Phantom Limb

by Dennis Palumbo

  “I’m not afraid of anything.”

  I folded my arms. “Then prove it.”

  We merely stared at each other for a long moment. Then, grunting from the effort, she got off the chair and somewhat stiffly lay on her back on the office carpet.

  “Okay,” I said. “You’re dead.”

  She frowned up at me. “I’m dead? What the fuck—?”

  I didn’t answer, but instead took two chairs, a small lamp table, and the piles of psych journals from different corners of the room, arranging them in a vaguely rectangular pattern around her on the floor.

  “Your coffin,” I informed her, taking my seat again.

  She let out a long breath. “This is such bull—”

  I interrupted her. “Who’s viewing you in the coffin?”

  “I’m supposed to answer that? Christ, I hated this stuff in those acting classes I had to—”

  “Humor me. Who’s at your funeral?”

  A long pause. “My family, of course. What’s left of them.”

  “You mean your parents? Siblings?”

  “I’m an only child. As for my parents…I guess you don’t read the papers, do you, Doc? Or watch TV. Or go online.”

  “I know you’re estranged.”

  “We don’t speak, if that’s what you mean. They slammed the door in my face when I came crawling back to Waterson. To beg their forgiveness, try to fix things with them. Turns out, their pastor ordered them to shun me. In this day and age. Shunned! Like a fucking leper.”

  I said nothing.

  “I guess,” she went on, “from their point of view I am a leper. Corrupted in mind and body. Damned.”

  She frowned. “Been that way for years. You know, back in my Hollywood days, when I started making money, I used to send them checks. They were always returned, torn into little pieces. Then, after I came back here and married old man Harland—the fifteenth-richest man in the state, by the way; you could look it up—I sent them a humongous check. I’m talking a shitload of money. Plus the nicest mea culpa letter I could write.”

  “What happened?”

  “Both the check and my letter came back, torn to pieces.” A short, bitter laugh. “Praise the Lord.”

  ***

  Outside, the wind had risen, pushing harder against the trees. Reducing the familiar, almost comforting noise of street traffic to a thin, barely audible hum. I tried to remember if some early spring shower was in the forecast.

  Lisa was rubbing her eyes, glasses riding up and down on her knuckles. Then she very deliberately adjusted them again.

  I leaned forward slightly, looking down at her. “When you mentioned your family, viewing you in the coffin…”

  “I was talking about my daughter Gail. She still lives back in L.A. with her husband, Tim. He’s a wannabe-actor. Gay, too, but the stupid shit doesn’t know it.”

  Another bitter laugh. Then, without my suggesting it, she closed her eyes. Her breathing slowed. She seemed to be consciously, gradually, allowing herself to “die.”

  Lisa wasn’t an idiot. She’d quickly realized that I’d asked her to imagine lying in her coffin so that she could make real her suicidal ideation. It allowed her defensive armor to go down, her sharp wit to take a recess. In other words, “dying” gave her the freedom to express genuine, unfiltered feelings. A passive, unhurried way to…let go.

  “What’s your daughter doing?” I said at last. “Right now, at your funeral?”

  “Crying. Those big sobs, like when she was little. Like she can’t catch her breath.”

  “What about Tim?”

  “Tim’s looking down at me, not doing a fucking thing. But I know damned well what he’s feeling.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Guilt. And it’s about time. I had to die before he’d finally feel it, though. Ungrateful son of a bitch.”

  I saw the yearning on her face. And took a chance.

  “You sure he’s feeling guilty?”

  A resigned sigh. “Probably not. Tim’s probably glad I’m dead. Now he doesn’t have to pretend anymore to give a shit about me, just to make sure my husband keeps paying their bills. For the new house, new car, the kids’ private schools…”

  She opened her eyes. “Yeah, he’s glad I’m gone. Especially since he figures my husband will keep supporting them. Tim would throw a public hissy fit if the money stopped coming, and even he’s smart enough to know Harland Industries couldn’t tolerate it. All that bad publicity.”

  “But you clearly see that your daughter’s grieving.”

  “Only because I wanted to. She doesn’t give a damn about me, either. I don’t believe those tears for a minute.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Hell, no. But I…Look, truth is, I want them both to be sorry for how they’ve treated me. But you know what? I bet they won’t. I bet they’ll just go on, relieved not to have to deal with me anymore. Well, fuck both of them.”

  Lisa folded her arms across her chest. A long sigh, as she stared now at the ceiling.

  “Shit, I’ll probably even die for nothing, too.”

  I took a measured pause.

  “Lisa, when you talked about your family viewing your coffin, you didn’t mention Charles Harland. Where’s your husband in this scenario?”

  She smirked. “Might as well ask, ‘Where’s Waldo?’ I mean, you know the little bastard’s in the picture somewhere, but…”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “I’ll be clear as crystal, Doc. I’m not interested in talking about my marriage. I already know what everybody thinks: I married the old guy for his money. Which I did. End of story.”

  “Got it.”

  For now, I thought.

  ***

  We spent the rest of the session this way, Lisa on her back on the floor, glancing over at me on my chair as we talked.

  Despite some initial reluctance, she gave me a brief overview of her childhood history. Her father’s physical and verbal abuse, interwoven with Old Testament rants about the sins of mankind and the imminent End of Days. Her mother’s lifeless, submissive piety, devotion to church work, and profound, never-discussed depression. Lisa was only slightly more forthcoming about her own painful adolescence as a chubby outcast in conservative, blue-collar Waterson, Pennsylvania.

  “Ever been to Waterson, Doc?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Even when I was a kid, it wasn’t much of a town. Nothing but prudes and rubes. County Fair was the biggest event of the year. But, hell, it’s even worse now. In this economy? Place is like Mayberry on life support.”

  I tried to interject, to ask some follow-up questions about her upbringing. But she cut me off.

  “Forget all that therapy crap, Doc. Trust me, I’ve been through it all before, with a dozen therapists. Besides, we don’t have the time.” A grim smile. “In case you forgot, we got kind of a ticking clock going here, right?”

  “Right.”

  In brisk, emotionless sentences, she sketched out the details of her arrival in Hollywood after leaving home at eighteen, her big acting break in a low-budget slasher film that turned into an unlikely hit, and her first marriage a year later to one of the movie’s financial backers. A man twice her age, who turned out to be a drug addict, gambler, and both physically and sexually abusive.

  “I’ll skip the gory details,” she said, “but he was into a lot of weird, kinky shit. One of his favorite things involved duct tape and a tennis ball. He wouldn’t stop ’til I screamed.”

  Seeing the pained, sympathetic look that must have crossed my face, she let out a short laugh.

  “Sorry if I shocked you, Doc.”

  I paused, carefully considering my next words.

  “Actually, I’m okay with how I reacted. I mean, how would you feel if nothing you said imp
acted me at all?”

  She smiled. “Surprised.”

  I have to admit, I was feeling a bit disoriented. Not that I hadn’t dealt with suicidal patients before. But Lisa Campbell was different—sardonic, deliberately provocative. As though daring me to treat her, understand her.

  No. There was something else. It occurred to me suddenly that perhaps my role in our dynamic was to try to help her, but ultimately to fail. Confirming her belief that she was somehow defective, permanently damaged. Beyond saving. Beyond hope.

  However, before I could give this half-formed notion further thought, Lisa turned her face away from mine and went on with her narrative.

  This time I merely listened, keeping in mind Martin Buber’s sage advice: “People need to be heard, not answered.”

  ***

  After divorcing her sadistic husband, Lisa fell into what she described as “the usual drugs, sex, and rock ’n’ roll” of high-octane Hollywood life.

  “At first, I only slept with A-list actors. We’d go to these insane parties, girls like me. New starlets or whatever. We were all Grade-A pussy, believe me, and you just got put in the rotation. Horn-dogs like Beatty, Nicholson, Jagger—though Warren could be sweet. But it was all so fucked up….

  “I remember, toward the end, waking up one morning next to People Magazine’s ‘Sexiest Man Alive,’—at least for that year, you ought to see his sorry ass now—and we’re both covered in white powder. And I’m thinking, what are we doing in the snow, are we in Aspen or someplace? Man, I never saw so much coke in my life. I was so out of it, I just lay there, naked, watching the sexiest man alive, on his hands and knees, scooping all the blow he could find into one of the hotel’s laundry bags. So much for afterglow.”

  Her promising acting career had suffered as well. Given her youth and inexperience, it wasn’t surprising that she let her agents put her in one lurid, pointless film after another.

  “But at least I got to travel, see places all over the world. I remember, on this one shoot…”

  Suddenly her voice faded, and she swiveled her head, away from my sight. Gaze drifting lazily to my office window.

  “What are you thinking about now, Lisa? You seem to be going off somewhere…in your head.…”

  She turned back. “You mean, dissociating?”

  At my quizzical look, she smiled again. “Impressed? I played a psychiatric nurse once early in my career. Before she was gang-raped and strangled, I got to do a scene where she worked with a patient who had these dissociative episodes. See? Movies can be educational.”

  “Okay, nurse,” I said. “When you ‘dissociated,’ where did you go? What were you thinking about?”

  “Don’t get all excited, it’s not that sexy. I was thinking about the one good thing that came out of that first marriage. My daughter, Gail. A great kid, back when she was a kid. I used to take her on location with me. We used to—”

  She stopped abruptly, blinking up at the ceiling.

  “Yes?” I said quietly.

  “Hey, I said forget all that therapy stuff, remember? It’s not why I’m here. That was a long time ago. When Gail was a kid. When I was a kid. Now we’re both…different. I’m just old. And she’s a mean, entitled bitch with two kids of her own, stuck in L.A., married to a failed actor who works at Denny’s and flirts with the busboys.” She frowned. “The only thing those two are good for is spending my husband’s money. Okay, maybe it’s just chump change to him, but still it galls me.”

  Lisa reached up and removed her glasses, holding them in her hand on her stomach. Her voice was listless.

  “Anyway, unless you’ve been living in a cave, you know the rest of the story. Stalled acting career. Short second marriage to a studio exec who was into kiddie porn. Now I was a single mother raising a rebellious teenager, dreaming of making movies again someday. Years of struggle, rejection. All that money I’d made…gone. Just gone. Then things really turned to shit.”

  By this point, she was blinking back tears.

  “I got busted. Twice, for dealing and using. My drug addiction meant losing custody of Gail to my ex. No irony there, eh? In and out of rehab, all the time trying get my daughter back. Which I finally did.”

  “How?”

  “Easy. Suddenly her father was engaged to some skank who wanted kids of her own, and didn’t want a brat from somebody else’s eggs messing up the Norman Rockwell family portrait.”

  “Is that when you retired from films?”

  Lisa gave me another of those withering looks with which I was quickly becoming familiar.

  “Is that what you call it when nobody returns your calls, or can find time for lunch, or pretends they don’t recognize you on the street? Then, yeah, I fucking retired.”

  I was about to follow up with another question when I glanced at the table clock. Lisa’s eyes followed mine.

  “You’re shitting me! Is that it?”

  I nodded slowly. “I know, and I’m sorry. There’s still so much we have to cover if I’m to help you. We never even got to the question of why? Why you want to end your life…”

  “And whose fault is that? I said you had fifty minutes to talk me out of it, and you didn’t.”

  “Well, then we have a problem.” I looked at her as directly and intently as I could. “Because our time is up.”

  She regarded me skeptically.

  “So suddenly you’re a hard-ass? You’re going to just let me go home and do it? Without even finding out why? Thanks a lot.”

  With that, she slowly got to her feet, straightening her clothes with great care.

  “Wait a minute, Lisa.”

  No reply. Glasses back on, she made a point of looking away from me, toward the door.

  I took a breath. Actually, since Lisa was my last patient for the day, my next hour was free. But I was still going on pure instinct, plus a belief that she and I had made a real connection. And that the conventional structure of treatment scheduling was crucial to working with her. To providing a firm though supportive foundation. So I suggested something else.

  “Lisa,” I asked gently, “would you like to come back tomorrow, same time, and die again?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Absolutely.”

  She considered this for a long moment. “What the hell, why not?” Followed by a wry, mirthless chuckle.

  Not exactly a ringing endorsement of our work together, but I’d take what I could get. I knew that what I’d done with Lisa was clinically outrageous, therapeutically questionable. Maybe even actionable. Yet as far as I could tell, she was no longer intent on killing herself.

  At least, not today.

  Still, as I walked her out through the empty waiting room, toward the hall door, I figured I’d call Lisa in a few hours to confirm tomorrow’s appointment, and to assess again for suicidal ideation. But my clinical intuition—my gut—told me that my new patient was out of danger, at least for the foreseeable future.

  My gut was wrong.

  He was standing right there when I opened the door.

  Big, taller than me. Filling the doorway. In a black jacket and jeans. Eyes hidden by dark glasses.

  He had something in his hand. Raising it…

  I thought I heard Lisa scream, though it could have been the soundless, panicked screech exploding from my brain as the thing in his hand came down.

  And my head seemed to split open.

  And then everything—my life, my world—was gone.

  Chapter Three

  An eternity or two passed. And then I heard the voice. Hard, gruff, commanding. With a smoker’s rasp.

  “Hey, looks like he’s comin’ around….”

  A sudden nausea gripped me as I blinked, repeatedly, willing my eyes to open.

  When they finally did, I found myself on the sofa in my office waiting room. Star
ing up into the ruddy, scowling face of Detective Sergeant Harry Polk.

  “So, Rinaldi, you are alive….” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating a youngish EMT in hospital greens leaning in behind him. “Which means I owe Hornbeck here twenty bucks. I had you figgered for a goner.”

  I managed a faint smile. “Tough break, Harry.”

  Polk muttered something unintelligible and stood to his full height, rubbing the small of his back with both hands. As always, the veteran Pittsburgh PD detective looked aggrieved. Put upon. As though he always wished he were anywhere but here—no matter where “here” was.

  I’d come to know Harry Polk pretty well, having first met him when I became involved in the Wingfield investigation some years back. Though he was uncomfortable with my being a psychologist, let alone a consultant to the Department, we had arrived over time at a kind of uneasy truce.

  Polk was a burly, barrel-chested cop of the old school, with thinning hair and a drinker’s bleary squint. Now, vainly trying to straighten the wrinkles from his ill-fitting gray suit, he gave me a last, dubious look before stepping back to let the EMT take his place at my side.

  Lean and wiry, with a tuft of curly reddish-brown hair, Hornbeck unspooled his stethoscope and gave me a professional smile. Then he methodically checked my vitals, giving me another two or three minutes to come fully into consciousness.

  Which may have been a mistake, because suddenly I was aware of the searing pain at the side of my skull. Aware, too, of the memory of the big man standing in the corridor outside my office when I opened the door.

  Then I remembered something else. Lisa Campbell.

  Gasping from the effort, I tried to get up on an elbow. Another mistake, as a second volley of nausea coursed through me. I struggled not to pass out.

  Hornbeck raised his hand, as though to restrain me, but I batted it away.

  “Harry! There was someone with me before. When I was attacked. A patient—”

  “Yeah, we know, Doc. Lisa Campbell. Why the hell you think we’re here?”

  I looked past where Polk stood by the waiting room window, wearily shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Saw that the sky outside had grown dark, blue-black. Heard the whistling of an ominous wind as it threaded the trees below.