Blinded

Every cop knows the taste and the odor that assault the senses when tenderness collides with evil. It’s a baby coddled in a bassinet in a fume-filled meth shack. It’s the fractured face of someone’s grandma after a purse-snatcher has done his thing. It’s a pregnant woman bloodied and dead on the floor.

I’d been a cop a long time. I knew the aroma. And I knew the taste.

I did.

It may sound goofy, but I also believed that on good days I could smell the spark before I smelled the fire and I could taste the poison before it reached my lips. On good days I could stand firm between tenderness and evil. On good days I could make a difference.

What the heck is it about a woman sleeping? Okay, a woman who isn’t your wife of double-digit years.

A woman was sleeping right beside me, no more than half a foot away. The spice of her perfume tickled the back of my throat, and the fire from inside her radiated right through my clothes. Yeah, I was paying attention to a thousand things I should have been ignoring. The intimacy of her breathing. The edginess of her eyes darting below their lids. The pure power of the rise and fall of her chest. The vulnerability of her slightly parted legs. They were all way too distracting to me.

Guilt about it all? A little maybe. Not that much. Not given what had happened already.

Still, I should have been looking in the other direction, out the window. I should have been watching for signs of the inevitable collision-for the arrival of the evil-because I knew that it was coming. I did. I could taste it in one tiny spot on the back of my tongue. Left side, all the way back where an oral surgeon having a very bad day had once hacked out one of my wisdom teeth.

I allowed myself a last greedy inhale of her tenderness-just one more taste-before I forced my attention outside. Had I missed something? Didn’t look like it, no. But when I cracked open the window, I instantly detected tenderness in the air out there, too. Outside right on in, the tenderness was being swept along on the glorious aroma of a roasting Thanksgiving turkey.

I even thought I knew the bird. It was a big tom, twenty-two pounds. Traditional stuffing like my mom used to make.

Tenderness in here. Tenderness out there.

So where was the evil?

Where?

I could taste the turkey as though it were already on my lips, and I could taste her spice as though her sleepy head were resting on my chest. But I could also taste that tiny spot of evil on the back of my tongue.

She moaned just a little.

Inside, I did, too.

Nine-fifteen on Monday morning. My second patient of the day.

Gibbs Storey hadn’t changed much in the ten years since I’d last seen her. If anything, she appeared to be even more of a model of physical perfection than she’d been in the mid-nineties. I guessed yoga, maybe Pilates. Her impeccable complexion hadn’t suddenly become pocked with acne or ravaged by psoriasis, nor had her high cheekbones dropped to mortal levels. Her blond hair was shorter but no less radiant, and her eyes were the same sky blue I remembered. The absence of any wrinkles radiating around them caused me to wonder about a recent Botox poke, but I quickly surmised that Gibbs’s fair skin would probably never be susceptible to the tracks of age. She’d be in possession of some magic gene, and she’d be immune.

She’d always had beauty karma. Along with popularity karma. And the ever-elusive charm karma.

She didn’t have marriage karma, though.

I’d first met Gibbs and her husband, Sterling, when they came to see my clinical psychology partner, Diane Estevez, and me for therapy for their troubled relationship. Diane and I saw them conjointly-a quaint, almost anachronistic therapeutic modality that involved pairing a couple of patients with a couple of therapists in the same room at the same time-for only three sessions. Ironically, with therapy fees being what they are and managed care being what it is, Diane and I hadn’t done a conjoint case together since that final session with Gibbs and Sterling Storey.

After they’d abruptly canceled their fourth session and departed Boulder -“Dr. Gregory, Sterling got that job he wanted in L.A.! Isn’t that wonderful!” Gibbs informed me breathlessly in the voicemail she’d left along with her profound thanks for how helpful we’d been-neither Diane nor I had heard a word from either of them. That was true, at least, until Gibbs called, said she was back in town, and asked me for an individual appointment.

Gibbs’s call requesting the individual appointment had come ten days before, on a Friday. My few free slots the following week didn’t meet any of her needs, so we’d settled on the Monday morning time. At the time she had accepted the week-and-a-half delay graciously.

In the interim between her call and her first appointment, I’d pulled her thin file from a box in the storage area that was stuffed with the records of old, inactive cases and examined my sparse notes. The few lines of intake and progress reports that I’d scrawled after the conjoint sessions told me less than did my memory, but I didn’t need copious notes to remind me that Diane and I hadn’t been all that helpful to Gibbs and Sterling.

Couples therapy is not individual therapy with two people. It is a whole different animal, more closely akin to group therapy with a radioactive dyad. Issues within couples aren’t subjected to the simple arithmetic of doubling; problems seem to be susceptible to the more severe forces of logarithmic multiplication. Therapeutic resistance in couples work, especially conjoint couples work, isn’t just the familiar dance between therapist and patient. Instead, a well-choreographed routine between husband and wife takes place alongside every interaction between either client and either therapist. Each marital partner knows his or her steps like an experienced member of a ballroom dancing pair. She retreats as he aggresses. He surely demurs as she swoons.

A couples therapist needs to learn everyone’s moves before he or she can be maximally effective.

My memory of the Storeys’ conjoint treatment was that Diane and I had only just begun to recognize their peculiar tango when they terminated the therapy and moved to California.

The first conjoint session had been a typical “what brings you in for help” introductory. “Communication” was the buzzword of the day in the care and feeding of relationships, and that’s the culprit the Storeys identified as the reason they had entered into our care. Each maintained that they desired assistance “communicating” more effectively with the other. He was, perhaps, a little less certain than she of his motivation.

Neither Diane nor I had believed either of them. No, we didn’t entertain the possibility that they were out-and-out lying to us-at least I didn’t; I could never be a hundred percent certain about Diane-but rather we were waiting for them to approach the revelation that they might be lying to themselves, or to each other, about their reason for being in our offices. “Communication problems” was a socially acceptable entree to treatment-an acceptable thing to tell their friends.

But Diane and I weren’t at all convinced at the time that it was the reason we were seeing the Storeys.

“Hi, Dr. Gregory,” Gibbs said as she settled on the chair in my office for her first individual appointment. Her greeting wasn’t coy exactly, but it wasn’t not-coy exactly, either. “Long time,” she added.

Her fine hair was pulled back into a petite ponytail. She smiled in a way that almost dared me not to notice how together she looked.

I nodded noncommittally. My practiced chin dip could have been measured in millimeters.

“I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m here,” she said.

Another microscopic nod on my part. Most days while doing my work as a psychologist, if I were paid by the word I’d go home a pauper. But Gibbs was right, I was wondering why she’d come back to see me after so many years. I had a guess-I was wagering that she’d divorced Sterling and had moved back to Boulder to start a new life. It was a scary journey for most people. Me? I was going to be the tour guide.

That was my guess.

“You remember Sterling? My husband?”

Husband?
Okay, I was wrong. The Storeys were separated then, not divorced.

I spoke, but since it was Monday morning I failed to assemble a complete sentence. “Yes, of course” was all I said.

Gibbs raised her fingertips to her lips and leaned forward as though she were whispering a profanity and was afraid her grandmother would overhear. She said, “I think he murdered a friend of ours in Laguna Beach.”

Okay, I was wrong twice.

The previous weekend.

I decided that I couldn’t stand watching her struggle with the damn halo.

It just wasn’t natural.

She hated it. And even for something as unearthly as a halo, it didn’t look right on her. Maybe it was the size-did the thing really have to be that big?-or maybe it was the way it seemed to block her off from the world. Was that the intent? And tight spaces? No way. If she could squeeze through a narrow pathway headfirst at all, she ended up making enough of a clanging racket that she emerged hanging her haloed head in shame. I wasn’t sure exactly what she hated most about wearing the damn thing, but I was absolutely sure that she hated it.

Still, I’m a psychologist not only by training but also by demeanor, and I was determined to help her live with the halo. Taking it off wasn’t an option.

We had our orders.

I wondered, why not transparent material instead of opaque? Wouldn’t that be an improvement? Maybe a rearview mirror would be nice. Or… wouldn’t the plastic cone be more tolerable if it were just smaller?

And there was always duct tape. Couldn’t I create some alternative with duct tape?

The ultimate solution hit me at a quarter to three in the morning in the utter darkness that divides Saturday from Sunday as I was soothing my year-old daughter back to sleep on the upholstered rocker in her room.

A paw umbrella.

I had to figure out a way to make Emily a paw umbrella. If I could shield her paw from her mouth, then she wouldn’t have to wear a bizarre plastic Elizabethan collar to shield her mouth from her paw. A little over a week before, her veterinarian had excised a basal cell carcinoma from the top of her front left paw. Now the dressing was off so that the excision could be exposed to the air. Emily’s only job was to let the wound heal without the aid of her big tongue and her copious saliva, a state of affairs absolutely in contradiction to a Bouvier’s instincts, which dictated that her drool was the finest salve on the planet.

The halo effectively prohibited her from licking the wound. But the bizarre collar was making our dog morose. A paw umbrella was the obvious alternative. How hard could that be?

I explained my project to my friend Sam Purdy, who’d come over for a late-morning bike ride. We were sitting at the kitchen table in my Spanish Hills home. The Thanksgiving decorations embellishing all the stores in Boulder and the naked trees below us in the valley at the foot of the Rockies screamed late autumn, but the day promised to read more like late spring. Bright sun, clear skies, gentle breezes, and the guarantee of an afternoon in the seventies.

“I decided-I think it was sometime around four o’clock this morning-that I needed to use rigid foam to make the doughnut piece,” I said. Sam didn’t answer me. I thought he was trying to swallow a belch. The surprising part was that he was trying to swallow it; Sam didn’t usually allow social decorum to interfere in his digestive processes.

I proceeded to trace a circle about five inches in diameter and then began cutting a hole in the gardener’s kneeling pad that I’d swiped from my neighbor’s barn. “It has to hold its shape,” I explained. “This foam will be perfect.”

“Lauren won’t care that you’re cutting up her stuff?” Sam knew me well enough to know that if it had to do with gardening, it couldn’t belong to me.

“It’s not Lauren’s. I stole it from Adrienne’s shed. But even if it were Lauren’s, she wouldn’t care. It’s for a good cause.” Sam was a Boulder police detective, so I was demonstrating a modicum of trust by copping to a misdemeanor before lunch.

Adrienne was my urologist neighbor and the keeper of a sizable vegetable garden. Our unofficial deal was this: For the right to steal goodies from her plot at will, each August, using her tomatoes, I made a year’s supply of fresh tomato sauce and roasted tomato salsa for her freezer.

Her tomatoes and basil and chiles, my kitchen labor. Communal living at its purest. I figured that the foam rubber I’d swiped would somehow become part of the annual accounting.

I cut a Bouvier-ankle-sized hole in the center of the disk of foam and then sliced from the center to the outside so I could close the contraption around Emily’s lower leg like a handcuff or, more accurately, pawcuff. The thing I’d created was the size of a DVD, more or less, but the hole in the center was larger, more like the circle in the middle of an old 45 rpm record.

“Is Adrienne home?” Sam asked.

I was so distracted by my veterinary appliance manufacturing that I almost failed to notice his fingers pressing up under his rib cage. Almost.

“Why?” I asked. Adrienne was a good neighbor-she lived with her son in a big house across the dirt lane-and a great friend, but what I suspected was more germane to this discussion was the fact that she was also a fine urologist who had once treated Sam for a kidney stone.

“Nothing,” he said. “I was just wondering.”

I began laying out some rigid plastic craft strips that I’d swiped from Lauren’s craft cupboard. Lauren wasn’t particularly craft-y; supplies tended to age indefinitely once they made it into crafts storage. There was some Elmer’s glue in there that I suspected dated back to Jimmy Carter’s administration.

The plastic strips I chose were about two inches by four. To accomplish my design, I’d figured I would need to cover about 270 degrees of the foam circle with the plastic strips. With a pair of kitchen shears I began to turn my circle into a rough octagon to accommodate the attachment of the flat strips.

Sam rotated his neck. Up. Side to side. Back. His fingertips disappeared below his ribs again.

“Nothing?” I asked. “You sure?”

“I’m thinking I may be developing another damn stone.”

I tried not to act obvious as I began using filament tape to attach the plastic strips to the octagon of foam, but I was watching Sam, too. Sam was usually stressed out, he was chronically overweight, he frequently ignored the diet that Adrienne had recommended after his first stone, and he didn’t get enough exercise unless I dragged him along on an occasional bike ride somewhere. All in all, he was a prime candidate for a return trip down the river of agony that carried sharp little stones from the kidneys to the hellish port of
Oh my God
!

“I’m sorry. Does it feel like the last one?” I asked. I’m quite adept at keeping alarm out of my voice. I think I kept the alarm out of my voice.

“Not exactly. But then I’ve worked hard to repress the memory of the last one. Who knows?”

“Suppress. Not repress. If you have to work hard at it, you’re suppressing. Repression is an unconscious act.”

He snorted at me and shook his head. “Work on your damn paw umbrella. Don’t insult me with your psychobabble.”

I used a totally benign please-pass-the-salt voice to inquire, “How is it different this time?”

“I don’t know.”

He stood up but didn’t go anywhere. He craned his chin upward, then side to side.

“Is your neck stiff?”

His face said it was. He added, “I must have slept on it funny.”

“Adrienne’s already gone for the day. She and Lauren took Jonas and Grace to the zoo in Denver. But I can probably reach her on her cell. Do you want me to give her a call?”

“Nah. I’ll be fine. You almost done with that thing?”

I was taping the plastic strips together, sealing the gaps between them with filament tape. I figured any slender gap was a potential escape route for Emily’s wily Houdini of a tongue. “Why don’t you sit, Sam?”

To my surprise, he did. I noticed beads of sweat dotting his wide forehead like drizzle on a car windshield.

“You don’t look too good. Let’s bag the bike ride. Why don’t I-I don’t know, take you somewhere? Go see a doctor. If you’re passing a stone, you’re going to need some drugs. Given how bad you felt last time, some serious drugs.”

“I’ll be okay. If it doesn’t go away in a minute, I’ll take some Tylenol or something.”

Yeah, that should help. And when you’re done,
I thought,
why don’t you go put out a forest fire by pissing on it?

He grimaced and twisted his neck some more. “Put that thing on her. I want to see how it works.”

Taping the device to Emily’s left front paw proved more challenging than manufacturing it had been. She didn’t fight me; the halo was so humiliating to her that a multicolored Clydesdale-hoof-shaped paw umbrella was little additional insult to her doggie fashion sensibilities. I needed two different adhesive tapes from the first-aid kit and then had to reinforce the harness with an astonishing quantity of filament tape. But the thing ultimately held together and stayed where it was supposed to stay on her lower leg.

I told Emily to stand.

She didn’t. She sighed.

I took the damn plastic halo off her collar and told her to stand.

She stood.

The umbrella hung over her wounded paw. The plastic strips stopped half an inch above the floor. Without delay her instincts emerged, and she leaned over to lick her open wound.

She couldn’t.

She lay back down to lick her wound.

She couldn’t.

She got back up and took a few tentative steps, offering a quick disciplinary nip at our other dog, a miniature poodle named Anvil. Anvil hadn’t done anything to warrant the discipline. Emily attempted to discipline him at irregular intervals because she could and, she believed, she should.

Anvil, as always, was unfazed. I’d realized long ago that he didn’t recognize discipline in any form.

“You know Jonas? Adrienne’s son?” I asked.

Sam grunted in reply.

“He has trouble saying Anvil, so he renamed him, calls him Midgeto. I think it fits, don’t you?”

Sam’s eyes were shut tight. Apparently so were his ears.

Emily returned her attention to the multicolored umbrella on her paw. She walked in a circle as though she were trying to determine if the thing was really going to stay with her.

After a careful appraisal from multiple angles she stared at me, gave a little flip of her bearded head, and uttered a familiar, guttural, all-purpose murmur of approval. To the untrained ear, the noise probably sounded like an insincere growl. But since I spoke a little Bouvier, I knew differently.

Rarely in history have members of two different species been so enamored of the same invention. I loved the paw umbrella. Emily, our big Bouvier des Flandres, loved her paw umbrella.

Sam’s opinion of the paw umbrella was more difficult to discern.

When I turned back to him to share our joy, I finally realized that he was having a heart attack.