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A Tightly Raveled Mind. Copyright © 2014 by Diane Lawson. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written consent from the publisher, except for brief quotations for reviews. For further information, write Cinco Puntos Press, 701 Texas, El Paso, TX 79901; or call 1-915-838-1625.
FIRST EDITION
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lawson, Diane.
A tightly raveled mind / Diane Lawson.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-935955-92-4 (paperback) : ISBN 978-1-935955-93-1 (eBook)
1. Women psychoanalysts—Fiction. 2. Marital conflict—Fiction. 3. Ex-police officers—Fiction. 4. Murder—Fiction. 5. San Antonio (Tex.)—Fiction. 6. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3612.A952T54 2014
813'.6—dc23
2014007656
Book and cover design by Anne M. Giangiulio
Poor girl has to go back to work.
Electronic edition handcrafted at Pajarito Studios.
Dedication
For my children,
Alejandro and Pilar
Epigraph
No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed devils
that inhabit the human breast and seeks to wrestle with them
can expect to come through unscathed.
NSigmund Freudn
Chapter One
Psychoanalysis is not and has never been the fashion in Texas. It’s a pull-yourself-up-by-your-cowboy-bootstraps kind of place where psychiatrists are only for crazy people. Texas psychoanalysts like to say they grow their own analytic patients, meaning people come seeking a quick fix for emotional pain and learn about the enduring value of self-knowledge as a by-product.
In no small part, my own success could be attributed to several advantages provided me by my former husband Richard, as he would have been the first to tell you. There was the money, of course—the plump cushion of his inheritance, on top of the income from his high-end psychiatric consulting—which allowed me the luxury of being selective about patients I took on. My office on the grounds of his childhood home was in a classy part of town, and, although I’d kept my maiden name for professional purposes, enough of the right people connected me to Dr. Richard Kleinberg and his old San Antonio bloodline to ensure my business card would be handed out in the best places. In Texas, as in most of the country, Jews are well enough regarded, as long as they’re doctors, lawyers or accountants.
On the other hand, I’d given up a lot for Richard. My career was just getting going in Chicago when he started lobbying to move back to San Antonio. From what I’ve observed, Texans must get a homing microchip implanted in their brains at birth. I’m not talking about everyday nostalgia for one’s home town. I’m talking about some primordial imperative for return. I’d agreed to relocate if, and only if, I could have my ideal practice. I would not, as too many psychiatrists have come to do, run patients through the office at fifteen-minute intervals with only a prescription to show for the encounter. I would restrict my work to psychoanalysis, the real five-times-a-week kind, not some watered-down version. Richard, under the influence of the migratory urge to reinhabit his birthplace, swore that he wouldn’t dream of pressuring me to make money.
I should have known better. His complaints about me not pulling my weight and my other numerous faults grew like weeds in his native soil. However, after a few years, despite domestic turbulence and brutal summers, I’d settled into a comfortable, if not blissful, routine. I was good at my job—or thought I was. And I liked my work: listening each day to the details of the lives of my seven patients, exploring the intricacies of their minds, trying to help people like Professor Howard Westerman get comfortable in their owns skins. So much for my good intentions. Like Private Investigator Mike Ruiz says, that and ninety-nine cents will get you a breakfast taco at Panchito’s.
The Monday that my patient, Howard Westerman, blew himself to kingdom come started out like any ordinary workday—like the kind of everyday day that feeds our communal delusion that everyone we care about will live forever. I’d felt my standard urgency to be at my station for Howard’s eight o’clock session. Once, early on in my work with him, I’d dawdled over the newspaper, reluctant to plunge into my routine, only to emerge from my back door to find him pacing the balcony of my converted carriage house office. He’d flat refused to use the couch that session, circling the room instead, talking in fragmented sentences, rolling a cat’s eye marble—the “lucky” one he always carried in his pocket—around in his fingers. I got the message about his desperate need for order. From then on, I’d done my best not to disrupt him.
This in mind, I’d pushed through the weekend’s worth of stale air in the waiting area that day to switch on the lamp and straighten the magazines before closing myself into the consulting room. I’d registered my usual irritation at the sight of the glass-paned door, a choice Richard had insisted upon for aesthetic reasons. It was that wavy kind of glass—some fancy Italian something, totally opaque of course—but it always struck me as posing too permeable a barrier for a therapeutic sanctuary.
I’d gone about my morning ritual: making coffee, adjusting the blinds for the morning sun, fluffing the pillow at the head of the couch, and covering it with a fresh tissue. When I finally looked up, the clock read 7:56, which was late for the painfully punctual Howard. I held my breath, anticipating the strike of his heavy black wingtips on the metal staircase. As if to provide a substitute sound, the resident redheaded woodpecker started pounding the tree by the window. The clock rolled to 8:00. I poured some coffee, burned my tongue on the first sip and thumbed through a psychiatric journal full of articles on schizophrenia, PET scanning and the thirty-one flavors of bipolar disorder before tossing it in the trash. There was no possibility of missing Howard coming up the stairs. I’d checked the waiting room anyway. Empty.
In theory, a patient coming late constitutes resistance to treatment. Not necessarily a big deal, just something to talk about once he or she arrives. Part of the process. Grist for the mill. Under ordinary circumstances, the analyst can even afford to experience a patient’s tardiness as a small gift. There are always calls to return, letters and bills to open, private thoughts to savor, fingernails to file. But I knew deep down this event was far too un-Howardly to consider ordinary.
Howard came seeking analysis when his socialite wife Camille put the divorce gun to his head. Their twin boys would be off to college in the fall, and she’d told him she didn’t fancy spending the rest of her life with a human robot. Howard, having grown up in rural West Texas, came by his lack of emotion honestly. He’d survived the bleakest of childhoods—seventh child of twelve, an emotional cipher for a mother, a hellfire Pentecostal minister for a father—by making feelings irrelevant. I‘d immediately understood Camille’s complaints about Howard. The man possessed no vocabulary for feelings, much less a clue as to what might require one. He was maddeningly and irrationally rational. All the same, I’d come to be quite fond of him, certain there was a tender guy inside awaiting rescue. My rescue.
I paced around the office as Howard’s minutes ticked by