I heard a click, then a man said, “Slaughter.”
“What?”
I felt a little crazy. Like some queasiness had taken over my head. I saw Howard’s workshop. I saw it in red. Slaughter. And then the kosher slaughterhouse where my father once worked appeared in my mind. It was an ugly job, but it seemed to suit my dad. He’d do in one domesticated victim after another, while arguing Torah with the shocet above the grinding of the machinery and the hiss of the water hose. My own analyst, Dr. Bernstein, found this bloody bit of my father’s story fascinating, said he’d never heard of such a clear example of counterphobic reaction to castration anxiety. At eight, I’d been equally intrigued, my curiosity urging me to the slaughterhouse against my mother’s strictest prohibition. Slaughter. I’d hear the complaining cows corralled in the back, not yet knowing how much they had to complain about. I’d stand all-eyes in the doorway, taking in the ritual. The process was oddly soothing: the coaxing of the leery but obedient animal, the quick slit of the throat, the hoisting of the carcass. All predictable. No surprises. Not at all like home.
“Detective Slaughter,” the man said. “Homicide.”
“This is Dr. Goodman,” I said, putting the emphasis on doctor to steady myself. “Returning your call.”
“Yeah. You have a patient Allison Forsyth?”
“I’m a psychiatrist.” I stalled. “I can’t reveal the names of my patients.”
“Well, this particular Allison Forsyth jumped off a very tall building earlier today. Didn’t survive to tell the story. Her husband said you were treating her. I’m in charge of the case. I’d like to talk to you. Get some things straight.”
He means Howard, I thought. Howard is the one who died. Allison can’t be dead. We have an appointment tomorrow. And the next day. A chill started at the base of my spine and rolled to my scalp.
“I could come tomorrow morning,” I heard my voice say.
“I’m here at dawn. Beat the I-10 traffic, you know.”
“Eight-fifteen?” I calculated I could drop the kids off, go straight downtown on San Pedro and be back for John Heyderman’s ten o’clock session.
“Police headquarters is on Nueva, west of the Courthouse. You can bypass the security booth. Homicide is down the first hall on the right.”
I wrote the directions in my appointment book using my favorite pen. Then, to try to make what he’d said real, so I would remember what I wanted to deny, I crossed out Allison’s name on my schedule: Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. And Friday. The thin blue lines I drew in a shaky hand underscored the empty eight o’clock slots formerly reserved for Howard’s name. I willed the action to make me feel. Something. Sad. Frightened. Angry. Something other than the awful numb anxiety that had taken claim of me since Howard’s death, that had invaded my brain, that pushed at the inside of my skull as if the barometric pressure had taken a hard plunge.
I had no choice but to stick with routine. Lock up. Walk the three blocks to pick up the kids from their San Antonio Academy classes: Throw Me a Curve for Alex, My Secret Journal for Tamar. They raced at me from the summer camp holding pen, the smell of dried sweat and dirt slamming into me seconds before they did.
“I get to tell Mom!” Tamar shouted, giving her brother a two-handed shove. “It’s about my friend.” She pulled me down and whispered in my ear, her breath reeking of Gatorade. “That girl named Abigail in my class? Her mom jumped off a building. A big one.” She gasped for air. “She’s dead. Abigail had to leave before snack.”
Small world.
Alex stood with his arms crossed. “She committed suicide. Just use the real word.”
“She needed a psychiatrist,” Tamar said. “Right, Mom?”
Small world.
“She had one, Baby.”
I didn’t have to say that, but the look on my face would have revealed me anyway. My physiology allows no secrets. I blush. I blanch. My mouth twitches. My pupils dilate.
“Mom! That’s two patients in a week,” Alex said. “You’re going to get sued and sent to jail, and we’ll have to go live with Dad. He’ll never let us keep the dogs in his stupid apartment.”
He took off through the parking lot, but not before I’d seen the tears cutting channels through the dust on his cheeks. He darted in and out between the cars, his red baseball cap a bobbing marker. I ran after him as fast I could with a ten-year-old girl by the arm and a pair of Claudia Cuti mules on my feet. Did you overlook the terror that accompanies the possibility of happiness? The voice was so vivid that I stopped and turned to look for the source. But it was in my head. Not Freud this time, but the voice of Dr. Nathan Bernstein, my former analyst.
By the time the kids and I got home that afternoon, my mind was crazed. I should have known just how crazed by virtue of the fact that calling Bernstein seemed to be a reasonable option. I didn’t know where else to turn. A drowning person grabs for a floating board, even if it’s full of nails.
“Dr. Bernstein,” he said, answering the phone with the same vaguely irritated, nasal voice that broadcast his once-daily piece of wisdom over my shoulder as I lay on the hard leather daybed. Those few words, always spoken just at session end, were my cue to vacate.
“This is Nora Goodman,” I said.
He did hesitate, but to his credit and my surprise, he remembered me. “I haven’t heard from you in some time,” he said.
Dr. Nathan Bernstein had been my assigned Training Analyst at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. Every analyst-in-training is required to undergo a personal psychoanalysis and for good reason. We all see the world through the constraints of our own psyches. There’s no way you can begin to understand where someone else’s psyche starts if you don’t know where yours ends. Bernstein wasn’t on my wish list for a Training Analyst, but I was too intimidated back then to buck the system with a special request.
Officially, I’d terminated with him fifteen years before all this happened—terminate being the curious word we psychoanalysts use to designate the ending of an analysis. In my case, escape would have been more apt. Freud recommended that analysts get re-analyzed every five years, like a mental tune-up. But in Freud’s time, most analyses lasted only a few months. My analysis with Bernstein went on for eight years. Even then, he wasn’t satisfied. Not all analysts adhere to Freud’s guideline for mental maintenance, but I venture that most do stay in touch with their former analysts to let them know about life events or to discuss problems that pop up. Once the door clicked behind me after my last session, I swore I’d never speak to him again.
“Something strange is happening in my life,” I said into the receiver, flooded by a familiar shamed, needful feeling. “I’d like to make an appointment to speak to you.”
“If you’re able, we could talk some now. I happen to be free.”
“I do want to pay you for your time.”
“Is it your wish that I’d not expect to be paid?” he said. “Rather narcissistic, wouldn’t you say? I do hope you’ve called about your inability to cut the tie with the impossible man you insisted upon marrying. Roger, was it?”
“Richard,” I said. For the briefest moment, I felt like defending my husband and the choice I’d made. I saw Richard as I’d seen him when we met our first day at Northwestern Medical School. My head was spinning from my last minute, off-the-waiting-list admission. And there he was. Brilliant. Exotic. A Jew from Texas, no less. Sophisticated and funny. The kind of guy who could joke about MD being stamped on his birth certificate. I’d been scared witless a few weeks later