Undone (26 page)

“I’m
serious
,” she hissed. “Don’t hurt
her.
” She looked again at Pauline and saw that Maddy, in climbing onto her mother’s lap,
had turned the wheelchair in their direction. Chloe pulled her hand from Dez’s arm. But too late. She saw Pauline’s eyes widen.

“It’s good of you to be concerned about the welfare of your stepmother,” said Dez, who also saw that Pauline had witnessed that intimate, familiar touch. What did it matter? The woman could say nothing. “But as Deepti says,” he went on, “there is really nothing to worry about.”

Dez strolled back into the living room and shooed Maddy off Pauline’s lap. “I’ll bring your mommy right back,” he told the child. He stepped behind the chair and seized the handles. Chloe watched helplessly as he rolled Pauline out of the room.

As Dez proceeded down the hallway, he suppressed an antic urge to lean on the handles of the wheelchair and pop it into a wheelie. He might have done so too if not for fear that Ulrickson, wondering what was delaying things, would stick his head out the door and spoil the fun.

Jasper, sitting in a pose of despondency, elbows on his knees, head hanging between his shoulders, looked up when Dez and Pauline entered the room. He greeted his wife with a smile that looked like a grimace. Dez parked her facing the sofa and then resumed his seat in the wingback armchair. Pauline’s eyes darted nervously back and forth between the two men, who sat facing her.

“I think,” Dez said to Jasper, “that it would be best if
you
were to explain to your wife what has come to light in the sessions.”

“Me?” said Jasper.

“
You
must break the silence.”

This seemed to make sense. Jasper cleared his throat. He began, haltingly, to tell Pauline about Chloe’s “emotional confusion,” her tendency toward regression “around issues relating to her lack of a father while growing up.” He traced, as Dez had explained it to him, Freud’s theory of erotic orientation and gender identity in females. Eventually, meanderingly, he arrived at the crux of the issue: Chloe’s Electra complex; her desire to “repossess the male member stolen from her at birth.” Pauline’s face flooded scarlet. Jasper, alarmed, looked at Dez.

“Go on,” Dez prompted him.

“So what this has resulted in,” Jasper said carefully, “is a quite predictable state of compensation in Chloe. One in which she has deluded herself into thinking that she is experiencing a kind of, well, infatuation with me.”

“There is no need to speak in euphemisms,” Dez cut in. “Your wife is an intelligent woman, fully capable of understanding the psychodynamics. To speak in anything but direct terms is to condescend needlessly.” Dez turned to Pauline. “Your husband is saying, or trying to say, that his daughter has formed a strong erotic desire for him. Furthermore,
her
unconscious desires have, predictably, awakened a countertransference response in your husband. In short, they strongly desire each other.”

“I have never acted on these feelings,” Jasper hastened to tell Pauline. “And I have made every effort to keep them hidden from Chloe. But, as Dr. Geld has made clear to me, the problem only continues to fester. I must stop sweeping all of this under the carpet. That’s why I’m telling you this. You, who are the most important person in my life. I know it’s difficult to hear,
and God knows it’s difficult to speak about, but Dr. Geld is committed to helping all of us resolve this, and that’s why you need to know.”

He paused, waiting for a reaction. Pauline glared at him. The blush had drained from her face. Her pupils had dilated, crowding out the light brown of her irises and making all but the whites of her eyes into gaping black holes. He looked at Dez with concern.

Dez avoided his eye. “I have prescribed,” Dez said to Pauline, “a regimen of physical closeness and expressed affection between father and daughter that would mimic, and thus make up for, the kisses, caresses and cuddling that Chloe missed from her father during the all-important childhood developmental stage. You might call it a form of regression therapy. The aim is to bring father and daughter closer together, to bring them, as it were, to the point of symbolic consummation.”

Pauline began to blink rapidly.

“Hold on,” Jasper said. “I think something’s wrong.”

“Yes—she’s resisting,” Dez said. “In denial. A not uncommon reaction.”

Pauline continued to flutter her eyelids.

“I don’t know if that’s it—” Jasper started to say, but Dez cut him off.

“Mr. Ulrickson,” he rapped out, “you alluded to a diary that you keep in an effort to exorcise your feelings toward your daughter. It would be beneficial for you to read some entries aloud, to impress upon Pauline the severity of your affliction and thus help her understand why I have prescribed such a course of treatment.”

“Read from my diary?” Jasper said, incredulous.

“If you would.”

Pauline stared at Jasper with a strangely glazed, empty expression.

Dez repeated, with an irritated emphasis, “If you would.”

Jasper, surrendering his will to the doctor—believing him the only person who could extricate his family from the deadly trap it had fallen into—rose and walked, with the heavy tread of a sleepwalker, over to his desk. He sat and typed in the password. He stared for a moment at the screen, and then looked at Dez, who nodded.

Jasper began, stumblingly, to read aloud. “‘No matter how I—I abuse myself, it is as if I cannot … cannot leech from my guts the poison that breeds there. It is Chloe’s face, Chloe’s limbs, Chloe’s scent, Chloe’s gestures and movements that stir this poison to life within me …’”

He read on in a robotic, stilted monotone, while Dez, his back to Jasper, grinned at Pauline. Oh, she recognized him all right: that was obvious from the look of freezing hatred that had come into her eyes. That touch on his arm from Chloe must have swept away any doubts.

“‘It is as if Chloe,’” Jasper’s voice read on, “‘were a stranger to me, an erotically intoxicating stranger not of my flesh, not of my blood—’”

Dez, his back to Jasper, grinned at the helpless woman. Pauline closed her eyes. A terrible grating noise came from her throat.

Jasper jumped to his feet and hurried over.

“She appears to be having a seizure,” Dez said coolly.

Her eyes had rolled up into her head. The grating noise continued to come from her throat. Jasper bellowed for Deepti—needlessly, since she had heard the sounds of Pauline’s distress and was already rushing down the hall. She burst in through the closed door, ran to Pauline and pried open her mouth. “I don’t see any obstruction,” she said.

Another set of footsteps came rapidly down the hallway. Then Chloe stepped through the open door into the office. She gaped at Pauline, screamed and looked at Dez, who imperceptibly shrugged. “What have you done?” she began to ask, when she was interrupted by the patter of small feet advancing up the hall. Maddy’s voice came from outside the office: “What’s everybody
doin’
in there?”

“Take the little one outside,” Deepti said. “She must not see this.”

“Right,” Chloe said, backing out of the room. She pulled the door closed behind her.

Deepti stood. “Call 911,” she said.

Dez had already strolled over to the desk and punched in the number. He handed the ringing phone to Jasper, who, when he heard the operator’s voice, began to wail, “It’s my wife! She’s dying! We need an ambulance.” The operator asked for the address. His mind went blank. “Where are we?” he cried helplessly.

Deepti took the phone and Jasper stumbled back to the wheelchair. “It’s my fault!” he cried, falling to his knees and putting his head in Pauline’s lap. “I insisted on bringing her into the session! Oh God, Pauline, I’m sorry! Hang on, honey!”

Dez was starting to find the emotionality of the scene
tiresome, and he was also beginning to detect in his stomach ominous stirrings of nausea at the sight of the woman’s white, upturned eyes and frothing lips. He announced his intention to venture out onto the front lawn so that he could direct the ambulance when it arrived.

“Good idea!” Jasper said. “Thank you!” He buried his face again in Pauline’s lap.

Dez ambled to the front of the house, opened the door and stepped out into the cool tranquility of the autumn evening. No sign of Chloe and the little brat. They must have gone out back. He thought about nipping around the house, but something in the beauty and stillness of the evening held him. The sun, low in the sky, shone through the canopy of changing leaves, igniting them into a glowing membrane of yellow and plum and pumpkin. A powdered light seemed to hang in the air, shrouding the housefronts, opposite, behind their mauve lawns. Dez was not much for scenic splendors, but in his present state of relief over how beautifully his exploit had played out, he found himself strangely receptive to the delights of the waning day.

He had been standing for only a minute or two on the flagstone walk, inhaling deeply the perfumed air, a mix of sourly rotting leaves and fragrant wood smoke, when he saw, in the misty reaches at the end of the street, a blinking red light. Almost immediately, the sound of a siren reached his ears. As the ambulance drew nearer, he stepped along the front path and waved it down. The vehicle, boxy white with
Beckford Emergency Medical Services
emblazoned on the side, swerved into the driveway and
halted with a spray of gravel from under its tires. Four uniformed BEMS personnel jumped out, three men and a woman in dark blue uniforms, squawking walkie-talkies on their waists, and ran toward Dez. “End of the hall on your left,” he said, pointing toward the open front door. They rushed inside, bearing a wheeled gurney and boxes of equipment. Dez did not follow.

Less than five minutes later, the emergency team emerged from the house. They rolled the gurney, upon which the woman lay. An L-shaped device was down her throat and a bag dripped liquid through a tube inserted into the crook of her arm. Jasper and Deepti followed behind. As Pauline was loaded into the back of the ambulance, one of the emergency personnel pointed Jasper toward the front passenger seat. He climbed in. “I’ll phone when I know something,” he told Deepti through the open passenger window. To Dez he added, “Please don’t blame yourself—it was
my
idea to bring her into the session.”

Dez bowed wordlessly. The engine caught, the siren wailed to hysterical life, and the vehicle swung off the driveway, then roared down the street.

“It is a terrible thing.”

Dez turned toward the voice. The home care woman was standing at his elbow, looking at him closely.

“Can you tell me,” she said, “what brought this on?”

“Search me,” Dez said bluntly. “I’m a shrink, not a neurologist.” Why coddle this woman?

Deepti stared at him in surprise, then said, “Well, it is in God’s hands now.”

Dez couldn’t resist. “Whose?” he said with smiling interest,
as if he had heard rumors of this entity but could not quite place him.

Deepti, unable to tell if this was impudence, obtuseness or a misplaced effort at humor, could find no reply. She turned, went up the path and entered the house. Dez immediately hied it around the side of the building to the backyard. He found Chloe and Maddy crouching, in the descending dusk, next to a flower bed. Chloe was apparently distracting the little girl by teaching her about flowers. At his approach, Chloe jumped to her feet and rushed over to him. She grimaced and raised her fists as if to batter his chest. But he caught her frail wrists. “Whoa!” he laughed.

“You
said
you wouldn’t hurt her!” she hissed.

“And I didn’t,” Dez said, feeling her cease to struggle in his grip. He released her. “It was
his
idea to bring her into the session.”

“His?”
she echoed. Then the full horror of the situation dawned on her, and she asked in a stricken voice, “What if she dies?”

“If she dies,” Dez said, “he will be plunged into existential despair and guilt, and be ready for anything. And if she survives, he’ll be euphoric, and equally at our mercy.
Your
mercy.”

Chloe regarded him, incredulous. “So that’s why you—”

“Like I said,” Dez interrupted, “it was his idea to bring her into our session. I merely seized an opportunity. And don’t forget why we’re doing this.” He turned his gaze to Maddy, who was squatting by the bed of blue impatiens, singing lightly to herself as she delicately fingered a flower petal.

Chloe studied the girl for a long moment. She turned back to Dez.

“No more silly wavering?” he said. “No more fantasies about what a wonderful man Ulrickson is? You’ll help that poor child?”

How could she say no? She nodded.

“That’s my girl,” he said, moving to take her in his arms. She retreated a step. “As you wish,” he said, lifting his hands.

There was a movement on the edge of Dez’s vision. Through the patio’s glass doors, he saw the loathsome home care woman. She was inside the house, standing by the kitchen and looking out at them.

“So, please don’t hesitate to call,” he said to Chloe, at slightly louder than normal volume. “I, or one of my colleagues, will be happy to talk to you. And one of us will be back to check on your progress in a few weeks.” He leaned in and whispered, “Good luck—not that you’ll need it.”

He patted her shoulder, waved to Deepti, and took his leave.

T
he ambulance sped through the twilit streets. Over the sound of the wailing siren, Jasper heard someone in the back of the vehicle say, “Start bagging her.”

Bagging her?

He twisted round. But instead of being confronted with the sight of Pauline being zipped into a body bag, he saw one of the ambulance workers attaching an inflated, balloon-like device to the end of the tube in her throat. The man began rhythmically squeezing the bag, forcing air into her lungs.
Thank God
, he thought.

The ambulance, barely slowing at the intersections, took just three minutes to get from 10 Cherry Tree Lane to Beckford
General. Jasper then sat for an excruciating forty-five minutes in a downstairs waiting area. This was the very hospital where Pauline, while in labor with Maddy, had had her stroke. Sitting now in the molded plastic chair in that dismal emergency waiting area with its floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the ambulance bay, Jasper was visited with harrowing memories of that earlier ordeal. And yet this was worse, so much worse, since this time it was his own actions that had brought about the catastrophe.