Missing Pieces (4 page)

“How are you, Mom?” I said instead, picturing her on the other end of the receiver, already showered and dressed, her short tightly curled gray hair framing her narrow face, dark brown eyes sparkling with expectation for the day ahead.

Her voice filled the room. “Magnificent,” she trilled. That was what she always said. Magnificent. Jo Lynn mouthed the word along with her. “How are you, darling?”

“I’m good.”

“And the girls?”

“They’re fine.”

“I’m good too,” Jo Lynn called out.

“Oh, is Jo Lynn there?”

“She dropped by for a cup of coffee.”

“Give her my love,” our mother said.

“Give it back,” Jo Lynn said flatly in return.

“Sweetheart,” our mother continued, “I’m calling because
I can’t find that wonderful recipe I have for poach crumble, and I wondered if you had a copy of it.”

“Poach crumble?” I repeated.

“Yes,” she said. “Remember? I made it for you a few weeks ago. You said it was delicious.”

“You mean the
peach
crumble?”

“Yes,” she said. “Isn’t that what I said?”

“You said … Never mind. It’s not important. I’ll look for it later and call you back. Is that okay?”

There was a moment’s silence. “Well, don’t wait too long.” A hint of agitation crept into her voice.

“Is something wrong?” I mentally crossed my fingers. Please don’t let there be anything wrong, I prayed. The day was already disintegrating around me, the sky steadily paling, leaking blue.

“No, nothing’s wrong,” she assured me quickly. “It’s just Mr. Emerson next door. He’s mad at me for something. I can’t imagine what, but he’s been quite unpleasant these last few days.”

“Unpleasant? What do you mean?” I pictured old Mr. Emerson, charming, slightly stooped but still debonair, with a full head of thick white hair. He’d lived in the apartment next to my mother’s for the two years she’d been a resident at the Palm Beach Lakes Retirement Home, a community for independent seniors. Mr. Emerson had always been an ideal neighbor, thoughtful, friendly, in possession of all his faculties. Of course, he was also closing in on ninety, so anything could happen.

“I thought I’d make him a peach crumble as a sort of peace offering,” my mother continued. “But I can’t find the recipe.”

“I’ll look for it and call you later,” I told her. “In the meantime, don’t worry about it. Whatever it is, he’ll get over it in time.”

“How much time does he have?” my mother quipped, and I laughed.

“Tell her I’m getting married,” Jo Lynn said loudly as I was about to hang up the phone.

“What’s that? She’s getting married again?”

“You’re gonna love him,” Jo Lynn said, as I whispered hurried assurances to our mother that it was all a joke.

Jo Lynn became visibly indignant, the green eyes narrowing once again, the orange lips disappearing one inside the other. “Why did you tell her that? Why are you always trying to protect her?”

“Why are you always trying to hurt her?”

We stared at each other for what seemed an eternity, our unanswered questions suspended in the air between us like particles of dust in the sunlight. What’s the matter with you? I wanted to shout. Can you really be serious about Colin Friendly? Aren’t you tired of being abused by selfish losers? Who exactly are you punishing here? Are you really going to keep cutting off your nose to spite your face?

“What’s going on here?” a voice asked sleepily from somewhere beside us. I turned around as Sara slouched into the kitchen, her feet bare, her Amazon’s body slipping in and out of a navy silk teddy and boxer shorts.
My
navy silk teddy and boxer shorts, I realized, understanding now why I hadn’t been able to find them in several weeks. Her eyes barely open and all but hidden by her long tangled hair, elegant arms extended in front of her, groping for the fridge like a blind woman, she opened the fridge door and extricated the carton of freshly squeezed orange juice, raising it to her lips.

“Please don’t do that,” I cautioned, trying not to scream.

“Chill,” she said, one of those delightful teenage expressions
I’d like to wipe from the face of this earth. “Get a life” is another.

“There are glasses in the cupboard,” I advised.

Sara lowered the carton and opened the cupboard, careful to make sure that I caught the disdainful roll of her eyes as she reached for a glass. “So, what were you two making such a racket about before? You were laughing so loud you woke me up.”

For a minute I couldn’t imagine what she was talking about. It seemed so long ago.

“Your mother actually said something funny,” Jo Lynn told her, reducing me instantly to the status of humorless crone. “About PMS. What was it again?”

“Well, I can’t really take the credit for it,” I qualified. “I heard it on a sitcom once.”

“So, what was it?” Sara filled the tall glass with orange juice, downed it in one noisy gulp, then put both the carton and the empty glass on the counter.

“Uh-uh. In the fridge.” I motioned. “In the dishwasher.”

Another roll of the eyes as two sets of appliance doors clumsily opened and closed. “Never mind,” she said, walking across the room, glancing down at the newspaper spread out across the kitchen table. The President, the priest, and Colin Friendly stared back. “He’s cute,” Sara said, heading back toward her room.

“I’m gonna marry him,” Jo Lynn called after her.

“Cool,” Sara said, not breaking stride.

M
onday arrived. I had clients booked every hour from eight through six o’clock, with forty-five minutes off for lunch.

My office, in the heart of Palm Beach, only blocks from the ocean, consists of two small rooms and a smaller waiting area. The walls of each room are soft pink, the furniture predominantly gray. Stacks of recent magazines fill several large wicker baskets on either side of two padded benches that sit against the walls in the waiting room. I’ve made a point of keeping the magazines up to date ever since one of my clients walked tearfully into my office clutching a copy of
Newsweek,
asking if I knew that Steve McQueen had cancer. At this point, Steve McQueen had already been dead many years.

An eclectic group of pictures hang on the walls: a black-and-white photograph of a polar bear hugging a baby cub; a muted watercolor of a woman reading under the shade of a giant banyan tree; a bright reproduction of a well-known poster by Toulouse-Lautrec—Jane Avril, kicking up her leg to dance. Classical music plays in the background, not too loud, but hopefully loud enough to cover up the sometimes raised voices that emanate from behind the closed doors of my inner office.

Inside, three upholstered gray-and-white chairs sit grouped around a rectangular glass coffee table. More chairs can be brought in when required. There are some potted plants that look real but are actually replicas, since I have no talent with plants whatsoever, and I got tired of watching the real ones wither and die. Besides, on a symbolic level, dying plants seemed to reflect badly on my ability as a therapist.

On the coffee table sit a small tin of cookies, a large notepad, and a giant box of tissues. There is a video camera in one corner that I sometimes use to record sessions—always with the client’s permission. A clock is on the wall behind my head, as well as several Impressionist prints: Monet’s incandescent water lilies; a peaceful Pissarro village; an apple-cheeked Renoir girl standing on a swing.

There’s another room at the back where I keep my desk, my phone, my files, a small fridge, some stacking chairs, and a treadmill, or “dreadmill,” as I’ve come to refer to it. The treadmill has always struck me as a perfect symbol of the times: people walking as fast as they can, going nowhere. Even so, I try to spend at least twenty minutes a day on this awful contraption. It’s supposed to relax my mind while toning my body. In fact, it only irritates me. But then, everything irritates me these days. I blame it on my hormones, which are in a state of constant flux, the magazines all tell me. These articles irritate me as well. It doesn’t help that “women of a certain age,” as I believe the French call us, are always being pictured in the accompanying illustrations as dried-up bare branches on a once-flowering tree.

Anyway, it was Monday, I’d been seeing clients all morning, and my stomach was growling its way through my last session before lunch. The couple sitting across from me had come for help in dealing with their teenage
son, who was as sullen and difficult a fourteen-year-old as I’d ever encountered. After two sessions, he’d refused to come back, although his parents persisted, gamely trying to find some sort of compromise that everyone could live with. Of course, compromise only works if all those involved are committed to it, and their son was committed only to wreaking havoc.

“He snuck out again after we’d gone to bed,” Mrs. Mallory was saying, her husband sitting stiffly beside her. “We wouldn’t even have known he was gone except that I woke up to go to the bathroom and I saw a light on. I went into his room, and you wouldn’t believe it, he’d stuffed his bed with pillows to make it look like he was still in it, like they do in those prison movies you see on TV. He didn’t get home until almost three in the morning.”

“Where did he go?” I asked.

“He wouldn’t say.”

“What happened then?”

“We told him how worried we’d been …”

“She
was worried,” her husband corrected tersely.

“You weren’t?” I asked.

Jerry Mallory shook his balding head. He was a neat man who always wore a dark blue suit and a gold-striped tie, in contrast to his wife, who usually looked as if she’d thrown on the first thing that tumbled out of the dryer. “The only thing I worry about is the police showing up on our doorstep.”

“I don’t know what to do anymore.” Jill Mallory looked from me to her husband, who stared resolutely ahead. “He’s making me a nervous wreck. I don’t sleep; I yell at everyone. I yelled at little Jenny again this morning. Although I explained to her that even though I yell at her a lot lately, it doesn’t mean I don’t love her.”

“You also gave yourself permission to keep yelling at
her,” I told her, as gently as I could. She looked at me as if she’d been shot through the heart with an arrow.

Jill, Jerry, Jenny, Jason, I recited in my mind, wondering whether the succession of J’s had been deliberate. Jo Lynn, I found myself adding, picturing her in a crowded West Palm Beach courtroom, praying that common sense had kept her at home.

“Is there some way to force Jason back into counseling?” his mother asked. “Maybe a psychiatrist …”

I told her that wouldn’t be a good idea. Teenagers are not great candidates for therapy, for two main reasons: one, they have no insight into why they do things, and two, they have no curiosity about why they do things.

When the hour was over and the Mallorys had gone, I went into the other room, grabbed a tuna fish sandwich from the small fridge, and checked my voice mail. There were two hang-ups and seven messages: three from clients seeking appointments; one from the guidance counselor at Sara’s school asking me to call at my convenience; two from my mother asking me to call as soon as possible; and one from Jo Lynn telling me she’d spent the morning in court, that Colin Friendly was even better-looking in person than in his photographs, that she was more convinced than ever of his innocence, and that I had to go with her to see for myself on Wednesday, a day I normally don’t go into the office. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and called my mother.

There was a frantic edge to her voice I wasn’t used to hearing. “Where have you been?” she asked. “I’ve been calling all morning. I kept getting that stupid machine.”

“What’s the matter, Mom? Has something happened?”

“It’s that damn Mr. Emerson.”

“What happened with Mr. Emerson?”

“He accused me of trying to poison him with that peach crumble I made for him. He claims he was up all night
throwing up. I’m so upset. He’s telling everyone in the building that I tried to poison him.”

“Oh, Mom, I’m so sorry. You must be so disappointed. Here you went to all that effort.” I imagined her bent over her kitchen counter, arranging slices of peaches in the pan in neat little rows. “Try not to worry about it. No one there is going to take him seriously.”

“Do you think you could talk to Mrs. Winchell?” she asked, referring to the retirement home’s administrator. “I’m just too upset, and I know if you phoned her and explained …”

“I really don’t think that’s necessary, Mom.”

“Please.” Again, that unfamiliar urgency clinging to her voice.

“Sure thing. What’s her number?”

“Her number?”

“Never mind.” Clearly my mother was in no frame of mind for such details. “I’ll find it.”

“You’ll call right away?”

“As soon as I can.”

“Thank you, darling. I’m sorry to be such a burden.”

“You’re never a burden. I’ll speak to you later.” I replaced the receiver, took a few quick bites of my sandwich, and flipped through my address book for Mrs. Winchell’s phone number, deciding first to check in with my daughter’s school. The guidance counselor came on the line just as an enormous piece of tuna glued itself to the roof of my mouth.

“Sara has been missing a lot of classes,” he told me without preamble. “In the last two weeks, she’s missed four math classes and two Spanish classes.”

Oh God, I thought. Here we go again. Hadn’t we been through this last year?

“I’ll talk to her,” I told the guidance counselor, feeling like a total failure, although I knew this was Sara’s responsibility,
not mine. Still, I felt responsible. Some family therapist, I thought, swallowing the rest of my sandwich, feeling it awkward and heavy as it lurched its way down my esophagus toward my stomach.

I called Mrs. Winchell, quickly explaining the reason for my call, and asking if she could pay Mr. Emerson a visit. Maybe he’d reached a point in his life, I suggested gently, when he needed to find a place that offered more supervised care. There was a moment’s silence before Mrs. Winchell spoke. I found myself holding my breath, though I wasn’t sure why.