Authors: Sarah Langan
Lila grinned. He wondered if she was like this at home with her children, a whining hag who woke them from peaceful dreams. Just like Sara Wintrob. For a moment he hated Lila, and his wife, and his mother, and especially Freud.
He looked up and noticed that Lila had stopped talk- ing. He waited for her to begin again, but she didn’t. It occurred to him that she’d tired herself out.
Fenstad cleared his throat. It was time to cut the crap. “You’re avoiding something. Tell me what hap- pened this week,” he said.
She cocked her head, and there was another silence. She was wearing an unprecedented amount of clothing. Usually her dress code was strictly roadhouse fare: tube tops and miniskirts. But today her long-sleeved blouse was buttoned above her bra line, and her jeans were high enough to conceal the butterfly tattoo on her hip.
The clock ticked. He knew he should be paying at- tention, but instead he was thinking about Meg. This last year had been going great until now. Sure, she had her bad moods once in a while, but mostly he’d been thinking that their life together was on the mend. And then the fish comment. He
hated
when she called him a trout. And what was that supposed to mean, anyway: He was bad in the sack? She’d been faking it for, say, twenty years?
“So,” Lila said, “I goofed, but only a little.” She shrugged her shoulders and grinned, like she’d been caught filling out a questionnaire in pen rather than pencil. “I was brushing my teeth, and I thought I’d just
taste
it but, well . . .” she said.
“You drank Robitussin again?” he asked.
She nodded. “Chest and cold. Sugar-free, at least. ” “How much?”
“Half the bottle. But then I threw it up again.” Robi- tussin is about 15% alcohol by volume. It’s mostly harmless, although a stiff scotch tastes a lot better.
“Can you describe what triggered the drinking?” he asked.
She chewed on her lip like she was thinking about it. Lila was newly divorced from a man who had never let her lift a finger, pay a bill, or even pick out a gown for the Corpus Christi Golf Club cotillion without his say- so. She was a ping-pong ball in an ocean, trying to gain purchase. Her kids snickered at her and called her use- less. Her contemporaries had never accepted her, this woman of lesser education and trashy good looks whom they viewed as competition. Her husband had remar- ried a younger trophy. And now she’d taken to drinking cough syrup because she was afraid that the neighbors would gossip if she bought the real stuff at the local li- quor store.
In a year or so she’d meet another man just like the one who’d left her, only older, and with luck she’d marry him. With more luck he’d die of old age or a heart attack before he replaced her, too. And the thing was, Fenstad could try to show her that this was no way to live, but she’d never believe him. In the end the best he could do was channel her cough-syrup drinking into a rigorous jogging program until a new man came around and told her she was pretty again.
Lila grinned winningly, and he wondered:
Who is the woman you’re hiding underneath that grin?
It was the question that kept him coming to work every morning. The mystery of people. It was the thing underneath the layers of invention that sloughed away over weeks and months and years of therapy until their hypochondria, their neuroses, their self-flagellation all looked the same.
What are you?
he wondered when he saw these people. It was a question, quite frankly, that he often asked himself.
“The news set me off,” she said. “The news?”
“Yes. I was watching
Entertainment Tonight
and they ran this story about a blind man.”
He nodded.
“Aran and Alice were supposed to be doing their homework but they weren’t. I knew I should have scolded them, but I was watching the show about the blind man. He lived in Seattle, and the only way he got around was his golden retriever. I like hounds better, but you know where I’m going.”
He remembered his dream for a moment, a barking dog, and then promptly forgot it. “You’ve caught me. I don’t know where this is going.”
“The seeing-eye dog. They had to retire him because he got too old to take care of the man. He got fired, just like that, you know? That made me think of my first dog, and how he got put to sleep on account he bit my brother Tom. We grew up in Bedford, did you know that? A trailer park—I don’t usually tell people that. I only moved away when I married Aran Senior.
“So I was thinking about the dog, and the rain, how it gets all wet in Seattle. And my brother and how much I miss him. He died in the fire in Bedford. He was asth- matic. Anyway, I told the kids I was going to take a
bath and they said, ‘Fine, Lila,’ because they only call me by my first name even though I hate that.
“And I was looking at the razor, you know? The straight one I got for Aran Senior as a gag present be- cause it was an antique and he likes that kind of thing, or he used to. He left everything when he moved out. I guess he only pretended to like the presents I gave him. I guess they weren’t any good, those pretty crystal ge- odes and that Underwood typewriter from 1917. He treated them like they were nothing. And then I remem- bered you’re supposed to slice with the grain, like wood. So I did.”
She rolled back the left sleeve of her white cotton blouse. Her wrist was crudely bandaged with brown masking tape and gauze. The exposed skin surround- ing the area was red and inflamed.
Fenstad’s stomach dropped. For the first time in a long while he was disappointed in himself. He’d failed her. He’d sat in judgment of her, this redundant woman whose husband had thrown her away like a used con- dom. He’d forgotten that he was supposed to be her advocate. Screw the wall, he was supposed to be her friend.
“Just the one arm.” She smiled. “I’m not a fanatic or anything . . .”
“Go on,” he said.
“Anyway, the water got all pink, and I was thinking about what would happen when they found me. The kids, they probably wouldn’t notice until they had to brush their teeth. They’d call him rather than breaking down the door. They’re closer to me, but they trust him. So it would have been a few hours before he found me. The blood would have settled to the bottom of the tub by then. It would have been all sticky like grout. In my hair, too. It would have clotted there. But then again, his new
wife’s a redhead . . .” Her eyes were dull specks of coal, and her voice was without emotion. This was the real Lila, the one he’d been waiting this last year to meet. A breakthrough, at last.
“I thought he’d find me and I’d look like Grace Kelly or something.” She laughed. The sound echoed eerily. “But you know, my skin would have gotten all pruned and thin. And I’ve packed on about six pounds. It would have scared the devil out of him, seeing me like that. He deserves it, too! The rest of his life he’d feel sorry for what he did to me.
“I don’t know. I decided not to cut the other wrist. So I tried to stop the blood.” She lifted up her arm, “One of those cotton gauze jobs from a ten-year-old first aid kit. Probably dirtier than toilet paper, but you know me, I don’t know how to take care of myself.” Her fin- gers were pale, and each long nail was perfectly shel- lacked with red paint. “And then I saw the Robitussin and I thought, well, at least it’s not permanent, and nobody’ll know. So there was that.”
“Can I see your arm?” he asked.
She clenched her hand into a fist and rolled down her sleeve so the wound was out of view.
“I’m a doctor. If there’s anything to do, I can do it.” She didn’t move, and it occurred to him that she didn’t trust him nearly as much as he’d assumed. “Lila, be reasonable. It might be infected.”
She shrugged and, after some time, handed him her arm. He lifted her sleeve while she turned her head, and it made him feel as if he was doing something shameful and too intimate.
The corners of the wound were crusted with yellow pus, and probably full of bacteria. He found a scissors and cut away the loose edges. Then he dabbed it with the peroxide from the hospital stock first aid kit in his
bottom desk drawer. Bit by bit he eased the cotton away from the clot. The wound reopened and started to ooze, but only superficially. The cut was a deep fissure, like a sideways mouth, and the skin surrounding it had not closed together. She’d sliced just right, splitting open about three inches of artery. If she’d fallen asleep in that tub, she would not have woken up.
He rebandaged the wound with more gauze, then wrapped it in surgical tape. It would leave a long scar and should have been stitched together by a surgeon, but it was too late for that now. He handed her a tube of antibiotic ointment to take home. “You should have called me,” he said.
She nodded. “I didn’t want to bother you. I know I talk too much.” There was a flicker of comprehension between them, and he understood that he represented her absent husband, father, brother, son. She was trying to punish them. She was trying to punish him, too.
“Do you think you should stay at the hospital for a while?”
She shook her head, “No. I won’t do it again.” “Lila, this is big,” he said. “I’m glad you told me, but
I’m concerned for your safety, and the safety of your children.”
She smiled broadly, and her flirtatious manner re- turned. The rapidity of the transition alarmed him. She cocked her head like a young girl at a debutante ball talking to the best marriage prospect in the room. “Oh, Dr. Wintrob. I promise, I’ll never do it again. Really. It was just the news. I won’t watch the news anymore.”
Fenstad considered. He knew he should check her into the hospital for the night. But she didn’t have family or friends, so she’d have to call her ex-husband to take the children. Aran Senior was waiting for an excuse to sue for full custody. This would qualify. Lila would crumble
under the pressure and cede the rights to her children. The downward spiral he was trying very hard to prevent would begin. He made his decision.
“I want you to keep up your journal. Try to write down what you’re feeling when you find the urge to drink or hurt yourself. Would you do that? And bring it in to me next week?”
She nodded.
The hour had ended five minutes ago, so he opened his desk and wrote her a prescription for a week’s sup- ply of the mood stabilizer Stelazine. “This should calm your nerves.”
She folded the paper and discreetly slid it into her purse like it was his phone number. “I want you to call me if you feel anything like this coming on again,” he said.
“Of course, Dr. Wintrob,” she said. Her grin was wide and vacant. She didn’t seem to notice that the ointment had made a wet spot on the sleeve of her white silk blouse. She was exposed, and she didn’t even know it. He was surprised and a little discomfited by the pity he felt for her. It made him rethink his decision: She needed to be hospitalized.
He was about to tell her so when his secretary burst through the door and announced that his wife had been attacked.
B
y seven o’clock that Tuesday in Corpus Christi, the day was coming to an end. The sun was sinking below the horizon, and street lamps cast a jaundiced glow. Shops lit up their “Open” signs, and people leav- ing day shifts at the hospital rolled down their windows on their way home to enjoy the temperate night. At the high school track, scrawny and muscle-bound adoles- cents ran laps. The days had gotten shorter since Au- gust. With early dark came a melancholy that made people regret the summer they were leaving behind, and the inevitable winter to come. It was a chill that ran along the backs of their necks; they traded pleasure for purpose. Backyard Stoli and tonics for work that had
yet to be done.
Lois Larkin was the exception. She wasn’t thinking about the lesson plans she needed to prepare, the grad- uate school applications that would soon be due, or how she’d intended to grovel at Ronnie’s door tonight and beg him to take her back. She was thinking about the little boy she’d lost. The boy without a coat or scarf, who was surely shivering by now. Worse things might be happening to James Walker than just a chill along the back of his neck.
She was curled in a fetal position in the back of the chief of police’s blue Dodge. She wanted to close her eyes and make this go away. She wanted a miracle. She wanted, just a little bit, to die.
When she got back to the school this afternoon, a quick head count gave her twenty-five instead of twenty- six. It took her a few seconds, she just couldn’t believe how stupid she’d been, didn’t
want
to believe it, but she counted again, and remembered the little pain in the butt who’d refused a partner, and before she even called his name and got no answer, she knew that James Walker was missing.
She sent the kids back to class with Janice Fischer and told the bus driver to head to the Bedford woods. Her gut told her that James was playing a prank. She hadn’t been upset yet, just galled that he’d outsmarted her.
Her next stop was the principal, Carl Fritz. Carl was forty, unmarried, and his socks always matched the brightly patterned dress shirts he ordered from Bluefly.com. She’d pegged him as gay until the day he told her that he didn’t think she knew her own worth. His eyes had lingered on her breasts, and she’d under- stood that his interest was not brotherly.
When she told Carl what happened, he took a slow and dramatic face dive into his desk, where he moaned like a dying bullfrog. When he surfaced, he started rear- ranging the yellow, green, and orange Beanie Babies that lined the front of his desk. He’d never cut their tags be- cause he was sure that one day he could sell them on eBay for a lot of money. “You
lost
him?” he repeated, like there was an off-chance Lois would say she’d misspoken, and really, she just wanted another week’s vacation.
“Yeah, Carl,” she said, even though before this day she’d always called him Mr. Fritz, just to keep their relationship clear. “I did.”
He didn’t look at her. He surveyed the annual debate team photos dating back to 1972, his vintage
Singin’ in the Rain
poster, and finally his shaking hands whose fingernails he got buffed weekly at Lee’s Salon.