“I think the healing is more metaphorical than literal, doc,” he said. Play the game, he thought, you’re almost done with it.
Dr. Zahara smiled. “Why immerse yourself in work merely to ‘keep busy’? A nice-looking young man like you must require a little more from his life than business. Metaphorical or not, it was your phrase.”
Shephard began to feel claustrophobic, as if his shirt were made of steel, shrinking in around him. His back was sweating. Hold on, he thought. Exude confidence.
“You’ve got the goods in front of you, doctor. I killed a boy. But some of the guys I worked with thought I did it too late, so they named me ‘Too-long Tom.’ My wife left me for a movie guy. My boss suggested I quit when the press and the ACLU came down. Last summer that was quite in vogue. These things all tend to make a man feel a tad lousy. When he works, he forgets them and pays the rent. When he comes to a doctor once a week to stroke the bureaucracy’s guilt, he wonders why he has to sit still and talk about it. He starts to wish that his life was a secret, you know, doc? He believes he deserves a little privacy, just like anybody else. I know what needs healing. And I think the best way to do it is to forget myself. Not to dwell. You can drink things under, or screw them under. I work them under. Work is a vacation, doctor.” Shut up, he told himself. Be healed.
“I hear anger in you. I probably shouldn’t be sharing this with you, but... a note here from Dr. Abrams. May fifteenth: ‘Getting response from patient nearly impossible. Cannot be provoked to talk, let alone to anger.’ You just told me more in ten minutes than you did Dr. Abrams in a year. Why?”
“You’re prettier.”
Dr. Zahara fastened her calm green eyes on Shephard and nodded matter-of-factly. “Yes, I am.” She flipped back the pages of his file. “You realize that this program was set up to help police officers cope with the trauma of a killing. I’ve seen lives ruined over shootings, no matter how clear it was to everybody that the shooting was necessary and unavoidable. I’ve seen the drinking you talk about, and the ‘screwing,’ as you call it. And I’ve seen a few men who keep things inside and deal with them on their own. Those types usually go one of two ways.”
“Oh?”
“They either come through the episode strong and healthy, or they kill themselves. It’s hard to tell which is going to happen. I lost a patient once whom I felt was making progress. This counseling might not mean much to you, Mr. Shephard, but it does to me. I don’t want you to become my Morris Mumford.”
“Sorry, doc. I won’t kill myself. I don’t have time.”
She smiled and closed the file, letting her glasses dangle by a chain around her neck. “I see here that your mother died when you were very young.”
“She was murdered. A man broke into the house when she was alone. I was a few months old.” Shephard felt anger rising inside, the flippancy draining from his voice. “So I never knew her, and I don’t see what that has to do with this counseling, if it’s for a shooting trauma. The ACLU seemed to think that made me shoot the boy.” He felt heated, clumsy, violated. Colleen Shephard was not to be disturbed. He watched the doctor shake her head slowly, wave a hand, and for the first time, blush.
“This counseling is to help make you a healthy person,” she said quietly. She lit another cigarette. “Do you feel healthy?”
“I smoke too much, like you. I don’t sleep enough, but besides that, I feel fine.”
There was a long silence while Dr. Zahara studied Shephard and Shephard stared back.
“Have you seen other women since the divorce?”
“A few.” He felt a shameful slide in his stomach as he reviewed his lack of contact over the last year. His one “date” had ended in the humiliation of trying to disprove what he had known anyway, that his desire had vanished. Since then it had been easier to be alone — a common reaction, according to Dr. Abrams. The silence of Dr. Zahara demanded that he go on. “Nothing steady,” he said.
“Is that to your liking?”
“Sure. Play the field. I’ve never felt the need to be connected,” he lied.
“But you enjoyed ten years of marriage?”
Enjoyed most of the time, he thought. Louise said he suffocated her, that she couldn’t grow, couldn’t breathe. And something about the difference between love and need. Don’t need me, don’t need me so much. And the harder he held on, the faster it fell apart.
“Since that, I mean,” he said, a partial retreat.
“It’s healthy to acclimate oneself to the opposite sex after the end of a long relationship. I would encourage anyone in your position to enjoy himself. Sometimes, the simple enjoying of oneself and another person can be tarnished by the end of a marriage. We have to learn to enjoy, if you will. That sounds contrary to nature, but it really isn’t. It is one of the purest delights of being human, I think.”
Shephard imagined Dr. Zahara pushing back her chair, standing and stretching languorously, coming toward him from around the desk, kneeling beside him to kiss his hand. Her skirt fell away as she stood up and his hand slipped into warmth and dampness. But when he stood to kiss her, her face cracked and blistered into Tim Algernon’s and she erupted, laughing, into flames.
“I suppose that’s true,” he said. Had Pavlik gotten good latents from the turpentine can? Was the stakeout man awake, or napping behind his sunglasses? This Bible Property of whom? Why had the killer left nearly fifteen hundred dollars behind, then checked into a cheap hotel? Could the bills have been his to begin with? If little liars burn first, who second?
“Is there anything you would like to talk about?”
“No, thank you.”
“Then you’re released from our care as scheduled,” she said. “I think you are dealing with your life in a, well, a quietly positive way. Please feel free to call me any time you wish; we can set up another session if you feel the need. You have a new life ahead of you, Tom, and I wish you all the good luck in the world.” She stood and offered her hand. “Don’t be afraid to look at yourself. It can only do good. Those secrets you feel the need of having, they’re common to us all. Go ahead, work. Sometimes when we lose ourselves, we find ourselves, too.”
Shephard’s dog, Cal, welcomed him home with minimal interest and a guilty slink. Flipping on the kitchen light, Shephard discovered one of his shoes had been thoroughly chewed and slobbered upon, its leather lace masticated to pulp. Cal offered an unrepentant glance, then waddled off to the patio to be fed. Shephard avenged himself by carrying a box of doggie treats to the patio, commanding Cal to sit, then dropping a banana peel from the trash into his eager jaws. The mutt spit up the peel with distaste but attacked his dinner gratefully, Shephard making it extra large out of a sense of guilt.
After dinner they were friends again, Shephard pouring himself a large Scotch, Cal yawning, then falling asleep in the middle of the kitchen floor.
His evening project was to unpack the dozen boxes still stacked in the living room, but it had been his evening project for nearly two months. So much for the healing waters of action, he thought. He pulled open the top of one, confronted a framed photograph of himself and Louise dressed up Roaring Twenties style for a Halloween party, and lost heart again. Would Dr. Zahara be a good fuck? He pondered the question, but the exercise was cerebral rather than hormonal, and he got no answer. He replaced the picture face down and poured another drink.
Suddenly, the dazzling fleck of cobalt under Ken Robbins’s microscope positioned itself square in his mind’s eye, as if to blot out introspection. Shephard closed his eyes. The cobalt rotated of its own will, offering him rich blue facets and begging the question: What was I doing in the killer’s hair? Then the blue gave way to the camel’s hair. It displayed itself similarly and begged the same question. Had it come from the collar of a coat perhaps, or a hat? No one washes coats or hats in hair conditioner, he thought. The image dispersed and he opened his eyes.