his sofa again, even with the shadow lurking in the corner. “I made the mistake of bringing up her brother and the family farm. I believe it was my mention of the farm’s pigs that triggered her reaction.”
“Interesting. Pigs, you say? Must have sparked an old memory, one she likely doesn’t fully recall. I trust you won’t bring it up again. She’s normally very docile.”
That pinprick word again– docile. I want to tell Rodham that blind obedience isn’t a personality trait of a happy, well-adjusted person. Instead I assure him I won’t bring it up again then suggest these meetings might be too stressful for Eunice. He merely shrugs.
“What prompted the discussion in the first place?”
“Well, it wasn’t a discussion. I was trying to make a connection is all. Her brother Roger used to visit her. I thought it would be a pleasant memory. He asked me to tell her that he misses seeing her.”
“I see. So you went ahead and spoke with the brother?”
“Yes, I went out to the farm yesterday. As we discussed, to get some background information, which is relatively sparse from my other sources.”
“My concern is that you’re still intent on dredging up the past.”
“My concern is that I’m trying to write a human interest story about a woman I can’t seem to learn anything about. A woman who was severely abused, possibly raped, abandoned by her own parents, her mother for—”
“Raped? What do you have to support that allegation?” Rodham’s brow is tight. It’s the most emotion I’ve seen from him yet.
“Her older brother John was charged. The victim or victims weren’t identified, but Eunice was still in the home at the time. He committed suicide so I have nothing to support any allegation.”
“Well, you’ve been doing your homework.”
“I’m doing my job. How can I write about a woman who has barely a first grade education, yet is articulate, clearly intelligent, and knows things she couldn’t possibly know from living in an institution for over forty years?”
Rodham is back to tapping his steepled fingers, an annoying and repressive habit. “I understand your point.
I do. But again, where you will find your answers is here with Eunice, with Matilda.”
“I was trying to do that yesterday. Unfortunately, Eunice doesn’t communicate and Matilda is still a mystery that I can’t easily access. Unless you can clarify how to go about that.”
I wait but Rodham is still tapping, and I know it’s not possible to hear those taps, but I do. Dull thumps in sets of threes over and over.
“Did you have a chance to check Eunice’s file for any references to the name Davenport?” I say this too loud. Rodham glares at me, stops tapping, and doesn’t answer.
“She told me she was a Davenport like it meant something. I can’t find any Davenports in Ruston or neighboring towns. Matilda said she didn’t live at Ashland but was a good Christian woman who visited….”
“Yes?”
“Nothing. You’re right. I need to talk to Eunice and Matilda. I’d like to do that now if you don’t mind, but first I’d like you to sign a medical release for Eunice’s hospital records at Ruston Memorial.”
“I wasn’t aware she was a patient there. You’re not planning on getting her birth records are you?” Rodham laughs, sarcasm drips from his lips.
“Her records reference a visit the same day she was found in the woods. I want to see if she said anything to the doctors to indicate why she attempted to runaway.”
“I’m sure she neither told the doctors anything nor attempted to runaway, as you say. Again, what does this have to do with the article?” Rodham lowers his eyes, a calming gesture, then looks up with a smirk. “I’ll review the entry and take it under consideration.”
He doesn’t wait for my reply. He’s already calling for Aljala to retrieve and deliver me to Eunice. I’ve been dismissed and other than thanking him for his time, I leave without a second glance. The reset button clearly malfunctioned.
The sky is free of rain clouds and other than a soggy lawn, it’s a lovely day to spend on the grounds. Aljala’s smile is contagious and I feel almost better. He tells me Eunice is waiting for me,
