Blameless (12 page)

Diana nodded and followed the striking woman in her designer suit. How did a receptionist afford such an expensive outfit? she wondered glumly as she walked through the hushed, wainscoted hallway. Diana was beginning to wonder if perhaps she hadn’t picked the wrong profession.

When they got to Valerie’s office it was much smaller and more modern than Diana expected, given the rest of the suite. But the office was the whirlwind of papers and activity that Diana could easily have predicted. Valerie waved her into a chair while she talked into the phone, ate a sandwich, and stuffed her briefcase with files. As usual, she was barefoot. Hanging up the phone, Valerie held out her hand. “Looks pretty hefty,” she said, waving her manicured fingers in the direction of the papers on Diana’s lap. “The Hutchins Files.”

Diana handed them to her. “I’ve been accused of being a bit compulsive when it comes to record keeping.”

“Good thing,” Valerie said between bites of her lunch. She carefully but efficiently ripped off the elastic bands and quickly flipped through the pages. “Proof positive,” she said, patting the stack, “of your professional competence. Let Engdahl try and prove substandard care now.”

“Substandard care,” Diana echoed. The whole situation was too impossible to believe. She had never provided substandard care to any patient. And definitely not to James Hutchins. But that was just what Jill was contending: that Diana had failed to do everything, from devising an appropriate treatment plan to properly terminating with James—and that she had mismanaged everything in between.

Valerie swallowed the rest of her sandwich in a large gulp and grabbed her suit jacket from a hanger on the back of the door. “If they’re admissible,” she muttered almost to herself.

“If what’s admissible?” Diana asked, catching something in Valerie’s tone that she didn’t like.

“The treatment notes,” Valerie said as she shrugged into her jacket.

“You mean my treatment notes might not be admissible in court?” Diana stared at Valerie. “What are you talking about?”

Valerie sighed and pulled a pair of gray leather heels from the bookshelf over her computer. She came around and sat on the edge of her desk. “It’s that damn doctor-patient privilege,” she said, wincing as she pushed her plump feet into the narrow pumps. “It’s often sacrosanct.”

Diana couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Are you saying that my personal,
stolen
journal is admissible—but my professional notes aren’t?” she demanded.

“Now don’t get all excited,” Valerie warned. “You just caught me talking to myself. First of all, I’ve already drafted the motion in limine to keep the journal out—so forget about that. And I’ll find some way around this confidentiality issue too.” She forced her other foot into its shoe and stood up. Frowning at Diana, she picked up her briefcase and tapped the stack of treatment notes again. “I’m trusting that you’re good at your job,” she said. “You’re just going to have to trust that I’m good at mine.”

By the time Diana got home she was completely exhausted by the emotion of the morning. Warily, she pushed the button on her answering machine. There were three messages. The first was from Craig. Her stomach squeezed as she listened to his deep, soothing voice. “We’ve gotten through tough times before, Di. We’ll get through this too. Hang in there, hon. Call me as soon as you get home.”

While she waited for the next beep, Diana rested her hands on the curve of her stomach. She really was quite small for five months, and she still hadn’t felt the baby kick. Although she knew from the amniocentesis—could only eight days have passed since she had received the results?—that everything was fine, she was still a bit worried. And even though Craig was still cracking bad jokes about her shoe size, she knew he was worried too. The little one had probably been kicking away for a week, Diana consoled herself. She had just been too distracted to notice.

Distracted was definitely the word, for the second message was from her obstetrician’s office, reminding her of her appointment later that afternoon. Diana had forgotten until this moment that she had one. She usually looked forward to her appointments with Gerri Jasset for days, writing down questions, reading up on fetal development, anxious to hear the rapid pump of the baby’s heart through the stethoscope Gerri placed on her stomach. And today she had almost forgotten.

Listening to the message, Diana stared at her blotter, following the deep red threads of the pad as they wove in and out, in and out, crossing over and under each other until they formed a solid mass. She thought of the empty whitewashed nursery three floors above her, just waiting for curtains and a crib and maybe some of those cloth primary-colored balloons she had seen in a window on Newbury Street. But instead of joy, these thoughts filled her with unease.

Diana was startled from her self-reflection by the third message. It was from her wandering patient Ethan Kruse—and it was very strange. His words were hard to understand because his voice was so shaky. It got louder and softer, and at one point he burst into hysterical laughter. There was no doubt in her mind that Ethan was in some kind of trouble. But, of course, this was nothing new. She rewound the tape and played it again.

“Dr. Marcus, it’s me, Ethan,” the message began. “I heard about James—I read it in the paper. I’m fine but you need to check out James’s records …” His voice dropped to a whisper, and it sounded as if he had turned away from the phone. She heard him giggle. “Something’s weird,” Ethan said quickly, as if his dime were running out. “Something no one knows but you need to find out to …” Here he hesitated once again, and Diana heard a loud burst of laughter in the background. “To understand,” Ethan finally said. “I’ll be in touch.” Then the phone was slammed down with a loud bang.

Diana stared at the machine as it clicked and blinked, resetting itself for the next call. What the hell was that all about? She replayed the tape and wrote down the message word for word. Then she played it back again to make sure her transcription was correct.

Everything was about as fine with Ethan as it was with her. Not that anything had
ever
been fine with Ethan. She had clearly made a mistake putting him in the borderline group, for he was far more unmanageable than the others. He had no ability to empathize, rendering him virtually useless as a group member, and his blatant drug use and violent outbursts had had an unsettling influence on them all—especially on James.

It was Ethan’s horrendous childhood trauma that had fooled her. He had fit so neatly into her theory that borderline personality disorders were really a protracted form of post-traumatic stress syndrome—that it wasn’t bad mothers, but some kind of horrible childhood abuse, that made her patients the way they were. Diana had allowed herself to be duped by Ethan because she desperately needed more subjects to increase her sample size, to complete her research, and to topple Adrian Arnold from his throne as the national expert on borderline personality disorders. How absurd and misguided her ambitions seemed now.

Suddenly she cared little about the scientific upheaval her results might cause among a tiny group of borderline experts. Diana realized that besting Adrian Arnold and becoming the new rising star had little appeal. She froze and stared at the silent answering machine. Adrian? Could Adrian have stolen her journal?

She laughed out loud. While he might have the biggest ego she had ever encountered, there was no way her little research project was going to turn one of the most eminent psychologists in the country into a cat burglar. Adrian Arnold, the next president of the American Psychological Association, arrested for breaking and entering. She really was losing her grip.

After leaving a message with Craig’s secretary that she was home from Jill’s, Diana flipped through her Rolodex and found Ethan’s telephone number. As she listened to the hollow ringing, she once again berated herself for letting Ethan into the group. She had exposed her other patients to his disruptive influence and had potentially retarded their improvement just because she needed more data to prove her precious theory. And it hadn’t worked anyway.

For it turned out that witnessing his mother’s murder was only one of a long line of horrors Ethan had suffered as a child. And right before James’s death he had confessed that he had excluded arson, aggravated assult, and two arrests for a scam on elderly homeowners from the “minor problems with authority” he had described to her at their first meeting. Based on everything she had learned and observed about Ethan since that first interview, Diana had finally come to the conclusion that he didn’t have a borderline personality disorder at all. Now it appeared that he suffered from an antisocial personality disorder. Ethan was what they used to call a psychopath.

Diana had planned to present Ethan’s case at peer review last week and ask for a recommendation. But after Adrian’s criticism of her research, she had decided to skip it. Now Diana wished that she had discussed Ethan; she had been seriously considering suspending him from the group when he returned. But after what had happened to James, she was gun-shy about making another mistake.

She looked back down at her notes. “Check out James’s records.” What records? James’s school records? Psychiatric records? Medical records? Phonograph records? “Something no one knows but you need to find out to understand.” To understand what? Her journal? James’s death? Suddenly Diana’s stomach squeezed in a new kind of fear. What exactly
did
Ethan know about James’s death? What
could
he know?

She pushed herself from her chair and began pacing the room. Stopping at the window and staring into the autumnal dreariness, Diana rubbed her arms to fend off both the inner and outer chill. Then she went to the file cabinet and grabbed the stack of manila files that sat on top of it: James’s records. Although she had just had the whole batch photocopied for Valerie, she hadn’t read through most of the material in ages.

Clearing her research materials from the desk, Diana placed the pile of files on her blotter. She flipped through them: treatment plans, histories, individual session notes by year, group session notes, and a fat miscellaneous file. She opened the miscellaneous file and sifted through the odd assortment of materials: a copy of the signed release from Mass General giving her access to James’s hospital records after his suicide attempt; postcards he had sent her last summer; a letter of reference she had written to Fidelity. These records were all that she had left of him.

He had had such a strong need to survive, such a powerful urgency to help himself and others. He was always running errands for Mr. Berger, the parapalegic who lived in the apartment below him on Anderson Street, and he was always bringing home strays—both animals and people. He took yoga and oil painting and stress-reduction classes. He sweated through hours of excruciatingly painful therapy. But despite the courses and the therapy sessions, despite his generosity with both his money and his time, James had always sensed that his future was foreshortened. “When I think of all the things I’m not going to achieve,” he had told her last spring, “I already feel as if I don’t exist.”

Diana closed the miscellaneous file and opened the one containing her notes on his individual sessions. James would be pleased with the bulk of his legacy. There must be at least one hundred and fifty pages from last year alone. Substandard care. It was ludicrous. Ridiculous. For, despite her ultimate failure, she had brought James so close to success.

When he first came to her, he had been completely blocked, unable to remember a large chunk of his childhood, unable to see the events that haunted and controlled his life. For the first two years she had worked to help him unlock the chains, to guide him safely toward—and through—the wall he had built to protect himself from the horrors. The wall that kept him from being who he really was.

Diana would never forget the day she and James had finally broken down the wall. That dark afternoon in early November, when for the first time James had allowed himself to remember what had happened to that little boy, had held so much pain and so much promise for them both.

For months James had described dreams of being surrounded by bright lights, of clowns playing with his toes, of being suffocated by the smell of horse manure. “I keep seeing these weird images,” he said, “but I know they can’t be real.” He smiled his arresting self-deprecating smile. “May be I’m more nuts than I think.”

Diana watched him closely, knowing what he was trying to remember—and trying not to remember. Jill had told her the whole depraved tale: the dilapidated old barn Hank Hutchins had used for his filming; the clown costumes he and the other men had worn to gain the boys’ trust; what they had done to James and the others after their trust had been attained. “Or maybe you’re not nuts at all,” Diana had told James gently. “If you keep thinking and feeling these things, keep seeing them, then maybe there’s something to them.” She paused, gripping her hands tightly under her desk, her eyes locked on to James’s. “Maybe they’re some kind of body memory trying to tell you something.”

James immediately started to deny her suggestions, then he stopped in mid-sentence and turned deathly pale. “Oh my God,” he whispered, staring over her shoulder and into the past. “Oh my God,” he repeated. He shifted his eyes and looked directly into hers, his face such a mask of pain that she could barely stand to hold his gaze.

“What is it, James?” Diana asked softly, all too cognizant from Jill’s tearful description of James’s years of sodomy and violation what he must be seeing. Her heart ached so for that little boy—and for the man he had become. She was simultaneously nauseated by the fact that she had forced him to look into the pit and exhilarated by her knowledge that what he saw might ultimately set him free.

“He—he—” James stuttered, covering his face with his hands as if to stop the flood of memories. “In a barn. A cold barn. Uncle Hank. He held me down while the clown—the clown—” He began to sob, huge wrenching sobs that shook his whole body.

Diana had truly understood for the first time in her life what murderous rage actually meant: For if Hank Hutchins had walked through the door at that moment, she would have killed him. Instead, she stood up and walked around her desk to where James was sitting, huddled and hurt and as wounded as if he had been physically attacked. She knelt and wrapped her arms around him. “He can’t hurt you anymore,” she murmured, caressing his hair and holding him as if he were a small child. “It’s over and you’re safe here,” she had repeated rhythmically, rocking him as she spoke. “It’s over and you’re safe.”