The Murderer's Daughters (34 page)

Fortunately, the rest of my morning patients were easy—a cold, followed by a strep throat, anxiety, gastritis, sprained toe, Pap smear, and a pulled back muscle. I got to Jerry’s cart at eleven-thirty, which in Jerry’s view was too late to expect much of a lunch selection.

“I’m almost sold out.” He steered his wheelchair closer. “You should have gotten here earlier.”

“When? At breakfast?” I bent down and studied the sandwiches.

“Most people buy when they get here. If you didn’t bring your lunch so often, you’d know that. What you got left is tuna or egg salad, Doc. Which will it be?” From the impatience in his voice, you’d think a line for Jerry’s food snaked out to the parking lot. “People will be here any minute.”

“What kind of bread is this?” I pointed to egg salad on yellowish bread.

“Anadama.”

“What’s that?”

“My wife bakes it.” He wheeled over to the sandwich area and plucked up a sandwich. “It’s cornmeal; you get corn muffins. You’ll like it.”

Before hearing my opinion, he placed the sandwich in the thinnest bag known to humankind. Actually, I remembered a thinner one.

“Coffee, right?” Jerry poured it without waiting for my answer.

“Fine.” I’d been planning to have a Coke, but I didn’t want another argument. I handed Jerry a ten-dollar bill and waited for the tiny bit of change I’d get. Which I would, of course, put in the glass jar marked “Paraplegic Veterans” in Jerry’s slashing scrawl. No one had the guts to ask him who, what, or where the paraplegic veterans were. Most of us assumed it was Jerry and a couple of his drinking buddies.

“Louise.”

Damn. I gave a phony smile to the medical director. Peter Eldon was born to be petty. When he was a child, I’d have bet he was the tattletale, the class monitor, the one who stuck his arm straight up in the air each time the teacher called for a volunteer. Now he was an overbearing Medicrat in love with his own authority and all things English. Today he wore what looked to be a hunting jacket.

“Peter. How are you?” I asked.

“Not so good. Some of my staff have been ignoring my e-mails.” He loomed over Jerry. “Coffee. Black. Bran muffin.” He turned back to me. “I’m compiling my monthlies, and I need to wrap up your department. You, Louise, are my squeaking wheel.” I’d swear he’d developed a British accent since our last encounter.

After pouring the coffee, Jerry stretched his arm to the back of the rows and grabbed the smallest bran muffin, placed it on top of the covered coffee without using a bag or waxed paper, and handed it to Eldon. The muffin absorbed moisture as we spoke. Good job, Jerry.

“Two fifty,” Jerry said.

Eldon wordlessly gave Jerry three dollars, keeping his hand out for change. “When can I expect them, Louise? And what exactly are you doing with that patient requiring you to double up on Denton’s work?”

“The patient requires extra.”

“Extra what?”

“Her husband died of cancer not a month before her diagnosis. She needs comfort. Help.”

“Refer her to a social worker.” He juggled his coffee and muffin.

I took cleansing breaths. I didn’t grab his hot coffee and spill it on his balls. “I’m not sure Denton has the time to deal with all her needs. He’s a man, and when he examines her she feels ugly.”

“Personality isn’t our stock-in-trade. Stick to the internal medicine patients and leave oncology to Denton.”

Jerry interrupted. “Hey, wait, Doctor Winterson. I forgot this.” He reached for a chocolate chip cookie, slipped it in a bag, and handed it to me.

“Send in your monthlies, Louise,” Eldon said. “I’ll be flagging this.”

When he entered the elevator, Jerry snorted.

“Thanks for the cookie, Jerry.”

He waved
it’s nothing.
“The guy’s a solid asshole.” With those words, Jerry capped off our bonding and wheeled over to serve the now-growing lunch crowd.

I headed to the stairwell. I’d stay as late as I needed to finish. Having him, having anyone, question my work, think I’d made mistakes—that didn’t happen to me.

All I wanted to do when I arrived home after hours of writing reports was collapse in bed, but my sister’s fragrance greeted me as I entered the living room. Merry’s scent usually trailed beside her, a lemony rose—a delicate perfume that had turned tart when I’d tried it. Smoky sweetness from the fireplace drifted through the house.

Drew and Merry seemed uncomfortable when they saw me. Merry, curled on the couch, managed to look both sexy and innocently vulnerable dressed in baggy blue sweats. Drew, slumped in the rocking chair, looked exhausted after his day working at home and then being with the girls. Kids drained everything but blood from you, their maturation feeding off molecules siphoned directly from the nearest adult in charge.

“The fire smells great. What a treat.” Instead of heading straight for bed, I went to Drew, kissing the top of his head, breathing in his musk of straightforward drugstore shampoo, cooking odors from supper, and a faint memory of the sunny cologne he slapped on each morning.

He stiffened. “It’s eight-thirty. Where were you?”

I pulled away, confused. “I had to work late. It was an emergency. Didn’t you get my message?”

“Did you get mine?” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Did you forget you were supposed to meet me at the girls’ school for our meeting with Cassandra’s teacher?”

I slapped my head. How could I forget Cassandra? What in the world was wrong with me lately? “I’m so, so sorry.”

“Sorry?” Drew’s voice rose on the word. “I canceled a client meeting I’d scheduled three weeks ago. A new client. A series I want very much.”

Merry stirred. “Maybe I’d better go.”

“Please, yes,” I said, turning from Drew to Merry.

Drew shook his head. “Stay,” he ordered.

Merry leaned forward, then back, settling on remaining locked upright and seated.

“What was the big emergency?” Drew asked.

I took a breath and thought before speaking, wanting to compress my mistake into as few words as possible. “Eldon’s after me. Either it was finish reports or he’d pull the plug on what he considers unnecessary visits with one of my patients. Breast cancer. Incredibly fast-growing.”

“Unnecessary visits?” Drew banged his hand on the wooden rocker arm.

I jumped as though he’d smacked me and backed away.

“Where’s your head, Lulu? Just once could we take precedence over your job?”

I grabbed the mantel edge and squeezed. “Okay, I forgot the appointment. But you don’t need to act as though I hung Cassandra over a cliff.”

“How would you even know?”

Don’t be mad at me; don’t be mad at me.
“So she’s talking about being adopted. Every kid has that fantasy. Nightmares. I had an entire pretend family.”

“Comparing anything to your fucked-up childhood doesn’t offer me comfort. It’s not like you have a bit of experience upon which to draw for stellar, hell, even halfway-decent mothering.”

“Stop,” Merry said. “The kids will hear you. Being mean to Lulu won’t help Cassandra. Don’t say stuff you’ll regret.”

“Thanks. I forgot what a relationship expert you are.” Despite his words, Drew stopped.

Merry came over and put an arm on my back. “Sit down, Lu.”

I let her guide me to the couch, where I sank down, pulling a pale yellow cushion over my stomach, kneading the cotton-covered down in both hands. “I just forgot, Drew,” I said. “I didn’t mean for you to have to handle it alone.”

“I know, I know.” He fidgeted with his watch. “Still. How could you forget your daughter because of a patient?”

I wondered the same thing. Weren’t children the most important thing in a mother’s life? Weren’t they supposed to rent most of the space in your brain? Didn’t children make you so acutely aware of others that everyone became in some way your child? Could Hitler have been Hitler if he’d been a father?

Stupid reasoning. My father was a father.

“Everything piled on top of me,” I said.

“Your daughter needs you. This isn’t a case of having little adoption fantasies.” He handed me a manila envelope from the coffee table. “Cassandra’s family pictures.”

I shuffled through the sheaf of scratchy drawing paper. Cassandra drew all of us, including Merry, in the bottom right corner of the paper. Everyone was underlined. A wavy half circle surrounded us. Ghostly men and women, drawn larger than life, floated above our family.

“Want to hear how the school shrink interpreted them?”

“They sent her to a shrink?”

Drew waved my question away. “She’s the guidance counselor. Just listen. Children who perceive their families as insecure underline the family figures.”

“You mean Cassandra’s insecure, or she thinks we are?” I didn’t want to hear this.

“The whole family system,” Merry said. “She thinks our family is insecure.”

“Have you become a shrink, too?” I curled my toes up and down, trying to get control of my mouth.

“The guidance counselor didn’t have a clue about our family, about our mother and father,” Merry replied. “And yet, look what she said.”

“Now this is all about them?”

“Just let Drew finish before you go off into the world of denial.”

I closed my mouth. Acid bubbled in my chest.

“See the floating figures in balloons?” Drew said. “The counselor thought they could be secrets. She asked if we were having problems, if maybe Cassandra was worried we were going to get divorced. She hinted that I was having an affair, for God’s sake.”

I stared at the picture, trying to recognize Cassandra’s watery circles as balloons.

“Okay,” I said. “I understand. But is this really so off the charts?”

Apparently, Merry could contain herself no longer. “Her teacher is suggesting she go to a private shrink. For counseling. Are you listening? Are you blind, deaf, and dumb?”

“You listen. You’re acting as though the teacher said Cassandra needs to be locked up in an insane asylum.” How dare they? How dare she, this teacher, make my child into some sort of deranged child at risk? “I know something about psychology, also.”

“You had a rotation for what, a month?” Drew said. “A hundred years ago?”

“And her teacher had what? One course, five hundred years ago?”

Drew grabbed the pictures from the coffee table and stuffed them back in the envelope. “We need these for the meeting with the child psychologist. I made an appointment for next week. Shall I enter it in your Palm-Pilot? Will that help you remember?”

I threw my hands up. “How could you make an appointment without letting me check this doctor out first?”

Drew’s face looked hard enough to crack wood. “She’s connected to the school.”

“All the more reason to distrust her.”

“Do you even hear yourself?” Merry slapped the arm of her chair. “Cassandra is having family issues. She thinks someone might kill her.
She’s afraid of being kidnapped. She worries about being abandoned. Does any of this sound familiar? Does it sound like something maybe a daughter
and
mother need to deal with?”

“Did I ask for your opinion?”

“When did I start needing your permission to talk? Aren’t I part of this family? Isn’t that what you’re always saying—
It’s all about us, we only have us, Merry
?
The five of us have to stick together, Merry
?” Merry plunked herself down next to me on the couch. “There are
six
of us, and you have to face it.”

“Face it? Have you figured out just how I present a grandfather who murdered their grandmother? Don’t you think I’ve thought about it a thousand times since they were born? What? You’re so high and mighty? Special Merry, who faces her father?”

Merry looked like I’d smacked her. I fought the instinct to comfort her, make her all better, and swallow my rage.

“Cassandra might be reacting to us having lost our parents at practically the same ages as she and Ruby are now,” I said. “She’s overidentifying with our being orphaned by a car crash.”
She’s okay. Cassandra is fine. Just fine.

Merry opened her mouth in disbelief. “But that’s not what happened.”

“It’s what she thinks happened, so it’s what happened. Leave this alone, okay? I’d rather Cassandra and Ruby worry about Drew and me getting in a car crash than have them know I’ve spent my life trying to forget seeing Mama dying in front of me.”