The Analyst (67 page)

“Le Docteur
Dumondais
, il est arrivé ce matin?”

“Ah, yes, Monsieur Lively. In his, ah,
bureau.
”

“Office is the word…”

“Yes, yes,
j ’oublie.
I forget. Office. Yes. He is there.
Il vous attend…
”

Ricky knocked on the wooden door and stepped inside. Auguste Dumondais, a wispy, small man, who wore bifocals and had a shaved head, was inside, behind his battered wooden desk, across from the examination table. He was pulling on a white clinical coat, and he looked up and smiled as Ricky entered. “Ah, Ricky, we shall be busy today, no?”

“Oui,”
Ricky replied.
“Bien sûr.”

“But, is not this day the day you are leaving us?”

“Only for a brief visit home. Less than a week.”

The gnomelike doctor nodded. Ricky could see lingering doubt in his eyes. Auguste Dumondais had not asked many questions when Ricky had arrived at the clinic door six months earlier, offering his services for the most modest salary. The clinic had thrived after Ricky was set up with an office much like the one he was standing in at that moment, nudging le Docteur Dumondais out of his own, self-imposed poverty, and allowing him to invest in more equipment and more medicines. Lately, the two men had discussed obtaining a secondhand X-ray machine from a clearinghouse in the states that Ricky had discovered. Ricky could see that the doctor was afraid that the serendipity that had delivered Ricky to his door was going to steal him away.

“A week at the most. I promise to you.”

Auguste Dumondais shook his head. “Do not promise me, Ricky. You must do whatever it is that you have to do, for whatever purpose that you have. When you return, we will continue our work.” He smiled, as if to display that he had so many questions that it was impossible for him to find one with which to start.

Ricky nodded. He removed his notebook from the bellows pocket of his shorts.

“There is a case…,” he said slowly. “The little boy I saw the other week.”

“Ah, yes,” the doctor said, smiling. “Of course, I recall. I suspected this would interest you, no? He is what, five years old?”

“A little older,” Ricky said. “Six. And indeed, Auguste, you are correct. It interests me greatly. The child has not yet spoken a single word, according to his mother.”

“That is what I, too, understood. Intriguing, I think, no?”

“Unusual. Yes, very true.”

“And your diagnosis?”

Ricky could picture a small child, wiry like so many of the islanders, and slightly undernourished, which was also a typical statement, but not tragically so. The boy had a furtive look in his eyes as he’d sat across from Ricky, scared even though he occupied his mother’s lap. The mother had cried bitterly, tears streaking down dark cheeks, as Ricky had asked her questions, because the woman thought her boy to be the brightest of her seven children, quick to learn, quick to read, quick with numbers-but never speaking a word. A special child, she thought, in most every way. Ricky had been aware that the woman had a considerable reputation in the community for magical powers, and made some extra money on the side selling love potions and amulets that were said to ward off evil, and so, he understood, for her to bring the child to see the odd white man in the clinic must have been a truly hard-reached concession that spoke of her frustration over native medicines, and her love for the boy.

“I do not think his difficulty is organic,” Ricky said slowly.

Auguste Dumondais grimaced. “His lack of speech is…?” This became a question.

“A hysterical response.”

The small black doctor rubbed his chin, and then ran his hand across his glistening skull. “I remember this, just a little bit, from my studies. Perhaps. Why do you think this?”

“The mother would only hint at some tragedy. When he was younger. There were seven children in the family, but now, only five. Do you know the family history?”

“Two children died. Yes. And the father, too. An accident, I recall, during a great storm. Yes, this child was there, that I remember, too. This could be the origin. But what treatment can we perform?”

“I will come up with a plan after some research. We will have to persuade the mother, of course. I don’t know how easy that will be.”

“Will it be expensive for her?”

“No,” Ricky said. He realized that there was some design in Auguste Dumandais’s request for him to examine the child at the same time that Ricky had a trip out of the country planned. It was a transparent design, but a good one, nonetheless. He suspected he might have done more or less the same. “I think it will cost them nothing to bring him to see me after I return. But I must learn much more, first.”

Doctor Dumandais smiled and nodded. “Excellent,” he said, as he hung a stethoscope around his neck, and then handed Ricky a white clinical jacket of his own to wear.

The day went by rapidly, busily, so much so that Ricky almost missed his CaribeAir flight to Miami. A middle-aged businessman named Richard Lively, traveling on a recently issued American passport with only a few modest stamps from various Caribbean nations, was waved through U.S. customs without much delay. He realized he didn’t fit any of the obvious criminal profiles, which were invented primarily to identify drug smugglers. Ricky thought he was a most unique criminal, and one that defied categorization. He was booked on the eight a.m. plane north to La Guardia, so Ricky spent the night in the airport Holiday Inn. He took a lengthy, hot, soapy shower, which he enjoyed from both a sanitary and sensual point of view, and thought bordered on true luxury after the spartan accommodations he was accustomed to. The air-conditioning that defied the heat outside and cooled his room was a remembered treat. But he slept fitfully, in starts, tossing for an hour before his eyes closed, then waking twice, once in the midst of a dream about the fire at his vacation home, then again, when he dreamed of Haiti, and the boy who could not speak. He lay in the bed in the darkness, a little surprised that the sheets seemed too soft and the mattress too springy, listening to the hum of the ice machine down the hall, and an occasional footstep passing by in the hallway, muted by the carpet, but not completely so. In the quiet, he reconstructed the last call he’d made to Virgil, nearly nine months earlier.

It was clear above New York, and from his window seat he could make out the Statue of Liberty and Central Park, as the plane swept over the city and approached La Guardia. He had the odd sensation that he wasn’t returning home as much as he was visiting some long forgotten dream space, more like seeing the wilderness camp where one had spent a single unhappy summer as a child, crying his way through some long parentally imposed vacation.

Ricky wanted to move swiftly. He was booked back to Miami on the last flight that night, and he didn’t have much time. There was a line at the rental counter, and it took some time to extricate the car reserved for Mr. Lively. He used his New Hampshire license, which was due to expire in another half year and thought that perhaps it would be wise to relocate fictionally to Miami before returning to the islands.

It took about ninety minutes through modest traffic to get to Greenwich, Connecticut, but he discovered that the directions obtained over the Internet were accurate down to the last tenth of a mile. This amused him, because, he thought, life is never actually that precise.

He stopped in the center of town and purchased an expensive bottle of wine at a gourmet shop. Then he drove out to a home on a street that was, perhaps by the inflated standards of one of the nation’s richest communities, fairly modest. The houses were simply ostentatious, not obscene. Those that fit this second category were located a few blocks over.

He parked at the bottom of the driveway outside a fake Tudor-style home. There was a swimming pool in back and a large oak tree in the front that had yet to bloom. The mid-March sun wasn’t insistent enough, he thought, although it did have some weak promise as it filtered between branches that were still to blossom. An oddly unsettled time of year, he decided.

With the bottle of wine in hand, he rang the doorbell.

It did not take long for a young woman, no older than her early thirties, to answer. She wore jeans and a black turtleneck sweater, and had sandy hair that was swept back from her face, displaying eyes that were lined at the corners and some wrinkles, probably prompted by exhaustion, around the edges of her mouth. But her voice was soft and inviting, and she spoke, as she swung the door open, in a near-whisper. Before he could say anything, she said, “Shhhh, please. I’ve just gotten the twins down for a nap…”

Ricky smiled back. “They must be a handful,” he said pleasantly enough.

“You have no idea,” the young woman replied. She kept her voice very low. “Now, how can I help you?”