Thy Neighbor (22 page)

“And somehow, even after Karen's death, she managed to keep an awareness of that dark world at bay. She went on living in a dream, and I think she wanted to keep that dream world alive for Robin. She thought it was the best thing she could give her.

“That day, when I told her what I had to tell her about Robin, about the HPV and what it meant, I knew she'd had nothing to do with it. It wasn't a case of domestic abuse. I knew John Bloom, too, and he was as drawn into and invested in her dream world as she was. He hadn't done this. He hadn't known. I'd have bet money on that. A lot of money.

“No. I looked into Anita's eyes and I saw that she was as horrified as I was—and absolutely ignorant as well. She broke down right there in my office and begged me not to say anything to anyone. Not because she didn't want to help Robin or protect her. She wanted that more than anything. But to acknowledge that Robin had been molested, possibly raped—well, that would have shattered the world she was trying to maintain. It would have shattered
her
. She would have broken into a million pieces under the strain. It was too awful to face.

“And so, I told myself that it was okay to let Anita and John handle it themselves, privately, because I told myself that whoever had done this awful thing was not living in that house. Robin was not in danger in their hands. They could and would protect her. Withdraw. Hide. Whatever it took.”

He fixed his eyes on me guiltily.

“Now, you may say that circumstances had already made it clear that they couldn't protect Robin, that they had failed in that already. And you would be right. But I wanted to believe in them and their made-up world— No, that's not quite true.”

He paused and thought. Then, seeming to land on the avoided thing, he added:

“I didn't want to hurt them anymore. I couldn't. I simply couldn't. And so, I suppose, without quite knowing it, or wanting to know it, I sacrificed the welfare of that little girl, just as her grandparents had and did, to protect an illusion of safety and the fragile sanity that went with it.

“And I have had to live with that for thirteen years, not a single day of which has passed without a painful reminder of my role in what ultimately happened to that poor child.”

He stopped as suddenly as he had begun.

I burst in.

“Listen, Doctor. I've come here, as it turns out, to do more than listen. I hadn't intended to tell you this, but there's something I want you to know, and I think it will help.”

He looked up with just the barest glimmer of hope in his eyes. Then he dampened it and his eyes were dull again with the years of ceaseless self-recrimination.

I stopped for a moment and wondered. Is this what Robin would have wanted? As angry as she was? If, in her eyes, her mother was to blame for seeing the evidence and explaining it away, wasn't the doctor even worse? Wasn't he the arch-criminal in her memory? Wouldn't she want him to go on suffering to the end, to be deepened also by his grief, for as long as guilt would last?

Or was I being too hard? Was I being too naive? I was struck suddenly by another passing thought. Had Robin known that I would come here all along? Had she set me on this course purposely, dropping the single word—
evidence
—and then the linking pronoun—
you, the same thing that happened to you
—into the lap of a man who wanted nothing so much as to solve his own mystery? Did she know? Had she forgiven? And did she want this kindness for the doctor, after all?

I couldn't puzzle it out, and I didn't want to. I didn't care. I was going to tell what I knew. It was the right thing to do.

“Doctor,” I blurted, “Robin Bloom is alive.”

His face didn't change.

“She's alive and well. I've spoken—I've corresponded with her.”

Again nothing.

His eyes moved back and forth slowly from one corner of the room to the other, but seemed to see nothing, as though he had hold of a difficult idea and was following it through to its end. At last he said:

“I know.”

I thought I had misheard.

“What?”

He fixed his eyes on me.

“I know that Robin Bloom is alive,” he repeated sternly.

“But . . . then how—?”

He smiled bitterly.

“I told you. Knowing won't release you.”

He paused, waiting for this to sink in.

“Do you know, Nick?” he said curiously. “How very strange. Right now, you look just as Anita looked that day. So startled. So innocent. You really have no idea, do you?”

He ran his palms along his thighs vigorously, as though to warm or wipe the sweat from them.

“Well, why should you?” he said. “I have the missing piece.”

The smile faded from his face, replaced by a furrow of sympathy in his brow and a small twist of regret on his lips.

“What was it you said?” he asked. “The child is the father—something?”

“The child is the father of the man,” I repeated wearily.

“Yes, that's it. The child is the father of the man. That's very good. Very good.”

He half smiled again.

“The Robin Bloom that lay on my examination room table that day thirteen years ago—almost to the day, I would wager—
that
Robin Bloom is the mother of the Robin Bloom you've just met. She knows all her secrets. She remembers
everything
.”

“I'm not following you,” I said. “I don't see how—”

He looked again at the small lacquered box on the table, picked it up, and held it.

“Why is it,” he said, turning it over in his hands, “that we always think life is preferable? . . . You know, I've always argued fiercely with my colleagues over that point. Medicine is polluted—positively wrecked—by this notion of life at all costs. Life almighty. As if it were the opposite of harm. Keep the patient alive.”

He lifted his arms above his head.

“
Save!
”

He dropped his arms with a slap.

“But save what?” he said. “We never ask ourselves: Save what? What is the thing, the creature that we are saving? . . . So Robin Bloom is alive. You say that as if it could cure. But the Robin Bloom who is alive—who is that person?
How
is that person? That is the relevant thing. Should I feel exonerated by her life? By the fact that she is living, when she is corrupted so thoroughly by the past? When she is the very miscarriage of her own disease?”

He clutched the lacquered box tightly in his fist, as if he meant to crush it, and winced. Then he replaced it once more on the table. He opened his hand, revealing a whitened palm and the angry red hexagon the box had imprinted there.

“I did not expect it to be you,” he said again. “You see, this is so marvelously done, really. I will have my confession but no relief, and you will have your reason and no relief. She has seen to that.”

“I don't understand,” I said.

“I know you don't, son.” He sighed. “Neither did I until just now. But you will understand, and you will wish that you did not.”

He stood then and crossed the room to the desk on the far side by the window. He opened a small drawer and took out a piece of paper.

“I received this in my mailbox—no postage, just as it is—three days ago.”

He crossed the room again, slowly, and handed the paper to me.

It was yellowed with age, but uncreased, as if it had been kept in a sleeve or between the pages of a book.

The top of the page had the logo of the Twin Pines Country Club, two pine trees flanked by the letters TP on one side and CC on the other, and beneath that, the club's sanguine motto: “Where the grass is always greener.”

As my eyes moved down the page, I recognized it as a scorecard for a game of golf. I'd never actually seen one before. As many times as I'd been to Twin Pines Country Club as a child and adolescent, I'd never once been on the golf course. I'd always been on the tennis courts or sitting by the pool.

But it was clear enough. Hole, par, handicap.

On the left-hand side of the card, the players' names were written by hand in pencil.

Simon Cunningham. James Walsh.

It was dated June 16, 1997.

James Walsh.

It was jarring to see my father's name on a piece of paper like that after so long, a piece of paper that he had no doubt touched, that might have once borne—perhaps still bore—the marks of the oil or the salt on his fingertips.

I raised the card to my nose.

Just paper. Old paper. And dust. The dust made largely of the flakes of other people's skin.

“You said you used to play golf with my dad,” I said.

“Yes,” he replied. “I did.”

“So?”

“Yes, so? That's exactly what I thought until you showed up at my door today asking about Robin Bloom. Until
you
showed up. Not just anyone. You. And not just anytime, but now. Unlucky thirteen years after the fact.”

“But you said you thought it was almost to the day—the day of her exam. The card is marked the sixteenth. Today is the twenty-ninth.”

He laughed.

“I don't remember the exact date, of course. Only the month. It was a beautiful June day. I remember that because I remember looking out at the sunshine glaring off the glass of the parked cars in the lot and thinking that it was going to be a gorgeous night for our party. My wife and I were throwing a party for my colleagues, as we did every June for thirty years. I remember I kept staring out at the sunshine so that I wouldn't have to keep looking into Mrs. Bloom's face, and I remember berating myself for thinking about something so selfish and mundane as our party and the weather while I was telling a mother that her child had probably been sodomized right under her nose. I got very drunk that night. Drunker than I had ever been. Damn near killed myself. I was throwing up for days. Haven't had a drink since . . . Yes, it was a day in June. That much I'm sure of.”

He sat down again heavily in his chair.

“The name and a day in June, and then you,” he said. “What else could it possibly mean?”

He paused, waiting for this to penetrate.

I waited, too, for the information, so long in coming, to break through.

But why a card? Why this card? This was a clue for me, not for him. So what? What was it I'd missed? I looked again. I looked not just at the date, but at my father's name written next to Dr. Cunningham's, and a few notes, presumably about the course, that were scribbled on the bottom and sides of the card.

James Walsh.

I read it again and again. James Walsh. James Walsh. James Walsh. Like knocking on a door, or calling into the dark without an answer. I stared. I echoed. I heard my father's name repeated. I looked at the nonsensical shorthand at the bottom of the card. And then, finally, I thought I saw. I thought I saw and then I saw. It came into focus slowly, landing on my brain as a thought. Not just the name, but the script itself. My father's name and the notations were written in
his
handwriting. His slightly more sloped—or as I had once thought, more drunken—version of my own handwriting, perhaps scribbled in the dark.

It was his hand for certain.

The same hand, the blemished hand that had written those terrible poems on those faded pink pieces of paper.

“You know it now,” the doctor said with conviction. “I can see it in your face.”

I nodded, but I hardly knew what I was saying.

“She must have . . .”

I looked at him for confirmation.

“Yes, she must have taken it from his pocket.”

“The left-hand breast pocket,” I said flatly. “Next to his wallet and his comb.”

Dr. Cunningham frowned.

“I'm sorry, Nick. I'm so very sorry.”

What happened to you? I thought again.

What happened to you?

And then again I heard the knowing answer.

The same thing that happened to you.

Nick, she'd said, you know nothing.

And then he.

He'd said.

I told you.

Knowing won't release you.

But still, I'd said, I don't understand.

And he again.

I know you don't, son, but you will, and you will wish that you did not.

I'm sorry, he said.

He said he was sorry.

Sorry.

But what did that mean?

To be sorry.

What did it ever mean when you were an accessory to the harm?

“You're sorry?” I shouted suddenly, brandishing the paper. “Then why did you show this to me? Why? You could have kept it from me. You could have kept your ridiculous silence.”

“Because, Nick. Don't you see? It was her or me. She contacted you, yes? She led you into the trap. She led me, too. But when I realized it only just a short time ago, I also realized that this was the better way. It's part of my penance. I owe you—I owe
her
that. It's only right that I be the one to tell you. You were going to know one way or the other. I knew that as soon as you said she was alive. I knew that she'd been in touch with you, just as she had been in touch with me, and that it was all playing out, piece by piece, just as she had planned it, as I said, almost to the day. How long do you think she thought it would take you to make your way to me through Jonathan Katz? How quickly can desperation follow a trail? She knew exactly. And honestly, I think she was, in some tortuous way, trying to soften the blow.”

“What, by having me listen to every clinical detail of what my fucking father did to her?”

“To have you understand slowly, because there was so much.”

“God. You sound just like her.”

“Well, then I'm right, aren't I?”

“You're right? Right about what? That I'm the last to know? Yes, I get it, finally. I get it. You're right about that. But you're wrong about one thing.”

“I'm sure I'm wrong about a lot of things,” he said. “If I knew before you, it was only minutes before, when I realized that it was Robin who'd left me the golf card. Until you showed up, until you said she was alive, I'd had no idea who could have planted that or why.”