Addiction

by G. H. Ephron

  After that, I kept running, every winter, whenever I couldn’t get out on the river. And then, after Kate died, it became a compulsion. For an hour each day, my body was occupied.

  I threw on some sweats, strapped on my portable CD player and let myself out. I was locking my door when my mother opened hers and peered out at me. My mother lives in the other half of the two-family side-by-side that Kate and I bought just after we were married. My parents moved in after my father got sick. He died about a year later.

  My mother had on a pink quilted bathrobe, her white hair wrapped in a gauzy scarf. She looked tired and concerned. I knew it wasn’t just the early hour. We were both often up before the birds. “I saw the paper,” she said. “Wasn’t that doctor your friend?”

  “I found her,” I said. My mother gasped. “Her daughter was there, too.”

  “Daughter?”

  “Seventeen years old.”

  My mother squeezed her eyes shut. “Such things shouldn’t happen.” Then she eyed me. “You’re doing for that little girl?”

  “I’m doing for her.”

  “Good,” my mother said, and disappeared into her side of the house.

  I jogged to the river. Soon I was running along Mem. Drive, watching one sneakered foot and then the other hit the pavement, a Richard Thompson CD playing in my ears. The river was slate gray, not a ripple on it. Nothing more than a shadowy outline suggested that the Hancock Tower was on the Boston side of the river. Mist coated my face.

  I was barely a mile into my run, and already I felt steam rising off my body, stifling inside the heavy sweatshirt. Perspiration was dripping into my eyes. I wiped my arm across my forehead. Physical discomfort can be very reassuring, pinning you securely in the moment.

  That’s what I wanted. The physical present and nothing else. I tried to get there, to sync my strides to the beat of the music, to feel each foot hit the ground and the shock wave rise up my shin and then ripple from knee to hip. I pulled off my sweatshirt and tied it around my waist, yearning for even five minutes when all I could think about was my body and the effort it took to keep going. I could hear Channing’s patient voice: “Talk to me. That way I’ll know you’re breathing.”

  But instead of anchoring me in the present, I found myself replaying the phone call I’d gotten last night from Drew. First, he’d asked about Olivia. His speech was slurred, one word slopping up against the next. He’d probably been drinking. I told him she was stable but still sedated.

  He asked if I knew when Channing’s body might be released, so they could make plans for cremation and a memorial service. I had no idea, but I offered to call and find out what I could. The logistics of death are a wonderful thing—they provide a rhythm, a driving force for getting you through those first few horrendous days. They move the body and the brain forward when the spirit wants to roll over and surrender.

  “How did she look?” Drew had asked. “Her face. Did she look frightened?”

  I didn’t want to turn my mind back, to remember, but I closed my eyes and tried. “No,” I could honestly say, “she seemed peaceful. At rest, even.”

  Drew gave an exhausted sigh. “Thank God for that at least.”

  I asked Drew if he’d eaten any dinner. He dismissed the question. The worst part, he said, was being alone. Even the housekeeper, overcome with grief, had gone home to her own family. “I’ll be all right,” Drew said. “I made up the bed in Channing’s study. She’s here, you know. Her books. Her papers. Her smell.” I could picture him, curled up like a little kid in a blanket on the sofa bed. “It’s my fault,” he said, and noisily blew his nose. “I’ve been having an affair.” He added quickly, “It meant nothing.”

  That was the problem with suicide. Everyone wanted to take credit. Shoulder the guilt. Daphne blamed herself for not paying attention. Olivia had said it was all her fault. Now Drew was doing the same. Survivors engage in an endless game of If-Only-I’d.

  “You should see your doctor,” I said. “Don’t be stoic. Let him prescribe something to get you through the worst of this.”

  “I called. He can’t see me until day after tomorrow.”

  “Take it easy on the booze,” I said. “You’re depressed. Alcohol only makes you more so.”

  “It’s all I have,” he said.

  Many psychiatrists have a bathroom cabinet full of samples dropped off by generous pharmaceutical salespeople. But Channing wouldn’t. It was a side of medicine that infuriated her, another example of the incestuous relationship drug companies and physicians shared.

  Then I remembered—Daphne said Channing was taking Ativan. I described what the pills looked like. “I’m not a physician,” I said. “I can’t tell you to take them. But I can tell you that one or two twenty-five-milligram tablets will probably help, and the side effects are minimal, but don’t take one now. Wait until the morning, when you’ve slept it off.”

  This morning, I couldn’t get Drew off my mind. I’d always thought he and Channing had had a good marriage. Perhaps no fireworks, but a solid partnership. Then I recalled the young, dark-haired woman in the pastel suit at Channing’s party. Surely Channing hadn’t known. She might not have been able to stop the affair, but she’d never have tolerated the woman’s presence at her own birthday party.

  By now, I was approaching the MIT Boathouse. My body felt like a mess of ill-fitting parts, the muscles dragging the bones, the joints complaining. I pulled the headphones down around my neck. My warm breath filled the hollow in my chest. Even without the music, Richard Thompson’s words kept ringing in my ears. “The ghost of you walks right through my head … .”

  I approached the Harvard Bridge and pushed past the ache in my legs, finally feeling the endorphins kicking in and starting to blow the pain away. I put the headphones back on and cranked up the volume, trying to fill my head with sound so my mind could empty. I crossed the bridge, building momentum, and effortlessly whipped around the downward spiral onto the Boston side.

  When I’d asked Drew if Channing had been depressed by the JAMA article, he’d scoffed. “Depressed, bullshit! Pissed. Energized. She was planning to fight back. I told her she was tilting at windmills. She didn’t care. She was going to go after the drug companies and anyone else who challenged her, and she was relishing the fight.” That didn’t sound suicidal to me.

  When I got to work, I checked in with Gloria. “I can’t tell,” she said, when I asked her how Olivia was doing. “In shock. Or else she’s shutting us out.”

  “Did she eat anything?”

  “Not much.”

  I went to Olivia’s room. The door was ajar. I knocked. “Hello?” I said. Then louder, “Olivia?”

  No answer. I pushed the door open and put my head in. “Good morning.”

  A small suitcase sat on a table, open but not unpacked. The bathroom door was ajar. Olivia was nowhere to be seen.

  I checked the common area. Matthew Farrell was sitting at the ebony grand piano, picking out a wooden-sounding version of “The Entertainer.” Mr. Fleegle sat in a chair, tapping his toe and nodding to what little rhythm there was. The television in the far corner delivered its weather report to an otherwise empty room.

  I returned to the nurses’ station and announced, “She’s not there.”

  Gloria gave me a pitying look. “Looked real hard, didn’t you. She’s there. I just checked on her a minute ago.”

  “Then she’s invisible.”

  “Did you check the closet?”

  “Of course. The closet. Now why didn’t I think of that?”

  “She’s been in there since, well, since I got here.”

  I returned to Olivia’s room. In the corner was a tall, narrow wardrobe. I tapped on the door and slowly pulled it open. Olivia was jammed inside, crouched down, hugging her knees to her chest. Her face was turned away from me.

  I squatted beside her. Her forearm was bandaged. Her body was taut, every muscle straining to hold herself in a tight ball. Crumpled tissues were piled on t
he floor.

  “Olivia,” I said gently.

  She didn’t respond.

  “I see your father brought you some clothes. Do you want help unpacking?”

  Still nothing.

  I knew ordering her out of the wardrobe would only cause her to shrink further into herself. I thought for a moment. “Does it work?” I asked.

  Her head gave a little jerk.

  “Does it work?” I repeated.

  Slowly she lifted her head and turned her face to me. Her eyes were rimmed with red. Her skin looked white against the black hair. She looked at me as if I had two heads, but gave a dull shrug.

  “Can I try it?” I asked.

  A tiny smile tugged at the corner of her lips.

  Encouraged, I continued, “I don’t think there’s room for both of us in there. Why don’t you get out and let me have a go at it.”

  She was watching me, evaluating. Finally, she put out a tentative foot and then emerged from the wardrobe. She stood aside, arms crossed.

  I wedged myself into the closet and, by flexing my knees, I could just get my head in. I felt like a size-fourteen foot in a size-nine sneaker.

  “Does it work better with the door shut?” I croaked.

  She nodded.

  “Well, go ahead then. Let’s give it a try.”

  She had to push hard against the door to get it to shut. I stood there, inhaling the dust of crumbling fiberboard, feeling the walls close around me, bands of light sliding in through the louvers in the door. Good thing I’ve never had a problem with tight quarters. Still, I was relieved when she pulled the door open and peered in at me.

  “Thanks,” I said, and extricated myself, being careful to unsnag my belt loop from the door latch. “I guess not much bad can happen in there.”

  Olivia went over to the bed and sat up against a pile of pillows. She glanced around the room, from the gray window shade that spanned a large barred window to the small nondescript chest of drawers, to the heavyweight door with its curved aluminum handle. “Mom and I were going to go shopping,” she said.

  “Do you want to talk about what happened yesterday?”

  “She promised me. We were going to Beadworks in the Square.”

  “Olivia, I can hold the police off for a couple of days. At least until you’re back to some equilibrium. But there’s a detective who’s going to want to talk to you. It’s not going to take him too long to figure out that your fingerprints are on the gun.”

  “You think I killed my mother?” The words floated in the air, emotionless.

  “No, I don’t,” I said slowly.

  Olivia twisted one of the rings on her thumb. She pulled it off, chewed on it, and put it back on. “We were going to get the cobalt beads, and the turquoise … .” she murmured.

  “It would help if I knew what happened,” I persisted.

  A tear squeezed out of Olivia’s eye. “I don’t know what happened,” she said. “I was supposed to meet her in her office. I was late. I’m always late. She hates that about me.” A tear appeared at the corner of the other eye.

  “Did you hear the gunshot?” I asked.

  Olivia looked away. Then she squinted up at me. “No, I didn’t. When I got there, she was …” She stopped, unable to form the next word.

  “And where was the gun?”

  “In her hand.”

  “Why did you take it?”

  Olivia stared at her own hands. “We were going to go to the bead store,” she whimpered. She turned away from me and curled up into a ball. “I want all different colors,” she said in a monotone, “and I don’t want to talk to cops. No cops.” Olivia started humming under her breath.

  “Olivia, I’d like to call Dr. Smythe-Gooding.”

  Olivia hummed louder and curled tighter.

  “I need your permission to talk to Dr. Smythe-Gooding,” I said, my voice clear and intense.

  She mumbled something.

  “What was that? I can’t hear you.”

  She rolled back to face me, wide-eyed with anxiety. “No,” the word exploded. “She’s a sick bitch.”

  I tried to keep my face neutral. “If you’re not going to talk to me, and you won’t let me talk to Dr. Smythe-Gooding, then how am I going to figure out how to help you?”

  Olivia contemplated me. I could feel the wheels turning, calculating. “It’s hereditary, isn’t it?”

  “What?” I asked, though I was pretty sure I knew what the it was.

  “Suicide.”

  I could have given her a canned response: No, suicide does not run in families. So definite and reassuring. But the research didn’t support it. I hedged. “A lot of people would like to know the answer to that question. It’s true, the risk of suicidal behavior is increased by a family history of suicide. But it’s never the result of a single factor.” I pulled up a chair to the bed and put my face close to hers. “That’s a long way from saying that because someone’s mother committed suicide, because their grandmother committed suicide, they’re going to do it, too. There’s nothing inevitable about it.”

  She stared at her bandaged arm. “I want to die,” she whispered.

  I ran the words I could not ignore forward and backward through my mind. I didn’t think she meant it, but still I had to ask. “Do you mean that literally, or is this a feeling that things are overwhelming?”

  She picked at the bandage and sniffled. “Everything seems so … so hopeless.”

  It wasn’t enough to call off the suicide police. “Do you have a plan?”

  She looked at me with a flicker of amusement. “You going to make me sign a contract?” she said. She must have heard her mother talk about going through this drill with patients. “You’ve already got them checking on me every two minutes.”

  I leaned back. “I can’t take you off five-minute checks until I feel comfortable that you’re not a danger to yourself. I don’t think we need a written contract. But you have to promise me you won’t try to kill yourself while you’re here. And if you have any active thoughts of doing so, you’ll tell me or one of the staff immediately.”

  She swallowed. “I promise,” she said solemnly.

  I looked at her appraisingly. “Olivia, I also want to know about the pills you’ve been taking. How long have you been taking Ritalin?”

  “Maybe a couple of months,” she said vaguely.

  “And where did you get the pills?”

  “Get? Uh … well, I …” she stammered, picking at the bedcovers. She stared at me. “Dr. Daffy.” The disdainful tone took me aback. Bad chemistry was how Channing had described Olivia and Daphne’s relationship.

  “She started you on Ritalin?”

  Olivia nodded. “To see if it would help.”

  “Help what?”

  “My black mood, as Mother puts it.” She squeezed her eyes shut and grimaced, as if her own words sucker punched her. It would take her a while to absorb the seismic shift her mother’s death would make in the way she saw the world.

  “Were you having trouble concentrating?” I asked.

  Olivia shrugged. “I guess.”

  “How much Ritalin were you supposed to take?”

  “A pill in the morning and another with dinner,” she said, addressing her lap.

  “And that’s what you were taking?”

  Olivia looked away. “Yes.” It wasn’t very convincing.

  Her blood work showed higher levels of Ritalin than a therapeutic dosage. I wondered how long she’d been slipping herself extra pills. It can be a vicious cycle. Excessive doses over a period of time can produce habituation. Before you know it, you need two or three as much to achieve the same effect.

  “Have you been taking anything else?”

  “Just Ritalin.”

  “When they admitted you, they found other drugs in your pockets.”

  “Just Ritalin,” she said, glaring at me.

  “So what were you doing with …” I tried to remember what else had been found on her.


  “For my friends. Easy stuff to sell.” She seemed unconcerned.

  Channing would have been apoplectic. When it suited her goals, Channing had no problem flouting authority. She considered that civil disobedience. But this was breaking the law, another thing entirely. I wondered if Olivia saw it that way. Or was she using drugs as entree to kids with whom she felt like an outsider?

  “We’re going to wean you off the Ritalin,” I told her. Olivia looked frightened. “Gradually. We need to find out what you’re like drug-free. Then we’ll evaluate.”

  Her eyes went left and right, and back again. “Why can’t I keep taking Ritalin? I need it.”

  “I know right now you feel you need it, but it’s not at all clear that it’s making you better. It could even be causing some of the problems you’re having. Meanwhile, we’re going to make sure that nothing bad happens to you. That’s why you’re here.”

  From the white-knuckled grip she had on the blankets, she didn’t seem reassured.

  8

  MACRAE WAS leaving me phone messages, every hour on the hour. He wanted to interview Olivia, and he wanted me to come in and give a statement. I hoped he’d be happy with half a loaf. I canceled an afternoon meeting and drove to police headquarters in Central Square. MacRae fetched me from the busy front desk.

  I followed him through a maze of corridors to the Investigations Division. His office was a surprisingly neat six-foot cubicle. One wall was covered with Post-it notes. On the desk a standing rack contained a tidy row of manila file folders, the tabs labeled in blue marker. The way a person keeps his office can be as revealing as the way he interprets an inkblot. He pulled in a wooden chair from a neighboring cubicle.

  Solid and broad-shouldered, MacRae even sitting looked as if a touch in the right place would send him springing out of his chair. He turned on a tape recorder and asked me to say who I was and then to tell what happened. I told him everything, except the part about Olivia holding the gun. Then I asked him if they’d picked up any leads from the crime scene.