The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (50 page)

“What happened?” I said.
“Nothing
happened. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh,” she said. “Okay. Yeah.”

I turned up the music. Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl.” We both stared ahead, our eyes on the highway ahead of us.

Back in Three Rivers, on Bride Lake Road, I passed the prison without looking at it. Put my blinker on, turned in, and drove up the long driveway to the farmhouse. Someone was outside, sitting on the front step. Was it a woman? A child?

“Oh, my God,” Janis said.

I cut the engine. Got out and walked warily toward her. Her face was bruised and puffy. There was a nasty-looking gash above her left eyebrow. She had dried blood on the front of her shirt, bloodstained teeth.

We sat down on either side of her. “What happened, Velvet?” I said.

“What do you
think
happened? I got beat up, that’s what.”

Janis took her hand. “Sweetie, who did this to you?” she asked.

“Some asshole at the rest stop. Gives me twenty bucks to go down on him, and when I start doing what he’s just paid me to do, he yanks me back up by my hair and starts slamming my face against his dashboard. Opens the door of his truck when he’s done, throws me out onto the ground, and drives off. Cocksucker.”

I stood up. Held my hands out and pulled her up. “Come on in,” I said. “Let’s get you cleaned up. See if that cut you got is going to need stitches.”

Velvet began to cry. “I want my mom,” she said.

“Your mom’s in jail,” I said. “You’re stuck with me.”

Janis looked back and forth between us.

THAT NIGHT, LYING AWAKE IN
bed, I listened to their voices murmuring above me, their footsteps: Moze’s, Janis’s, Velvet’s. I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t stop thinking about everything that had happened that day: the flashback or whatever it had been, the feel of her kisses.

I put the light on. Opened the book I’d bought. I found a letter he’d written to his friend Twichell shortly after his daughter’s death.

I closed the book, turned off the light, and cried in the dark. For
the Clemenses, the Columbine families. For Morgan Seaberry’s parents, the Harrises and the Klebolds. I cried, too, for Moze and Maureen. I wished I hadn’t kissed Janis, but I had and wanted to kiss her again. Wanted to undress her, hold her nakedness against my own, and spill my seed inside of her…. She’d lit a match to a loneliness that, for years, I’d tried hard to bear.
What
happened? I’d said.
Nothing
happened. But something had. Something had jumped the track back there in Bushnell Park. Some first domino had fallen.

“WHAT DID YOU CALL IT
again?”

“Vicarious traumatization. It can happen to those who bear secondary witness to the traumas of others. Therapists, for instance—an occupational hazard to which those in my profession must be alert.”

“So it’s like … transference or something?”

Dr. Patel nodded. “But I’m not sure about flashbacks, Mr. Quirk. More typically, vicarious traumatization manifests itself as hyper-vigilance or an inabilty to focus. Nightmares, sometimes. All classic symptoms of—”

“Posttraumatic stress,” I said.

“Yes, yes. Now I’m thinking the episode you experienced—vicarious flashback or not—may have triggered a rapid drop in your blood pressure. And that, in turn, may have been the reason you seem to have lost consciousness for a second or two. Were you alone when this happened?”

“No, I … well, yeah. Yes, I was.” I looked away from her curious face. Looked back. There was no way in hell I was getting into the subject of Janis and me. “Vicarious traumatization, huh? Weird.”

“My concern is that if it happens again, you might fall and hurt yourself, and there would be no one to help you.”

I shook my head. “I’m sure it was just some weird, onetime thing.”

“Perhaps you should see your physician, Mr. Quirk. Have some tests done to rule out physiological causes. And, should symptoms persist and the problem
does
seem to be psychological in nature, I would be happy to work with you. But at any rate, it’s lovely to see you again.”

“You, too. And I see you’ve got a new office mate since the last time I was here.” I pointed past her puzzled face to the marble sculpture on the table behind her: elephant head, human body, four arms flailing.

“Ah, you mean Lord Ganesha! Are you familiar with him?” I shook my head. “Ganesha is the destroyer of sorrows and the remover of obstacles. A fitting ‘office mate,’ don’t you think, given what we try to accomplish here?”

I nodded. “And four hands instead of two. Must be a multitasker.”

She laughed. “Yes, yes. A Hindu deity well suited to busy Americans. You should remember to rub his big belly before you leave. It’s said to bring good luck. More tea?” I held out my cup. She poured. “I must say, Mr. Quirk, you are looking quite well despite your recent episode.”

“Am I? Well, I’ve started running again. Helps with the stress.”

Janis and I were doing three or four miles together, first thing in the morning. We’d get back at about the time Moze drove in from night baking, and the three of us would have breakfast together. The
four
of us, actually, on the days when Princess Velvet managed to drag herself out of bed and saunter downstairs. I’d agreed to let Velvet move in with the Micks—temporarily, I’d stipulated. I wasn’t crazy about the idea, but I figured it would keep her out of harm’s way for a while. I’d also said yes as a favor to Janis. Velvet was helping Moze set up his sculpture business, and that freed Janis to work on all the stuff she’d discovered in those old filing cabinets.
Caelum! You’re not going to believe this! I found Lizzy’s Civil War letters! And old photographs, too—a whole big envelope of them!
Jesus, she’d acted like a kid on Christmas morning.

“You’re smiling, Mr. Quirk,” Dr. Patel noted.

“Hmm?”

“Your face just broke into a lovely smile. A penny for your thoughts.”

I shook my head. “I’d be overcharging you.”

Her eyes moved from my face to my tapping left foot, then back. “And so you are running again. And teaching your new course: The Quest in Literature, as I recall. Are you enjoying that?”

I nodded. “Students are a little resistant, though. They keep wanting to know what all these classical Greek myths we’re reading have to do with them. Community college students tend to be pragmatists, you know? Can’t blame them. A lot of them are balancing school, work, kids.”

“Multitaskers,” Dr. Patel observed. “And when they ask you what the ancient stories have to do with them, how do you respond?”

“Last week, I threw the question back at them. Told them each to pick a myth and write a personal essay about its relevance to their lives.”

“Ah, that’s an interesting assignment, and a useful one, too, I should think. The archetypal stories address human needs and longings so marvelously. Which is why they have lasted since antiquity, yes?” I nodded. “And did your assignment yield good results?”

“Don’t know yet,” I said. “Papers are due next Tuesday.”

“Well, Mr. Quirk, your resistant students are fortunate to have you as their teacher. Now tell me, please. How is Maureen?”

“Mo?” I looked away from her for a second. Looked back. “Doing okay for the most part. She’s got a cellmate she’s compatible with now, so that helps. Gambling addict. In there for embezzlement.” I pulled at an unraveling thread on my sweatshirt sleeve. “She seesaws from visit to visit. Mo, I mean. Some days she’s up, some days she’s down.”

“And how often are you able to see her?”

“How often?” I shifted in my chair, folded my arms in front of me. “It goes by the last digit of their inmate numbers. Odds can have visits one day, evens the next. So, theoretically, I can go every other day.”

Dr. P’s head tilted slightly. “Theoretically?”

I took a sip of tea. Over the rim of my cup, I watched her watch me.
“No, it’s just … I
was
getting there every other day at first. Because that’s what she needed, you know? She was so intimidated by everything. And everybody.”

“Well, that’s understandable.”

“Yeah. It is. All the loud noises really freaked her out at first, you know? Doors banging, people screaming and swearing at each other. This one little darling on her tier realized that noise bothered her, so she’d rile her up on purpose. Sneak up behind her and clap in her ears, go ‘Boo!’”

Dr. Patel shook her head. “Assimilation to such a harsh environment would be difficult for anyone, but particularly so for someone with PTSD.”

“But she’s better now. Like you said, assimilating. Other day I was down there and she said she heard ‘on the down-low’ that there was going to be a shakedown that weekend. A shakedown’s where the goons herd them over to the gym and strip-search them while another bunch pulls their cells apart, looking for contraband. Drugs, weapons. That kind of thing.” I shook my head. “On the down-low: like she grew up on the streets or something. Part of her assimilation, I guess. Learning the lingo. Next thing I know, she’ll be getting a jailhouse tattoo.”

I sat there, waiting for her to say something. Watching her wait.

“They got this thing down there called ‘five on the floor,’ okay? Which means that once an hour, the CO at the control desk pops their cell doors. Everything’s controlled electronically, okay? So the CO pops their doors and they get a whopping five minutes to go out to this common area where there’s phones, and a TV, and a pot of hot water so they can make themselves instant coffee or tea or whatever. That’s when she can call me, okay? During ‘five on the floor.’ Except after we get through the rigmarole of me accepting the phone company charges and the State of Connecticut surcharge and all that yadda yadda, we’ve got maybe two, three minutes to talk. And, you know, all the time we’re trying to have a conversation,
the TV’s blaring and everyone’s yapping away in the background with
their
volume jacked up. And so, half of our conversation is me repeating two or three times what I already said because she can’t hear me over the racket. Gotta stick her finger in her ear the whole time, she says, and even then…. Plus, there’s this intermittent beep-beeping coming through the receiver to remind you that Big Brother may be eavesdropping.”

Dr. P shook her head. “Face-to-face visits are preferable, then. Yes?”

“Yeah. Somewhat…. But it gets hard, you know? I mean, I’m teaching, conferencing with students, going to these bullshit committee meetings that drag on forever. You know academics: love to hear themselves talk. All that plus I’ve got a forty-minute commute twice a day…. And now? With the civil suit coming up? The lawyer I hired says he needs all the documentation from the criminal trial, plus all the information about our assets. Takes
time
to gather all that stuff, you know? She doesn’t realize that I can’t just put the brakes on everything from three to four thirty every other day and get over to see her.”

“So this is an issue between the two of you?”

“An issue? No, not really. Not a
big
issue.”

In the dead air that followed my bogus denial, her eyes moved from my eyes down to my crazily tapping foot, then back again.

“Hey, I can understand it from her perspective, you know? I mean, what’s
she
doing all day while I’m running from one thing to another? Sitting in her cell, waiting for three o’clock. So when they
don’t
call her down…. I mean, I
get
that, but … She’s applied for a job, though. That should help. She’d like to get assigned to the infirmary—use her skills, you know? But her unit manager told her he doesn’t think it’ll happen because of her drug history. Says she’ll probably get food prep or janitorial or something. Which would be okay, too, I guess. Anything to eat up some of her day. Make the time go by quicker.”

“Indeed,” Dr. Patel said. “Well, I hope—”

“Trouble is, whenever they apply for something at that place, the
paperwork takes forever. I swear, the entire system’s being run by inefficiency experts. It’s ridiculous.”

“And so it goes with large institutions, I’m afraid.”

“And then? When I
do
bust my butt—drive back from school like a bat outa hell and rush over there? It’s hurry-up-and-wait. They’ve got this rule: inmates have to be seated in the visiting room before they let us enter. And Mo says a lot of the guards take their sweet time calling them from their units. Or they hold them up at the walk gate—hassle them for the simple reason that they can get away with it. Make themselves feel like big shots.”

“An abuse of their authority,” Dr. P noted.

“Right. Exactly. And meanwhile, I’m parked in the bullpen with all the other visitors, thinking about all the things that aren’t getting done while I’m just sitting there…. Sometimes? You wait there for half, three-quarters of an hour, and then they come strolling out and tell you visits have been canceled for the day. No explanations, no apologies for anyone’s wasted time. It’s like, see ya, don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.”

“That must be very frustrating, Mr. Quirk.”

“Hey, it’s not even that big a deal for me. I live right up the road. You know who
I
feel sorry for? The grandmothers. These poor, exhausted-looking women who are stuck raising the daughter’s kids while she’s doing time. They drive an hour, hour and a half from Bridgeport or Stamford, some of them, in these rusted-out old gas guzzlers that look like they might not make the trip back. Got the toddlers strapped into their car seats in back. Haven’t even had time to change out of their work clothes, a lot of them—they’re still wearing their nursing-home smocks or whatever. Then they get there and the goon at the gate goes, ‘Sorry. No visits today.’ … Sucks for those little kids, you know? And for the grandmothers.”

Dr. Patel nodded sadly. “As it sucks for the prisoner who has anticipated seeing her loved ones.” She stopped, cocked her head to the side. “Something is humorous, Mr. Quirk?”

“No, I just … You usually speak the Queen’s English. Struck me funny to hear you say something ‘sucked.’ Another occupational hazard, eh, Doc? Assimilating the slang you have to listen to all day long from us boneheads?”

By way of an answer, she gave me a noncommittal smile.

Her smile faded. She glanced at her clock. “I’m afraid we’ll have to end in a few minutes, Mr. Quirk. But tell me something, please, before we do. Maureen’s failure to understand how busy you are: Would you say your frustration about that stems more from anger or from fear?”

“Neither, really. It’s just …” I shrugged. “It is what it is.”

“That’s a circumlocution, Mr. Quirk—the kind of time-wasting response which, I imagine, you would not accept from your students. Suppose I were to insist you choose one or the other. Which would it be? Anger? Or fear?”

As if she
wasn’t
insisting. “I don’t know. Anger, I guess.”

“And what would be the source of that anger?”

We held each other’s gaze for several seconds.

“This lawsuit we’re facing?
I’m
facing. Hey,
I’m
the one who had to go out, get a lawyer, get all this stuff ready while she’s sitting down there at the human warehouse…. I keep going back to this Sunday night several years back when my aunt called me. My aunt Lolly—the one I inherited the farm from. This was back in ninety-seven, ninety-eight—after she and I reconciled and we moved out to Colorado. So my aunt calls me, okay? Says she’s having her will done. Asks me, do I want her to put the farm in just my name, or in both our names. Maureen’s and mine. ‘Both,’ I said. Hey, we’d moved out there to save our marriage, right? Clean slate, new beginnings. And it was working pretty well. Things
were
better. So I said, without really thinking about it, ‘Put it in both our names.’ As an act of faith, or whatever. So that’s what she did. But now … because of that …”