The Best Revenge

by Stephen White

  During our brief phone conversation the day before, had I even asked how he’d gotten my name?

  I didn’t think I had. Which meant I hadn’t.

  The previous day I definitely hadn’t been on top of my game.

  How can I be of help?” I said after Tom Clone seemed settled on the chair across from me. It was my stock opening line.

  “Do you know who I am?” he asked. His voice was hopeful. It was apparent he didn’t want to have to tell me.

  “Yes, I do, Mr. Clone.”I didn’t yesterday when you called, but I do now. “I saw some coverage in the news.”

  “Then you can probably guess how you can be of help.”

  “I could make a guess,” I said, “but my experience tells me that I’d probably be wrong.”

  He pursed his lips and exhaled through them. “This isn’t exactly my idea. Coming here.”

  I waited, immediately concerned that Mr. Clone’s presence in my office was court-mandated, though I couldn’t imagine under what legal circumstances that might have occurred. I took the opportunity to observe him. He was wearing what I guessed were new clothes. His shorts had cargo pockets on the legs, a fashion statement that wasn’t being made when Tom had entered the Colorado penal system. His feet were clad in Tevas. Ditto.

  I thought his body looked slightly puffy, as though he were still coming off an extended period on steroids. Something I’d learned during a consultation I’d done years earlier at Camp George West, a minimum-security facility in nearby Golden, was that inmates often grew pudgy during their time inside. The culprit was lack of exercise coupled with a less-than-ideal diet. An analogy came to mind and it felt right: Tom Clone looked like a frat boy who occasionally lifted some weights but had otherwise started to go to seed.

  “I’m staying with my grandfather. As part of the bargain, he’s insisting that I see somebody for therapy. He’s a good guy, but he’s stubborn sometimes. Hey, listen, I’m not saying it’s not a good idea, but I thought you should know the circumstances of my being here.”

  I waited some more, wondered if I knew his grandfather, and wondered whether he might be the source of the referral.

  “I guess since I have to do it, I’d like to make use of the time and get some help adjusting,” he said. “It’s so weird being here. Out of prison, I mean. I don’t want to screw it up. There’re a lot of people who would like me to screw it up.”

  I heard what might have been the rustling winds of paranoia, but reminded myself to allow the possibility that my new patient’s concerns were absolutely justified. “That sounds like a reasonable goal, Tom. Where would you like to begin?”

  Tom said, “You broke your arm.”

  “I tripped over my dog.” After four prior attempts at explaining my malady to patients that day, I’d distilled it down to its essence.

  He appeared to be about to say something else about my arm, or my dog, or my klutziness, but he didn’t. He said, “Thirteen years. That’s what they took from me. They took thirteen years that I’ll never get back.”

  The throbbing in my arm probably hadn’t stopped. But I suddenly wasn’t noticing it. I was confident that I was about to get a chance to do something that might renew my faith in the value of this work I did. I was anticipating that I was about to hear something that I hadn’t heard in all my years in practice. I was about to learn what it was like for a man to be incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit, what it was like for him to sacrifice, involuntarily, a huge chunk of the prime of his life to a miscarriage of our justice system.

  I was about to learn firsthand what it was like for him to watch his appeals dwindle like a winter’s supply of firewood while he waited for the final chill to arrive.

  What it was like to sit on death row waiting for someone to tell him “It’s time.”

  But that’s not exactly what Tom Clone began telling me about. Instead, he began telling me about his ride home from prison. More specifically, he began telling me about his conversation with the warden and about the woman who picked him up and drove him to Boulder.

  He went into great detail telling me about an FBI agent named Kelda James and the perfume she wore and the white jeans that hugged her ass and the run-in that they’d had with sheriff’s detectives from Park County and how fast she had filled her hand and the cop’s face with the barrel of a Sig Sauer, whatever that was.

  “When she pulled the gun on that asshole, I thought—sweet Jesus, I can say anything here, right? You can’t tell anybody? Good. This isn’t being taped, is it?” He twisted his head left and right as though he half expected to see a camera sitting on a tripod across the room.

  I opened my mouth to explain the limits of confidentiality, but my explanation was quickly overrun by the continuation of his narration.

  “When she had that gun pointed at his nuts, I was scared, sure, but I was also thinking this woman was the hottest female on the planet Earth. The way she took him down, stood him up, backed him down. Oh man! She never wavered, I swear. He tried to act tough but she had him pissing his boots.

  “Sexy? Oh, let me tell you. After where I’ve been and what I’ve been through, that barely begins to describe the way she was. I swear my single goal right now is to find some way to get back in touch with that woman.”

  I wondered when he would stop to take a breath. I hadn’t detected an inhalation from him for a while.

  “First, she’s gorgeous. I mean hotter-than-hot gorgeous with a body that shows no sign of her years—I mean, she’s not exactly twenty-five anymore—and then she sends this guy packing and then the next minute she’s down on her knees changing the tire on her car like she practices doing it every night when she gets home from work. I swear I’ve never seen a woman do something like that in my life.

  “And then? And then—you’ll love this part—she takes me to the damn Broadmoor Hotel for breakfast. She’s the sexiest thing in the world and she’s driving me up to the front door of this great hotel. I’m thinking I’m dreaming, this can’t be happening. I’m an hour out of the damn penitentiary and this fox is taking me to a five-star crib.

  “I can tell you honestly that breakfast was the furthest thing from my mind as we walked into that hotel lobby. Have you ever been there? It’s like, oh my God, I just wanted to reach into my wallet, pull out my credit card, and get us a big suite overlooking that damn lake and those mountains. That’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t care what it cost.” Abruptly, he slowed his soliloquy. “Problem was I didn’t have a wallet, and I sure as hell didn’t have a credit card. I’m stuck wearing these crap clothes they give you to leave the damn pen, and I don’t even have a fucking wallet to stick my damn hundred dollars in.”

  He grew silent and for a few seconds his mind seemed to go somewhere I wasn’t supposed to accompany him. I was about to point that out when he brightened and started talking again.

  “Did I tell you about the cartwheels? I didn’t, did I? Okay, okay. Here’s that part. This is good.”

  He told me about the cartwheels. And the back flips.

  And then he returned to his plans for getting back in touch with Kelda James.

  The whole time, I remained oblivious to the pulsing pain in my arm. I was too busy casting aside all my assumptions about who Tom Clone might be. Caution was imperative, I knew; I couldn’t begin to fathom what this man had endured over the last baker’s-dozen years. I was certainly prepared to discover that the man sitting across from me was a poster boy for post-traumatic stress disorder.

  Before the time was up, Tom and I agreed to meet again the following Wednesday.

  “Do you know,” Tom asked just as the final moments of our session were approaching, “that I actually made it through all that time inside without a single tattoo? I’m proud of that.” He held out his arms for my inspection, then rotated them so that I could examine both sides.

  “Congratulations,” I said. I don’t know why I said it. Maybe it was because he seemed so sincere.

  “Yep,�
�� he replied cheerfully.

  CHAPTER 13

  Kelda James was one of the reasons that I had started to work late on Thursday evenings. A month before, when she’d called me seeking an initial appointment, my Thursday schedule ended at five forty-five. But I’d agreed to see Kelda James at six o’clock. So now my Thursdays ended at six forty-five. Why did I agree to stay late for her? I figured that I had three reasons.

  One: At some level, I suspected she wasn’t going to be wasting much of my time lecturing me on the vicissitudes of dishwasher loading.

  Two: She was an FBI agent and I thought it would be interesting to hear about her life. Number two was, admittedly, a rotten reason for agreeing to see a new patient. But there it was. I couldn’t deny it. The truth was that, had Kelda James been a produce manager at Whole Foods or a marketing consultant at IBM, or spent her days disinfecting laboratories out at Amgen in Longmont, I might have referred her on to another therapist rather than agreeing to extend my workday.

  Reason number three for agreeing to treat her even though it meant staying late? Reason number three was complicated.

  If Lauren had spotted Kelda in my waiting room, she would have argued that reason number three was even more pathetic than reason number two. She would have maintained that reason number three I was seeing Kelda was that she was more than pleasant to look at.

  I didn’t even want to approach the entrance to that cave, so I didn’t. I was self-aware enough that I knew I was at a stage in my career and my life where I could barely tolerate an increase in professional self-doubt.

  So what wasmy reason number three for agreeing to treat Kelda so late in the day? Call it rationalization—Lauren probably would; Diane definitely would—but I had a suspicion that I was the right person to help Kelda James.

  However burned out I was feeling, I wasn’t burned out enough that I’d stopped caring about that.

  The day after I broke my arm, Kelda was late for her appointment, not arriving until ten minutes after six.

  During our very first session she’d warned me that she wasn’t going to be punctual for therapy, that sometimes she’d cancel sessions at the last minute, and that at other times she would not even be able to cancel—she’d just not show up. Her work was like that. She didn’t ask whether it was okay with me. She just wanted my consent that I’d live with it.

  I’d thought about it for a moment that day and finally explained to her that I’d wait for twenty-five minutes for her to show up for her sessions. If she didn’t arrive, during her next appointment we’d discuss her rationale for not showing up. If her excuse didn’t involve FBI business, I would charge her anyway.

  “Deal,” she’d said.

  Patients come in to see a clinical psychologist for a lot of reasons. Some are sent by others: Husbands by their wives. Teenagers by their parents. Employees by their bosses.

  Or, as I’d recently learned, exonerated murderers are sent by their grandfathers.

  But mostly people come to see people like me because they are in pain. The pain is usually not new. Typically it is pain that the patient has lived with and endured for months or years or even decades. The patients come in to see a psychotherapist like me because something has changed that has caused their tolerance of their pain to crumble. The pain has gotten justthat much worse. Or they’ve decided they can’t live with it anymore.

  Something.

  Kelda’s motivation was a combination of the two categories. First, she was certainly in pain. There was no doubt about it. And second, she’d been sent to see me by someone else. Her referral to me was made by her Boulder neurologist, Larry Arbuthnot. What was unusual about treating Kelda was that her experience of her pain was more corporal than psychological. Larry was treating Kelda for chronic pain in her legs, and part of his willingness to continue to treat her while he searched for a diagnosis that would explain the agony she suffered was his insistence that she see someone like me to assess possible concomitant psychological components of her condition.

  Patients being treated for what they consider to be purely physical illnesses usually don’t like to hear that their physicians are thinking that there might be a psychological component present. Kelda was no different. She’d spent much of her first three sessions with me displaying resistance to the idea. I was already prepared to spend a fourth, and fifth, and a ninth and tenth session doing the exact same thing. It hadn’t taken long for me to recognize that Kelda James’s will was something to behold.

  The only topic other than Kelda’s physical pain that we’d covered in any detail during those initial sessions was the story of Rosa Alija. I remembered the little girl’s name, of course, from the blanket news coverage of her kidnapping and rescue, and could have related the gist of her story myself. Rosa was the Denver child who’d been rescued by Kelda in dramatic fashion a few years earlier. I still recalled that one of my more cynical friends had commented, after her rescue, that Rosa Alija was “the metropolitan area’s antidote to JonBenét Ramsey.”

  For some reason, people do tend to forget the names of heroes sooner than they forget the names of villains or their victims. But Kelda James had proven to be different. I think half the population of the metro area could still have identified her as the person who had rescued Rosa Alija.

  Along Colorado’s Front Range, Kelda James was a certified hero.

  Not surprisingly, her impression of herself was different. She’d informed me, “I’m not a hero. I’m just an average person who was lucky enough to save a little girl. Some days I’m not even sure I qualify as an average person.”

  “How so?” I’d said.

  “I’m sorry about how things happened that day. I’m sorry that I had to kill the guy. I wish I could do it all over again, and do it differently.”

  “How would you do it differently?”

  She didn’t blink. “I wish he wasn’t dead.”

  I made a puzzled face. I was eager for her to keep talking.

  She still didn’t blink.

  After all the years I’d been doing psychotherapy, sometimes I actually knew when to shut up. This was one of those times.

  A few seconds later Kelda finally said, “Rosa still suffers. She’ll probably suffer until she dies. Her parents still suffer. Their agony will never end. So why should that monster rest in peace?”

  Oh.

  Although the possibility of a psychological connection seemed so seductive, I reminded myself that the pain in Kelda’s legs had developed years before she’d saved Rosa Alija. There couldn’t be a connection, right?

  I was almost convinced.

  I asked, “And you?”

  “What?”

  “Do you still suffer, too?”

  She blinked and looked away from me.

  “It’s not about me,” she said.

  “No? Well, this is,” I replied, waving my hand between us.

  I thought she shook her head, but the movement she made was so constricted that I wasn’t totally sure. I thought at the time that she was daring me to start digging, and I admit that I was tempted to put a shovel in the dirt right then and there.

  I didn’t. I made a judgment that the alliance between this patient and this therapist wasn’t secure enough yet.

  Was my failure to heft the shovel evidence of clinical acumen? Or was it clinical cowardice?

  As she left the office that day, I generously decided that the jury was still out on that.

  It would turn out to be one of many things I would be guilty of misjudging regarding Kelda James.

  The first words from Kelda’s mouth in the waiting room the day after my run-in with my poodle were, “Oh my God, Alan! What on earth did you do to your arm?”

  I tried the Cliffs Notes version. “I tripped.”

  “Are you okay? Does it hurt? When did you do it? How did it happen?”

  “I just did it yesterday, Kelda. It’s still a little achy, but I’ll be okay when I get used to the cast. Come on back to the office.”r />
  Less than a minute later she settled onto the chair opposite mine and watched me struggle to lower myself into position. “We can cancel. Why don’t you go home and take care of yourself? You must be miserable.”

  “Thank you for your concern, but I’m okay.” My reply was intended to acknowledge her compassion and to redirect her to focus on to the reason she was in my office.

  “You’re sure you’re all right?” The fact that Kelda couldn’t distract herself from my broken arm was every bit as meaningful as was the fact that Tom Clone had barely noticed it.

  “What happened?”

  I told her about tripping over my dog. The story sounded sillier every time I told it.

  She wanted to know if the dog was okay.

  I decided to try being more direct with Kelda. “Yes, the dog is fine. What about you?”

  She sighed and adjusted her position on the chair while the fingers of her left hand kneaded the muscles on the outside of her thigh. I wasn’t certain she was even aware she was doing it.

  “You asked me to try to remember when the pain started. What was going on in my life?”

  “Yes,” I said, although I hadn’t actually asked her to remember. I’d suggested that it might be helpful for her to remember. I noted the slight translation she had made.

  “You’re sure you’re okay?”

  I said I was.

  “I think, looking back, that the pain started when I was in Australia, living in Sydney. It may have been earlier but I think it was then. I think I told you about Australia. Didn’t I?”

  I shook my head.

  “The insurance company I worked for when I first got out of college had an office in New South Wales. One of my bosses in the accounting department was sent over to supervise an internal investigation of some fraud they suspected was going on in the Australian office. He asked me to come with him to Sydney to help with the investigation.

  “At some level I knew he asked me to go only because he figured he could get me to sleep with him, but I was fresh out of school, I was twenty-four years old, and I thought, hey, what a great opportunity to get to see some of the world. So I went to Sydney, and ended up being there for almost six months. I loved Australia—just had a terrific time—and I learned most of what I know about forensic accounting while I was there. It was a wonderful period in my life.”