Blameless (7 page)

“And did you follow these ‘acceptable practices,’ Dr. Marcus?” Craig boomed, waving his finger in her face. “Do you have notes? Professionals who can verify that your therapy was appropriate?”

Diana thought of her incredibly complete files, the ones Gail and Marc always laughed at, calling her a perfectionist-obsessive; she must have hundreds of pages on James alone. “Yes, Mr. Prosecutor.” She grabbed his finger and stuck her tongue out at him. “And I’ll be glad to give the court copies of every note I ever took on James Hutchins—if you’ve all got a spare month or two.”

“See?” he said, coming over and kneeling next to Diana’s chair. “She’s fishing. There’s no substance.” He wrapped his arms around her. “There’s nothing there.”

Diana snuggled into him, feeling better for his words, for his arms, for his love. “I just worry because Jill isn’t your usual person. She’s quirky. Volatile.” Diana played with the top button of his shirt. “She runs hot and cold. She did to James. She did to me.” Diana shook her head. “I just don’t think we can count on her to see things as they really are—or to do the reasonable thing …”

“Honey,” Craig said, raising her chin. “Don’t you see, it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t have anything to go on—reasonable or unreasonable. This is a matter of law. There
is
no case.”

Diana nodded and dropped her head onto his shoulder. He was right. Of course he was right. She took one of his hands and placed it on her stomach. They sat in quiet contact. The voice was finally still.

Through their silence, Diana heard the street suddenly come alive: brakes squealed; car doors slammed; voices were raised in excitement. Another frat party. Didn’t those guys ever study? Diana wondered, listening to the intensifying street noises as the dining room windows glowed from the approaching headlights. “Thanks,” she said.

“I love you.” He rubbed her stomach. “Both of—” Craig was cut off by the chime of the bell. He looked questioningly at Diana; she shrugged. They both stood and, their arms still around each other, walked to the entryway. Diana stepped to the side as Craig pulled the heavy oak door toward him.

The door swung open, and they were hit by a blaze of lights so bright that it might have been noon. Diana stood frozen, like a rabbit caught on the highway, the sinking feeling in her stomach registering the catastrophic significance of what she saw before her befuddled brain could fully assess the scene.

“Ned Holt. Channel 5 News,” declared a short man with the manufactured look of a doll, his face painted the color of Mercurochrome. He stuck a microphone under Diana’s nose. “Is it true that James Hutchins’s family is holding you responsible for his death, Dr. Marcus? Do you have any comment on the family’s allegations?” he added before she could even comprehend his first question.

Dr. Marcus. Dr. Marcus. Her mind was whirling. How did they even know it was she? “I, ah, I—” She blinked into the intense light, trying to discern what was out there, trying to find a place to run. “I don’t really know,” she finally said, groping for Craig.

“But this isn’t the first you’ve heard of it?” Holt was demanding, waving his hand for a squat heavyset boy with a camera on his shoulder to climb the steps. “You were aware that a suit was filed? Charging you with malpractice and wrongful death?”

Before she could answer, another reporter came from behind a van with “Channel 7 News” lettered on its side in diagonal black graphic. “You did know that you were the beneficiary of James Hutchins’s will?” asked a vaguely familiar woman.

Diana gripped the wrought iron railing. Once again she was at 33 rpm, separated from these frenetic plastic-looking people, not of the same world as everyone else. She was only peripherally aware of Craig’s hands gripping her shoulders as the memory that had eluded her that morning came flooding back. “Without you I’d be nothing—you’ve saved my life,” James had told her after his promotion at Fidelity. “And to show you my gratitude, I’m going to change my will so that you’re my sole beneficiary. When I die, you’ll be a rich woman.” She had dismissed the whole thing as another one of his meaningless grandiose gestures, forgetting the incident completely. Until now.

“We deny everything,” Craig boomed in a strong, angry voice, coming around to stand in front of Diana, blocking her from view. “This is completely trumped up and ridiculous.”

“Do you deny that your wife is the beneficiary of James. Hutchins’s considerable estate? We have information from a source in Hutchins’s lawyer’s office …”

“No one has contacted us.” Craig hesitated, his voice not nearly as confident as before. “We have seen no documents.” He turned and propelled Diana toward the open door. “We have nothing else to say.”

As they slipped into the foyer the woman called out. “What about the sexual abuse charge?”

Diana and Craig stopped and turned as if one. “What?!”

“Jill Hutchins charges that Dr. Marcus was having sexual relations with her brother,” Holt said. “She claims he told her the whole story. Told another psychiatrist too.” The microphone once again rose up in front of Diana’s face. “Do you have any comment, Dr. Marcus?”

“That’s completely insane,” sputtered Craig, shoving the microphone away from Diana and pulling it toward himself. “It’s a complete and total lie!”

“If you knew anything about people suffering from borderline personality disorder,” Diana said, “you would know that—”

“Don’t say anything else,” Craig hissed at Diana, just about pushing her into the house. “We’ll countersue,” he said into the microphone. “For defamation of character,” he called over his shoulder before he shut the door.

Diana leaned back against the cold plaster wall, her eyes locked onto Craig’s; he appeared as shaken as she. Jill’s words reverberated through her brain.
You used him for your own perverse pleasures … James told me everything … You two had a real sicko thing going … I even have proof …
Diana reached out for Craig’s hand. He pulled her to him and held her tight.

7

D
IANA TOOK HER LECTURE NOTES FROM THE FILE AND
spread them before her on the desk. Although she was quite familiar with the material, she liked to spend at least half an hour reviewing her notes before each class. This allowed her to speak without consulting the pages, giving her lectures a more extemporaneous feel and, as she told Craig, bamboozling the students into thinking she knew what she was talking about.

Bipolar disorder with psychotic features, she read, although the words might have been engineering jargon rather than psychological nomenclature for all the sense they made to her at the moment. Schizoaffective schizophrenia. Mania.

How was she going to pull this off? she wondered as her eyes skidded down the paper. By just doing it. She started at the top of the page again, forcing herself to concentrate. Bipolar disorder with psychotic features.

Yesterday she had hid in the house, studying her picture in the
Boston Globe
. She was unable to grasp that the stunned, obviously pregnant woman standing on the stoop, her hair blown backward off her high forehead, was really she—that Diana Marcus was the center of this media circus. No one could possibly believe this nonsense. Not her friends. Not her colleagues. Not those who knew her. But what of all the others? They would believe it; it was in the newspaper, ergo, it must be true. What else could they think? As she stared at the picture, her horror grew. They could think she was pregnant with James’s baby.

TICKNOR PSYCHOLOGIST CHARGED WITH WRONGFUL DEATH IN PATIENT SUICIDE
, read the front-page headline. The subtitle of the article noted the malpractice and sexual abuse charges in thick black letters. Ned Holt’s eleven o’clock news story had been tame compared to the
Globe
.

The paper had focused almost entirely on Jill’s allegations: James’s tales that Diana had shared her erotic fantasies with him; a postcard Diana had sent him from vacation on the Cape; Jill’s contention that, prior to his contact with Diana, James had been completely normal. Craig called to tell her that the
Inquirer
was even worse.
SEX DOC SAYS SHE’S NO MURDERER,
the tabloid headline screamed.

She had stood staring out the front window, careful to stay behind the curtains so that curious eyes could not see her from the street, watching for reporters, watching those blessed with anonymity go about their wonderfully normal lives. She had been just like them only last week: worried about whether Craig’s firm would win the Central Artery project; worried about firing one of her teaching assistants; worried about whether hobbits were too scary to include in the baby’s fantasy mural. She would give anything to have those worries again, to go back to when it was safe.

Today she had to go out.

Yesterday she had canceled all her appointments and talked only to Craig and her mother and Valerie Goldman, the lawyer her insurance company had retained. “Best malpractice lawyer in the Commonwealth,” the woman at Joint Underwriters of America had assured her. Diana had met Valerie Goldman once when she spoke at a New England American Psychological Association breakfast last winter. Her topic was “Protecting Yourself From Malpractice Suits,” and the room had been completely full.

Valerie was tall and carried an extra twenty pounds, but her perfectly tailored suit turned what would have been heft in another woman into a look of substance and competence. Her speech had been coherent and informative, and she had answered questions from the audience—half of whom had been involved in malpractice suits—with an ease that showed the depth of her knowledge. But she had also struck Diana as humorless; she never smiled, and she looked puzzled at Marc Silverman’s joke about the lawyer, the psychologist, and the rabbi that had cracked everyone else up.

In Valerie’s defense, Diana did remember that halfway through her speech, she had ripped off her Italian leather heels. “Men designed these shoes to make sure that woman couldn’t run as fast as they,” Valerie had said without a smile as she placed them on the chair next to the podium. And Gail swore by her: Joint Underwriters had hired Valerie to handle Gail’s malpractice case also. This morning, after a quick phone conversation with the woman, Diana was even more convinced of both Valerie’s competence and her humorlessness.

Yesterday Diana had prowled her office, listening to the endless stream of messages on the answering machine. Channel 7. The
Globe
. The
Inquirer
. Gail. She hadn’t even talked to her brother, Scott; Craig had called him back in the evening. The
Worcester Telegram
. Channel 4. The
Providence Journal
. She hadn’t bothered to pick up the phone when Valerie called to say that, after trying Diana’s house, the sheriff had served the complaint at her office. Valerie had agreed to accept service. They had twenty days to file an answer in court.

Today she had a class to teach.

Yesterday she had indulged her anger and sorrow. She had slammed doors and yelled into the empty house. Then she had called her mother and sobbed out her humiliation, just barely finding the strength to resist her parents’ offer that they come East immediately. As much as she needed the support, they were better off in California, geographically spared the brunt of her shame. She hollered out her fury at the media. “Would you be doing this if I were a man and James was a woman?” she had yelled out loud. “Would this be front-page news if our sexes were reversed?”

And although she knew that it was Jill and the media and society’s sexist values that were really at fault, most of her anger was focused on James. She pictured him as he had been last July, right after she had terminated with him. He was waiting for her outside the dry cleaner’s, leaning against the plate-glass window, his arms crossed and his blue eyes flashing defiance. “I’ll just kill myself and save you the trouble of doing it slowly!” he had screamed at her. And when she had ignored him and walked calmly down the street, he had gone home and swallowed a bottle of Seconal, coming extremely close to making good on his threat.

Diana didn’t care that James was now dead, that his threat had been fulfilled and her worst nightmare realized. She didn’t care that she was being immature and unprofessional. She wanted to hurt him. To punish him as he was punishing her. So she brought back every detail of him, until James Hutchins loomed large and three-dimensional in her mind. She breathed life into him and then mentally threw darts into his chest.

Valerie had called a third time to say that Diana had to go out, that if she didn’t continue on her normal schedule, her behavior could be construed as an admission of guilt. “It’s like falling off a horse,” Valerie had told Craig. “Make her get up and go to work tomorrow.”

So she had. She had gotten up, showered, and put on a new purple maternity dress, hoping the feel of the soft wool against her skin would raise her spirits. After checking the sidewalk for reporters and finding none, she had even eaten some breakfast. The
Globe
sat on the front stoop, unretrieved by anyone; Diana was afraid if she saw the paper she would lose her nerve. Craig wanted to go into work late and drive her to Ticknor, but Diana assured him that she was fine and shooed him out the door. After he left, she had walked down to her office, her steps heavy but resolute, the purple dress doing little for her spirits.

Bipolar disorder with psychotic features, she read yet one more time. Schizoaffective schizophrenia. Mania. She snapped the folder closed and stuffed the notes in her briefcase. It was no use. She glanced at the clock and stood up. It was time anyway.

Then she sat down again, relief flooding her body. There was really no reason that she had to go into the psychology department offices today. If she waited another ten minutes, she could go directly to class and then leave right after the lecture. Perhaps not exactly her normal schedule, but normal enough. She could go to work, as Valerie had ordered, while still avoiding her colleagues. Diana knew she couldn’t do this forever, but for today, she felt it would be acceptable. She would take a lesson from Scarlett O’Hara and not worry about tomorrow until tomorrow.