by G. H. Ephron
Jess continued, “Problems with concentration. Irritability. Labile affect. She broke down when I asked her if she’d ever thought about killing herself. She’s terrified that suicide is hereditary. And she’s next.”
It was succinct and to the point, though nothing I didn’t already know.
I grabbed a leather case from a storage closet and went to the dining room. Olivia glared at me. “When is this Kutrid or whatever it is supposed to start working? I still feel completely gross.”
I stood, rigid. Quit whining, I wanted to snap. Get past it. Think about something other than yourself for a change. But that would have been the caffeine withdrawal talking. I tried to relax the muscles in my back and shoulders, to release the tension from my neck and jaw.
“Do you need to take a break, or can we go on to another test?” I asked.
She shrugged. “You’re not going to make me write things, are you?”
“Not this time,” I said, putting the case on the table and unzipping it. Olivia watched as I pulled out an odd assortment of items. Forty-six in all. When I was done, they covered half the table. Olivia picked up the little brown-and-white plastic toy dog. I could see from her look that she didn’t think much of my so-called test.
I took the dog from her and put it back on the table. “As you know, we have some concerns about how efficiently you’re processing information,” I said. “It’s probably one of the reasons Dr. Smythe-Gooding started you on Ritalin.” A small moth fluttered close to my head, and I brushed it away.
“What do you mean, ‘processing information’?”
“It means how you make sense of the world and deal with it. Here’s an example. You take a person with information-processing problems and plunk them down in the middle of Grand Central Station in rush hour and tell them they have to be on a certain train. They become overwhelmed by all the people racing around, the hullabaloo—so much so that they can’t figure out how to get to where they’re going. They become anxious and shut down.
“But, take that same person and plunk them in Grand Central Station at midnight. In the deserted station, they can figure out where they need to go, no problem.”
Olivia still looked skeptical.
“In this test, the objects on the table are Grand Central Station. And the fact that I’m sitting here timing you makes it rush hour.” Olivia tried to contain a smile, but it leaked out the edges. “The test gives me some idea how you take in and categorize the world around you.”
“What do I have to do?” she asked.
“Just sort the items. Put the things together that go together. In any way you like.”
“How much time do I get?”
“Five minutes,” I said. Olivia eyes widened. “You’ll see, that’s actually quite a lot of time. Ready?”
Olivia nodded.
I started my stopwatch, and the second hand began its first sweep around the dial. Olivia tucked her feet up on the chair, hugged her knees, and rocked forward and back. She surveyed the table. She sighed, put her legs down, and propped her elbows on the table. She twiddled with her hair.
Abruptly, she stood up, knocking her chair over. “This is lame. Why do I have to do this?”
“Bear with me,” I said. “I know this feels babyish.”
She folded her arms and glared at the table. “There are too many things. And I’m probably already out of time.”
“You’re right, there are a lot of things. Sometimes people have trouble deciding where to begin. Why don’t you just start with one or two things and see how it goes. If you need help, I’m here.”
Reluctantly, Olivia sidled back into the chair. She put her elbows on the table, her head in her hands. Casually, she fingered the bicycle bell.
“That’s a good one to start with. Now what goes with it?” I asked.
She picked up a red ball and gave me a sideways look before putting it down, alongside the bicycle bell.
“Very good,” I said. As she worked, I took careful notes.
She added the sugar cube, the piece of candy, and the stick of gum to the grouping. Then she sat back.
“Great job,” I said.
To most of us, this test is straightforward. But it went right to the core of the problems Olivia had, structuring her world. For someone who gave equal importance to tasks like brushing her teeth and writing a term paper, picking a starting point when faced with forty-six items was a risky act, opening herself up to the shame of making a foolish choice.
“How about another group?” I suggested. She had three minutes left.
Olivia pushed the chair away. She got up and walked around the table. Then she sat back down.
She pulled aside the plastic dog and held it in her hand while she stared at the remaining items. Her gaze shifted to the edge of the table, where the moth was now resting. Her head tilted to one side as she watched it sit there, and then fly off. After that, her attention drifted and she started rocking, stroking the ears of her bunny slippers.
“Any other groups?” I asked.
She looked at me as if she wasn’t sure what it was she’d been doing. Remembered. And then concentrated once again on the remaining items.
Hesitantly, she touched the red picnic plate.
“Good,” I said. “Is that the beginning of a new group?”
She set the plate to one side. On top of it, she placed the plastic cup, the napkin, the silverware, a package of saltines, a chocolate kiss, and a candy cigarette. As an afterthought, she pulled over a little toy fork and spoon as well.
“Super,” I said.
Then she made another grouping with the hammer, matches, a jackknife, pliers, a screwdriver, nails, a padlock, and keys.
About a dozen items remained ungrouped. Olivia stared at them. Then she looked up at the ceiling. The moth now fluttering around the fluorescent light.
“Time’s up,” I said.
She was still holding the plastic dog.
“You did a great job. Let’s look at this group.” I pointed to the grouping with the bicycle bell, ball, and candy. “What would you call it?”
“Things that make you happy,” she replied promptly.
“What about them makes you happy?”
She rolled her eyes. “Sugar is sweet. You play with the ball.” She rang the bicycle bell and smiled. “I had one of these when I was little. On my purple bike. It had silvery streamers that came out of the handle.” Her eyes glazed over. “My mom taught me to ride it.” She brushed away a tear.
“And what about this,” I asked, pointing to the grouping of utensils and plates.
Olivia gave me a pitying look. “Things for eating, I guess.”
“What makes them things for eating?”
“Come on,” she whined.
“Just humor me.”
“Well, these are the things you put on the table, and you use them to eat your food. And these are toys. Like, you could pretend to eat your food with them. And these things, you eat.”
“Good. What do you call this next group?”
She looked at me sideways. “These are things you can hurt people with,” she said.
“Can you tell me more?”
“Well,” she said slowly, picking up the jackknife and opening it up, “you can stab people with a knife. Or hit people with a hammer.” She poked at the padlock. “You can lock people up, like I’m locked up, so they can’t get out. And they can’t go outside.” She started to cry. “And they can’t do anything but what you tell them to.”
I took more notes and waited, hoping her frustration would dissipate itself. More than a dozen other items, mostly at the edges, remained untouched. It was odd that she had omitted the toy gun and the bullet from the things-you-can-hurt-people-with group.
“Any other groups?” I asked.
She opened her hand. The plastic dog was in her palm. She set it on the table. “This is by itself. It needs to be taken care of,” she said.
I was reminded of the time I gave the
same test to a patient who was a loner. He had great difficulty relating to other people. He divided everything into two groups. One group, he said, were objects that went with other objects. The other group consisted of items that stood alone. That, in a nutshell, was that young man’s world—a place where he stood alone while other people were able to relate to one another.
Olivia’s response was nowhere near that extreme. But that little dog that needed to be taken care of certainly reflected her own need for the same. The extent to which drives and emotions ruled the way in which she organized the items spoke to how she was still reeling from recent events. It was also evident that she had a hard time getting organized, deciding where to begin, and making good use of her time. The average person makes about ten groups, Olivia had made only four. Psychological tests never cease to amaze me—so simple and yet so insightful.
I asked her to sort the items again, in a different way. This time, she created only three groups, leaving more items unsorted. The things-you-can-hurt-people-with group reappeared, again without the toy gun or bullet.
When I asked her to sort the items a third time, she said she couldn’t. There weren’t any other ways.
I had more testing to do, but I could already hear clattering in the kitchen as the staff prepared for lunch. If a single moth was enough to distract Olivia, she’d never manage to concentrate with the anvil chorus going on.
I wondered if my results were consistent with Daphne’s impressions. “Olivia, I’d like to call Dr. Smythe-Gooding,” I said.
“I don’t want—” Olivia started, her face hardening.
“Look, it will really help in determining the best long-term treatment for you if I can talk to her. She’s been working with you for a year. She knows …”
“She doesn’t know me at all,” Olivia said. “She’s always telling me that I have to stop being so stupid. I try. I make lists so I won’t forget things. I write down my feelings, but it doesn’t make them go away. None of it helps. She doesn’t help. She just makes me feel like an idiot.”
Olivia’s inability to organize her world must have baffled Channing. It was a shame that she’d turned to Daphne for help. Olivia and Daphne were a mismatch. Instead of building Olivia’s confidence and then teaching her new behaviors, Daphne had Olivia continually practice what she was weakest at doing. The wounds were picked raw, rather than bound and soothed. Self-confidence collapsed at a time in Olivia’s development when she was most vulnerable.
“How about if I promise to restrict our discussion about you to these test results?”
Reluctantly, Olivia agreed.
“You’ll be meeting with Mr. Ferguson this afternoon,” I said.
Olivia looked at me, solemn.
“He’s here to help you. Just be honest. Be yourself.” It sounded obvious, but it was the best I advice I could give.
I had bumper-to-bumper appointments all afternoon. I only had time to put my head in and say hello to Chip while he met with Olivia. Later, during a break, I was talking with Gloria when Kwan appeared.
“Sorry. I haven’t been able to find out what this is,” he said, holding out my mother’s white pill. “I suppose we could have it analyzed.”
Gloria picked the pill out of Kwan’s open palm. “Looks like what Ginger takes for arthritis. I recognize the shape.”
“It is for arthritis,” I said. “But isn’t Ginger your dog?”
“Dogs get arthritis,” Gloria said defensively. I remembered the Christmas cards Gloria and Rachel sent out each year, photographs of their cocker spaniel in a red bow and felt antlers. “Ginger’s getting on, poor thing,” she added.
“It’s probably got the same drug they give to humans,” Kwan said. “Probably safe. We just have to figure out how much …”
“You’d advise your mother to take it?” I asked.
“My mother wouldn’t go all the way to Canada and bring back mystery medicine. She’s nutty in different ways from your mother. You know, acupuncture and ginseng.”
I called my mother and told her why we hadn’t been able to find her pill in the Physicians’ Desk Reference. “It’s a veterinary medicine.”
My mother gasped. “You’re kidding me. You mean, for cows and chickens?”
“More like dogs and cats. Cows and chickens usually get slaughtered long before they become arthritic.”
“Is that what you think should happen to me now that I have a little arthritis?”
“Of course that’s not what I think. What I think is that it’s a crazy way to save money when you can afford to pay what drugs cost. And if you can’t, I can.”
“It just galls me …” my mother started, and was off on a tirade about how the drug companies were making their profits on the backs of the elderly poor. But I knew it was something else, too. My mother hates to pay full price for anything. I remembered the cold mornings my brother and I got schlepped to Union Square in Manhattan and stood on the sidewalk, huddled alongside her, jostled by the crowd of women waiting for S. Klein’s to open its doors. We’d be steaming in too many layers of clothing, inhaling a miasma of wet wool, mothballs, and hair spray. Our reward was pants that we’d “grow into.”
My mother had ended her rant. There was a silence. Then I heard footsteps. Then it sounded like a toilet flushing. “So much for their veterinary medicine! What do they think I am?” she asked, outraged. “A Siamese cat?”
Back in my office, my brain felt as if it had a fog machine going in it. I reached for my coffee mug. A reflex. I walked down the hall to the men’s room and doused my face with cold water. That didn’t help.
When I got back, my phone was blinking. I retrieved the message. It was Chip. “Can you come over and meet with Annie and me? The autopsy results show Channing Temple was comatose when she’s supposed to have shot herself.”
16
IT WAS nearly six by the time I made it over to Chip’s office. By then, there were plenty of parking spaces in East Cambridge. The new office was in a brick building shaped like a miniature airplane hangar. Before renovations it had been an auto-repair shop, and long before that, probably a stable and blacksmith’s. Double doors that would have swung open to admit a horse and buggy had been replaced by multipaned windows.
I climbed the stairs to the second floor. They had an old-fashioned oak door with a pebbled glass panel in the upper half and a brass doorknob that reminded me of the engraved ones on every door in P.S. 181. In black letters across the glass, it said FERGUSON & ASSOCIATES. And in smaller letters beneath that: SQUIRES INVESTIGATIONS.
The door was locked. I rang the bell. A minute later, Annie pulled the door open. A roomy, skylighted central area opened up before me. The space dwarfed the meager furnishings—a half-dozen file cabinets and a few industrial-strength steel desks.
“Nice digs,” I said, looking around at the beamed ceiling and exposed-brick wall. “Very nice.” I gave her a quick kiss on the mouth.
Annie glowed with pleasure. Her hand lingered on my arm. “As soon as our receivables turn the corner, we’ll have an assistant or two out here. In the meanwhile, I’m considering moving my futon in. This is a helluva lot nicer than my place.”
She took me on a tour of the five-room suite. I was relieved that the coffeepot was turned off. Nothing to tempt me. Then we went into Chip’s office. He was finishing up a phone call, his back to a huge arched window. In the distance, white cables supporting a new bridge were strung like a giant, inverted fan-shaped harp across the skyline at the northern edge of the Big Dig, Boston’s Herculean effort to bury its primary north-south artery and let mere mortals reclaim the heart of the city and the waterfront.
I recognized the Grateful Dead poster on the wall, now in a chrome frame. Chip had had it tacked to the back of his office door in the public defender’s office.
When he got off the phone, Chip got straight to the point. “The autopsy results turned up a fair amount of drugs in Channing Temple’s stomach. But even more had been metabolized. S
he was probably unconscious when she was shot.”
“Probably?”
“They always hedge. They’re putting together an arrest warrant for Olivia.”
“How soon?” I asked.
“MacRae wouldn’t tell me that,” Annie said. “But I think you can count on it by the end of the week.”
“Have you told Drew?” I asked.
“That was him on the phone, just now,” Chip said. “He’s frantic.”
I’d known this could happen—Olivia getting arrested for Channing’s murder. But knowing something intellectually and then having it happen are two different things. How do you help a seventeen-year-old prepare to be charged with murder? All my training in psychology came up short.
“How was your meeting with Olivia this afternoon?” I asked Chip.
“She’s terrified,” he said.
“Seems like an appropriate response.”
“The jury will want to like her. But she is off-putting. Not someone who gives you the warm fuzzies.”
“I like her.”
“That’s because it’s your job,” Chip said.
I started to explain that it wasn’t my job to like her, but I let it go.
Chip went on. “I wanted you here to help prepare for the arraignment. There are two ways we can go with this. Plead not guilty—someone else did it. Or not guilty and go with a Twinkie defense.”
“Better if someone else did it,” Annie said.
“Absolutely,” Chip answered, “but I want to be ready to go either way, depending on what kind of evidence they dig up.”
I wasn’t surprised at their reluctance to embrace a Twinkie defense—a defense based on diminished capacity. The Twinkie part of it goes back to a trial for a double murder in San Francisco. A city supervisor shot and killed Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk, another city official. The press reported that the defense team blamed the killer’s actions on Twinkies and other sugary junk food. Diminished his mental capacity.
As usual, the press got it wrong. What the defense actually argued was that the guy had a long-standing, untreated depression that diminished his capacity to distinguish right from wrong. He was incapable of the premeditation required for first-degree murder. How could you tell? Here was a guy who’d always eaten a healthy diet and suddenly, he’s bingeing on junk food. Eating Twinkies didn’t cause the depression, but it was evidence of it, like his lack of personal hygiene.
