"You certainly seem to want to try."
"But I always start with myself." She laid her head on my chest. "That's what you need to do. Feel everything you've been trying not to feel."
"The good Dr. Lloyd." I closed my eyes.
"I really should be charging you," she whispered.
* * *
I slept until the sun woke me around six. I looked at Rachel, still asleep, and thought I saw the hint of a smile across her lips. Perhaps I invented it. I felt content myself. I knelt down by her side, buried my face in her hair and took deep breaths, as if to make her aura mine. Then I collected my clothes, pulled them on and took a step toward the door.
"Frank," she yawned.
I walked back to the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress. She slipped her hand over the sheet that covered her. I took it.
"Where are you going?" she asked without opening her eyes.
"Lynn."
"It's not over yet?"
"No."
Her hand went limp as she drifted off a few seconds, then her fingers tightened around mine again. "Be careful."
I felt like telling her that I loved her, but I had used the words more than a few times when I hadn't meant them, which had ruined them for me. So I just leaned over and kissed her forehead before heading down to the Rover.
I got in and drove away from Chelsea. I didn't wonder whether I'd see Rachel again. I knew I would. She had become a part of me. As exhausted and worried as I was, that fact lifted me. Because it proved that all the beatings I'd suffered, all the cocaine I'd snorted, and all the tragedy I'd listened to and seen hadn't finished me off. I could still let another human being inside the maze of my existence. And that gave me hope of finding my way out.
My euphoria, however, was short-lived. I wasn't a mile over the Revere line into Lynn when I heard a siren behind me. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw Malloy behind the wheel of his cruiser. I pulled over, and he pulled within a couple feet of me. I watched as he jumped out of the car and spit on the ground. He was holding a sheet of bright pink paper in his hand, which I knew was a Section 12, the form used by psychiatrists to order the involuntary hospitalization of patients dangerous to themselves or others. Cops sometimes initiate the commitment process to get some minor offender they think is clearly crazy out of a jail cell and into a locked psych unit. An M.D. has to sign off on the transfer. I figured Malloy was too lazy to track down the psychiatrist on call at Stonehill Hospital. I focused on his pudgy legs carrying him toward my door. I rolled down the window.
"Good morning," he grinned.
"This is twice you've turned up in my rearview mirror. You following me, or what?"
"In a way. You got a box in your car."
"Excuse me?"
"A
box
. The LoJack recovery system. I figured a rig this nice would have the best alarm going. So I ran your vehicle ID number at the Registry. That's all I needed. I can activate the homing device from my cruiser any time. If you're within fifty miles, you light up on a map."
"You're only supposed to track the car if I report it stolen."
"Really? You're kiddin’ me."
I glanced at the form in his hand. "I should make you chase the doc-on-call at the ER," I said.
"For this?" He rustled the paper.
"No. Because you and he would make a fabulous couple." I shook my head. "Of
course
for that."
"It's already signed," he deadpanned. "We didn't request this one. It got messengered to the station from a Dr. Pearson. Out of Boston. A few other towns got ’em, too."
"Pearson?" The last piece of paper I'd seen with his signature had been a note from his vacation home on the Cape urging me to get back into therapy. I worried Lucas might be using Pearson and the Impaired Physicians’ Program to jump from the criminal justice system to the health care system, paving the way for an insanity plea.
"You'll want to read it." He held the paper up.
I looked at the space for the patient's name, hoping I was wrong. But where I feared I would find Lucas’ name, my own had been written in. "What the hell—"
"I'm obviously not the only one in the world who thinks you need help."
A few lines down, Pearson had written the rationale for commitment:
Patient expressing suicidal ideation. Recent suicide attempts. History of illicit drug use. Acute paranoia
.
Malloy folded the pink paper and slipped it into his shirt pocket. "We'll have to leave the Rover here. I can't let you drive. You might decide to barrel into a tree or something."
"I'm not going anywhere with you. Where's Hancock?"
"She's not in today. Monique's funeral is this morning. And it wouldn't matter if she was sitting in my cruiser, because it isn't up to her whether this gets done. It's state law. We get the form, we get you. Period."
I started to roll up the automatic window, but Malloy plopped his hairless arms on the edge of the glass. The motor strained. I took my finger off the button.
"I have to get you to the hospital, any way I need to."
I thought about stepping on the gas, but I knew he was right. He could call as many cruisers as it took to stop me. I didn't see any benefit in a chase scene. "Look," I said, "pretend you never found me. Give me a couple hours to straighten this out. It's either a bad joke, or something worse." I nodded at my cellular phone. "I could probably get in touch with Pearson right now."
"According to the form, you're about to off yourself." He shrugged and looked up and down the road. "Personally, I don't think that's a half-bad idea. For instance, were you to grab my piece and shove it in your mouth, there wouldn’t be anything I could do about that." He unsnapped the leather strap over his gun.
"You know something? This isn't the first time you've made me wonder about you. So let me be clear: There is no part of you I want in my mouth. If you like a dick, talk to Monique's roommate. As far as I know, he still has one and he might be interested."
Malloy's face turned crimson. "We're late for your date with a padded cell. C’mon out of there."
"This is another mistake you're making. Emma won't be pleased."
"I'm doing my job. Nobody can say different. And you know what? Whatever she could do to me would be worth seeing you in the looney bin."
I couldn’t understand how anyone had convinced Ted Pearson to force me into the emergency room, but I wasn't going to find out sitting by the side of the road with Malloy. I got out of the Rover and walked back to the cruiser.
"In back," he said.
"Why?"
"Because that's the way I want it."
I winked. "Exactly," I said. "I just don't understand why you're so damned ashamed of it." I climbed into the back seat and watched as we pulled past the Rover. I knew where we were going, but I couldn’t have seen why.
* * *
Nels Clarke, the family physician working the emergency room, saw me come in with Malloy, but I looked away as I walked past him, headed for the psychiatric evaluation room behind the nurses' station.
A black health aide named Elijah Randolph opened the steel door for me. He was a big man in his early thirties whose puffy cheeks, half-beard and overalls made him look like the cartoon character Bluto. We'd worked the ER together before. "Cleaned up like the Ritz-Carlton for you, Doc," he grinned. "Ain't often a brother gets to see a white professional man lose his freedom."
"Glad I can even the scales out for you." I paused at the threshold, noticing a set of four-point leather restraints fastened to a gurney against the far wall. I had walked into the room countless times to see patients, but now, knowing the dead bolt would keep
me
inside, I hesitated. For some reason — probably because he was a natural enemy of psychiatry — I looked back at Malloy.
"You've talked your way out of bigger messes," he said, a reluctant hint of kindness in his voice. "You'll talk your way out of this one."
"Thanks. I think." I took a deep breath and walked inside.
Elijah followed me and pulled the door closed. "That pig would best be used for BLTs. I'd fry him up crispy and have myself extra helpings." He sat down on a stainless steel stool.
"For a second there, I sensed a human being lurking inside him." I leaned against the gurney. "What do you know about why I'm here?"
"They say you're crazy."
"I know
that
."
"We all know it. Why else would the maniacs that come through this place quiet down like church mice when they get around you? You ain't quite right. People been saying so for years."
"Who's saying it
now
, for the pink paper?"
He glanced through the observation window at the activity around the nurses’ station. A button on the countertop can activate a two-way intercom, in and out of the evaluation room. No one was near it. He stood up and rolled a blood pressure machine over to the gurney. He started to wrap the nylon cuff around my arm. "I'm not one to spread rumor and innuendo."
"The hell you're not."
He jiggled with laughter. "Women been tying men up from the beginning of time. Goes right back to Adam and Eve and that apple pie, if you catch my drift." He put his stethoscope in his ears. "Should be in the Bible that way.
Pie
is the source of all human suffering."
"Which women?"
"Hmm? Speak up." He stuck the bell of the scope in front of my face, like a microphone.
"Why do you say
women
? What do women have to do with me being locked up?" I asked.
He held up a finger, then slipped the bell under the blood pressure cuff. He started pumping the rubber bulb in his hand.
"You gonna tell me?"
"Shhh." He looked down at the blood pressure meter. The silver column of mercury rose. When it reached about 160, he stopped pumping, then turned a valve on the bulb to let the air start flowing out. At 110 he unscrewed it all the way. "A little high. Systolic and diastolic," he said. "Could be that you're tense."
I glared at him.
He checked the window. A nurse was standing over the intercom button. He ripped the cuff off my arm and took the stethoscope out of his ears. Then he fished an electronic thermometer out of his pocket.
"Say, ‘Ahhhh.’"
"Christ, do I have to?"
"Ahhhh..."
I opened my mouth, and he slid the probe under my tongue.
He turned around long enough to see that the nurse had moved on. "Word is that your woman and your mother double-teamed you. Went to court to commit your ass, on account of you being addicted to this or that, you being suicidal and you being generally hopelessly fucked up. The judge called the Impaired Physicians’ Program. Then the Section 12 came down." He grabbed the thermometer out of my mouth and read the digital display. "At least one thing about you is normal. Ninety-eight point six. On the money."
I had heard what he'd said, but I couldn't quite believe it. "You're telling me Kathy and my mother started all this?"
"I was close by when Nels got the call from some big-shot shrink in town." He paused, checked the nurses’ station again, then turned back to me. "They were talking maybe Section 35-ing you from here."
A section 35 was an involuntary, thirty-day detox, out at Bridgewater State Hospital, which was really more of a prison. "I'm already off the shit," I said. "Tell Nels to run my blood and urine. I'm clean."
"I'm sure he'll be buying that stock on my expert advice," Elijah said. "Let me get him. You can have a go at him yourself." He started toward the door, then turned back to me. "I got to lock you in. Sorry."
I nodded. I watched the door swinging shut and heard the bolt slide home. I watched the activity in the ER, focusing now and again on Nels Clarke as he darted between patients. About fifteen minutes passed before I saw him leave one of the curtained cubicles, pull off a pair of latex gloves and walk toward my door. I heard a key in the lock.
"He's all yours, Dr. Clarke," Elijah said. "I'll wait right outside."
Nels walked in. He stayed near the door. "You look very angry," he said.
"Me? Why would I be angry, Nels?"
"I didn't sign the Section 12."
"I know. Ted Pearson did."
"I'd like to help."
"Good. You can start by telling me why the fuck I'm locked up. Who's behind this?"
He nodded. "You feel there's a conspiracy?"
I could see I had my work cut out for me. I took a deep breath. "No. I think everyone is trying to be helpful. I got free transportation here, and the accommodations are spectacular. So you can check off the no box on the mental status exam under paranoia. The next two boxes are about voices and visions. Why don't you go ahead and ask about those."
He cleared his throat. "This is uncomfortable for both of us."
"For both of us? You gonna make
me
play therapist for
you
, for God's sake? I'm the one who got dragged in here against my will."
"I'm sure Elijah told you everything. He was standing right by the phone when I got the call from Pearson."
"Kathy and my mother." I stared at him.
"The reporting process is confidential. I can't confirm or deny."
"Nels, think about what's going on here. You know Kathy and I are having trouble. She's not an impartial observer of my psyche. As for my mother, she'd go along with caning me were someone to suggest it."
He let out a long sigh. "OK. Just for the sake of discussion, let's pretend they're the ones who got the ball rolling. What are we supposed to do if a close friend and a family member of yours both think you're at grave risk? Ignore them? I mean, c’mon, Frank. Nobody could dismiss what they said without an evaluation." He paused. "And you do have those lacerations on your wrist."
I turned my arm over and pulled up my sleeve. "I told you I did this down at the jail, to get William Westmoreland to stop biting into himself. Didn't I?"