"I was wondering," Dr. Williams said, "if it's ever occurred to you that you may never find your sister's killer?"
It was early evening, and the sun snaking through the yellow curtains threw thin fingers of light onto the vase of white carnations on the table next to her. She sat with her long legs crossed at the ankles, her hands folded calmly in her lap.
Lee felt his throat constricting at her words, and the heat of shame rising from his neck.
"What makes you say that?" he asked in a tight voice.
"Well, it's a possibility you may have to face at some point, and I was just wondering if it was something you've considered." Her voice was mild and nonconfrontational, but his neck hairs bristled at the remark.
"That's a rather punitive question, isn't it?" he replied, not bothering to hide his irritation.
"Why would I want to punish you?"
"You would know that better than I would."
She leaned back in her chair, the tips of her long fingers touching.
"Actually, I was wondering if your continued search for Laura's killer could be a form of self-punishment."
He stared at her. "Why on earth would you say that?"
"Well, it is keeping open a wound, isn't it?"
"I don't see any way that would change until her killer is found."
"Other people might have decided to move on by now, that's all."
"They haven't even found her body, for God's sake! How am I supposed to 'move on'?" The blood vessels in his head were pulsating. The headache he'd been fighting all day was getting worse.
"It's interesting you're having such a strong reaction-"
"Oh, Jesus Christ!" he exploded. "What kind of reaction do you expect? We're talking about my sister's death-how am I supposed to react?"
"It's your reaction to my suggestion I'm talking about. You could have just said that was an interesting observation, and moved on. But you didn't-you saw it as an attack."
The light was directly behind her now, surrounding her head like a gauzy halo. He blinked and rubbed his temple. The light seemed to pulsate at the same speed as the throbbing in his head.
"Okay," he said, "I know where you're going with this-it's Therapy 101. The force of my reaction means that you struck a nerve, which means that the more I protest, the more you have a point. Ergo, I am using my sister's death to serve my own masochistic need to punish myself because I feel responsible somehow."
His words hung in the air, the harshness of his voice echoing in his ears. But Dr. Williams merely smiled.
"All right," she said. "Shall I write you a check this week?"
"Touche," he said, ashamed of his outburst. "But why do you always have to be so goddamn right all the time?" "I'll take that as a compliment," she said, taking a sip from her sports bottle, which was usually filled with iced tea. He was wondering if she sometimes wished it were filled with whiskey. She opened her mouth to say something, but he spoke first.
"Please don't say that my anger at you is all about my mother."
"Actually, I was going to observe that your anger at your mother is somewhat ironic," she said, crossing her legs.
"How so?"
"Well, you're mad at her because she refuses to believe your sister is dead."
"And?"
"Hasn't it ever struck you that your profession is in some ways an attempt to keep your sister alive?" He took a deep breath.
"I don't see it that way. I know she's dead-I've accepted that. I just want to find out who killed her. And if I can't do that, then I can at least catch the people who are out there killing other people's sisters."
"Or wives, or husbands-"
"Right."
"So we're back to my first point." "That I may never catch him."
"Or her."
Or her. Funny, but he had assumed from the first that Laura's killer would be a man-even now the idea of it being a woman struck him as odd and unlikely. Not that he believed women were incapable of great violence and evil deeds-he had too much experience for that-but he felt Laura would never have fallen victim to anyone unless she was vastly overmatched in size and physical strength.
He looked at Dr. Williams, who was smoothing her long maroon skirt as she rose from her chair.
"I'm afraid our time is up."
Later, on the walk home, as he calmed down, he realized that-as usual-there was something to what she said. He remembered as a child the feeling of worrying a scab, and the perverse satisfaction at the sight of his own blood as he pulled it away from his skin. He recalled the summer after his father left, when he had skinned his elbow jumping from the tree house next door on a dare from Drew Apthorp. She was a slim girl with smooth, straight-as-a-stick sandy hair and freckle-mottled skin who came to spend summers with her grandparents, and he had a crush on her.
He would lie in bed at night thinking of Drew, picking at his scab while listening to the buzzing of moths as they hurtled their hairy bodies against the window screens. He wondered why they were so desperate to get into the lighted room that they were willing to risk self-destruction. He remembered his fascination with the gathering globule of bright blood on his arm, and his odd enjoyment of the stinging sensation as he pulled back the scab.
He was irritated with the fact that once again Dr. Williams was right, but he was even more irritated at his own reaction. For God's sake, it was Therapy 101. Hit a nerve, and the patient will respond emotionally. Good Lord, he'd done it scores of times with his own patients, and knew all the signs, but when it came to his own unconscious… Physician heal thyself, indeed.
It was only now that he made the connection between his father's disappearance and the odd satisfaction he took inflicting pain on himself-as though the physical pain lightened the heaviness inside him. It was exactly the same mechanism with the "cutters"-teenagers who nicked their skin with knives or razors until the blood flowed. They too were suffering, whether from garden-variety adolescent angst or something more sinister. But somehow physical pain was preferable to the emotional kind and served as a distraction-the cutters had figured this out, and, bizarre as it looked, were actually self-medicating.
He passed the Cooper Union building, its square, redbrick facade stately and solid against the dimming evening sky. He felt a drop of rain on his cheek as he rounded the corner and swung out onto the Bowery. As he headed toward Seventh Street, he felt another drop, and then another. This was no misty autumn rain-the droplets were fat and full, falling faster and faster as he hurried toward his apartment.
A stooped old Asian woman scurried along the sidewalk, trailing a garbage bag full of plastic bottles and soda cans behind her in a rickety shopping cart. He wondered how many hours she had spent rooting through trash bins and Dumpsters in search of bottles and cans to recycle at five cents each. Her face was weathered, wizened, worried looking. Her thin brows were drawn together in a frown as she bent her head under the rapidly increasing rain.
So much misery in the world, he thought, so much suffering. He looked at the woman's retreating figure, her thin chicken legs and scrawny body, her feet stuffed into cheap shoes. She stopped to fish a battered green raincoat out of her shopping cart before continuing on her way. As he trudged through the rain to his building, he wondered what she was going home to. What kind of life did she have? What twists of fate had brought her to collecting discarded cans and bottles on the Bowery in the rain on a Friday night?
Later that night he sat at the piano struggling with the left hand of a Bach prelude. His right hand lay useless in his lap, and the notes winding around each other on the page made his head ache. Normally he found Bach profoundly illuminating, but tonight the scramble of black notes on the page reminded him of raindrops-and of the unending, inscrutable suffering that was mankind's lot. He forced himself to grapple a while longer, but gave up just as a clap of thunder shook the skies, as the storm settled in, rattling the windowpanes in its fury.
He got up and looked out the window. The droplets hurtled themselves at the panes just as the moths had that childhood summer so many years ago, with equal determination to get inside, it seemed. He thought about Drew Apthorp, and wondered what had become of her. So many people who touch our lives and who we never see again. He didn't like loose ends. He knew that life is full of them, but he still didn't like it. His sister's death was just another kind of loose end, and he ached to solve the gnawing question in his soul.
He and Drew had shared a kiss out in her grandmother's summerhouse, at the end of the long narrow lawn, on the edge of the woods. They sat on the marble bench until their legs stiffened and their bare feet got cold, as the sun settled over the tree line and the mourning doves cooed softly to each other from beneath the honeysuckle bush. The air was full of its fragrance, and the night began to come alive with the twittering and hoots of woodland creatures. Lee tasted the faint flavor of strawberries on Drew's lips as she inclined her freckled face toward him, her sandy hair brushing his cheek. It was his first kiss-he never did find out if it was hers or not. He knew even then that life would never be sweeter than it was sitting in the summerhouse kissing a girl he might never see again, but whose straight hair and freckles had become, for him, a template of beauty itself.
A gust of wind drove a sheet of rain at the window-the droplets rapped against the panes like bullets, startling him. He peered out at the Ukrainian church across the street, its huge rosary window dark and cold against the stormy sky. He thought of the window as though it looked into the mind of the killer. What source of illumination would he need to see inside that mind-to finally glimpse, and perhaps understand, the darkness within?