Salter, Anna C (6 page)

"I'm Katy," she said.

"I know you're here to see Dr. Gleason, but he got called out on emergency, and I thought maybe I could help. Have a seat. You're here about his group?"

"Well, I think so," she said sitting down on the far end of the couch. "Although sometimes I have to work nights, and I don't think I can get off, so I don't know if I can do it, but I thought I'd come and ask about it, anyways. The kids are gone now, and I think maybe it's time I got out some. I haven't gotten out much for a while —well, quite a while really, but now they're all grown up and gone. The last one moved in with her boyfriend the day she turned eighteen last Tuesday, and I thought I just got to get out and do something more than just go to work and come home and sit in front of the television." She was nervous and running on, which wasn't surprising if she had gotten out as little as she said.

I started to say something, but she went on. "I just was never one of those mothers who run around all the time. I don't know why some folks have kids. They never stay home with them. Even my sister—I love her the best—but she's out at Bingo five nights a week, and her youngest isn't any more 'n ten."

"What made you choose this particular group?" I asked. I wanted to ask her about her goals for joining the group, but I didn't know how to phrase it in a way that wouldn't sound pretentious or threatening.

"Well, my friend saw the ad, but it didn't say nothing about how much it cost so that's another thing."

"It's a sliding scale," I said. Actually, I didn't have a clue what Marv was charging, but I knew he was a softer touch than I was. "It's whatever you can afford."

"Not very much right now, I'll tell you that, although I might be able to get more work in the summer. Lots of people take time off in the summer, and they're short on some of the shifts."

"What about the group interested you?" I persisted. It was hard to see her in a process, obsessing-over-your-naval, interpersonal growth group.

"I just haven't done much social," she said, "so when Tanya said it was a social group, I thought, well, what have I got to lose? I haven't met any decent men, and I figured a dating thing like this was a lot better place to look than going to a bar. I just don't hold with bars. I've seen too much drinking and carrying on."

Uh-oh, her friend had thought "interpersonal" had something to do with dating, which wasn't a bad guess but made this awkward. "Well, it's not really a dating kind of thing. It's a group for talking about problems. And mostly, these groups are made up of women. A few men might come, but they're likely to be married. It's not really set up for dating."

"It isn't? . . . Oh."

"No, although I can see where the ad might make it look that way, but it's really for talking about problems."

"I've had my share of those, I tell you, but I thought it was a group to meet people."

"No," I said. "What kind of problems have you had?" I don't know what made me ask. I could have just let her go. Maybe I asked out of curiosity because of her handshake. Maybe I just didn't want to go back into the waiting room. Maybe it was because people sometimes lose their nerve at the last minute when they come to see a counselor and pretend they came to the wrong place.

I was a little more rabid than most about that since the day a woman came to my office and asked if it was the social security office. I said "no" and gave her directions. Three days later she attempted suicide. I saw her right after that, and only then did I begin to learn about her fears of poverty.

"Well," she said. "I seen hard times, though not as hard as some. My husband was a drinker. I didn't mind that so much, and he used to hit me too, but I could take that, and then one night he tore my little Billy up, and he weren't no more 'n five. I tell you he could do anything he wanted to me, but he hadn't never hit one of my children before, and I said right then and there that he wouldn't never hit one again.

"I tried to stop him when he started in on Billy a'course, but he was a big man, and when he set his mind to beating something, he beat it. He went out drinking, and I cleaned Billy up as best I could. He kept asking me what he done wrong, and I told him nothing, but a little child don't understand.

"I waited up for him. I knew he'd be liquored up when he came back, and sure enough, along about five o'clock he came in drunker than a skunk, and I hid behind the stairs. When he started up, I just stepped out and hit him as hard as I could right in the face with one of those big iron frying pans. I hit him square in the face, and he stumbled out and never came back no more."

"Never?" I was mesmerized. She had come for something more than the group, but I wasn't sure what. Maybe just to tell someone her story.

"Never. We did all right, although it was a hard time that first winter. We got ourselves a house for five hundred dollars." I must have looked surprised because she quickly added, "well a chicken coop, really, but me and the kids fixed it up. And we dug ourselves a well, got it down to close to twenty feet. It was hard going, but the kids helped me. I took in ironing, made twenty-five dollars every other week.

"But that first winter the day came when I didn't have any money, and the kids were hungry, and there wasn't a thing in the house to feed 'em. I heard he was up at his mother's, and I hadn't asked him for a cent since he left, so I went up to ask him for ten dollars for some food money for the kids.

"I saw him on the porch, and I walked in the screen door and came up behind him, but afore I got there he turned around and saw me. Right away, he says to me, he says, I'll tell you one thing. Don't you never ask me for no money cause I don't pay for no dead horses.' I turned on my heel and I left, and I never asked him for a thing.

"We got through that winter, the Lord only knows how, and then the next thing I knowed he was up in Newport jail. We hadn't heard nothing from him for the whole three years, and then he started in writing me, asking me to bring this kids up, telling me how hard it was to be away from his family, telling me how much he missed us."

"What'd you do?" I was afraid to ask. I'd heard this story before, and I waited for the ending I was used to.

"I wrote him back," she said. "I told him, I said, 'Let me just tell you one thing. I don't pay for no dead horses.'"

I was stunned. After she left I sat there for a while. This woman had a "mind of winter," as Wallace Stevens would say. She saw the "nothing that was not there and the nothing that was." What did she have that the others didn't —all the people I had seen who would have been up to Newport jail telling the kids to "be nice, now, Daddy's sorry." Come lie to me and be my love.

What was it people needed badly enough to buy the tears in his eyes when in their heart of hearts they knew better? Company, sometimes? Money? Sex? And these were folks who hadn't run out of money and out of food in the New England winter with small kids. What did this woman have that the others didn't? What did this woman have that Ginger didn't, who couldn't be alone for two seconds without clutching at someone?

Was there anything I wanted badly enough to go up to Newport jail? I certainly hoped not. Then again, I'd never tried to dig a twenty-foot well with kids to take care of and winter on the way.

My hat was off to her. Maybe it was true, as Marge Piercy wrote, that "Nothing is won by endurance/But endurance." But sometimes that is a lot.

I was still thinking about her when Melissa, my secretary, came in. "FedEx," she said. "I signed for you." I threw it on the desk hardly glancing at it. FedEx was routine: Lawyers never seemed to use the snailmail anymore. My mind was on Katy, and it wasn't until I swung around that I noticed the return address:

Wilbee Cingu

Never-Never Land Enterprises 64 Martin Luther King Blvd. Cross Roads Junction, NH

I looked again. Wilbee Cingu. I didn't know any Wilbee Cingu, and there were law firms that should be called Never-Never Land Enterprises but weren't.

I looked more closely. Wil-bee-c-ing-u. Uh-oh. I didn't have to worry about finding Willy. He had already found me. Fear pushed its way up in my throat, and I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. Willy had gotten the jump on me, and I hated it as much as I thought I would. I didn't mind walking down a dark alley to meet him —well, I did, actually, but there was nothing I could do about it —but I could not tolerate sitting in one while Willy walked toward me.

I had a friend who twenty years back had been the first female police officer in her state. She once had to climb a dark stairwell by herself in an apartment building with a man waiting at the top with an ax. Nobody knew how she did it. I did. She was the one doing the climbing.

I hesitated a second. A letter bomb was feasible. Willy could do it. On the other hand, he wouldn't be there to see the results, so it wouldn't be all that enjoyable for him. If he sent a letter bomb, my diagnosis of sexual sadist was wrong. I almost smiled. I didn't usually have to have that kind of faith in the diagnoses I made.

I opened the letter. "Free at last," Willy quoted. "Free at last." I'll bet Martin Luther King didn't have Willy in mind when he said that.

"By now," Willy wrote, "you must be wondering what our role in Never-Never Land will be. After all, reality is the product of the most august imagination.' Show me yours and I'll show you mine." It was signed,

[email protected].

I stared at the letter for a long time. It wasn't a very long communication, but it said a lot. I knew what was in Willy's imagination — fairly horrific ways of torturing people —and if Willy was planning on bringing them to reality, then somebody was in for a bad time.

I didn't really want to see Willy's imagination brought to life, up close and personal. The only people who saw Willy's imagination brought to reality were the victims. If he was planning on personally showing me "his," then I was the one who was in for a bad time.

So he'd managed to tell me that, yes, he was up to his old tricks and, guess what, he had plans for me. Worse, he said it without anything he could be prosecuted for. It was a threat that didn't look like a threat, even if I could tie it to Willy, which I doubt very much that anyone could. Willy wouldn't be on any of the main networks with their billing records. Willy would have software that would access the Internet directly, and he could dial up from any phone in the world.

At least I didn't have to feel bad about not taking it to Adam. What could he do about it?

What could
I
do about this was a bigger problem. I tried to think. Jesus, he hadn't been out ten minutes before he got in touch. Had he been planning this?

All right then, what role did Willy have in mind for me in Never-Never Land? I had no doubts that Willy saw himself as Peter Pan and no doubts too about what his plans were for the "lost boys" he'd inevitably pick up. But what about the females —given that he was talking about my role—where did I fit? There were only two female roles in Peter Pan —Tinker Bell and Wendy —and nothing terrible happened to either of them.

Well, there was also the Indian Princess. As I remember, her role had something to do with being tied at the stake in a cave while the water rose. That would be a reasonably unappealing prospect.

One thing was clear: Willy was inviting me to communicate with him via e-mail, and he didn't have the address.

I didn't really want to play games with him, and if I corresponded with him, he'd have my e-mail address and one more way to worm his way into my privacy. But if I didn't, I wouldn't have any clues at all about what was coming next.

What a hand to play by myself. Didn't I know anybody I could talk to about this who wouldn't just advise me to move to Afghanistan? No, I did not. Not even Marv.

The phone rang. I jumped and then took a moment to steady myself before I picked it up. One letter from Willy and I was already spooked. "It's the ED," Melissa said. "The on-call doc wants to talk to you."

"Who is it?" I asked.

"She didn't say," Melissa answered.

"Put her on," I said. In my heart of hearts the ED was still the ER to me, but it was true that the "emergency room" had been a lot more than a room for a long time now: a small city was more like it. "Emergency Department" really was more accurate but still bothered us old-timers. An ER by any other name was still an ER.

"Michael, this is Suzanne. I'm in the ED, and we have a patient of yours down here, a woman named Camille Robbins."

Fortunately, Suzanne Stenson was one of the sharpest psychiatric residents Jefferson had ever produced. This was fortunate because dealing with a crazy patient wasn't half as bad as dealing with a crazy psychiatrist.

"What brought her in?"

"Who is more like it. You know Harvey, runs Sweet Tomatoes? He found her hiding in the shrubs this morning outside her house. Her damn dog wouldn't let him near her, and he was getting ready to call the police when she seemed to come out of it and called the dog off. It looks like she was having some kind of flashback.

"Harvey drove her in. She was disoriented and confused and in and out of flashbacks."

Oh, Lord. I just hoped Harvey knew something about dogs. I had the feeling he didn't, or he'd have called the police the first time that Rottweiler looked at him.

"Michael, the problem here is the dog came with her. I hate to say this, but the staff down here are more worried about the dog than your client. Nobody here wants to get within two feet of him, which is a big problem since your client is clutching his lead like it's a lifeline. She says he's a seizure dog. Is that true?"

"It's a 'she,'" I said, "although I'm not surprised you didn't get close enough to look. Her name is Keeter. As far as I know she is a seizure dog, which means that she can go anywhere. She's also an attack dog so be careful."

"Look, if people here were being any more careful they'd shoot her."

"Why don't I come down and see Camille."

"Why don't you."

"By the way, she just told you I was her therapist or she asked to see me?"