The Map of True Places
The Map of True Places
Brunonia Barry
From the author of The Lace Reader comes an emotionally resonant novel of tragedy, secrets, identity, and love.Zee Finch has a career as a respected psychotherapist and she’s about to get married, but the shocking death of Zee’s most troubled patient brings to the surface secrets in Zee’s own life.Zee is finally forced to confront the truth behind her mother’s death and the unfinished story she left behind. With a rich atmosphere, colourful, memorable, engaging characters, Brunonia Barry has written a wonderful novel that will appeal to fans of THE LACE READER but also to readers who enjoy sophisticated, emotionally gripping fiction.
BRUNONIA BARRY
The Map of True Places
For my parents, June and Jack. I miss you every day.
And, as always, for Gary.
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
—HERMAN MELVILLE
Contents
Cover (#u6f046d24-fc30-5533-8e69-3c1eb49c19ad)
Title Page (#u2ae16b1a-738a-5134-9008-eec8acc00d9d)
Epigraph (#u246e1518-1c6f-5a8c-8203-544af9235100)
Prologue
Part 1: May 2008
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part 2: June 2008
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Part 3: July 2008
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Part 4: August 2008
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Part 5: September–October 2008
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Epilogue: May 2009, Memorial Day Weekend
Acknowledgments
Author’s Disclaimer
Also by Brunonia Barry
Copyright
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_fac3656f-5184-5d08-8da7-7447b36f8157)
In the years when her middle name was Trouble, Zee had a habit of stealing boats. Her father never suspected her of any wrong-doing. He let her run free in those early days after her mother’s death. He was busy being a pirate reenactor, an odd leap for a man who’d been a literary scholar all his life. But those were desperate times, and they were both weary from constantly carrying their loss, unable to put it down except in those brief moments when they could throw themselves into something beyond the reach of their memories.
In her fantasy world, the one where she could forgive herself for what happened that year, Zee liked to think that her father, Finch, would have been proud of her skills as a thief. In her wildest dreams, she pictured him joining her adventure, a huge leap for the professor, but not for the pirate he was quickly becoming.
She had a preference for speedboats. Anything that could do over thirty knots was fair game. There was little security back then, and most of the keys (if there were any) were hidden somewhere on the boats themselves, usually in the most obvious place imaginable.
The game was simple. She would pick a boat that looked fast and sleek, give herself exactly five minutes to break in and get the engine started, and head out of the harbor toward the ocean. Once she passed the confines of Salem, she would open up the engine and point the bow straight out toward Baker’s Island. Later that night she would return the stolen boat.
There was only one rule. She could never return a boat to the same mooring from which she had stolen it. It was a good rule, not just because it presented an additional challenge but also because it was practical. If she put the boat back on the same mooring, she would be much more likely to get caught. Everyone knows that the last thing any good thief should do is revisit the scene of the crime.
Usually Zee would abandon the boat at one of the public wharves that lined Salem’s waterfront. Often it was the one at the Willows, the first wharf you came to when you entered the harbor. But when the cops started looking for her, she began to leave the boats in other, less obvious places. Sometimes she would jump someone else’s mooring. Or she would leave a boat in one of the slips at Derby Wharf, which made it easy to get away, since she lived so close.
Only one time did she mess up and misjudge the fuel level. She was all the way up by Singing Beach in Manchester when the engine died. At first she didn’t believe she had run out of gas. But when she checked the fuel again, her mistake was clear. Fighting the panic that was beginning to overtake her, she tried to come up with a plan. She could easily swim to shore, but if she did, the boat would either drift out to sea or smash against the rocks. For the first time, she was afraid of getting caught. In a strange way, she was grateful that there were no other boats around, no one she could signal for help. Not knowing what else to do, she let the boat drift.
She looked up at the moonless sky, the stars brighter than she had ever seen them, their reflections dissolving in the water around her like an effervescent medicine that seemed to dissolve her panic as well. Here, floating along with the current, staring up at the heavens, she knew that everything would be all right.
When she looked back down at the horizon to get her bearings, she found she had drifted toward shore. A dark outline of something appeared in her peripheral vision, and, when she turned to face it, a wharf came into focus and, on the hill beyond it, a darkened house. She grabbed an oar and began to steer the boat in toward shore, catching the onsweep of tide that propelled it broadside toward the wharf. She grabbed the bowline and jumped, slipping and twisting her ankle a little but keeping the boat from colliding with the wharf. She tied up, securing bow and stern, and scrambled over the rocks to the beach. Then she made her way up the road toward the train station, limping a bit from her aching ankle but not really too bad, all things considered.
Zee wanted to take the train back to Salem, but it was past midnight, and the trains had stopped running. She thought about sleeping on the beach. It was a warm night. It would have been safe. But she didn’t want to concern her father, who had enough to worry about these days. And she didn’t want to be anywhere in the vicinity of Manchester when they found the stolen boat.
So she ended up hitchhiking back to Salem. Not a smart thing to do, she thought as she walked to the Chevy Nova that had stopped about fifty feet ahead of her and was frantically backing up.
It was a woman who picked her up, probably mid-forties, slightly overweight, with long hair and blue eyes that glowed with the light of passing cars. At first the woman said she was only going as far as Beverly. But then she changed her mind and decided to take Zee all the way home, because if she didn’t she was afraid that Zee would start hitchhiking again and might be picked up by a murderer or a rapist.
As they rode down Route 127, the woman told Zee every horror story she had ever heard about hitchhiking and then made Zee give her word never to do it again. Zee promised, just to shut her up.
“That’s what all the kids say, but they do it anyway,” the woman said.
Zee wanted to tell her that she never hitched, that she wasn’t the victim type, and that she had only thumbed a ride tonight to cover a crime she’d committed—grand theft boato. But she didn’t know what other cautionary tales such a confession might unleash, so she kept her mouth shut.
As she was getting out of the car, Zee turned back to the woman. Instead of saying thank you, she said, in a voice that was straight out of a Saturday-morning cartoon show she’d watched when she was a little girl, “Will you be my mommy?”
She had meant it as a joke. But the woman broke down. She just started crying and wouldn’t stop.
Zee told the woman that she was kidding. She had her own mother, she said, even though it wasn’t true, not anymore.
Nothing she could say would stop the woman’s tears, and so finally she said what she should have said all along: “Thank you for the ride.”
Of course Zee hadn’t given the woman her real address—she didn’t want her getting any ideas, like maybe going into the house and having a word with Finch. She had planned to hide in the shadows until the woman drove away and then cut through the neighboring yards to get home. But in the end she just walked straight down the road. The woman was crying too hard to notice where Zee went or how she got there.
Ten years later, as Zee was training to become a psychotherapist (having outgrown the middle name Trouble), she saw the woman again in one of the panic groups run by her mentor, Dr. Liz Mattei. The woman didn’t remember her, but Zee would have known her anywhere—those same translucent blue eyes, still teary. The woman had lost a child, a teenager and a runaway, she said. Her daughter had been diagnosed as bipolar, like Zee’s mother, Maureen, but had refused to keep taking lithium because it made her fat. She’d been last seen hitchhiking on Route 95, heading south, holding a hand-lettered sign that read new york.
It was the winter of 2001 and ten years since the woman had lost her daughter. The Twin Towers had recently come down. The panic group had grown in size, but its original members had become oddly more calm and helpful to each other, as if their free-floating anxiety had finally taken form, and the rest of the country had begun to feel the kind of terror they’d felt every day for years. For the first time Zee could remember, people in the group actually looked at each other. And when the woman talked about her daughter, as she had every week they’d been meeting, the group finally heard her.
The world can change, just like that! the woman said.
In the blink of an eye, someone answered.
Tissues were passed. And the group cried together for the first time, crying for the girl and for her inevitable loss of innocence and, of course, for their own.
Bipolar disorder had recently become a catchall diagnosis. While it had once been believed that the condition occurred after the onset of puberty (as it had with this woman’s daughter), now children were being diagnosed as early as three years of age. Zee didn’t know what she thought about that. As with many things lately, she was of two minds about it. She hadn’t realized her joke until Mattei pointed it out, thinking it was intentional. No, Zee had told her. She was serious. Certainly it was a disease that needed treatment. Untreated bipolar disorder seldom led to anything but devastation. But medicating too early seemed wrong, something more in line with insurance and drug-company agendas than with the kind of help Zee had trained for years to provide.
The world-famous Dr. Mattei had long since abandoned her panic group, leaving them for Zee or one of the other psychologists to oversee. Mattei had moved on to her latest bestselling-book idea, which proposed the theory that the daughter will always live out the unfulfilled dreams of the mother. Even if she doesn’t know what those dreams are, even if those dreams have never been expressed, this will happen, according to Mattei, with alarming regularity. It wasn’t a new idea. But it was Mattei’s theory that this was more likely to happen if those dreams were never expressed, in much the same way that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Zee had often wondered about the woman with the translucent eyes who came back to the panic group only once after that evening. She wondered about her unfulfilled dreams, expressed or unexpressed, and she wondered if there was something that the daughter was acting out for her mother as she herself had stood on Route 95 and accepted a ride from a stranger heading south.
Zee was glad that the woman had left the group before Mattei had brought up her latest theory. The mother blamed herself enough for her daughter’s disappearance, wondering every day if she might have changed the course of events if only she’d given her daughter that one elusive thing she’d failed to provide—something tangible and even ordinary, perhaps, like that red dress in Filene’s window. Or the week away at Girl Scout camp that her daughter had begged for years ago.
No one understood the concept of “if only” better than Zee. She lived it every day, though she didn’t have to search to find the elusive thing. She thought she knew what her mother had wanted that day so many years ago, what might have helped lift her out of her depression. It was a book of Yeats’s poetry given to Maureen by Finch on their wedding day, and it was one of her mother’s treasures. Zee’s “if only” had worked in reverse. If only she hadn’t gotten her mother what she wanted that day, if only she hadn’t left her alone, Zee might have been able to save her.
Part 1: May 2008 (#ulink_6c3d87f7-f4c7-593f-8da7-f2919df5a26f)
Method of Keeping a Ship’s Reckoning . . .
A ship’s reckoning is that account, by which it can be known at any time where the ship is, and on what course or courses she must steer to gain her port.
NATHANIEL BOWDITCH: The American Practical Navigator
Chapter 1 (#ulink_b01904f5-6c64-5734-864d-2120b2779344)
Lilly Braedon was late.
Mattei poked her head through Zee’s door. “It’s so damned hot out there,” she said. “Oh, God, you’re not in session, are you?”
“I’m supposed to be,” Zee said, looking at the clock. It was three-fifteen.
Mattei was re-dressing as she spoke, kicking off running shoes and pulling on her suit jacket. She walked five miles along the Charles River every afternoon, weather notwithstanding. When she was overbooked, which was a good deal of the time, she had been known to conduct her sessions while strolling along the river, calling it a walking meditation, telling patients it would be easier to open up if they didn’t feel her prying eyes on them. A week after she started conducting sessions that way, every shrink in Boston was out walking with patients.
“God, not that agoraphobic again.” It was another of Mattei’s jokes. Fifty percent of their patients had some degree of agoraphobia, a phenomenon that made attendance poor at best and had lately prompted Mattei to start charging time and a half for missed appointments, though Zee seldom required her patients to comply with this new rule.
Mattei was trying harder than usual to make her laugh today, meaning that Zee must be frowning again. Zee’s natural expression seemed to be the type of frown that inspired joke telling, often from total strangers, who always felt compelled to make her feel better somehow. Just this morning an older gentleman who had neglected to pick up his dog’s poop in Louisburg Square had walked over to her and ordered her to smile.
She stared at him.
“Things can’t be all that bad,” he said.
If he hadn’t been older than her father, Zee would have told him to get lost, that this was her natural expression, and that a man who didn’t pick up his dog’s excrement shouldn’t be allowed to roam free. But instead she managed a vague smirk.
“So seriously, which patient?” Mattei was waiting for an answer.
“Lilly Braedon.”
“Mrs. Perfect,” she said. “Oh, no, I forgot, that’s you.”
“Not yet,” Zee said a little too quickly.
“Aha!” Mattei said. “Simple, simple. Case closed. That will be three hundred and fifty dollars.”
“Funny,” Zee said as Mattei gathered up her running shoes and left the room.
It was Lilly Braedon’s husband who had originally sought help at Dr. Mattei’s clinic. People came from all over the world to be treated by her. Harvard trained, with a stint at Johns Hopkins, Mattei was a psychiatrist who had great credentials. She’d written the definitive article on bipolar disorder with panic for the American Journal of Psychiatry. She had also worked closely with a team of genetic researchers who had uncovered a correlation between the disease and the eighteenth chromosome, a substantial and groundbreaking discovery.
But then Mattei’s career took a turn. She became fascinated by a more popular approach to psychiatry. The book she wrote during her tenth year in practice, a folksy self-help book entitled Safe at Home, lifted her to celebrity status. The book was inspired by a Red Sox second-stringer she had successfully treated for panic. Her practical solutions to his terror were based on biofeedback, desensitization, and sense memory.
“The world is a terrifying place,” Mattei explained first to a local newscaster and later to Oprah. “And here is what you can do to stop being afraid.” The book was filled with sensory tricks, tips almost too simple to inspire much credibility: carry a worry stone, smell lavender, breathe deeply. The companion CD featured guided meditations, some with music, some including nature sounds or poetry. It even quoted the old Irish prayer (the one that basically tells you not to worry about a damned thing because the worst thing that can happen is that you’ll go to hell, but that’s where all your friends will be anyway, so it’s pointless to fret). Though Mattei herself was a loose fusion of French, Italian, and Japanese ancestry, with not a bit of Irish blood, for some reason she loved everything about the Irish. It might have been a Boston thing. She loved James Joyce and even swore she had read and understood Finnegans Wake, which Zee seriously doubted. That Mattei loved Guinness and U2, Zee did not doubt. Zee and her fiancé, Michael, had spent last St. Paddy’s Day at a bar in Southie with Mattei and her partner, Rhonda, and Mattei had held her own, drinking with the best of Boston’s Irish. And just a month ago, Mattei had come back from one of her therapy walks sporting a pair of pink Armani sunglasses that looked very similar to a pair Zee had once seen Bono wear.
Mattei had done the usual book-tour circuit. But it was when she landed on Oprah that things went wild. There was a growing sense of panic in this country, Mattei explained to Oprah. It was everywhere. Since 9/11, certainly. And the economy? Terrifying. “Do you know the number one fear of women?” she had asked. “Becoming homeless,” she said. She went on to explain that the number one fear of the general population is public speaking. Many people say they’d rather die than get up in front of a group to give a presentation. After she reeled off such statistics, Mattei turned and spoke directly to the camera. “What are you really afraid of?” she asked America. It became a challenge that echoed through the popular culture. She closed the show with a paraphrased quote from Albert Einstein. The only real question you have to ask yourself is whether or not the universe is a friendly place, she explained, then went on to translate into terms anyone could understand. Once you’ve decided that, Mattei said, you can pretty much determine what your future will hold.
Her book hit the top of the New York Times Best Seller list and stayed there for sixty-two weeks. As Mattei’s fame grew, her patient list expanded exponentially, and she brought in interns to mentor, though her real work was still with bipolars.
“Did you know that eighty percent of poets are bipolar?” Mattei asked Zee one morning.
“My mother wasn’t a poet. She wrote children’s books,” Zee said.
“Nevertheless . . .” Mattei replied.
“Nevertheless” was probably the best thing Zee had ever learned from Mattei. It was a word, certainly, but much more than a word, it was a concept. “Nevertheless” was what you said when you were not going to budge, whether expressing an opinion or an intention. It was a statement, not a question, and the only word in the English language to which it was pointless to respond. If you wanted to end a conversation or an argument, “nevertheless” was your word.
Zee often thought that what had happened with her mother was another reason Mattei had hired her. Maureen’s case history might well be considered good material for a new book. But Mattei had never approached her about it. When Zee mentioned her theory one day, Mattei told her that she was mistaken, that she had actually hired Zee because of her red hair.
Theory and research were still Mattei’s passion, and though she had a thriving practice, she also had that elusive second book to write and her new mother-daughter theory to document. So most of Zee’s patients were Mattei’s overflow. Her “sloppy seconds” is what Michael called them, though he was clearly unaware of the perverse meaning of his slang. He’d meant it to be amusing rather than pornographic. The truth was, anything Mattei did was okay with Michael. They had been friends since med school. When Mattei suggested that Michael meet Zee, telling him she thought she’d found the perfect girl for him, he was only too happy to oblige.
Soon after that, Zee had found herself out on a blind date with Michael.
Upon Mattei’s recommendation, he had taken her to Radius. He had ordered for both of them, some Kurobuta pork and a two-hundred-dollar Barolo. By the time they finished the bottle, Zee found herself saying yes to a weekend with him on the Vineyard. They had moved in together shortly afterward. Not unlike the job Mattei had given her, the relationship just sort of happened.
What followed still seemed to Zee more like posthypnotic suggestion than real life. Not only had Michael easily agreed that Zee was the perfect girl for him, he’d never even seemed to question it. And exactly one year after their first date, a period of time most probably deemed respectable by Mattei, Michael had proposed.
Zee had been grateful when Mattei chose to hire her. She had just received her master’s and was working on her Ph.D. when Mattei invited her to join her practice, giving her some group sessions to moderate and mentoring her as she went. By the time she’d earned the title of doctor, Zee had ended up in a corner office with a view of the Charles and a patient list that would have taken her years to develop on her own.
The phrase “case closed” was one of Mattei’s biggest jokes. Though patients almost always got better under her care, they were never cured. There was no such thing as case closed. Not in modern American society anyway, Mattei insisted. Not in a country that planted the most fertile ground for both mania and the resultant depressive episodes, the country that had invented the corporate marketing machine that left people never feeling good enough unless they were overextending their credit, buying that next big fix. Not that Mattei minded the corporate marketing machine. That machine had made her rich. But there was definitely no such thing as case closed. Case closed was decidedly un-American.
When Lilly Braedon came along, Mattei quickly handed her off to Zee.
In the past year, Lilly had developed the most crippling case of panic disorder. She’d been to local doctors, who had ruled out all probable physical explanations: thyroid, anemia, lupus, et cetera. Then, after watching an episode of The View, something he swore he’d never done before, her husband, who in his own words “loved Lilly more than life itself” (a quote that resonated on a very problematic level with both Zee and Mattei), went to the Spirit of ’76 Bookstore in Marblehead to purchase Mattei’s book, only to find that they were sold out. He immediately ordered two copies, one for himself and another for his ailing wife.
But Lilly was too troubled to read. The only time she left the house in those days was in the late afternoon, when the shadows were longer and the bright summer light (another irrational fear) was dimmer. In the late afternoon, her husband said, Lilly often took long walks through the twisted streets of Marblehead and up through the graves of Old Burial Hill, to a precipice high above Marblehead Harbor, where she sometimes stayed until after sunset.
“So technically she isn’t agoraphobic,” Mattei said to the husband when she finished her initial patient analysis of Lilly. “She does leave the house.”
“Only for her walks,” her husband said. “She says she does it to calm herself down.”
“Interesting,” Mattei said.
But Zee could tell she didn’t mean it. The reason Zee was in attendance at Lilly’s session was that Mattei had already decided she was handing her off. Mattei wasn’t interested in Lilly Braedon.
But Zee was very interested. From the first time she met her new patient, Zee suspected that there was much more to the story than Lilly was telling.
Every Tuesday, Zee had her own therapy session with Mattei. Mostly they talked about her patients, or at least the ones who required meds, which was most of them. If patients with panic attacks weren’t on meds these days, you could be pretty sure there was a reason. Perhaps they were in some kind of twelve-step program, usually for alcohol or drugs, or else they had the kind of paranoia that kept them from taking any medication at all.
This morning Zee had gone through “the usual suspects,” as Mattei called her list of patients. This one had improved, that one was self-medicating with bourbon and sleeping pills. Another one had taken herself off all meds and was beginning to show signs of a manic episode. When they got to Lilly, Zee told Mattei she had nothing to report.
“Unsatisfactory,” Mattei said. Normally Mattei didn’t seem to care one bit about Lilly Braedon. But something Zee had said at their last meeting had piqued her interest for a change and prompted a question. When Zee reported that nothing had changed, Mattei wasn’t having any of it.
“Does that mean that Lilly is in a normal phase?” Mattei was referring to Lilly’s bipolar disorder, which had been their diagnosis. Bipolar disorder was something Zee understood only too well. It was what her mother had been diagnosed with years ago, except that in those days it had been called manic depression, which Zee had always thought a better description. In most cases the disorder was characterized by severe mood swings followed by periods of relative normalcy.
“I wouldn’t say normal,” Zee said.
“Any more trouble with the Marblehead police?”
“Not lately,” Zee said.
“Well, that’s something.”
At 3:35, Lilly still hadn’t arrived. Zee walked to the window. Across Storrow Drive a homeless woman sat on one of the benches, but there was no one walking along the Charles River. It was too hot and humid for movement of any kind. Traffic was snarled, the drivers honking and agitated, trying to get onto roads heading north. The “cardboard bridge,” as Zee called the Craigie, looked like a bad fourth-grade art project. Years of soot had collected in the wrong areas for shading, and today’s haze made it look even flatter and more one-dimensional and fake than it had ever looked before.
At 3:45, Zee dialed Lilly’s number. It was a 631 exchange, Marblehead. It used to be NE 1, Lilly had told her when she’d scribbled down her phone number for the records. “NE for Neptune—you know, Neptune, the Roman god of the sea?”
Zee thought back to her school days. Neptune—or Poseidon, his Greek equivalent, god of the sea and consort of Amphitrite, which had been Zee’s mother’s middle name. Though Maureen Doherty was a decidedly Irish name, Zee’s grandmother had given all three of her children the middle names of Greek gods and goddesses. Thus Zee’s mother was Maureen Amphitrite Doherty. Uncle Mickey’s middle name was Zeus, and Uncle Liam, who had died back in Ireland before Zee was born, was Antaeus, a clear foreshadowing of the mythmaking violence in his future. Zee remembered Maureen teasing Uncle Mickey about his middle name. “Well, what mother doesn’t think her son is a god?” Mickey had answered. Indeed, Zee thought.
Zee willed herself back to the present. Lately her mind had been wandering. Not just with Lilly, but with all of her patients. They seemed to tell the same stories over and over until her job became more like detective work than therapy. The key wasn’t in the stories themselves, at least not the ones they told and retold. Rather it was in the variations of their stories, the small details that changed with each telling. Those details were often the keys to whatever deeper issues lay hidden beneath the surface. What wasn’t the patient telling the truth about?
“Everybody lies,” was another of Mattei’s favorite expressions.
And so as the weeks passed, Zee listened to Lilly, to the variations in the stories she told over and over. But on the day that Lilly had mentioned Neptune, the story she told was one that Zee had never before heard.
“Back in the day,” Lilly was saying, “before the phones in Marblehead had dials, way back when the operators used to ask ‘Number, please’ in a nasal four syllables, you would have to say ‘Neptune 1’ for the Marblehead exchange.” Lilly was far too young ever to have remembered phones without dials and operators who connected you, but for some reason she seemed to find this bit of trivia very significant.
“Does Neptune have a special meaning for you?” Zee asked.
Lilly’s face contorted. “I’ve always been afraid of Neptune,” she said. “Neptune is a vengeful god.”
At 5:20, Zee dialed her wedding planner. “I’m very sorry, but I’m going to have to cancel again, my five-o’clock is late,” she said, relieved that she’d gotten the machine instead of the person—who, she had to admit, scared the hell out of her.
Zee felt a bit giddy, the way she’d felt as a kid when there was a snow day. Michael wouldn’t be home from Washington until the last shuttle. Having come up with the winter image, Zee decided to treat this unanticipated block of freedom as a snow day. Never mind that it was ninety-six degrees outside. The evening stretched ahead of her. She could do anything she wanted with it. Zee couldn’t remember the last time she’d had an open evening. Between her work schedule and the wedding plans, there’d been little time for anything else lately. She hadn’t even seen her father in the last few months, and she felt guilty about it, though she knew he understood.
The wedding date was not until the late fall, but it seemed as if there was at least one major wedding item a day on her to-do list. Zee hated the process. Tonight they were supposed to be sampling sushi at O Ya, and three kinds of sake. Not a bad evening, all things considered. But Michael wasn’t going to make it back in time, and she couldn’t deal with the wedding planner alone. The problem wasn’t the planner, who was arguably the best in Boston. The problem was that Zee couldn’t make a decision, couldn’t make herself choose anything from the myriad of options the wedding planner offered.
Her excuse had been a lie—well, more of a twist, really. Lilly was her three-o’clock, not her five, and whether she showed up or not would make little difference to tonight’s plans.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_0d8281cd-e60f-5438-8c4e-ad6a7780b38a)
Though it was an easy walk to their house on Beacon Hill, Zee hailed a cab. She wasn’t Mattei. She didn’t like to sweat. Out on the streets, exhaust and steam merged, creating a heat mirage that made the buildings across the river look as if they were beginning to melt. Both inbound and outbound traffic were completely knotted. A truck that had found its way onto Storrow Drive had knocked down one of the overhead crosswalks, and now there was no movement in any direction. Zee directed the taxi driver away from the traffic and up the hill.
It was chilly inside the cab. Mahler played on some weaker station, interrupted by intermittent static from the driver’s iPhone as it checked for e-mails. A king-size bottle of hand sanitizer had spilled onto the front seat and was spreading its alcohol scent, unnoticed by the driver. Zee’s mind moved to old spy movies, chloroform on a handkerchief, a hand over the mouth, and waking up in some dark place. She cracked the window and tried not to breathe, or anyway not to breathe too deeply.
She thought of Mattei’s sense exercises. Close off two of your senses and switch them. Smell and what? Hearing? No, touch was better. Zee ran her fingers along the door handle and the fake leather seat. Shut off the offending senses, choose the ones you can manage.
When they finally reached the house, Zee tipped the cabbie and walked around back, climbing the outside stairway to the deck, letting herself in through the kitchen door. The room was freezing, which fit well with her snow-day theme.
She had been happy for the heat a few minutes ago, and now she was happy for the cold. Zee seemed to need these extremes more and more lately, something she didn’t want to think about because it reminded her too much of her mother. She removed her shoes but didn’t take a pair of slippers from the bin that Michael provided for guests. Her hot feet left moist footprints on the cool, dark wood floor. With each step forward, the footprints she left behind slowly disappeared.
She was vaguely hungry. She opened the fridge. There were some leftovers from the party they’d had last weekend, some imported prosciutto and a ton of cheese. They’d invited several people over. Mostly people Michael worked with and some of Mattei’s friends, too, including Rhonda, whom Zee really liked. Mattei and Rhonda were planning a wedding, too, now that such things were legal in Massachusetts. Rhonda wanted to talk about all the details: her flowers (all peonies tied tightly in a nosegay, but with spiraling stems that remained visible), her music (jazz-pop fusion). Their wedding was to be in August, the day before Labor Day, which fell on September 1 this year. That Rhonda so clearly knew what she wanted didn’t bother Zee all that much. Rhonda had probably always known what she wanted, Zee thought, the way most girls know that kind of thing, straight or gay. Listening to Rhonda, Zee had wished for the first time that she were one of those girls who knew what she wanted. She’d been one of those girls once, but it seemed so long ago that she could barely remember how it felt.
July was fast approaching and, with it, the official beginning of summer parties. She thought back to last year’s Fourth of July. While Michael and Mattei had made the rounds, passing hors d’oeuvres and making small talk, Zee and Rhonda sat on the deck and watched the fireworks. The condo Zee shared with Michael had one of the best views in Boston, the perfect place to see the light show, though you couldn’t hear the Pops from here—you’d have to be on the esplanade for that. So Michael had turned on the radio, creating a sound track that was a second off from the visual, each beat later than the flash.
Michael had seemed so happy then, walking around refilling every-one’s glass with another good Barolo he’d found at auction. Last weekend he had served all French wines, some second-cru houses. Michael had a good collection, all reds.
Zee reached into the vegetable bin and pulled out a half bottle of Kendall-Jackson chardonnay that she’d hidden the night of the party, not in the wine fridge but in with the lettuces, which was somewhere Michael would never look. He hated salads, the only things she ever made as a main course. She created elaborate salads with homemade dressings, vinaigrettes, and infusions. She made oatmeal, too, for winter breakfasts, steel-cut stuff that took forty minutes to cook, and cowboy coffee with an egg, which was something Michael actually did like, though he didn’t much like her method of letting the pot boil over onto the stove before she dumped the cup of cold water in to clear it. Michael said he expected that the boiling-over bit worked better with a campfire, and couldn’t she just grab the pot before it bubbled up and went all over everything? The answer was no, she couldn’t seem to, though she always cleaned up her messes afterward.
Zee filled a coffee mug with the K-J and started to recork the bottle. Then, seeing how little was left, she dumped the rest of the wine into the mug. She carefully placed the bottle into the trash compactor, then flipped the switch, waiting for the pop and the smash. The bag was almost full, so she removed it and took it out to the deck, walking all the way back down the stairs in her bare feet, placing the compacted bottle into the bottom of the garbage bin, not with the recyclables, as she would have preferred, but with the regular trash, so that there would be no evidence of the bottle. It wasn’t that Michael minded her drinking, but he definitely minded her drinking an oaky California chardonnay.
She walked back up the stairs and ran a bath, letting the water get as hot as she could stand. She went to her closet and grabbed her winter bathrobe, a worn terry-cloth thing she’d stolen from some spa Michael had taken her to when they first met, which she’d later felt guilty about and sent a check to the hotel to cover its cost. If this was going to be a snow day, then let it be a snow day, she thought. It certainly was cold enough in this house to imagine snow on the roof.
She filled the tub as high as she could and slid into the water. She took one gulp of the wine, then another, then finished the cup. When the falling feeling hit her, the slackening of muscles, a momentary release that came and went fast, she glided under the water, letting it into her ears, her mouth. She pushed her legs wide and let the heat fill her. As her head finally began to quiet, she forgot about Lilly, and the intimidating wedding planner, and Finch, and finally about Michael and the gnawing feeling of guilt she felt most of the time now when she thought about the wedding and everything she was supposed to be getting done.
Zee didn’t realize that she had fallen asleep until she saw Michael standing above her in the bathroom. How long had it been? The water had gone cold, the sky outside was dark.
She stood up and grabbed a towel.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” she said, wrapping herself in the terry-cloth robe.
He just stood there watching her, his expression difficult to read. She could tell he had something to say, something important from the look of things, but she wasn’t ready to talk.
“Give me a minute, will you?” Zee said, and Michael turned and walked out of the bathroom.
She went to the bedroom and grabbed a pair of socks, so her feet wouldn’t leave more prints on the wood floors. She put on a sweatshirt and jeans.
She found him in the kitchen. He was eating a piece of salmon. She recognized the O Ya box.
“What’s all this?” she asked him.
“I’ve been calling you. You didn’t answer either phone.”
“Sorry,” she said. “Sorry” seemed to be the word that started most of her sentences these days.
“The wedding planner quit,” Michael said. “But she’s charging us six thousand dollars for her time.” He held out the tray to her. “I figure these are worth about half a grand apiece.”
She shook her head. She wasn’t hungry. She felt a little sick.
“For that price she should have sent the sake, too,” he said.
She walked over and hugged him, holding on for longer than she wanted. He didn’t return the embrace. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll pick up the expense.”
“It’s not about the expense,” he said. She could see him considering before he continued. “I have to ask you an important question,” he finally said.
“What question?”
“Do you not want to get married?”
His question caught her off guard. “Why would you even ask me that?”
“Come on, Zee.”
A long silence followed. The truth was, she didn’t know. She didn’t know if she didn’t want to get married at all, or if she just hated the process. The big wedding was clearly something he wanted. She could count only about five people she would even invite.
“Maybe I just don’t like the wedding planner.” She knew that much was true, though it was all she seemed to know. She felt suddenly foolish for the snow day and guilty that she’d made him feel bad.
“Well, you’ve solved that problem, I’d say.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. She reached into the box they’d sent over and pulled out a piece of sushi. She would take a bite, and then she would tell Michael how much she liked it and that she thought they’d found the perfect food for the wedding. “It’s really good,” she said. “Great, actually.” She didn’t have to lie.
The phone rang. Zee didn’t move to answer it.
She could follow his thought process. Michael was a game theorist and as famous as Mattei in his own right. He was paid to predict what groups of people would do. As a result, Michael always seemed to know what she would do before she did it, even when (as was so often the case these days) she had no idea herself.
Don’t answer the phone, she thought.
She didn’t say it. It would have been stupid. And it would have been futile. As she stood there with him, she felt as if she were the one who was the game theorist. She knew exactly what he would do.
Michael picked up the phone on the fifth ring. “Yes?” he said into the receiver. Zee could tell that it was Mattei. Then, so she continued to feel his earlier reprimand, he went on, “No, evidently Zee does not answer her cell.” He listened to Mattei for a moment, and then, at her direction, he walked over to the TV and flipped it on. “What channel?” he asked. Then he handed the phone to Zee.
Zee kept her eyes on the television as Michael changed the channels, settling on the local news, Channel Five.
“What’s going on?” Zee said to Mattei.
On the screen several cars were pulled over on the top level of the Tobin Bridge. An SUV with its driver’s door opened sat next to the leftmost guardrail. Police were trying to contain the crowds who were leaning over the side, pointing. The TV camera panned across the blackening water, but aside from a few pleasure boats nothing seemed unusual. The camera cut back to the newscaster, a blonde in a blue top. Pointing the microphone at the toll collector, she asked, “Did you know she was going to jump when she pulled over?”
The toll taker shook her head. “I thought she was opening the door because she had dropped her money.”
Another eyewitness leaned into the microphone, vying for camera time. “She didn’t jump, she dove.”
The newscaster held the microphone out to a man who stood off to the side, staring over the railing. “I am told that you witnessed the whole thing,” she said to him.
He didn’t say anything but just stared at the newscaster.
Zee recognized shock when she saw it and hoped one of the medical personnel would treat him for it.
The woman poked the microphone closer. “What did you see?”
As if suddenly realizing where he was, the man pulled himself together. With a look of disgust and anger, he pushed the microphone away. “Stop,” he said.
Zee felt dizzy. She held on to the couch arm to steady herself. A faint beeping sound was still audible from the SUV’s driver’s-side door, near where the key had been left in the ignition. It was weak and failing, but no one had thought to put a stop to it.
Zee recognized the car.
“Her husband left a message on the ser vice,” Mattei said to Zee.
Michael stared at Zee, still not understanding what was happening.
“Who was it?” he finally asked.
“My three-o’clock,” Zee said.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_2a240fd4-4178-5c11-ba39-d4e723659e0c)
Zee took the tunnel to the North Shore instead of the bridge. The old Volvo she’d gotten in grad school barely passed inspection every year, and though she seldom drove in town, she couldn’t seem to give it up. The alignment was so bad that she had to keep both hands firmly on the wheel to stay in her lane as she drove.
Zee hated tunnels—the darkness, the damp, the dripping from overhead, where she imagined the weight of water already pushing through the cracks, finding any weak spot and working its way through. She wasn’t alone. Since the Big Dig tunnel ceiling collapse a couple of years back, most Bostonians were skittish about tunnels.
“Water always seeks its own level,” Zee said aloud, though she was alone in the car and the sound of her own voice seemed wrong. The thought was wrong, too. It only made her more tense. Think of something else, she told herself. She wished she had taken the bridge. At the same time, she wondered if she would ever be able to take the bridge again.
Both Mattei and Michael had told Zee not to go to Lilly’s funeral.
“Why would you do that?” Mattei asked.
“Because she was my patient,” Zee said. “Because I’m a human being.”
“I hope you don’t have any delusions that the family will welcome you,” Mattei said.
“I’m going,” Zee said.
Zee had planned to stop to see her father before the funeral, but she was running late. These days she didn’t drive enough to know how bad the traffic would be this time of day. The Big Dig might officially be over, but traffic was still a mess. She had planned to go directly to Salem and surprise Finch with a visit. She was worried about him. Lately she had only seen him in Boston when he came in for his doctor’s appointments. He seemed frail and weak. And she couldn’t help but feel that he was hiding something from her. So today she planned to drop in unannounced to see for herself. But it was too late to go to Salem now. She’d have to see Finch after Lilly’s funeral.
She altered her route, electing to take the coast road directly to Marblehead, winding along the golden crescent of beach that stretches from Lynn through Swampscott to the town line. At the last minute, she decided to take a shorter route through downtown Lynn, not counting on road construction. It was summer. Road crews were everywhere, the required extra-shift cops sleepily directing traffic.
Zee hadn’t been on this road for a long time. Mostly the streets were as she remembered them. Roast-beef and pizza places lined every block. Popping up next to them were bodegas, nail salons, and the occasional package store. The businesses were essentially the same. But the ethnicity had changed. Small groceries sat next to each other, their signs in Spanish, Korean, Arabic, Russian. Lynn had always had a diverse population. These days there were more than forty languages spoken in the Lynn schools. Zee forgot who had told her that. Probably it had been her Uncle Mickey.
Her mother’s people, including Uncle Mickey, were from Lynn, though they were originally Derry Irish. They had come over from Ireland to become factory workers at a company on Eastern Avenue that made shoe boxes.
They were all IRA, or at least the two brothers had been, Uncle Mickey and his brother Liam, who died in an explosion in Ireland. Zee remembered her mother telling her that their emigration had been sudden. Maureen’s reluctance to say more about it left Zee wondering about the details. It was out of character for Maureen to hold back any details when she was telling a story. Whatever it was that had happened, the family had no longer been safe in Ireland. They’d had to leave the country overnight, taking only what they could carry.
Maureen had told her all this in such a matter-of-fact tone that Zee had never quite believed the story.
“Make no mistake,” her mother had said many times. “We are, every one of us, capable of murder. Given the right circumstances, it is within each of us to take a life.”
Zee never knew whether by “every one of us” her mother had meant all of humanity or simply all of the Doherty clan. She had often thought about asking that question, but she never did. In the end she decided she really didn’t want to know.
Their house had been on Eastern Avenue, near the factory but farther down the street, closer to the beach. Zee doubted if she could find the place now. It was so long ago that her grandmother had died. Her mother died only a few years later, just after Zee turned thirteen. Besides Zee, Mickey was the only Doherty left.
The factory where they’d once worked had long since closed. A sign on the front of the building read king’s beach apartments. It was directly across from Monte’s Restaurant, where she used to go for pizza with her father and Uncle Mickey in their pirate days.
When her grandmother died, Uncle Mickey had moved to Salem. He wanted to be closer to his sister, he said. Mickey could pilot a boat with the best of skippers, but he had never learned to drive a car. Though it was only a town away, Lynn was too far from what was left of his family, he said. And he didn’t like riding the bus. Though Maureen had killed herself just a few years after he made the move to Salem, Mickey stayed on. He had grown to love the Witch City. He was both a born entrepreneur and a natural salesman. He had a bit of the old clichéd blarney in him as well. When Salem reinvented itself, Mickey was right there to take advantage of the opportunity. He now ran a witch shop on Pickering Wharf, several haunted houses, and a pirate museum. He had done well. People in Salem fondly referred to Mickey Doherty as “The Pirate King.”
Lynn, Lynn, City of Sin. Zee recited the old poem in her head. A sign on a Salvation Army building read city of him. People were always trying to find a new image for Lynn. Zee liked it the way it was. It seemed to her a real place where real people led real lives.
She could smell Lynn Beach from here, fetid and heavy. At the Swampscott town line, she noticed a little shop with a woman in the window seated at a sewing machine. Outside the store hung a sign, hand-lettered, with penmanship that slanted downward as it progressed: MALE/FEMALE ALTERATIONS.
City of Sin. There was a reason she felt so right here, Zee thought. As sins go, Zee had committed her share. She felt guilty about a lot of things, not the least of which was the question that Lilly had asked shortly before her death. Lilly’s question reminded Zee so much of Maureen that she hadn’t shared it with Mattei. It was the thing that in retrospect should have tipped her off about Lilly, but instead it hit her in a much more personal way, as if someone had punched her in the stomach.
The last time she’d seen Lilly Braedon, Zee had been trying so hard to rationalize the risky behavior Lilly had been engaging in that she found herself unprepared for the question. Just as the session was ending and Lilly was walking out the door, she turned back to Zee and asked, “Don’t you believe at all in true love?”
Chapter 4 (#ulink_c229166d-6fa1-589f-aeba-258c9432a1e6)
When Lilly’s husband had first brought her to Mattei, Lilly had been heavily dosed on Klonopin. Her anxiety had become so debilitating that the internist her husband had been taking her to had first prescribed Xanax and then, when that failed, increasing doses of the branded clonazepam. Lilly could barely speak. She couldn’t drive. The pupils of her eyes looked like tiny pinpoints. But she was no longer anxious. She was zombie calm.
It turned out that Lilly hadn’t driven for the better part of a year, which had been inconvenient at best with a husband and two young children to care for. Instead of taking the kids to the yacht club to swim, Lilly had started walking them down to Gashouse Beach, which she said she preferred. But the kids missed their friends and the swimming lessons they had signed up for, and Lilly had such a bad feeling about the ocean—a terror that it would take her children, that the surf would send a rogue wave or that some remnants of red tide would seep through their skin to infect them—that she didn’t even let them wade in the water at the beach. Instead they were allowed only to sit on the rocky shore, playing in what little sand they could find, building castles, and slathered with so much 45 SPF that the blowing sand began to coat their pale bodies, making them look like sugar cookies.
By August, Lilly’s husband had taken pity on her and hired a nanny. That was when the real trouble started.
Lilly willingly surrendered her SUV to the nanny, happy to be free of it, preferring to walk around town. She had Peapod deliver groceries. And then she paced.
At first she confined her pacing to the house. She went up and down stairs. She circled from the foyer to the kitchen, through the sunporch to the dining room and library. She climbed all three flights of stairs, avoiding the basement but pacing the rough, unfinished floor of the attic, feet tapping a rhythmic heel-toe, heel-toe. She slept little, pacing the house at night until the nanny complained that she thought the old place might be haunted, because she could hear someone walking above her ceiling.
The next day, when the nanny took the children to their lessons, Lilly’s feet took her outside, through the labyrinth of Marblehead streets, past the fading window boxes where the vinca and blue scaevola struggled against the August drought. On the day when the drought finally broke, she ducked into the Spirit of ’76 Bookstore to get out of the rain, but the place was too quiet for her and she imagined that everyone could hear the squishing sound her sneakers made as she walked on the carpet, so she went back outside. But it was pouring, thundering and very windy. She stood under the awning and watched as a black plastic garbage can caught wind and rolled down the two-lane street, hitting a standing group of planters like a bowling ball, leaving a seven-ten split. She stayed under the awning until she noticed people looking at her, and then she crossed the street and entered the Rip Tide, someplace she’d never been to in her life.
It was three-thirty. The construction workers who weren’t already finished for the day were finally called off the job because of the rain, and the bar was filling up. Lilly walked to the far end and took one of the high stools, one she could wind her feet around to still their movement.
“What can I get you?” the bartender asked.
Lilly didn’t drink. She had no idea.
“Do you have any kind of food?” she asked the man. She was aware that she was the only woman in the place. She could feel all eyes on her.
“They have great steak tips,” a man two stools down offered. “Lunch is over. The kitchen doesn’t open until five,” the bartender said.
“Oh, come on, the lady looks like she could use a good steak.”
She knew they were looking at her, but she had no idea how she must appear. Wet-T-shirt contest was the first thing she thought, but she was too skinny for wet tees to matter much. Her collarbones felt sharp and jutting.
The bartender muttered and went to the back to cook. “You owe me one,” he said, not to Lilly but to the man who’d procured the steak tips for her.
The man dragged his bar stool over to hers.
His name was Adam, he told her. He lived above one of the shops on Pleasant Street, just a few houses down on the left. He did finish carpentry for a local contractor, the same one her husband had recently hired to do some work on their house.
Lilly ate the steak tips. She ate the salad that came with them, too. She even ate the garnish, something pickled and sour, though she couldn’t name what it was.
She had gone to his house, she later told Zee, because he’d offered her a dry T-shirt and a ride home.
They’d done it that first afternoon, she said, not in the bedroom but right there on the green couch in the corner, the wind whipping the aluminum sign against the side of the building, hailstones the size of golf balls crashing hard against the windows, denting the cars in the bank parking lot across the street.
“I felt safe for the first time in years,” Lilly told Zee.
Zee thought Lilly’s description sounded anything but safe, yet she knew it was an important statement. “What about it made you feel safe?”
“The couch, for one thing. It was this deep-cushioned thing, kind of a dark green velvet. Like a forest or something.”
“Forest green?”
“Yes, and the light from the window.”
“You said it was stormy.”
“It was. Maybe it wasn’t the light—it was the sound of the hail against the window. It was also what was outside. The car sounds and the shops. The bookstore and a ballet school. You could hear the music from the school, and I was picturing the little girls doing their barre exercises.”
“Even in the storm, you could hear so well?” Zee asked.
“Yes,” Lilly said. “I could hear the music. It was as if real life was happening right outside the window—all around us, really—and we were part of it somehow. I’ve never felt that way before. Safe and warm,” she said.
He had given her a ride home in his red truck. She made him drop her off down the hill from where she lived, near Grace Oliver Beach, by the little house that had once been a penny-candy store. “Can I see you again?” he asked, taking her hand. He was so sweet that he made her want to cry. She told him no. He told her he thought he loved her.
They made love every afternoon all summer, sometimes at his place, sometimes in the truck if they could find a secluded spot to park. She was always home by five. Lilly thought it was important that Zee know this.
“I’m always home in time to cook dinner,” she explained.
What Lilly actually cooked were huge guilt feasts. The more she fooled around, the better she cooked. She pureed vegetables, adding odd flavorings like strawberry and peanut butter, anything the kids would actually eat. She went organic at the farmers’ market. She even dug up the backyard at midnight to put in a vegetable garden. She never finished it, which caused a huge issue with their landscape designer. The Guatemalan yard workers seemed to have less of a problem with it. They just mowed around the pit as if they believed that it really would become something beautiful one day, and they never filled it in as their boss had suggested. One of them even found a packet of seeds in the shed and planted a few rows of what looked at first like carrots but later revealed itself to be yarrow.
As the days grew shorter, Lilly sank into a depression that rivaled those of the great poets. She stopped walking. She fired her nanny. Dishes piled up in the sink. One of the children got lice, and she didn’t even know it until the school nurse sent home a note and a bottle of Pronto shampoo.
How did that make you feel? Zee never even had to ask the standard shrink question. She already knew the answer. Lilly felt all the most destructive emotions out there—fear, judgment, inadequacy—as if there were some secret to parenting that she’d never been taught.
“Look,” Mattei had told Lilly’s husband when he’d dragged her in to see the famous doctor in what amounted to his last hope for his wife. “Most places they give you a pill, they send you on your way. I’m not going to do that.” Zee could see the look of relief in his eyes as Mattei explained the process. First they would wean Lilly off all her meds, and then they would be able to see just what they were dealing with. In the meantime Lilly would be given a complete physical and all the standard tests, checking thyroid and estrogen levels, and even a dexamethasone-suppression test to rule out Cushing’s, though both Mattei and Zee were already pretty sure what the diagnosis would turn out to be.
“We already had a physical,” the husband said, confused by some of the terms Mattei was using but clear on this one. He gestured to the folder he had presented her with earlier.
“I want you to have it at Mass General,” Mattei said.
They agreed. Then Mattei asked Lilly one more question, one she asked all of her patients.
“Where were you when you had your first panic attack?”
There was a long silence. The husband, who usually answered every question for his wife, looked baffled.
Everyone waited for Lilly to speak. Finally, after the silence was so awkward that the husband was getting nervous, he started to make suggestions to Lilly. In church, maybe? Or at the market? Maybe at the beach with the kids?
“Let your wife answer the question,” Mattei said.
“I don’t know where I was,” Lilly said. Her voice was flat.
“That’s bullshit,” Mattei said privately to Zee after the session ended. “Everybody knows.”
Chapter 5 (#ulink_5d3de3eb-f0af-5ff3-817c-7b8b6019ac2b)
The parking lot across from the Old North Church in Marblehead was already full, so one of the funeral directors waved Zee down a side street where there were more spaces. When she turned the corner, she caught a flash of ocean so bright her eyes throbbed with it.
The pallbearers were unloading the coffin as she climbed the steep granite steps. She hurried ahead, into the wide expanse of church, taking a seat in the back row. An old woman moved aside to make room for her, dragging her cane across the wooden bench with a scraping sound.
There were photos of Lilly everywhere.
Zee had to swallow hard to keep from crying. She hadn’t cried yet; up until now all she had felt was shock. And guilt. She recognized Lilly’s children from photos. They sat in the front pew, the little girl unaware and chatting; the boy, who was reputedly so spirited, sat apart from his father and sister, staring straight ahead at the plain white wall. Zee couldn’t take her eyes off the boy. His stoicism stole her heart. She almost expected him to salute the coffin like the famous photos of John-John Kennedy, though she knew it would not happen.
Mattei had prescribed lithium to Lilly at their third session. She diagnosed Lilly with bipolar 2 disorder, probably with a chromosomal element, she said, and definitely with panic. Mattei treated Lilly alongside Zee for the first two months, until she was certain the medication was working. So often during manic periods, patients were tempted to discontinue their medication. It was very important to monitor both the meds and the dosage. When Mattei was certain that the drugs were properly dosed and were being taken, she turned the case over to Zee.
It had taken Lilly several months to start talking. But when she finally did, it was like opening the floodgates at Salem Harbor after a nor’easter. She didn’t stop. Her childhood had been ideal, she said when Zee asked. There was no abuse of any kind and no history of alcoholism. Her mother and father had a wonderful relationship. And Lilly loved her husband. Maybe not more than life itself, the way he said he loved her, but she did love him. She spent the next three sessions talking about how and why this was true.
“I was having sex.” Lilly hadn’t answered Mattei’s question until her sixth month of treatment with Zee. So it took a moment for Zee to understand the implications. “When I had my first panic attack . . . I was having sex with Adam.”
It was before Lilly had told her the story of Adam. At first Zee thought that she meant her husband. But her husband’s name was William, not Adam. Lilly watched for Zee’s reaction. She expected to be judged. But Zee didn’t flinch.
“Tell me about Adam,” was all she said.
It was about this time that Zee stopped sharing all of Lilly’s stories with Mattei. Her case discussions, which had always been so detailed, began to have their sharper edges rounded over, so that they would more easily merge into the general. There were more discussions about the symptoms, the phases and progression of disease, than about the details of each case. For her part, Mattei thought this was a good step, that Zee was gaining confidence as a therapist. Sensing that she could handle the caseload, Mattei began to send more patients Zee’s way.
By June it was apparent either that Lilly had stopped taking her medication altogether or that the dosage Mattei had prescribed was insufficient. Lilly was in the middle of one of the most clearly manic periods Zee had ever witnessed.
Lilly’s feet were moving again. She never slept. She spent huge sums of money. Her food bills alone for the elaborate guilt feasts she was cooking for her family were running about $750 a week—for two adults and two children, both of whom were picky eaters. Lilly no longer remembered why she’d ever needed a nanny in the first place. She could easily handle two young children. And her trysts with Adam were getting more and more daring. With no nanny on board, Lilly had taken to sneaking Adam into her house in the late afternoons, claiming that the place needed some repair work, first on the playroom shutters and later on a crooked piece of crown molding in the living room that had bothered her for years.
Lilly and Adam had sex on every horizontal surface in the house. Hearing their cries of passion one afternoon and thinking that someone was hurting the children, a neighbor called the police. As the cruiser pulled up in front of the house, Adam went out the back door of the basement, hurrying across the yard by Black Joe’s Pond and down Gingerbread Hill, pulling on his work clothes as he ran. The police were waiting for him at the bottom of the hill, where his red truck was almost always parked these days. He knew them all, had gone to high school with a couple of them.
“Everyone knows what you’re up to,” one of the cops told him. “Why don’t you try to keep a lower profile?”
There were some stifled smiles, maybe even a pat on the back from the cop he knew.
“They don’t exactly disapprove,” Adam had said to Lilly when she freaked out about the cops. “One of us? Messing with some rich guy’s wife?”
It was the first time Lilly had felt uneasy about what she was doing and the first time she felt bad for her husband. Sweet William, who had never done anything to deserve this. For the first time during her long affair with Adam, Lilly felt shame. And the minute the shame cloud descended, things began to fall apart.
At Zee’s direction Mattei wrote a script and added a sedative to take the edge off and a light sleeping pill to keep Lilly’s feet from wandering. When Lilly complained of weight gain from the lithium, they switched her to an antiseizure medication.
It was difficult to say when Mattei started to become suspicious. “Tell me what’s going on,” she asked Zee directly. “I don’t mean with the symptoms, I mean in her life.”
“She’s been having an affair,” Zee confessed, feeling her face redden.
“And you didn’t tell me this because . . . ?”
“Doctor-patient confidentiality.” Zee knew that this was a hot button with Mattei, who claimed to have enormous respect for doctor-patient confidentiality.
“What’s the real reason?” Mattei said.
“That is the real reason,” Zee insisted.
“Is the affair still going on?”
“Yes,” Zee said.
“What else is she doing?”
“What do you mean, what else?”
“Is she drinking, is she doing drugs? What other kinds of risky behavior is our so-called Mrs. Perfect indulging in?”
There was some triumph in Mattei’s voice as she asked. She’d begun calling Lilly “Mrs. Perfect” ever since William’s initial goddess-like description of her. No one was that perfect, Mattei had told him with Lilly right there. Perfect was a huge burden for any woman.
“Just the affair.” Zee was aware that her stomach was churning. She wished she hadn’t said anything. Her face felt hot and red. She wanted to throw up. In all the cases she’d treated so far, nothing like this had ever happened to her. It was as if she had just confessed to the infidelity herself.
“Maybe you should take back this case,” she said.
Mattei seemed to think about it for a while before making her decision. “No,” she said. “I don’t have time to take on another patient. And you’re not getting out of this that easily.”
Zee sat quietly as she waited for Mattei to mull over their plan of action. She thought about getting up and walking out of the office and never looking back. It had become her fantasy lately. Not yet five years into her practice, and she was already having burned-out escape fantasies. Not a good sign.
“We’re upping her meds,” Mattei said, reaching for her pad. She slid a prescription across the desk.
As the new dosage of antiseizure medication started to work, Lilly seemed to come back to mid-range. During the next several sessions and into the early fall, she drove herself to Boston and spoke in her sessions with Zee the way a more normal patient might have. She talked about going back to college, or at least taking a class or two. She talked about the competitive process of getting her son into their private school of choice.
She had stopped seeing Adam, she told Zee. It had been very difficult for her. The medicine hadn’t changed the fact that she thought she was in love with him. She said she believed that Adam was the great love of her life, her soul mate. But she was trying hard to do the right thing. For her children. And for the man who used to be referred to simply as “my husband” and who had now taken on the permanent moniker of “Sweet William.”
It seemed to work. Right up until Halloween weekend, when (as she later put it herself) “all hell broke loose.”
First Lilly’s cat had disappeared. She’d looked everywhere, hanging posters all over town, calling all the neighbors. The children were upset, especially her daughter, who’d planned to carry the black cat she had named Reynaldo with her as part of her witch costume. But by Halloween night there was still no sign of the cat, and so her daughter had refused to wear the costume Lilly had made for her and refused to go trick-or-treating until Lilly took her downtown to buy another one.
It had been raining intermittently on Halloween, so instead of paper bags Lilly had given them pillowcases in which to collect their candy, but her daughter was still little, and her pillowcase hung too low and dragged along the sidewalk as they went house to house. The kids had wanted to trick-or-treat alone, insisting that they were only going to the neighbors’ homes, that they wouldn’t leave Gingerbread Hill. But Lilly wouldn’t hear of it. Terrible things happened to children all the time: razor blades in apples, kidnapping. No town was immune, not even Marblehead. She had always taken them trick-or-treating, and she wanted to go along. She even had a costume picked out for herself—or half a costume, at least. She still had on her jeans, but from the waist up she was Snow White, or a rather Disneyfied version of the famous beauty. She wore a black wig with a red bow, a half-length pink cape, and a blue shirt with puffy sleeves. In her hand she carried an apple.
She was actually excited about going. But at the sight of Lilly dressed up and ready to walk with them, her daughter started to cry. “I’m not a baby!” she insisted. And so Lilly walked behind them, staying in the shadows, watching while they knocked on the doors of her neighbors, and eventually eating the apple she carried house to house, dropping the core into a neighbor’s compost pile.
When they got home, it was past their usual bedtime, though William was still at work. She had hoped to keep the children up long enough for him to see their costumes, but tomorrow was a school day. They had their baths. She tucked them in. As she started down the stairs, she heard a noise from the basement. She decided it was the wind, slapping the French windows they’d recently had put in. It had happened before. The house had a walk-out basement, which they’d had remodeled a few years back. But the new windows were faulty; they often didn’t close properly. She’d already had two of them repaired by Adam. She’d been meaning to speak with him about fixing this final one, but she hadn’t gotten around to it before she stopped seeing him.
William returned home later that night, but Lilly wasn’t there. The children were asleep. At midnight he called the police and reported her missing. They told him he’d have to wait forty-eight hours before they got involved. Though they didn’t share their information with him, the police had a pretty good idea where she might be.
Lilly didn’t come home until two days later. When she did, she was sullen and down-cycling. She wouldn’t eat. She had several bruises. No matter how many times she was asked, she would never say where she’d been or what had happened.
After the emergency room took care of her injuries, Zee had Lilly admitted to a Boston psychiatric hospital on an involuntary seventy-two-hour hold.
Lilly’s three-day stay turned into three weeks. Zee went by every other day. One weekend, when Lilly wasn’t expecting her, Zee showed up. Lilly was in the lounge, a book in front of her. Instead of reading, she was staring out the window.
Zee paused to watch. Lilly was looking at a red construction truck, idling outside in the parking lot. Zee recognized it immediately. She had walked out of the office one day after Lilly’s session in time to see her getting into that same truck. Adam clearly knew who Zee was, and the look he gave her as she walked by that day had sent a shiver up her spine.
“You have to get away from him,” Zee said to Lilly.
Lilly didn’t answer.
By offering advice Zee knew she had crossed a line with Lilly. A therapist is never supposed to tell a patient what to do. But it was a line Zee felt she had to cross.
Zee left Lilly and called security.
William didn’t know what had happened while Lilly was away. He could tell from the police reaction that they were not as worried as he was. “People walk out on marriages all the time,” they said.
He had convinced himself that it had been a kidnapping, from which his wife had narrowly escaped. He waited until Zee had been seeing Lilly at the hospital for almost two weeks before he couldn’t stand it anymore and came by the office.
He demanded to know what had happened to Lilly. “I know she told you,” he said.
“She didn’t, actually,” Zee said. “But even if she had, I couldn’t tell you.”
“I’m the one who brought her to you. I’m the one paying the bills,” he said.
“Lilly has to be able to trust me,” Zee said calmly. “Doctor-patient confidentiality.”
It was the only time she had seen William angry. “What the hell am I paying you for?” he demanded.
The sound of his raised voice brought Zee to her feet. Mattei got to the door in time to see him hurl a glass paperweight across the room, shattering it against the far wall.
“Do you need some help in here?” Mattei asked Zee.
William looked confused and embarrassed. “I was just leaving,” he said.
“Let me see you to the door,” Mattei said.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled to Zee.
Mattei held the door for him, shooting Zee a look as they left.
Two days before Lilly was scheduled to be released, both Zee and Mattei were called to the hospital. Lilly’s hospital psychiatrist sat across from a social worker named Emily, whom Zee recognized from the Department of Social Ser vices.
“What’s going on?” Zee asked.
“We’re here because of Lilly’s physical injuries,” Emily said.
“What physical injuries?” Zee asked.
“The ones she initially presented with,” the social worker said.
“Lilly refuses to talk about them,” the staff psychiatrist said.
“She told me she fell,” Zee said. “On Halloween night.”
“That’s what’s on her admission records,” the psychiatrist said. “ ‘Suffered a fall on Halloween night due to slippery rocks.’ ” She looked at the others. “It was raining pretty hard on Halloween.”
“The bruises aren’t consistent with a fall,” Emily said. “They seem more like a beating.”
“You think she was beaten?” Zee asked.
“This is routine procedure,” Emily said. “Especially when the woman doesn’t give an explanation consistent with her injuries.”
“Lilly is scheduled to be released in two days,” the psychiatrist said. “She’s stable, her medications are properly dosed, and she’s showing no signs of depression.”
“I would respectfully disagree on that last point,” Zee said. “I think she seems depressed. She’s normally much more communicative.”
The psychiatrist paused to consider. “There is one point that makes me agree with you, Dr. Finch.”
“Only one?” Zee was getting annoyed. “What’s that?”
“Lilly does not want to go home.”
“Which plays into our suspicions of spousal abuse,” the social worker said.
“It’s not William,” Zee said.
“But if she’s afraid to go home . . .” the social worker said.
“She doesn’t feel safe at home.” Zee turned to Mattei. “If she was abused in any way, it’s Adam.”
“Who’s Adam?” Emily asked.
“Lilly was having an affair with him several months ago. He was here the other day.”
“Maybe the husband found out about the affair,” Emily suggested. “Maybe that’s what made him violent.”
“It’s not William,” Zee said again. “He’s not the type.”
Emily looked to Mattei for verification.
“I think Zee’s right,” Mattei said. “But I can’t say for certain that it wasn’t William.”
Zee shot her a look.
“I would have agreed with you until the other day,” Mattei said.
“What happened the other day?”
“There was an incident. We had to escort him from the office.”
“I think we have to cover all bases,” the psychiatrist said.
“What we really need is a formal complaint,” Emily said. “No matter which one it is.”
“You can try,” Zee said. “But I can tell you right now, she’ll never give it to you. She doesn’t want William to know about her affair. And she’s afraid of Adam.”
Not only did Lilly refuse to file a complaint, but when she was released from the hospital, she decided she wanted to see another therapist. “One closer to home,” William told Zee.
The internist who had initially prescribed the Klonopin set her up with an old-school Freudian analyst who worked out of Salem Hospital. She had agreed to meet with him five days a week and to start analysis.
“You’re kidding me,” Mattei said.
But Zee was clearly upset. “We have to stop them,” Zee said. “She shouldn’t be starting over again. That’s not the right kind of therapy for her. And she won’t tell the new therapist the truth until it’s too late. . . . We have to do something,” Zee said to Mattei.
“There’s nothing you can do,” Mattei said. “She’s not your patient anymore.”
It had been a tough winter for Zee. She’d begun to dream about Lilly, and in her dreams the images of Lilly and Zee’s mother, Maureen, had become confused. They were still separate people, but in the dream she was unable to tell them apart and kept having to ask which one she was talking to.
“This is good,” Mattei said when Zee detailed the dream in her next session.
“Really? How so?” Zee asked.
“Let’s talk about the real reason you became a therapist.”
“It wasn’t the unfulfilled dream of my mother, I can tell you that much.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“Oh, please,” Zee said.
“What was the unfulfilled dream of your mother?”
“We both know what it was.”
“Why don’t you tell me again?” Mattei said.
“The Great Love. It’s what she wanted from my father—and what she never got.”
“So already there’s a similarity to Lilly.”
“And just about every other woman in America,” Zee said.
“True enough. Your mother was onto something when she started writing fairy tales about The Great Love.”
“Something that evidently killed her,” Zee said.
“Which?” Mattei said.
“Was it the fairy tale that killed her? Or The Great Love?”
“Aren’t they pretty much the same thing?”
“You tell me,” Mattei said.
When Zee didn’t take the bait, Mattei asked a different question. “What’s the other dream of the fairy tale?”
“Besides true love?”
“What are both your mother and Lilly looking for?” Mattei asked.
“My mother’s not looking for anything. My mother’s dead.” Zee was growing tired of this line of questioning.
“Bear with me for a moment,” Mattei said.
Zee folded her arms across her chest.
“What did your mother want from you then, and what does Lilly want now?”
“I don’t know,” Zee said.
“Think about it.”
Zee thought about Mattei’s question, and she thought about Lilly Braedon many times during the next few months.
It was William who finally contacted Zee. He was desperate. “She’s not doing well,” he sobbed into the phone. “I don’t know what to do.” He told Zee that Lilly had stopped the therapy within the first month. Convinced that the doctor was coming on to her, she had refused to step back into his office. “I don’t know,” William said. “She’s such a beautiful woman. Men can’t help throwing themselves at her. I tend to believe her.” He tried to compose himself before going on. “She won’t even get out of bed.”
Whose bed? Zee wanted to ask. But she didn’t. Instead she agreed to go to the house to meet with Lilly, and with that, Zee crossed another line.
The house was a mess. It hadn’t been cleaned for weeks, William told her. Finally, in frustration, he had hired a maid ser vice, three women from Brazil who didn’t speak much English, which he decided was a good thing, because he was afraid of what Lilly might say to them if she started talking. But instead of speaking even a word of hello, Lilly had taken to locking herself in her bedroom and crying the whole time they tried to clean—huge, wrenching sobs that finally upset the maids so much that they quit. “What was she crying about?” he’d asked the women, but they didn’t know. Gesturing, they managed to communicate to him that Lilly had been talking on the phone with someone.
William thought that maybe the phone calls had been to Zee.
Zee didn’t tell him what she already knew, that the phone calls were to Adam.
“You didn’t break up with Adam, did you?” Zee asked Lilly at her first return session.
“I couldn’t,” Lilly said. Then she started to cry.
Lilly became Zee’s patient once more. And once again her meds were adjusted. Soon she was driving herself into Boston on a regular basis. She seemed better. Spring was turning to summer again, and Lilly’s spirits were lifting.
They didn’t talk about Adam anymore. Lilly wouldn’t, and there were clearly boundary issues that Zee had violated; she didn’t want to risk making things worse. For now it was important not to drive Lilly away again. It was enough that she was here and that she seemed to be improving. It was Lilly who finally brought up Adam.
It was about six months later, in one of her sessions. “We think we’re free,” she said, “but we’re not. We’re the product of every association we’ve ever made, and sometimes of ones we inherited from people we never even knew.”
“That’s very profound,” Zee said.
“So you agree?”
“It doesn’t matter whether I agree or disagree. What matters is what you think.”
“I just told you what I think.”
“So you did,” Zee said.
Lilly made a face.
“What?” Zee said.
“Did you ever want to get out of something but you didn’t know how?”
“What is it you want to get out of?”
“Just about everything right about now,” Lilly said.
“Why don’t you tell me the specifics, and I’ll see if I can help you work through it,” Zee suggested.
“My marriage, for one,” Lilly said.
“Why do you want to get out of your marriage?”
“I feel as if William set up this elaborate trap for me and made it look all pretty, and I just fell into it,” Lilly said.
“And now you want to free yourself from the trap?”
“Yes.” Lilly looked at Zee. “You don’t approve.”
“It doesn’t matter whether I approve.”
“But you don’t.”
“I didn’t say that. People get divorces. No judgment,” Zee said.
“So you’re saying it’s okay?”
“Do you think it’s okay?”
“I have two children,” Lilly said.
“Yes, you do.”
“I feel like I’m dying,” Lilly said.
“Let’s explore that,” Zee said.
Lilly said nothing.
“In what way do you feel like you’re dying?” Zee asked.
“Not dying. Trapped. I can’t leave because of the children. And I can’t stay.”
“I understand feeling as if you can’t leave. Why do you feel you can’t stay?” Zee said.
“It’s not safe,” she said.
“Are we talking about Adam?”
“It’s not Adam. Adam is wonderful,” Lilly said.
“Are you telling me you want to be with Adam?” Zee asked.
Lilly looked confused for a moment. “No, I never said that.”
“Why do you feel unsafe?” Zee asked again.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” she said. “I’m sorry I brought it up.”
“I’m glad you brought it up. If you feel unsafe in any way, I need to know about it,” Zee said.
“I told him what you said. That I should get away from him.”
“We’re talking about Adam now,” Zee said.
Lilly hesitated for a second. “Yes. Adam.”
“Adam whom you just described as wonderful.”
“I’m so confused.” Lilly started to cry.
“It’s okay,” Zee said.
Lilly clearly looked frightened.
“And what did Adam say when you told him that?” Zee asked.
“He said that you were a bitch and someone should teach you to mind your own business,” Lilly said. “Those were his exact words.”
It took Zee by surprise. She sat for a moment trying to figure out how to put what she needed to say next. Finally she leaned forward. “There is no need for you to be afraid of this man,” Zee said. “There are things you can do.”
“Like what?”
“Like a restraining order, for one thing,” Zee said. “If he’s harassing you, we can go get a court order making him stay away from you.”
“Then William would find out,” Lilly said.
“Probably,” Zee said.
“I can’t do that,” Lilly said. She couldn’t stay seated but got up and stood nervously by her chair.
“Did Adam threaten you in any way?”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“Did he threaten your children?” Zee asked.
“No. I didn’t say he threatened anyone. You’re putting words into my mouth.”
“So he didn’t threaten you,” Zee said.
“No,” Lilly said.
Zee could tell she was lying.
“Isn’t your safety and the safety of your children more important than keeping this secret?”
“I’m so stupid.” She was crying in earnest now. “I can’t believe I ever started up with him.”
“You’re anything but stupid,” Zee said. “You made a mistake.”
“One I can’t recover from,” Lilly said.
“I think you can,” Zee said.
“With a restraining order?” Lilly asked.
“As a start,” Zee said.
“Do you know how many women are killed every year who’ve gotten restraining orders?”
Zee had to admit she had no idea. But it was interesting to think that Lilly had been looking into it.
“A lot,” Lilly said.
Zee went to Mattei as soon as the session was over.
Mattei called a detective she knew in Marblehead, a woman she’d been on some panel with a few years back, who agreed to look into things.
“Can you do it discreetly?” Mattei asked. “We already have confidentiality issues with the husband.”
“Do you have a last name for Adam?” Mattei asked, turning to her.
Zee shook her head. “But he drives a red truck. A Ford. With the name of a construction company on the side.”
“Do you know the name of the company?” Mattei asked.
“No,” Zee said. “I think it’s an Italian name.” Zee thought for a moment. “It starts with a C?”
A few hours later, Mattei came into Zee’s office.
“We might be lucky,” she said. “This Adam guy seems to have left town.”
“Really?”
“The truck belongs to a local company. Cassella Construction, I think it was. They said that Adam drove the truck once in a while. He hasn’t been around lately. He got into some kind of fight with the foreman, and he took off. They said he’s a good worker. They were actually hoping he’ll come back to work,” Mattei said.
“That doesn’t mean he left town.”
“The police stopped by his house. None of the neighbors has seen him for several weeks.”
“Are you sure Lilly was telling you the truth?” Mattei asked. “The only reason I ask is something the detective said.”
“What was that?”
“She told me that this wasn’t the first time there’d been trouble involving Lilly Braedon,” Mattei said.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Evidently the Marblehead police have gotten calls about her before. Not just with this Adam but with other men as well.”
Zee sat staring. “Men? As in plural?”
“Classic bipolar if you think about it. Sex with multiple partners certainly qualifies as risky behavior.”
Zee thought about it for a moment. “It doesn’t mean that one of them isn’t stalking her,” Zee said.
“No,” Mattei said. “It doesn’t.”
Zee looked shaken.
“The police will keep an eye out for Adam,” Mattei said.
“Which won’t help a bit if she takes off with him again,” Zee countered.
“Well, at least we now know it wasn’t William,” Mattei said.
Zee shot her a look but said nothing.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_5f8460b0-8149-5a82-bb8f-4b4bacfd8ae2)
The funeral ser vice went on for far too long. Zee was aware that many people spoke, though she could not keep her mind on their words. Her eyes scanned the crowd.
Sweet William sat silent and obviously drugged in the first pew.
Zee realized that both Mattei and Michael had been right about her coming here today, if for different reasons. Mattei thought it was unprofessional and strongly advised against it. Michael hadn’t advised her at all; he simply put forward a question: What good could come of it?
She wondered just that as she sat here. The family certainly wouldn’t want to see her. Years later, as they looked back on this day, they might be glad she’d paid her respects. But today it would only serve as a harsh reminder that she hadn’t been able to save Lilly.
There was another reason Zee had come, though she hadn’t admitted it to either Michael or Mattei. She needed to see for herself whether or not Adam showed up. If he did, it would mean one thing. If he stayed away, it would mean something else entirely. By all rights he shouldn’t come anywhere near them today. But if he had been stalking Lilly, as Zee still believed he had, he probably wouldn’t be able to stay away.
Even if she was right, though, there wasn’t much to be done about it. Lilly had jumped off the Tobin Bridge and into the Mystic. It was suicide, not foul play.
It turned out that Adam didn’t come to the funeral. But, to Zee’s surprise, two of the eyewitnesses showed up. Not the woman who had been so competitive for camera time, as Zee might have expected. It was the other woman, the toll taker, who came. And the man in the blue van, the one who’d been so reluctant to talk with the newscaster, was there as well.
When the organ signaled the end of the ser vice, the funeral director gave the sign to the pallbearers to lift the coffin, and the congregation filed out behind, family first and then, row by row, the other congregants.
As the family passed, Zee was careful not to catch William’s eye. Whatever he might feel when he saw her, she didn’t want to make it any worse.
As the crowd moved out into the bright sunlight, Zee followed them to her car. She didn’t see the red truck until it was directly in front of her. It was pulled over illegally, half blocking the street. Adam watched the pallbearers and the family. When she looked up, his eyes met hers. He looked at her coldly. Then he put the truck in gear and pulled out, tires screeching, leaving about twenty feet of rubber.
Shakily, Zee let herself into her car. Stuck in the middle of the funeral procession, she moved with it through old town and around Peach’s Point to West Shore Drive and Waterside Cemetery.
She wanted to pull out of the procession, to head directly to the police station and tell them what she’d seen. But she and Mattei had already talked it through. Lilly’s death was a suicide. The police were not likely to open any kind of investigation. And if they did, and the story of Lilly’s affair with Adam came out, it would only hurt the family more than they’d already been hurt.
“Let it go,” Mattei had told her.
When the other cars turned right, into the cemetery, Zee went straight, following the signs on West Shore Drive that aimed her toward Salem. She had waited too long already. She needed to see Finch.
Both of the old man’s knees had stiffened to the point that movement had become nearly impossible. Even his arms would not move, and so he stood near the window looking out at Maule’s Well, or at the re-creation of it now on his cousin’s property. After The House of the Seven Gables became well known, his cousin had grown obsessed with re-creating the building as befitted the story. No, not his cousin— his mind was playing tricks on him again. It was not his cousin but someone else entirely. The strands of his memory were breaking. Often now he would struggle to make his way from one room to another only to find when he arrived at his destination that he had no idea why he had come. Names escaped him. Even the simplest of language eluded him now, as if his words, yet unformed, had been stolen by the salt air and blown out to sea.
He looked out over Turner Street at the old house. It had changed so much over the years that it was difficult to picture its reconstruction. At first it had been simple, just a few low-ceilinged rooms. As fortunes grew, the house had been added to, so that eventually there were the full seven gables of his famous book. But Federalist fashion had dictated simplicity, and so gables had been removed, then added back again when his book had made the house so popular. It was amusing, truly, that this woman, whose name he could not even remember, had undertaken to display the house to the public, and more amusing indeed that the public wanted to see it, seemed willing to pay money in fact to see not just the house with its secret room but other things that had never existed in the house before his fictional account, things like Hepzibah’s Cent-Shop and Maule’s Well.
He was not certain how he felt about any of it. He was a shy man by nature and did not appreciate the accolades afforded to him. Still, he loved the house more than any dwelling before or since, and he felt a deep responsibility to watch over the property. It seemed his only job now. His hands could no longer hold the pen. And his words were gone. But he was aware (because his writing had made it so) that the gabled house, however cursed it might be, belonged, always and forever, not to the family who originally built it, or to his cousin, or to the woman whose name he could not remember, but to the characters he had created in his story, to Hepzibah and Clifford and Phoebe.
Somewhere in the distance, he could hear a phone ringing. He was not well today. It was not simply his knees. His head was foggy, more foggy than usual. And his hands had a rigidity he could not soften. He had taken something for it. A visitor, one he had at first thought to be his beloved Hepzibah, had given it to him. He was going to die soon. He could feel it. Slow and steady, death seemed to crawl over him. He could sense the rigor mortis already, in his knees. He was leaning against the wall, looking out across the street at his famous house, and he could not move. He had turned to stone, and all he could do was wait for the medicine or for some force of nature to release him.
Where were the ones he had so loved in life? Where was Sophia? Dead, he thought, though he could not remember her passing. He thought then about Melville, and the tears started to fall. Melville wasn’t dead. Couldn’t be. Then an anger rose up in him, an almost murderous rage.
He stood here now, a statue, a formation of cold granite that trapped just a trace of life inside its chill. The statue could see and feel and want. What he wanted now—wanted desperately, it seemed—was to see the gardens across the street where, in his famous story, the old rooster he had named Chanticleer and his two aging hen wives had been able to come up with only one last diminutive egg, which, rather than ensuring the rooster’s aristocratic line, had been served for breakfast. He had found the words amusing when he’d first written them. But today he mourned Chanticleer and the hens and their loss of lineage. But of course it wasn’t real, had been real only in his imagination and on the page. And there was a wall between them now, a very real wall that his vision could not penetrate. Standing here today, he could not see his beloved gardens, though he could still manage to see the ocean beyond.
He wanted to cry out for Hepzibah, though he knew she wasn’t real, and she seemed to him now two different people, the wizened old woman he had created, the one the actual shop was modeled on, and someone as young and beautiful as he might have once imagined her. And he was filled with love for this last Hepzibah, who was really in his mind more like his character of Phoebe might have been, Phoebe who had come into their lives and changed everything and brought the light back to the old house and love to it as well. He started to cry and was aware that he was crying for what once had been, and for what had passed.
More than anything now, he wanted to see his Hepzibah, and he willed her to him with a force so strong that his knees released their grip and his throat loosened. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, he could feel the stone cracking to release him. He moved first a hand and then an arm. Then, carefully, he took a step away from the wall and toward the window.
When he was able, he began his daily work. His strength growing, he raised his shutter and opened the cent shop. It was not Hepzibah’s shop, the one he had created in the book; it was not even a bad rendering of it. But it was the best an old man could do.
The customers bought what he put out. One by one they came, shyly at first like the little boy in his story, but then more boldly.
Zee couldn’t find a parking place on Turner Street. Tour buses lined the lot at the House of the Seven Gables, and the tourists who came in their own cars parked on the sidewalk, ignoring the residents only sign in favor of a ten-dollar ticket they would never pay.
She finally parked on the small patch of green where Finch kept his bird feeders. As she got out of the car, she noticed a tourist walking away with an antique ship’s model, which seemed to fly through Finch’s first-floor window and into his hands.
Her first thought was that Finch was being robbed. Then she noticed the tourist’s bags hanging from the guy’s arm, a small child at his side. As she got closer, she spotted the hand-lettered sign in the top of the window: hepzibah’s cent-shop. And underneath it a smaller sign, also hand-lettered: everything must go.
Finch’s hair stood up in white tufts. His voice was hoarse. He didn’t recognize her until she stood directly in front of him, and when he did, he immediately started to cry.
The tourists moved back, out of the way.
“Dad,” she said. “What’s going on here?”
“Hepzibah,” he said. “My Zee.” He reached out for her, gripping her hand as hard as he could. “I willed it so,” he said, and then turned to his audience, his faith in life itself renewed. “I willed it so!” he cried.
Part 2: June 2008 (#ulink_8ae9b393-6a63-503a-aa39-c27a0be64b26)
The ancient method of Dead Reckoning or deduced reckoning is often unreliable. Winds, tides, and storms can easily push the ship off course. Every mistake is compounded, altering her passage in critical ways, often with tragic results. For this reason, sailors eventually turned to celestial navigation. The stars are a constant. The earth spins, but the stars remain fixed in the heavens. Even the stormiest sky eventually will clear to reveal them.
Chapter 7 (#ulink_8a72fe9e-f0d8-5191-a32b-90d61be0797c)
Finch practiced touching his thumb to his middle finger as rapidly and accurately as he could. He had succeeded fairly well with his right hand but was slower and clumsier with his left.
“There’s usually one side that’s weaker than the other,” the doctor said, taking notes.
“I’m aware of that,” Zee said. They’d been through the routine at least a dozen times. “We’re here about his medication.”
“Unfortunate,” he said. “But we did know that this one might not work. This particular medication came with warnings. It causes hallucinations in some people.”
“And clearly he’s one of those people. He thought he was Nathaniel Hawthorne.”
The doctor’s eyebrows raised. “Creative. Of course, considering his background . . .”
Zee fired him a look.
“Often men believe they’re working for the CIA, some covert-ops kind of thing. Women’s hallucinations often tend to be more sexual in nature,” he said, grinning at her.
Zee ignored his remark.
Neurologists have a rather warped sense of humor, Mattei had told her more than once.
“We’ll take him off it.”
“I’ve already done that,” she said. When she hadn’t been able to reach the doctor by phone, she had checked the PDR and had called a friend of Michael’s who was also a neurologist. There was no danger from sudden withdrawal, no weaning period.
“Don’t talk about me as if I’m not here,” Finch said. His voice, once loud enough to be heard unmiked in lecture halls of a hundred or more students, was now barely audible.
“Sorry, Dad,” she said.
“The hallucinations are not usually unpleasant. They’re generally more alarming for the family than for the patient.”
“Nevertheless,” she said, ending any possibility of continuing the meds. It seemed astounding to Zee when she thought of the side effects some doctors expected their patients to contend with. Any television ad for pharmaceuticals these days came with a list of contraindications so long it sometimes seemed amazing to Zee that people would dare to take so much as an aspirin.
The doctor stood up. “Can you walk for me, Professor Finch?”
Finch stood shakily. Her first impulse was to help him, but she willed her hands to stay at her sides.
With great effort Finch shuffled fifteen feet across the doctor’s office. Zee could tell how difficult his effort was only by his breathing. His face was masked, a classic sign of Parkinson’s.
Once a reserved New England Yankee, Finch had become more emotional with the progression of his disease. But his emotion showed neither on his face nor in any vocal inflection. It was a more subtle energy that told Zee how frustrating and impossible this short walk had become for her father.
She had often wondered at the fact that Finch didn’t have the shaking so common to Parkinson’s. Ten years into the disease, he had only recently developed any kind of resting tremor, and even that was so slight that anyone who was not looking for it would never notice.
Curiously, none of these symptoms had been the first signs of Finch’s illness. The first cause for concern had happened in a restaurant in Boston, the night Finch had taken them all out to dinner to celebrate the release of his new book based on Melville’s letters to Hawthorne. The book was aptly titled: An Intervening Hedge, after a review that Melville once wrote for one of Hawthorne’s books.
Finch had been working on the book for the better part of ten years. The fact that he had finished it at all was cause enough for celebration; the fact that someone had actually published it represented job security. Finch didn’t need to work. His family had left him money. But teaching was something he loved, and teaching Hawthorne and the American Romantic writers was his greatest joy in life.
Finch presented a copy to both Zee and Melville, the name of the man for whom Finch had left Zee’s mother. That’s what Zee often told people who asked, though neither statement was very accurate. Actually, Finch never left Maureen, though he had met Melville for the first time during one of Maureen’s extended hospitalizations. And Melville’s name was really Charles Thompson. Melville was a nickname Finch had given him, one that stuck.
Zee opened her book to the title page, which he had inscribed to her. To my sweet Hepzibah, he had written in a hand that was much diminished from the one she remembered. A million thank-yous. Zee was contemplating just what those thank-yous might be for when she caught the dedication that was printed on the following page: FROM HAWTHORNE TO MELVILLE WITH UNDYING AFFECTION.
Zee had always had mixed feelings about the book, which hinted at a more intimate relationship between Hawthorne and Melville than had previously been suspected. Though even Finch admitted that the men of the times had been far more accustomed to intimacy than those of today, often writing detailed letters of their affection for each other and even sharing beds, the fact that Finch had tried to prove that there was something deeper there bothered Zee more than she liked to admit. In espousing this theory, it seemed to Zee that Finch was attempting some strange form of justification for his own life choices, justification that was, in Zee’s opinion, both far-fetched and unnecessary.
That Finch and Melville were the real thing, Zee had never doubted. Not only were they clearly in love, but because they were so happy and devoted to each other, they had provided for Zee the kind of stability that Finch and Maureen never could. So despite any damage their love might have caused to the family, Zee would always be grateful for that stability.
But the relationship between Hawthorne and Sophia was a legendary love story, the kind Maureen had always wished she could find for herself. The fact that it was a true story, and one her mother had loved so much, made it sacred for Zee. Although her father was one of the country’s preeminent Hawthorne scholars and, as such, had more intimate knowledge of Hawthorne than Zee would ever have, that didn’t make it any easier for Zee to handle. From the time she was little, Finch’s love of Hawthorne had made the writer’s life almost as real to her as her own, but until recently she had never heard Finch’s theory about Hawthorne and Melville. Maybe it was some kind of misplaced loyalty to her mother, or the desperate hope that The Great Love really did exist, but Zee hated the idea that Finch was messing with the story of Hawthorne and Sophia.
She felt her face getting hot. She could see Melville watching her. Not wanting to ruin the evening, she excused herself from the table. “I forgot to feed the meter,” she said, standing too quickly, almost knocking over her glass of wine. “I’ll be right back.”
She walked out the front door and onto the street. The truth was, she had parked in the lot and not at a meter. She walked halfway down the block before she stopped.
It was Melville finally, and not Finch, who caught up with her. She could feel him standing behind her on the corner. He didn’t speak, but she could sense his presence. At last she turned around.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She just stared at him.
“I had no idea he was going to write that dedication.”
“Right,” she said. She realized as she looked at him that it was probably true. She had noticed the expression on his face when he opened the book, the quick glance that passed between them. Finch loved him. That was the truth of it. They loved each other.
“Hawthorne adored his wife,” she said to him. “There are volumes dedicated to that fact.”
“I don’t think anyone is disputing that,” Melville said.
“His whole book is disputing that.”
“I’ve read it,” Melville said. “It isn’t.”
They stood together on the sidewalk. People walked around them.
“It’s possible to truly love more than one person in this life,” Melville said. “Believe me, I know.”
She regarded him strangely. It was the first time she’d ever heard Melville say anything so revealing about his past.
She had no idea what to say.
“This night means so much to him,” Melville said.
He wasn’t telling her how to feel; he was just telling her what was true.
She felt stupid standing here, like a kid who had just thrown a tantrum. It surprised her. “I don’t know why that got to me.”
“I think it’s fairly obvious,” Melville said.
“You know that I believe you two belong together.”
“Of course,” Melville said.
“It’s just the way he does things sometimes. It brought everything back.”
“I know,” Melville said, putting his hand on her shoulder. “Come on inside with me.”
They walked back together. Finch was sitting alone at the table, looking confused. She kissed his cheek.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “My car was about to be ticketed. Lucky for me Melville had quarters.”
Finch looked so relieved that Zee almost cried. The book sat on the table where she had left it. She picked it up and turned it over, reading the blurbs on the back. A picture of a younger-looking Finch stared out at her from the jacket cover. He was standing in front of the House of the Seven Gables. “To those hedges,” she said, raising her glass.
She could see Melville’s amusement at her toast. As much as she resented him sometimes, Melville was one of the only people in the world who truly got her.
They ordered dinner and drank several glasses of wine.
Since the celebration was in Finch’s honor, Melville had planned to pick up the tab. But Finch wouldn’t hear of it and insisted on paying. The bill came to $150, but Finch laid down $240 in cash, unusual for him, as a frugal Yankee. Melville reached over and retrieved three twenties. “I think these bills were stuck together,” he said, handing them back to Finch. “Damned ATMs.”
Finch looked surprised and then slightly embarrassed. He stuffed the returned bills into his pocket.
Zee could see that he was genuinely confused.
“What’s the matter with my father?” she called to ask Melville the next morning. She was moving between classes, and the reception on her cell phone kept cutting in and out.
“He had a lot of wine,” Melville said.
“He always has a lot of wine.”
“Maybe the bills really did get stuck together.”
“Right,” Zee said.
At Melville’s insistence Finch had already made an appointment with his primary-care physician. Zee said she would prefer for him to see a neurologist in Boston.
She felt relief for about sixty seconds when the neurologist said it wasn’t Alzheimer’s.
“It’s Parkinson’s,” the doctor told them.
Now, almost ten years later, it took Finch more than a minute to shuffle to the other side of the doctor’s office.
“Good,” the neurologist said. “Though you really should be using your walker. Any falls since your last visit?”
“No,” Finch said.
“What about freezing?”
“No,” Finch said. “No freezing.”
The doctor pulled out a piece of graph paper and once again drew the wavy curves he’d drawn for them at every appointment they’d been to for the last ten years. He drew a straight line through the middle, the ideal spot indicating normal dopamine levels, the one that meant the meds were working. The waves seemed larger and farther apart in this new drawing, the periods of normalcy much shorter.
“The idea is to try to keep him in the middle,” the doctor said.
She knew well what the idea was. At the high point of the wave, there was too much dopamine and Finch’s limbs and head moved on their own, a slow, loopy movement that made him look almost as if he were swimming. At the low point on the wave, Finch was rigid and anxious. All he wanted to do then was to pace, but his stiffness made any movement almost impossible, and he was likely to fall.
“It’s a pity he didn’t respond to the time-release when we tried that,” the doctor said. “And the agonists clearly aren’t working for him. As you were informed, they do cause hallucinations in some patients.” He turned to Finch. “We can’t have you living as Nathaniel Hawthorne forever, now, can we, Professor?”
Finch looked helplessly at Zee.
“So what’s our next step?” she asked.
“There really isn’t a next step, other than upping the levels of dopamine.”
He took Finch’s hand and looked at it, then placed it lightly in Finch’s lap and watched for signs of tremor. “The surgery only seems to help with the tremor, and you really don’t have much of that, lucky for you.”
Zee had a difficult time finding anything lucky about the disease that was slowly killing her father.
“We’ll keep the timing of his Sinemet the same. But with an extra half pill added here”—he pointed to the chart—“and here.”
“So basically he still gets a dose every three hours,” Zee repeated, to be certain she was correct. “Though two of those doses will increase.”
“That’s right,” the doctor said. “Every three hours except when he’s asleep. There’s no need to give him a pill if he’s sleeping.”
“He nods off all the time. If I don’t wake him to give him his pills, he’ll only get one every six hours.”
“Wake him during the day, but don’t give him anything at night,” he instructed. “You have any trouble sleeping at night, Professor Finch?”
“Some,” Finch said.
The doctor reached for his prescription pad and wrote a prescription for trazodone. “This is to help you sleep,” he said to Finch. To Zee he said, “It should help with the sundowning as well, which should stop his wandering. And give him his first dose of Sinemet about an hour before he rises. He’ll want to move, but he’ll be too stiff. We see some nasty falls in the mornings.”
Zee looked at Finch.
“Your daughter will have to keep a close eye on you in the morning,” the doctor kidded.
She wanted to tell the doctor that she didn’t live with her father, that it was Melville he should be telling all this to, but Melville hadn’t come home last night, and she had no idea where he was. When she had asked Finch where he was, all he would say was that Melville was gone.
The doctor started to the door and turned back. “Do you have ramps and grab bars?”
“He has one grab bar,” she said. “In the shower.”
“I’m going to send over an occupational therapist to check the house. The OT can tell you what you’re missing.”
The doctor extended his hand for Finch to shake. “Nice to see you again, Professor,” he said too loudly, as if he were talking to a deaf person and not someone with what Zee had just now come to realize was advanced Parkinson’s. She wasn’t certain how Finch and Melville had kept that fact from her.
“I’m sorry the meds didn’t work out,” the doctor said. “Not so bad to be Nathaniel Hawthorne for a day or two, though, all things considered.”
Finch didn’t smile back. He took Zee’s arm as they left the office together.
“You lied to the doctor about the freezing thing,” Zee said. “I’ve seen you freeze.” She remembered the last time Finch had come to Boston for one of his checkups. As they were leaving the restaurant, he’d frozen on his way out the front door. He couldn’t move forward and he couldn’t move back. They had all stood helplessly waiting for the freeze to break, freeing Finch to step out the door.
“Not for a while,” he lied. “I haven’t frozen once since the last time he asked me that damned question.”
Chapter 8 (#ulink_1ee11521-195f-56f7-9179-f9b9e594ee24)
Friday-afternoon traffic north from Boston was brutally slow. Zee dialed the house again from her cell, hoping that Melville would answer. She was really starting to worry about him.
“Did he go to see his family?” she asked. Melville had family somewhere in Maine, a sister and two nieces. They weren’t close, but he’d been known to make occasional visits.
“No,” Finch said. “Well, where the heck is he?” Zee was frustrated. She had asked Finch where Melville was at least ten times and was tiring of his one-syllable answers.
Melville had seldom left Finch’s side for the better part of twenty years now, a fact that Zee found difficult to comprehend in these times of trial marriages and soaring divorce rates. The two had become a couple long before her mother’s suicide, though Zee had been too young to realize it at the time. When they’d first gotten together, Zee had believed her father when he told her that the reason they spent so much time with each other was that Melville was his best friend. It wasn’t a lie, it just wasn’t the whole truth.
Zee’s mother was the one who told her about Finch’s preference for men. As with many of the inappropriate things Maureen had told her during her manic episodes, Zee would only understand the full impact of the statement in retrospect. At the time the professor had begun to hang out with Mickey and his pirate-reenactor buddies on weekends and during school vacations, and Zee supposed that was what her mother had meant by a preference. Zee was very aware of how much partying they all did together. The pirates drank and they sang, and Finch, who was usually almost prim in his New England reserve, drank and sang with them. Sometimes she would hear him singing as he made his way into the house late at night, the clichéd songs of the gutter drunk that she recognized from the old movies she watched with her mother. Finch was the singing, tippling, happy drunk of 1930s comedies. His joy at such times, especially as it contrasted with Maureen’s growing depression, made Zee believe she understood why her father preferred the company of men. Men drank and sang and had fun. Her only wish at those times was that she could be one of them.
Maureen, being Maureen, eventually told Zee intimate details of Finch’s predilection for men. Much later, when Zee was old enough to have a reference point for such things, she began to understand what her mother had meant and why she had told the stories with such anger. Finch’s misrepresentation of himself to Maureen had become the major betrayal of her mother’s life.
In Zee’s mind, Maureen’s unfulfilled dream had always been to experience what she referred to as “The Great Love.” It was what she wanted most in life and what she had sworn to have from Finch when they first met and when they spent the early days of their marriage on Baker’s Island. She often spoke longingly of the night he had recited aloud to her—not the dark lines of Hawthorne but Yeats. On their wedding night, he had presented her a copy of the book the poem had come from, and that book became one of the treasures of her life. She kept it locked on Baker’s Island in the room where she’d spent her wedding night and which had since become her writing studio. That she no longer found such passion in her everyday life with Finch was her cross to bear. Being Irish and Catholic, Maureen Finch was all too familiar with the idea of burden, and hers had become an increasingly loveless marriage within the confines of a religion that vehemently discouraged her escape.
After it became clear to her that Finch had turned to men, a time Maureen referred to as “The Betrayal,” Maureen had holed up in her cottage on Baker’s Island and had begun to write the story she’d never been able to finish, which she had entitled “The Once.” Finch marked this as the first sign of her impending insanity, though when Zee thought about it now, it was more likely a very bad case of postpartum depression, and one from which Maureen had never fully recovered.
It had been a difficult pregnancy and an even more difficult labor and delivery. The fact that Maureen hadn’t bonded with the child she’d borne him was no great worry to Finch—he had bonded well enough for both of them. The birth of his beloved Hepzibah was the single factor that kept him in his marriage, for, not being a Catholic himself, he was more inclined to believe that the mistake he’d made with such a hasty marriage might be easily remedied.
The days leading up to Maureen Finch’s death had been so terrible that Zee and her father had never talked about them. Zee had talked with Mattei about them many times during her sessions, but never with Finch. In retrospect she wondered how many of those days Finch actually remembered, his drinking having progressed, on many occasions, to the blackout stage.
What Zee remembered only too well was a late night, not long before Maureen’s death, when Finch, drunk and dressed in his pirate garb, stood in the kitchen and recited Hawthorne in a voice loud enough to fill one of his lecture halls: “ ‘No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.’ ” At the time Zee had believed that he was talking about being a pirate. Now, of course, she knew better.
Whether Finch remembered the day of the suicide or not, Zee would never forget his face. Coming home from his revelry, singing up the alleyway, he was instantly sobered by the sound of Maureen’s screams. He rushed into the house and up the stairway to find Maureen bent backward, spine arched in backbend until her head was almost resting on the floor. Her arms stuck straight outward parallel to the floor as if she were performing a gymnastic feat of great difficulty. He stood in the doorway staring, then watched as his wife collapsed. It was such a bizarre and frightening sight that Zee thought of demonic possession and even of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.
Zee stood helpless and distanced, praying that the 911 ambulance she had called would arrive in time. She did not dare touch her mother’s body. A moment before, her touch had started her mother’s third convulsion—she was certain of it. Zee and Finch stood back, staring in horror, completely helpless as they watched Maureen die.
Ironically, it had been the wail of the approaching ambulance that had sent Maureen into her final convulsion.
For the next two years, until the day Melville came back for good, Finch had dedicated himself to the process of totally anesthetizing himself, leaving Zee stealing boats and otherwise fending for herself.
They didn’t talk about Maureen’s death, not directly anyway. One night almost a year later, Finch turned to Zee and invoked another quote from Hawthorne, speaking of “ ‘That pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere. The firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage-scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm.’ ”
Finch was clearly distraught. Family life, strange though it might have been with Maureen, was nonexistent now. So when Melville came back and moved into the house to stay, with him came a certain peace that Zee had not previously known. Finch stopped spending all his leisure time with Mickey and the pirates. And he slowed his drinking to a pace that was quite respectable for a seacoast town in New England— that is to say, more than moderate but not too extreme. He didn’t sing anymore, but Zee could see that Finch was truly happy.
One day in Zee’s freshman year of high school, she came home and announced, “My friend Sarah Anne says that our home is not a normal place.”
Finch thought about it for a long moment before he spoke. This time, instead of quoting Hawthorne, he quoted Herman Melville: “It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
Zee recognized the quote immediately. Though Finch usually quoted Hawthorne, he had schooled his daughter well in all the American Romantic writers. Moby-Dick was her all-time-favorite book.
Zee had to admit that, for the first time she could remember, there was a semblance of family in the old house on Turner Street. And though it might seem an odd situation to the outside world, it was far more normal than anything Zee had yet experienced in her young life.
For his part, Finch seemed rather to enjoy shocking people with his new status, a fact that ultimately turned Mickey against him. Taking it up a notch, Finch often introduced his new partner to people he’d known his entire life, telling them that Melville was not only his live-in lover but an ecoterrorist as well. Actually, Melville was a journalist. Before he met Finch, Melville had been investigating a Greenpeace splinter group that was trying to interfere with minke whaling off the coast of Iceland. The nickname Finch gave him stuck. Everyone in town now called him Melville.
He wasn’t a bad guy. In some ways Melville was easier to be around than Finch. Her only real objection was that Finch always let Melville run interference for him. Melville handled everything that Finch found difficult in life, which was a lot. And although Finch was happily letting the rest of Salem know of his relationship with Melville, he had never really talked to his daughter about it. It had been Melville, finally, who explained the kind of love that he and Finch had for each other, though by the time he got around to talking to her about it, she had pretty much figured things out for herself.
Finch and Melville had started seeing each other during her mother’s final and longest hospitalization. The way Melville explained it, Finch had led him to believe that Maureen was probably never going to get out of the hospital. Zee always wondered about that. It was the opposite of what Finch had told Zee on their Saturday trips to see her mother. Every Saturday, on the way to the hospital, Finch assured his daughter that Maureen would be coming home soon and that they shouldn’t give up hope.
Still, she believed Melville when he told her that he’d been misled by Finch. It seemed important to Melville that she know this, desperately important somehow that she not think he was a man who would intentionally break up a family. Surprisingly, she believed him. Zee knew all about The Betrayal, though she was certain that Finch didn’t know she knew. Maureen was a talker, particularly when she was in one of her manic periods. Over the years she had told Zee much more than was appropriate to tell a daughter about her father. And Zee could do nothing with the information her mother had given her. Maureen had sworn her to secrecy. So Zee became aware, as Maureen had intended, that her father was sometimes less than honest and forthcoming when it came to getting what he wanted. She didn’t fault him for it. Zee knew better than anyone how difficult Maureen’s illness had become. But she noted it.
When Maureen had finally come home from the hospital, it was Melville who had disappeared, accepting a writing assignment that took him first to California and later as far away as the Aleutian Islands. He didn’t return to Salem until two years later. By that time Maureen was dead, Finch was spending his summer vacation drinking with the pirates, and Zee was out stealing boats.
Finch immediately sobered up, quit pirating, and moved Melville into the house.
Months later, when Zee was caught stealing a cuddy-cabin boat, it wasn’t Finch who came to post bail but Melville. It was also Melville who accompanied her to court and Melville who made certain that her juvenile records were sealed.
And when she was required to go to therapy in Boston, it was Melville who drove her. Finch, who had no idea she was stealing boats to get herself out to Baker’s Island and the house her mother had left her, not only was disgusted by her behavior but accused her of being just like her mother.
“You don’t understand,” she heard him say to Melville. “This illness runs in families. She’s showing the same kinds of signs, doing the same kinds of dangerous things. She’s skipping school. She’s stealing boats. I can’t have it,” he said. “I’ll send her away to school before I will deal with this again.”
And so Melville took her to a therapist and waited for her in the waiting room. The therapist found no signs of manic depression. While it was clear that Zee was acting out, the therapist thought it was a cry for help, or at least for attention from her father.
If the therapist was correct and it was a cry for help, it had been Melville, and not Finch, who answered it.
“He’s threatening to sell your mother’s house on Baker’s Island,” Melville told her on the way home from her session with the psychiatrist.
“He can’t do that,” Zee said.
“He can. You’re a minor, and Finch has been paying upkeep and taxes.”
Zee panicked. The house was the last thing she had of her mother’s. “I’ll get a job,” she said.
“It wouldn’t be enough.”
“I’ll quit school and get a job.”
“If you quit school, he will sell the house immediately. Don’t even think about quitting school.”
“What am I supposed to do? He can’t sell my house.”
“If I were you,” Melville said, “I think I would learn to behave.”
It was simple advice, and she heeded it. From that day on, Zee didn’t steal another boat. She didn’t skip school again. And, to the best of her ability, she tried to learn to please her father and do what was expected of her.
The ride back from Boston had taken forever. Finch was weary, and so was Zee. She turned the car onto Turner Street, stopping to let a group of day-campers, who had just come from the Gables tour, get back onto their yellow school bus. After they passed, Zee pulled the car into the driveway next to Melville’s boat. Dusty, the cat next door, who had become the mascot for the House of the Seven Gables, was sunning himself on the bench in the stern. He looked up, yawned, then stretched and settled back into a more comfortable sleeping position.
The old lobster boat was wrapped in white plastic that had begun, over the years, to flake and tear. A screen door that was cut into the wrapping over the stern showed through to the boat’s interior ribs, revealing the vital internal organs: the galley, the bunk beds, the head. A yellow slicker she recognized as Melville’s was still slung over the brass cleat near the captain’s chair. The old boat gave the impression of a sugared Easter egg, the old-fashioned kind that contained a whole world inside.
Seeing the boat, Zee was prompted to ask one more time after Melville.
“What do you mean, gone?” she asked when Finch repeated the word for probably the fourteenth time.
“Gone, disappeared, poof!” he said, making an upward sweep with his hand.
In a way she wished, hoped, he had not altogether given up speaking as Hawthorne. At least Hawthorne would have answered her question with a recitation that might have yielded more meaning.
This time she changed her question. Instead of asking where Melville had gone, she asked, “Well, when do you think he will be back?”
“Never,” Finch said.
She should have let him off at the kitchen door, she thought. It would have been a much easier walk. Because they used the front door, there was a long and cluttered hall that Finch had to negotiate. She grasped his arm to guide him down the hall to the kitchen, but he shook her off. He could do it himself, he told her.
It took several minutes for Finch to travel the long hall from the front door to the kitchen of the old house. She followed his stiff-legged shuffle the length of the hall. The ceilings were low in this house. The wide pine floors sloped on the diagonal. A child’s marble dropped in the living room would end up in the kitchen, which made walking difficult enough. But the piles of newspapers Finch had collected over the years seemed to grow precariously out of the floor every few feet. They were waist-high in some places, and they seemed to sway when she walked by them like Disney rocks that were about to tumble. And then there were Finch’s books, piled on every surface: the mantels, the desk, the raffia awning-striped wing chair in his den. She was reminded of a pinball machine as she watched Finch navigate unsteadily through the room. His walker stood in the kitchen fireplace. Still wrapped in plastic, it was the same yellowing white as Melville’s boat.
After she helped Finch inside, Zee went around the side of the house and began to collect the assorted things that he had placed outside the window of the cent shop he’d created: two pairs of shoes, fishing gear, several lightbulbs of varying wattage, and a set of binoculars. Slowly she began to realize that most of the items Finch had been selling actually belonged to Melville. The hand-lettered sign he’d hung on the window, the one saying that everything must go, began to take on a new meaning.
Some people throw people’s belongings to the curb. Finch, ever the practical Yankee, had opened Hepzibah’s Cent-Shop and tried to make a profit.
“Don’t bring that stuff back in here,” Finch said when he saw her coming through the door with a pile of Melville’s shirts.
“What the hell happened between you two?” Zee asked.
“None of your business,” he answered.
She put the shirts and the rest of what she could gather on Melville’s boat, forgetting Dusty was there and almost tripping herself in a last-minute effort not to step on his tail. “You’d better be getting on home,” she said when the old cat looked up at her. “It’s going to rain.”
By dinnertime Finch seemed almost his normal self again. She wondered how much of this was the meds. Though he was considerably better than he had been, she knew that the drugs were still in his system. The doctor had told her they wouldn’t totally clear out of his bloodstream for another forty-eight hours.
“Let me make you something for dinner,” she offered.
“No, look, I’ve got it right here,” he said.
He opened the fridge to reveal a row of labeled sandwiches. She noticed the script on the labels, cursive and feminine, decidedly not Melville’s. Peanut Butter, Tuna, Deviled Ham—dates scribbled under the titles. Finch took out the deviled ham, pointing to the others and telling her to help herself.
He couldn’t swallow very well anymore. She remembered Melville’s telling her that. Melville had also told her that bowel movements were becoming increasingly difficult for Finch, peristalsis slowing with the disease. She remembered he was supposed to eat prunes. She looked around for some, searched in cabinets and in the fridge. Then she wondered if they had settled on some medication instead.
She needed to ask Melville these questions. Even if he was gone, as Finch insisted, she still needed to talk to him.
“What do you want to drink?” she asked.
“Milk,” he said.
He wasn’t supposed to drink milk with his pills. He knew that. She poured him a glass of ginger ale instead. She chose a tuna sandwich for herself.
They ate in silence. She could see the difficulty he was having swallowing his food. It made her sad. But at least he was eating. Melville had long ago replaced Finch’s favorite Wonder bread with whole wheat. Two Oreo cookies had been placed on the side of each plate, Saran Wrap tight over the top. Finch had always loved Oreos.
She slid the two cookies on her plate across the table to him. He smiled at her. Standing up slowly, he shuffled toward the fridge.
“What do you want?” Zee asked. “I’ll get it for you.”
“I told you,” he said. “Milk.”
“You can’t have milk with your pills,” she said. “Milk interferes with dopamine absorption.” She was there when the doctor had told him that.
Finch acted as if he had no such recollection. But Zee could tell by his smirk that he was lying. This was his form of cheating. Oreos with milk.
“I took my pills half an hour ago,” he said.
“Twenty minutes,” Zee corrected.
He rolled his head back and forth to demonstrate the ease of movement. He was acting, exaggerating the range, imitating the looping head of the dopamine at its peak. “See, it’s working already,” he said. He was right, of course. If it weren’t working at least a little bit, he would be too stiff to fake any movement. As if to punctuate, he touched his thumb to his middle finger over and over, the way they made him do in the doctor’s office.
“Suit yourself,” Zee said. But he knew she didn’t mean it.
He ate the cookies and sipped at the milk. The fun had gone out of it for him, though. He left half a glass on the table when he got up and made his way into the den.
By 7:00 P.M. he was asleep in his chair, heavily dosed with Sinemet, his head flopping forward. A long string of saliva dripped out of his open mouth and onto his pressed shirt. He wouldn’t wake up again until it was almost time for the next pill. Then he would be agitated, looking for something, anything, to take away the tension his brain was creating. He might open his cent shop again for the tourists, though they had cleared out by now. Most likely he would try to walk, the worst thing he could do.
It turned out that Finch had been right. The medicine was working. The flattened midpoint of normalcy the doctor always drew on the wave graph had happened exactly when Finch said it had happened, when they were in the kitchen eating the Oreos. She realized that now. She should never have complained about the milk.
Chapter 9 (#ulink_69c1e576-cd21-5a52-9728-a24b44cc35e4)
Strangely, it was Michael and not her father who finally let her know where Melville was.
“He’s been leaving you messages on the home phone,” Michael said.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“You’re in Salem. I figured you knew.”
She could tell that Michael was angry. She’d been feeling guilty about it all week, but now she was angry, too. He’d been traveling again, and he hadn’t called. She’d been leaving messages on the home phone as well as his cell. She’d also been texting.
“So how was the funeral?”
“Okay,” she said.
“Did it turn out as you expected?”
“I don’t know what I expected,” she said. “But no.”
A long pause, then from Zee, “Could we please get back to Melville?”
“I told you all I know.”
“He didn’t say anything else? Just that he had moved out?”
“That and the phone number,” he said.
She wanted to call immediately.
“How’s Finch?” he asked.
“Not good,” she said.
She could hear his tone soften as they talked about her father. The two men had always gotten on well together. In many ways they were a lot alike. “You want me to come out there?”
“Not right now,” she said, a little too quickly.
“Jesus,” he said.
“That didn’t sound the way I meant it.”
“You sure about that?”
“Let me call Melville and see what’s going on. I’ll call you right back,” she said. “Then we can decide whether or not you should come out.”
“Don’t do me any favors,” he said. “I already had plans for the weekend—we had plans, actually.”
More wedding stuff, she thought. “I can’t talk about any of that right now,” she said.
“Nothing to talk about. Just a statement of fact.”
“I’ll call you back,” she said, hanging up.
She dialed the number Melville had left for her.
He picked up on the first ring. “Oh, thank God,” he said. “You’re in Salem.”
“Yeah, I am. Where the hell are you?”
“Finch kicked me out,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“He’s very angry at me.”
“I can see that,” Zee said. “What did you do to him?”
“I don’t know.” He paused for a long moment. “Actually, I do know. But it doesn’t make much sense. It was something that happened a long time ago, something I thought we had worked out.”
“Evidently not,” she said. “He was selling all your things through the window when I got here.”
“Please tell me you’re kidding.”
“I’m not,” Zee said. “He has re-created Hepzibah’s Cent-Shop in the front room. He was selling all your belongings.”
Melville couldn’t help but laugh.
“It’s not funny,” she said.
“No, but it’s creative,” he said. “Forgive me, it’s the only time I’ve even smiled all week.”
“I rescued some of your shirts,” she said.
“For that I am eternally grateful.”
“The doctor thinks it’s the new meds,” she offered. “They were causing hallucinations. We took him off them.”
“What’s he doing instead?”
“More Sinemet. One every three hours with two half doses added in twice a day.”
Melville was quiet.
“Are you still there?” Zee asked.
“Yeah.” After another long moment, Melville changed the subject. “I hired a home health aide,” he said. “Her name is Jessina. She doesn’t work on Fridays, but she’ll be in tomorrow.”
“I don’t understand how you’ve been keeping all this from me,” Zee said. “Or why.”
Melville sighed. “Finch didn’t want to worry you.”
She thought back to the effort it must have taken them both to keep things from her. “Any other secrets?”
“You should come over here. We need to figure things out,” he said.
“Where is ‘here’?”
“I’m house-sitting,” he said. “Friend of a friend. Over by the Athenaeum. Come by tomorrow after Jessina gets there.”
She wrote down the address. After she hung up, she went to the bedroom to check on Finch. He was sleeping soundly. She walked back to the kitchen and dialed Michael.
It rang three times before it went to voice mail.
Zee took out her anger on the kitchen. She cleaned. She scrubbed down stove and counters. She polished the toaster until it shined. As she pulled the canisters away from the wall and began to clean behind them, she found several items meant for decorating cakes: red and blue sugar, some bottles of food coloring, and some spices, including an old amber bottle—all stuff obviously left over from some baking project of Melville’s. She opened the amber bottle and looked inside at the tiny silver balls, the kind you might find on a fancy cake or maybe Christmas cookies—dragées, she thought they were called. They were probably too old to keep, but she didn’t want to throw anything out without asking, so she put all the bottles back in the cabinet with the other baking things.
Melville was a great cook, but he had never been great at cleaning or organizing. As she put the cake decorations away, she started reorganizing the cabinets, putting like with like, the canned goods in one cabinet, the spices in another. Her anger was fading, but the energy of adrenaline was not, and so she moved from cabinet to cabinet, wiping down the surfaces as she went, arranging the labels. She became aware that she was being a bit obsessive when she actually considered alphabetizing everything.
When she got to the third cabinet, she was surprised. Hidden behind the boxes of cereal, she found all the wine that Michael had given Finch, every birthday and Christmas for the last four years, all second-growth vintages, really good wines from Michael’s own collection. They weren’t stored on their sides but stood upright, a sure way to ruin the corks. Horrified, she pulled them out and set them on the counter.
Before his diagnosis of Parkinson’s, from his pirate days on, Finch’s alcohol consumption had been increasing steadily. He had developed a real fondness for wine. From a medical standpoint, this now made sense to Zee, though she’d never seen the phenomenon described in any of the medical journals she’d begun to read on a regular basis. Alcohol releases dopamine, the one chemical that Parkinson’s patients need.
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Brunonia Barry
From the author of The Lace Reader comes an emotionally resonant novel of tragedy, secrets, identity, and love.Zee Finch has a career as a respected psychotherapist and she’s about to get married, but the shocking death of Zee’s most troubled patient brings to the surface secrets in Zee’s own life.Zee is finally forced to confront the truth behind her mother’s death and the unfinished story she left behind. With a rich atmosphere, colourful, memorable, engaging characters, Brunonia Barry has written a wonderful novel that will appeal to fans of THE LACE READER but also to readers who enjoy sophisticated, emotionally gripping fiction.
BRUNONIA BARRY
The Map of True Places
For my parents, June and Jack. I miss you every day.
And, as always, for Gary.
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
—HERMAN MELVILLE
Contents
Cover (#u6f046d24-fc30-5533-8e69-3c1eb49c19ad)
Title Page (#u2ae16b1a-738a-5134-9008-eec8acc00d9d)
Epigraph (#u246e1518-1c6f-5a8c-8203-544af9235100)
Prologue
Part 1: May 2008
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part 2: June 2008
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Part 3: July 2008
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Part 4: August 2008
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Part 5: September–October 2008
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Epilogue: May 2009, Memorial Day Weekend
Acknowledgments
Author’s Disclaimer
Also by Brunonia Barry
Copyright
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_fac3656f-5184-5d08-8da7-7447b36f8157)
In the years when her middle name was Trouble, Zee had a habit of stealing boats. Her father never suspected her of any wrong-doing. He let her run free in those early days after her mother’s death. He was busy being a pirate reenactor, an odd leap for a man who’d been a literary scholar all his life. But those were desperate times, and they were both weary from constantly carrying their loss, unable to put it down except in those brief moments when they could throw themselves into something beyond the reach of their memories.
In her fantasy world, the one where she could forgive herself for what happened that year, Zee liked to think that her father, Finch, would have been proud of her skills as a thief. In her wildest dreams, she pictured him joining her adventure, a huge leap for the professor, but not for the pirate he was quickly becoming.
She had a preference for speedboats. Anything that could do over thirty knots was fair game. There was little security back then, and most of the keys (if there were any) were hidden somewhere on the boats themselves, usually in the most obvious place imaginable.
The game was simple. She would pick a boat that looked fast and sleek, give herself exactly five minutes to break in and get the engine started, and head out of the harbor toward the ocean. Once she passed the confines of Salem, she would open up the engine and point the bow straight out toward Baker’s Island. Later that night she would return the stolen boat.
There was only one rule. She could never return a boat to the same mooring from which she had stolen it. It was a good rule, not just because it presented an additional challenge but also because it was practical. If she put the boat back on the same mooring, she would be much more likely to get caught. Everyone knows that the last thing any good thief should do is revisit the scene of the crime.
Usually Zee would abandon the boat at one of the public wharves that lined Salem’s waterfront. Often it was the one at the Willows, the first wharf you came to when you entered the harbor. But when the cops started looking for her, she began to leave the boats in other, less obvious places. Sometimes she would jump someone else’s mooring. Or she would leave a boat in one of the slips at Derby Wharf, which made it easy to get away, since she lived so close.
Only one time did she mess up and misjudge the fuel level. She was all the way up by Singing Beach in Manchester when the engine died. At first she didn’t believe she had run out of gas. But when she checked the fuel again, her mistake was clear. Fighting the panic that was beginning to overtake her, she tried to come up with a plan. She could easily swim to shore, but if she did, the boat would either drift out to sea or smash against the rocks. For the first time, she was afraid of getting caught. In a strange way, she was grateful that there were no other boats around, no one she could signal for help. Not knowing what else to do, she let the boat drift.
She looked up at the moonless sky, the stars brighter than she had ever seen them, their reflections dissolving in the water around her like an effervescent medicine that seemed to dissolve her panic as well. Here, floating along with the current, staring up at the heavens, she knew that everything would be all right.
When she looked back down at the horizon to get her bearings, she found she had drifted toward shore. A dark outline of something appeared in her peripheral vision, and, when she turned to face it, a wharf came into focus and, on the hill beyond it, a darkened house. She grabbed an oar and began to steer the boat in toward shore, catching the onsweep of tide that propelled it broadside toward the wharf. She grabbed the bowline and jumped, slipping and twisting her ankle a little but keeping the boat from colliding with the wharf. She tied up, securing bow and stern, and scrambled over the rocks to the beach. Then she made her way up the road toward the train station, limping a bit from her aching ankle but not really too bad, all things considered.
Zee wanted to take the train back to Salem, but it was past midnight, and the trains had stopped running. She thought about sleeping on the beach. It was a warm night. It would have been safe. But she didn’t want to concern her father, who had enough to worry about these days. And she didn’t want to be anywhere in the vicinity of Manchester when they found the stolen boat.
So she ended up hitchhiking back to Salem. Not a smart thing to do, she thought as she walked to the Chevy Nova that had stopped about fifty feet ahead of her and was frantically backing up.
It was a woman who picked her up, probably mid-forties, slightly overweight, with long hair and blue eyes that glowed with the light of passing cars. At first the woman said she was only going as far as Beverly. But then she changed her mind and decided to take Zee all the way home, because if she didn’t she was afraid that Zee would start hitchhiking again and might be picked up by a murderer or a rapist.
As they rode down Route 127, the woman told Zee every horror story she had ever heard about hitchhiking and then made Zee give her word never to do it again. Zee promised, just to shut her up.
“That’s what all the kids say, but they do it anyway,” the woman said.
Zee wanted to tell her that she never hitched, that she wasn’t the victim type, and that she had only thumbed a ride tonight to cover a crime she’d committed—grand theft boato. But she didn’t know what other cautionary tales such a confession might unleash, so she kept her mouth shut.
As she was getting out of the car, Zee turned back to the woman. Instead of saying thank you, she said, in a voice that was straight out of a Saturday-morning cartoon show she’d watched when she was a little girl, “Will you be my mommy?”
She had meant it as a joke. But the woman broke down. She just started crying and wouldn’t stop.
Zee told the woman that she was kidding. She had her own mother, she said, even though it wasn’t true, not anymore.
Nothing she could say would stop the woman’s tears, and so finally she said what she should have said all along: “Thank you for the ride.”
Of course Zee hadn’t given the woman her real address—she didn’t want her getting any ideas, like maybe going into the house and having a word with Finch. She had planned to hide in the shadows until the woman drove away and then cut through the neighboring yards to get home. But in the end she just walked straight down the road. The woman was crying too hard to notice where Zee went or how she got there.
Ten years later, as Zee was training to become a psychotherapist (having outgrown the middle name Trouble), she saw the woman again in one of the panic groups run by her mentor, Dr. Liz Mattei. The woman didn’t remember her, but Zee would have known her anywhere—those same translucent blue eyes, still teary. The woman had lost a child, a teenager and a runaway, she said. Her daughter had been diagnosed as bipolar, like Zee’s mother, Maureen, but had refused to keep taking lithium because it made her fat. She’d been last seen hitchhiking on Route 95, heading south, holding a hand-lettered sign that read new york.
It was the winter of 2001 and ten years since the woman had lost her daughter. The Twin Towers had recently come down. The panic group had grown in size, but its original members had become oddly more calm and helpful to each other, as if their free-floating anxiety had finally taken form, and the rest of the country had begun to feel the kind of terror they’d felt every day for years. For the first time Zee could remember, people in the group actually looked at each other. And when the woman talked about her daughter, as she had every week they’d been meeting, the group finally heard her.
The world can change, just like that! the woman said.
In the blink of an eye, someone answered.
Tissues were passed. And the group cried together for the first time, crying for the girl and for her inevitable loss of innocence and, of course, for their own.
Bipolar disorder had recently become a catchall diagnosis. While it had once been believed that the condition occurred after the onset of puberty (as it had with this woman’s daughter), now children were being diagnosed as early as three years of age. Zee didn’t know what she thought about that. As with many things lately, she was of two minds about it. She hadn’t realized her joke until Mattei pointed it out, thinking it was intentional. No, Zee had told her. She was serious. Certainly it was a disease that needed treatment. Untreated bipolar disorder seldom led to anything but devastation. But medicating too early seemed wrong, something more in line with insurance and drug-company agendas than with the kind of help Zee had trained for years to provide.
The world-famous Dr. Mattei had long since abandoned her panic group, leaving them for Zee or one of the other psychologists to oversee. Mattei had moved on to her latest bestselling-book idea, which proposed the theory that the daughter will always live out the unfulfilled dreams of the mother. Even if she doesn’t know what those dreams are, even if those dreams have never been expressed, this will happen, according to Mattei, with alarming regularity. It wasn’t a new idea. But it was Mattei’s theory that this was more likely to happen if those dreams were never expressed, in much the same way that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Zee had often wondered about the woman with the translucent eyes who came back to the panic group only once after that evening. She wondered about her unfulfilled dreams, expressed or unexpressed, and she wondered if there was something that the daughter was acting out for her mother as she herself had stood on Route 95 and accepted a ride from a stranger heading south.
Zee was glad that the woman had left the group before Mattei had brought up her latest theory. The mother blamed herself enough for her daughter’s disappearance, wondering every day if she might have changed the course of events if only she’d given her daughter that one elusive thing she’d failed to provide—something tangible and even ordinary, perhaps, like that red dress in Filene’s window. Or the week away at Girl Scout camp that her daughter had begged for years ago.
No one understood the concept of “if only” better than Zee. She lived it every day, though she didn’t have to search to find the elusive thing. She thought she knew what her mother had wanted that day so many years ago, what might have helped lift her out of her depression. It was a book of Yeats’s poetry given to Maureen by Finch on their wedding day, and it was one of her mother’s treasures. Zee’s “if only” had worked in reverse. If only she hadn’t gotten her mother what she wanted that day, if only she hadn’t left her alone, Zee might have been able to save her.
Part 1: May 2008 (#ulink_6c3d87f7-f4c7-593f-8da7-f2919df5a26f)
Method of Keeping a Ship’s Reckoning . . .
A ship’s reckoning is that account, by which it can be known at any time where the ship is, and on what course or courses she must steer to gain her port.
NATHANIEL BOWDITCH: The American Practical Navigator
Chapter 1 (#ulink_b01904f5-6c64-5734-864d-2120b2779344)
Lilly Braedon was late.
Mattei poked her head through Zee’s door. “It’s so damned hot out there,” she said. “Oh, God, you’re not in session, are you?”
“I’m supposed to be,” Zee said, looking at the clock. It was three-fifteen.
Mattei was re-dressing as she spoke, kicking off running shoes and pulling on her suit jacket. She walked five miles along the Charles River every afternoon, weather notwithstanding. When she was overbooked, which was a good deal of the time, she had been known to conduct her sessions while strolling along the river, calling it a walking meditation, telling patients it would be easier to open up if they didn’t feel her prying eyes on them. A week after she started conducting sessions that way, every shrink in Boston was out walking with patients.
“God, not that agoraphobic again.” It was another of Mattei’s jokes. Fifty percent of their patients had some degree of agoraphobia, a phenomenon that made attendance poor at best and had lately prompted Mattei to start charging time and a half for missed appointments, though Zee seldom required her patients to comply with this new rule.
Mattei was trying harder than usual to make her laugh today, meaning that Zee must be frowning again. Zee’s natural expression seemed to be the type of frown that inspired joke telling, often from total strangers, who always felt compelled to make her feel better somehow. Just this morning an older gentleman who had neglected to pick up his dog’s poop in Louisburg Square had walked over to her and ordered her to smile.
She stared at him.
“Things can’t be all that bad,” he said.
If he hadn’t been older than her father, Zee would have told him to get lost, that this was her natural expression, and that a man who didn’t pick up his dog’s excrement shouldn’t be allowed to roam free. But instead she managed a vague smirk.
“So seriously, which patient?” Mattei was waiting for an answer.
“Lilly Braedon.”
“Mrs. Perfect,” she said. “Oh, no, I forgot, that’s you.”
“Not yet,” Zee said a little too quickly.
“Aha!” Mattei said. “Simple, simple. Case closed. That will be three hundred and fifty dollars.”
“Funny,” Zee said as Mattei gathered up her running shoes and left the room.
It was Lilly Braedon’s husband who had originally sought help at Dr. Mattei’s clinic. People came from all over the world to be treated by her. Harvard trained, with a stint at Johns Hopkins, Mattei was a psychiatrist who had great credentials. She’d written the definitive article on bipolar disorder with panic for the American Journal of Psychiatry. She had also worked closely with a team of genetic researchers who had uncovered a correlation between the disease and the eighteenth chromosome, a substantial and groundbreaking discovery.
But then Mattei’s career took a turn. She became fascinated by a more popular approach to psychiatry. The book she wrote during her tenth year in practice, a folksy self-help book entitled Safe at Home, lifted her to celebrity status. The book was inspired by a Red Sox second-stringer she had successfully treated for panic. Her practical solutions to his terror were based on biofeedback, desensitization, and sense memory.
“The world is a terrifying place,” Mattei explained first to a local newscaster and later to Oprah. “And here is what you can do to stop being afraid.” The book was filled with sensory tricks, tips almost too simple to inspire much credibility: carry a worry stone, smell lavender, breathe deeply. The companion CD featured guided meditations, some with music, some including nature sounds or poetry. It even quoted the old Irish prayer (the one that basically tells you not to worry about a damned thing because the worst thing that can happen is that you’ll go to hell, but that’s where all your friends will be anyway, so it’s pointless to fret). Though Mattei herself was a loose fusion of French, Italian, and Japanese ancestry, with not a bit of Irish blood, for some reason she loved everything about the Irish. It might have been a Boston thing. She loved James Joyce and even swore she had read and understood Finnegans Wake, which Zee seriously doubted. That Mattei loved Guinness and U2, Zee did not doubt. Zee and her fiancé, Michael, had spent last St. Paddy’s Day at a bar in Southie with Mattei and her partner, Rhonda, and Mattei had held her own, drinking with the best of Boston’s Irish. And just a month ago, Mattei had come back from one of her therapy walks sporting a pair of pink Armani sunglasses that looked very similar to a pair Zee had once seen Bono wear.
Mattei had done the usual book-tour circuit. But it was when she landed on Oprah that things went wild. There was a growing sense of panic in this country, Mattei explained to Oprah. It was everywhere. Since 9/11, certainly. And the economy? Terrifying. “Do you know the number one fear of women?” she had asked. “Becoming homeless,” she said. She went on to explain that the number one fear of the general population is public speaking. Many people say they’d rather die than get up in front of a group to give a presentation. After she reeled off such statistics, Mattei turned and spoke directly to the camera. “What are you really afraid of?” she asked America. It became a challenge that echoed through the popular culture. She closed the show with a paraphrased quote from Albert Einstein. The only real question you have to ask yourself is whether or not the universe is a friendly place, she explained, then went on to translate into terms anyone could understand. Once you’ve decided that, Mattei said, you can pretty much determine what your future will hold.
Her book hit the top of the New York Times Best Seller list and stayed there for sixty-two weeks. As Mattei’s fame grew, her patient list expanded exponentially, and she brought in interns to mentor, though her real work was still with bipolars.
“Did you know that eighty percent of poets are bipolar?” Mattei asked Zee one morning.
“My mother wasn’t a poet. She wrote children’s books,” Zee said.
“Nevertheless . . .” Mattei replied.
“Nevertheless” was probably the best thing Zee had ever learned from Mattei. It was a word, certainly, but much more than a word, it was a concept. “Nevertheless” was what you said when you were not going to budge, whether expressing an opinion or an intention. It was a statement, not a question, and the only word in the English language to which it was pointless to respond. If you wanted to end a conversation or an argument, “nevertheless” was your word.
Zee often thought that what had happened with her mother was another reason Mattei had hired her. Maureen’s case history might well be considered good material for a new book. But Mattei had never approached her about it. When Zee mentioned her theory one day, Mattei told her that she was mistaken, that she had actually hired Zee because of her red hair.
Theory and research were still Mattei’s passion, and though she had a thriving practice, she also had that elusive second book to write and her new mother-daughter theory to document. So most of Zee’s patients were Mattei’s overflow. Her “sloppy seconds” is what Michael called them, though he was clearly unaware of the perverse meaning of his slang. He’d meant it to be amusing rather than pornographic. The truth was, anything Mattei did was okay with Michael. They had been friends since med school. When Mattei suggested that Michael meet Zee, telling him she thought she’d found the perfect girl for him, he was only too happy to oblige.
Soon after that, Zee had found herself out on a blind date with Michael.
Upon Mattei’s recommendation, he had taken her to Radius. He had ordered for both of them, some Kurobuta pork and a two-hundred-dollar Barolo. By the time they finished the bottle, Zee found herself saying yes to a weekend with him on the Vineyard. They had moved in together shortly afterward. Not unlike the job Mattei had given her, the relationship just sort of happened.
What followed still seemed to Zee more like posthypnotic suggestion than real life. Not only had Michael easily agreed that Zee was the perfect girl for him, he’d never even seemed to question it. And exactly one year after their first date, a period of time most probably deemed respectable by Mattei, Michael had proposed.
Zee had been grateful when Mattei chose to hire her. She had just received her master’s and was working on her Ph.D. when Mattei invited her to join her practice, giving her some group sessions to moderate and mentoring her as she went. By the time she’d earned the title of doctor, Zee had ended up in a corner office with a view of the Charles and a patient list that would have taken her years to develop on her own.
The phrase “case closed” was one of Mattei’s biggest jokes. Though patients almost always got better under her care, they were never cured. There was no such thing as case closed. Not in modern American society anyway, Mattei insisted. Not in a country that planted the most fertile ground for both mania and the resultant depressive episodes, the country that had invented the corporate marketing machine that left people never feeling good enough unless they were overextending their credit, buying that next big fix. Not that Mattei minded the corporate marketing machine. That machine had made her rich. But there was definitely no such thing as case closed. Case closed was decidedly un-American.
When Lilly Braedon came along, Mattei quickly handed her off to Zee.
In the past year, Lilly had developed the most crippling case of panic disorder. She’d been to local doctors, who had ruled out all probable physical explanations: thyroid, anemia, lupus, et cetera. Then, after watching an episode of The View, something he swore he’d never done before, her husband, who in his own words “loved Lilly more than life itself” (a quote that resonated on a very problematic level with both Zee and Mattei), went to the Spirit of ’76 Bookstore in Marblehead to purchase Mattei’s book, only to find that they were sold out. He immediately ordered two copies, one for himself and another for his ailing wife.
But Lilly was too troubled to read. The only time she left the house in those days was in the late afternoon, when the shadows were longer and the bright summer light (another irrational fear) was dimmer. In the late afternoon, her husband said, Lilly often took long walks through the twisted streets of Marblehead and up through the graves of Old Burial Hill, to a precipice high above Marblehead Harbor, where she sometimes stayed until after sunset.
“So technically she isn’t agoraphobic,” Mattei said to the husband when she finished her initial patient analysis of Lilly. “She does leave the house.”
“Only for her walks,” her husband said. “She says she does it to calm herself down.”
“Interesting,” Mattei said.
But Zee could tell she didn’t mean it. The reason Zee was in attendance at Lilly’s session was that Mattei had already decided she was handing her off. Mattei wasn’t interested in Lilly Braedon.
But Zee was very interested. From the first time she met her new patient, Zee suspected that there was much more to the story than Lilly was telling.
Every Tuesday, Zee had her own therapy session with Mattei. Mostly they talked about her patients, or at least the ones who required meds, which was most of them. If patients with panic attacks weren’t on meds these days, you could be pretty sure there was a reason. Perhaps they were in some kind of twelve-step program, usually for alcohol or drugs, or else they had the kind of paranoia that kept them from taking any medication at all.
This morning Zee had gone through “the usual suspects,” as Mattei called her list of patients. This one had improved, that one was self-medicating with bourbon and sleeping pills. Another one had taken herself off all meds and was beginning to show signs of a manic episode. When they got to Lilly, Zee told Mattei she had nothing to report.
“Unsatisfactory,” Mattei said. Normally Mattei didn’t seem to care one bit about Lilly Braedon. But something Zee had said at their last meeting had piqued her interest for a change and prompted a question. When Zee reported that nothing had changed, Mattei wasn’t having any of it.
“Does that mean that Lilly is in a normal phase?” Mattei was referring to Lilly’s bipolar disorder, which had been their diagnosis. Bipolar disorder was something Zee understood only too well. It was what her mother had been diagnosed with years ago, except that in those days it had been called manic depression, which Zee had always thought a better description. In most cases the disorder was characterized by severe mood swings followed by periods of relative normalcy.
“I wouldn’t say normal,” Zee said.
“Any more trouble with the Marblehead police?”
“Not lately,” Zee said.
“Well, that’s something.”
At 3:35, Lilly still hadn’t arrived. Zee walked to the window. Across Storrow Drive a homeless woman sat on one of the benches, but there was no one walking along the Charles River. It was too hot and humid for movement of any kind. Traffic was snarled, the drivers honking and agitated, trying to get onto roads heading north. The “cardboard bridge,” as Zee called the Craigie, looked like a bad fourth-grade art project. Years of soot had collected in the wrong areas for shading, and today’s haze made it look even flatter and more one-dimensional and fake than it had ever looked before.
At 3:45, Zee dialed Lilly’s number. It was a 631 exchange, Marblehead. It used to be NE 1, Lilly had told her when she’d scribbled down her phone number for the records. “NE for Neptune—you know, Neptune, the Roman god of the sea?”
Zee thought back to her school days. Neptune—or Poseidon, his Greek equivalent, god of the sea and consort of Amphitrite, which had been Zee’s mother’s middle name. Though Maureen Doherty was a decidedly Irish name, Zee’s grandmother had given all three of her children the middle names of Greek gods and goddesses. Thus Zee’s mother was Maureen Amphitrite Doherty. Uncle Mickey’s middle name was Zeus, and Uncle Liam, who had died back in Ireland before Zee was born, was Antaeus, a clear foreshadowing of the mythmaking violence in his future. Zee remembered Maureen teasing Uncle Mickey about his middle name. “Well, what mother doesn’t think her son is a god?” Mickey had answered. Indeed, Zee thought.
Zee willed herself back to the present. Lately her mind had been wandering. Not just with Lilly, but with all of her patients. They seemed to tell the same stories over and over until her job became more like detective work than therapy. The key wasn’t in the stories themselves, at least not the ones they told and retold. Rather it was in the variations of their stories, the small details that changed with each telling. Those details were often the keys to whatever deeper issues lay hidden beneath the surface. What wasn’t the patient telling the truth about?
“Everybody lies,” was another of Mattei’s favorite expressions.
And so as the weeks passed, Zee listened to Lilly, to the variations in the stories she told over and over. But on the day that Lilly had mentioned Neptune, the story she told was one that Zee had never before heard.
“Back in the day,” Lilly was saying, “before the phones in Marblehead had dials, way back when the operators used to ask ‘Number, please’ in a nasal four syllables, you would have to say ‘Neptune 1’ for the Marblehead exchange.” Lilly was far too young ever to have remembered phones without dials and operators who connected you, but for some reason she seemed to find this bit of trivia very significant.
“Does Neptune have a special meaning for you?” Zee asked.
Lilly’s face contorted. “I’ve always been afraid of Neptune,” she said. “Neptune is a vengeful god.”
At 5:20, Zee dialed her wedding planner. “I’m very sorry, but I’m going to have to cancel again, my five-o’clock is late,” she said, relieved that she’d gotten the machine instead of the person—who, she had to admit, scared the hell out of her.
Zee felt a bit giddy, the way she’d felt as a kid when there was a snow day. Michael wouldn’t be home from Washington until the last shuttle. Having come up with the winter image, Zee decided to treat this unanticipated block of freedom as a snow day. Never mind that it was ninety-six degrees outside. The evening stretched ahead of her. She could do anything she wanted with it. Zee couldn’t remember the last time she’d had an open evening. Between her work schedule and the wedding plans, there’d been little time for anything else lately. She hadn’t even seen her father in the last few months, and she felt guilty about it, though she knew he understood.
The wedding date was not until the late fall, but it seemed as if there was at least one major wedding item a day on her to-do list. Zee hated the process. Tonight they were supposed to be sampling sushi at O Ya, and three kinds of sake. Not a bad evening, all things considered. But Michael wasn’t going to make it back in time, and she couldn’t deal with the wedding planner alone. The problem wasn’t the planner, who was arguably the best in Boston. The problem was that Zee couldn’t make a decision, couldn’t make herself choose anything from the myriad of options the wedding planner offered.
Her excuse had been a lie—well, more of a twist, really. Lilly was her three-o’clock, not her five, and whether she showed up or not would make little difference to tonight’s plans.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_0d8281cd-e60f-5438-8c4e-ad6a7780b38a)
Though it was an easy walk to their house on Beacon Hill, Zee hailed a cab. She wasn’t Mattei. She didn’t like to sweat. Out on the streets, exhaust and steam merged, creating a heat mirage that made the buildings across the river look as if they were beginning to melt. Both inbound and outbound traffic were completely knotted. A truck that had found its way onto Storrow Drive had knocked down one of the overhead crosswalks, and now there was no movement in any direction. Zee directed the taxi driver away from the traffic and up the hill.
It was chilly inside the cab. Mahler played on some weaker station, interrupted by intermittent static from the driver’s iPhone as it checked for e-mails. A king-size bottle of hand sanitizer had spilled onto the front seat and was spreading its alcohol scent, unnoticed by the driver. Zee’s mind moved to old spy movies, chloroform on a handkerchief, a hand over the mouth, and waking up in some dark place. She cracked the window and tried not to breathe, or anyway not to breathe too deeply.
She thought of Mattei’s sense exercises. Close off two of your senses and switch them. Smell and what? Hearing? No, touch was better. Zee ran her fingers along the door handle and the fake leather seat. Shut off the offending senses, choose the ones you can manage.
When they finally reached the house, Zee tipped the cabbie and walked around back, climbing the outside stairway to the deck, letting herself in through the kitchen door. The room was freezing, which fit well with her snow-day theme.
She had been happy for the heat a few minutes ago, and now she was happy for the cold. Zee seemed to need these extremes more and more lately, something she didn’t want to think about because it reminded her too much of her mother. She removed her shoes but didn’t take a pair of slippers from the bin that Michael provided for guests. Her hot feet left moist footprints on the cool, dark wood floor. With each step forward, the footprints she left behind slowly disappeared.
She was vaguely hungry. She opened the fridge. There were some leftovers from the party they’d had last weekend, some imported prosciutto and a ton of cheese. They’d invited several people over. Mostly people Michael worked with and some of Mattei’s friends, too, including Rhonda, whom Zee really liked. Mattei and Rhonda were planning a wedding, too, now that such things were legal in Massachusetts. Rhonda wanted to talk about all the details: her flowers (all peonies tied tightly in a nosegay, but with spiraling stems that remained visible), her music (jazz-pop fusion). Their wedding was to be in August, the day before Labor Day, which fell on September 1 this year. That Rhonda so clearly knew what she wanted didn’t bother Zee all that much. Rhonda had probably always known what she wanted, Zee thought, the way most girls know that kind of thing, straight or gay. Listening to Rhonda, Zee had wished for the first time that she were one of those girls who knew what she wanted. She’d been one of those girls once, but it seemed so long ago that she could barely remember how it felt.
July was fast approaching and, with it, the official beginning of summer parties. She thought back to last year’s Fourth of July. While Michael and Mattei had made the rounds, passing hors d’oeuvres and making small talk, Zee and Rhonda sat on the deck and watched the fireworks. The condo Zee shared with Michael had one of the best views in Boston, the perfect place to see the light show, though you couldn’t hear the Pops from here—you’d have to be on the esplanade for that. So Michael had turned on the radio, creating a sound track that was a second off from the visual, each beat later than the flash.
Michael had seemed so happy then, walking around refilling every-one’s glass with another good Barolo he’d found at auction. Last weekend he had served all French wines, some second-cru houses. Michael had a good collection, all reds.
Zee reached into the vegetable bin and pulled out a half bottle of Kendall-Jackson chardonnay that she’d hidden the night of the party, not in the wine fridge but in with the lettuces, which was somewhere Michael would never look. He hated salads, the only things she ever made as a main course. She created elaborate salads with homemade dressings, vinaigrettes, and infusions. She made oatmeal, too, for winter breakfasts, steel-cut stuff that took forty minutes to cook, and cowboy coffee with an egg, which was something Michael actually did like, though he didn’t much like her method of letting the pot boil over onto the stove before she dumped the cup of cold water in to clear it. Michael said he expected that the boiling-over bit worked better with a campfire, and couldn’t she just grab the pot before it bubbled up and went all over everything? The answer was no, she couldn’t seem to, though she always cleaned up her messes afterward.
Zee filled a coffee mug with the K-J and started to recork the bottle. Then, seeing how little was left, she dumped the rest of the wine into the mug. She carefully placed the bottle into the trash compactor, then flipped the switch, waiting for the pop and the smash. The bag was almost full, so she removed it and took it out to the deck, walking all the way back down the stairs in her bare feet, placing the compacted bottle into the bottom of the garbage bin, not with the recyclables, as she would have preferred, but with the regular trash, so that there would be no evidence of the bottle. It wasn’t that Michael minded her drinking, but he definitely minded her drinking an oaky California chardonnay.
She walked back up the stairs and ran a bath, letting the water get as hot as she could stand. She went to her closet and grabbed her winter bathrobe, a worn terry-cloth thing she’d stolen from some spa Michael had taken her to when they first met, which she’d later felt guilty about and sent a check to the hotel to cover its cost. If this was going to be a snow day, then let it be a snow day, she thought. It certainly was cold enough in this house to imagine snow on the roof.
She filled the tub as high as she could and slid into the water. She took one gulp of the wine, then another, then finished the cup. When the falling feeling hit her, the slackening of muscles, a momentary release that came and went fast, she glided under the water, letting it into her ears, her mouth. She pushed her legs wide and let the heat fill her. As her head finally began to quiet, she forgot about Lilly, and the intimidating wedding planner, and Finch, and finally about Michael and the gnawing feeling of guilt she felt most of the time now when she thought about the wedding and everything she was supposed to be getting done.
Zee didn’t realize that she had fallen asleep until she saw Michael standing above her in the bathroom. How long had it been? The water had gone cold, the sky outside was dark.
She stood up and grabbed a towel.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” she said, wrapping herself in the terry-cloth robe.
He just stood there watching her, his expression difficult to read. She could tell he had something to say, something important from the look of things, but she wasn’t ready to talk.
“Give me a minute, will you?” Zee said, and Michael turned and walked out of the bathroom.
She went to the bedroom and grabbed a pair of socks, so her feet wouldn’t leave more prints on the wood floors. She put on a sweatshirt and jeans.
She found him in the kitchen. He was eating a piece of salmon. She recognized the O Ya box.
“What’s all this?” she asked him.
“I’ve been calling you. You didn’t answer either phone.”
“Sorry,” she said. “Sorry” seemed to be the word that started most of her sentences these days.
“The wedding planner quit,” Michael said. “But she’s charging us six thousand dollars for her time.” He held out the tray to her. “I figure these are worth about half a grand apiece.”
She shook her head. She wasn’t hungry. She felt a little sick.
“For that price she should have sent the sake, too,” he said.
She walked over and hugged him, holding on for longer than she wanted. He didn’t return the embrace. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll pick up the expense.”
“It’s not about the expense,” he said. She could see him considering before he continued. “I have to ask you an important question,” he finally said.
“What question?”
“Do you not want to get married?”
His question caught her off guard. “Why would you even ask me that?”
“Come on, Zee.”
A long silence followed. The truth was, she didn’t know. She didn’t know if she didn’t want to get married at all, or if she just hated the process. The big wedding was clearly something he wanted. She could count only about five people she would even invite.
“Maybe I just don’t like the wedding planner.” She knew that much was true, though it was all she seemed to know. She felt suddenly foolish for the snow day and guilty that she’d made him feel bad.
“Well, you’ve solved that problem, I’d say.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. She reached into the box they’d sent over and pulled out a piece of sushi. She would take a bite, and then she would tell Michael how much she liked it and that she thought they’d found the perfect food for the wedding. “It’s really good,” she said. “Great, actually.” She didn’t have to lie.
The phone rang. Zee didn’t move to answer it.
She could follow his thought process. Michael was a game theorist and as famous as Mattei in his own right. He was paid to predict what groups of people would do. As a result, Michael always seemed to know what she would do before she did it, even when (as was so often the case these days) she had no idea herself.
Don’t answer the phone, she thought.
She didn’t say it. It would have been stupid. And it would have been futile. As she stood there with him, she felt as if she were the one who was the game theorist. She knew exactly what he would do.
Michael picked up the phone on the fifth ring. “Yes?” he said into the receiver. Zee could tell that it was Mattei. Then, so she continued to feel his earlier reprimand, he went on, “No, evidently Zee does not answer her cell.” He listened to Mattei for a moment, and then, at her direction, he walked over to the TV and flipped it on. “What channel?” he asked. Then he handed the phone to Zee.
Zee kept her eyes on the television as Michael changed the channels, settling on the local news, Channel Five.
“What’s going on?” Zee said to Mattei.
On the screen several cars were pulled over on the top level of the Tobin Bridge. An SUV with its driver’s door opened sat next to the leftmost guardrail. Police were trying to contain the crowds who were leaning over the side, pointing. The TV camera panned across the blackening water, but aside from a few pleasure boats nothing seemed unusual. The camera cut back to the newscaster, a blonde in a blue top. Pointing the microphone at the toll collector, she asked, “Did you know she was going to jump when she pulled over?”
The toll taker shook her head. “I thought she was opening the door because she had dropped her money.”
Another eyewitness leaned into the microphone, vying for camera time. “She didn’t jump, she dove.”
The newscaster held the microphone out to a man who stood off to the side, staring over the railing. “I am told that you witnessed the whole thing,” she said to him.
He didn’t say anything but just stared at the newscaster.
Zee recognized shock when she saw it and hoped one of the medical personnel would treat him for it.
The woman poked the microphone closer. “What did you see?”
As if suddenly realizing where he was, the man pulled himself together. With a look of disgust and anger, he pushed the microphone away. “Stop,” he said.
Zee felt dizzy. She held on to the couch arm to steady herself. A faint beeping sound was still audible from the SUV’s driver’s-side door, near where the key had been left in the ignition. It was weak and failing, but no one had thought to put a stop to it.
Zee recognized the car.
“Her husband left a message on the ser vice,” Mattei said to Zee.
Michael stared at Zee, still not understanding what was happening.
“Who was it?” he finally asked.
“My three-o’clock,” Zee said.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_2a240fd4-4178-5c11-ba39-d4e723659e0c)
Zee took the tunnel to the North Shore instead of the bridge. The old Volvo she’d gotten in grad school barely passed inspection every year, and though she seldom drove in town, she couldn’t seem to give it up. The alignment was so bad that she had to keep both hands firmly on the wheel to stay in her lane as she drove.
Zee hated tunnels—the darkness, the damp, the dripping from overhead, where she imagined the weight of water already pushing through the cracks, finding any weak spot and working its way through. She wasn’t alone. Since the Big Dig tunnel ceiling collapse a couple of years back, most Bostonians were skittish about tunnels.
“Water always seeks its own level,” Zee said aloud, though she was alone in the car and the sound of her own voice seemed wrong. The thought was wrong, too. It only made her more tense. Think of something else, she told herself. She wished she had taken the bridge. At the same time, she wondered if she would ever be able to take the bridge again.
Both Mattei and Michael had told Zee not to go to Lilly’s funeral.
“Why would you do that?” Mattei asked.
“Because she was my patient,” Zee said. “Because I’m a human being.”
“I hope you don’t have any delusions that the family will welcome you,” Mattei said.
“I’m going,” Zee said.
Zee had planned to stop to see her father before the funeral, but she was running late. These days she didn’t drive enough to know how bad the traffic would be this time of day. The Big Dig might officially be over, but traffic was still a mess. She had planned to go directly to Salem and surprise Finch with a visit. She was worried about him. Lately she had only seen him in Boston when he came in for his doctor’s appointments. He seemed frail and weak. And she couldn’t help but feel that he was hiding something from her. So today she planned to drop in unannounced to see for herself. But it was too late to go to Salem now. She’d have to see Finch after Lilly’s funeral.
She altered her route, electing to take the coast road directly to Marblehead, winding along the golden crescent of beach that stretches from Lynn through Swampscott to the town line. At the last minute, she decided to take a shorter route through downtown Lynn, not counting on road construction. It was summer. Road crews were everywhere, the required extra-shift cops sleepily directing traffic.
Zee hadn’t been on this road for a long time. Mostly the streets were as she remembered them. Roast-beef and pizza places lined every block. Popping up next to them were bodegas, nail salons, and the occasional package store. The businesses were essentially the same. But the ethnicity had changed. Small groceries sat next to each other, their signs in Spanish, Korean, Arabic, Russian. Lynn had always had a diverse population. These days there were more than forty languages spoken in the Lynn schools. Zee forgot who had told her that. Probably it had been her Uncle Mickey.
Her mother’s people, including Uncle Mickey, were from Lynn, though they were originally Derry Irish. They had come over from Ireland to become factory workers at a company on Eastern Avenue that made shoe boxes.
They were all IRA, or at least the two brothers had been, Uncle Mickey and his brother Liam, who died in an explosion in Ireland. Zee remembered her mother telling her that their emigration had been sudden. Maureen’s reluctance to say more about it left Zee wondering about the details. It was out of character for Maureen to hold back any details when she was telling a story. Whatever it was that had happened, the family had no longer been safe in Ireland. They’d had to leave the country overnight, taking only what they could carry.
Maureen had told her all this in such a matter-of-fact tone that Zee had never quite believed the story.
“Make no mistake,” her mother had said many times. “We are, every one of us, capable of murder. Given the right circumstances, it is within each of us to take a life.”
Zee never knew whether by “every one of us” her mother had meant all of humanity or simply all of the Doherty clan. She had often thought about asking that question, but she never did. In the end she decided she really didn’t want to know.
Their house had been on Eastern Avenue, near the factory but farther down the street, closer to the beach. Zee doubted if she could find the place now. It was so long ago that her grandmother had died. Her mother died only a few years later, just after Zee turned thirteen. Besides Zee, Mickey was the only Doherty left.
The factory where they’d once worked had long since closed. A sign on the front of the building read king’s beach apartments. It was directly across from Monte’s Restaurant, where she used to go for pizza with her father and Uncle Mickey in their pirate days.
When her grandmother died, Uncle Mickey had moved to Salem. He wanted to be closer to his sister, he said. Mickey could pilot a boat with the best of skippers, but he had never learned to drive a car. Though it was only a town away, Lynn was too far from what was left of his family, he said. And he didn’t like riding the bus. Though Maureen had killed herself just a few years after he made the move to Salem, Mickey stayed on. He had grown to love the Witch City. He was both a born entrepreneur and a natural salesman. He had a bit of the old clichéd blarney in him as well. When Salem reinvented itself, Mickey was right there to take advantage of the opportunity. He now ran a witch shop on Pickering Wharf, several haunted houses, and a pirate museum. He had done well. People in Salem fondly referred to Mickey Doherty as “The Pirate King.”
Lynn, Lynn, City of Sin. Zee recited the old poem in her head. A sign on a Salvation Army building read city of him. People were always trying to find a new image for Lynn. Zee liked it the way it was. It seemed to her a real place where real people led real lives.
She could smell Lynn Beach from here, fetid and heavy. At the Swampscott town line, she noticed a little shop with a woman in the window seated at a sewing machine. Outside the store hung a sign, hand-lettered, with penmanship that slanted downward as it progressed: MALE/FEMALE ALTERATIONS.
City of Sin. There was a reason she felt so right here, Zee thought. As sins go, Zee had committed her share. She felt guilty about a lot of things, not the least of which was the question that Lilly had asked shortly before her death. Lilly’s question reminded Zee so much of Maureen that she hadn’t shared it with Mattei. It was the thing that in retrospect should have tipped her off about Lilly, but instead it hit her in a much more personal way, as if someone had punched her in the stomach.
The last time she’d seen Lilly Braedon, Zee had been trying so hard to rationalize the risky behavior Lilly had been engaging in that she found herself unprepared for the question. Just as the session was ending and Lilly was walking out the door, she turned back to Zee and asked, “Don’t you believe at all in true love?”
Chapter 4 (#ulink_c229166d-6fa1-589f-aeba-258c9432a1e6)
When Lilly’s husband had first brought her to Mattei, Lilly had been heavily dosed on Klonopin. Her anxiety had become so debilitating that the internist her husband had been taking her to had first prescribed Xanax and then, when that failed, increasing doses of the branded clonazepam. Lilly could barely speak. She couldn’t drive. The pupils of her eyes looked like tiny pinpoints. But she was no longer anxious. She was zombie calm.
It turned out that Lilly hadn’t driven for the better part of a year, which had been inconvenient at best with a husband and two young children to care for. Instead of taking the kids to the yacht club to swim, Lilly had started walking them down to Gashouse Beach, which she said she preferred. But the kids missed their friends and the swimming lessons they had signed up for, and Lilly had such a bad feeling about the ocean—a terror that it would take her children, that the surf would send a rogue wave or that some remnants of red tide would seep through their skin to infect them—that she didn’t even let them wade in the water at the beach. Instead they were allowed only to sit on the rocky shore, playing in what little sand they could find, building castles, and slathered with so much 45 SPF that the blowing sand began to coat their pale bodies, making them look like sugar cookies.
By August, Lilly’s husband had taken pity on her and hired a nanny. That was when the real trouble started.
Lilly willingly surrendered her SUV to the nanny, happy to be free of it, preferring to walk around town. She had Peapod deliver groceries. And then she paced.
At first she confined her pacing to the house. She went up and down stairs. She circled from the foyer to the kitchen, through the sunporch to the dining room and library. She climbed all three flights of stairs, avoiding the basement but pacing the rough, unfinished floor of the attic, feet tapping a rhythmic heel-toe, heel-toe. She slept little, pacing the house at night until the nanny complained that she thought the old place might be haunted, because she could hear someone walking above her ceiling.
The next day, when the nanny took the children to their lessons, Lilly’s feet took her outside, through the labyrinth of Marblehead streets, past the fading window boxes where the vinca and blue scaevola struggled against the August drought. On the day when the drought finally broke, she ducked into the Spirit of ’76 Bookstore to get out of the rain, but the place was too quiet for her and she imagined that everyone could hear the squishing sound her sneakers made as she walked on the carpet, so she went back outside. But it was pouring, thundering and very windy. She stood under the awning and watched as a black plastic garbage can caught wind and rolled down the two-lane street, hitting a standing group of planters like a bowling ball, leaving a seven-ten split. She stayed under the awning until she noticed people looking at her, and then she crossed the street and entered the Rip Tide, someplace she’d never been to in her life.
It was three-thirty. The construction workers who weren’t already finished for the day were finally called off the job because of the rain, and the bar was filling up. Lilly walked to the far end and took one of the high stools, one she could wind her feet around to still their movement.
“What can I get you?” the bartender asked.
Lilly didn’t drink. She had no idea.
“Do you have any kind of food?” she asked the man. She was aware that she was the only woman in the place. She could feel all eyes on her.
“They have great steak tips,” a man two stools down offered. “Lunch is over. The kitchen doesn’t open until five,” the bartender said.
“Oh, come on, the lady looks like she could use a good steak.”
She knew they were looking at her, but she had no idea how she must appear. Wet-T-shirt contest was the first thing she thought, but she was too skinny for wet tees to matter much. Her collarbones felt sharp and jutting.
The bartender muttered and went to the back to cook. “You owe me one,” he said, not to Lilly but to the man who’d procured the steak tips for her.
The man dragged his bar stool over to hers.
His name was Adam, he told her. He lived above one of the shops on Pleasant Street, just a few houses down on the left. He did finish carpentry for a local contractor, the same one her husband had recently hired to do some work on their house.
Lilly ate the steak tips. She ate the salad that came with them, too. She even ate the garnish, something pickled and sour, though she couldn’t name what it was.
She had gone to his house, she later told Zee, because he’d offered her a dry T-shirt and a ride home.
They’d done it that first afternoon, she said, not in the bedroom but right there on the green couch in the corner, the wind whipping the aluminum sign against the side of the building, hailstones the size of golf balls crashing hard against the windows, denting the cars in the bank parking lot across the street.
“I felt safe for the first time in years,” Lilly told Zee.
Zee thought Lilly’s description sounded anything but safe, yet she knew it was an important statement. “What about it made you feel safe?”
“The couch, for one thing. It was this deep-cushioned thing, kind of a dark green velvet. Like a forest or something.”
“Forest green?”
“Yes, and the light from the window.”
“You said it was stormy.”
“It was. Maybe it wasn’t the light—it was the sound of the hail against the window. It was also what was outside. The car sounds and the shops. The bookstore and a ballet school. You could hear the music from the school, and I was picturing the little girls doing their barre exercises.”
“Even in the storm, you could hear so well?” Zee asked.
“Yes,” Lilly said. “I could hear the music. It was as if real life was happening right outside the window—all around us, really—and we were part of it somehow. I’ve never felt that way before. Safe and warm,” she said.
He had given her a ride home in his red truck. She made him drop her off down the hill from where she lived, near Grace Oliver Beach, by the little house that had once been a penny-candy store. “Can I see you again?” he asked, taking her hand. He was so sweet that he made her want to cry. She told him no. He told her he thought he loved her.
They made love every afternoon all summer, sometimes at his place, sometimes in the truck if they could find a secluded spot to park. She was always home by five. Lilly thought it was important that Zee know this.
“I’m always home in time to cook dinner,” she explained.
What Lilly actually cooked were huge guilt feasts. The more she fooled around, the better she cooked. She pureed vegetables, adding odd flavorings like strawberry and peanut butter, anything the kids would actually eat. She went organic at the farmers’ market. She even dug up the backyard at midnight to put in a vegetable garden. She never finished it, which caused a huge issue with their landscape designer. The Guatemalan yard workers seemed to have less of a problem with it. They just mowed around the pit as if they believed that it really would become something beautiful one day, and they never filled it in as their boss had suggested. One of them even found a packet of seeds in the shed and planted a few rows of what looked at first like carrots but later revealed itself to be yarrow.
As the days grew shorter, Lilly sank into a depression that rivaled those of the great poets. She stopped walking. She fired her nanny. Dishes piled up in the sink. One of the children got lice, and she didn’t even know it until the school nurse sent home a note and a bottle of Pronto shampoo.
How did that make you feel? Zee never even had to ask the standard shrink question. She already knew the answer. Lilly felt all the most destructive emotions out there—fear, judgment, inadequacy—as if there were some secret to parenting that she’d never been taught.
“Look,” Mattei had told Lilly’s husband when he’d dragged her in to see the famous doctor in what amounted to his last hope for his wife. “Most places they give you a pill, they send you on your way. I’m not going to do that.” Zee could see the look of relief in his eyes as Mattei explained the process. First they would wean Lilly off all her meds, and then they would be able to see just what they were dealing with. In the meantime Lilly would be given a complete physical and all the standard tests, checking thyroid and estrogen levels, and even a dexamethasone-suppression test to rule out Cushing’s, though both Mattei and Zee were already pretty sure what the diagnosis would turn out to be.
“We already had a physical,” the husband said, confused by some of the terms Mattei was using but clear on this one. He gestured to the folder he had presented her with earlier.
“I want you to have it at Mass General,” Mattei said.
They agreed. Then Mattei asked Lilly one more question, one she asked all of her patients.
“Where were you when you had your first panic attack?”
There was a long silence. The husband, who usually answered every question for his wife, looked baffled.
Everyone waited for Lilly to speak. Finally, after the silence was so awkward that the husband was getting nervous, he started to make suggestions to Lilly. In church, maybe? Or at the market? Maybe at the beach with the kids?
“Let your wife answer the question,” Mattei said.
“I don’t know where I was,” Lilly said. Her voice was flat.
“That’s bullshit,” Mattei said privately to Zee after the session ended. “Everybody knows.”
Chapter 5 (#ulink_5d3de3eb-f0af-5ff3-817c-7b8b6019ac2b)
The parking lot across from the Old North Church in Marblehead was already full, so one of the funeral directors waved Zee down a side street where there were more spaces. When she turned the corner, she caught a flash of ocean so bright her eyes throbbed with it.
The pallbearers were unloading the coffin as she climbed the steep granite steps. She hurried ahead, into the wide expanse of church, taking a seat in the back row. An old woman moved aside to make room for her, dragging her cane across the wooden bench with a scraping sound.
There were photos of Lilly everywhere.
Zee had to swallow hard to keep from crying. She hadn’t cried yet; up until now all she had felt was shock. And guilt. She recognized Lilly’s children from photos. They sat in the front pew, the little girl unaware and chatting; the boy, who was reputedly so spirited, sat apart from his father and sister, staring straight ahead at the plain white wall. Zee couldn’t take her eyes off the boy. His stoicism stole her heart. She almost expected him to salute the coffin like the famous photos of John-John Kennedy, though she knew it would not happen.
Mattei had prescribed lithium to Lilly at their third session. She diagnosed Lilly with bipolar 2 disorder, probably with a chromosomal element, she said, and definitely with panic. Mattei treated Lilly alongside Zee for the first two months, until she was certain the medication was working. So often during manic periods, patients were tempted to discontinue their medication. It was very important to monitor both the meds and the dosage. When Mattei was certain that the drugs were properly dosed and were being taken, she turned the case over to Zee.
It had taken Lilly several months to start talking. But when she finally did, it was like opening the floodgates at Salem Harbor after a nor’easter. She didn’t stop. Her childhood had been ideal, she said when Zee asked. There was no abuse of any kind and no history of alcoholism. Her mother and father had a wonderful relationship. And Lilly loved her husband. Maybe not more than life itself, the way he said he loved her, but she did love him. She spent the next three sessions talking about how and why this was true.
“I was having sex.” Lilly hadn’t answered Mattei’s question until her sixth month of treatment with Zee. So it took a moment for Zee to understand the implications. “When I had my first panic attack . . . I was having sex with Adam.”
It was before Lilly had told her the story of Adam. At first Zee thought that she meant her husband. But her husband’s name was William, not Adam. Lilly watched for Zee’s reaction. She expected to be judged. But Zee didn’t flinch.
“Tell me about Adam,” was all she said.
It was about this time that Zee stopped sharing all of Lilly’s stories with Mattei. Her case discussions, which had always been so detailed, began to have their sharper edges rounded over, so that they would more easily merge into the general. There were more discussions about the symptoms, the phases and progression of disease, than about the details of each case. For her part, Mattei thought this was a good step, that Zee was gaining confidence as a therapist. Sensing that she could handle the caseload, Mattei began to send more patients Zee’s way.
By June it was apparent either that Lilly had stopped taking her medication altogether or that the dosage Mattei had prescribed was insufficient. Lilly was in the middle of one of the most clearly manic periods Zee had ever witnessed.
Lilly’s feet were moving again. She never slept. She spent huge sums of money. Her food bills alone for the elaborate guilt feasts she was cooking for her family were running about $750 a week—for two adults and two children, both of whom were picky eaters. Lilly no longer remembered why she’d ever needed a nanny in the first place. She could easily handle two young children. And her trysts with Adam were getting more and more daring. With no nanny on board, Lilly had taken to sneaking Adam into her house in the late afternoons, claiming that the place needed some repair work, first on the playroom shutters and later on a crooked piece of crown molding in the living room that had bothered her for years.
Lilly and Adam had sex on every horizontal surface in the house. Hearing their cries of passion one afternoon and thinking that someone was hurting the children, a neighbor called the police. As the cruiser pulled up in front of the house, Adam went out the back door of the basement, hurrying across the yard by Black Joe’s Pond and down Gingerbread Hill, pulling on his work clothes as he ran. The police were waiting for him at the bottom of the hill, where his red truck was almost always parked these days. He knew them all, had gone to high school with a couple of them.
“Everyone knows what you’re up to,” one of the cops told him. “Why don’t you try to keep a lower profile?”
There were some stifled smiles, maybe even a pat on the back from the cop he knew.
“They don’t exactly disapprove,” Adam had said to Lilly when she freaked out about the cops. “One of us? Messing with some rich guy’s wife?”
It was the first time Lilly had felt uneasy about what she was doing and the first time she felt bad for her husband. Sweet William, who had never done anything to deserve this. For the first time during her long affair with Adam, Lilly felt shame. And the minute the shame cloud descended, things began to fall apart.
At Zee’s direction Mattei wrote a script and added a sedative to take the edge off and a light sleeping pill to keep Lilly’s feet from wandering. When Lilly complained of weight gain from the lithium, they switched her to an antiseizure medication.
It was difficult to say when Mattei started to become suspicious. “Tell me what’s going on,” she asked Zee directly. “I don’t mean with the symptoms, I mean in her life.”
“She’s been having an affair,” Zee confessed, feeling her face redden.
“And you didn’t tell me this because . . . ?”
“Doctor-patient confidentiality.” Zee knew that this was a hot button with Mattei, who claimed to have enormous respect for doctor-patient confidentiality.
“What’s the real reason?” Mattei said.
“That is the real reason,” Zee insisted.
“Is the affair still going on?”
“Yes,” Zee said.
“What else is she doing?”
“What do you mean, what else?”
“Is she drinking, is she doing drugs? What other kinds of risky behavior is our so-called Mrs. Perfect indulging in?”
There was some triumph in Mattei’s voice as she asked. She’d begun calling Lilly “Mrs. Perfect” ever since William’s initial goddess-like description of her. No one was that perfect, Mattei had told him with Lilly right there. Perfect was a huge burden for any woman.
“Just the affair.” Zee was aware that her stomach was churning. She wished she hadn’t said anything. Her face felt hot and red. She wanted to throw up. In all the cases she’d treated so far, nothing like this had ever happened to her. It was as if she had just confessed to the infidelity herself.
“Maybe you should take back this case,” she said.
Mattei seemed to think about it for a while before making her decision. “No,” she said. “I don’t have time to take on another patient. And you’re not getting out of this that easily.”
Zee sat quietly as she waited for Mattei to mull over their plan of action. She thought about getting up and walking out of the office and never looking back. It had become her fantasy lately. Not yet five years into her practice, and she was already having burned-out escape fantasies. Not a good sign.
“We’re upping her meds,” Mattei said, reaching for her pad. She slid a prescription across the desk.
As the new dosage of antiseizure medication started to work, Lilly seemed to come back to mid-range. During the next several sessions and into the early fall, she drove herself to Boston and spoke in her sessions with Zee the way a more normal patient might have. She talked about going back to college, or at least taking a class or two. She talked about the competitive process of getting her son into their private school of choice.
She had stopped seeing Adam, she told Zee. It had been very difficult for her. The medicine hadn’t changed the fact that she thought she was in love with him. She said she believed that Adam was the great love of her life, her soul mate. But she was trying hard to do the right thing. For her children. And for the man who used to be referred to simply as “my husband” and who had now taken on the permanent moniker of “Sweet William.”
It seemed to work. Right up until Halloween weekend, when (as she later put it herself) “all hell broke loose.”
First Lilly’s cat had disappeared. She’d looked everywhere, hanging posters all over town, calling all the neighbors. The children were upset, especially her daughter, who’d planned to carry the black cat she had named Reynaldo with her as part of her witch costume. But by Halloween night there was still no sign of the cat, and so her daughter had refused to wear the costume Lilly had made for her and refused to go trick-or-treating until Lilly took her downtown to buy another one.
It had been raining intermittently on Halloween, so instead of paper bags Lilly had given them pillowcases in which to collect their candy, but her daughter was still little, and her pillowcase hung too low and dragged along the sidewalk as they went house to house. The kids had wanted to trick-or-treat alone, insisting that they were only going to the neighbors’ homes, that they wouldn’t leave Gingerbread Hill. But Lilly wouldn’t hear of it. Terrible things happened to children all the time: razor blades in apples, kidnapping. No town was immune, not even Marblehead. She had always taken them trick-or-treating, and she wanted to go along. She even had a costume picked out for herself—or half a costume, at least. She still had on her jeans, but from the waist up she was Snow White, or a rather Disneyfied version of the famous beauty. She wore a black wig with a red bow, a half-length pink cape, and a blue shirt with puffy sleeves. In her hand she carried an apple.
She was actually excited about going. But at the sight of Lilly dressed up and ready to walk with them, her daughter started to cry. “I’m not a baby!” she insisted. And so Lilly walked behind them, staying in the shadows, watching while they knocked on the doors of her neighbors, and eventually eating the apple she carried house to house, dropping the core into a neighbor’s compost pile.
When they got home, it was past their usual bedtime, though William was still at work. She had hoped to keep the children up long enough for him to see their costumes, but tomorrow was a school day. They had their baths. She tucked them in. As she started down the stairs, she heard a noise from the basement. She decided it was the wind, slapping the French windows they’d recently had put in. It had happened before. The house had a walk-out basement, which they’d had remodeled a few years back. But the new windows were faulty; they often didn’t close properly. She’d already had two of them repaired by Adam. She’d been meaning to speak with him about fixing this final one, but she hadn’t gotten around to it before she stopped seeing him.
William returned home later that night, but Lilly wasn’t there. The children were asleep. At midnight he called the police and reported her missing. They told him he’d have to wait forty-eight hours before they got involved. Though they didn’t share their information with him, the police had a pretty good idea where she might be.
Lilly didn’t come home until two days later. When she did, she was sullen and down-cycling. She wouldn’t eat. She had several bruises. No matter how many times she was asked, she would never say where she’d been or what had happened.
After the emergency room took care of her injuries, Zee had Lilly admitted to a Boston psychiatric hospital on an involuntary seventy-two-hour hold.
Lilly’s three-day stay turned into three weeks. Zee went by every other day. One weekend, when Lilly wasn’t expecting her, Zee showed up. Lilly was in the lounge, a book in front of her. Instead of reading, she was staring out the window.
Zee paused to watch. Lilly was looking at a red construction truck, idling outside in the parking lot. Zee recognized it immediately. She had walked out of the office one day after Lilly’s session in time to see her getting into that same truck. Adam clearly knew who Zee was, and the look he gave her as she walked by that day had sent a shiver up her spine.
“You have to get away from him,” Zee said to Lilly.
Lilly didn’t answer.
By offering advice Zee knew she had crossed a line with Lilly. A therapist is never supposed to tell a patient what to do. But it was a line Zee felt she had to cross.
Zee left Lilly and called security.
William didn’t know what had happened while Lilly was away. He could tell from the police reaction that they were not as worried as he was. “People walk out on marriages all the time,” they said.
He had convinced himself that it had been a kidnapping, from which his wife had narrowly escaped. He waited until Zee had been seeing Lilly at the hospital for almost two weeks before he couldn’t stand it anymore and came by the office.
He demanded to know what had happened to Lilly. “I know she told you,” he said.
“She didn’t, actually,” Zee said. “But even if she had, I couldn’t tell you.”
“I’m the one who brought her to you. I’m the one paying the bills,” he said.
“Lilly has to be able to trust me,” Zee said calmly. “Doctor-patient confidentiality.”
It was the only time she had seen William angry. “What the hell am I paying you for?” he demanded.
The sound of his raised voice brought Zee to her feet. Mattei got to the door in time to see him hurl a glass paperweight across the room, shattering it against the far wall.
“Do you need some help in here?” Mattei asked Zee.
William looked confused and embarrassed. “I was just leaving,” he said.
“Let me see you to the door,” Mattei said.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled to Zee.
Mattei held the door for him, shooting Zee a look as they left.
Two days before Lilly was scheduled to be released, both Zee and Mattei were called to the hospital. Lilly’s hospital psychiatrist sat across from a social worker named Emily, whom Zee recognized from the Department of Social Ser vices.
“What’s going on?” Zee asked.
“We’re here because of Lilly’s physical injuries,” Emily said.
“What physical injuries?” Zee asked.
“The ones she initially presented with,” the social worker said.
“Lilly refuses to talk about them,” the staff psychiatrist said.
“She told me she fell,” Zee said. “On Halloween night.”
“That’s what’s on her admission records,” the psychiatrist said. “ ‘Suffered a fall on Halloween night due to slippery rocks.’ ” She looked at the others. “It was raining pretty hard on Halloween.”
“The bruises aren’t consistent with a fall,” Emily said. “They seem more like a beating.”
“You think she was beaten?” Zee asked.
“This is routine procedure,” Emily said. “Especially when the woman doesn’t give an explanation consistent with her injuries.”
“Lilly is scheduled to be released in two days,” the psychiatrist said. “She’s stable, her medications are properly dosed, and she’s showing no signs of depression.”
“I would respectfully disagree on that last point,” Zee said. “I think she seems depressed. She’s normally much more communicative.”
The psychiatrist paused to consider. “There is one point that makes me agree with you, Dr. Finch.”
“Only one?” Zee was getting annoyed. “What’s that?”
“Lilly does not want to go home.”
“Which plays into our suspicions of spousal abuse,” the social worker said.
“It’s not William,” Zee said.
“But if she’s afraid to go home . . .” the social worker said.
“She doesn’t feel safe at home.” Zee turned to Mattei. “If she was abused in any way, it’s Adam.”
“Who’s Adam?” Emily asked.
“Lilly was having an affair with him several months ago. He was here the other day.”
“Maybe the husband found out about the affair,” Emily suggested. “Maybe that’s what made him violent.”
“It’s not William,” Zee said again. “He’s not the type.”
Emily looked to Mattei for verification.
“I think Zee’s right,” Mattei said. “But I can’t say for certain that it wasn’t William.”
Zee shot her a look.
“I would have agreed with you until the other day,” Mattei said.
“What happened the other day?”
“There was an incident. We had to escort him from the office.”
“I think we have to cover all bases,” the psychiatrist said.
“What we really need is a formal complaint,” Emily said. “No matter which one it is.”
“You can try,” Zee said. “But I can tell you right now, she’ll never give it to you. She doesn’t want William to know about her affair. And she’s afraid of Adam.”
Not only did Lilly refuse to file a complaint, but when she was released from the hospital, she decided she wanted to see another therapist. “One closer to home,” William told Zee.
The internist who had initially prescribed the Klonopin set her up with an old-school Freudian analyst who worked out of Salem Hospital. She had agreed to meet with him five days a week and to start analysis.
“You’re kidding me,” Mattei said.
But Zee was clearly upset. “We have to stop them,” Zee said. “She shouldn’t be starting over again. That’s not the right kind of therapy for her. And she won’t tell the new therapist the truth until it’s too late. . . . We have to do something,” Zee said to Mattei.
“There’s nothing you can do,” Mattei said. “She’s not your patient anymore.”
It had been a tough winter for Zee. She’d begun to dream about Lilly, and in her dreams the images of Lilly and Zee’s mother, Maureen, had become confused. They were still separate people, but in the dream she was unable to tell them apart and kept having to ask which one she was talking to.
“This is good,” Mattei said when Zee detailed the dream in her next session.
“Really? How so?” Zee asked.
“Let’s talk about the real reason you became a therapist.”
“It wasn’t the unfulfilled dream of my mother, I can tell you that much.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“Oh, please,” Zee said.
“What was the unfulfilled dream of your mother?”
“We both know what it was.”
“Why don’t you tell me again?” Mattei said.
“The Great Love. It’s what she wanted from my father—and what she never got.”
“So already there’s a similarity to Lilly.”
“And just about every other woman in America,” Zee said.
“True enough. Your mother was onto something when she started writing fairy tales about The Great Love.”
“Something that evidently killed her,” Zee said.
“Which?” Mattei said.
“Was it the fairy tale that killed her? Or The Great Love?”
“Aren’t they pretty much the same thing?”
“You tell me,” Mattei said.
When Zee didn’t take the bait, Mattei asked a different question. “What’s the other dream of the fairy tale?”
“Besides true love?”
“What are both your mother and Lilly looking for?” Mattei asked.
“My mother’s not looking for anything. My mother’s dead.” Zee was growing tired of this line of questioning.
“Bear with me for a moment,” Mattei said.
Zee folded her arms across her chest.
“What did your mother want from you then, and what does Lilly want now?”
“I don’t know,” Zee said.
“Think about it.”
Zee thought about Mattei’s question, and she thought about Lilly Braedon many times during the next few months.
It was William who finally contacted Zee. He was desperate. “She’s not doing well,” he sobbed into the phone. “I don’t know what to do.” He told Zee that Lilly had stopped the therapy within the first month. Convinced that the doctor was coming on to her, she had refused to step back into his office. “I don’t know,” William said. “She’s such a beautiful woman. Men can’t help throwing themselves at her. I tend to believe her.” He tried to compose himself before going on. “She won’t even get out of bed.”
Whose bed? Zee wanted to ask. But she didn’t. Instead she agreed to go to the house to meet with Lilly, and with that, Zee crossed another line.
The house was a mess. It hadn’t been cleaned for weeks, William told her. Finally, in frustration, he had hired a maid ser vice, three women from Brazil who didn’t speak much English, which he decided was a good thing, because he was afraid of what Lilly might say to them if she started talking. But instead of speaking even a word of hello, Lilly had taken to locking herself in her bedroom and crying the whole time they tried to clean—huge, wrenching sobs that finally upset the maids so much that they quit. “What was she crying about?” he’d asked the women, but they didn’t know. Gesturing, they managed to communicate to him that Lilly had been talking on the phone with someone.
William thought that maybe the phone calls had been to Zee.
Zee didn’t tell him what she already knew, that the phone calls were to Adam.
“You didn’t break up with Adam, did you?” Zee asked Lilly at her first return session.
“I couldn’t,” Lilly said. Then she started to cry.
Lilly became Zee’s patient once more. And once again her meds were adjusted. Soon she was driving herself into Boston on a regular basis. She seemed better. Spring was turning to summer again, and Lilly’s spirits were lifting.
They didn’t talk about Adam anymore. Lilly wouldn’t, and there were clearly boundary issues that Zee had violated; she didn’t want to risk making things worse. For now it was important not to drive Lilly away again. It was enough that she was here and that she seemed to be improving. It was Lilly who finally brought up Adam.
It was about six months later, in one of her sessions. “We think we’re free,” she said, “but we’re not. We’re the product of every association we’ve ever made, and sometimes of ones we inherited from people we never even knew.”
“That’s very profound,” Zee said.
“So you agree?”
“It doesn’t matter whether I agree or disagree. What matters is what you think.”
“I just told you what I think.”
“So you did,” Zee said.
Lilly made a face.
“What?” Zee said.
“Did you ever want to get out of something but you didn’t know how?”
“What is it you want to get out of?”
“Just about everything right about now,” Lilly said.
“Why don’t you tell me the specifics, and I’ll see if I can help you work through it,” Zee suggested.
“My marriage, for one,” Lilly said.
“Why do you want to get out of your marriage?”
“I feel as if William set up this elaborate trap for me and made it look all pretty, and I just fell into it,” Lilly said.
“And now you want to free yourself from the trap?”
“Yes.” Lilly looked at Zee. “You don’t approve.”
“It doesn’t matter whether I approve.”
“But you don’t.”
“I didn’t say that. People get divorces. No judgment,” Zee said.
“So you’re saying it’s okay?”
“Do you think it’s okay?”
“I have two children,” Lilly said.
“Yes, you do.”
“I feel like I’m dying,” Lilly said.
“Let’s explore that,” Zee said.
Lilly said nothing.
“In what way do you feel like you’re dying?” Zee asked.
“Not dying. Trapped. I can’t leave because of the children. And I can’t stay.”
“I understand feeling as if you can’t leave. Why do you feel you can’t stay?” Zee said.
“It’s not safe,” she said.
“Are we talking about Adam?”
“It’s not Adam. Adam is wonderful,” Lilly said.
“Are you telling me you want to be with Adam?” Zee asked.
Lilly looked confused for a moment. “No, I never said that.”
“Why do you feel unsafe?” Zee asked again.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” she said. “I’m sorry I brought it up.”
“I’m glad you brought it up. If you feel unsafe in any way, I need to know about it,” Zee said.
“I told him what you said. That I should get away from him.”
“We’re talking about Adam now,” Zee said.
Lilly hesitated for a second. “Yes. Adam.”
“Adam whom you just described as wonderful.”
“I’m so confused.” Lilly started to cry.
“It’s okay,” Zee said.
Lilly clearly looked frightened.
“And what did Adam say when you told him that?” Zee asked.
“He said that you were a bitch and someone should teach you to mind your own business,” Lilly said. “Those were his exact words.”
It took Zee by surprise. She sat for a moment trying to figure out how to put what she needed to say next. Finally she leaned forward. “There is no need for you to be afraid of this man,” Zee said. “There are things you can do.”
“Like what?”
“Like a restraining order, for one thing,” Zee said. “If he’s harassing you, we can go get a court order making him stay away from you.”
“Then William would find out,” Lilly said.
“Probably,” Zee said.
“I can’t do that,” Lilly said. She couldn’t stay seated but got up and stood nervously by her chair.
“Did Adam threaten you in any way?”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“Did he threaten your children?” Zee asked.
“No. I didn’t say he threatened anyone. You’re putting words into my mouth.”
“So he didn’t threaten you,” Zee said.
“No,” Lilly said.
Zee could tell she was lying.
“Isn’t your safety and the safety of your children more important than keeping this secret?”
“I’m so stupid.” She was crying in earnest now. “I can’t believe I ever started up with him.”
“You’re anything but stupid,” Zee said. “You made a mistake.”
“One I can’t recover from,” Lilly said.
“I think you can,” Zee said.
“With a restraining order?” Lilly asked.
“As a start,” Zee said.
“Do you know how many women are killed every year who’ve gotten restraining orders?”
Zee had to admit she had no idea. But it was interesting to think that Lilly had been looking into it.
“A lot,” Lilly said.
Zee went to Mattei as soon as the session was over.
Mattei called a detective she knew in Marblehead, a woman she’d been on some panel with a few years back, who agreed to look into things.
“Can you do it discreetly?” Mattei asked. “We already have confidentiality issues with the husband.”
“Do you have a last name for Adam?” Mattei asked, turning to her.
Zee shook her head. “But he drives a red truck. A Ford. With the name of a construction company on the side.”
“Do you know the name of the company?” Mattei asked.
“No,” Zee said. “I think it’s an Italian name.” Zee thought for a moment. “It starts with a C?”
A few hours later, Mattei came into Zee’s office.
“We might be lucky,” she said. “This Adam guy seems to have left town.”
“Really?”
“The truck belongs to a local company. Cassella Construction, I think it was. They said that Adam drove the truck once in a while. He hasn’t been around lately. He got into some kind of fight with the foreman, and he took off. They said he’s a good worker. They were actually hoping he’ll come back to work,” Mattei said.
“That doesn’t mean he left town.”
“The police stopped by his house. None of the neighbors has seen him for several weeks.”
“Are you sure Lilly was telling you the truth?” Mattei asked. “The only reason I ask is something the detective said.”
“What was that?”
“She told me that this wasn’t the first time there’d been trouble involving Lilly Braedon,” Mattei said.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Evidently the Marblehead police have gotten calls about her before. Not just with this Adam but with other men as well.”
Zee sat staring. “Men? As in plural?”
“Classic bipolar if you think about it. Sex with multiple partners certainly qualifies as risky behavior.”
Zee thought about it for a moment. “It doesn’t mean that one of them isn’t stalking her,” Zee said.
“No,” Mattei said. “It doesn’t.”
Zee looked shaken.
“The police will keep an eye out for Adam,” Mattei said.
“Which won’t help a bit if she takes off with him again,” Zee countered.
“Well, at least we now know it wasn’t William,” Mattei said.
Zee shot her a look but said nothing.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_5f8460b0-8149-5a82-bb8f-4b4bacfd8ae2)
The funeral ser vice went on for far too long. Zee was aware that many people spoke, though she could not keep her mind on their words. Her eyes scanned the crowd.
Sweet William sat silent and obviously drugged in the first pew.
Zee realized that both Mattei and Michael had been right about her coming here today, if for different reasons. Mattei thought it was unprofessional and strongly advised against it. Michael hadn’t advised her at all; he simply put forward a question: What good could come of it?
She wondered just that as she sat here. The family certainly wouldn’t want to see her. Years later, as they looked back on this day, they might be glad she’d paid her respects. But today it would only serve as a harsh reminder that she hadn’t been able to save Lilly.
There was another reason Zee had come, though she hadn’t admitted it to either Michael or Mattei. She needed to see for herself whether or not Adam showed up. If he did, it would mean one thing. If he stayed away, it would mean something else entirely. By all rights he shouldn’t come anywhere near them today. But if he had been stalking Lilly, as Zee still believed he had, he probably wouldn’t be able to stay away.
Even if she was right, though, there wasn’t much to be done about it. Lilly had jumped off the Tobin Bridge and into the Mystic. It was suicide, not foul play.
It turned out that Adam didn’t come to the funeral. But, to Zee’s surprise, two of the eyewitnesses showed up. Not the woman who had been so competitive for camera time, as Zee might have expected. It was the other woman, the toll taker, who came. And the man in the blue van, the one who’d been so reluctant to talk with the newscaster, was there as well.
When the organ signaled the end of the ser vice, the funeral director gave the sign to the pallbearers to lift the coffin, and the congregation filed out behind, family first and then, row by row, the other congregants.
As the family passed, Zee was careful not to catch William’s eye. Whatever he might feel when he saw her, she didn’t want to make it any worse.
As the crowd moved out into the bright sunlight, Zee followed them to her car. She didn’t see the red truck until it was directly in front of her. It was pulled over illegally, half blocking the street. Adam watched the pallbearers and the family. When she looked up, his eyes met hers. He looked at her coldly. Then he put the truck in gear and pulled out, tires screeching, leaving about twenty feet of rubber.
Shakily, Zee let herself into her car. Stuck in the middle of the funeral procession, she moved with it through old town and around Peach’s Point to West Shore Drive and Waterside Cemetery.
She wanted to pull out of the procession, to head directly to the police station and tell them what she’d seen. But she and Mattei had already talked it through. Lilly’s death was a suicide. The police were not likely to open any kind of investigation. And if they did, and the story of Lilly’s affair with Adam came out, it would only hurt the family more than they’d already been hurt.
“Let it go,” Mattei had told her.
When the other cars turned right, into the cemetery, Zee went straight, following the signs on West Shore Drive that aimed her toward Salem. She had waited too long already. She needed to see Finch.
Both of the old man’s knees had stiffened to the point that movement had become nearly impossible. Even his arms would not move, and so he stood near the window looking out at Maule’s Well, or at the re-creation of it now on his cousin’s property. After The House of the Seven Gables became well known, his cousin had grown obsessed with re-creating the building as befitted the story. No, not his cousin— his mind was playing tricks on him again. It was not his cousin but someone else entirely. The strands of his memory were breaking. Often now he would struggle to make his way from one room to another only to find when he arrived at his destination that he had no idea why he had come. Names escaped him. Even the simplest of language eluded him now, as if his words, yet unformed, had been stolen by the salt air and blown out to sea.
He looked out over Turner Street at the old house. It had changed so much over the years that it was difficult to picture its reconstruction. At first it had been simple, just a few low-ceilinged rooms. As fortunes grew, the house had been added to, so that eventually there were the full seven gables of his famous book. But Federalist fashion had dictated simplicity, and so gables had been removed, then added back again when his book had made the house so popular. It was amusing, truly, that this woman, whose name he could not even remember, had undertaken to display the house to the public, and more amusing indeed that the public wanted to see it, seemed willing to pay money in fact to see not just the house with its secret room but other things that had never existed in the house before his fictional account, things like Hepzibah’s Cent-Shop and Maule’s Well.
He was not certain how he felt about any of it. He was a shy man by nature and did not appreciate the accolades afforded to him. Still, he loved the house more than any dwelling before or since, and he felt a deep responsibility to watch over the property. It seemed his only job now. His hands could no longer hold the pen. And his words were gone. But he was aware (because his writing had made it so) that the gabled house, however cursed it might be, belonged, always and forever, not to the family who originally built it, or to his cousin, or to the woman whose name he could not remember, but to the characters he had created in his story, to Hepzibah and Clifford and Phoebe.
Somewhere in the distance, he could hear a phone ringing. He was not well today. It was not simply his knees. His head was foggy, more foggy than usual. And his hands had a rigidity he could not soften. He had taken something for it. A visitor, one he had at first thought to be his beloved Hepzibah, had given it to him. He was going to die soon. He could feel it. Slow and steady, death seemed to crawl over him. He could sense the rigor mortis already, in his knees. He was leaning against the wall, looking out across the street at his famous house, and he could not move. He had turned to stone, and all he could do was wait for the medicine or for some force of nature to release him.
Where were the ones he had so loved in life? Where was Sophia? Dead, he thought, though he could not remember her passing. He thought then about Melville, and the tears started to fall. Melville wasn’t dead. Couldn’t be. Then an anger rose up in him, an almost murderous rage.
He stood here now, a statue, a formation of cold granite that trapped just a trace of life inside its chill. The statue could see and feel and want. What he wanted now—wanted desperately, it seemed—was to see the gardens across the street where, in his famous story, the old rooster he had named Chanticleer and his two aging hen wives had been able to come up with only one last diminutive egg, which, rather than ensuring the rooster’s aristocratic line, had been served for breakfast. He had found the words amusing when he’d first written them. But today he mourned Chanticleer and the hens and their loss of lineage. But of course it wasn’t real, had been real only in his imagination and on the page. And there was a wall between them now, a very real wall that his vision could not penetrate. Standing here today, he could not see his beloved gardens, though he could still manage to see the ocean beyond.
He wanted to cry out for Hepzibah, though he knew she wasn’t real, and she seemed to him now two different people, the wizened old woman he had created, the one the actual shop was modeled on, and someone as young and beautiful as he might have once imagined her. And he was filled with love for this last Hepzibah, who was really in his mind more like his character of Phoebe might have been, Phoebe who had come into their lives and changed everything and brought the light back to the old house and love to it as well. He started to cry and was aware that he was crying for what once had been, and for what had passed.
More than anything now, he wanted to see his Hepzibah, and he willed her to him with a force so strong that his knees released their grip and his throat loosened. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, he could feel the stone cracking to release him. He moved first a hand and then an arm. Then, carefully, he took a step away from the wall and toward the window.
When he was able, he began his daily work. His strength growing, he raised his shutter and opened the cent shop. It was not Hepzibah’s shop, the one he had created in the book; it was not even a bad rendering of it. But it was the best an old man could do.
The customers bought what he put out. One by one they came, shyly at first like the little boy in his story, but then more boldly.
Zee couldn’t find a parking place on Turner Street. Tour buses lined the lot at the House of the Seven Gables, and the tourists who came in their own cars parked on the sidewalk, ignoring the residents only sign in favor of a ten-dollar ticket they would never pay.
She finally parked on the small patch of green where Finch kept his bird feeders. As she got out of the car, she noticed a tourist walking away with an antique ship’s model, which seemed to fly through Finch’s first-floor window and into his hands.
Her first thought was that Finch was being robbed. Then she noticed the tourist’s bags hanging from the guy’s arm, a small child at his side. As she got closer, she spotted the hand-lettered sign in the top of the window: hepzibah’s cent-shop. And underneath it a smaller sign, also hand-lettered: everything must go.
Finch’s hair stood up in white tufts. His voice was hoarse. He didn’t recognize her until she stood directly in front of him, and when he did, he immediately started to cry.
The tourists moved back, out of the way.
“Dad,” she said. “What’s going on here?”
“Hepzibah,” he said. “My Zee.” He reached out for her, gripping her hand as hard as he could. “I willed it so,” he said, and then turned to his audience, his faith in life itself renewed. “I willed it so!” he cried.
Part 2: June 2008 (#ulink_8ae9b393-6a63-503a-aa39-c27a0be64b26)
The ancient method of Dead Reckoning or deduced reckoning is often unreliable. Winds, tides, and storms can easily push the ship off course. Every mistake is compounded, altering her passage in critical ways, often with tragic results. For this reason, sailors eventually turned to celestial navigation. The stars are a constant. The earth spins, but the stars remain fixed in the heavens. Even the stormiest sky eventually will clear to reveal them.
Chapter 7 (#ulink_8a72fe9e-f0d8-5191-a32b-90d61be0797c)
Finch practiced touching his thumb to his middle finger as rapidly and accurately as he could. He had succeeded fairly well with his right hand but was slower and clumsier with his left.
“There’s usually one side that’s weaker than the other,” the doctor said, taking notes.
“I’m aware of that,” Zee said. They’d been through the routine at least a dozen times. “We’re here about his medication.”
“Unfortunate,” he said. “But we did know that this one might not work. This particular medication came with warnings. It causes hallucinations in some people.”
“And clearly he’s one of those people. He thought he was Nathaniel Hawthorne.”
The doctor’s eyebrows raised. “Creative. Of course, considering his background . . .”
Zee fired him a look.
“Often men believe they’re working for the CIA, some covert-ops kind of thing. Women’s hallucinations often tend to be more sexual in nature,” he said, grinning at her.
Zee ignored his remark.
Neurologists have a rather warped sense of humor, Mattei had told her more than once.
“We’ll take him off it.”
“I’ve already done that,” she said. When she hadn’t been able to reach the doctor by phone, she had checked the PDR and had called a friend of Michael’s who was also a neurologist. There was no danger from sudden withdrawal, no weaning period.
“Don’t talk about me as if I’m not here,” Finch said. His voice, once loud enough to be heard unmiked in lecture halls of a hundred or more students, was now barely audible.
“Sorry, Dad,” she said.
“The hallucinations are not usually unpleasant. They’re generally more alarming for the family than for the patient.”
“Nevertheless,” she said, ending any possibility of continuing the meds. It seemed astounding to Zee when she thought of the side effects some doctors expected their patients to contend with. Any television ad for pharmaceuticals these days came with a list of contraindications so long it sometimes seemed amazing to Zee that people would dare to take so much as an aspirin.
The doctor stood up. “Can you walk for me, Professor Finch?”
Finch stood shakily. Her first impulse was to help him, but she willed her hands to stay at her sides.
With great effort Finch shuffled fifteen feet across the doctor’s office. Zee could tell how difficult his effort was only by his breathing. His face was masked, a classic sign of Parkinson’s.
Once a reserved New England Yankee, Finch had become more emotional with the progression of his disease. But his emotion showed neither on his face nor in any vocal inflection. It was a more subtle energy that told Zee how frustrating and impossible this short walk had become for her father.
She had often wondered at the fact that Finch didn’t have the shaking so common to Parkinson’s. Ten years into the disease, he had only recently developed any kind of resting tremor, and even that was so slight that anyone who was not looking for it would never notice.
Curiously, none of these symptoms had been the first signs of Finch’s illness. The first cause for concern had happened in a restaurant in Boston, the night Finch had taken them all out to dinner to celebrate the release of his new book based on Melville’s letters to Hawthorne. The book was aptly titled: An Intervening Hedge, after a review that Melville once wrote for one of Hawthorne’s books.
Finch had been working on the book for the better part of ten years. The fact that he had finished it at all was cause enough for celebration; the fact that someone had actually published it represented job security. Finch didn’t need to work. His family had left him money. But teaching was something he loved, and teaching Hawthorne and the American Romantic writers was his greatest joy in life.
Finch presented a copy to both Zee and Melville, the name of the man for whom Finch had left Zee’s mother. That’s what Zee often told people who asked, though neither statement was very accurate. Actually, Finch never left Maureen, though he had met Melville for the first time during one of Maureen’s extended hospitalizations. And Melville’s name was really Charles Thompson. Melville was a nickname Finch had given him, one that stuck.
Zee opened her book to the title page, which he had inscribed to her. To my sweet Hepzibah, he had written in a hand that was much diminished from the one she remembered. A million thank-yous. Zee was contemplating just what those thank-yous might be for when she caught the dedication that was printed on the following page: FROM HAWTHORNE TO MELVILLE WITH UNDYING AFFECTION.
Zee had always had mixed feelings about the book, which hinted at a more intimate relationship between Hawthorne and Melville than had previously been suspected. Though even Finch admitted that the men of the times had been far more accustomed to intimacy than those of today, often writing detailed letters of their affection for each other and even sharing beds, the fact that Finch had tried to prove that there was something deeper there bothered Zee more than she liked to admit. In espousing this theory, it seemed to Zee that Finch was attempting some strange form of justification for his own life choices, justification that was, in Zee’s opinion, both far-fetched and unnecessary.
That Finch and Melville were the real thing, Zee had never doubted. Not only were they clearly in love, but because they were so happy and devoted to each other, they had provided for Zee the kind of stability that Finch and Maureen never could. So despite any damage their love might have caused to the family, Zee would always be grateful for that stability.
But the relationship between Hawthorne and Sophia was a legendary love story, the kind Maureen had always wished she could find for herself. The fact that it was a true story, and one her mother had loved so much, made it sacred for Zee. Although her father was one of the country’s preeminent Hawthorne scholars and, as such, had more intimate knowledge of Hawthorne than Zee would ever have, that didn’t make it any easier for Zee to handle. From the time she was little, Finch’s love of Hawthorne had made the writer’s life almost as real to her as her own, but until recently she had never heard Finch’s theory about Hawthorne and Melville. Maybe it was some kind of misplaced loyalty to her mother, or the desperate hope that The Great Love really did exist, but Zee hated the idea that Finch was messing with the story of Hawthorne and Sophia.
She felt her face getting hot. She could see Melville watching her. Not wanting to ruin the evening, she excused herself from the table. “I forgot to feed the meter,” she said, standing too quickly, almost knocking over her glass of wine. “I’ll be right back.”
She walked out the front door and onto the street. The truth was, she had parked in the lot and not at a meter. She walked halfway down the block before she stopped.
It was Melville finally, and not Finch, who caught up with her. She could feel him standing behind her on the corner. He didn’t speak, but she could sense his presence. At last she turned around.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She just stared at him.
“I had no idea he was going to write that dedication.”
“Right,” she said. She realized as she looked at him that it was probably true. She had noticed the expression on his face when he opened the book, the quick glance that passed between them. Finch loved him. That was the truth of it. They loved each other.
“Hawthorne adored his wife,” she said to him. “There are volumes dedicated to that fact.”
“I don’t think anyone is disputing that,” Melville said.
“His whole book is disputing that.”
“I’ve read it,” Melville said. “It isn’t.”
They stood together on the sidewalk. People walked around them.
“It’s possible to truly love more than one person in this life,” Melville said. “Believe me, I know.”
She regarded him strangely. It was the first time she’d ever heard Melville say anything so revealing about his past.
She had no idea what to say.
“This night means so much to him,” Melville said.
He wasn’t telling her how to feel; he was just telling her what was true.
She felt stupid standing here, like a kid who had just thrown a tantrum. It surprised her. “I don’t know why that got to me.”
“I think it’s fairly obvious,” Melville said.
“You know that I believe you two belong together.”
“Of course,” Melville said.
“It’s just the way he does things sometimes. It brought everything back.”
“I know,” Melville said, putting his hand on her shoulder. “Come on inside with me.”
They walked back together. Finch was sitting alone at the table, looking confused. She kissed his cheek.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “My car was about to be ticketed. Lucky for me Melville had quarters.”
Finch looked so relieved that Zee almost cried. The book sat on the table where she had left it. She picked it up and turned it over, reading the blurbs on the back. A picture of a younger-looking Finch stared out at her from the jacket cover. He was standing in front of the House of the Seven Gables. “To those hedges,” she said, raising her glass.
She could see Melville’s amusement at her toast. As much as she resented him sometimes, Melville was one of the only people in the world who truly got her.
They ordered dinner and drank several glasses of wine.
Since the celebration was in Finch’s honor, Melville had planned to pick up the tab. But Finch wouldn’t hear of it and insisted on paying. The bill came to $150, but Finch laid down $240 in cash, unusual for him, as a frugal Yankee. Melville reached over and retrieved three twenties. “I think these bills were stuck together,” he said, handing them back to Finch. “Damned ATMs.”
Finch looked surprised and then slightly embarrassed. He stuffed the returned bills into his pocket.
Zee could see that he was genuinely confused.
“What’s the matter with my father?” she called to ask Melville the next morning. She was moving between classes, and the reception on her cell phone kept cutting in and out.
“He had a lot of wine,” Melville said.
“He always has a lot of wine.”
“Maybe the bills really did get stuck together.”
“Right,” Zee said.
At Melville’s insistence Finch had already made an appointment with his primary-care physician. Zee said she would prefer for him to see a neurologist in Boston.
She felt relief for about sixty seconds when the neurologist said it wasn’t Alzheimer’s.
“It’s Parkinson’s,” the doctor told them.
Now, almost ten years later, it took Finch more than a minute to shuffle to the other side of the doctor’s office.
“Good,” the neurologist said. “Though you really should be using your walker. Any falls since your last visit?”
“No,” Finch said.
“What about freezing?”
“No,” Finch said. “No freezing.”
The doctor pulled out a piece of graph paper and once again drew the wavy curves he’d drawn for them at every appointment they’d been to for the last ten years. He drew a straight line through the middle, the ideal spot indicating normal dopamine levels, the one that meant the meds were working. The waves seemed larger and farther apart in this new drawing, the periods of normalcy much shorter.
“The idea is to try to keep him in the middle,” the doctor said.
She knew well what the idea was. At the high point of the wave, there was too much dopamine and Finch’s limbs and head moved on their own, a slow, loopy movement that made him look almost as if he were swimming. At the low point on the wave, Finch was rigid and anxious. All he wanted to do then was to pace, but his stiffness made any movement almost impossible, and he was likely to fall.
“It’s a pity he didn’t respond to the time-release when we tried that,” the doctor said. “And the agonists clearly aren’t working for him. As you were informed, they do cause hallucinations in some patients.” He turned to Finch. “We can’t have you living as Nathaniel Hawthorne forever, now, can we, Professor?”
Finch looked helplessly at Zee.
“So what’s our next step?” she asked.
“There really isn’t a next step, other than upping the levels of dopamine.”
He took Finch’s hand and looked at it, then placed it lightly in Finch’s lap and watched for signs of tremor. “The surgery only seems to help with the tremor, and you really don’t have much of that, lucky for you.”
Zee had a difficult time finding anything lucky about the disease that was slowly killing her father.
“We’ll keep the timing of his Sinemet the same. But with an extra half pill added here”—he pointed to the chart—“and here.”
“So basically he still gets a dose every three hours,” Zee repeated, to be certain she was correct. “Though two of those doses will increase.”
“That’s right,” the doctor said. “Every three hours except when he’s asleep. There’s no need to give him a pill if he’s sleeping.”
“He nods off all the time. If I don’t wake him to give him his pills, he’ll only get one every six hours.”
“Wake him during the day, but don’t give him anything at night,” he instructed. “You have any trouble sleeping at night, Professor Finch?”
“Some,” Finch said.
The doctor reached for his prescription pad and wrote a prescription for trazodone. “This is to help you sleep,” he said to Finch. To Zee he said, “It should help with the sundowning as well, which should stop his wandering. And give him his first dose of Sinemet about an hour before he rises. He’ll want to move, but he’ll be too stiff. We see some nasty falls in the mornings.”
Zee looked at Finch.
“Your daughter will have to keep a close eye on you in the morning,” the doctor kidded.
She wanted to tell the doctor that she didn’t live with her father, that it was Melville he should be telling all this to, but Melville hadn’t come home last night, and she had no idea where he was. When she had asked Finch where he was, all he would say was that Melville was gone.
The doctor started to the door and turned back. “Do you have ramps and grab bars?”
“He has one grab bar,” she said. “In the shower.”
“I’m going to send over an occupational therapist to check the house. The OT can tell you what you’re missing.”
The doctor extended his hand for Finch to shake. “Nice to see you again, Professor,” he said too loudly, as if he were talking to a deaf person and not someone with what Zee had just now come to realize was advanced Parkinson’s. She wasn’t certain how Finch and Melville had kept that fact from her.
“I’m sorry the meds didn’t work out,” the doctor said. “Not so bad to be Nathaniel Hawthorne for a day or two, though, all things considered.”
Finch didn’t smile back. He took Zee’s arm as they left the office together.
“You lied to the doctor about the freezing thing,” Zee said. “I’ve seen you freeze.” She remembered the last time Finch had come to Boston for one of his checkups. As they were leaving the restaurant, he’d frozen on his way out the front door. He couldn’t move forward and he couldn’t move back. They had all stood helplessly waiting for the freeze to break, freeing Finch to step out the door.
“Not for a while,” he lied. “I haven’t frozen once since the last time he asked me that damned question.”
Chapter 8 (#ulink_1ee11521-195f-56f7-9179-f9b9e594ee24)
Friday-afternoon traffic north from Boston was brutally slow. Zee dialed the house again from her cell, hoping that Melville would answer. She was really starting to worry about him.
“Did he go to see his family?” she asked. Melville had family somewhere in Maine, a sister and two nieces. They weren’t close, but he’d been known to make occasional visits.
“No,” Finch said. “Well, where the heck is he?” Zee was frustrated. She had asked Finch where Melville was at least ten times and was tiring of his one-syllable answers.
Melville had seldom left Finch’s side for the better part of twenty years now, a fact that Zee found difficult to comprehend in these times of trial marriages and soaring divorce rates. The two had become a couple long before her mother’s suicide, though Zee had been too young to realize it at the time. When they’d first gotten together, Zee had believed her father when he told her that the reason they spent so much time with each other was that Melville was his best friend. It wasn’t a lie, it just wasn’t the whole truth.
Zee’s mother was the one who told her about Finch’s preference for men. As with many of the inappropriate things Maureen had told her during her manic episodes, Zee would only understand the full impact of the statement in retrospect. At the time the professor had begun to hang out with Mickey and his pirate-reenactor buddies on weekends and during school vacations, and Zee supposed that was what her mother had meant by a preference. Zee was very aware of how much partying they all did together. The pirates drank and they sang, and Finch, who was usually almost prim in his New England reserve, drank and sang with them. Sometimes she would hear him singing as he made his way into the house late at night, the clichéd songs of the gutter drunk that she recognized from the old movies she watched with her mother. Finch was the singing, tippling, happy drunk of 1930s comedies. His joy at such times, especially as it contrasted with Maureen’s growing depression, made Zee believe she understood why her father preferred the company of men. Men drank and sang and had fun. Her only wish at those times was that she could be one of them.
Maureen, being Maureen, eventually told Zee intimate details of Finch’s predilection for men. Much later, when Zee was old enough to have a reference point for such things, she began to understand what her mother had meant and why she had told the stories with such anger. Finch’s misrepresentation of himself to Maureen had become the major betrayal of her mother’s life.
In Zee’s mind, Maureen’s unfulfilled dream had always been to experience what she referred to as “The Great Love.” It was what she wanted most in life and what she had sworn to have from Finch when they first met and when they spent the early days of their marriage on Baker’s Island. She often spoke longingly of the night he had recited aloud to her—not the dark lines of Hawthorne but Yeats. On their wedding night, he had presented her a copy of the book the poem had come from, and that book became one of the treasures of her life. She kept it locked on Baker’s Island in the room where she’d spent her wedding night and which had since become her writing studio. That she no longer found such passion in her everyday life with Finch was her cross to bear. Being Irish and Catholic, Maureen Finch was all too familiar with the idea of burden, and hers had become an increasingly loveless marriage within the confines of a religion that vehemently discouraged her escape.
After it became clear to her that Finch had turned to men, a time Maureen referred to as “The Betrayal,” Maureen had holed up in her cottage on Baker’s Island and had begun to write the story she’d never been able to finish, which she had entitled “The Once.” Finch marked this as the first sign of her impending insanity, though when Zee thought about it now, it was more likely a very bad case of postpartum depression, and one from which Maureen had never fully recovered.
It had been a difficult pregnancy and an even more difficult labor and delivery. The fact that Maureen hadn’t bonded with the child she’d borne him was no great worry to Finch—he had bonded well enough for both of them. The birth of his beloved Hepzibah was the single factor that kept him in his marriage, for, not being a Catholic himself, he was more inclined to believe that the mistake he’d made with such a hasty marriage might be easily remedied.
The days leading up to Maureen Finch’s death had been so terrible that Zee and her father had never talked about them. Zee had talked with Mattei about them many times during her sessions, but never with Finch. In retrospect she wondered how many of those days Finch actually remembered, his drinking having progressed, on many occasions, to the blackout stage.
What Zee remembered only too well was a late night, not long before Maureen’s death, when Finch, drunk and dressed in his pirate garb, stood in the kitchen and recited Hawthorne in a voice loud enough to fill one of his lecture halls: “ ‘No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.’ ” At the time Zee had believed that he was talking about being a pirate. Now, of course, she knew better.
Whether Finch remembered the day of the suicide or not, Zee would never forget his face. Coming home from his revelry, singing up the alleyway, he was instantly sobered by the sound of Maureen’s screams. He rushed into the house and up the stairway to find Maureen bent backward, spine arched in backbend until her head was almost resting on the floor. Her arms stuck straight outward parallel to the floor as if she were performing a gymnastic feat of great difficulty. He stood in the doorway staring, then watched as his wife collapsed. It was such a bizarre and frightening sight that Zee thought of demonic possession and even of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.
Zee stood helpless and distanced, praying that the 911 ambulance she had called would arrive in time. She did not dare touch her mother’s body. A moment before, her touch had started her mother’s third convulsion—she was certain of it. Zee and Finch stood back, staring in horror, completely helpless as they watched Maureen die.
Ironically, it had been the wail of the approaching ambulance that had sent Maureen into her final convulsion.
For the next two years, until the day Melville came back for good, Finch had dedicated himself to the process of totally anesthetizing himself, leaving Zee stealing boats and otherwise fending for herself.
They didn’t talk about Maureen’s death, not directly anyway. One night almost a year later, Finch turned to Zee and invoked another quote from Hawthorne, speaking of “ ‘That pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere. The firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage-scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm.’ ”
Finch was clearly distraught. Family life, strange though it might have been with Maureen, was nonexistent now. So when Melville came back and moved into the house to stay, with him came a certain peace that Zee had not previously known. Finch stopped spending all his leisure time with Mickey and the pirates. And he slowed his drinking to a pace that was quite respectable for a seacoast town in New England— that is to say, more than moderate but not too extreme. He didn’t sing anymore, but Zee could see that Finch was truly happy.
One day in Zee’s freshman year of high school, she came home and announced, “My friend Sarah Anne says that our home is not a normal place.”
Finch thought about it for a long moment before he spoke. This time, instead of quoting Hawthorne, he quoted Herman Melville: “It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
Zee recognized the quote immediately. Though Finch usually quoted Hawthorne, he had schooled his daughter well in all the American Romantic writers. Moby-Dick was her all-time-favorite book.
Zee had to admit that, for the first time she could remember, there was a semblance of family in the old house on Turner Street. And though it might seem an odd situation to the outside world, it was far more normal than anything Zee had yet experienced in her young life.
For his part, Finch seemed rather to enjoy shocking people with his new status, a fact that ultimately turned Mickey against him. Taking it up a notch, Finch often introduced his new partner to people he’d known his entire life, telling them that Melville was not only his live-in lover but an ecoterrorist as well. Actually, Melville was a journalist. Before he met Finch, Melville had been investigating a Greenpeace splinter group that was trying to interfere with minke whaling off the coast of Iceland. The nickname Finch gave him stuck. Everyone in town now called him Melville.
He wasn’t a bad guy. In some ways Melville was easier to be around than Finch. Her only real objection was that Finch always let Melville run interference for him. Melville handled everything that Finch found difficult in life, which was a lot. And although Finch was happily letting the rest of Salem know of his relationship with Melville, he had never really talked to his daughter about it. It had been Melville, finally, who explained the kind of love that he and Finch had for each other, though by the time he got around to talking to her about it, she had pretty much figured things out for herself.
Finch and Melville had started seeing each other during her mother’s final and longest hospitalization. The way Melville explained it, Finch had led him to believe that Maureen was probably never going to get out of the hospital. Zee always wondered about that. It was the opposite of what Finch had told Zee on their Saturday trips to see her mother. Every Saturday, on the way to the hospital, Finch assured his daughter that Maureen would be coming home soon and that they shouldn’t give up hope.
Still, she believed Melville when he told her that he’d been misled by Finch. It seemed important to Melville that she know this, desperately important somehow that she not think he was a man who would intentionally break up a family. Surprisingly, she believed him. Zee knew all about The Betrayal, though she was certain that Finch didn’t know she knew. Maureen was a talker, particularly when she was in one of her manic periods. Over the years she had told Zee much more than was appropriate to tell a daughter about her father. And Zee could do nothing with the information her mother had given her. Maureen had sworn her to secrecy. So Zee became aware, as Maureen had intended, that her father was sometimes less than honest and forthcoming when it came to getting what he wanted. She didn’t fault him for it. Zee knew better than anyone how difficult Maureen’s illness had become. But she noted it.
When Maureen had finally come home from the hospital, it was Melville who had disappeared, accepting a writing assignment that took him first to California and later as far away as the Aleutian Islands. He didn’t return to Salem until two years later. By that time Maureen was dead, Finch was spending his summer vacation drinking with the pirates, and Zee was out stealing boats.
Finch immediately sobered up, quit pirating, and moved Melville into the house.
Months later, when Zee was caught stealing a cuddy-cabin boat, it wasn’t Finch who came to post bail but Melville. It was also Melville who accompanied her to court and Melville who made certain that her juvenile records were sealed.
And when she was required to go to therapy in Boston, it was Melville who drove her. Finch, who had no idea she was stealing boats to get herself out to Baker’s Island and the house her mother had left her, not only was disgusted by her behavior but accused her of being just like her mother.
“You don’t understand,” she heard him say to Melville. “This illness runs in families. She’s showing the same kinds of signs, doing the same kinds of dangerous things. She’s skipping school. She’s stealing boats. I can’t have it,” he said. “I’ll send her away to school before I will deal with this again.”
And so Melville took her to a therapist and waited for her in the waiting room. The therapist found no signs of manic depression. While it was clear that Zee was acting out, the therapist thought it was a cry for help, or at least for attention from her father.
If the therapist was correct and it was a cry for help, it had been Melville, and not Finch, who answered it.
“He’s threatening to sell your mother’s house on Baker’s Island,” Melville told her on the way home from her session with the psychiatrist.
“He can’t do that,” Zee said.
“He can. You’re a minor, and Finch has been paying upkeep and taxes.”
Zee panicked. The house was the last thing she had of her mother’s. “I’ll get a job,” she said.
“It wouldn’t be enough.”
“I’ll quit school and get a job.”
“If you quit school, he will sell the house immediately. Don’t even think about quitting school.”
“What am I supposed to do? He can’t sell my house.”
“If I were you,” Melville said, “I think I would learn to behave.”
It was simple advice, and she heeded it. From that day on, Zee didn’t steal another boat. She didn’t skip school again. And, to the best of her ability, she tried to learn to please her father and do what was expected of her.
The ride back from Boston had taken forever. Finch was weary, and so was Zee. She turned the car onto Turner Street, stopping to let a group of day-campers, who had just come from the Gables tour, get back onto their yellow school bus. After they passed, Zee pulled the car into the driveway next to Melville’s boat. Dusty, the cat next door, who had become the mascot for the House of the Seven Gables, was sunning himself on the bench in the stern. He looked up, yawned, then stretched and settled back into a more comfortable sleeping position.
The old lobster boat was wrapped in white plastic that had begun, over the years, to flake and tear. A screen door that was cut into the wrapping over the stern showed through to the boat’s interior ribs, revealing the vital internal organs: the galley, the bunk beds, the head. A yellow slicker she recognized as Melville’s was still slung over the brass cleat near the captain’s chair. The old boat gave the impression of a sugared Easter egg, the old-fashioned kind that contained a whole world inside.
Seeing the boat, Zee was prompted to ask one more time after Melville.
“What do you mean, gone?” she asked when Finch repeated the word for probably the fourteenth time.
“Gone, disappeared, poof!” he said, making an upward sweep with his hand.
In a way she wished, hoped, he had not altogether given up speaking as Hawthorne. At least Hawthorne would have answered her question with a recitation that might have yielded more meaning.
This time she changed her question. Instead of asking where Melville had gone, she asked, “Well, when do you think he will be back?”
“Never,” Finch said.
She should have let him off at the kitchen door, she thought. It would have been a much easier walk. Because they used the front door, there was a long and cluttered hall that Finch had to negotiate. She grasped his arm to guide him down the hall to the kitchen, but he shook her off. He could do it himself, he told her.
It took several minutes for Finch to travel the long hall from the front door to the kitchen of the old house. She followed his stiff-legged shuffle the length of the hall. The ceilings were low in this house. The wide pine floors sloped on the diagonal. A child’s marble dropped in the living room would end up in the kitchen, which made walking difficult enough. But the piles of newspapers Finch had collected over the years seemed to grow precariously out of the floor every few feet. They were waist-high in some places, and they seemed to sway when she walked by them like Disney rocks that were about to tumble. And then there were Finch’s books, piled on every surface: the mantels, the desk, the raffia awning-striped wing chair in his den. She was reminded of a pinball machine as she watched Finch navigate unsteadily through the room. His walker stood in the kitchen fireplace. Still wrapped in plastic, it was the same yellowing white as Melville’s boat.
After she helped Finch inside, Zee went around the side of the house and began to collect the assorted things that he had placed outside the window of the cent shop he’d created: two pairs of shoes, fishing gear, several lightbulbs of varying wattage, and a set of binoculars. Slowly she began to realize that most of the items Finch had been selling actually belonged to Melville. The hand-lettered sign he’d hung on the window, the one saying that everything must go, began to take on a new meaning.
Some people throw people’s belongings to the curb. Finch, ever the practical Yankee, had opened Hepzibah’s Cent-Shop and tried to make a profit.
“Don’t bring that stuff back in here,” Finch said when he saw her coming through the door with a pile of Melville’s shirts.
“What the hell happened between you two?” Zee asked.
“None of your business,” he answered.
She put the shirts and the rest of what she could gather on Melville’s boat, forgetting Dusty was there and almost tripping herself in a last-minute effort not to step on his tail. “You’d better be getting on home,” she said when the old cat looked up at her. “It’s going to rain.”
By dinnertime Finch seemed almost his normal self again. She wondered how much of this was the meds. Though he was considerably better than he had been, she knew that the drugs were still in his system. The doctor had told her they wouldn’t totally clear out of his bloodstream for another forty-eight hours.
“Let me make you something for dinner,” she offered.
“No, look, I’ve got it right here,” he said.
He opened the fridge to reveal a row of labeled sandwiches. She noticed the script on the labels, cursive and feminine, decidedly not Melville’s. Peanut Butter, Tuna, Deviled Ham—dates scribbled under the titles. Finch took out the deviled ham, pointing to the others and telling her to help herself.
He couldn’t swallow very well anymore. She remembered Melville’s telling her that. Melville had also told her that bowel movements were becoming increasingly difficult for Finch, peristalsis slowing with the disease. She remembered he was supposed to eat prunes. She looked around for some, searched in cabinets and in the fridge. Then she wondered if they had settled on some medication instead.
She needed to ask Melville these questions. Even if he was gone, as Finch insisted, she still needed to talk to him.
“What do you want to drink?” she asked.
“Milk,” he said.
He wasn’t supposed to drink milk with his pills. He knew that. She poured him a glass of ginger ale instead. She chose a tuna sandwich for herself.
They ate in silence. She could see the difficulty he was having swallowing his food. It made her sad. But at least he was eating. Melville had long ago replaced Finch’s favorite Wonder bread with whole wheat. Two Oreo cookies had been placed on the side of each plate, Saran Wrap tight over the top. Finch had always loved Oreos.
She slid the two cookies on her plate across the table to him. He smiled at her. Standing up slowly, he shuffled toward the fridge.
“What do you want?” Zee asked. “I’ll get it for you.”
“I told you,” he said. “Milk.”
“You can’t have milk with your pills,” she said. “Milk interferes with dopamine absorption.” She was there when the doctor had told him that.
Finch acted as if he had no such recollection. But Zee could tell by his smirk that he was lying. This was his form of cheating. Oreos with milk.
“I took my pills half an hour ago,” he said.
“Twenty minutes,” Zee corrected.
He rolled his head back and forth to demonstrate the ease of movement. He was acting, exaggerating the range, imitating the looping head of the dopamine at its peak. “See, it’s working already,” he said. He was right, of course. If it weren’t working at least a little bit, he would be too stiff to fake any movement. As if to punctuate, he touched his thumb to his middle finger over and over, the way they made him do in the doctor’s office.
“Suit yourself,” Zee said. But he knew she didn’t mean it.
He ate the cookies and sipped at the milk. The fun had gone out of it for him, though. He left half a glass on the table when he got up and made his way into the den.
By 7:00 P.M. he was asleep in his chair, heavily dosed with Sinemet, his head flopping forward. A long string of saliva dripped out of his open mouth and onto his pressed shirt. He wouldn’t wake up again until it was almost time for the next pill. Then he would be agitated, looking for something, anything, to take away the tension his brain was creating. He might open his cent shop again for the tourists, though they had cleared out by now. Most likely he would try to walk, the worst thing he could do.
It turned out that Finch had been right. The medicine was working. The flattened midpoint of normalcy the doctor always drew on the wave graph had happened exactly when Finch said it had happened, when they were in the kitchen eating the Oreos. She realized that now. She should never have complained about the milk.
Chapter 9 (#ulink_69c1e576-cd21-5a52-9728-a24b44cc35e4)
Strangely, it was Michael and not her father who finally let her know where Melville was.
“He’s been leaving you messages on the home phone,” Michael said.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“You’re in Salem. I figured you knew.”
She could tell that Michael was angry. She’d been feeling guilty about it all week, but now she was angry, too. He’d been traveling again, and he hadn’t called. She’d been leaving messages on the home phone as well as his cell. She’d also been texting.
“So how was the funeral?”
“Okay,” she said.
“Did it turn out as you expected?”
“I don’t know what I expected,” she said. “But no.”
A long pause, then from Zee, “Could we please get back to Melville?”
“I told you all I know.”
“He didn’t say anything else? Just that he had moved out?”
“That and the phone number,” he said.
She wanted to call immediately.
“How’s Finch?” he asked.
“Not good,” she said.
She could hear his tone soften as they talked about her father. The two men had always gotten on well together. In many ways they were a lot alike. “You want me to come out there?”
“Not right now,” she said, a little too quickly.
“Jesus,” he said.
“That didn’t sound the way I meant it.”
“You sure about that?”
“Let me call Melville and see what’s going on. I’ll call you right back,” she said. “Then we can decide whether or not you should come out.”
“Don’t do me any favors,” he said. “I already had plans for the weekend—we had plans, actually.”
More wedding stuff, she thought. “I can’t talk about any of that right now,” she said.
“Nothing to talk about. Just a statement of fact.”
“I’ll call you back,” she said, hanging up.
She dialed the number Melville had left for her.
He picked up on the first ring. “Oh, thank God,” he said. “You’re in Salem.”
“Yeah, I am. Where the hell are you?”
“Finch kicked me out,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“He’s very angry at me.”
“I can see that,” Zee said. “What did you do to him?”
“I don’t know.” He paused for a long moment. “Actually, I do know. But it doesn’t make much sense. It was something that happened a long time ago, something I thought we had worked out.”
“Evidently not,” she said. “He was selling all your things through the window when I got here.”
“Please tell me you’re kidding.”
“I’m not,” Zee said. “He has re-created Hepzibah’s Cent-Shop in the front room. He was selling all your belongings.”
Melville couldn’t help but laugh.
“It’s not funny,” she said.
“No, but it’s creative,” he said. “Forgive me, it’s the only time I’ve even smiled all week.”
“I rescued some of your shirts,” she said.
“For that I am eternally grateful.”
“The doctor thinks it’s the new meds,” she offered. “They were causing hallucinations. We took him off them.”
“What’s he doing instead?”
“More Sinemet. One every three hours with two half doses added in twice a day.”
Melville was quiet.
“Are you still there?” Zee asked.
“Yeah.” After another long moment, Melville changed the subject. “I hired a home health aide,” he said. “Her name is Jessina. She doesn’t work on Fridays, but she’ll be in tomorrow.”
“I don’t understand how you’ve been keeping all this from me,” Zee said. “Or why.”
Melville sighed. “Finch didn’t want to worry you.”
She thought back to the effort it must have taken them both to keep things from her. “Any other secrets?”
“You should come over here. We need to figure things out,” he said.
“Where is ‘here’?”
“I’m house-sitting,” he said. “Friend of a friend. Over by the Athenaeum. Come by tomorrow after Jessina gets there.”
She wrote down the address. After she hung up, she went to the bedroom to check on Finch. He was sleeping soundly. She walked back to the kitchen and dialed Michael.
It rang three times before it went to voice mail.
Zee took out her anger on the kitchen. She cleaned. She scrubbed down stove and counters. She polished the toaster until it shined. As she pulled the canisters away from the wall and began to clean behind them, she found several items meant for decorating cakes: red and blue sugar, some bottles of food coloring, and some spices, including an old amber bottle—all stuff obviously left over from some baking project of Melville’s. She opened the amber bottle and looked inside at the tiny silver balls, the kind you might find on a fancy cake or maybe Christmas cookies—dragées, she thought they were called. They were probably too old to keep, but she didn’t want to throw anything out without asking, so she put all the bottles back in the cabinet with the other baking things.
Melville was a great cook, but he had never been great at cleaning or organizing. As she put the cake decorations away, she started reorganizing the cabinets, putting like with like, the canned goods in one cabinet, the spices in another. Her anger was fading, but the energy of adrenaline was not, and so she moved from cabinet to cabinet, wiping down the surfaces as she went, arranging the labels. She became aware that she was being a bit obsessive when she actually considered alphabetizing everything.
When she got to the third cabinet, she was surprised. Hidden behind the boxes of cereal, she found all the wine that Michael had given Finch, every birthday and Christmas for the last four years, all second-growth vintages, really good wines from Michael’s own collection. They weren’t stored on their sides but stood upright, a sure way to ruin the corks. Horrified, she pulled them out and set them on the counter.
Before his diagnosis of Parkinson’s, from his pirate days on, Finch’s alcohol consumption had been increasing steadily. He had developed a real fondness for wine. From a medical standpoint, this now made sense to Zee, though she’d never seen the phenomenon described in any of the medical journals she’d begun to read on a regular basis. Alcohol releases dopamine, the one chemical that Parkinson’s patients need.
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Brunonia Barry
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: From the author of The Lace Reader comes an emotionally resonant novel of tragedy, secrets, identity, and love.Zee Finch has a career as a respected psychotherapist and she’s about to get married, but the shocking death of Zee’s most troubled patient brings to the surface secrets in Zee’s own life.Zee is finally forced to confront the truth behind her mother’s death and the unfinished story she left behind. With a rich atmosphere, colourful, memorable, engaging characters, Brunonia Barry has written a wonderful novel that will appeal to fans of THE LACE READER but also to readers who enjoy sophisticated, emotionally gripping fiction.