“WOULDN’T YOU SAY THAT’S A LITTLE EGOCENTRIC? TO ASSUME THAT you were the cause of everyone else’s misfortunes?”
Frank Lundquist could be such a pain in the ass.
Still, she found herself liking him. He had some strangely adolescent moves. For example, the way he flicked his head when his hair slid too far over his eyes. Tearing small notches in the rim of his empty tea cup. He was eager to help at all times, so unlike the rest of the somnolent, grudging staff at Milford Basin. It was touching, kind of. Also, sadly irrelevant. The man was merely a medium for getting the medication she needed. Still, in the weeks she’d been seeing him, she’d often found herself moved to reflection in his presence. Something about his manner—the fillip of concern in his questioning—lit up certain dusty corridors of memory, in a way she’d never expected.
The problem was, she didn’t want to start reliving her life right now. Now that she was ready to end it.
“We probably all walk the path we deserve,” she ventured.
“Come on.” He leaned his forearms on the desk, his eyes intent. She could tell he thought they were making strides. “You were a kid. A kid doesn’t deserve that.”
She shrugged. “What about original sin?”
“Are you a Catholic?”
“I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of going to confession.”
He sat back, his chair let out a groan. “Is there something you want to confess?” he said quietly. “It won’t leave this room.”
She didn’t like the way her heart revved at his question. She stood. “I just did that, remember? My mother’s rings. I was the culprit.”
“I think we’re moving forward,” he said.
“I think our time’s up,” she said.
THEN SHE LEARNED THAT ZOLOFT MIGHT BE TOO WEAK A DRUG TO do the job. Standing in line at the meds window waiting for her daily dose, she had met Delina, a pharma authority with three attention-grabbing gold teeth. “I know you’re cheeking the stuff,” Delina chuckled one day as they returned to the unit. Spears of summer sunlight pierced the long hallway through its slivered windows and flashed on her dental work as they walked and talked. “You’re looking to OD, I bet. I would, if I was you. Couldn’t handle that kind of time.”
Her hair was worked into tight knots across her head, rows of tiny dark cabbages. “You need Elavil or some such strong stuff, fifty, sixty caps’ worth. You come up with the cash up front, I might be able to help you out.”
They had reached the unit. Miranda nodded but said nothing as they filed through the door. “You let me know,” said Delina as she glittered on her way.
April, waiting for Miranda in the common area, witnessed this exchange with a scowl. “That is the worst news in this place. What could she want with you?”
Though five feet flat, April frequently stepped up to defend Miranda, and the ladies took note; they knew she was a veteran. The army had granted her a height waiver due to her lofty IQ and flawless marksmanship. “I was a sharp girl with a sharp eye,” she’d told Miranda soon after they met, as they fitness-walked the weedy, hard-dirt track that traced the perimeter fence. “In the service, I was the complete package.”
Now, Miranda put a hand on April’s shoulder, steered her into a quiet corner. “Delina said she could get me some pills, maybe.” April glared, disapproving. “Just for sleeping,” lied Miranda.
No, she hadn’t told April that she was leaving prison the easy way. Of course not. Miranda understood that she was the only person April had left on the planet. April’s father, a chief petty officer at a naval air base in Pensacola, had cut her off when she’d been convicted and forbade her mother to visit or even write to her. “Before I fucked up,” she told Miranda, “I was his girl.” Once she’d shown Miranda a gold bracelet he’d given her when she’d made staff sergeant, delicate gold links with a heart-shaped charm dangling below. She had never taken it off until she got to prison, where she kept it hidden at the bottom of a baby-powder bottle. Showing it to Miranda, she’d emptied the bottle onto a sheet of paper, fishing out the chain, rubbing the powder away with her fingertips to make the gold gleam. Her father had bought it in the jewelry district of Manila, she said. He had the heart engraved, To A from Dad. “That just touches me,” she had whispered as she showed Miranda these words. “Every time I read it, I feel like God loves me or something.”
Now her parents didn’t even send a card at Christmas. “He says I brought shame to their door. They don’t want to know me,” April told her. She still wept about it at least weekly, often daily.
Now she said, “You don’t want to trust the stuff that gets passed around in here. It’s half poison. Girls cook it up with Ajax and who knows what, Mimi.”
April had picked up the nickname from Lu. But from her North Florida lilt, it sounded sweeter. “You need sleeping pills, get it from the doctor.”
Miranda could only hope that she could continue compiling her stock of Zoloft until she had enough to do the job. She’d need at least six weeks’ worth, or eight, perhaps. Could she stand Frank Lundquist’s perturbing presence that long? His unwelcome attempts to dislodge carefully stowed chunks of her past. And what if, in the end, his meds didn’t work? The last thing she wanted to do was kill herself only to wake up alive.
As for April, Miranda tried not to think about what such a death would mean to her. Another abandonment.
A WEEK INCHED INTERMINABLY PAST, AND IT WAS TIME TO SEE HIM again. She navigated the barren corridors that smelled of chalky stone, like still-hardening concrete, though these passages had been built years ago. The final corridor led to a black steel door with a wire-reinforced window. Beyond it, rain streamed from the eaves, a glassy wall. The guard stationed at the security point, an older man Miranda didn’t recognize, looked over her pass. “You’ve got a few minutes yet. Stand here and see if the rain’ll ease up.” She was taken aback by his kindness. She searched her mind for an appropriate comeback. “Thank you,” she finally said. The guard returned to his Daily Racing Form, and she stood at the door, staring out through the scratched glass at the drops slamming down into the mud of Onida’s garden, flicking the begonias’ heads from side to side, making the yellowing tulip stalks, stripped of their blossoms, bob and weave. She tried to think about what she might say to Frank Lundquist.
She kind of wanted to tell him everything.
“You oughta get going, rain or no,” said the guard, nodding at the clock.
The buzzer sounded explosively, right next to her ear. She leaned into the door, and it opened, dumping her into the cold rain. She walked quickly, raising her face to its pelting.
She decided: she would not tell him everything. Instead, nothing.
In fact, she would tell him that she had no need to see him anymore.
Delina’s message stuck: Zoloft wasn’t the right exit strategy, the foolproof one she craved. She’d go back to this golden-toothed pill genius, or find some other way to get what she required. She had generally accomplished whatever she’d set her mind to, and she was going to free herself. End this misadventure, also known as her life. Talk about wasting time: Frank Lundquist was just wasting the little time she had left.
5
End Therapy When a Client Is Not Likely to Benefit from Continued Service
(Standard 10.10.a)
“That’s some downpour,” I said. Strands of her hair had slipped free from their restraints and were stuck to her cheeks. “A little chilly?” I took my jacket from the coatrack by the door and offered it to her. She declined.
“Fill me in. How are you? Besides wet, I mean.”
She squinted at the floor, as if absorbing some meaning from its pattern of scratch marks and rainy-day mud spots, then raised her eyes to me. “I don’t really think these visits are helping. This isn’t the right thing for me now.”
Current literature on therapist self-care warns us not to panic at a premature termination. A client’s decision to terminate therapy may very well be rooted in
the client’s resistance, and not in anything we have or haven’t done, say the experts, and it’s most important that one should never experience a termination as a personal rejection.
But nevertheless. A dark surge. Flash flood of dismay. I sat back in my chair, stared at her composed face, her lowered eyes. I realized: I simply could not let her go. Way too much at stake. Hers was the case that would lead me out of the wasteland, banish the depression that had been hounding me for the last year, since the Zach Fehler matter, since Clyde’s slide. Her progress would deliver mine.
“Listen,” I said. “It would be a big mistake for you to stop coming here.”
Her eyes, suddenly guarded, met mine. “Why?”
“You’re resisting something. I believe we’re going somewhere.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she snapped. “I’m never going anywhere. What can you do about that? How can you possibly help me with that?” She gazed at me in the most penetrating way. Against the small window, the rain fell heavier. A barrage of white noise.
I walked around the desk. I leaned back on it, facing her, within an arm’s reach. I took a calculated risk. “We are actually very much alike,” I said. “I understand a lot more about you than you think.”
She bowed her head, hiding her face in her hands. Her shoulders trembled. I looked down at the place where her hair parted. It was pale like a part of someone that you don’t regularly see. The space between the toes or under the arm. It seemed too private a part to stare at. I turned away, grabbed a few tissues from the box on my desk.
How I wanted to say, I know where your locker was, just outside the typing room. For years when I heard a manual typewriter I thought of you. I really care about what happens to you. Helping you suffuses my life with meaning. You have become my best reason to get out of bed.
But I couldn’t say that. Not now. The timing seemed all wrong. “Kleenex?” I offered.
I decided to use a judicious bit of self-disclosure, instead. Anna Freud believed that the therapist-client relationship could often benefit from the acknowledgment of a common humanity. “You know, I used to be in private practice,” I said. “I didn’t always do this prison job. I screwed up, and I ended up here. Kind of like you.”
She looked at me tearfully. “You couldn’t possibly understand what I’m going through here.”
“Hey, why don’t you try me.”
Shaking her head, she bent her face to her hands again. I squatted in front of her chair, offering the tissues. She took one, wiping her eyes. I rose and leaned against the desk.
“Do you have a life?” She looked up at me. “I mean, are you married, kids, all that?”
“I’m just finalizing a divorce,” I said, reluctantly. “No kids.”
“But you have your work,” she said.
“Yes, true. Though this is not where I imagined I’d be, at this point in my career.”
“Is it a pretty deadly job?” She sniffled. “I bet it is. A lot of stupid people, a lot of complaining.”
I shrugged. “Pays the bills.”
She held the wad of tissues over her eyes. “When I think about what I’ve thrown away.”
“What have you thrown away?” I said softly.
“Everything,” she whispered. She began to weep again. “A life. Possibilities. Children.” She wiped her nose. “I think I should go. I don’t feel like talking anymore.”
As she stood, crumpled tissues tumbled from her lap to the floor. I watched from above, feeling a strange sense of disembodied flight, as she crouched beneath me to gather them one by one. She straightened, tossed them in the trash, turned toward the door. I reached out then and grasped her wrist. “M,” I said. “Give me a chance.”
It wasn’t my touch, I think, so much as the way I said her name that made her stop, turn to face me. Suddenly, she seemed quite clear-eyed. Maybe she saw something right then. Some hint in my expression. Some hairline crack.
“Stick with this,” I said. “Have some faith.”
“Then get me a stronger prescription.” she said. “I want Elavil.”
CERTAIN CLIENTS RIPPLE YOUR PSYCHIC POND. ZACHARY FEHLER DID that, with his furious shiny little chocolate-drop eyes and the frown lines between his brows, the terribly selfish and incompetent parents. I couldn’t stop thinking about the kid while treating him. He had me pacing my living room floor late into the night. Winnie complained. The downstairs neighbors complained.
When I was still in training, I was assigned to a cancer-riddled Presbyterian minister, who was terrified of dying because he was sure he’d be sent to hell for beating his kids. He’d imagined what the underworld would be like down to the smallest detail, telling me about how the devil would flay the skin from the soles of his feet and make him dance on floors of glowing-hot metal.
I had nightmares for years after this man was dead and gone, the kind of nightmares that have you waking up shrieking and tearing at the bedsheets.
But my clients never knew how indelibly they marked me. This is why therapists burn out. Certain stories get incised in the mind. You hear Zach’s tale and you want to gather him in your arms and press his anguished little face to your shirtfront and take him for ice cream with sprinkles and sing him to sleep with soothing songs, but you can’t. You sit there trying to talk to him for forty-five minutes, twice a week. You do your play therapy, you ask leading questions. The time is up, and he is sent to the wolves again.
But this case, the case with M, would be different: I was determined. For her, I would orchestrate some unmistakably positive outcome, some significant change in her life for the better. Zach Fehler’s parents, in their lawsuit, had claimed that I’d done just the opposite with their child. That I—and my methods, the damned role-playing, the damned puppets, and yes, that one breach, those irretrievable seconds when I let myself slip. That blip. That somehow this, my swerve away from therapeutic detachment, had ignited his fury, turned it deadly. That his crack-up, the whole horror, was somehow my fault. I have always been 90 percent sure that this wasn’t true—but the doubt, the doubt enveloped by that last 10 percent, destroyed my practice, my marriage. It precision-bombed my self-confidence, naturally. One would expect that.
All would be set right with M though. Now that I had treated her for some weeks, I saw that this person, this memorable classmate, had reentered my life as a gift, an opportunity to do something true and truly good.
That’s how I found myself in the lofty reading room of the public library’s main branch, where, at rows of dark wood tables, the underemployed discreetly napped or basked in dusty slabs of sunlight. A staffer ushered me to a microfilm reader, and soon back issues of the New York papers whizzed before my eyes. I stopped when I reached June three years previous: EX-CONGRESSMAN’S DAUGHTER ARRESTED.
Charged with second-degree murder in a botched robbery attempt in Candora, a town in upstate New York. . . .
Police said the suspect had admitted to having disposed of a firearm in the Oshandaga River. . . .
. . . two men with fatal gunshot wounds, one identified as the captain of the Candora volunteer fire squad. . . .
. . . the other fatality, whom police have tentatively identified as the accused’s accomplice, was the co-owner of two New York City bars, one shuttered last year for drug violations. . . .
. . . the suspect’s father served one term in Congress, representing the Twenty-Eighth District of Pennsylvania from 1976 to 1978, and was later named in an influence-peddling investigation. Charges were never brought.
FRIENDS, FAMILY MYSTIFIED BY A PROMISING LIFE GONE AWRY. A longer piece.
Her boss at the marketing firm where M had worked: “She was a dream employee. We were grooming her. Our minds are boggled by this whole thing.”
M’s cousin: “If she was involved in this awful episode, it was not of her own free will.”
M’s close friend since college: “I worried about her relationships sometimes. She suffered a lot. But she’s an incredibly loyal per
son, she doesn’t give up on people.”
The state’s attorney in Utica: “We intend to prove that she knowingly participated in this crime.”
M’s attorney: “My client is innocent of the charges. This was self-defense, against a man she thought she knew. She had no idea what she had gotten herself into.”
A DAZED BUS RIDE HOME TO THE APARTMENT, WHICH, UNIMPRESSED by the summery glare outside, received me with its usual gloom and dark. I dug into the stacked boxes of albums in the coat closet and found my mother’s favorite Leonard Cohen. I hadn’t even thought of it in years, but now for some reason, fragments of its songs were rattling around in my mind. I lay on the scratchy sofa, an olive-green barge. I listened now to these not-my-taste but richly familiar tunes, and I wondered: What had I gotten myself into?
Throughout my career, I’d always tried to avoid a fusion of roles. I tried to build a high wall between my personal life and my professional one. But, to be honest, I often failed. It’s a major myth, that in a counseling capacity a person can listen with scrupulous detachment. Psychologists—even psychiatrists—are just humans, after all. Like everyone else, we carry our whole lives with us to the office, and we bring what we witness in the office home again at night.
I’d arrived at Milford Basin with my life in shreds. Practice lost, Winnie and I already talking to lawyers. So let’s say I had demons during my stint there. I wrestled them as I drove to work each morning, and too many days they refused to stay in my car, parked outside the electrified mesh. Instead, they followed me in and bedeviled me while I worked. If Lana started talking about how her mother always thought she’d take over her Aunt Fay’s hair salon, but she didn’t because she got hooked on the pipe, my devils would prick up their heads and start swinging around me, cackling like zoo chimps at feeding time. If Pet sobbed about her sweet baby who she left to die in a park one rainy night, my demons struck up a conga line and pranced jubilantly through my brain.
The Captives Page 5
