A red, adult-sized ten-speed.
Chloe’s, he surmised. This boded well. If she’d been arrested, surely Ulrickson would not have left her bike out front.
He parked by the curb, got out and eased the door shut. The stealth of his mission made him reluctant to fling it shut with a neighborhood-rousing slam. He ran a nervous palm from back to front over his hair, straightened his tie, then walked up the flagstone path to the front door and pushed the bell. He could hear activity inside—a muffled female voice, with an Indian accent: “I will get it.” Footsteps. Then the door opened and he was looking into the face of a short, plump, dark-skinned woman who smiled at him, clearly puzzled. This, he realized, must be the home care worker, Deepti. He had not had the pleasure on his last visit.
“Dr. Geld,” Dez said in a lightly inflected Teutonic accent. He extended between two fingers a business card bearing the name and phone number of his old psychotherapist. The legendary sexologist had passed away a few years earlier. Dez, during his treatments, had had the foresight to steal a small stack of Geld’s business cards, on the theory that they might be useful to him someday.
Deepti took the card, looked at it, then back at Dez, uncomprehending. “I’m sorry …?” she said, handing the card back.
“I have a four o’clock meeting,” Dez said, repocketing the card. “With Mr. Ulrickson’s daughter. Vermont Department of Children and Families arranged it. A routine status follow-up.”
“Mr. Ulrickson is expecting you?” she asked.
“I believe so,” Dez said.
“He did not mention anything.”
Dez pulled a notebook from his jacket pocket, glanced into it, then put it back. “Yes,” he said. “Wednesday, four o’clock.”
She asked him to step inside. “Your name again?”
“Dr. Geld.”
She hastened away.
Dez consulted his reflection in the gilt-framed mirror that hung on the wall above a small crescent-shaped mail table. He admired his beard and modified Caesar hairdo (he had thought to finger-comb forward his thinning hair to mitigate the widow’s peak that was such a distinctive feature of his face). He flexed his lips and tongue, like an actor before taking the stage. Gradually, as his nervous system calmed, he became aware of a sound emanating from a nearby recess of the house: a young woman’s voice speaking in a gentle, incantatory manner. He had dismissed it as the murmur of a radio or television, but something in its familiar cadences made him realize that the voice belonged to Chloe.
He moved on silent tiptoe to the end of the vestibule, where he stopped and peered into the living space.
She was some ten feet or so down the room, seated, facing him, on a beige sofa. The younger child, the one he had stolen the sample from—the brat Maddy—was on her lap. Chloe, with one hand, stroked the child’s bobbed brown hair, and with the other she held a book from which she was reading aloud. Dez could just make out the title: The Little Prince. Directly in front of Chloe, with her back to him, sat Ulrickson’s wife in her wheelchair, immobile, hunched.
It was a picture of happy, healthy domesticity—of family harmony—the likes of which Dez had, in all his nights of recent insomnias, never once conjured as a possibility. He could not have said what, exactly, he expected to find at the house on this visit of inspection, but this wholesome tableau was not it. What could it portend?
He was about to pull his head back around the corner of the door frame, to feint back into the foyer, when Chloe caught the shadow of his movement, looked up and saw him. The beard and suit could not for a moment disguise him. The shock jolted her whole body. Dez saw a deep blush flow upward from the neck of her baggy gray sweatshirt into her face. With her eyes locked on him, she shifted Maddy onto the sofa and rose quickly to her feet.
She was plumper, better fed than he had ever seen her, and if he was not hallucinating, those shorts she was wearing (her legs were, if anything, more beautifully sculpted for all their extra muscle mass) were tennis shorts, and she wore anklet socks with pom-poms and a pair of those revolting puffy running shoes with the thick molded soles and despicable bands of nylon and rubber and webbing and God knows what else forming a garish pattern from heel to toe. With her hair pulled back into a ponytail, her lashes free of mascara and lids free of eyeliner, her mouth innocent of gloss or lipstick, she looked for all the world like a scrubbed and buffed upper-middle-class Connecticut preppie, a pampered daughter of the Northeast, jock-like, essentially sexless.
“What are you doing h—” she started to say, and then slapped a hand over her mouth. There was a sound of approaching footsteps. Her eyes flashed.
“Keep reading, Chloe!” Maddy cried.
Chloe sat down again and Maddy climbed back onto her lap. Dez retreated a half step into the foyer.
Deepti came around the corner from the hallway. “Mr. Jasper will be right with you,” she said and went into the kitchen.
A few racking heartbeats later, Ulrickson appeared. Dez noticed instantly that, in contrast to Chloe, he had lost weight, his blue dress shirt standing out from his neck, the waistline of his khaki pants cinched in with his belt. His face looked narrowed, almost gaunt, his eye sockets shadowed. Was this a product of overwork? Dez wondered. He had said, during Dez’s last visit, that he was writing a new novel—or was his emaciation the result of some other stress in his life?
“Can I help you?” Jasper said, stopping a couple of paces in front of Dez.
Dez explained that Vermont Child Services had arranged for him to do a psychological assessment of Chloe.
“I’m afraid that this is the first I’ve heard of it,” Jasper said. “Chloe?” He turned. “Do you know anything about an appointment?”
Dez, rising on tiptoe and peering over Ulrickson’s shoulder, caught Chloe’s eye. He nodded vehemently.
“I forgot,” she told Jasper. “They called a couple of days ago.”
“Oh—well,” Jasper said, turning back to Dez, who had dropped back onto his heels and rearranged his features into a bland smile, “it seems I owe you an apology.”
“Not at all,” Dez said. “Teenagers.”
“The thing is,” Jasper said, “Chloe saw a social worker just last week. We were told that she’s adjusting well. Better than expected. So I wonder if it’s really necessary—”
“A social work assessment is one thing,” Dez interrupted. He smiled with just a hint of condescension. “As a psychiatrist—a medical doctor—my job is to make sure that various deeper, psychodynamic needs are being met.”
Jasper nodded slowly. “I see,” he said. “So would this be a private session? I mean, would you need me or my other daughter too? We’ve had some group work.”
“Oh, no—purely one on one,” Dez assured him. “We will need only a private room, away from the rest of the family—not, however, the child’s bedchamber. A more neutral environment.” Jasper paused, thinking this over. “I suppose you can use my office,” he said. “I was about to take a break anyway.”
“That sounds perfectly perfect,” said Dez.
Jasper led him into the living room to meet the “patient.” At their approach, Chloe rose from the sofa. She shook Dez’s extended hand but avoided his eye. What, he wondered, has been going on here?
“Does Chloe have to stop reading?” Maddy asked.
Dez smiled down at the little girl. “I promise not to keep her long,” he said. Then he turned to Pauline. “And of course I know you. I’ve read your husband’s magnificent memoir—which is already a classic in psychiatric circles.” He bowed, bringing his face down to Pauline’s level. He saw her eyes kindle. Was she recognizing him? He quickly straightened.
Jasper led them down the hall and into his office. Dez swept his gaze around the room. It was, to the last detail, the clichéd writer’s den: Persian carpet underfoot, deep leather sofa and armchair, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, stout wooden desk upon which Dez half expected to see an old Remington typewriter. Instead, there was an iMac. A number of
framed posters featuring the covers of Ulrickson’s inane mystery novels were hung on the walls. Heavy curtains covered the one window. “Quite perfect,” Dez said. “Thank you.”
“And how long will you need?” Jasper asked, moving to the door.
“The standard therapeutic hour,” Dez said. “Fifty minutes.”
Jasper nodded, glanced at Chloe, smiled and then went out, closing the door behind him.
4
Dez waited until Jasper’s footsteps had faded, then he stepped quickly to the door and twisted the small latch under the knob, locking them in. He turned to face Chloe, who was standing, frozen, in the middle of the room, watching him. He saw her eyes flash quickly around, as if she were searching for an escape route. Indeed, for a crazed moment, she imagined diving for the window, clawing the curtains aside and clambering out to freedom. Instead, she turned her eyes back to him. Her lips quivered into a feeble smile that quickly died. He couldn’t help noticing that she did not run into his arms, as she would have done just a few short weeks ago.
“So,” Dez said, also holding his ground. “Alone at last.”
“Why are you here?” she almost shouted.
Dez shrugged, smiled. “Got lonesome. But let’s keep it down. I’d hate for our host to get curious.” He looked over at the leather sofa. “Come,” he said. “Sit.”
Without taking her eyes off him, she moved to the sofa and lowered herself onto its creaking leather. Dez sat on the armchair adjacent to her, assuming the position he would have taken if this were an actual therapy session, or a New Yorker cartoon. But Chloe, instead of lying on the sofa, remained sitting up alertly, her joined hands between her knees. (She felt ready, at any moment, to run, should he pounce on her.) Dez, unconsciously adopting the role of doctor of the mind, said nothing, simply regarded her with a quizzical expression.
“I thought you said we weren’t supposed to be in touch,” Chloe said. “I mean, until … well, until.”
“Correct,” Dez said. “And I am quite naughty for breaking my own rule. But I got restless, back home. I was curious as to how the plan was proceeding. And,” he added with a bitter little self-mocking smile, “I missed you.”
She looked away. Her brow wrinkled and she began to work her mouth as if she were rolling something around inside it. Apparently, she was not going to tell Dez that she had missed him.
“So,” he said, “can I assume, from this cool reception, that the plan has run into a snag?”
She continued to avoid his eyes. Almost a minute passed. Dez waited. Suddenly, she turned and looked at him with an expression of desperate, pleading appeal—an appeal for understanding, for mercy. “Oh God, Dez,” she burst out. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry! I would have told you. I should have told you. Probably fifty times I picked up the phone to call you. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.” She began to cry.
Dez, with all the cool dispassion of his former psychiatrist, said, “Take your time.”
She swallowed her sobs, and then wiped her nose with the inside of her wrist. “I knew right away that it wasn’t going to work,” she said. She described how practically the second she laid eyes on Jasper, in that courthouse, she knew that it wasn’t going to happen. His eyes were so warm and kind, and he looked at her with such love. A father’s love. She had never seen that look before. Every other man stared at her with hunger, sneaky desire or open lust. Not Jasper. He looked at her as if he wanted to protect her, to teach her things, to be an example to her. She must have been waiting for such a thing all her life.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I tried.”
On the long drive down from Vermont, she showed him her legs; she looked at him in that way that made men melt. But it had no effect. He didn’t react the way other men did. He continued to look at her like a father. And she felt so grateful. Grateful and happy. To be looked at as a person, as someone lovable. Not just—just fuckable. It meant everything to her. Could Dez see that?
“Please,” he said, “go on.”
Well, she said, when they got home, here, to this house, and she saw Pauline—that poor woman—trapped in her wheelchair, in her silence, and the little girl, Maddy, who was so brave and smart and funny and who was so happy to have a big sister—well, it made things even harder. Still, she tried! That first night, when the others had gone to bed, Chloe talked her way into his bedroom, sat on his bed, cried and got him to comfort her, and she climbed onto his lap and tried to make him kiss her. But he just held her and rocked her like a baby, and it was so nice, and that’s when she started to be sure that he wasn’t going to do anything bad, anything he shouldn’t do. And then he took her to her own bedroom and showed her everything that he had bought for her—and it wasn’t the things themselves, wasn’t the money he had spent, it was the thoughtfulness, the idea that he had devoted days and maybe weeks to thinking about her, thinking about what she might want, and then assembling these things and surprising her with them—well, really, it was then that she just knew. Knew it was impossible. That was when she became his daughter, became part of the family.
She started helping Deepti with the grocery shopping and the cooking and the cleaning and with looking after Pauline. She began reading to Pauline every day and taking her on walks through the neighborhood, pushing her wheelchair along the sidewalk. And meanwhile, Dad—well, she called Ulrickson “Dad” now, and it didn’t even seem strange—Dad got her a membership at the tennis club and she was learning how to play and she turned out to have a lot of natural talent for the game and she had made friends with some of the teenagers there—they weren’t half as snobby as you would think, even though they went to private schools, but of course Chloe was going to be attending one of those schools in a few days herself, and when she went for an orientation session last week, it wasn’t nearly so scary as she had thought it would be. All the teachers and the principal were so nice, and they assured her that it would not be long at all before she was up to speed with the other students. So before she knew it, she had just fallen into life here, with Jasper as her dad and Pauline as her mom and Maddy as her little sister and sweet Deepti. It all just happened.
“I didn’t want it to,” she said. “I never saw it coming. But I’m happy, Dez. I can’t help it, I’m happy. You know, I …” She paused, then went on in a near whisper: “What we had … it wasn’t right. Wasn’t normal. Now I can see what a normal life is. And it’s funny. From all the social workers I’ve been talking to, I see how I always wanted a dad, but I didn’t know it. I was messed up. I didn’t think I deserved a father. So when I met him—” She paused, then looked at Dez pityingly. “I’m not saying I didn’t love you, Dez. I did. I do. But it wasn’t right. What we were doing was not right. The sex. My social worker told me that what I really wanted was a daddy. I was sublimating, she told me.”
He felt an impulse to throw himself at her, to seize her with one strong claw around her tender throat; but he could not risk her crying out and, besides, there was the old problem of his aversion to violence. The thought of hurting her made his gorge rise. He choked out a question: “Are you saying you can’t go through with it, or you won’t go through with it?”
She gestured helplessly. “Both,” she said. “I can’t do it. He’s my father! He is my father now, Dez. And girls don’t sleep with their fathers! And I won’t go through with it because it wouldn’t work anyway. You don’t understand. He would never do it; he’s not like that. He’s good. A decent person. Not everyone is like—” She stopped, and pressed her lips together.
“Like me?” Dez said.
“I was going to say ‘like us.’” Then her expression grew excited, animated, like a religious convert bent on bringing a sinner the good news. “But I’ve changed, Dez. And you can too. I swear. It’s never too late. You just have to learn to see the good in people! And in yourself.”
She talked on in this vein, this dithery, inane, ridiculous vein—for all the world like one of those morons on Tovah. But he was
no longer listening. He was thinking. Thinking about how, in all his worst imaginings over the last five weeks, he had never pictured this turn of events, never admitted of its remotest possibility. How could he have been so blind? Really, he had no one to blame but himself. He could have—he should have—seen that the girl was not up to the task, that she was fatally afflicted with a conscience; all that weeping and wailing over the death of her despised mother should have been the tip-off. But he had not seen what was directly under his nose.
“Say something, Dez,” Chloe begged. “Please say something.”
“What can I say?” he managed, finally, to squeeze out through the strange constriction in his throat. “How could I possibly have anticipated how pathologically needy you are? How emotionally damaged and deficient?”
“Please, Dez,” she said, “don’t.”
If Chloe had been a very different person, he might have suspected her of having planned this double cross: letting him go through the dangerous and difficult machinations that established her as one of the rightful heirs to the fortune of a wealthy man, only to cut Dez loose and keep all the spoils to herself. But there was no question of Chloe being so duplicitous, so calculating. The problem was precisely the opposite: she was so fundamentally innocent, so malleable and impressionable, and that is why she had fallen in love with Ulrickson and his loathsome, freakish family—gone hopelessly native. A victim of Stockholm syndrome. That was why the plan had gone awry. There was, equally, no point in trying to force her back on track by issuing empty ultimatums, threatening to expose her to Ulrickson unless she continued with the plan. That would mean admitting his own role in the hoax, implicating himself. No. No, it was done. All done. He had lost. He would have to skulk back to the trailer park, tail between his legs, leave Chloe to the ideal life he had unwittingly bestowed upon her.
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