Good for you,
Adrienne thought.
One of us should be sure of herself.
She took her eyes off the highway as dawn struggled, let her gaze drift left, to the mountains. Great vast ranges of rock and earth, they looked so tame from here. Snow-drenched peaks sat wreathed in cataracts of cloudy mist like Olympian dwellings.
It was right that Clay had come this direction. Had she been forced to track him, she would have known instinctively. Deserts and mountains, the refuges of hermits … these called to him with a voice clearer than that of any human being. He professed to be an atheist but she was not convinced he meant it, seemingly compelled to touch something so great it might destroy him. Or maybe it was because he was so inefficient at destroying himself. Either way, he was a believer in search of a higher power.
They picked their way through Fort Collins, following the sketchy directions Clay had provided; found a route that led out the other side of town, to the northwest, toward the foothills at the base of a mountain drive. The city had thinned to its barest elements, the final fringes before civilization ended.
He had called from a pay phone at an all-night diner and gas station, a rustic outpost set amid generations of pines. They found him inside at a booth, as far from the other early diners as he could get, everyone under a warm comforting miasma of pancakes and cinnamon rolls, coffee and sausage gravy.
Clay said nothing as they approached, laced his hands around a steaming cup; she wondered how many times it had been filled, if that glaze in his eyes was due to caffeine or something deeper.
Adrienne slid into the booth across from him.
Sarah hitched her mittened thumb back over her shoulder. "Why don't I head over to the counter awhile, okay?"
"That's all right," Clay said, "you can stay."
"No,"
Adrienne said, looked at Sarah. "Go on, it'd be best if we were alone."
She complied, and Clay raised his head, his eyebrows, in mild surprise at her
take-charge mood. He looked dreadful, paler than during his final visits, with days of stubble and his hair falling toward his eyes, sweaty and matted from two nights beneath the stocking cap beside him.
"If you called me because you need a taxi," she said, "then I'm afraid I may have to leave without you. If you called me to talk … I'm here."
It came close to an ultimatum, tough talk, but the time had come for that. It was the push of the crowbar that got the story started, interrupted by a waitress, and she took coffee only. He told her about Friday night, some pitiful encounter with Erin. She tried to listen with professional distance but things had gone too far. She pictured the two of them on that floor, too crippled to even hold each other — the most heartbreaking image she had yet associated with him, worse even than the authoritarian abuses by his father; worse than the boy given permission to cry, just the once, for his dead baby sister and discovering he could not.
He told her of hitting the road again, of walking into Fort Collins. Of the record store. And there was remorse in his voice, his eyes; genuine remorse, held in check of course, but present, and that was something to cling to.
"I just kept hitting him," he whispered. "I don't know why."
And as long as he felt bad about it, that made it all right? No, it didn't. Some kid whose worst offense was poor public-relations skills was dead or hospitalized. Yet all she could do was analyze how Clay might be kept in the clear. He had paid with anonymous cash; the shop's only other customer was behind him and would give a poor description; he had worn gloves and left no prints on the plastic carousel. He might never be connected with this.
But if he was, and it came out that she had decided to shield him from the consequences, she could lose her license and might even face prosecution. She shut her eyes.
I am aiding and abetting a felony.
She was making a value judgment of ghastly proportions: Clay's crime was less than would be the crime of sending him to prison.
Neither of them spoke for a minute or more. She looked at him sitting there in his ancient field jacket and the layers beneath, saw him as a mountain man driven by the snows down from his chosen isolation. Unfit for society once he got there, living by some simpler brutal law hardwired into his brain.
"After you broke off our sessions, there was something that occurred to me, that I wanted to tell you," she said. "But you wouldn't let me. I'd been listening to tapes of old sessions, and going through your file … and what I wanted to tell you then was: You may think you have no control over yourself, but you
do
. Because with all the conflicts you've been in, you could've killed somebody … yet you haven't. I wanted to tell you that you must've had something inside that was holding you back. Even if you never believed it was there, Clay,
it was
."
"Was," he repeated. "Did you hear yourself?"
She nearly winced. "Clay, I don't know what applies anymore. Whatever it is you've done, I don't even know how bad it is." She drew in tighter with a smoldering and unexpected anger. He was turning into her career's most spectacular failure. They taught you not to take such things personally, although doctors did it anyway. "But I'll tell you what I
do
know: Ever since you started getting those envelopes from Boston, you've acted as if you've completely given up on yourself. You. Have given. Up."
He stared into his coffee, swirling it. "Well, you know, a minute ago I thought I even heard my doctor talk about my little internal lifeline in the past tense."
"
Am
I your doctor?"
It was as blunt a demand as she'd made, and quieted him; he wouldn't be accustomed to that tone of voice. He set his cup down and she saw the child in him, fleetingly, still tethered to stakes more than twenty years old.
"Yes," he surrendered.
There was no triumph in hearing it. No relief. Worse, for a moment she thought she might have hoped he'd say no.
Coward.
"Am I going to jail?"
"I don't know," less an answer than a sigh.
I am not proud of myself, any way I turn, I am not going to feel proud of myself.
"Maybe we should wait and see what you've done before…" Before what? Rationalizing it any further? "Before deciding that."
"Thank you," he whispered, and she could not recall him ever having said that before.
"There's something we need to air right now," she said. "This case, it quit being remotely normal a long time ago. I'm not even sure when that happened, probably before you left the hospital, and since then it's only gotten more deviant. I've gone out on one limb after another, I've done things I swore I'd never do, I'm doing them right now —"
Adrienne caught her tongue. Clay wasn’t the one to tell this to; she should be talking to a fellow professional, should be on the phone with Ferris Mendenhall the way recovering alcoholics call their sponsors. She had gone too far. And was not prepared to stop.
"What I need to know from you is this: What do you
want
?"
Clay looked only perplexed.
"In the beginning you wanted an explanation about why you react to things the way you do. You wanted understanding. For better or for worse, it looks like you got it. No thanks to me, for the most part, I realize that. But that can't be all. I refuse to believe that's all there was motivating you. So if I'm still your doctor, what else is it you want?"
Clay scratched at his stubbled chin, then looked at her with the smile of one who hopes for the return of lost loves, resurrection of the dead; things that can never be.
"I want to live in a different world," he said.
"I can't help you with that."
Nodding, Clay sighed. "It's a loveless world, you know."
This she denied, pointing toward the counter, where Sarah sat with her back to them, picking at a plate of something; braided and unlike anyone else around, all the shift workers, the early rising sportsmen.
"
I
am in love," she told him quietly. "
Deeply
in love. It's the best and most healing thing in the world. But I wouldn't be in love if I didn't allow myself to take that risk."
"I won't deny that." He chose his words with care, as if taking refuge on the safer ground of theory. "But institutionally, it's still a loveless world. The way we're taught to survive, get ahead, to prosper? You can't tell me that love plays any part in that." Frowning now. "That confused me for the longest time, when I was younger."
There he went again, making sense. She was still trying to cobble together a response when Clay went rampaging on. He may have given up on himself, but he never quit trying to root out an explanation.
"What do
I
want?" He grunted a tiny laugh. "Think about this: What do you think cancer wants?"
She had come to dread these asides. They felt as if he were taking her by the hand and leading her through minefields. Any moment an unexpected truth might explode in her face, while his path was so oblique she could never see them coming.
"You know what cancer is, don't you? It's rapid growth, is all it is, there's nothing magic about it. Cells start multiplying too fast, and so they form their own mass. It gets so, it's like the mass has a mind of its own. It doesn't fit in with the rest of the body but it wants to live anyway. And the more it thrives…" he said, leaving it open for her.
"The more the body suffers," Adrienne finished. The coffee began to curdle in her stomach like a sour pool. Cancer. He was comparing himself to cancer.
"Tumors," he murmured, his eyelids drifting. Had he gone the entire night without sleep? "If that's the way it goes in the human body, why not the body politic? They've decided now that the world's just one big complex organism anyway. So why shouldn't it get cancer? Everybody else is these days." He groaned. "I think it all just started growing too fast one day. Everything. Everybody. So tumors were inevitable, social tumors. Serial killers. Mass murderers. I'm just part of a new kind of tumor that got squeezed out of it all."
Adrienne breathed deeply, everything inside her crying out to be ill. The coffee had gone toxic, while even the scent of food had become oppressive, nauseous. She imagined all the Helverson's subjects, in united voice, reciting their manifesto:
We are the cancers, the aberrations unable to serve the whole organism. We are the tumors birthed in decay and nourished on rot.
To which she could think of only one rebuttal.
"A tumor can't change its nature, Clay. A human being can."
"In theory," he said. "If a tumor had self-awareness, do you think it would want to kill its host? I don't think it would, it'd want to come to some coexistence." Pondering now, the dawn of new thoughts. "And maybe that's what I want…
"A separate peace."
They got him home and he stayed put, and, to Adrienne's great relief, accessible. No more avoiding her phone calls, he promised; back to his sessions. His latest bout of wanderlust had been aborted after just thirty-three hours, and she and Sarah were the only ones who even knew he had been gone.
It felt like more than a secret. It settled within her as a grim and ugly pact shared by conspirators who had buried a body by moonlight, who had smoothed the earth over as best they could, and swore an oath.
Thankfully, however, it had not literally come to that.
She had bought the Sunday edition of the Fort Collins
Coloradoan
from a vending machine before they had left town, and found nothing on the assault in the record store. She picked up the next day's edition in Denver and learned that, whatever his transgressions, Clay was no killer. The CSU junior he'd attacked had been hospitalized with a skull fracture and lacerations; not good, but a long way from a murder victim. The police had only the vaguest description of his assailant, and she reasoned that, if they investigated much at all, they would concentrate locally. What reason would they have of suspecting the assailant to be a drifter? How many drifters, in the winter, went shopping for cassettes?
Clay conformed to no pattern.
He'll get away with this,
she thought.
He'll get away with this because I let him.
Adrienne got him, under some protest, to resume taking lithium; got him another bottle to replace those he had flushed. She got him to agree to three sessions in six days — a crisis schedule, but surely this qualified.