Mother's Milk (3 page)

‘I figured you'd hear it later. Will you go?'

‘I don't know … I have to get back to the office, love you, Mom,' she said, making a fast exit, running down the stairs, needing to get out of there and away from Ruth's searching eyes. The mere mention of Jimmy Martin filled Barrett with a fear that seemed endless. And the secrets that she'd kept from her mother, who knew only that James Martin and his twin Ellen had kidnapped Barrett and her sister, and killed a number of people, including Barrett's husband, Ralph. Barrett had killed Ellen Martin in the process of breaking free and Jimmy had been imprisoned in the forensic hospital, from which he should never have been released. And what Ruth Conyors most crucially didn't know, and what Barrett would never tell her, was that Jimmy Martin had raped her, albeit through artificial insemination, and that he – not Ralph – was Max's biological father.

W
ith minutes to spare, Barrett made it back to her ninth-floor office with the bagged lunch her mother had stuffed into her briefcase. It was an odd mix of Barrett's usual super-healthy regimen and Ruth's comfort foods – a turkey and Swiss on homemade multigrain, honey-mustard oil-free dressing, lettuce, tomato, with an unsweetened bottle of iced tea, also four cheese biscuits, still warm wrapped inside the foil, and two pieces of cold fried chicken left over from yesterday. She was starving and quickly popped one of the buttery biscuits into her mouth. She could hear her mother's voice as she savored the first bite –
You're losing the weight too fast, it's no wonder your milk is drying up.
‘God, this is good,' she said aloud, as she picked at the crispy skin on a chicken breast. She settled back into her chair, cracked open the iced tea, and sank her teeth into the chicken as the intercom buzzed and one of the lights lit. Her secretary and front-door watchdog, Marla, told her, ‘Dr. Houssman on line two.'

With her mouth full of deliciously juicy chicken, she picked up. ‘Hi, George.'

‘I got your message,' her eighty-something-year-old mentor started. ‘Thought I wasn't going to call you back, didn't you?'

‘One can hope,' she said, trying to swallow and take a swig of iced tea.

‘Are you feeling any better?' he asked, honing into the heart of the talk they'd been having, even before the birth of Max.

‘Well, some yes and some no, it rips me apart every morning when I have to leave. He follows me with his eyes, and he can keep his head up now. He starts to cry the second I'm out the door; it's heartbreaking. But I have to work, I have to make money. I try not to think about how everything hangs by this tiny little thread. If I don't bring home a paycheck, it's like a house of cards that starts to collapse … my house, Mom's health insurance, Justine's apartment.'

‘How often are you getting attacks?'

Barrett felt the pounding in her chest, and a lightheaded feel from starting to hyperventilate. ‘Mostly I can control it. Exercise helps, and at least when I'm back in the kung-fu studio or out running I can shut my mind down, but it never stops. It's like when people used to talk about having nervous breakdowns, maybe there's this edge and I feel like it's not so far off. Problem is, I can't afford to have a breakdown; it's not in my schedule.'

‘I hate to bring this up … there are meds for this.'

‘I can't,' she said firmly. ‘Even when they claim they don't get in the breast milk,' she said, feeling fullness in her breasts even having just nursed, ‘you know there's some; I refuse to do that. He's got enough going against him genetically, and I swear to God I'm not going to do anything to make it worse. And speaking of which … there was a message on my machine saying Jimmy's six-month review is coming up next month.'

George sighed. ‘It would have been so much better if he'd gone to trial.'

‘Top lawyers and a ton of money,' she commented. ‘And he is one of the most psychically damaged people I've ever known.'

‘Are you getting any sleep?'

‘Some, not much. Thank God Max sleeps through the night. So I can't blame this on him, if anything just watching him helps. Some nights I'll just stare at him, wondering how something so beautiful could have come out of me. But I still wake up every couple hours and my thoughts go a mile a minute … and my dreams. In the morning I feel like I've been running laps, like I'm about to jump out of my skin. Although …'

‘What?'

She took a sip of iced tea. ‘I went on an outreach this morning with one of the social workers.'

‘Really? You're the director now; you could have sent someone else.'

‘It was one of my regulars, a young man with schizophrenia, whom I've known for years. Seems he picked up a dope habit. Anyway, he called in a panic and begged me to come out. Said he wanted to get back on meds and go to a hospital. I should have known something was up.'

‘Because?'

‘I really like Jerod, one of these guys that under all of the badness he's been through, and his low-level crimes, mostly to get food or drugs, you know he's a good person. I mean half the time whatever he steals he gives away. But here's the thing, he hates being on meds and he hates being locked up; it makes him nuts. So he wants us to meet him down in the Lower East Side, says he's too scared to bring himself to an emergency room.'

‘I don't like where this is going,' George said.

In spite of her funk, Barrett cracked a smile. ‘So we go down there, and we pull up to one of those buildings that if a building inspector ever showed up would be condemned. No working security door, broken steps, graffiti in the hallways …'

‘For the love of God, Barrett. Are you about to tell me you dragged some poor social worker into a crack house without a police escort?'

‘When you say it like that … what am I doing in this job, George?'

Houssman chortled. ‘Stop fishing … no one else wanted it, or at least no one competent. So did you find your schizophrenic junkie with the heart of gold?'

‘His name's Jerod,' she said, feeling a twinge of annoyance, and not liking the way George so easily put labels on people. ‘Not then, what we did find was two suburban-looking dead teenagers, and there was someone else in that building, someone who didn't want us there.'

‘So what you're telling me is that you nearly got yourself and some poor crisis worker killed this morning, is that about right?'

‘The funny thing is, here I'm swimming in jitters, always feeling like I'm on the verge of a panic attack, but not when I was in that building. It's like all of that had evaporated, and for a few minutes I started to feel like myself again.'

‘Oh, good,' George said dryly, ‘mortal danger as a cure for panic disorder. You should be on meds. You breast-fed for four months, switching to formula is not going to make a hill of beans difference.'

‘No.'

‘Then therapy at least.'

‘Yeah, right. With my crappy cash flow I'm going to shell out a couple hundred bucks a week for therapy? I don't think so. Besides, I've got you.' She pictured George, sitting in the living room of his sun-drenched apartment in a dated brown suit, his eyes big behind Coke-bottle lenses, his gray hair uncombed and sticking up at odd angles.

‘This isn't therapy, and you know it.'

‘Whatever it is, George, and I don't tell you enough, but it helps. Ever since I became the director and not just another staff psychiatrist, everything changed here. People watch what they say around me. It's just different.'

‘It has to be,' he said. ‘That's the downside of being the boss – lonely at the top.'

‘Yeah, and what's quickly become my least favorite part of this is that all the yearly evaluations are due at the end of the month.'

‘Horrible stuff,' George agreed.

‘It's worse than just that, George. I've got three “hostile workplace” grievances filed against me with the union, all because some of the docs that my predecessor hired are unhappy with their evaluations. I think it's a record. The craziest part is that none of the evaluations are bad; I just didn't give them the very top score – they don't deserve it. Which reminds me,' Barrett said, ‘going through my rendition of “These are a few of my least-favorite things,” I've got a bullshit meeting with two commissioners in a few minutes.'

‘Is Janice one of them?'

‘Of course.'

‘Be careful,' George said.

‘I know,' Barrett said, ‘she's made it very clear that I was not her first choice for this job.'

‘True, she was gunning for Hugh Osborn. She'd brought him over from DFYS, I'm pretty sure she promised him rapid advancement. I thought he was completely unqualified and made that clear to the selection committee; she wasn't at all happy. The politics of that place can drive you crazy. It's this constant tension because of the dual reporting structure, where it's both part of a state agency and attached to the medical school as a training site. Both want control and so whenever it's time to pick a director there's this huge pissing match over which candidate gets selected, someone from the university or someone from the state system.'

‘OK, but based on that you'd think I'd have been her choice; I've always turned down faculty positions, not because I have anything against the medical school, but they pay crap.'

‘It's not that, Barrett. You're too high profile for someone like Janice, who just wants to keep her agency out of the headlines. You write books, have articles published, and occasionally … how do I put it?'

‘Get abducted by sociopaths who want to end civilization as we know it.'

‘Pretty much. When you chased down Richard Glash last year,' he said, referring to an escaped convict who had nearly introduced a lethal plague into the Manhattan water supply, ‘you and the forensic center were front-page. Janice has survived three governors and been commissioner of two agencies. And like all political appointees she lives in constant fear. At any point she can be terminated, which often happens after something bad hits the papers. You make her nervous. And while I don't want to add to your worries, I've heard rumblings.'

‘Give me the details,' she said, feeling a knot tighten in her belly. She needed this job, too many people depended on her and even with Ralph's life-insurance settlement there wasn't much of a cushion.

‘The deal with the two months you were on maternity leave when she had Osborn fill in as the acting.'

‘Hey, he wasn't my pick. In fact, I'd never have hired him in the first place. He's not the brightest bulb in the box, and if you don't keep on him his reports don't get done on time. I've had to field angry calls from half a dozen AGs, needing psychiatric evaluations.'

‘So he's broken the cardinal rule of medicine,' George said dryly.

‘Which is?'

He chuckled. ‘You can be stupid or you can be lazy, but you can't be both.'

‘Thanks,' she said. ‘And by the by, he's one of the three filing a grievance against me. I couldn't justify giving him all fives, which apparently is what he's always received. It's also very clear he wants my job, and there've been a few occasions – nothing I can prove definitively – where he's gone around my directives on cases.'

‘Well, according to Janice he's “solid and dependable.” More importantly, he's not the type who'll go running into abandoned crack houses.'

‘It wasn't abandoned. And yes, I do have the sense that Janice is waiting for me to fuck up.'

‘Sounds like she's not the only one. So be careful, Barrett. I'll call you later, and I still think you should see somebody.'

‘Yeah, but you know what they say about doctors …'

‘Uh-huh, we make the worst patients.'

She hung up, and looked down at her half-eaten chicken and still-wrapped sandwich. She was about to taken another bite when the intercom buzzed.

‘Dr. Conyors,' Marla said, ‘Commissioners Fleet and Martinez have arrived.'

‘Thanks, Marla,' and felt like adding –
and stop calling me doctor; use my first name
– ‘send them in.' She stood as Marla, rail-thin, wearing a blue dress with her face shadowed by her long dark bangs, ushered in the two officials. Janice Fleet, Barrett's boss, an aging blond in a form-fitting burnt-red wool suit, the top two buttons of a cream silk blouse open revealing freckled skin and cleavage of surgically enhanced breasts, greeted her coolly.

Barrett watched as Janice looked over her new furniture, an early sore point. Janice had complained fiercely about the budget overrun. Barrett also feared what Janice might make of today's escapade, which if Lydia were to file a grievance could turn into a union nightmare.

Behind Janice came Carlos Martinez, a grandfatherly and slightly rotund PhD in a bulging navy suit, the current Commissioner of Family and Youth Services, an agency now under intense scrutiny for several recent deaths in the foster-care system.

Barrett motioned for the two to take seats around the teak conference table, when Marla buzzed in. ‘Dr. Conyors, Dr. Osborn is here.'

Barrett was in no mood to see Hugh, who'd probably come to complain again about his evaluation. ‘Tell him I'm busy and have him make an appointment.'

‘Dr. Conyors,' Janice interjected, while examining her French-tipped pink-and-white nails, ‘I asked Hugh to join us, I was certain you wouldn't mind. I thought with all his experience at the DFYS, he'd be invaluable for this.'

Barrett's anger surged; clearly Hugh and Janice had been having conversations behind her back. ‘Marla,' she said into the intercom, ‘send Dr. Osborn in.' She fumed as Hugh entered, a broad smile on his politician's face, his short dark hair perfectly coiffed, his navy suit, white shirt, and burgundy tie like a Brooks Brothers ad.‘Commissioner Fleet,' he said, ‘you look absolutely stunning,' and he planted a kiss on Janice's cheek.