Celeste’s hand disappeared into the Day-Timer and miraculously emerged with a business card. She handed it to me. “That’s my cell number. Call me when your lady’s ready for our services. I’ll have someone come over here and get her. I don’t want her followed to the shelter. Anything else? You guys know about the Christmas benefit? Good, I thought so. I’ll see you there. Be sure to bring your checkbooks.”
And she was gone.
I looked at Diane and said, “Über-popular alpha bitch?”
NINE
I was late getting home.
After the meeting with CeeCee ended I squeezed in a few minutes of decompression with Diane before I drove out to Louisville to visit Sam again. The torture contraption had been removed from his groin, and he’d been turfed from the coronary care facility to a telemetry unit. I found him propped up in bed staring at a muted TV screen. He’d already trashed the hospital gown and was wearing nothing but a pair of running shorts and a tangle of wires that snaked to an array of sensors plastered to shaved rectangles in the thick mat of hair on his chest.
Sherry plodded into the room a minute or two after I arrived. We hugged. I explained that Sam had just asked me a poignant question about his son Simon’s reaction to the heart attack. Sherry stood with her arms folded across her chest while I finished telling Sam what I thought he might expect to see.
Sam’s wife had lost weight since I’d last seen her. Her face was thin, almost gaunt. I wasn’t totally convinced that the gauntness wasn’t a side effect of the makeup that was liberally applied around her eyes. Saturday night makeup in the middle of the day, I wondered.Stress,I thought.What’s that about? Sam’s health, probably.
I excused myself moments later, kissing Sherry on the cheek. I implored her to call if she needed anything from Lauren or me. Anything. I told Sam I’d see him the next day.
Before I made it to the door he said, “Alan?”
I turned back toward him. He pinched a thick roll of skin at his waist-the roll of flesh had the heft of a healthy brisket-and asked me if I thought he was fat, adding, “I think my cardiologist thinks I’m fat. He hasn’t said so exactly, but that’s what he thinks.”
I glanced at Sherry before I looked my friend in the eye and said, “Yes, Sam, I think you’re kind of fat.”
For a split second he looked injured, then he said, “Yeah, me too.”
My laugh echoed in the room.
It sounded like a fart at the opera. The tension between Sam and his wife was as thick as plasma.
Ten minutes later I was home.
Grace was sick. Lauren had her hands full with a work problem that had followed her home from the office. She was short-tempered and fearful that our daughter had croup. I was determined not to join in the chorus of catastrophizing-rare things happen rarely, after all, and common things happen commonly-and I decided that I would act as though my daughter had a cold until her symptoms insisted otherwise. But it was clear that both of my girls required some immediate attention.
The dogs hadn’t been out all day, and Emily in particular was restless. Her paw umbrella had fallen like a forty-year-old’s butt so that itclack-clackedon the wood floors with every step she took. The noise, coupled with whatever was going on at work, was driving Lauren closer and closer to distraction, or worse.
“Do that first,” she directed me as I went to relieve her of Grace. She was pointing at Emily’s paw. “Fix that thing, please.”
I did what I was told. It took me fifteen minutes to check Emily’s paw wound-it looked terrific-to dress it with antiseptic, to retape the plastic umbrella into place, and to walk both the dogs down the lane and back.
Lauren tucked the portable phone between her ear and shoulder and carried Grace to the nursery while I threw together some pasta and bean soup. Experience told me that if I hurried I could make a passable version in twenty-five minutes.
During the half hour or so until I had dinner on the table, Grace finally fell asleep. Lauren came into the kitchen for dinner with her hair wet. She appeared much less harried after her quick shower, and with a smile she told me that the work problem was solved.
I poured her a glass of wine and filled her in on developments with Sam and Sherry.
She asked a few questions. I answered as best I could.
“Has Sherry said anything to you, Lauren? Is there any trouble brewing between them? She seems really angry at him.”
“I haven’t talked to her in a while, and the last couple of times we did talk she wasn’t very open with me. But you know that Sam was a heart-attack-in-waiting. His weight, his stress, his diet. His family history. I’m not surprised she’s furious. He should have been taking care of himself.”
Not the level of compassion I’d expected to hear from her. “Tough day?” I finally asked. “You feeling all right?”
The second question was a back-door way of wondering out loud about the current status of her struggle with multiple sclerosis. New symptoms? Aggravated fatigue? Anything?
I hated asking. She hated answering. I think I hated asking because of how much she hated answering. She hated answering because she believed that her chronic illness and its myriad symptoms constituted the most grievously tedious subjects in the world.
“I just realized what I said about Sam and Sherry. Do you get angry with me, Alan? Because I’m sick? Do you think it’s my fault when I’m not feeling well? That I do something to… or I don’t do something that…”
I sat back. “I get angry that you’re sick. But no, I don’t get angry at you for having MS.”
“I do,” she said. “I get angry at me. I think it’s okay if you do, too.”
No, it’s not,I thought.It’s not. You would like it to be okay, I know you would. But it’s not.
Lauren sipped some wine. “Grace isn’t going to let us sleep tonight,” she warned, having successfully ignored my question regarding the current state of her health. “We can’t let her stay down too long.”
“Let’s leave her down long enough to have dinner. We’ll get her up after. Maybe she’ll be in a better mood.”
Lauren lifted a spoonful of soup. “Yeah, that’s likely to happen. So, is there anything new at the office?” she asked in a playful, I’ll-go-along-someplace-else-with-you voice.
I surprised her. I said, “Actually, there is something that came up. I could use your advice.”
Without using any names or revealing in what state, let alone in what city, the events had taken place, I gave Lauren the broad outlines of the tale of Gibbs and Sterling Storey. I included my suspicions about the psychological and likely physical abuse that were part of the fabric of their relationship.
My indiscretion with Lauren was a gray area in confidentiality that I usually tried to avoid. These “I have a patient who…” conversations happen all too frequently between psychotherapists and colleagues or laypeople. Most mental health professionals engage in them with a rationalization that if they do not reveal sufficient details to allow the listener to identify the patient in question, then the letter of the patient’s confidentiality has not been violated.
Lauren’s soup bowl was empty when I completed my exposition. I ladled her some more.
“So what are you going to do?” she asked me.
“Exactly what she wants me to do, I guess. As soon as I’m sure she has a safe place to stay, I’ll call the police in the town where she was living and tell them what she told me.”