Compulsion (25 page)

"From her place," Julia said.  She smiled.

I nodded.

She took off her jacket and walked over to my bed.  "I need to sleep for half an hour or so.  I'm exhausted.  Do you mind?"

"Of course not," I said.

She laid down on the gray linen comforter, curled up like a cat.  "Hold me?" she asked.

I walked over and climbed onto the bed, spooning myself against her, my face lost now in her hair, my hand laced into hers, held close to her breast.  I could feel her engagement ring against my skin, but that seemed an artifact from a life she had lived before ours intersected.

"A psychiatrist — a woman — came by the intensive care unit to talk with me," she said.

"And..."

"I told her I won't want to go on if Tess doesn’t make it," she said.  "I couldn’t bear to survive, thinking I let this happen to her."

"Dr. Karlstein is fighting like hell for Tess," I said.

"I believe that," she said.  "And I believe she’ll pull through.  Otherwise, I could never have left her, not even for an hour."

We lay together as Julia slept.  Before dozing off myself, I let my mind wander three, four months into the future, past the investigation, which I now believed should end with Darwin Bishop’s arrest.  And I could actually see Julia and myself making a life together, somehow offering Billy and Garret safe harbor from the storms they had weathered.  I actually thought I might have the chance to redeem myself for losing my adolescent patient Billy Fisk to suicide.

We awakened at the same moment.  Julia rolled over and faced me.  "I want to know that we’re together," she whispered.  "I want you to make love to me."

I propped myself on an elbow and brushed her hair away from her face.  "This is a complicated time to start," I said.

"We started the first time you touched my arm," she said.  "The day you met me outside the house, with Garret."

"I just..."

"You can’t control what you feel for me," she said, glancing at my crotch, full with my excitement.  She unbuttoned and unzipped her jeans, guided my hand into her panties and between her legs.  She was completely shaved, and her impossibly soft skin was warm and wet.  "Not any more than I can control what I feel for you."

Julia’s sexual desire in the face of losing Brooke and nearly losing Tess troubled me, but I silently chastised myself for judging her.  What textbook reaction, after all, would have satisfied me?  Bitter rage?  Isolation?  Did I want to see her slip deeper and deeper into depression?

My head was swimming.  Why resist Julia’s needs, I asked myself, when the gods of chance and love might be giving me my one shot at happiness?  Why deny my own needs?  I looked into Julia’s eyes and ran the tip of my finger along the cleft between her delicate folds.  She sighed.  And as she opened herself to my touch, it seemed a part of my soul, lost a long time, was being returned to me.

*            *            *

Friday, June 28, 2002

I started driving Julia back to Mass General at 1:30
A.M.
  We had fallen asleep again, after making love.  I checked my rearview mirror a few times to make sure we weren’t being followed.

"Worried about Win?" Julia asked.

"Shouldn’t I be?"

"I’ve worried about him for so long, I sometimes forget to."

"Why do you think you married him in the first place?" I asked.  "You’ve said you thought you were in love, but why did you fall for him?  What attracted you?"

She took a deep breath.  "I’m not sure it was about Win," she said.  "He was charming, handsome.  All that.  But it was more about me.  I think I was actually using him."

That sounded pretty up-front.  "How so?" I asked.

"I come from a large family," she said.  "Four brothers and myself.  Dad was an attorney, but not a real name in his profession, nothing like that.  My mother was quiet.  A homemaker.  She didn’t have any dreams to speak of and she never seemed terribly interested in mine.  Darwin was larger than life — certainly larger than my life seemed at the time."

"Your relationship with your father?" I asked.  "How was that?"

"I loved him, but he spent most of his time with my brothers — their athletics, their schooling.  I started modeling at fourteen, probably to compete for his attention.  It grew into a lot more than I expected, but he never really cared about it.  And I never developed real self-confidence from it."

"Your marriage provided that?"

"In a way," she said.  "Or it seemed to.  Being Win’s wife meant I didn’t have to figure out what else I was.  Mrs. Darwin Bishop was a good enough label for my parents and friends.  For most people.  And for a long while, it was good enough for me, too.  I borrowed his success.  I even fooled myself into thinking I was contributing to it.  The power behind the throne.  That kind of thing."

"But you had achieved a good deal of success yourself, in modeling," I said.

"I always understood that was skin-deep, and that it would end."  She looked out the window at the Boston skyline as we crossed the Tobin Bridge.  "I knew from the first time Darwin hit me that our marriage would end, too.  But I was... paralyzed.  I never took the time or had the strength to find my own way."

"Yet," I said.

"Yet."  She smiled.  "Enough about me, already, Dr. Clevenger.  How have you happened to stay single?"

"I was with a woman for years who was ill — mentally," I said.

"Who was she?"

"A doctor," I said.  "An obstetrician."

"Is that what brought you together?" Julia asked.  "Medicine?"

"That was part of it.  But, in a certain way, I was using her, too," I said.  "She was fragile, so I was the one in control.  My being with her gave me the chance to say I was in a relationship when I was really avoiding relationships.  Hiding out."

"Why hide?" she said.

"Because I had to hide — emotionally and physically — in the house I grew up in.  I guess it got to be a habit."

She looked at me as if she wanted more of an explanation.

"My father used a belt, just like Darwin," I said.

"I’m so sorry, Frank," she said.  "I had no idea."

"It was a long time ago," I said.

Julia was silent several seconds, sitting and looking through the windshield.  Then she turned to me.  "You don’t have to hide anything, anymore," she said.

My skin turned to gooseflesh.  I wanted to believe the heart of what Julia had said — that I could be known and loved at the same time.  Because, deep down, I had always suspected the two were mutually exclusive.  I glanced at her as she looked at me, with eyes full of acceptance and warmth.  And I felt, truly, as though I had arrived at a new and better place.

I parked in the MGH garage and walked Julia the two blocks to the door of the hospital.  We played it safe — no parting kiss, no long goodbye.  She walked into the lobby, and I turned and started back for the truck.  It was just before 2:00
A.M.

The MGH garage is a five-story, cement structure, the back of which overlooks the Charles River.  The building runs two city blocks, with the wall furthest from the hospital sitting on Cambridge Street and the wall closest to it bordering a darkened alleyway that leads to Storrow Drive.  I had just started walking across that alleyway when someone pushed me, hard, from behind.  I lurched forward and, struggling to stay on my feet, felt a sudden and odd twisting sensation at the bottom of my rib cage, about halfway between my spine and my side.  It burned red-hot for the first second or two, then flipped into a penetrating ache so severe it made me double over and fall to the ground.  I tried reaching for the Browning Baby in my pocket, but my arm didn’t seem to be taking instructions from my brain.

"What could she have done," a husky, peculiar-sounding voice said, "being what she is?"

I struggled to see the figure jogging away from me, but only caught a glimpse of black, army-style boots.  I groped for the painful place on my back that was making me see double.  I felt something warm and slick.  Then everything went black.

*            *            *

"Frank!" Colin Bain called to me.  "C’mon, man, stop ignoring me."  I felt my sternum being assaulted by Bain’s knuckles — a sternal rub, they call it, which is actually more of a brutal sternal raking, designed to wake the unresponsive and separate them from the dead.

"Christ!  I’m fine," I muttered, twisting away from him.  I opened my eyes and tried to sit up, but a searing pain reached through my back and yanked me down to the mattress by my ribs.

Bain was standing by the bed, wearing his round wire-rimmed glasses.  He swept his longish red hair away from his face.  "Welcome, friend," he said.

I was naked to the waist.  Bandages circled my torso like a half-wrapped mummy.  "What the hell happened to me?" I said.

"Someone jumped you in the alleyway near the garage," he said.  "Stuck you good.  A five-inch blade, so far as I can tell.  At least, that’s how deep it went."  He smiled.  "You slept through the best parts. I already explored the wound, cleaned it up, sewed you shut.  You were so out of it I didn’t even have to use lidocaine."

"The mind is a wonderful thing," I said.  "Thanks for the help."

"No problem," he said.

"Did they catch the guy?" I asked.

"Not even close," he said.  "They didn’t find you for five or ten minutes, judging from the amount of blood you’d lost."

I checked out the space around me and spotted a unit of packed red blood cells hanging from an IV pole.  A length of red IV tubing ran into my arm.  I shook my head.

"Hospital security said they thought you were some homeless drunk napping on the pavement," Bain said.  "They didn’t notice the blood all over your jacket until they flipped you onto a gurney to sleep it off in the lobby."  He winked.  "I do have their names, if you want to catch up with them."

I started to chuckle, but choked on a bolt of pain that shot straight through my abdomen, then up into my throat.

"You’re gonna be in a fair amount of discomfort for a couple days," Bain said.

"Discomfort’s a nice word for it," I said, catching my breath.

"An MRI showed the blade sliced through the latissimus dorsi and internal oblique," he said.  "I threw in about sixty stitches.  The tip just missed your portal artery, by the way.  If that had been severed, you’d have bled out for sure.  You’re lucky to be alive."

"Thanks for letting me know."

"It wouldn’t be a bad idea to be admitted overnight, for observation.  Just to make sure nothing got nicked in there that we don’t know about."

"No way," I said.  "I don’t have the time."

"You were almost out of time — for good," he said.  "What’s a day or two?"

"No it was a day
or two
.  "I’m in the middle of a forensic case," I said.  Saying those words helped my still-foggy brain make the obvious connection between the Bishops and my being stabbed.  "This probably has something to do with that."

"So maybe it would be good to lay low for twenty-four, forty-eight hours, you know?"

"I can’t," I said.

"Suit yourself," he said.  "I’ll write you a scrip for some Keflex.  Hopefully that’ll prevent any infection.  Percocet for the pain.  Just let me know when you need more."

The addict in me perked up.  Downing three, four Percocet would be like taking a chemical vacation from the whole Bishop mess.  I actually caught myself wondering how many refills Bain would write for me.  Luckily, I realized what a great excuse he was giving me to fall apart.  "I’d better skip anything abusable," I said.  "I’ve had problems with that stuff before."

He took the revelation in stride.  "I didn’t know.  We’ll make do with Motrin, then."

"Thanks."

"If you get any fever, chills or swelling, come right back here.  Agreed?"

"You got it," I said.

"The external sutures come out in ten days.  The internal ones dissolve," he said.

"I’ll see you in ten days, then."  I gritted my teeth and sat up.  My side felt as if it was ripping away from the rest of my body.

"The cops want to talk to you, by the way," Bain said.  "Should I let them know you’re awake?"

"Sure."

"These guys are Boston cops," he said.  "But I did take the liberty to let a friend of yours from Nantucket know your condition.  North Anderson?  He told me he heard what had happened to you from colleagues on the force up here.  I hope I didn’t step out of line filling him in."

"No," I said.  "I’m glad you talked with him."

Bain looked at me with concern.  "You’re sure you won’t stay the night.  A couple very pretty nurses on Blake eight."

"Maybe I’ll take a rain check after I’m healed up," I said.

*            *            *

I told the Boston patrolmen everything I could remember, which was nothing much.  Even the black boots had temporarily slipped my memory, let alone the odd turn of phrase spoken by my assailant.  They had no clues, either.  There’d been a mugging in the same spot about eight months before, but that didn’t amount to much of a pattern, and it didn’t do anything to push Darwin Bishop — represented, of course, by one of his thugs — out of my mind as the most likely culprit.

I waited for the rest of the blood to drip into my arm, swallowed three Motrin, and pulled myself together enough to roll off the gurney and maneuver into a big white button-down shirt I borrowed from Bain.  I steeled myself for the elevator ride up to the ICU, but every jostling stop made me break out in a cold sweat.

I found Julia seated next to Tess’s bed, with a twenty something male sitter on the opposite side of the mattress, reading what looked like a law school textbook.  He and I exchanged the standard greetings.

"What happened?" Julia said.  "You look awful."

I told her.

She went pale.  "This is my fault," she said.  "I should never have taken the chance coming to your place."

"It could have been a random attack," I said, even though I knew better.

"We have to be much more careful," she said, shaking her head.  "This is what I was afraid of."