Salter, Anna C (8 page)

"Did he let you go?" I asked. It didn't sound like the kind of situation that would have been easy to get out of.

"I had a seizure," she said, flatly. "I hadn't had one for years. I don't remember much. When I came to he was saying I wasn't worth killing. I guess I wasn't, but sometimes I think it would have been better if he had. At least I wouldn't have to go through it again."

Her voice had a kind of resignation in it that gave me the creeps. This woman really thought her tormentor was back and had no belief whatsoever that she or anybody on earth could stop him from doing it again—whatever it was. Worse, the son-of-a-bitch had annihilated her self-esteem to the point she thought she wasn't even worth killing.

By now her nose was starting to drip, but she was paying no attention. Reflexively, I started to try to hand her a Kleenex again but realized the one I had was all balled up. I tossed it and picked up the Kleenex box to pull out another. I heard a sharp intake of breath from Camille. Surprised, I looked up.

Her pupils were dilated wide open, and then they contracted to pinpoints. She was sitting rigidly, grasping the arms of the chair on both sides. Her knuckles were white. Her face started to get the kind of unfocused look that said I wasn't in the room anymore.

"Camille," I said urgently. "Look at the chair; look at Keeter. What do you see?" She was losing contact with her surroundings, and sometimes you can keep people grounded in the present by getting them to focus on what's around them. If she could look at Keeter or the room or anything around her, it might help her stay in the here and now.

It didn't even slow her down. Her eyes never even flickered toward Keeter. Instead, she slowly raised her hands and touched her cheeks. "Dear God, not my nose. Just my nose, leave my nose. I won't be able to breathe." Her voice was getting sharp, and her breath was coming in panicky grasps. "Don't cover my eyes," she said. "I can't see ... I can't see," she said, her voice rising.

"What?" I said. "What's on your face?"

She turned her face toward me as a blind person might, her eyes showing no recognition at all. "Can't you see?" she said. Then I lost her entirely. She quietly slipped off the chair and curled up in a fetal position, covered her head with her hands, and started rocking back and forth. Silence filled the room only to be broken by Camille making some sort of slight sound. If I had leaned forward, I could have caught it, maybe. I didn't. I knew what it was.

Keeter hardly reacted to any of this. She just looked dead tired, as well she might be. Her owner had been acting like this for probably the last twenty-four hours.

I looked down at the Kleenex box in my hand, trying to understand what had just happened. It just looked like an ordinary Kleenex box. I started to put it down and froze. There, on the table, sitting behind the Kleenex box until I picked it up, was the problem. I flashed back to my office. "Mummy," she had said, and I had thought she had been calling for her mother. Boy, the things people tell me that I just don't hear.

It was a simple thing sitting there on the table. You'd find it in anybody's house, in every hospital. Most people thought of it as a reassuring thing to have around. It was nothing really, just a large, ordinary roll of adhesive tape.

Suzanne had the big problem, of course. Once Camille showed up at the ED, she was Suzanne's responsibility, and Suzanne couldn't exactly put her on the street in the shape she was in. She could leave her in a treatment room for hours and hours —I'd seen that happen—but it was going to be more than a few hours before Camille came back to earth.

We called Harvey—neither of us thought a neighbor was likely to know much about Camille's friends or relatives — but neither of us knew anybody else to call. There wasn't anybody else we could think of who even knew Camille, and Camille was now too out of it to answer any more questions.

The call to Harvey yielded zip. Camille had hardly spoken to him or his wife, and Harvey could not remember ever seeing anybody go in or out of Camille's house except her. Dog or no, somehow Camille had to be admitted, at least temporarily.

There was a huge fight with the powers that be. I took as much of the flak as I could —Suzanne was a shoo-in for chief resident next year if she didn't alienate the entire hierarchy first, which this little episode might. In the end we came up with a compromise. Camille was going into a twenty-four-hour bed. Some psychiatric beds were reserved for short-term crisis patients, and those beds were only available for twenty-four hours at a time.

Keeter got special attention. She was not to leave Camille's room the entire time except to be walked outside. I wondered who was supposed to walk her, but decided against asking. At the end of twenty-four hours, if Camille wasn't able to leave the hospital and go home, she was to be committed to the state hospital. Let them deal with the dog, seemed to be the administrative point of view.

Suzanne and I just looked at each other. Neither of us mentioned to the "risk-management" person we were dealing with that Camille would never meet the criteria for commitment. These days to be committed you had to be actively homicidal or suicidal —and that meant have the gun in your hand and your finger on the trigger—plus be mentally ill. Camille was certainly ill enough but not planning on killing anybody, although both Suzanne and I were both considering it at this point.

Suzanne and I had a different plan. We thought the dog was more committable than Camille. Maybe if she wasn't better after twenty-four hours, we'd just commit the dog and Camille could go along.

It had taken us the entire day, and all we had bought Camille was twenty-four hours in a safe place to put herself back together. Neither of us was surprised. It was always tougher dealing with the hierarchy than the patients.

"Keeter," I said sternly when I left, "keep your cool. Do not cause any trouble. No snacking. Not one little obsessive-compulsive disorder. Not a single major depression."

As I left I passed the resident coming in to take over for Suzanne, who, mercifully, would finally get to go home and sleep. "Watch out for the antisocial in 102," I said as I passed him in the hall. "Mean as a junkyard dog."

I stepped outside in the cool spring darkness and glanced at my watch. Eight o'clock. It wouldn't be light this late until June. I particularly hate winter, where you go to work in the dark and come home in the dark. There was a reason God said, "Let there be light." If I was God, it would be the first thing I'd say too.

I went back upstairs to my office and retrieved Willy's note before I left. I put it on the seat of the car and just looked at it a moment before starting the car. Surely, I wasn't thinking of answering it tonight. I was too tired from all the fighting over Camille, too zonked from watching her deteriorate in such a painful way. I wasn't in shape for it.

I drove home with the note still sitting on the seat. When I did respond to Willy —which wouldn't be tonight —the big issue would be what to say.

Dealing with Willy wasn't exactly like dealing with anybody else I knew. The closest thing maybe was an antisocial personality disorder—a bully, in short. There were rules for dealing with bullies. You never cowered and you never blustered. And most of all, you never got into a power struggle. Anti-socials would cut off their noses to spite their faces, they would go to jail, they would literally die —or worse, kill you—before they'd lose a power struggle. So, instead, you gave them choices. If you do this, this will happen. If you do that, that will happen. Up to you; not my choice.

"That's fine," I had said to one who had announced he was going to tear up my office. "Sure, if you choose to, you can tear up my office. No problem. Now, here's the deal. If you tear it up, you go to jail. If you don't tear it up, you don't go to jail. Up to you. If you want to go to jail, you can go to jail. If you don't want to go to jail, then we can sit down and talk about why you're so upset. But you need to understand this: Either way — whether you go to jail tonight or you don't, I am not going to jail." He had sat down.

It wouldn't work with Willy. I knew in my soul it wouldn't, but what would? Nothing. So you took your best shot.

This time I didn't hesitate to get out of the car in the dark. Willy wouldn't be waiting. This much I knew about him: He loved foreplay. He wanted to talk, so he'd give me time to answer. I walked from the car to the house feeling safe for the first time since before I had been attacked. I dropped my stuff in the living room and walked out onto the deck.

The outside lights lit up the small stream below. I hadn't been out on the deck much recently, and I had almost forgotten how the stream looked at night. Water always looks different at night. It comes alive like some nocturnal animal that sleeps during the day. Look at water long enough at night and you would swear the light was coming up from below, braided through the gurgling stream like phosphorous. I'd seen that too. Dipped my oars in real phosphorous, leaving arcs of light as it dripped off the circling oars.

Somewhere, a thousand miles or so straight south, most of my people were probably sitting out on the water tonight, just like I was. One way or another, most of them live on the water—on the ocean or an inlet or at the least a river. In my family, my little stream wasn't a very big deal in the water department, but I couldn't imagine living without it. I went back in, got some ice tea, came out, and sat down. I felt the day start to slip from my shoulders.

I sat quietly and let the water from the stream mesmerize me. Water is pretty much all my family has in common. I have all kinds of relatives: bright ones and dumb ones, nice ones and mean ones. I have a Mama that makes barracudas look cuddly, and once upon a time I had a Daddy who'd rather drink than fight. But every single one of us has salt water in our veins.

I'm the black sheep. Not my cousin Mary Lou, who turned into a total drunk and was picked up by the police passed out in the street outside Hardee's. Mary Lou found God and straightened herself out, and my family decided Mary Lou was a testimony to the healing powers of the Lord. Not my nephew Buddy, who spent a couple of years in a military stockade for something or other—I didn't even want to know what. That was just considered youthful hijinks.

But a good Southern girl like me going up to live in a place that froze a body to death all winter and where, everybody knew, the people were as cold as the weather? I laughed out loud, thinking if Willy did kill me, nobody in my family would be surprised. What do you expect if you're going to live up North among strangers?

How would Mama deal with Willy? Mama wouldn't see the problem. "Shoot him on sight," she'd say, as if that settled it.

"It's not that simple. Mama. It's all going to be shadow and slight of hand. By the time I see him it'll be too late." I don't know why I carry on conversations with Mama as much as I do: I couldn't live within seven states of her.

On impulse I walked inside the tiny A-frame and started to pick up the phone. For the first time I noticed the message light flashing and hit the button to play it.

Marv's voice came on, tinged with anxiety. "Michael," he said. "Thank you for seeing my client. I gather from your notes the group was not what she was looking for.

"I'm actually calling because I read in the paper that Willy got out. I am terribly sorry. I'm wondering if this is likely to be a problem for you? I'd be happy to consult with you any time about him. And . . . well ... I hope other matters are going better."

I hadn't told him why I'd landed on his couch, but I knew Marv was well aware the only kind of thing that could put me in that kind of shape was Jordan. "Let me know if I can help. And please come back whenever you like."

He was an amazingly benign man, and maybe I would wind up on his couch again. I picked up the phone. From the benign to the . . . , but that was the problem with Mama, I never even knew what to call her. I brought the phone back outside and sat down again. I looked at it for a moment and then sighed. Might as well. I dialed and waited. If Mama was there she'd pick it up immediately. Mama didn't dillydally around.

"Hello," the voice said. Mama never identifies herself, no matter whose phone she answers. She just expects everybody knows who she is.

"Mama, this is Michael."

"Michael, well land-sakes, girl. It's been many a moon since I heard from you."

"Phone works both ways, Mama." How did I do this? I could get in a fight with Mama within seconds of being on the phone with her.

"Well, we been busy planting the garden. You know how much work that is. There hasn't been time to breathe." Mama wasn't one to let things go. I tried to think if I had ever in my life heard Mama take even part of the responsibility for anything going wrong. Probably not. This was going nowhere, as usual.

"Mama, tell me about attack dogs." Mama did know her dogs.

"Attack dogs. Girl? They don't call them 'attack dogs' anymore. Doesn't look good in court. You know how people sue over every little thing these days. Goddamn lawyers are ruining the country."

I had the feehng getting eaten by an attack dog didn't meet my definition of a httle thing, but I let it go. Too, Daddy had been a lawyer, but I let that go also. "Right, protection dogs. That's not what I'm asking. I want to know how a female protection dog would likely act if she had an owner who couldn't control her. Is she going to get mean? What's she likely to do?"

"Well, that owner shouldn't have her. That's ridiculous."

"I don't run the world. Mama. There's nothing I can do about the fact that somebody has a protection dog who shouldn't. I just want to know how the dog is likely to act."

"Is she mean? Some of them are just naturally mean and some aren't."

"I don't know. She looks mean to me, but I can't tell."

There was a pause. "One thing's for sure, she'll take over."

"What do you mean? Turn on her owner?"

"Not necessarily. But she'll start making decisions on her own. A good dog won't just protect a person. They'll protect their territory. Your girl will pick out her territory, and before long you won't see any more mail. The UPS man won't come around either. Lord, there was one over on Marker's Island, he attacked the UPS truck when it was coming down the driveway."