The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (34 page)

Mo nodded glumly.

“So what I’m thinking is, there had to have been enormous pressure at just the points where you’re feeling this persistent pain.”

“Are you saying it did nerve damage or something?” I asked.

“No evidence of that.” He turned back to Mo. “Your pain is real, Mrs. Quirk. I understand that. But I’m ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent sure the cause is psychological. Now there’s a Dr. Mario Mancuso down in New Haven who’s done some wonderful work with Ericksonian hypnosis and …” His eyes followed her out of the room.

Mo felt more simpatico with Dr. Pelletier, a general practitioner in his seventies whom she knew from her days as nurse supervisor at Rivercrest Nursing Home, and who, without ordering tests, prescribed the “muscle relaxer” Valium to address both her pain and the insomnia it caused.

I kept my mouth shut for a while. Kept watch. Kept counting her remaining tablets each morning when she walked the dogs. More and more, I didn’t like the math. She seemed dazed sometimes. Was it psychic numbness or was she overdoing the Valium?

“Look, they
help
me, okay?” she insisted. “Why is that a problem?”

“Because the bottle says three a day tops, and they’re disappearing faster than that.” If I wanted to act like a prison guard, she said, then I should go next door where the
real
drug addicts were. Because she
wasn’t
one, and she resented being treated as if she were. She was a nurse, remember? She knew a hell of a lot more about medications than I did.

The next day, while she was out, I called Pelletier’s office. No, I told the receptionist, I
didn’t
want a call-back; I’d hold. I stood there, waiting, shaking her pill vial like a castanet.
“Mister
Quirk,” he finally said, like I was one more pain in the ass he had to tolerate in the middle of his busy day.

I blurted it out. “Valium’s addictive, right?”

He said all minor tranquilizers had the potential to become habit-forming; the risks had to be weighed against the benefits. “Valium got a bad rap after that Hollywood book came out back in the seventies. I forget the title—something about dancing. But I’ve been prescribing it without a problem for years now. To
hundreds
of patients. Your wife says her pain has lessened, her sleep patterns have regulated. And she understands this is a short-term, not a long-term, solution. Now is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Guess not,” I said.

“Good. Stop worrying. She’ll be fine.”

But Dr. Pelletier didn’t know that Dr. Yarnall up in Plainfield was also writing her scripts for Valium, or that Dr. Drake down in New London was supplying her with Ativan. I didn’t know this either, until that afternoon down at the bakery. I was helping Alphonse with a big special order: fifteen dozen pastries for some ballroom lecture event up at UConn. “Hey, Quirky! It’s for you!” Al called, and I put down the frosting knife and walked over to the wall phone. Jerry Martineau was on the other end. One of his detectives had brought Maureen in, he said. I’d better get down to the station ASAP.

“She’s been doctor-shopping,” Jerry said. We were seated side by side on a long wooden bench in the hallway of the station house, speaking in hushed voices. “And this afternoon the computer system caught up with her.”

I nodded. “So I take it you’re arresting her. I better get her a lawyer, right?” Jerry shook his head. He said he understood she’d been to hell and back because of what happened “out there.” So when Detective Meehan brought her in, he told him he’d handle this one personally. He’d made some calls, pulled in a favor from the controlled substance guys—not that
that
was for publication. Maureen and he had had a long talk, he said, and she’d made him two promises: she was going to get back into counseling and she was going to start going to meetings.

“What kind of meetings?” I asked.

“Narcotics Anonymous. And I need
you
to make sure she keeps her promises. Okay?” I nodded. “Okay. Good. Now what do you think? You want to take her home or get her into a treatment place? Because, depending on how much of that shit she’s gotten hooked on, the next couple days might not be too pretty.”

I told him I’d take her home.

“Okay then. Your call, Caelum. I’ll go get her.”

While I waited on that scarred old wooden bench, I wondered if it was the same one I’d sat on all those years ago, on that snowy day when my father and I had gone downtown to buy me a Davy Crockett coonskin cap and we’d ended up, side by side, in this same friggin’ station house hallway. I closed my eyes and saw him again: his front tooth dangling, his shirt stained with blood and egg yolk.
Don’t you ever be like me, buddy,
I heard him say.
Because my name is mud. Alden George Quirk the Third MUD!

Maureen and Jerry approached from the opposite end of the corridor. It hit me: she
looked
like an addict—scrawny and scared, with those jumpy eyes. She walked up to me and, without a word, rested her forehead against my chest. My hand hovered an inch or so away
from the small of her back, but I couldn’t bring myself to place it there. Not with Jerry standing there, watching us. I felt grateful to him, but resentful, too. “Let’s go home,” I said.

In the car, she kept thanking me for my loyalty and begging me not to leave her. She was
relieved
she’d been found out, she said. As horrible as this day had been, it had given her the motivation she needed. She was going to get better. I’d see.

“Good,” I said. “Because I’m not even sure who you are anymore. I miss the woman I married. The woman that sat across from me in the bakery on our first date. Where did
she
go?” Neither of us said anything more, but we were both in tears.

The dogs managed what I couldn’t: a welcome-home party. They barked and sashayed, nuzzled her. “I don’t want to have to pull this whole place apart,” I said. “So why don’t you get up off your knees and show me where you’ve stashed it all?” She nodded obediently and got back on her feet.

Her prescription from Dr. Pelletier—the only one I’d known about—was in the medicine cabinet. She handed it over. She’d hidden the pills from Dr. Yarnall inside a package of tampons. The generic mail-order meds were in her closet, tucked in the toes of her winter boots. She smiled and said she was glad all the sneaky stuff was over. “What about the Ativan?” I said.

“The Ativan?”

I consulted the notes I’d taken during my conversation with Jerry. “The shit you conned some Dr. Drake into giving you,” I said.

She nodded, defeated. I followed her back downstairs and into the pantry. Standing on the stool, she stretched her arm to the top shelf and groped behind some of Hennie’s old cookbooks. “Here,” she said.

“And that’s all of it?” She said it was, but, hey, you take an addict’s word with a grain of salt.

Her contrition lasted until about nine that evening, at which point her panic went into overdrive and she went on the attack. “What
about
you?
” she screamed. “You drink too much, and you’re on that goddamned computer all the time! Those are addictions, too, aren’t they? What’s the difference?”

“I didn’t get my ass hauled into the police station today.
That’s
the difference. Do you know how close you came to getting arrested?”

“Oh, shut up. You and your bullshit self-righteousness. Why don’t you pour a drink and toast yourself for being so superior? Fucking hypocrite!”

I went to the liquor cabinet, uncapped and uncorked every bottle that was in there, and brought them all to the sink. Then I pulled her confiscated meds out of my jeans pockets, uncapped the vials, and poured them down the drain. Poured my scotch and vodka and wine over them. When she lunged for the few pills that hadn’t made it down the pipe, I grabbed her from behind and pulled her away. She took several half-hearted whacks at me, but I blocked them. In the scuffle, we both tumbled onto the floor. The dogs stood over us, barking crazily. Maureen got herself up and, from the doorway, glared at me. “I need help!” she screamed. “Help me!”

“What the fuck do you think I’m
trying
to do?” I screamed back.

We were up most of that night, her pacing through the house, ranting half the time, sobbing and whimpering the other half. At one point, she said she wished they’d found her that day and killed her, too. “Well, they didn’t,” I said. “You came out of there alive. So goddamn deal with it.”

I made pots of coffee, mugs of tea, trying to stay awake and alert, trying to outlast her. She finally conked out, splayed the wrong way across our bed, somewhere after three in the morning. I covered her with a quilt, then flopped into the chair by our bed and fell into a deep sleep myself. I awakened with a start to a clanging sound. She wasn’t in bed, or in any of the upstairs rooms. I ran downstairs and headed to the kitchen, where the noise was coming from. From the doorway,
I took it in: my toolbox, the wrenches, the hammer wrapped up in a dishtowel. She’d tried but failed to disassemble the drain pipe. Now she was standing at the sink, slamming her hand, over and over, against the drain. Hoping against hope, I realized, that she might jam her hand down far enough and retrieve a pain pill or two that had survived the dousing.

Her desperation gave her a broken finger, a sprained wrist, and five badly skinned knuckles, but none of those lost pills.

HER NARCANON MEETINGS WERE IN
the basement of the Episcopal church at the corner of Sexton and Bohara. Night driving made her uneasy, especially in that area of town, so every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday evening, I’d drive her over there, then drive back home. Get in the car and go pick her up an hour and a half later. “So how’d it go?” I’d ask.

She’d shrug.

“These meetings helping you?”

She’d shrug again.

Her sponsor, Gillian, was laconic-bordering-on-hostile. She usually called at dinnertime. “It’s the Ice Queen,” I’d say, my hand over the mouthpiece, and Maureen would rise from the table, take the cordless from me, and leave the room. Leave me sitting there with my meal and myself. “Maybe you could ask her to call a little later?” I suggested one night.

“Why?”

“Because this is
our
time. And because I hate to see you have to get halfway through your dinner and then come back to it after it’s gone stone cold.” Maureen said Gillian worked full time and had a family. She called when she could. These conversations were more important than whether or not she ate hot food.

I ran into Jerry Martineau at Target. Yes, she was going to meetings,
I reported. No, she hadn’t gotten back into counseling just yet, but we were working on that, too.

That night, I sat in bed with her, leafing through the Yellow Pages.

“What about Dr. Patel?” I said. “You liked her.”

She reminded me that Dr. Patel was a couples counselor.

“That’s what
we
went to her for. Doesn’t mean that’s all she does.”

I called and left a message; Dr. P called back. Yes, yes, she said. Many of her patients over the years—the majority of her forensic patients, actually—suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder. So while she couldn’t claim to be an expert, she was certainly familiar with this malady and its treatments. And it would be lovely to work with Maureen again. “And so, very good, we will meet next Wednesday at four p.m. Yes, yes.”

She had relocated her practice to a warren of duplex two-stories in the Industrial Park—medical and dental offices, for the most part. The brick walkway leading to her door was lined with waist-high Indian statuary—Hindu gods and goddesses whose serene smiles and bared breasts belied the damp chill of the gray March day. The waiting room was narrow and nondescript. We were hanging up our coats when the inner office door swung open, and Dr. Patel emerged in a sari of brilliant blues and greens. “Ah, yes, the Quirks. Come in, come in.” She seemed genuinely happy to see us, but of course, she didn’t know who we’d become.

Her office walls were painted a sunny yellow; the furniture, soft and comforting, was kiwi green. Mo and I sat on the sofa, and I was suddenly aware of how drab and monochromatic we were: she in her baggy gray sweater and black jeans, me in gray jeans and a gray UConn sweatshirt. The table between us held a small stack of magazines, a bubbling dish fountain. A terrarium, filled with lush, moist plants, was home to a fat leopard frog, turquoise and black.

She fed us first: slices of mango on a pale green dish, a small bowl of cashews, a larger bowl, royal blue and white, that brimmed with
strawberries. “It’s robbery, the price they ask for fruit out of season,” she said. “But March is such a long and dreary month. One must treat oneself to small indulgences, yes?” I nodded. Popped a strawberry in my mouth. It was so delicious that I ate another, a third, a fourth. Maureen bit into a single cashew.

I told Dr. P about our lives in Littleton: our home, our jobs, Mo’s attempts to reestablish a connection with her father and his family, the shootings and their aftermath. “You want to tell her about the pills?” I asked Mo. She shook her head, so I told her. I was aware, as I spoke, that Dr. Patel was both listening to me and observing Maureen.

“Most helpful, Mr. Caelum,” she said. “Very, very useful information. And now, shall we hear from Saint Augustine?”

I shrugged. “Why not?” I said.

Dr. P read from a blood-red leather book.
“My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry…. Where could my heart find refuge from itself? Where could I go, yet leave myself behind?”

She closed the book, then reached across the table and took Maureen’s hand in hers. “Does that passage speak to you?” she asked. Mo nodded and began to cry. “And so, Mr. Caelum, good-bye.”

Because the passage had spoken to me, too, it took me a few seconds to react. “Oh,” I said. “You want me to leave?”