If Wagner was concerned, he didn’t show it. “I think you should leave the legalities to me,” he advised. “Focus on the individual before you, not his paper trail. Talk to him.”
“I’ve been talking to him. For two days now. He doesn’t say much—doesn’t seem to know what to say.”
“It can be difficult.”
“It’s frustrating. I have no patient history or prior assessments to help me here. I don’t even have a list of his current medications.”
Wagner smiled through his goatee. It was a look, I suppose, that was meant to be disarming. “I think you have everything that you need right now. Talking to him is the most important thing. Everything else is secondary.”
I turned and left the office without a retort, deciding that whatever response I might muster wasn’t worth the price of my job.
Why don’t you tell me a little bit about your childhood,” I suggested. We were walking across the hospital grounds, an environment I felt was more conducive to psychotherapy than sitting in a small office as my patient and I stared at each other. Something about the outdoors opens people up—frees them, in a way.
He gave me a pitying, incredulous look—one I’d already become accustomed to receiving from him. I never would figure out where that look came from, but I began to recognize it as his default expression. It was the look I imagined parents of teenagers received with regular frequency. I’m embarrassed for you because of how clueless you really are, it seemed to say, except with teenagers there was usually an added dose of resentment, and I never got that from him. Rather, Jason’s expressions were touched with empathy—something about the depth of those eyes, perhaps—almost as if he were here to help me, instead of the other way around.
“On the surface, I was part of what you might call a traditional family. We lived in a middle-class suburban neighborhood in Columbia.”
“Columbia, Maryland,” I clarified, and he nodded. It was located in Howard County, about a thirty-minute drive to the west of us.
“Dad was a police officer,” he continued. “Mom used to be a teacher, but when the kids were born, she took several years off to run a part-time day care out of our house. It allowed her to stay home with us during those first couple of years.”
“You say ‘us.’ You had siblings?”
“A sister.”
“Where is she now?”
He sighed, as if he’d explained this all a thousand times before. I wondered how many psychiatrists he’d been through before me.
“Your sister,” I prodded, waiting for him to answer my question, but he was silent, looking down at the Severn River below us.
“Is she older or younger?”
“She was three years older,” he said, and his use of the past tense was not lost on me.
“Is she still alive?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I haven’t spoken with her in a long time.”
“You had a disagreement? A falling-out?”
“No,” he said. His face struggled for a moment. Beyond the iron pickets, a seagull spread its wings and left the cliff, gliding out into the vacant space some eighty feet above the water.
I put a hand on his shoulder. I wasn’t supposed to do that, I knew. There are rules of engagement to psychiatry, and maintaining appropriate boundaries—physical and otherwise—is one of them. What may seem like a compassionate gesture can be misconstrued. Extending a casual touch, or revealing too much personal information, for example, puts the psychiatrist at risk of being perceived by the patient as someone other than his doctor. The relationship of doctor and patient becomes less clear, and the patient’s sense of safety within that relationship can suffer. And yet, here I was with my hand resting on my patient’s shoulder for the second time this week. I found it unsettling, for I was doing it without thinking, almost as a reflex, and I didn’t understand where it was coming from. Was I attracted to him? I must admit I did feel something personal in his presence, a certain … pull. But it was hard to define, difficult to categorize. But dangerous, yes … I recognized that it had the potential to be dangerous for us both.
“What happened to your sister?” I asked, withdrawing my hand and clasping both behind my back.
“Gone,” he said, following the flight of the gull before it disappeared around the bend. He turned his eyes toward mine, and the hopelessness I saw there nearly broke my heart. “She’s been gone for five years now, and alive or dead, I don’t think she’s ever coming back.”
The evening group session I ran in the Hinsdale Building on Tuesdays and Thursdays finished on time, but I had paperwork that I’d been putting off, and by the time I finally put that to rest it was almost 8 P.M. Full dark had settled across the campus, and although the hospital does a pretty good job with exterior lighting, the footprint of the place is still over twelve acres and unavoidably prone to large swaths of shadows. It’s for this reason that I don’t like leaving after dark. It’s not the patients I’m afraid of, although we house more murderers per capita at Menaker than they do at the closest prison, Brockbridge Correctional Facility in Jessup. And, yes, we’ve had our share of attacks—something the visitor brochures about this place will never mention. An experienced nurse was once killed here during the night shift, struck by a large television (this was before the days of flat screens) hurled at her by a patient while her back was turned. She’d fallen forward, the TV’s trajectory matching the arc of her fall, and the second impact had crushed her skull between the old Sony and the tiled floor. There are inherent dangers in working with people—many of them with a history of violence—whose self-control is tenuous at best.
But no, it’s not the patients I’m afraid of, but rather the dark itself that I find menacing. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember, and I can’t help but think that it has something to do with him, the way his mind turned the final corner that night when I was eight years old, the way I had to go looking for him, terrified that I was already too late.
The wide brick walkway from the physician offices to the front gate was well lit, but I could hear the April night breeze pushing past the oaks on either side, making their newly budding limbs shift and sway as if finally awakening from a long sleep and realizing they had someplace better to go. I could hear the trees whisper to one another, spiteful old men with malevolence in their hearts, the shadowy expanse of the grounds providing complicit cover for their furtive movements. A finger of one of the branches dipped down to graze my shoulder as I passed, catching on the slick fabric of my windbreaker, and for a moment I felt that it did not want to let go.
“Out for a walk, Lise?” Tony Perkins called out to me from the watchman’s booth near the gate, and the sound of his voice made me jump.
“Goin’ home, Tony,” I replied, but he held up a hand for me to stop a second.
“Let me get someone to escort you. Make sure you get there safe.”
I live in an apartment less than a quarter mile from the hospital, which enables me to commute by foot in all but the most inclement weather. Security here doesn’t like me to walk home at night unattended, and they often have someone accompany me on the trek if I’m leaving after dark. It’s sweet of them and reminds me how Menaker, for all its notoriety, can sometimes feel more like a close-knit