Tuesday Night Miracles (16 page)

17

Touching the Edge of Dreams

I
n the pouring rain the Franklin Building, with its dark brick façade, dim exterior lights, and side-street location, is a better fit for a Halloween house of horrors than for an anger-management class.

Kit is holding her jacket above her head, as if it is a makeshift umbrella, and running down the sidewalk as fast as she can. There was rain in the morning forecast, but she’s been living for years with the ridiculous notion that if you ignore the weather it will just go away. She suddenly wonders how many other things she has ignored that she probably shouldn’t have.

She shakes herself off like a wet dog before she enters the building. There are wads of paper in the entryway hall, an overflowing garbage can, and a collection of used coffee cups sitting on every visible ledge.

“Budget cuts and slobs coming to court-mandated meetings,” she grumbles as she decides to try her luck with the old elevator while she kicks a discarded brown paper bag with her left foot.

Something besides the way the building looks makes Kit uneasy. She’s not thrilled to be coming back to another meeting with her fake happy-face log tucked into her purse. Even though she has nothing to do but apply for graphic-arts jobs she knows she probably won’t get, Kit would rather be anywhere but standing in front of an antique elevator that will take her to a meeting that will probably embarrass her. Who knows what they will do tonight? Carve old pumpkins?

“Crap,” she says, putting her ear to the door to see if the elevator is coming, going, or has fallen halfway to hell.

When the door suddenly springs open and she sees Jane and Grace standing inside, looking as if they have just seen a ghost, Kit is paralyzed.

“Are you getting in or what?” Jane snaps, totally avoiding eye contact. “We were almost to the damn third floor when you must have pushed the button.”

Grace gives Jane a look, then sticks out her hand so the door won’t close.

“Come on in, Kit. We should probably all take the stairs, because this thing sounds like an old tank,” Grace warns.

Kit steps in and says, “Maybe we’ll get stuck in here and won’t have to go to the damn meeting.”

“That would be an unbelievable dream come true,” Jane agrees, laughing as she steps back to make room for Kit.

It takes so long for the door to close after Grace pushes the button again that all three of them wonder if it indeed might have been better to attack the stairs.

The elevator lurches, and the sound of a chain dragging against metal makes them all raise their eyes.

“Is this a good idea?” Kit wants to know as she braces herself against the side of the elevator.

“It did this before, too,” Grace says, trying to reassure herself and Kit. “The inspection notice here on the wall is current. I thought using the dark stairs would be just as dangerous as getting on this thing.”

“Well, this is just great for me,” Jane whines. “Being scared doesn’t make me happy. This is not a good sign for tonight’s meeting.”

The elevator is moving so slowly that Kit is now certain they will all be late.

She takes comfort in their shared misery. “Did you two do the happy-log thing for tonight?”

Jane snorts. “What a crock that was. I couldn’t believe it when I got the email. I mean, really!”

“But did you do it?” Grace asks as the chain continues to bump and grind.

“I wrote a few things down. That’s all she’s getting from me. Did either of you keep a log?”

Grace and Kit look at each other and do not say a word.

Jane, who appears to get irritated by simply breathing, asks again.

“Sort of,” Grace finally replies. “It’s not something I really think about, or have time for, but I get her point. It’s just one more thing to have to do and worry about, and I have enough of that.”

Jane and Grace look at Kit.

“I wrote in mine, but not like she wanted me to,” Kit admits. “Grace is right. It’s not the worst idea—it’s just, well, hard in a way, and I for one do not care if I have to lie about it.”

“Good girl,” Jane says, smiling.

“Do you think Leah kept a log?” Grace has thought about Leah more than a few times this week. Kit has wondered about her once or twice also, and Jane has done everything possible not to think about her.

“I couldn’t believe it when she walked into the room,” Jane says.

“Why?” Kit wants to know, although she realizes she could easily guess at Jane’s answer.

“She lives in a shelter, for God’s sake,” Jane responds with more than a hint of disgust in her voice. “She’s well, hell, you know—she’s not like us. My mother would say she’s from the other side of the tracks.”

The word
mother
causes Kit’s heart to skip a beat. Her mother would have slapped Jane openhanded on the cheek three times by now, because Jane obviously thinks she’s better than Leah, and maybe Grace and Kit, too. Her mother, who raised a house full of boys and lived with a man who thought he was king, put up with a lot, ignored a lot, swept a lot under the table, but she would have paid someone to go after Leah’s husband with a shotgun, two knives, and her Mafia in-laws. Her mother would also never, ever, in a million years, believe that her only daughter, her Agnes, would be standing in an ancient elevator with two other women who got caught with their weapons drawn.

Ellington County Anger-Management Class. Sweet Mother of God. How did this happen to me?

Kit looks at Jane and says, “So?”

Grace is praying that the elevator makes it to the third floor. She has already decided that she’s going to get a small folding knife for her purse and take the stairs to class next week. Maybe she’ll get some Mace, or brass knuckles, or hire a bodyguard—and it won’t be just for the dark stairway. It will be to protect her from her fellow classmates.

“I know what you mean, Jane,” she agrees, raising her hands in a peacekeeping gesture. “But I’m guessing Kit doesn’t think it’s fair to judge Leah. We really don’t know much about her. You never know a person’s whole story until they tell it. Don’t you think we all have secrets, too?”

Jane looks appalled. Did these women fall on their heads when they were babies? Did they not see how Leah was dressed and what her face looked like? And secrets? She would never dare to open up her heart to these women, to tell them how lonely and alone she feels, how she lies on the couch and makes believe she’s sitting on her mother’s lap, how sometimes she imagines she’s just like them.

Before Jane can say anything, Kit speaks up. “You know, we really don’t know each other at all.”

She wants to say more. She wants to say that Jane looks like a high-class hooker and someone else that she can’t quite identify, and that Grace could be dropped into any suburban neighborhood in America and blend in like an additional stop sign. A part of her wants to agree with Jane and say yes, Leah is white trash and probably got beat up when she was living in the last legal trailer park in Illinois. She wants to hit the stop button and freeze them between floors two and three so that they don’t have to go into the meeting. Maybe she really does want happy and not all this damn angst.

But Kit also can’t stop thinking about her mother and how even though she’s now dead Kit has totally let her down. And she has let herself down, too. All this anger and loss and yearning have sent her backward instead of forward and she feels as if there is nothing to hold her in place.

“We at least look like normal women,” Jane fires back as the elevator lumbers toward the third floor. “And, before you say anything else, I know that looks aren’t everything and we aren’t supposed to judge a book by its cover and whatever else happens when we are prejudging others. But
really
. Think about it.”

What Grace and Kit think about is that they’re all prejudging one another. It’s fairly obvious that the tension between them is razor-sharp. And you don’t have to have a degree in psychology to figure out why. How easy is it to transfer your own angst, hurt, and fear to someone else? It takes the heat off you and holds the spotlight over someone else’s head. They should all be looking into a mirror instead of into one another’s eyes.

But they remain silent until Grace can’t stand it any longer. She has to talk and she’d rather talk about anyone but herself, and she feels bad that poor Leah isn’t trapped in the elevator with them to defend herself.

“Hey, doesn’t Dr. Bayer remind you of an old hippie who probably protested the Vietnam War braless while smoking marijuana without her shoes on?”

Imagining Dr. Bayer walking through the mud at Woodstock with hairy legs makes them all start laughing as the elevator lurches and then begins to drop into place. The movement of the door against the ancient steel glider it sits on sounds like the door of a dungeon creaking open.

“I think, especially on Tuesday nights like this, we’re not just riding in a dungeon but living in one, too,” Kit suggests, laughing as the elevator door screeches open.

Finally, here is one thing they can agree on and their combined laughter rolls down the hall a few seconds before they do, and when the three of them walk into the room they’re startled to see that Leah is already there and she’s apparently having an intimate conversation with Dr. Bayer.

Dr. Bayer looks up and smiles. “Well, it sounds as if you’re all in a good mood tonight.”

Leah is already here? She’s having a private conversation with Dr. Bayer? Is Dr. Bayer playing favorites?

Grace, Kit, and Jane walk in wordlessly, half nod to Leah, who silently waves with her left hand, and Dr. Bayer groans internally, straightens up, and prepares to do battle. Apparently the girls weren’t happy about being happy.

Battle is not what a therapist usually thinks about as a tactical maneuver at the start of an experimental group session. Occasionally some group members will be inappropriate. There will be flirting, or someone will constantly be late. Sometimes she will notice lewd gestures or smirking that intimidates other group members. Several times Dr. Bayer has had to bring along a fellow therapist, usually a burly weightlifting psychologist who can scare even the hardest criminals. He enters the room, Dr. Bayer introduces him, and then he stands at the door in a short-sleeved shirt with his arms crossed, constantly flexing his biceps.

When Dr. Bayer interned following her postgraduate work, she chose to focus on women in prison. She designed a remarkable program for female inmates who were mothers and who wanted to maintain that role even though they were incarcerated. She worked with murderers, career felons, women so accustomed to the hard edges of life that at first glance it would seem impossible to discover even a hint of emotion.

But Dr. Olivia Bayer was dauntless and rarely gave up on any of the inmates enrolled in her classes and therapy sessions. When she thinks of someone hard, someone whom everyone else had given up on, the person who comes to mind is an inmate named Denise, who turned to prostitution in order to support her two sons. That led to drug addiction, because she couldn’t stand to look at herself in the mirror. The addiction led to AIDS, and then Denise robbed a small grocery store to feed her habit and her sons.

Dr. Bayer wouldn’t give up, even as Denise refused to let her sons visit her in prison, and showed no remorse for what she had to do to survive. Finally, a month before her death, Denise understood what her life choices had done, not just to her but also to her sons.
There is always another way
was, and remains, Dr. Bayer’s mantra. When Denise received permission to leave prison and die in a hospice, she was reunited with her sons, who have stayed in touch with Dr. Bayer for thirty years. One of the sons owns a furniture store and is a city alderman, and the other son became a dentist and runs a monthly clinic for impoverished inner-city children.

Dr. Bayer thought about Denise on her drive to tonight’s meeting. Leah and the other three women have so much at stake—every single one of them—and she so needs them to see the importance of letting go of the moment in the past that holds them in place. All this lingering on the anger and holding on to it is like refusing to bury the dead dog. Olivia nearly laughs. This group might want to stuff the dead dog and keep it around! She’d love to throw them all in a locked detention room for two days without food or water. When and if they turned inward and looked around she might consider letting them out. Their responses, and what she has seen of their writings, have been superficial. They must try and work harder.

That is why Dr. Bayer is poised to do battle tonight. Olivia knows that once you lose the lead, once the people in the chairs think they have you right where they want you, think they have outsmarted you, you may as well hoist the white flag and get the hell out of sight.

Grace Collins, Jane Castoria, Kit Ferranti, and Leah Hetzer have come to spar with a five-star general. They should look a lot more frightened than they do.

Dr. Bayer starts out slowly. She watches the women as she speaks, asks to see the assignment, does not bother to look at them when Grace, Jane, and Kit hold them up, because she’s certain the women have been lying about what’s inside. They don’t look very happy, but that’s okay. This process can’t complete itself overnight—look how long it took these four women to get here. When Leah admits that she didn’t write in her log, Dr. Bayer, much to the shameful delight of the other three women, is curt and to the point.