Blameless (27 page)

Diana tuned the radio to an oldies station and tried to cheer herself by singing out loud to the Beatles. The clouds thickened, and the sun dropped behind the Worcester hills. Although it was early afternoon, she turned on her headlights.

A shiver ran down her spine and silenced her singing. She jacked up the heat, but it didn’t help. It was that feeling again. The eyes. She glanced nervously in the rearview mirror. She turned to her right, and then to her left. But no one was looking at her.

No one had any interest in her at all.

When Diana got home she wasn’t able to call Mitch, for Sandy Pierson was huddled in the alley waiting for her, hollow-eyed and scared. “I’m sorry, Dr. Marcus,” Sandy sobbed from her seat wedged against the cold brick of the house. “But I—I couldn’t help it. I did it again,” she wailed. “Even though I promised I wouldn’t, I did it again.”

“Come on in,” Diana said, reaching her hands out to help the younger woman up. Even in her misery, Sandy rose gracefully. Diana waved Sandy into her office, hung up her coat, and went to the bathroom. When she returned, Sandy was still crying.

“I wanted to be like you,” Sandy said. “For you to be a part of me …”

Diana walked around the perimeter of the room, her hand pressed to her lower back, watching Sandy. It was almost impossible to believe that the stringy-haired, white-faced woman sitting before her was the same person who had smiled so alluringly out of a Filene’s “Night on the Town” ad in the
Globe
last week. Diana dropped heavily into her chair and swiveled so that she faced Sandy. “Why don’t you start from the beginning?” she suggested.

Sandy hung her head, twisting a thick clump of hair around her finger. “I made a chocolate-chip cookie,” she whispered.

Diana nodded.

“I know chocolate-chip are your favorite,” Sandy said to her feet. “Your very favorite food in the whole world, you told us once. Full of wonderful memories that you could relive again and again. Every time you ate them. Smelled them even, you said.”

When had she ever told Sandy that? Diana wondered. And why? Then she remembered a group session early on, when James had been so promising, before Ethan arrived on the scene. Everyone was telling a story about a positive childhood experience. When James asked Diana to tell them one from her own childhood, she had agreed. “Psychotherapy cannot proceed without empathy on both sides,” Adrian had pounded into her during her postdoc. “You must offer yourself as a positive, supportive figure. As a real person—with your own foibles and fantasies—for identification to take place.” So much for Adrian’s great advice, Diana thought. “You made chocolate-chip cookies …” she coaxed, glancing at the clock and wondering how late Mitch stayed in his office.

“I only did it because I love you so much,” Sandy said sharply, as if somehow tuning in to Diana’s distraction. “If it weren’t for you”—she raised her head and stared at Diana, defying her to disagree—”I never would have done it at all!”

“Is what you did really so bad?” Diana asked softly.

Sandy crossed her arms over her chest. “I made a huge chocolate-chip cookie and I shaped it to look just like you!” she said, glaring at Diana’s stomach.

“And?” Diana kept her voice soft and her emotions from her eyes.

There was silence as the two women looked at each other. Sandy’s expression slowly shifted from defiant to confused, then settled into a sulk. “I ate the whole thing,” she finally said.

Diana nodded.

“But it didn’t fill me with wonderful memories—and it didn’t fill me with you,” Sandy said sullenly. “So I stuck my finger down my throat and threw it all up.”

Diana closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them, Sandy was standing, facing the back wall. Diana watched Sandy square her shoulders and turn with the fluid motions of an experienced model during a photo shoot. The woman from the Filene’s ad stood facing her.

“I guess you’re right,” Sandy said, as if she had not just told Diana she had vomited her into a toilet. “Now that I’ve actually said it, it doesn’t sound all that bad after all.”

Diana watched warily as the self-confident model approached and sat gracefully in the chair, throwing one of her long legs across the other. “You feel better now?” Diana asked.

Sandy leaned back in an overly nonchalant manner. “Yes,” she said as if she wasn’t all that sure. “Yes,” she repeated more loudly, but with no more certainty.

Diana looked at the beautiful but terribly damaged woman before her. How could people do these things to their own children? she wondered, not for the first time. How could Sandy’s father have locked her up in a dark closet every day after school? How had Uncle Hank brought himself to photograph his nephew being sodomized? Resting her hand protectively over her stomach, Diana thought of her new research data: If it actually
was
these horrendous—but isolated—events that caused the disease, then there really might be hope for a therapeutic cure. And then maybe Sandy wouldn’t have to relive—and relive and relive—her fear of abandonment; maybe she could be freed to put her trust in another human being. “Does this remind you of anything that’s happened before?” Diana asked softly.

Sandy shook her head. “No, not that I can—” Then she stopped and her eyes widened. “The time I called everyone and canceled group?” she asked. “To have you all to myself?”

Diana nodded.

“James and Ethan said I was selfish and spiteful. Terri and Bruce too.” Sandy stared over Diana’s shoulder, through the window beyond, but Diana knew from the pain in Sandy’s eyes that she was not seeing the alley. “They didn’t want me in the group anymore.”

“And do you remember what I told you at the time?”

“You—you mean,” Sandy began, her eyes welling with tears, “you mean after my binge?”

Diana nodded.

“You told me a good expression of love might make me feel better,” she whispered.

“And did it?” Diana asked, handing Sandy a tissue.

Sandy nodded, wiping her cheeks. “Remember?” She smiled through the tears. “I did something nice for everyone. I cleaned James’s apartment and loaned Bruce my car.”

Diana returned Sandy’s smile, remembering very clearly how good she, Diana, had felt when the group reconnected, how proud of herself she had been. Until Ethan had caused it all to fall apart by fighting with James. Her smile disappeared.

Sandy sniffed and raised her chin. “I did it even though I was really pissed off at them.”

“You did giving things,” Diana said. “Loving things.” She flashed to James’s sweetness during her ectopic pregnancy; she could almost feel his hand covering hers as he sped toward the hospital, almost hear his soft, crooning voice. Even Ethan had helped her once when her jeep broke down—shrugging off the fact that it made him late for a date. How much could be salvaged? she wondered. How deep did the damage have to go before the true person was irretrievable?

“And they decided that I could stay.” Sandy played with the wet tissues. She shredded them and then molded them into a ball. She clenched the ball tightly in her fist. “So I should do something for you?” she asked without raising her eyes.

“That’s not necessary, Sandy,” Diana said. “Just remember that things can be undone. That people who care about you are willing to accept you—even if you’re not perfect.” Diana rested her arms on her desk and leaned closer to Sandy. “None of us is perfect.”

Sandy glanced up, then quickly looked out the window. She twisted her hair around her finger and inspected her nails. Then she clutched her hands together and looked straight at Diana. “I want to give you something because I love you.”

Diana nodded.

“But I don’t have anything to give,” Sandy wailed.

“It’s really not—”

“There were a lot of things about the group that you never knew,” Sandy blurted. “That we kept from you. Especially James and Ethan. James’s sister too.”

“Oh?” Diana gripped the edge of her desk, her surprise at the mention of Jill catching her off-guard. She carefully folded her hands and forced herself to relax in the chair.

“We all knew it was against the rules.” Sandy’s words came out in a rush. “We knew it was dishonest and not fair to you. But Ethan made it into such a fun game. You know, like when you were a kid and there was a substitute teacher?” Sandy’s eyes begged Diana’s forgiveness. “He—he made it exciting—like, to see how far we could go.” She hung her head, shielding her face with her hair and kneading her wet wad of tissues.

“How far you could go?” Diana prompted. The rules of the group were that anything that transpired between members outside group hours would be discussed at the next session. Diana knew that this was virtually impossible, as James and Ethan had been friends prior to Ethan’s entering the group—and that had been one of her many reservations about Ethan joining—but Sandy’s words made it sound much more sinister than the few undisclosed pranks Diana had suspected.

Fright crossed Sandy’s face and she shrugged and looked down at her feet. “I promised never to tell,” she mumbled. “Ethan said he’d find out if I ever did.”

Diana bit her lip and stared at the fearful woman in front of her, caught between her own needs and those of her patient. Maybe Sandy knew something that could help her—but maybe she, Diana, knew something that could help Sandy more. “Thank you,” Diana finally said. “It means a lot to me that you shared this.”

Sandy jumped up and looked around the room as if she thought it might be bugged. “I can’t,” she said, grabbing her coat. Then she leaned toward Diana and tilted her head, her voice dropping to a whisper. “We used to go to Ken’s Pub in Cambridge. All together. All the time.”

“Sandy—” Diana began, standing also.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Sandy said, shaking her head. “Nothing matters anymore.” She began to cry softly. “They’ve both left me. Everyone’s gone.” She shrugged into her coat and, shoulders drooping, walked out the door.

Diana sat back down, knowing that Sandy had said all she was going to say, that it was best for Sandy to work this through by herself for a while. Diana swiveled her chair and watched as the lonely, beautiful woman climbed gracefully into her car.

Sandy had offered her a gift: a “good expression” of her love. Ken’s Pub. But before Diana could fully take in the information, before she could figure out if Sandy really wanted to help her or hurt her, before she could consider how—and if—Sandy’s information could be of any use, she felt a gush of warm dampness. She jumped from the chair and a bolt of terror highlighted every nerve in her body. She was bleeding.

As she lunged for the phone, nauseated with fear, Diana imagined herself lying within a softly billowing curtained enclosure, lost and empty and crying, her dead baby leaking from her body. James was holding her hand.

23

C
RAIG SAT ON THE EDGE OF THE BED AND BRUSHED
the hair from Diana’s forehead. “How are you doing?” he asked. It had been a long, stressful afternoon and evening in the emergency room, and they both looked it: pale and drawn and droopy. But the news had been good, and the doctors had sent Diana home to rest for a few days, optimistic that she could resume her regular schedule on Monday with the expectation of a normal delivery—and a healthy child.

“Now that I’m home, I feel much better,” she said, although what she felt was exhausted. Completely and totally drained. All she wanted was sleep. But Craig looked so much like a little boy who had been lost and finally found, the fear and relief equally mixed in his tired eyes, that she didn’t have the heart to ask him to leave.

He picked up her hand and kissed her palm and then pressed it between his two. “We’ll get through this, Diana,” he whispered, his voice cracking slightly. “All of it. Whatever it takes. Even if there’s only the two of us, we’re still a family.” He squeezed her fingers so hard that they hurt.

She gently extricated her hand. “They said everything’s going to be fine.” According to the doctors, she had had a “minor bleeding episode,” a not-uncommon event. They had quickly determined that she wasn’t miscarrying, that she didn’t have placenta previa, and, in answer to her repeated questioning, that this pregnancy was not ectopic.

An ultrasound had been performed, and she and Craig had watched the screen, breathless and grinning, as the technician focused first on the baby’s face, then on her legs, pressed tightly to her belly. At one point, the baby had turned and popped her thumb into her mouth. They even had a photograph: an eerie but beautiful grainy black-and-white reverse image of a perfect nose, a perfect mouth, and two perfect eyes, widely spaced and wide open. Their daughter appeared to be smiling at them.

“This whole thing today scared the shit out of me,” Craig said. “Made me think about things—about what’s really important.” He stood and began to pace their small bedroom. He ran his hand along the edge of the bureau and the brass railing at the foot of the bed. Through half-closed eyes, Diana watched him as he walked to the closet, then abruptly turned and walked to the door. Finally he stopped at the window. His back toward her, he crossed his arms and stared silently into the dark alley.

A shiver ran down Diana’s spine and she tucked the comforter up around her chin. “Please close the drapes,” she asked. He immediately jerked the cord, and the heavy fabric closed over itself. The room was brighter and warmer, and, Diana thought, somehow safer.

“I know I haven’t been completely supportive,” Craig said, still facing the window. “That I’ve been thinking of myself and worrying about stupid things that happened in the past.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Diana said, pushing herself up in the bed. “You’ve been fabulous—wonderful. Much more understanding and tolerant than I would’ve been if our roles were reversed.”

“No.” He turned and looked her straight in the eye “You would have had more trust in me.” Coming over and kneeling by the side of the bed, he reached for her hand under the comforter. “It’s you and me against that detective.”

“Craig—” Diana began.

“No more questions,” he said, holding a finger to her lips. “No more recriminations. Just trust.”