Self-Defense (15 page)

At 4:10 Robin called to let me know she’d
been invited to attend a showcase that night at the Whiskey, a band of
thrash-metal heroes brandishing guitars she’d built.

“Would you mind if I passed?” I said.

“If I had a good excuse, I’d pass too.
Zero showed up at the site and invited me personally.”

“What time do you think it’ll be over?”

“Late.”

“How about if I come by before and we grab
some dinner.”

“What about Spike?”

“I can bring takeout.”

“That would be great.”

“When should I get there?”

“Soon as possible.”

I picked up earplugs at a pharmacy in
Point Dume and sandwiches and drinks at a deli nearby. It took forty minutes to
get to the jobsite. Several trucks were pulling away, and Robin was conferring
with a bare-chested man with a tobacco-stained walrus mustache. Nearly bald
except for some yellow back fringe and a ponytail, he was concentrating hard as
she spoke.

She saw me and waved and continued to talk
to him, waving a roll of blueprints. Spike was on the rear bed of her truck,
and he stuck his frog face above the tailgate and barked. I went over and
lifted him out. He licked my face and waved his forelegs in the air, and when I
put him down, he stood up, hugged my knees, and rubbed his head against my leg.

“What a
handsome
guy you are,” I
said. “Handsome” was his favorite word, after “meat loaf.” He started panting;
then his nose went after the bag in my hand.

Robin said, “Okay, Larry?” in a tone of
voice that meant she was working at patience.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So let’s try for inspection by next
Monday. If there are any other problems, let me know
right
away.” She
shifted the blueprints to the other hand.

“Yes, ma’am. For sure.” Larry looked at
me.

“This is Dr. Delaware. He pays the bills.”

“Sir,” said Larry, “we’re fixing up a nice
new place for you, you bet.”

“Great,” I said.

He scratched his head, walked up toward
the house, and began talking to another worker. The pond was empty and half
filled with dirt. What had once been a garden was a muddy pit. The new house’s
roof points sliced the sky at sharp angles. The sun that showed through was
platinum-white.

“What do you think?” she said.

“Very nice.”

“Soon.” She kissed my cheek.

I kept looking at the construction. The
framing was complete and the walls had been papered and partially mudded. The
mud was ridged with trowel marks and still wet in spots. The original house had
been redwood walls and a cedar roof. “Kindling on a foundation,” the fire
marshal had called it. The new building would be stucco and tile. I’d get used
to it.

Robin put her arm around me and we walked
to the truck. “Sorry about tonight.”

“Hey, everyone has their emergencies.
Here’s something for your sanity.”

I gave her the earplugs and she laughed.
Pulling down the tailgate, she spread an army blanket and we set out the food.
We ate listening to the sounds of hammer guns and saws, feeding Spike bits of
sandwich and watching birds circle overhead. Soon, I felt pretty good.

I brought Spike home, fed him dinner, took
him for a jog on the beach, and settled him in front of the tube. Then I
showered, changed into fresh clothes, and headed for Woodbridge Hospital,
making it to the parking lot by seven.

The Psychiatric Unit was on the third
floor, behind swinging doors labeled LOCKED. I pressed a buzzer, gave my name,
and heard the tumblers click. Pushing, I entered a long well-lit hallway.

The chocolate carpet was freshly vacuumed,
the walls a pleasant brownish-white. Ten closed doors on each side, the nursing
station at the end. One nurse sat there. Soft conversation came from somewhere,
along with television dialogue, radio music, and an occasional ringing phone.

When I got to the station, the nurse said,
“Dr. Delaware... yes, here it is. Lucretia’s in 14, that’s back there on the
left side.” She was very young and had yellow cornrowed hair studded with tiny
blue ribbons, and beautiful teeth.

I retraced my steps. Before I got to 14,
the door to 18 opened and a small, sweet-faced woman around fifty looked out at
me. She wore a pink dress, pearls, and pink pumps. The back wall of her room
was covered with family photos, and the aroma of chocolate chip cookies poured
out.

“Have a nice day,” she said, smiling.

I smiled back, trying not to look at the
bandages around her wrists.

Her door closed and I knocked on Lucy’s.

“Come in.”

The room was eight by eight, painted that
same brownish-white, with a bed, a fake-wood nightstand, a tiny doorless
closet, and a desk and chair that looked child-sized. The TV was mounted high
on the wall, the remote control bolted to the nightstand. Next to it was a
stack of paperbacks. The top one was entitled
Grievous Sin.

No bathroom. A single immovable window,
embedded with metal mesh, offered a view of the parking lot and the supermarket
that was the hospital’s neighbor.

Lucy sat on the bed, on top of the covers,
dressed in jeans and a white button-down shirt. Her sleeves were rolled to the
elbow, her hair was pinned up, and her feet were bare. An open magazine rested
in her lap. She could have been a college girl relaxing in a dorm room.

“Hi.” She put the magazine aside.
Good
Homemaking.
The cover promised “Holiday Snacks Your Family Will Love You
For.”

“How’s it going?” I said, sitting in the
chair.

“I’ll be glad to get out of here.”

“They treating you okay?”

“Fine, but it’s still prison.”

“I spoke to Dr. Embrey. She seems nice.”

“Nice enough.” Flat voice.

I waited.

“Nothing against her,” she said, “but I’m
not going to have anything to do with her when I get out.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because she’s too young. How much
experience could she have?”

“Did she do or say something to weaken
your confidence?”

“No, she’s smart enough. It’s just her
age. And the fact that she’s the one who’s keeping me in—a jailor’s a jailor.
Once I’m out, I’m finished with this place and anyone associated with it. Do
you think that’s foolish?”

“I think you need someone to talk to.”

“What about you?”

I smiled and touched the gray at my temple.
“So I’m old enough for you.”

“You’re
experienced,
Dr. Delaware.
And we’ve already got a relationship, why start from scratch?”

I nodded.

“You don’t agree,” she said.

“I’ll never abandon you, Lucy.”

“But you think I should see Embrey.” Her
voice had tightened.

“I think ultimately you make the choice. I
don’t want you to feel abandoned, but I also don’t want to sabotage Dr. Embrey.
She seems very capable, and she’s interested in you.”

“She’s a kid.”

I said nothing.

She scooted to the edge of the bed and sat
there, legs dangling, toes brushing the carpet. “So that’s it for my therapy
with you.”

“I’ll always be here for you and I’ll help
you any way I can, Lucy. I just want you to do what’s best for you.”

She looked away.

“Who knows, maybe I don’t even need a therapist.”
She turned back to me sharply. “Do you really think I tried to kill myself?”

“It looks that way, Lucy.”

A painful smile flickered. “Well, at least
you’re honest. And at least you call me Lucy.
They
call me
Lucretia. He
gave me that name. After Lucretia
Borgia—
he
hates
women. Jo’s full name was
Jocasta.
How’s that for
Oedipal
?”

“What about your brothers?”

“No, the
boys’
names are okay. He
let the
boys
be named by their
mothers.
He was only out to ruin
the girls.”

“Ruin, how?”

“Rotten names, for one. How can I have
confidence in this place when they don’t even respect me enough to call me what
I want? I keep telling them Lucy, but each time a new nurse comes on shift, all
they do is read the chart. Lucretia this, Lucretia that. “How are
you,
Lucretia?’ ”

She got up and looked out the window.

“I
didn’t
put my head in that
oven,” she said. “I have no idea how I ended up there, but I didn’t
do
it. Not sleepwalking or any other way.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because I just
know.
Not that I’d
ever tell Embrey that. She’d think I’m crazy.”

“She doesn’t,” I said. “And neither do I.
But I do think you might have done it while sleepwalking. It’s unusual but not
impossible.”

“Maybe for someone else, but not me.”

She turned around. She’d cried, and
moisture streaked her cheeks.

“I know it sounds bizarre and paranoid,
but someone’s trying to kill me. I told Embrey I changed my mind about that
because I didn’t want her to lock me up forever. But there’s something you
should know about. Can I tell you in confidence, without your telling her?”

“That puts me in a bind, Lucy.”

“Okay,” she said. “I understand. I don’t
want to do that to you. But either way, she won’t know. Not until I get out of
here.”

We didn’t speak. She dried her eyes and
smiled.

“Thanks for coming. Thanks for doing what
you think is right.... I didn’t put my head in that oven. Why would I do that?
I want to live.”

She dried her cheeks. “Those phone calls.
I thought they were nothing—maybe they were nothing. But I
am...
going
to tell you, even though you’ll probably think I’m nuts and I’ll get locked up
till who-knows-when.”

She began to cry.

I put my hand on her shoulder and it made
her cry harder. When she stopped, she said, “I so don’t want to be locked up. I
cherish my independence.”

“I won’t do anything to lock you up, if
you promise not to hurt yourself.”

“That’s easy. I don’t want to hurt myself.
I promise, Dr. Delaware—I
swear.
”

She sat quietly for several moments. “One
time—right after I started seeing you—I came home and found some of my stuff
moved.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Clothes... underwear. I’m no neat freak,
but I do have places for everything. And my panties and bras had been
moved—reversed in the drawer—as if someone had taken them out and put them
back, folded a way I never fold them. And one pair of panties was missing.”

“Why didn’t you tell anyone about this?”

“I don’t know. It only happened once, and
I thought maybe I was imagining it. I’d just done a load of laundry the day
before; I figured it was possible I’d left the panties in the machine and maybe
I
had
put my stuff back differently—absentminded. I mean, I’m not the
kind of person to imagine the worst. But now I realize someone must have been
in my place.”

She grabbed my arm. “Maybe that’s why I
started having the dream again. Because I felt threatened. I don’t know;
sometimes I think I
am
imagining everything. But I’m not crazy.”

I patted her shoulder and she let go of my
arm.

“Did Ken really save me?”

“Yes.”

“What’s he like?”

“He seems nice.”

“Another thing I’m worried about is,
where’s Puck? Embrey’s giving me some story about his calling her from New
Mexico, but that makes no sense.”

“He called Ken from there, too.”

She took hold of my arm again, harder.
“Then why hasn’t he called
me
?”

I was silent.

“It doesn’t make sense,” she said.

“He told both Dr. Embrey and Ken that he
was on some kind of business trip. He had a dinner date with Ken a couple of
nights ago but didn’t show up. That’s how Ken came to save you. He was looking
for Puck at your place because Puck told him you were close.”

“We are.... Puck never told me about any
dinner date.”

“It was a trial balloon the two of them
had worked out, to see how they’d get along. If they did, they were going to
get you involved.”

“Protecting me? Typical.” She stood up and
yanked her hair loose. “Puck’s always trying to protect me, even though—so why
hasn’t he called?”

“Even though what?”

Hesitation. “Even though he’s not the
toughest guy in the world himself.”

“What does he do for a living?”