“Hello, I’m Doctor Harper, I work in the Psychiatric Department upstairs, the hospital sent me down,” she started sounding friendly and calm, but also very professional, as if she were seven steps removed from the situation. “I want you to know that everyone understands what you’re going through, and no one here is going to tell you that there is a right way or a wrong way to act or feel, but they are concerned and it’s protocol when something like this happens to send us in. Don’t think my coming down is because you reacted to this in the wrong way,” she explained, taking the tan seat next to Claire. She looked as if she wanted to make contact, to touch Claire’s arm or rest a neat hand briefly on her knee, but she just looked at Claire, not daring to crack a smile. “Is there anything you’d like to talk about?” she asked, her voice incredibly understanding, as if even with these questions she expected nothing from Claire. When Claire just stared at her, shaking her head “no,” she went on. “That’s okay. But in a few weeks it might be a good idea to see someone, and if you still feel this bad in a few months, I’d definitely suggest getting help. Not that it wouldn’t be completely fair for you to feel this way even in a few months, still, you shouldn’t have to feel this bad if there’s anything anyone can do even just to help a little bit.”
“I don’t feel bad,” Claire said, because she wouldn’t have put it that way. Bad was what happened when she invited a friend for coffee and they said they couldn’t make it, bad was when the dog ran off for a few hours, bad was when Preston hadn’t been home at five-twenty, but they’d passed bad at six o’clock that night and this right here, whatever she was feeling, this wished it were bad, this feeling was to bad what a slum was to a penthouse apartment.
“I understand,” the psychiatrist said. “Look, I’m going to go get you a prescription for something to help you sleep. You need your rest right now and I understand that you’re not going to get it without help. I’m not even going to make you fill it tonight. I’m going to give you a Valium to calm you down for now and prescribe some sleeping pills for when you go to bed tomorrow. You don’t have a history of allergies to medications, do you?”
“No,” Claire answered.
“Any history of dependency?”
“No.”
“Okay, good, then I can prescribe you a couple of pills for the next two days.”
“Why can’t you give me a week’s worth?” Claire asked. “I’m not going to want to come back.”
“I know, but it’s best this way,” the doctor replied, with a sympathetic half-smile. Claire knew the doctor was worried she’d take all the pills at once, that this was not the time to be handing her the keys to an easy and painless suicide. “I’ll be back. I’ll give you the pill and you can stay here and relax. Your husband will be out shortly,” she said and this was the first time Claire had really thought of Matthew since the sheet had been lifted from Preston’s face.
“Where’s my husband?” she demanded of the girl at the desk.
“I’ll call back,” the girl said as the psychiatrist wrote her prescription and silently left. The girl nodded at Claire as she listened to the phone she’d just picked up. “He’s in back talking with Doctor Palmer. Matthew told me to tell you he called his sister and she’ll be picking you up soon to go home.”
“Go home?” Claire asked. She hadn’t even considered that. What was there at home? The prospect of that big house in such a child-friendly neighborhood, the yard with Preston’s toys, the game of Stratego he and Matthew had left out last night for the following day, the one they would have been playing today, it all felt like a gaping wound. If only she stayed here, if she lay down on this cold floor and slept on these tiles, if she never moved from this spot, maybe none of it would be real. “I don’t think I want to go home.”
“Well, not just yet,” the girl said, misunderstanding. “The doctor is going to do his autopsy tomorrow. He needs you to sign one more form.”
“Autopsy?” Claire asked.
“The doctor already talked to you about it, you signed a form,” the girl replied. “It’s only for your son. . .to find whoever. . . .”
“I signed a form?” Claire asked. She shook her head and stared vacantly at the floor, finding it fascinating how the brown and black swirls moved and bent with the light. “I guess I signed a form while I was so. . . upset.”
It took a few minutes for anything more to happen and this time Claire felt the time. She watched the clock, noting that it was almost midnight. Maybe the pumpkin would burst, the clock would strike and she’d hear it, waking up with Preston alive and well, with everything as it had been this morning. She’d go check on her son and he’d be huddled under his Spiderman comforter, one arm hanging over the bed as the sun came through the windows, shining on his exposed left foot and reaching up to his face.
The doctor came out first, followed by Matthew, and it seemed as if they’d been cavorting in there. “Where were you?” Claire demanded of her husband, hugging herself as she shivered, pushing the tears from under her eyes with clenched fists. It wasn’t even that cold in the waiting room, not like inside the morgue, but she had been perpetually shivering since she arrived.
“I was with Doctor Harper,” Matthew explained. “She told me it was best if we both had some time alone and so I took a walk. I called my sister,” he went on, shaking his head as he looked at Doctor Palmer. “That’s where I saw the doctor.” Matthew put his arm around Claire, standing tall next to his wife and she melted into him, feeling weak.
“I want you to know I did a thorough investigation of the body, though of course we won’t know anything for sure until the official autopsy tomorrow,” Doctor Palmer started, and Claire and Matthew turned to look at him. “I did…” He went on citing medical jargon about tests done on the blood, the hair, the skin, information neither Claire nor Matthew could understand. Claire nodded, looking directly at the doctor before glancing up at Matthew, who also didn’t appear to comprehend. “We don’t know anything for sure yet, but you should be aware that there will be an investigation.”
“What for?” Claire asked, her mind blank.
“It’s protocol after a child is found like this to assume—“ the doctor started.
“Someone did this to him?” Claire interrupted. And it only made sense, children who were not sick or the victims of horrible accidents did not just die. It was only logical, someone had caused this, she knew it, and yet it wasn’t until the doctor suggested it that she fully realized the truth. The feelings she was experiencing, what she had just gone through and what was to come (though she couldn’t even begin to think about that), had been done by someone and if that someone had never existed, if that someone had never encountered Preston. . . . If only she had not let him go out with his friend today her son really would be sleeping in his bed, and so would Claire and Matthew and they’d have had dinner with the Smithson’s on Thursday evening and Eva would have come knocking on their door at eleven twenty-two like clockwork the next morning. But instead that person had existed, instead they’d found Preston and nothing, not her life or Matthew’s, not the house, not the world as they knew it, would ever be the same.
“What?” Claire cried, and turning around she sauntered toward the secretary’s desk, grasped the clipboard attached to the sign-in sheet, the first and only object she saw lying out, and threw it onto the floor. It bounced once and Claire stepped on it as if she were extinguishing a fire, as if once it was smashed she’d go on to something else and then something else and something else until the entire world had been trampled.
“Claire,” Matthew called, tears in his voice. “Claire, we have to talk to the doctor.”
She stopped, the tone of her husband’s voice wrapped around her skin and she couldn’t think straight. Matthew stood in front of her; he grasped her shoulders and looking at his face, at his blue eyes, the eyes Preston had inherited, she stopped, took a deep breath and calmed down, turning back to