What I’d said was I’d be available if the situation changed but that right now Ovid didn’t need treatment because he was bright, creative, and adaptable. His preschool teacher termed him “Sharp as a tack, kind of brilliant, really, especially with building stuff. He tends to play by himself but I see that in artistic kids.”
Most important, near the end of the fifth session, hours before his mother’s return, I’d asked him if he wanted me to come back and he’d shuffled tiles and tilted his body away from me and said, “You didn’t give me any shots and you let me do what I want.”
“That was the deal.”
“Now I believe you.” He looked down. “Please let me build. I’m okay.”
As gracious a dismissal as any I’d received.
I said, “It’s a deal, Ovid. But if you do ever need me, Ovid, I can be here.”
“Nah, I won’t,” he said. “Maybe you can come for Mom. If she needs you.”
“You think she might?”
Shrug. “She sometimes needs people.”
Starting work on a tower, higher than any he’d ever built, he said, “People are okay but I don’t need them.”
Lou never called me again. Not about Ovid or Zelda or any other patient and I wondered if something about the case had altered our relationship. Or maybe he simply hadn’t needed a child psychologist. Or had retired.
A few weeks later, still curious about Zelda’s condition, I googled her, learned SubUrban had been canceled early in its third season. The cast had been quoted, some of them lapsing into profanity.
Zelda’s comment: “It happened.”
I kept searching and found no sign she’d ever gotten another acting job, but no evidence she’d fallen apart.
Off the radar: a performer’s nightmare. How could someone as fragile as Zelda cope?
I imagined all sorts of worst-case scenarios, worked hard at sweeping them from my head. She was Lou’s patient, not mine, hopefully his treatment had evened her out.
In the best of worlds, he’d managed to do some psychotherapy and had built her up sufficiently to cope with disappointment.
If there had been a problem with Ovid, he’d have called. Put it to rest.
Shortly after that, the Charmleys went to family court and began tearing each other apart. Julie and Bryce each called me asking me to be their custody witness. I refused as tactfully as I could. The result was cold silence from both of them and Robin never heard from Julie again and that necessitated a bit of discussion in our house.
The joys of inhuman relations.
Two and a half years after evaluating Ovid Chase, I was skimming the med school faculty newsletter and saw Lou Sherman’s obituary. Seventy-three years old, long illness — which could explain the end of our professional relationship — a widow named Maureen, no kids, no funeral, donations to the cancer society in lieu of flowers.
I phoned his home number to offer condolences, hoping a woman I’d never met wouldn’t find that intrusive.
Out of service. I took that as an omen and tried to forget about Lou, though I did think about Ovid from time to time.
Smart, little buttoned-down boy, a self-made expert in constructing his own world. Maybe because his mother had been on the verge of falling apart.
Or that was psychobabble bullshit and the kid just liked playing with Magna-tiles.
Eventually, he slipped from my memory, five years of no news being good news.
Now all that had changed.
Chapter 6
The building that housed LACBAR-I-SP resembled what it had once been: a discount furniture outlet in a homely section of mid-city.
The front was mostly windows painted chalky white. All that glass seemed unwise if you were dealing with seriously mentally ill people in a sketchy neighborhood. A sign warned the place was on twenty-four-hour video surveillance despite the obvious lack of a camera. A locked but flimsy door with a call button sent a ludicrous mixed message.
I got buzzed in without announcing who I was, stepped into an empty waiting area backed by another window. No paint on this glass, just dust clouding the image of an elderly woman pecking a desktop keyboard. To her left was a white door marked No Admittance. She was aware of me but kept working.
I tapped the glass and she slid open the partition.
“Dr. Delaware to see Zelda Chase.”
Closing the glass, she got on the phone, returned to her keyboard.
I stood around for a while before a skinny, white-coated young woman entered the booth and conferred with the receptionist.
The new arrival sported a basic-training brass-colored buzz cut tipped black. The coat was too large, parachute-billowing over a T-shirt and jeans. I’d never met her but I recognized her and knew plenty about her because she liked attention and had sprayed personal data all over cyberspace.
Kristin Doyle-Maslow was twenty-five years old, the possessor of a B.A. in urban studies from Vassar, the only child of a father who practiced gestalt therapy in Newton, Massachusetts, and a mother who lived in Brookline and taught bio-psychiatry at Tufts. She favored “farm to table” cocktails. The list of her favorite bands broke new ground in obscurity. She liked Ethiopian food, especially “the teff and the pumpkin,” and believed public policy was a “contact sport.”
For the past two years she’d worked as an intern at HUD in Washington, “conceiving and authoring position papers on community outreach.” No training in psychology or any other mental health field.
As she continued to talk to the typist, she turned and studied me. Young, but afflicted with the kind of severe, pinched face that gets old quickly. Steel-rimmed glasses of a style favored by corporate executives in the fifties didn’t help.
She checked a few papers on the typist’s desk, finally emerged through the white door.
The T-shirt under her coat was green and read — what else—
An oversized green plastic badge pinned to the coat’s breast pocket informed the world who she was, but she announced, “Kristin Doyle-Maslow,” in a voice that could intimidate a trombone.
I said, “Nice to meet you. How’s she doing?”
“By ‘she’ I assume you mean Ms. Chase.”
Stifling a flood of retorts, including references to Amelia Earhart and Marilyn Monroe, I said, “I do.”
“There’ve been no obvious problems.” She made a show of producing a ring of keys and unlocking the white door. Breezing through, she left me to catch the swinging panel.
I followed her into a drafty, unoccupied, white space partitioned into cubicles but devoid of furniture or office equipment. The sting of fresh paint was overwhelming. At the rear was another white door marked No Unauthorized Entry.
I said, “Your project has just started?”
“We’re in the development phase.”
“But you’re equipped to handle inpatients.”
She stopped, adjusted her glasses. “At this point in time, we have one patient. Yours.” Her forward march resumed.
I said, “Hold on.” Trying to keep my voice even but the vibes set off by those stifled retorts seeped in and raised the volume and hardened my tone.
Kristin Doyle-Maslow’s shoulders jumped but she kept walking.
I said, “I need you to explain what’s going on. Now.”
She stopped and half turned. “You’re the psychologist. Isn’t explaining your job?”
“What’s yours?”
“I’m executive director of LACBAR—”
“Meaning?”
“I conceptualize and organize.” Her jaw jutted but her voice had lost conviction and the pale eyes behind her glasses shifted uneasily.