by Linda Barnes
“Would she cancel the wedding?”
“If I asked her to, I suppose, but I’d never hear the end of it.”
“Do you want her to cancel the wedding?”
I watched Jessica Franklin closely. I’d heard of brides having last-minute regrets, wanting to call the whole thing off, but not having the nerve. Some catch the last-minute flu; a few make a run for it. I wondered if the note had been folded and placed in her handbag by none other than the bride herself. It was such a personal way of delivering bad news. If she hadn’t placed the accusation of infidelity in her own bag, I wondered whether she’d considered what the method of delivery meant: an enemy close enough to touch.
What kind of person was Jessica Franklin? It’s hard to make any kind of judgment about a person in crisis. Jessica at work—she was in the billing department at St. Elizabeth’s hospital—might have been clever and competent, but the Jessica in my office was an emotional mess, and that was the only snapshot I had to go on. I wasn’t sure which she needed more, a psychiatrist or a PI, but there she was, sitting in my client chair, and I don’t do therapy.
“You want me to find out who sent it?”
I hoped she didn’t think I’d be able to lift fingerprints off the document, wave a magic wand, and reveal the name of the miscreant in five seconds flat. Fingerprints were out. The thing had been handled and the paper wasn’t the sort I could deal with at home. If I’d still been working Homicide, I could have sent it to the state crime lab and waited a year for results.
“I—I don’t care who sent it. I just want to know it isn’t true.”
“Have you asked?”
“Asked Ken?” She spoke as though it was absolutely out of the question, an impossibility, as though the man in the moon or the prime minister of Canada would have been a more logical choice to ask instead of Kenneth L. Harrison, the groom listed on the invitation.
Probably, I thought, she should just call off the wedding, no matter how much money had been spent, no matter the shame and humiliation. If she couldn’t ask her intended a simple question, how would they be able to stay married when the questions came thick and fast later on?
When I nodded, she hung her head. “I can’t.”
“But you think he’s unfaithful?”
“Unfaithful. That sounds so clean. You mean, why do I think he’s fucking around? Why do I think he’s been using me for a cheap place to rent and a good place to eat?”
I didn’t respond; she didn’t want a response.
She said, “Could you follow him, watch him, see what he does?”
“You can’t follow a guy around all the time, not if you want the marriage to work.”
“No, no, I mean just on Friday, this Friday night, tomorrow night.”
“You won’t be here?”
“I travel sometimes—business seminars—and tomorrow night I’ll be in New York.”
“Don’t go.”
“I can’t get out of it; I left it too late.”
“Take Ken with you.”
“Oh, I couldn’t.”
“You think the letter writer’s telling the truth?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I’ve thought about it. God, that’s all I’ve thought about. It’s not like I call Ken and he’s not there or I’ve seen lipstick on his shirts. He’s the only man— He’s the only man I’ve ever loved, and if— I don’t know. I thought that was what a private investigator would do, and I wanted a woman, somebody who’d— It’s just an overnight trip, you know, and I can’t ask anybody I know. I can’t ask my dad; he’d just go out and kill Ken, or he’d kill me, if he found out we were living together. I don’t know which. I couldn’t stand either one. You know, the whole lecture about what men are and how women have to bear up and get over it, or else a full-out cry against marrying Ken, who never was good enough for me anyway. I don’t want my family or friends ever to know about this, not ever.”
I raised an eyebrow. A member of her family or one of her friends had set the whole thing up.
She said, “This is what I’ve told myself; this is what I’ve decided. If he stays home tomorrow night, I’ll go with it. I’ll marry him. If he doesn’t, if he doesn’t sleep at home, I’ll call it off.”
She blew her nose, glanced briefly around the room, and stuffed the used tissues in her handbag. “You live here?”
I nodded. My office does double duty. It’s also the living room of the big Cambridge Victorian my aunt Bea left me in her will.
“Are you married?”
“No.”
Her face was alive with interest, but I wasn’t eager to answer any more questions. I might have been reading into the situation, but it seemed to me that she was interested only because she was looking for an alternative, an answer to a question: What do women do if they don’t get married? How do they live?
I don’t consider myself a role model, just somebody who does what she can.
Jessica said, “I’ll pay. I’ll pay for your time and for gas and whatever else you charge for—and a bonus because I’ve left it so late. I have the money. Don’t you see, I have to know.”
“Let me get this straight: You want me to wait on your doorstep and tell you when Ken comes home, and whether he leaves again?”
She bit her lip. “Well, no.”
“What then?
“I guess I want to know where he goes.” She swallowed and sniffed and I thought, Oh, no, she’s going to start wailing again. “I want to know who.”
I held up the anonymous note. “You think you know who sent this?”
“No. I just don’t want to be unfair! What if it’s nothing? I mean, what if he’s visiting a sister or—”
“Does he have a sister? Locally?”
“No. But what if he’s crashing at a friend’s, a male friend’s?”
That, I thought, could be worse. But I didn’t even want to bring up the possibility. The girl was upset enough.
I said, “So you think he might go to a party without you, or visit an old friend?”
“He doesn’t have family around here. He might go out, to a bar or something, watch a game, but there’s nobody I know who’d want him to stay overnight, so if he did, I’d know. I mean, could you follow him, write down where he goes, who he sees?”
Following, tailing, is a skill at which I excel, requiring good eyes, patience, and sheer cussed doggedness. I could do it and feel competent, more than competent. The offer was tempting. I don’t do divorce work, but I do handle due diligence cases, preventive work. Jessie’s dilemma was somewhere between the two, in a hazy new area.
“You really don’t want to ask the guy?”
“I love him,” she said. “Whatever he said, I’d believe him.”
“If you love him—”
“No,” she said. “I love him, but I’m not like that.” Her expression altered, grew even graver. “I won’t share him. I mean, either what we have is special and separate or it’s nothing. I don’t want to be with somebody I can’t trust.”
If she trusted him, she wouldn’t be hiring me, I thought.
“Okay,” I said. “Where does Ken work?”
She answered more questions, filled out the usual forms, paid half up front, offering cash. Now I like cash as much as the next person, but it always makes me a little nervous. I signaled as much by raising an eyebrow.
“It’s not that I don’t want your name on a check or anything,” she said. “It’s just that I’ve got more cash on hand than usual. I hit it big at Foxwoods.”
I’d noticed matchbooks from Foxwoods, the Connecticut casino, when she’d dropped her handbag.
“Would you rather have a check?”
Her offer soothed my suspicious nature. I took the cash and we made arrangements to meet Monday afternoon when she got back from New York.
“I might call sooner,” she said. “If that’s okay.”
Poor baby, I thought. She wants to know, but she doesn’t want to know.
“Sure,�
� I said. “No problem.”
She wants to know, but she doesn’t want to know.
The words echoed long after Jessica Franklin departed. They described me as well as my new client. I wanted to know about Sam, but I didn’t want to know.
I went to the fridge, yanked out a Rolling Rock, downed it standing at the counter, staring at nothing. Beer fueled my way upstairs, gave me the guts to walk past my little sister’s empty room.
A week ago today. A week ago tonight. Late. Past midnight, I’d climbed the same steps, noticed the crack of light beneath her door, opened it to the tableau of Paolina’s masklike face and the knife and the thin line of blood tracing the cut on the inside of her left arm.
Tomorrow I’d meet her new doctor, the long-term therapist. I’d find out how badly those weeks in Colombia had damaged my little girl.
I wanted to know. I didn’t want to know.
THREE
Friday morning, much too early. Dry mouth. Headache. The clock ticked loudly in the small room. On the corner table, a plant arced upward, searching for light. The corner was dark, but the plant was lush and glossy. Maybe it was a plastic replica, but I doubted it. Everything in the office was as perfect as the plant: dustless, orderly bookshelves, shining mahogany desktop, cool blue walls, flickering fireplace. The reclining couch in the corner gave a hint that this was more than a waiting room. But I was waiting. The clock kept ticking and I kept waiting.
The doctor’s shoes whispered on the carpet as he entered and settled himself behind the desk. He was perfect, too, aside from being eighteen minutes late for our appointment. A central-casting shrink, not old, simply mature, with graying temples and crow’s feet at the corners of eyes that matched the walls. His name was Eisner, Aaron Eisner, and he spoke slowly, weighing each word as it left his mouth.
“I’m recommending residential placement, given the brief contact I’ve had with the patient. Considering what I know about the immediate cause of her distress, a time of continuous evaluation and monitoring seems indicated.”
“You think she might—?”
“Harm herself?”
“She did harm herself,” I said.
Harm. That was a good word. Better than the word that wouldn’t cross my lips. Better than kill. Do you think my little sister is planning to kill herself?
His voice was calm and reassuring. “We know a great deal more about these self-inflicted injuries than we used to, a good thing and a bad thing. If it weren’t endemic, we wouldn’t know so much.”
“Like what?” I said. “Like why would she do it?”
“I could try to explain her behavior—the cutting— as an attempt to alter her mood state. To improve it.”
“You’re saying she tried to change the way she felt by slicing her arm with a kitchen knife? How would that make her feel better?”
“It’s counterintuitive, you mean?”
“I don’t want to play word games. How?”
“Among those who self-injure, the act of self-harm tends to bring their levels of psychological and physiological tension down to a tolerable level. The relief is almost immediate.”
“How? Why?”
He clasped his hands, interweaving long, tapered fingers. “Let’s say that your sister feels a strong uncomfortable emotion—”
How would you feel if you’d watched your father die? I thought.
“And she doesn’t know how to handle it; she may not even know how to name it. But she has discovered that hurting herself reduces the emotional discomfort quickly. She may still feel terrible, but she doesn’t feel panicky or jittery or trapped, the way she did before.”
I pressed my lips into a thin line. Paolina had been tied up for hours at a time by the kidnappers. Maybe she’d bitten the inside of her lip or dug her nails deep into her palms, learned about self-inflicted pain then.
“But not all people react that way,” I said.
“No. One factor common to people who self-injure is abuse.”
As far as I knew, the last time my little sister was physically abused—prior to the kidnapping—was as a child of seven, when her mother brought her to the Area D station, her face cut and bruised. Marta had turned in her own boyfriend, insisted he be jailed.
In some ways she’d been a decent mother. I had to keep reminding myself of that.
“Another factor,” Eisner said, “is a sort of invalidation. Many of these people were taught at an early age that their interpretations of—and feelings about—the things around them were wrong or bad. They may have learned that certain feelings weren’t allowed.”
Marta had been a child herself when Paolina was born. Who knows what she taught her daughter?
“And then there’s the serotonin imbalance. We’re learning a lot about neurotransmitters, things that may one day make treatment far more effective.”
One day, I thought. What about now? What about a girl who ought to be in high school, catching up on her classwork, a girl who should be choosing a dress for the junior prom?
I’d called in every favor, yanked every string I could pull, to get Paolina admitted here, to East House at McLean, the psychiatric hospital affiliated with Harvard. It hadn’t been easy, and if I couldn’t figure out how to play the insurance game, it would be incredibly costly. Everyone I knew in mental health, cops and civilians both, assured me that this was the best place, the very best place.
“Then there’s PTSD,” Eisner said.
“Posttraumatic stress, yeah, I know about that.”
“She’s been through the wars, this girl. Is there anything else you can tell me about her captivity? Any other details?”
“I wasn’t with her most of the time. I know she was kept in the trunk of a car. I know she was tied to a chair. And she was forced to make a phone call, to get her father to come, to set up her father.”
“A tethered goat.”
Maybe that’s why she won’t talk, I thought. Because when she did talk, it led to Roldan’s death.
Eisner glanced at the clock. “One thing you should remember is that this was not a suicide attempt. Cutting is a coping mechanism.”
His voice was kind and my head suddenly felt too heavy for my neck. I planted my elbows on my knees and rested my head in my hands.
“Are you okay?”
“Me? Sure.” I tried out a smile. It felt like my face would crack with the effort, my skin shatter like a mirror and fall to the ground.
“Really?” he said mildly.
I nodded.
“You must have gone through quite a lot yourself. To bring Paolina home.”
I sat silently, thinking.
“How do you cope?” he said.
I don’t talk about it. I fix it. I do things. I move. I make it okay.
“Do you have any idea how long this will take?” I said. “Paolina’s already missed a lot of school. I don’t know how long Rindge and Latin will wait before they make her repeat the year.”
“Excuse me for mentioning it, but I can’t help noticing that you pull your hair. I wondered if you were aware that—”
“Trichotillomania. I know what that is, too.” I know because another shrink told me when I was forced to see him because I’d shot a man, killed him, on one of my last days as a cop. I dropped my right hand to my side. Most of the time I’m not even aware that I do it, that I grab a single strand of copper hair and loop it around my finger, fondling it, tugging it.
“I was going to say that hair-pulling is sometimes another way of controlling or altering one’s mood state. Self-harm is not that rare; it affects roughly the same amount of people as the number affected by eating disorders.”
Right, I thought. People who yank their hair out or overeat don’t bleed on the floor.
“Does she talk to you?” I asked.
His eyebrows went up.
“Look, I know you’re not supposed to—”
“She hums,” he said. “She taps out rhythms.”
“Can I see her?”
“I’m sorry.”
“What do you mean?”
“She doesn’t want visitors.”
“I’m not a visitor. I’m here for her. Whenever she wants to see me, whenever she’s ready to talk.”
“I understand.” He got to his feet, not hastily, not rudely. He’d had practice putting an end to interviews.
FOUR
The icy air in the parking lot felt bracing after the overheated room. I fumbled for my car keys and wondered if I’d always remind Paolina of the terror she’d felt when gunfire erupted in the dimly lit room, if my presence would unfailingly bring back memories of the father she’d found only to lose. I considered the possibility that she would never want to see me again, then shut my mind to it, as firmly as if I were closing a heavy door.
Driving home, I pondered an early lunch, wondered why I’d skipped breakfast, when mealtimes would get back to normal, and whether they’d ever been normal in the first place. The trip to Colombia hadn’t messed with my internal clock, since Bogotá and Boston share the same time zone. But meals there hadn’t arrived at regular intervals. Time had passed in a disorderly progression, alternating between chunks that sped by faster than lightning and moments that inched as slowly as growing grass.
Soup, I thought; homey, thick, and soothing, a pale imitation of something my grandmother might have spent a whole day concocting, adding a pinch of this, a pinch of that as the spirit moved her. Alas, no homemade stuff for me, but I might get lucky and find a forgotten can of Campbell’s at the back of a kitchen cupboard.
That’s what I was dreaming of—soup—until I saw the rumpus on my doorstep: Roz, my tenant, housecleaner, and assistant, hanging halfway out the door, yanking a muscular tough by the arm and shrieking. Just the sort of tranquil domestic scene I longed to come home to.
