Psychopath (3 page)

"Smooth sailing," Jonah said.

"Excellent."  Ellison looked over his glasses.  "Your résumé said home was Miami.  You traveled from there?"

"I worked upstate New York last month.  Medina.  Near the Erie Canal.  St. Augustine’s Medical Center."

Ellison smiled.  "I’m surprised you’d trade the beach for the mountains."

"I love to hike," Jonah said.

"That explains it.  I’ve been after half a dozen staffing companies to get me a child psychiatrist — every since our Dr. Wyatt retired."

"There just aren’t many docs interested in locum tenens work, anymore," Jonah said.

"Why is that?" Ellison asked.

"Fewer psychiatry residents graduating.  Staff salaries increasing.  You can earn nearly as much staying put as you can traveling."

Ellison smiled wryly.  "Twenty thousand a month?"

"Sixteen, seventeen, counting benefits," Jonah said.  "Within the last two years, two-thirds of the psychiatrists at Medflex have taken permanent positions at one of the hospitals they were assigned to."

Ellison winked.  "That’s something we can talk about.  I reviewed your letters of recommendation.  I’ve never seen anything like them.  Dr. Blake called you ’the finest psychiatrist’ he’d ever worked with.  I happen to have been a resident with Dan Blake when he was at Harvard.  He’s not one to hand out false praise."

"Thank you," Jonah said.  "But I would get anxious if I didn’t move around."

"Maybe we could coax you to stay longer than six weeks."

"I never do," Jonah said.  That was his rule.  Six weeks max, then move on.  Longer than that, and people started wanting to know you.  They started circling too close.

"I take it you don’t have a family," Ellison said.

"No."  Jonah let the word hang in the air, enjoying the crisp sound of it and glad to be able to answer so definitively.  Because he had not only forsaken a wife and children.  He had completely cut himself off from his family of origin, severed every tie with every relative and childhood friend, cast himself adrift, a man alone on the planet.  He nodded toward a silver-framed, black-and-white photograph on Ellison’s desk.  Two children laughed on a swing set while an attractive woman with windswept hair pushed them.  "Yours?" he asked.

Ellison looked at the photograph.  "Yes," he said, with a mixture of pride and melancholy.  "They’re grown now.  Conrad is finishing his surgical residency at UCLA.  Jessica is a real estate attorney here in town.  Good kids.  I’m blessed."

Ellison hadn’t mentioned the woman in the picture.  Jonah intuited she was the source of the sadness in his voice, sadness Jonah was irresistibly drawn to.  "Is that your wife?" he asked.

Ellison looked back at him.  "Elizabeth.  Yes."  A pause.  "She passed away."

"I’m sorry," Jonah said.  He sensed Ellison’s emotional wound was raw.  "Quite recently?"

"A little under a year."  He pressed his lips together.  "It feels recent to me."

"I understand," Jonah said.

"People say that," Ellison said, "but surviving the woman you love... it’s something you’d almost have to live through yourself to understand.  I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy."

Jonah stayed silent.

"We were married thirty-seven years," Ellison said.  "Together, forty-one.  I have no complaints."

Jonah nodded, but he knew that Ellison issuing such a denial meant he had plenty of complaints, not the least of which would be with mortality itself, the horrific fact that our lives and those of the people we love are impermanent and exquisitely fragile, that any of us can cease to exist without warning, that loving anyone, anywhere, at any time, leaves you infinitely vulnerable at every single moment.

The thought transported Jonah out of Ellison’s office.  He was with Anna Beckwith’s mother as she answered the phone, a state trooper on the other end, about to deliver bad news.  Unthinkable news.  A daughter found murdered in the woods near her car, just off the highway.  Jonah imagined himself holding Mrs. Beckwith as she sobbed.  He stroked her hair.  He whispered in her ear, "
Anna isn’t really dead.  A part of her is alive.  Inside me
."

"Dr. Wrens?" Ellison was saying, leaning forward a little in his chair.

"Yes," Jonah said.

Ellison looked over his half glasses again.  "Did I lose you there, for a moment?"

"I was just thinking of being with the same woman for forty-one years.  You must have loved her very much."

Ellison cleared his throat, settled back in his chair.  "You’ve never married?"

Jonah had asked Anna Beckwith precisely the same question. 
You’ve never married?
  He looked askance at Ellison, wondering whether the kindly doctor might be telegraphing that he knew the mayhem Jonah had committed.  But that was impossible, and Jonah dismissed his worry as the mental echo of a guilty conscience.  For he did feel guilt-more and more with every life he took.  "I was married for a short time," he said.  "I was young."

"Weren’t we all," Ellison said.  "You weren’t ready for a commitment?"

Jonah shook his head.  "I was ready."

"She wasn’t," Ellison said.

Jonah gazed down at his lap, tugged nervously at his right pant leg, then looked back at Ellison.  "Actually, she died," he said, opting for starker words than Ellison’s,
She passed away
.

Ellison’s face fell.

"For whatever it’s worth," Jonah said, "and I trust you to keep my confidence, I do know something about what you’ve been through.  I’ve been through it myself."

"I’m so sorry," Ellison said, his brow furrowing.  "What I said must have sounded—"

"Like the truth," Jonah interrupted.  "Only someone who’s been through what we went through could ever understand."

Ellison nodded.

"Her name was Anna," Jonah said, letting his eyes drift to a corner of Ellison’s desk.  "We met at a dance at Mount Holyoke College, in Massachusetts."  He closed his eyes a moment, then opened them and smiled as if comforted by a pleasant memory.  "She’d chosen a girls’ school because she was shy — painfully, really.  She had two older brothers who had teased her ceaselessly.  Really ramped it up when she was about eleven, just in time to inflict the most damage psychosexually.  But she came into her own after we were engaged.  Blossomed in every way.  She seemed to have needed that kind of security."  He looked directly at Ellison again.  "Security," he said, shaking his head.  "She was twenty-three when she died."

"My God," Ellison said.  He was quiet a few moments.  "Do you mind if I ask what she died of?"

Jonah knew that a woman who died at the age of Ellison’s wife Elizabeth was likely a victim of cancer.  Heart disease was also possible.  A car accident could never be ruled out.  "Anna died of cancer," he gambled.  He was in the mood to test the limits of his intuition.  "Ovarian," he said.

"Breast," Ellison said, of his own loss.

Close enough, Jonah thought.  Ovarian.  Breast.  Neither end was short or painless.  Ellison had seen hell, and now he believed Jonah had seen it, too.  "People tell you you’ll get over it," Jonah said, "given time, given another relationship, given enough Sunday mornings saying enough prayers, but I don’t expect I ever will."

Ellison looked at him like a blood brother.  "Nor I," he said.

Jonah swallowed hard and said nothing for several seconds, letting the glue of their emotional bond harden.  When he did speak, it was with the tone of a man consciously reshelving the memory of a great tragedy.  "Well, then... okay," he said.  "Moving right along..."

"Right along," Ellison said.

"Tell me about the ward," Jonah said.  "How can I be helpful?"

"You’ve already been helpful," Ellison said.  He smiled at Jonah.  "Thank you."

Jonah nodded solemnly.

"But about the ward..." Ellison said, refocusing.  "As you know, it’s twenty beds.  We generally run full, with a waiting list.  We’re the only locked psychiatry unit within two hundred fifty miles.  Canaan and the towns around it are blue collar, mostly logging.  The parents tend to be high school-educated, if that.  Plenty of alcoholism, as you might expect given our locale.  Also a fair amount of illicit drug use.  Cocaine.  Heroin.  All of which brings abuse and neglect.  And I’d say we have more than our share of depression."

"Tough winters," Jonah said.

"Possibly.  Or it may just reflect a population of lower-than-average socioeconomic status."  Ellison paused.  "What I can tell you is that the kids who come here, probably not unlike other units where you’ve worked, are severely mentally ill.  Major depression, schizophrenia, drug dependence.  The insurance companies would deny them admission for anything less.  And there isn’t a family around here that could foot the bill for an elective stay."

"I like working with very ill patients," Jonah said.

"Then you’ll like it here," Ellison said.

"Night call is every third?"

"Right.  You’ll be working with Michelle Jenkins and Paul Plotnik.  I promise they’ll be very pleased to see you.  They’ve been splitting Dr. Wyatt’s caseload, which is no small burden.  He was very popular."

"I hope I measure up."

"I’m certain you will," Ellison said.  He looked at a datebook open on his desk.  "You’ll start the third of the month then, as planned?"

"I can start today," Jonah said, anxious not only to make amends for his destructiveness, but to feed himself the tortuous life stories he needed.

"How about yesterday?" Ellison said, smiling.  He stood up.  "I’ll show you around."  He paused.  "Come to think of it, we have case conference at noon.  Usually Dr. Jenkins or Dr. Plotnik presents the case to me.  I interview the patient in front of the staff and see if I can ferret out anything they haven’t, pull a rabbit out of the proverbial hat."  He winked.  "Plotnik is up today.  Why don’t you sit in for me?  That’ll be a good way for the staff to get to know your style."

"I’d be honored," Jonah said.  "Thank you."

"Thank me after the nurses and social workers get done peppering you with questions," Ellison said.  "They love taking pot shots at my clinical assessments.  I doubt they’ll be any more gentle with you."

"Tell them to shoot away," Jonah said.  "I’ll take it as a rite of passage."

*            *            *

The auditorium of little Canaan Memorial Hospital was an amphitheater that looked newly renovated, with fresh, dark gray carpeting, two hundred or so nicely cushioned, pearl-gray folding seats, and an array of wall sconces that cast pleasant plumes of light against the rose-colored walls, hung here and there with prints of peaceful mountain scenes.  Snowy pines.  Wafting clouds.  An icy brook.

When Jonah arrived with Craig Ellison, men and women were just drifting in.  A lectern and honey oak table sat at the front of the room.  Behind the table sat two upholstered wingback chairs facing one another.

Jonah had been in dozens of auditoriums just like this one, all of them designed much like he had designed himself — from his clothing to his mannerisms to his choice of words — to hold people and comfort them so they felt safe enough to speak their darkest thoughts.  The demons that lurked inside people — those grotesquely disfigured sewer dwellers of the mind, driven underground by the unspeakable emotional holocaust of what we call daily life — were themselves easily spooked, quick to retreat back into the maze of the unconscious, where they might be hopelessly lost and alone and desperate to be touched, but at least safe in their isolation from the kinds of beatings, whether physical or emotional, real or imagined, that they had taken by light of day.  Manipulative mothers, violent fathers, lecherous mentors, double-crossing friends, loveless marriages, dead grandparents, dead parents, dead siblings, dead children, death waiting patiently — for them.  What they needed was the quiet reassurance of pastels and soft shadows, of endless vistas and clear skies, of a velvet voice like Jonah’s, a pale blue gaze like his.

Yet all these things could reach only elbow-deep into the unconscious, leaving the most severe of pathologies untouched.  Jonah’s reach was far deeper, to the remotest corner of the darkest mind.  And the secret ingredient that beyond any other explained the magic he could work with patients was simply this:  the palpable presence of his own demons.  Those who harbored unthinkable thoughts knew in their hearts they had found a kindred spirit, one who understood the special torture it is to live fractured into pieces, some of them so sharp that to touch them would be to bleed forever.

"There’s one of your partners in crime," Ellison said to Jonah, nodding toward an exotic-looking woman with long, straight black hair, in her mid to late thirties, standing in a small group at the far side of the room.  "Dr. Jenkins.  Let me introduce you."

Jonah followed Ellison over to the woman.

"Excuse me," Ellison said, touching her arm from behind.

Jenkins turned around.  She wore a simple but smartly cut black pantsuit, with a lime green, scoop-neck T-shirt.  "How are you, Craig?" she said.  She acknowledged Jonah with a nod, then looked back at Ellison.

"I’m just fine," Ellison said.

"Paul has a real brain teaser for you today," she said.  "A nine-year-old boy.  Nearly mute.  The poor kid hasn’t said more than ten words since he was admitted."  She winked at Jonah.  "We’ll see what the chief can do with him."

Jonah looked into Jenkins’s amber eyes, the whites gleaming beside her lustrous hair.  The crescent contour of her eyes and the way they sat at a subtle angle above her cheekbones suggested she might be part Asian, as did her tawny skin and long, graceful neck.  When she smiled, dimples appeared in her cheeks, making her an accessible, rather than untouchable, beauty.  "What were they?" Jonah asked.

"Excuse me?" Jenkins said.

"The words," Jonah said.  "What ten words has the boy spoken?"

Jenkins smiled.  "I didn’t think to ask.  I should have."

Ellison chuckled.  "Michelle Jenkins, meet Jonah Wrens, the doctor I told you about from Medflex."

"I thought so," Jenkins said, extending her hand.  "My savior."