Denial (8 page)

I went into the men's room and locked the door.  I let the cold water run, then doused my face again and again.  I needed to stay awake and to stay in control, but my mind kept flipping through images of Trevor and Kathy together.  Even taking the sudden loss of Sarah into account, I couldn’t make sense of her shacking up again over my cocaine.  What kind of insulation from the randomness of the universe could she hope for spending the night with a playboy?  Unless randomness — the unpredictable life and death of relationships — was exactly the thing she was replaying.  But that seemed like a reach.  Maybe Nels was wrong; maybe Trevor was exaggerating a phone call from Kathy into a rendezvous with her.  I wasn't in any condition to see her, but I needed to hear the story firsthand.  I opened my packet, spread a pinch over my gums and snorted a line off my key.  Then I shot up to the fourth floor and over the Of-Gyn Department.

Kathy's office was one of six in a row behind a semicircular reception desk.  The secretary, Kris Jerold, a young gay activist with a bleach-blond crew cut, motioned for me to wait until she was off the phone.  "She isn't here yet," she said, hanging up.  She fingered the three gold hoops through her ear.  "She called earlier to let me know she'd be in at nine o'clock."

"I'll wait in her office."

She nodded tentatively.

My fuse was short.  "Is there a problem with me waiting in there?" I asked.

"Not that I can think of."

"Well, is there one that you
can't
think of ?"

"I love psychiatrists," she smiled, then paused.  "There's no problem at all with you being in the office.  I was just going to ask how Dr. Singleton is doing after losing her friend."

"I'm trying to get a feeling for that myself.  How does she seem to you?"

"I haven't seen much of her.  She left early yesterday.  Now she's missed half of her morning clinic."  She shook her head.  "They were almost like sisters..."

"Yes."  I thought again of the fire that took Kathy's sister.  "I think that's right."

"I'll hold her calls when she comes in."

"Thank you."

I walked into Kathy's office and collapsed into her desk chair.  I could smell her perfume.  I smiled at a photograph of me she kept inside a sterling, beaded-edge frame I had given her for Christmas.  I was looking smug outside a Lynn hole-in-the-wall called the Irish Mist, straddling the black Harley Fat Boy I'd bought just a few weeks after we'd met.  I chuckled, remembering that I'd paid for the bike with money set aside to get back into analysis.  "You ought to figure out where you intend to go before you get all excited about how to get there," my psychiatrist, Ted Pearson, had offered when I canceled the appointments we had scheduled.

"I think I'll be alright," I told him.

"Then you're even worse off than I suspected," he said.  "Call me when you need me."

There had been at least a few times during the last year when I'd been tempted to seek out Pearson and admit how lost I felt, but he'd gone on to run the state's Impaired Physician's Program, dedicated to identifying and treating alcoholism, drug abuse and mental illness in doctors, and I wasn't about to throw my hat anywhere near that ring.

The standard hospital-issue furnishings in Kathy's office were institutional modular units, but she had overcome them.  Her frilly Laura Ashley love seat filled the space in front of her desk.  Porcelain-faced dolls sat in a row atop a few yards of ivory lace on the credenza.  Instead of the usual collection of degrees and awards, original oils of children at play hung on the walls.  A piece of antique stained glass blocked the view of the tenement houses out her window and cast orange and yellow and red light across the gray carpet.

I noticed one of Kathy's blond hairs coiled on the edge of the blotter, picked it up and pulled it straight between my fingers.  The muscles in my neck and shoulders relaxed.  I tilted the chair back and closed my eyes.  If a single hair of hers moved me, I wondered, why not take the final step to marry her?  What was I afraid of?

I fell asleep for several minutes, then woke to Kathy's hand gently massaging my shoulder.  Her scent enveloped me.  I kept my eyes closed and didn't move.  If she was part of a lingering dream, I didn’t want to scare her off.

"Frank," she whispered.

I took a deep breath but said nothing.

Sharply:  "Frank.  You fell asleep."  She raked her knuckles across my collarbone.

"Ahh!  Shit!"  I cursed, wriggling away.  I looked up and saw her standing over me, looking half-amused, half-annoyed.  She was wearing blue scrubs that made her eyes seem even brighter.  Her hair was damp.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

"Jesus Christ."  I rubbed my shoulder.

"What are you
doing
here?"

"I was looking for you.  Alright?"

"What for?"

"I missed you last night."

"Really."  She sat down on the love seat.  "Why?"

I took a deep breath and straightened up in the chair.  "Oh, I don't know, Kathy.  You sleep with someone hundreds of nights in a row, you kind of get used to it."

She shrugged.  "Does that put me above or below cocaine on your list of habits?"  She noticed my wrist.  "What happened to you?'

I looked at the bandage.  Blood had seeped through.  "Nothing.  I was interviewing the man who... It happened at the jail."

"The man who killed Sarah," she said flatly.  "You can say it.  I won't fall apart.  I hope they electrocute him.  I'd throw the switch myself."

"Falling apart is allowed," I said.  "So is rage."

"You would know.  Let me look at your wrist."

"It's all set.  Nels stitched me up."

Her expression turned to worry.  "Last night?"

I smiled.  "Actually, Nels usually has the morning shift.  I just finished up with him.  But you're right.  He was on last night, covering for Buck Berenson. I think he felt badly interrupting you."

"Me?"

"You and Trevor."

She stood up.  "You know what?  I don't appreciate being interrogated — or set up — especially by someone as trustworthy as you."

"Did you fuck him?"

"Did I...?"  Her eyes filled up.  "I can't believe you'd ask me that."

"Did you?"

She looked like a little misunderstood girl.  "No."

"The two of you just visited?  I'm supposed to believe that?"

"Believe what you want."

"You didn't come home."

"I don't have a home."

"Where did you sleep?"

"Your mother's."  She wiped away a tear.  "She showed me the scratches you made on her dining room table."

"You two are getting closer and closer."

"Maybe you'd like to know if I fucked her."

I stood up and walked over to her.  I grabbed her scrub shirt, pulled her toward me and started to kiss her neck.

"Let go of me!" she demanded.

I held her tight, pulled the drawstring of her scrub pants loose and slipped my hand down between her legs.  She tried to push me away at first, but stopped struggling as I kept touching her.  Fighting me had always excited her.  I felt her getting wet.  I slipped a finger inside her, then two.  She pressed herself against me.  Her breathing quickened, and her pelvis rocked slightly toward and away from me.  But just as she began to tighten around my fingers, her whole body froze.  She dug her nails into my arm.  "Don't," she said.

I pushed to keep my fingers inside her.

She took a step back and yanked my hand out of her pants.

She looked confused and needy and angry and very, very beautiful.  I brushed the hair back from her face.

"I want to, Frank.  You know I do.  But I won't until you get help.  I'm not going to be with someone who could be gone tomorrow."

"Any of us could be gone tomorrow."

"See how it feels, then."  She tucked her top into her pants and took a few steps toward the door.  "I have patients waiting in the clinic.  Call me when you're off that shit.  If you start to care a little more about yourself, maybe I'll start to care again, too."

"Where will you be?"

"Somewhere a little safer," she said.

*            *            *

I left the hospital and started toward Boston, hoping the V.A. Medical Center on Huntington Avenue might have more information on Westmoreland.  Halfway there, my eyes fixed on the two-story, pink neon greyhound outside the Wonderland Dog Track.

I knew stopping would be the wrong thing to do.  A lucky bet would be another drug — and I didn't have time to waste getting high.  But insight doesn't necessarily produce self-control.  Sometimes you just see your destructiveness more clearly.  I pulled off Route 1A, lined my car up next to a thousand others and bought my two-buck program on the way to the betting windows.

I didn't really know whether Kathy had slept with Trevor.  I didn't know whether she'd come back to me.  I didn't know if Emma Hancock would report me to the Board.  I didn't even know for sure whether I was officially off Westmoreland's case.  I had no idea where I would find the $4,815 mortgage payment Eastern Bank wanted for September.  What I knew was that Pompano Beached, whose name I liked immediately, was running in the fourth race of the afternoon, paying twenty-five to one, to win.

Manny, the clerk at the window, beamed when he saw me.  "Help ya, Doc?" he urged.  He was a little, round-shouldered, obese man with gold crowns that shimmered when he spoke.

"I need all kinds of help," I winked.

"You and me both," he nodded.  "Missed you Saturday.  Trifecta came in.  Twenty-dollar bet paid out twenty-three grand."

"Don't tell me:  A little old lady from Revere who lives in a triple-decker and bet her address."

"Nope.  Guy was flashin’ a gold-and-diamonds Rolex. Nobody wins when they need to."

"Don't say that, Manny. 
I
need to."

"Then get back in your car."

"Give me fifty bucks on Pompano Beached to win."

"Hmm.  Pompano?"  He ran his fingers over his bald head like he still had hair.  "Fifty?"

"Bad idea?"

"There are no bad ideas," he chuckled.  "Not at
Wonder
land."  He looked past me, right and left.  "I might have a better one."

I slid a five-dollar bill under the window.  It was Manny's standard fee.  He moved his hand to a panel of buttons but didn't press any.  "If I had fifty to spend," he said, tapping his diamond pinky ring on the countertop, "I'd lay it on Belle Dango."  His eyes lit up.  "I watched that bitch on a couple practice laps this morning.  I never seen a hound like that.  Every muscle carved like stone, Doc.  Fucking poetry in motion."  He shook his head.  "Pompano's built OK, but she's too pretty in the face.  Dog that pretty don't need to run, and she knows it."

"Ain't that the truth.  What are the odds on Belle?"

"Four to one."

I wasn't about to turn down a tip from a gold-toothed gnome like Manny, but I didn't want to kick myself for getting off a winner, either.  "Twenty-five on Belle to win, twenty-five on Pompano to place."

"I'd go thirty-five, fifteen," he nodded.

"Done."

He slid the five-dollar bill back to me.  "I'm in for ten percent."

"Deal."

Manny keyed in the bet just before the race began.  I heard the starting pistol fire and walked to the wall of television monitors adjacent to the betting windows.  The bunny flew down the track.  Pompano had faded well back by the first turn.  Belle Dango was stuck in the middle of the pack.  "Boxed in," I muttered.

"She's setting the pace from the center," Manny said with confidence.  "Cagey little bitch.  I love that.  Fuckin’ beautiful."  I glanced at him and saw that he was talking to himself, not to me.  "Wait... wait... wait... wait... now!  Go!"

Belle's spotted torso began flying past the other greyhounds.  I felt my heart begin to race.  My palms were moist.  She moved just behind the leader, started to fade a bit, then advanced.  The two dogs looked like one.  They turned the last corner into the homestretch.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Manny looking at the program, not the monitors.  "Homestretch," I called to him.

"No way to beat Belle in the stretch.  Come get your money."

I stayed put.  Belle opened up a lead and kept it.  Pompano Beached finished next to last.  I could hear my pulse in my ears.  I waited out the few people who were placing bets with Manny, then walked back to his window.  "My God, what a dog.  I thought she'd panic there in the pack.  It didn't look like she had anywhere to go."

"You and me, we'd run scared in that much traffic," Manny said, shaking his head.  "A dog like Belle sees the whole race before it starts.  I know it's hard to believe, but she meant to be where she was every step of the way."  He counted out seven twenties and slid them under the window.  "I'd marry that dog."

I pushed one back toward him.  "Here's your engagement gift."

"Too much."

"You earned it.  What's next?"

"What's next is you should walk away," he joked.  "Buy yourself a nice sweatshirt or something in the gift shop."

"Next dog."

"I like Maiden Voyage."

I slid my six twenties along with four more from my wallet under the window.  "To win."

"You sure?"

"I guess not."

"Bet her to place.  She gets in trouble near the finish line.  Fear of success."

"I'm glad I'm not chasing bunnies.  I think I got that fear worse than she does."

"
Everybody’s
chasin’ bunnies, Doc.  Two hundred to place?"

"What are the odds?"

"Eleven to one."

"Two hundred."

I took my spot in front of the monitors.  Maiden Voyage led from the beginning, then, twenty yards from the finish, gave up two lengths to Silly Puppy.

Manny and I had won and lost over the years, but this time he was definitely on a roll.  I was up around twelve hundred.  I didn't even think about stopping.  "Hit me again," I said when I got to the window.

"You got it bad," Manny winked.

"I need—"

He covered his ears.  "Don't say that."

"You're right.  I'm sorry."