Dad didn’t appear to notice the pocked arms. “I suppose that’s true, Clyde,” he said softly. “Pie isn’t going anywhere.”
“And I know how to make all the flavors of the rainbow, Dad. All of them. And then some.”
THE NEXT MORNING, DAD FLEW HOME AND CLYDE MELTED BACK TO Jimmy’s, his pockets stuffed with the gift vouchers I’d bought him, supermarkets, chicken rotisserie chains. I hoped these would serve him better than cash. I bought myself a brand-new Hitachi, with the latest picture-in-picture and surround sound. Back at the Counseling Center, just before lunch, Charlie Polkinghorne called me into his office. A large framed lithograph of Arthur Ashe adorned one wall, and dusty hanging plants hovered behind his head. “Well, it’s confirmed,” he said, flipping open a file on his desk. “Investigation shows that your client, the suicide attempt, was indeed stockpiling her medication. Saving her daily dosage up, hiding it in her private space somewhere.” He looked up at me, thinning eyebrows knit. “Like a little pack rat, eh?” He shook his head. “Shows a great deal of premeditation. You had no clue?”
“No,” I said, rubbing my unshaven scruff nervously. “I didn’t see anything in her that—”
“Relax, my friend,” Charlie said. “This is strictly procedural here, I’m not pinning anything on you. You know I need to fill out these confounded forms for Albany.”
“Right. I know.” I took a deep breath.
“How did you come to recommend a shift from Zoloft to Elavil?” he said, glancing through the file.
“Well. I suppose I just—I thought she could benefit from a tricyclic, the Zoloft didn’t seem to be hitting the right buttons for her . . .”
“Of course, of course.” Charlie scratched a few notes. “Elavil is one of my favorite items in the toolkit. Would have done the same myself, in all likelihood.” He closed the case folder and turned a benevolent gaze upon me. “Put this behind you now, Frank. Remember, you are a valued member of our counseling community.”
When I returned to my office, I shut the door behind me and stood in the center of the room. Stared for a long time at lozenges of sunshine trembling on the floor, shadow and light shaken by the hot breeze that swept in from far away upstate, perhaps as far away as Oneanta County, then down along the Hudson and across the hills of Westchester to trouble the tired lilacs outside my basement window. I tried to think back. Back to M’s face as she requested “something stronger.” To all the sessions that followed, when she quickly studied her medication remand as she took it from me. Stockpiling. Of course. And I had been sure that I was helping her, that we had—for Christ’s sake—reached some “therapeutic stride.”
She’d had her own plan.
She’d played me.
Recognized me as a mark. Her mark.
How had I allowed this to happen?
And this fucked-up notion of “freeing her.” Just what were my motives here? This woman was a killer, after all.
But.
But perhaps she wasn’t. Perhaps it was self-defense, an accident, a miscarriage of justice. Perhaps M was just what I’d perceived—lost and lonely, bereft, catapulted into a terrible circumstance, plummeting in painful slow motion toward a fate so dire she’d grabbed her only chance to upend it. To end it. Willing to go to any lengths, to deceive whomever she needed to deceive, in order to ease her cares, to release herself at last.
SOMEHOW, I LANDED BACK IN MY APARTMENT THAT EVENING, I HAVE no clue how. I don’t remember driving down the Saw Mill, parking my car. I changed, hoisted my basketball, and wandered out to Riverside Park in a daze. The Hudson off-gassed a steamy mist, like a steam table in an old Eighth Avenue saloon. The last dog walkers meandered along the promenade. Down at the bankside courts, I began to shoot listless free throws, observed only by a mangy squirrel foraging through the trash can for its dinner. I tried to figure it all out.
The squirrel found a burger bun. A jogger pounded by. A helicopter buzzed vaguely overhead. The moon surfaced through the haze, softened, wavering, an underwater light in a murky swimming pool. And of course, the answer came to me, because it had been buried within me, just waiting for a moment of honest self-reflection.
Core concept: We age, we grow, we struggle very diligently to evolve and progress, but by some inescapable law of nature, the teenage self remains the essential self. The unalterable core. You can run from it, but it will run with you. It will follow you down every byway and basement corridor. And sometimes it will catch up to you, throw its gangly arms around you, dampen your neck with its hot breath.
I was in the grip of that high school freshman. That boy. And I was still in her thrall, still clinging to the locker-room wall, unable to tear my gaze away.
If a passing dogwalker had handed me a sketchbook, I could have drawn her wrists from memory. Delicate and knobbed, traced with veins of lavender under the ivory skin. I could have traced the arc of her eyebrows and the curve of her jaw. The tone and sheen of her hair, like copper brushed with rain.
I’d been unable to tear my gaze away, and I’d been blinded by her.
I WALKED THROUGH SECURITY WITH A STONY HEART A FEW MORNINGS after I saw M in the Psych Sat. Only one way to proceed, this was clear as could be. I tried not to blame myself—we in the therapist’s chair are no less human than anyone else. Sometimes a client is attractive to us—we share their secrets, after all, and laugh and cry together, and our hormones aren’t left behind in a box at home. Emotions arise. The intimacy of therapeutic exchange is intense. And when stirred, the therapist needs to reach deep inside for strength. Self-restraint, self-control. Self-deprivation.
I realized that I had to stay the course, stick to the decision I’d made during our last session before her overdose. Ensure no further contact with M.
I picked up my daily schedule from our receptionist, Imelda, her hair whipped up into an elongated shape, her head an exclamation point. “Hey, how are you, Doc?” She smiled.
“TBD,” I said.
Continuing down the hall to my office, I glanced at the sched. The name in my 9 A.M. slot.
I looked up. She perched there, the bench outside my office door, fidgeting nervously with the ponytail fallen over one shoulder. My lungs compacted, air became blockage. “Good morning,” I managed.
She rose, stepped toward me. “I’m sorry.”
The irises, variegated, the spray of pale freckles. Look away, I scolded myself. “You’re out of Psych Sat already?”
“I’m not. They send me back to population next week. I made a special request to come here.”
I opened my office door and gestured for her to enter. Muddled morning light smudged the room’s shapes. I left the overheads off. “You look much improved.”
She didn’t sit in the client chair. She wandered about a little as I set my papers and briefcase down. Aware of every step she made, the angle of her chin and where she rested her fingers, the corner of the cabinet, the chrome chairback.
“I’m so sorry,” she said again. “I hope my . . . what happened . . . didn’t cause any trouble for you.”
“Well,” I said carefully. “I suppose I was overly focused on my own deceptions.”
She glanced up at me. She didn’t seem to register this. “I came here to apologize. For seeing you under false pretenses.” She leaned one hip against the desk, looked at me with solemn eyes. “I wasn’t really interested in the therapy. Getting better. I just wanted to get out.”
I nodded. “Understandable,” I said. Moisture—where did it come from—popped up at my hairline. The small of my back.
I took a deep breath. “And you sensed I might help you.”
She raised her brows, confused.
“Because of our connection,” I said.
I attempted to compose my face, but it had gone soft and hot, like warm rubber, unable to keep its shape.
She slowly lowered herself into the client chair. “So you do remember me,” she said finally.
“The first second I saw you. Instantly. I kn
ew you.”
She stared at me, then lowered her eyes. “It took me a while,” she whispered.
“Your locker was outside the typing room.” She nodded. “You always wore this white denim jacket. And a Pegasus earring. You sat next to that friend of yours in Showalter’s trig class.”
“Ellen Something.” She lifted her eyes to me.
“You dated Brian Fuller. You did ceramics. Your car was sort of maroon brown. A Toyota hatchback?”
“Your powers of recall are much better than mine,” she said.
“You won the fifty-meter dash against Westlake.”
“Jesus.” She shook her head, studied her hands in her lap. “I don’t remember much of anything. But vaguely . . . just your name. It had a very slight echo.”
“I was shy. A shy kid.” I blushed when I said this. Ridiculous. “But now you see . . . we’re deep into ethical violation territory here.”
She sighed. “I didn’t think you knew me, but . . . I sensed you . . . I don’t know. Had a soft spot for me.”
“And that I’d give you the Elavil,” I added, quietly.
“But now I’m so grateful it didn’t work,” she said. “So grateful. I just wish I knew how I’m going to live my life.” Palms up in her lap, she seemed to read them for a long minute.
“So you were in my trig class.” She peered up at me again. “I just cannot remember.”
“I was shy back then,” I heard myself whisper again. I turned away from her. Out the window, up above the shrubbery, dark-breasted rain clouds hurried east, toward the oceans. I felt the most extraordinary burning in my chest. My heart was burgeoning, a bulb of pure adrenaline. My hand came back from my brow dripping.
“M?” I said, still staring up at the window. “How about we get you out?”
Silence. I could feel her eyes on my back. I turned to her. She regarded me as if I were a stranger on the bus.
“Do you know what I’m saying.” My voice had gone very low.
“Not a clue,” she said.
I sank into my chair again. “I really want to help you. And we have a kind of history. Don’t we?”
She didn’t say anything. I stumbled on. “You were . . . you are . . . a very key person to me.”
Across her cheeks, a pinkening. Rising gradually, like water through sand, grain by grain. “I’m not sure what you’re saying,” she said slowly.
“Truthfully, neither am I.” I rubbed my jaw, trying to summon some useful words. “See, I’m at a strange moment. In my life.”
She stared at me.
“I lost my practice, I’m divorced.”
“A lot of people are divorced,” she said. “That’s nothing. Jesus, that’s nothing. Look at me, for instance.”
I lowered my gaze to my desktop. “That’s all I can do. Look at you. Think of you. Think how I can help you. I’m feeling like I want to help you.”
The silence, for a long moment, settled in around us. It enrobed us. Her, me, desk, chair, cabinet, teakettle, the entire godforsaken room.
Then I vanquished it.
“It seems that counseling is not the solution, M.”
“It seems not,” she said. In her eyes, then. A distant flicker, as down a deep cavern. A remote flare of—I couldn’t quite see what. Alarm, maybe, or hope.
“I should just say it straight,” I said.
She nodded slightly. “Please.”
I leaned forward, steadied my hands on my desk. Didn’t stop the shaking.
“Escape,” I said. “We get you out,” I said. “You escape,” I said. “Out.”
Choice
10
September 1999
The snow. Surely the snow played a role. Hurled down from blackness, coming from nowhere, so otherworldly, so abundant. So transforming. The prideful city fell mute and pale. New York submitted. The snow took the upper hand.
A birthday party in Morningside Heights. This was five years ago. The weatherpeople marveled on the TV all night, cooing like new parents boasting about a robust baby. Two feet, two inches. Two feet six. And get this—two feet ten just called in from west of the Pelham Parkway. Unreal.
Only five people showed at the party. Five people and a case of so-so red wine. One of the people was Miranda, who had ridden a skidding bus uptown, balancing a boxed almond-cream cake in her mittened hands. One was the birthday girl, a graphic artist named Gillian, Miranda’s favorite on her floor at Jacobs-Hahn, with her laughing, skeptical eyes and streaked hair, spiked on top, twitching like insect feelers. One was the hostess, Ann, a pretty, cuticle-nibbling painter who knew Gillian from school, and one was Gillian’s boyfriend, a dandified stockbroker from Spain.
The last was Duncan McCray.
Miranda had reached the plateau of twenty-six. The why-not years were over. Nicky Scorza had given her a scare, she had been wary and abstinent since the incident with him the previous fall. She had ventured an occasional date, but kept the men at arm’s length. She avoided bars, she worked, she spent evenings reading.
“—and this is Duncan. Duncan, Miranda.”
He nodded. He said her name.
In the slotlike galley kitchen, taking the cake out of the box. Gillian barreled in and just managed to bang the half-broken door closed behind her, muffling the music and the sound of Ann’s high-pitched giggle. “Please, please get with him so you can tell me all about it,” said Gillian. “And I want every sordid detail.”
“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
“He’s checking you out, Miranda. And you are definitely checking him.” She leaned against the counter and grinned at her. “I can tell.”
Miranda eased the cake onto a platter. “He and Ann are sitting in that big chair together.”
“He’s her cousin, Miranda,” she said. Gillian chuckled. “I’ve heard legends about him. I wouldn’t recommend him for long-term investment, but in the short term, oh my.”
Minimetallic crashes as Miranda opened and shut Ann’s drawers, searching for a knife. “I’ve taken a vow of celibacy.”
Gillian turned and plucked a carving knife from a rack on the wall. “I can’t take my eyes off him,” she said, handing the blade to Miranda. “If Raf weren’t here, I’d be a lost cause,” said Gillian. She dipped her finger into the frosting, then licked it clean. “Yum. I love my birthday cake.” She looked up at Miranda. “So are you a lost cause?”
She bisected the cake, quartered it. It was far too large for this blizzard-thinned gathering. “Truly, I’m not.”
“Save your breath, Miranda.” Gillian held out a plate and smiled. “You and I always go for the same kind of men. You can’t fool me.”
Miranda left the party alone. She thought she did. But as she turned the corner for the elevator, there he was, shrugging on a black wool coat, winding a gray scarf around his neck.
“How’re you getting home?” he said.
Was it his eyes? Deep-set, darkest blue, watchful, reluctant, suppressing something, a submerged intent. She couldn’t look at them for more than an instant—not long enough to accurately read them.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “Whatever’s running.” The doors lurched apart; the elevator offered up its crimson walls and brass handrails, then welcomed and enclosed them. “How about you?” she ventured, glancing in his direction. His hair flowed just over the back of his coat collar. Brown with whispers of red. Like hers, a bit, but nicer, actually.
“I live around the corner,” he said. He turned to her, caught her glance. He smiled. “If you can’t make it home.” To her astonishment, she felt her pulse click into a new gear. The elevator’s descent seemed to be making her queasy. She looked away from him, trying to steady her breathing.
She didn’t sleep with him that night. She fled into the subway, which never came, so she ended up taking an intrepid radio cab home and paying thirty bucks. He called the next day, though, and after a cursory tramp through the snowbound Village, they ended up in her apartment. She was amazed
by how practiced he was; before she even noticed it, while she was still going through the pretense of making coffee, he was coming up behind her, reaching around her, undoing a button on her shirt. She carefully finished feeding water into her kettle, the stream quavering. Set down the carafe and turned to him, feeling as if her breath, maybe her soul, was abandoning her, but not caring, particularly.
There was a moment when she realized: she’d never felt anything like this, she’d never wanted anyone so much in her life. At that exact moment he stopped and held her away from him for a minute. Her breathing was ragged. He regarded her with—what was it? Detachment? Affection? “Too fast?” he murmured. “Because we don’t have to fuck, you know. I could just hold you.”
MIRANDA STARED AT THE CEILING OF HER CELL ALL NIGHT, THE WATER stains that, in the light filtering in from security, seemed to form a trio of sad faces. Sad, splotchy faces. She tried closing her eyes, reading, running through old radio lyrics in her head.
If you leave me now, you take away the very heart of me.
Sleep wouldn’t come.
This had gone on for a week. She dragged all day. At her new job in the literacy center, she’d been nodding off as the women beside her fumbled aloud through the stories about Bill and Jan that filled “The Adult Learner.” “Bill and Jan Cook,” “Bill and Jan Jog,” “Bill and Jan Fly.” One of her tutees caught her snoozing. “See? Books are fucking boring,” she said, throwing the thing down.
She could thank Frank Lundquist. The vaguely remembered schoolmate. Yes, she had tried to play him a bit, after slowly, slowly, it dawned on her. She could just about recall his name, from a roll call or class roster. Couldn’t bring his face into focus, he had left no impression, apparently. Still, a name, the faintest outline of a shared history, this was something she could work with. She thought she’d play it quietly and cleverly, but he had already pinned her, long before. Recognized her from the very first moment she darkened his door.
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