At some point shortly after the last of the other guests headed home, the hostess invited her to spend the night in the guest room and drive herself home the next morning.
Staying over in her host’s guest suite quickly became the plan.
The host and hostess poured some more wine. The three of them sat in front of the fireplace.
At that point in Hella’s story, I said, “I think I’m going to need some names. I’m having trouble keeping everyone straight. The host? The hostess?”
Hella said, “I don’t know anyone’s names. She wouldn’t tell me.”
“What?” My what? was puzzled, not challenging.
“The lawyer? She met with one Saturday before she met with me. He instructed her not to reveal the name of anyone who was involved in the rape in any way. The other people who attended the party. Anyone. He doesn’t want anyone to learn those identities. She said he stressed the need for discretion when she spoke with him on the phone, and then again when they met in his office. No names, no addresses, no directions, no license plate numbers, no vehicle makes and models, nothing that could identify anyone who was there.”
“Do you know the lawyer’s name?” I asked.
“No,” Hella said. “Only that he’s really tall. And very formal.”
She was describing Cozier Maitlin. Cozy was six-seven. He dressed like a lord. At various points in his career, Cozy had defended both Lauren and me, and he’d once defended Sam’s detective partner Lucy Davenport. Although I couldn’t understand why Lucy felt the rape victim needed a personal attorney, it wasn’t surprising that she’d given out Cozy’s name.
Cozy could be bombastic. But I knew from experience that he was a thoughtful advocate who had a purpose for everything he did during any case he was litigating. If he told his new client to keep her mouth shut, the advice wasn’t pro forma. Cozy had to be concerned about something specific.
But I didn’t know what it was. I couldn’t figure out why Cozy had directed his client not to use the name of the alleged rapist, and was even more puzzled that he was adamant that she not reveal the identity of anyone who’d been at the party. Regardless of Cozy’s legal rationale, because communication between his client and her psychologist was privileged, and thus protected from discovery, I was certain that he didn’t intend that his instructions to his client extend to her psychotherapy relationship. And although Cozy would have no way to know that Dr. Zoet’s practice was supervised, the privilege that the patient enjoyed with her therapist also extended to the relationship between the psychotherapist and his or her supervisor.
I began to explain all that to Hella. She stopped me; she already knew it.
“I told her the same thing, Alan—except for the supervision part. She said she explained to the attorney she was in therapy and she made it clear to him that she wanted to be able to talk to me about what happened. He told her that wasn’t a problem, he encouraged her to talk to me about what happened, but he also made it clear to her that even with me the safest thing was not to use anyone’s name.”
“Safest? Cozy used that word?”
Hella hesitated. “I think that’s the word she used with me, Alan. I could be wrong. Maybe prudent. I wasn’t taking notes at that point of the conversation. That’s the connotation, though. I’m sure of that.”
I remained puzzled. “You said she went to the police. Have charges been filed?”
Hella shrugged. “I don’t know. She went straight to the police when she woke up and realized what had happened. But as of yesterday afternoon—she and I met on Saturday, and talked on the phone for about ten minutes yesterday—no one had been arrested. Charges had not been filed. Since then? Maybe that’s why all the secrecy? Would that matter? If an arrest was pending?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“I may find out more later today. She’s coming in again after she gets off work.”
I said, “I haven’t seen anything in the news about this.”
Hella said, “There is nothing in the paper or online. I checked.”
Colorado has a rape shield law that protects accusers’ and victims’ identities by shielding their names and likenesses from public/media scrutiny. I wasn’t aware that Colorado had any kind of restrictions on reporting the names of alleged assailants, or of witnesses who might have been present around the time of the alleged crime.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened? Maybe the need for all the secrecy will become clear.”
Hella resettled on the sofa. “The way she told the story is important, I think. She was determined to remember everything she could, even little details that are probably irrelevant. I’m going to try to give you all her little details, just in case they turn out to be significant. This is my first real, big legal case. I don’t want to screw this up.”
I said, “Sounds good, Hella.”
“The three of them were drinking wine. Everyone else was gone. The housewarming had been catered by some famous chef. He had left. The bartender had left. The caterers—the servers—had left.”
The vague discomfort I was feeling about the story suddenly jumped up and barked in my face. I exhaled twice in a row, with no inhale in between. I thought, Did those caterers leave in a big white van, maybe? I was telling myself, No way. Can’t be.
“At one point, the woman—the hostess—got up to check on something. The host kept insisting she have some more wine. She agreed to have one more glass. The hostess came back. The three of them—the host couple and my patient—sat and talked. She said they eventually finished a bottle.
“My patient admits that she was a little drunk by then. She said she definitely would not have gotten behind the wheel of her car after they finished that bottle of wine.
“The hostess excused herself again to check on the linens in the guest suite. My patient offered to help her out. The hostess said she wouldn’t think of it—she said something about being so excited that they were having their first overnight guest in their new house.”
Shit, I thought. Oh shit. “First guest?” I said.
“They’d just moved in. It was a housewarming-type gathering. The couple wanted their old friends to see their new place. Want more details?”
No, I thought. “Yes,” I said. “Whatever you have.”
“The couple is planning to do extensive renovations and they wanted to show everyone the house and hear their friends’ thoughts so they could pass along any good ideas to their architect. The architect is apparently busy designing the remodel.
“They had set up a couple of drafting tables and had copies of the floor plans and pencils and rulers and things. They wanted everyone to sketch out their best ideas.
“My patient said the house has an amazing view of the mountains and the city that is partially obstructed to the west by an old shed or barn of some kind, and by a nearby neighbor’s house, which my patient said is not very attractive, and by the neighbor’s garage, which everyone agreed is out of scale and an eyesore.”
Not attractive? Out of scale? An eyesore?
“The people who threw the party own the shed, which they said they’re planning to knock down as part of the renovations. The host and hostess are worried that the neighbors might object to the demolition on historic grounds—the structure is apparently pretty old, original to some . . . ranch.”
It’s not a shed, it’s a beautiful old barn, meticulously restored by the previous owners.
Hella hooked her hair behind her ears. “One couple at the party knows the neighbors across the way, the ones with the ugly house and the big garage, the ones who might object to the demolition and the renovation. The woman in that couple said she wasn’t comfortable talking about their friends’ home. My patient said that the discussion became kind of awkward at that point, but that the hostess sensed it, handled it well. She moved the conversation on and got everyone talking about the addition they were planning to the main house. How big a footprint it should have. Where to put a new
powder room on the main level—there isn’t one currently, the guests had to use the bathroom in the guest suite. What kind of traffic flow they want. What walls to take down. Stuff like that.”
I WAS HIT BY AN INSTANT WAVE OF GRIEF. I had thought that after many months and many tears I was getting over Adrienne’s death, but the fresh sadness that she was gone, really gone, almost knocked me out of my chair. It sounded as though my new neighbors were determined to erase every trace of her.
My heart was ripping for Jonas.
“Are you all right, Alan?”
Rape, I reminded myself. There was a rape. I composed myself enough to say, “Yes, fine. I’m fine, Hella. This is a tough situation you’re describing, that’s all.”
Hella nodded as though she understood. She didn’t, of course, which was the way I preferred it.
I said, “I interrupted your story. You were saying that the hostess had left to check on linens?”
“Yes. My patient thought she’d been gone quite a while, but she came back carrying some pajamas and some fresh towels. Later on, she led my patient to the guest room. It’s on the back of the first floor, off of a family room addition. Sort of off by itself, she said. My patient thought it was probably originally a maid’s room. She said that the other bedrooms are upstairs. Three, or four, she thought. They got a tour at the beginning of the evening. One of the upstairs bedrooms was used as an office. One as a kid’s room. I hope I have all this right.”
She did. All of Hella’s patient’s architectural descriptions about the house were correct. Peter and Adrienne had added a two-story addition to the back—east side—of the house immediately after they moved in. On the first floor of the addition was a family room. Above it, an extension of the master suite. Peter had also lined one of the small upstairs bedrooms with floor-to-ceiling walnut bookshelves so that his wife, Adrienne, a urologist, could have a proper office.
“My patient thanked both of her friends for the party and said good night. She went to the guest room, shut the door, used the bathroom, changed into the pajamas, and climbed into bed.”
“She said everything about the guest room—the pajamas, the linens, the mattress, everything—was so much nicer than what she was used to. They left bottled water for her, a fresh toothbrush. New soaps, everything. She said she felt completely pampered in that guest suite. It was as though she was staying in the kind of hotels she saw pictures of in magazines.”
I had been in the suite Hella was describing before. I’d followed Adrienne in there once as she was preparing the space for a new nanny after the previous nanny had departed in a huff. Adrienne’s nannies mostly departed in huffs.
The nanny/guest suite at the back of the original house was a nice space, but I never considered it opulent. It sounded to me as though Mimi and Mattin might have spruced it up a bit.
I was impatient to get to the ending. I was waiting, almost literally on the edge of my seat, for the unknown acquaintance rapist to enter from the wings.
Hella said, “Oh my God, we’re out of time! I have an eleven o’clock.” She looked at me, then at her watch. “I’m not sure I can get back to my office on time. I may be late.” Her eyes revealed an emotion I had never seen in her face before—mortification pureed with disbelief. “I am never late, Alan. Never.”
It was true, at least with me. Hella was never late.
“Hella, that’s fine, I understand if you need to go. But I absolutely need to hear the rest of this story. I need to know what’s going on with your patient, both psychologically and legally, in case something comes up. I can’t be in the dark on this. What time are you done tonight?”
She hit some buttons on her phone. I assumed she was checking her calendar. “Six fifteen,” she said. “By the time I actually walk out to my car though, it’ll be closer to six thirty.”
I would still be with a patient at six thirty. “Can you come back here at seven?”
She was pulling on her jacket as she took two tentative steps toward the door. “I will really have to get something to eat. Blood sugar? Sorry. How about eight o’clock?”
That would mean I wouldn’t get home until well after nine. Lauren was going to be exhausted by then. Asking her to manage the kids and get them fed and ready for bed wasn’t fair to her, especially on an infusion day.
I said, “Do you have any breaks during the rest of today? Any brief windows when we could meet?”
Hella was at the door. Her purse was on her shoulder. Her keys were in one hand. Her phone was in the other. She said, “She is such a sweet woman, I want to go over and give her a hug and tell her she’ll get through this. But don’t worry, I won’t. I’ll check my calendar, and I’ll text you about possible times. Sorry, but I really have to go.”
12
The time between appointments for me can be brief. Seconds, literally. One patient leaves. The door closes behind her. I step down the hall to greet the next patient in the waiting room. Sometimes I’ll schedule three sessions back-to-back-to-back. Three is about all my bladder will permit.
Shifting gears becomes second nature. I’ve grown accustomed to leaving the intensity of one patient’s life behind as the door closes behind him so that I can permit the intensity of the next patient’s life to enter my awareness and become the focus of my concentration. Somehow in the short, solitary walk I make from my office to the waiting room, I am almost always able to clear my head and set aside whatever insistent emotional pressure I was feeling from the affective undertow of the previous session.
That morning, my ability to compartmentalize failed me. I couldn’t stop thinking about my supervision appointment with Hella Zoet and what had happened to Burning Man Lady shortly after she mused that the linens in my neighbor’s guest bedroom were the quality of a five-star resort’s.
BEFORE WORK THAT MORNING, I had dropped Lauren at an infusion center near Community Hospital so she could receive her monthly dose of Tysabri. The IV-only drug was a monoclonal antibody intended to prevent an acute exacerbation of her multiple sclerosis.
An MS exacerbation—the formation of scarring caused by an acute loss of myelin somewhere in her central nervous system—can be a small thing to an MS sufferer, or it can be a big thing. Many exacerbations are silent; a patient like Lauren wouldn’t know she’d had one of those until a routine MRI indicated a plaque in her brain that hadn’t been visible on a prior scan. Other new lesions—plaques—cause immediately apparent symptoms like vision loss, numbness, weakness, pain, or bladder problems. The list of possible new symptoms from an MS lesion is almost as long as the human body is complex.
With each new MS symptom, dice get rolled on the craps table that is multiple sclerosis. How those dice come up determines important things for the person with the disease. The new symptom, or symptoms, caused by the newly faulty neural wiring, might be transient—days, weeks, or months in duration—or the new symptom might prove to be permanent. Any recovery from the symptoms, if recovery occurs at all—that’s not a guarantee—might be complete, or the recovery might be only partial.
Partial may mean 90 percent resolved or only 10 percent resolved.
The remission that follows the fresh exacerbation may extend for years. Or the next relapse may come the same afternoon.
With MS, the dice are always rolling.
The major exacerbation Lauren experienced in Holland had robbed her of a lot. For weeks she was almost paralyzed in her lower extremities. These many months later, she was still too weak to walk without a cane. The prophylactic drug that Lauren had been taking before the switch to Tysabri knocked her off her feet for a day or more each week with severe side effects. Despite the fact that the new drug required her to schlep across town to get the IV, Tysabri was proving to be much less intrusive to her life. Once she left the infusion center Lauren usually felt as well as she did going in.
The Tysabri that was pumped into her vein that morning would do nothing to undo the damage from the last truck that hit her. The drug’s
sole purpose was to keep Lauren from being hit by the next truck, from suffering the next exacerbation. Because every MS preventative medicine—each more profanely expensive than the next—was nothing more than prophylaxis against a rare event, it was always an act of faith for me to believe that any of them was more than god-awfully expensive modern sorcery.
Although scientific data revealed that the drugs reduced exacerbation frequencies and disability profiles across a sample of MS sufferers, there was no way to be sure that any particular medicine was at all salutary for a specific individual. Like my wife. With Lauren’s MS, I had days I believed in Tysabri like I believed the earth rotated around the sun, and I had other days when I believed that MS was in the hands of a god whose portfolio included folly and fate.
Even during days when I believed in science, I had moments when I was sure I could hear the dice tumbling after they’d been tossed by that god, as he laughed.
WHEN I ARRIVED to pick Lauren up at the infusion center after my supervision appointment, she responded to my “How are you doing?” by telling me she was feeling “okay.” Between us, the word had a certain meaning. It didn’t indicate “fine.” It meant “tolerable.” Or “how I expect to feel.” It almost always meant Don’t inquire further, please.
I knew the dialect. I didn’t inquire further.
Lauren then asked me to take her to work, not back home, which had been the original plan.
“Do you have time for lunch first?” I asked. “I’m free until one thirty.”
“I’d love to,” she said.
I turned onto Ninth, the mountains to our right. “Do you feel up to walking a couple of blocks?” I was hoping to park at my office; midday parking near the Boulder Mall was always a bitch.
The Last Lie Page 9
