The Sociopath Next Door (20 page)

I said quietly, “Your father's in prison?”

“Yes.” She looked up slowly when she answered, almost surprised, as if I had gleaned this information telepathically. “He killed a man. I mean, he didn't mean to, but he killed a man.”

“And now he's in prison?”

“Yes. Yes, he is.”

She blushed, and her eyes filled.

I am always impressed by the fact that even the tiniest amount of being listened to, the barest suggestion of the possibility of kind treatment, can bring such an immediate rush of emotion. I think this is because we are almost never really listened to. In my work as a psychologist, I am reminded every day of how infrequently we are heard, any of us, or our actions even marginally understood. And one of the ironies of my “listening profession” is its lesson that in many ways, each of us ultimately remains a mystery to everyone else.

“How long has your father been in prison?” I asked.

“About forty-one days. There was a really long trial. They didn't keep him in prison during the trial.”

“And you felt that you needed to talk to someone?”

“Yes. I can't . . . It's just so . . . Depressed. I think I'm getting depressed. I have to start med school.”

“Med school? You mean in September?”

It was July.

“Yes. I wish I didn't have to.”

The tears came, soundless ones, no weeping noises, as if the rest of her were unaware she was crying. Streams fell from her eyes and rolled down onto her white silk shirt, making translucent stains. Apart from this, her demeanor remained unchanged, stoic. Her face did not fall.

I am always moved by stoicism. Hannah's was extreme. I was hooked.

Using both forefingers, she shoved her straight black hair into submission behind her ears. Her hair was so shiny it looked as if someone had polished it. She gazed past me, at the window, and asked, “Do you know what it's like for your father to be in prison?”

“No, I don't,” I said. “Maybe you'll tell me.”

And so Hannah told me her story, or this part of it.

Her father had been the principal of the public high school in the middle-class suburb where Hannah was raised, in a different state, a thousand miles west of Boston. According to Hannah, he was an extremely likable man who naturally drew people to him—a “star,” as Hannah put it—and was much loved by the students, the teachers, and nearly everyone else in the small community that surrounded the high school. He was always at the cheerleading practices and the football games, and whether or not the home team won was personally important to him.

Born and raised in the rural Midwest, he had “strong conservative values,” Hannah said. He believed in patriotism and a mightily defended country, and also education and self-betterment. Hannah was his only child, and for as long as she could remember, he had told her that, even though she was not a boy, she could be whatever she wanted to be. Girls could be whatever they wanted to be. Girls could be doctors. Hannah could be a doctor.

Hannah loved her father dearly. “He's the sweetest, most moral man in the world. He really
is,
” she told me. “You should have seen all the people who came to the trial. They just sat there and cried for him, cried and cried. They felt so sorry for him, but there was nothing they could do. You know? Nothing they could do.”

The killing took place on a March night when Hannah, a college sophomore at the time, happened to be home on spring break. In the wee hours, she had been wakened by a very loud noise outside her parents' house.

“I didn't know it was a gun until later,” she told me.

She got up sleepily to look around, and found her mother standing just inside the open front door of the house, weeping and wringing her hands. The March air was rushing in.

“You know, it's the weirdest thing. I can still close my eyes and see her standing there like that—the wind was blowing her bathrobe around—and it was like I knew everything, everything that happened, right at that moment, before I even knew anything. I knew what had happened. I knew my father would be arrested. I saw it all. Well, that's like a picture from a nightmare, right? The whole thing was like a nightmare. You can't believe it's happening in real life, and you keep thinking you'll wake up. Sometimes I still think I'm just going to wake up, and everything was just some kind of horrible dream. But how did I know everything before I even knew anything? I saw my mom standing there like . . . like it was happening in the past, like déjà vu or something. It was weird. Or maybe not. Maybe it just seems that way now, when I remember it. I don't know.”

As soon as she saw Hannah, her mother grabbed her, as if pulling her daughter out of the way of an oncoming train, and screamed at her, “Don't go out there! Don't go out there!” Hannah made no move toward the outside, nor did she press her mother for an explanation. She just stood there in her terrified mother's embrace.

“I'd never seen her like that before,” Hannah said. “Still, like I keep wanting to say, it was almost as if I'd been through it already. I knew I'd better stay inside.”

At some point—Hannah is not sure how long this took—her father came in by the wide-open front door, to the place where she and her mother stood clutching each other.

“He didn't have the gun in his hand. He dropped it out there in the yard somewhere.”

Wearing only pajama pants, he stood before his little family.

“He looked fine. He was sort of panting, but I mean he didn't look frightened or anything, and for just a second, just about half a second, I thought maybe everything was going to be okay.”

As she told me this, Hannah's tears came again.

“But I was too scared to ask him what happened. After a while, Mom let go of me. She went and she called the police. I remember she asked him, ‘Is he hurt?' And he said, ‘I think so. I think I hurt him really bad.' And then she went into the kitchen and she called the police. That's what you're supposed to do, right?”

“Right,” I said. It had not been a rhetorical question.

In bits and pieces, Hannah learned what had happened. Earlier during that awful night, Hannah's mother, always a light sleeper, had heard noises coming from the living room, sounds like breaking glass, and had roused her sleeping husband. There were more noises. The man of the house became convinced there was an intruder to be dealt with, and got out of bed to prepare. Carefully (according to his wife, later)—by only the dim illumination of a tiny book light—he took out the gun box that he kept in the bedroom closet, unlocked it, and loaded the gun. His wife pleaded with him simply to call the police. He never even replied to this entreaty. He hissed at her commandingly, “Stay here!” And still in near darkness, he left for the living room.

Seeing him, or, more likely, hearing him, the prowler fled the house by the front door. Hannah's father gave chase, shot at the man, and “by sheer blind luck,” as one of his attorneys would put it later, hit him in the back of the head, killing him instantly. As it happened, the intruder fell on the sidewalk between the lawn and the curb. This meant, technically, that Hannah's father had shot an unarmed man on the street.

Strangely, incredibly, no neighbors came out of their houses.

“Everything was so quiet after. So very, very quiet,” Hannah said to me there in my office.

The police arrived quickly after Hannah's mother called them, followed by a few more people and a silent ambulance. Eventually, her father and her mother were taken away to the police station.

“My mother called her sister and my uncle to come stay with me for the rest of the night, just like I was suddenly a little girl all over again. They weren't any help. They were pretty hysterical. I think I just felt really numb.”

The next day, and in the following weeks, the situation occupied the local media's interest. The shooting had taken place in a quiet middle-class suburb. The shooter was an ordinary middle-class man with no known history of violence. He had not been drunk, nor had he been using drugs. The dead man was a known felon, a drug addict, and just before he was shot, he had broken into the house through a window. No one except the prosecuting attorney disputed that he was a robber, or that Hannah's father had pursued and shot him because he had been an intruder in the house.

This was a victim's rights case. This was a gun-control case. This was a get-tough-on-crime case. It clearly illustrated the dangers of being a vigilante. Or maybe it demonstrated conclusively that home owners ought to have increased rights. The ACLU got mad, the NRA even more so.

There was a long trial, as Hannah had said, and then an appeal and another long trial. In the end, Hannah's father was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to a maximum of ten years in prison. The attorneys said it was more likely to be “only” two or three.

The news of a high school principal sentenced to ten years in prison for shooting a burglar on his front lawn aroused strong emotions. There were protests on all sides: The decision was unconstitutional. It defied common sense and natural law. The convicted man was a dangerous self-appointee and a rights violator. He was an American hero and a family-protector. He was a violent madman. He was a martyr to the cause, to any number of causes.

Through all of this, impossibly, Hannah was going to college, making
A
's, and applying to medical schools, activities dogmatically insisted upon by her embattled father.

“He just wouldn't allow my life to be ruined by all the ‘stupidity.' That's what he said.”

And Hannah got into nearly every medical school she applied to, despite her father's predicament. She told me that “if anything, the whole thing probably helped me get in. He was a cause.”

Finished with her narrative, Hannah searched through a small leather handbag, found a tissue, and began to blot her cheeks and dab at the streaks on her shirt. This she did even though there was a full box of tissues in plain sight on a little table just at her left elbow.

“So you see, I don't really need ‘therapy' exactly. But I really would like to talk to someone. I really don't want to be this depressed when I start med school. I don't know. Do you think it would be all right for me to see you?”

Hannah had affected me with her story, and with her demeanor. I felt tremendous sympathy for her, and I told her so. To myself, I wondered how much help she would actually be able to accept from me, the psychological trauma therapist she had called because she had seen my name in a newspaper article. Out loud, we agreed to meet once a week for a while, so Hannah could have someone to talk to. The medical school she had finally chosen was in Boston, and at her mother's urging she had moved east right after her college graduation, so she could be “settled in” before classes started, and away from the craziness back home. Her mother felt the situation with her husband was “negative” for her daughter. I thought I had seldom heard such an understatement, and I assured Hannah that, yes, it would be all right for her to see me.

After she left, I paced around my office for a minute or two, staring out the tall windows onto Boston's Back Bay, walking over to riffle papers on the wide, cluttered desk, and then returning to the windows, as I often do after a session in which someone has told me a great deal, but not nearly everything. As I paced, I was interested not so much in the legal and political questions of who, what, when, and where, but rather in psychology's perennial question of why.

Hannah had not asked why—as in “
Why
did my father shoot that gun?
Why
didn't he just let the man go?” I reflected that, emotionally, she could not afford to ask why, as the answer might be too unsettling. The entire relationship with her father was at stake. And maybe this was the reason she needed me, to help her navigate through the conceivable answers to this perilous question. Perhaps her father had been caught up in the frenzy of the moment and had shot the gun almost accidentally, hitting the intruder lethally in the head “by sheer blind luck,” as the attorney had said. Or perhaps her father had genuinely believed his family was in danger, and his protective instincts had taken him over. Or perhaps Hannah's father, the family man, this ordinary middle-class high-school principal, was a killer.

In subsequent sessions, during that summer and in the fall as Hannah began medical school, she told me more about her father. In the kind of work I do, I often hear about behaviors and events that the patient herself, over her lifetime, has grown used to and thinks of as normal, but that to me sound distinctly abnormal and sometimes alarming. This kind of report is what I soon began to get from Hannah. As she described her father, though she obviously believed she was recounting unremarkable stories, I pieced together the picture of an emotionally cold individual whose mean and controlling actions made me cringe. Also, I became familiar with the understandable haze my intelligent young patient was lost in when it came to seeing her father for what he was.

I discovered that Hannah's father dealt with his pretty wife and his high-achieving daughter more like trophies than human beings, usually ignoring them completely when they were sick or having a difficult time for some other reason. But, lovingly, Hannah reinterpreted her father's callous treatment of her.

“He's really proud of me,” she said, “or so I've always thought—and so he can't stand it when I make mistakes. Once when I was in the fourth grade, my teacher sent a note home that I wasn't doing my homework. Dad didn't speak to me for two weeks after that. I know it was two weeks because I had this little calendar—I still have it somewhere—and I marked off the days, one by one. It was as if suddenly I didn't even exist. It was awful. Oh, and another good example, more recent: I was in high school already—
his
high school, you know?—and I got this really huge, ugly blemish on my cheek.” She pointed to an empty space on her lovely complexion. “He didn't say a word to me—wouldn't even look at me—for three days. He's such a perfectionist. I guess he wants to show me off, and when something's wrong, he really can't do that. It makes me feel bad about myself sometimes, but I suppose I can understand it, more or less.”