Blameless (15 page)

“Federal Express from Boston to Boston?” Diana asked, feeling more disoriented by the moment.

“More importantly, with a fake return address.” Valerie dropped the pad to the coffee table with a loud thump.

“So much for detective work.”

“I’m a lawyer, not a detective,” Valerie snapped. “My job is to prevent that journal from being introduced in court. And don’t you worry: I’m going to do just that.” She leaned toward Diana. “I’m going to hit Engdahl with a motion in limine that’s going to wipe that cocky smile right off his alligator-preppy face.”

“What about the newspapers?” Diana asked again.

Valerie frowned and tapped her pencil on the table. “What about them?”

“Do they know about it?” It took all of Diana’s strength to keep from screaming at the woman. She swallowed hard. “Will they print it?” she asked softly.

“Even if the person sent them copies,” Valerie said, “I doubt any newspaper would risk it.”

“What’s the risk?” Diana asked, although the blood was pounding so hard in her ears that she knew she would have trouble hearing Valerie’s answer.

“We don’t have a lot of law on this in Massachusetts,” Valerie said slowly. “And although it wouldn’t be libelous—it
is
your diary, after all—printing it in a newspaper would be a pretty clear invasion of privacy.” She paused and looked up at the ceiling. “Chapter 214. Right of privacy. If I remember correctly, it protects against something like ‘unreasonable, substantial, or serious’ interference with a person’s privacy …” She shook her head. “A legitimate newspaper printing an unauthorized personal diary sounds pretty unreasonable, substantial,
and
serious to me.” She shook her head. “I just don’t think they’d pull it.”

“We could sue them?”

Valerie nodded emphatically. “In a flash.”

Diana sighed in relief and leaned back into the couch. Then she bolted up as another thought came to mind. “What about the press if you lose the motion in limine?”

Valerie hesitated, playing with her pencil and avoiding Diana’s eye. “If we lose the motion in limine,” she finally said, “it becomes admissible in court.”

Diana felt sweat prickling under her arms. “And then the sniffers can print it?”

“I’m sorry, Diana, but once it’s public record then the …” Valerie paused and looked questioningly at Diana. “What was it you called them?”

“Sniffers.”

Valerie nodded. “Then the sniffers will be all over it.”

Nausea boiled up toward Diana’s throat. She pressed her hand to her stomach. “We can’t let that happen.”

“I’m not going to. I’ll win the motion—both motions,” Valerie said, putting her pad and pencil back into her briefcase. “I got this hearing combined with the hearing on the admissibility of your therapy session notes.”

Diana realized she was biting the cuticle on her thumb and yanked her finger from her mouth. “We still have the good judge?”

Valerie nodded again. “Hershey’s cool—and he doesn’t like clutter—so my guess is that he’ll rule on both motions Tuesday,” she said, slipping her shoes back on. Then she turned and stared out the window. “The thing that worries me is that he might construe both motions as hinging on the same issue: confidentiality versus direct relevance …”

Diana felt her stomach plummet to her knees. “What does that mean?”

“According to that logic,” Valerie said slowly, “one would assume that
both
the therapy notes and the journal would fall into the same category.”

“And?”

“And that both motions will be either granted or denied. From our point of view, we’d get a split decision.”

Speechless, Diana stared at the lawyer. If the journal was allowed into evidence, Craig would be devastated. If her therapy notes were not allowed into evidence, her career would be devastated. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

Valerie stood up and reached for her coat. “Not unless you want to spend the weekend boning up on privilege against self-incrimination.” She looked at Diana, and for a moment her face softened. “You just need to sit tight until Tuesday and have some faith.”

“I’m not a religious person,” Diana mumbled.

Valerie burst out laughing, the first real laughter Diana had ever heard from the woman. “I didn’t mean in God—I meant in me.” Chuckling, she walked down the stairs and let herself out of the house.

Great, Diana thought as she heard the front door slam. Now the woman develops a sense of humor.

13

D
IANA CANCELED THEIR RESERVATIONS AT THE
E
CHO
Lake Lodge. When Craig came home and she told him what had happened, he went to the video store and rented a half-dozen classic movies. The two of them spent the weekend holed up with Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Clark Gable, and Marilyn Monroe. They didn’t talk much, just sat close together on the couch and ate lots of popcorn.

Diana didn’t tell Craig about the worst of the entries, still holding to the hope that Valerie’s motion on Tuesday might spare him from reading them. But there was ice around her heart as she worried about direct relevance and Valerie’s skill and whether whoever sent the pages to Engdahl might not also send them to the
Inquirer
.

But she kept these worries to herself as she held Craig’s hand and watched Bogie in
Casablanca
. Sometimes she got up and roamed around the house. Often she found herself in the empty nursery, her mind wandering to images of driving up to Albany to visit Craig’s parents, she and Craig laughing as the baby gurgled from her car seat in the back of the jeep. Of the house on the Cape they had talked about renting in August with their friends Larry and Sheryl and their one-year-old son. Of what it would be like if Craig was so hurt and angry after he read her journal entries that none of these things ever happened.

On Monday morning Craig went to the office and Diana saw a few patients. After her borderline group left, she tried to analyze some of her research data. But she didn’t get much accomplished. She was just too scared to concentrate.

By Tuesday she was exhausted from both stress and lack of sleep; she was having difficulty concentrating on anything but the hearing scheduled for that afternoon. The journal had to be ruled inadmissible. It had to stay out of the papers. And out of Craig’s hands. Diana tried to focus on the lecture notes for her morning class, but her worries kept intruding. The fact that the lecture, which she called “Who’s Really Crazy Here, Anyway?”, was one of her favorites didn’t seem to bolster her ability to focus on it.

Social expectations, social stigma, negative sanctions, she read. Every word, every concept, seemed to relate to her own plight, seemed to be speaking directly to her. She was violating social expectations. And that was why she wasn’t sleeping, why her stomach was squeezing and turning and leaving her in a constant state of nausea. She was scared. Scared of the negative sanctions. Terrified of the social stigma. And, just as her lecture notes said, it was making her crazy.

“It’s in the bag,” Valerie had told her last night. “I’ll call you as soon as it’s over.” Diana had nodded and hung up the phone. Then she turned to Craig, “It’s in the bag,” she repeated. Craig had hugged her and said that he was sure that it was, his trusting eyes full of compassion and a slight puzzlement over the fact that she didn’t seem to be comforted by Valerie’s optimism.

Was Valerie’s optimism just a front? Part of her tough-lady personality? Or could they really win both of the motions? Diana forced her eyes and her mind back to the page. Mental illness as a social phenomenon. Sanity and insanity as socially defined states.

Diana loved throwing the sociological perspective on mental illness at her students. The sociological arguments turned the theories she had been discussing all semester on their heads and got even those slumbering in the back row to sit up and think. Perhaps R. D. Laing was right after all, she would suggest to the class. Perhaps insanity
was
just a form of “supersanity”; perhaps psychosis was just the sane response to an insane world.

She sure could relate to that, for she was struggling to respond to a world that no longer made any sense. She, a psychologist with no interest in the legal profession, was obsessed with motions in limine and with the intricacies of confidentiality versus direct evidence. She, a pregnant woman with a devoted husband and a promising career, was obsessed with the fear that her entire life was falling to pieces around her. It
was
truly an insane world. And it was definitely making her nuts.

Could the judge really be convinced to interpret the two motions as different issues? Valerie said that she had come up with an unimpeachable argument for separating the two—something even Engdahl wouldn’t be able to counter. “You’ll be getting your money’s worth on this one,” she had assured Diana.

But Diana was far from assured. Valerie hadn’t seen the love and support in Craig’s eyes last night—nor had she seen the fury that filled them just a few weeks ago, just before James’s suicide, when Diana had told Craig that James was following her. That she had seen James sliding through the corridors at Ticknor, ducking into classrooms when she turned around. That James had hidden behind the garbage cans and jumped out at her as she walked to the back door, hurling insults and wild nonsense. Her gentle Craig, rocklike and stoic, could become a different man if he thought someone he loved had been wronged.

Diana rested her hand on her stomach, searching for a butterfly flutter. She closed her eyes for a moment. If it had to be one or the other, she prayed to a God she didn’t really believe could hear her, please err on the side of confidentiality. Please don’t let Craig read the journal.

Diana opened her eyes and focused on the words in front of her. Residual rule breaking. Exceeding the limits of eccentricity. Defective coping strategies. It was no use. Nothing was computing. She threw her pen down on the desk, grabbed her hat and coat, and walked out the door.

She crossed the busy intersection at Symphony Hall and headed toward the reflecting pool at the Christian Science Center. Well, at least her coping strategies weren’t all that defective, Diana thought as she strolled among the soaring columns, breathing in the fresh air. She felt much better already. Sitting on a bench in the open plaza, she watched the pool spilling over itself, marveling at the serenity of the water flowing perpetually over the brown-speckled marble. She had always wondered how a religion so seemingly closed-minded could have such a vast vision of architecture.

Nothing made any sense. Not the Christian Scientists. Not the obviously impoverished kids running through the plaza in their hundred-dollar sneakers. And certainly not her present situation. Diana shook her head and watched the water rolling over the pool’s rounded rim as if it were a living creature. A soft breeze played across one end of the basin, rippling the water, changing its form, separating it into a myriad of tiny waves. But when the water fell, it resumed its smooth totality and disappeared as a complete entity over the edge. Everything was strange, Diana thought, pulling her coat more tightly around her and shifting to the other side of the bench to remain under the anemic touch of the autumnal sun.

The plaza grew more crowded, filling with scurrying figures trying to beat the threatening clouds to their destination. Some clutched briefcases, others children’s hands, and still others held brown paper bags close to their chests. Most, being city-wise, looked neither left nor right. But here and there, a few adventurous souls cast their gaze on Diana.

She stiffened as a tall man in work clothes, the head of a hammer sticking from his back pocket, slowed his steps to get a closer look at her. He pushed his face close to hers, and his eyes lit up as if with recognition. “Howdy,” he said, but when Diana didn’t respond, he shrugged and sauntered away.

Diana pulled her hat farther down on her forehead to avoid the probing, beady eyes of an elderly lady carrying a plastic shopping bag. But Diana’s attempts were futile; the woman stopped right in front of her and dropped her bag on the ground. Lifting a pair of glasses from her ample bosom, the lady perched them on the end of her nose. Then she sighed, clearly disappointed, picked up her bag, and continued on her way.

Diana shook her head. Her growing paranoia was straight out of her lecture: Once she labeled herself as being watched, the signs were everywhere. Self-fulfilling prophecies. The looking-glass self. If she wasn’t careful, she would soon be falling down Lemert’s slippery slope to madness.

The sociologists were right: The stress, the fear, and the labels were all making her crazy. The tall man had just been trying to pick her up. The elderly woman’s myopic eyes had momentarily mistaken Diana for a long-lost granddaughter. Diana took a series of deep breaths and forced herself to focus on the rolling smoothness of the water. Both her paranoia and her fears were unfounded. And self-defeating.

A young man in a wheelchair, a briefcase across his legs and a Red Sox hat on his head, rolled himself across the plaza toward the elevators. Diana watched him smile and wave away another man who tried to help him. Then he raised himself on one arm and pushed the button. The man in the baseball cap didn’t give up, Diana thought as she watched him wheel himself into the elevator. He must have problems far more serious than hers, and here she was giving up, declaring defeat, before defeat had even occurred. This was all wrong. Valerie was still fighting. She would keep fighting too.

Okay, Diana thought, her eyes trained on the water as it curled around the edge of the pool. Think positive. Act positive. Valerie said it was in the bag; ergo, it was in the bag. She had a class to teach, James’s records to finish compiling—perhaps even Ethan’s “something” to find within them.

Chin high, she headed home, choosing a route that took her along her favorite street in Boston: St. Germain. As she stepped onto the narrow lane, European and appealing with its flower boxes and rounded recessed doorways, she decided to put her fears out of her mind. She would trust Valerie and let Valerie take care of her business while she, Diana, took care of her own.