Chapter 9

Max sat in a contemplative pose, leaning forward on his cane and closing his eyes as they headed for their destination. Lindsey studied the look of concentration on his face and again tried to imagine not being able to see. She’d slept with a nightlight until she was ten; being surrounded by darkness all the time would drive her to the mental asylum in a week.

When she was first told about Max’s case, she thought it would put her on the road to getting off Gull Island. The challenge of rehabilitating Max would draw the attention of her superiors and maybe even lead to an article in The New England Journal of Medicine with her byline attached. He certainly was the most interesting case she’d met in the two years since graduating from medical school. A blind man institutionalized for the last twenty years with obvious feelings of guilt over the deaths of his parents and a social anxiety disorder gave her more fertile ground for study than the run-of-the-mill teenagers with self-esteem issues, housewives with eating disorders, and men with midlife crises she saw at Gull Island Hospital.

The Explorer hit a bump, but Max absorbed the impact without flinching. He was so bound up emotionally after so much time in virtual seclusion that she wondered what had prompted Dr. Lee to release him. His recent inquisitiveness did give her some hope, though. Maybe she could reach him and pry him out of that comfortable little cocoon he’d spun for himself at Gull Island Psychiatric.

“We’re almost there,” she said.

“OK,” he said in his usual deadpan voice.

“It’s a lovely place. Part of this new development under construction on Finley Bluff. We should probably go back to the Wal-Mart for some fancier clothes to fit in.” On the outside she laughed, but inside she groaned. She always made jokes in uncomfortable situations. No matter how she analyzed it by herself and with colleagues, she couldn’t cure the self-defense mechanism she’d leaned on for fifteen years now. It had become too fused with her nervous system, like a parasite.

“You think so?”

“No, it’s fine. I was just kidding.”

“Oh.”

She stepped on the accelerator to power the SUV up the incline leading to Gullcrest Heights. Halfway up the unnamed drive she saw the rust-colored shingles and white eaves of the house rising in the Explorer’s windshield. Immediately she felt back at home in Oak Park. “We’re here,” she said.

“Great,” he said. She saw muscles twitch in his cheek as if he were trying to suppress a smile. She wondered if this trip meant more to him than he’d let on.

She turned into the driveway and made sure to stop well before the fragile glass-paned garage doors. Max unfastened his seatbelt and bounded down from the Explorer as though he’d been riding in it forever. He is a quick learner. Dr. Lee had noted on Max’s file how quickly he’d mastered the GED test, despite almost no formal education for eighteen years. But memorizing trigonometry formulas and learning to unbuckle a seatbelt were a lot easier than overcoming his psychological baggage.

She took his arm, taking note of how he flinched at her touch, and then led him up the sidewalk to the front steps. He reached out with his cane to tap the base of the front door. She thought at first he meant to knock on the door, but instead he ran his hand over the door and along the glass panes on either side with the same care as when he’d touched her face during their first session.

Her cheeks turned warm at the memory of his touch. His hands were so strong and yet so soft, like Dad’s. The entire time he’d run his fingers over her face, she had worried about a repressed Oedipal complex. After she went home that night, she realized he was the first man to touch her in three years.

“How big is it?” he asked her, shaking her back to reality.

“Two stories, four bedrooms. I forget how many square feet exactly. It’s almost as big as the hospital.” She meant it as a joke, but recognized the bitterness in her voice. Gull Island Hospital couldn’t be too much bigger than this house. “Come on, let’s go inside.”

She lifted up a softball-sized rock next to the doorway, underneath which Audrey had said she’d left a key for them. Lindsey would have to drop by her house tonight to return the key, which meant another night of drinking expensive wine while Audrey complained about her nonexistent love life. As a psychiatrist, Lindsey was expected to have the magic solution to make Audrey irresistible. Drop fifty pounds, don’t use a paintbrush to put on your make-up, and wear a more supportive bra, Lindsey wanted to say. As if she had any room to talk. Every time she saw Audrey, she couldn’t help seeing what she would look like in fifteen years when she reached middle age. It was not much to look forward to. The things I do for a patient, she thought.

She held open the front door to usher him into the foyer. Max started to the left, towards the staircase and dining room, but Lindsey took his elbow, guiding him into the living room. Right away he began feeling the wallpaper with the same look of concentration he’d worn on the ride over. “It’s beige,” she said. He nodded and continued to move his hands along the wall.

Lindsey sat down on a white-and-blue-striped sofa and sighed. It was just as well that Audrey had been too busy to meet them here. She would never understand what Max was doing and would probably make some insensitive remark. Audrey had left her racist family in Georgia—her great-grandfather had founded the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan—but her racist family would never leave her. No one could escape their families, no matter how far they went, Lindsey knew from personal experience.

Max had reached a window by now and ran one of the drapes through his fingers. “What color are these?”

“Dark blue,” she said. He nodded and continued his exploration of the room. “Are you going to be all right here by yourself for a few minutes?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Good, I’m going upstairs to the little girl’s room.” She chugged upstairs and went down the hall to the master bathroom. The Jacuzzi tub, dual sinks, and marble counters all reminded her of the house in Oak Park.

When she was thirteen, she came home from school and went upstairs to find Mother, but she wasn’t in the bedroom. Lindsey heard a splash and went into the bathroom expecting to find a trail of blood coming from Mother’s wrists. Instead, Mother sat on the edge of the tub, toweling off. In that moment when she saw Mother’s pale, thin, unharmed body she realized her disappointment and ran away.

Lindsey looked into a mirror above one of the sinks and saw tears had come to her eyes from the memory. As part of obtaining her license, she had discussed her mother’s depression and Dad’s accident with a colleague, but even understanding the psychological issues of Mother’s breakdown and her own anger and guilt about Dad’s death couldn’t erase the pain. She dabbed at her red cheeks and tried to smile. At least Max couldn’t see her like this. She squatted over the toilet to avoid getting germs on the seat and dried her hands on her pants, keeping her eyes away from the mirror.

She left the bathroom and from the stairwell looked down into the family room. Max felt his way through as he had in the living room. “Need any help?” she called to him.

“Could you describe this for me?”

“Of course. We’ve got the vaulted ceiling in the same beige as the living room with French doors opening to the patio and backyard.” As she described the furniture, she saw herself lying on the plush carpet, a tubby twelve-year-old with a bag of Oreos and game shows on the television. About this time every weeknight Dad used to come home from the city to watch TV with her. With him gone, she was alone. Outside, her brothers shouted, laughed, and grunted as they played football in the backyard. She wanted to join them, but she was too fat to keep up with them. Instead, she turned up the TV and shoved a handful of cookies into her mouth.

“Is something wrong?” Max asked.

“No, I’m fine. Over there to your left is the fireplace, which is more for show than anything else. For that romantic effect when you bring a date over.” She saw her sixteen-year-old brother Philip curled up with a girl by the fire. As fourteen-year-old Lindsey crouched at the top of the stairs, invisible as always, she watched Philip unzip the girl’s dress while her hands went to the fly of his pants. Lindsey waited until they finished before creeping back to her bedroom. In the mirror of her vanity she touched her sagging belly and flat breasts and turned away in disgust. No one would ever make love to her by the fireplace. “I’m sorry, where was I?” she asked.

“The fireplace.”

“Oh, right. Next to that we have a bookshelf loaded right now with cardboard cutouts. Not Harlequin romances, but just as one-dimensional.” She laughed, but inside she wanted to cry for the girl she’d been, haunting the house in Oak Park for eighteen years. “Hold on a minute and I’ll come back down.”

She wanted to leave so she could collect her thoughts and gain perspective on the painful memories this model house had dredged up from the subconscious soup of her mind, but she couldn’t. Max needed her and she’d taken an oath to do everything possible to help her patients. Her own pain could wait until later, when she could deal with it in a healthy way.

She showed him the library, dining room, kitchen, and even the laundry room. He wanted to touch everything and bombarded her with questions about the color of the furniture or how the appliances worked. Never had she seen him so animated. By the time they went upstairs to the bedrooms, she worried about him becoming too excited. “We should probably get you back to Midway House before Mrs. Garnett thinks I’ve kidnapped you.”

“A few more minutes,” he said. “Please?”

She heard such longing and desperation in his voice that she couldn’t say no. “All right, but let’s skip the other bedrooms and go straight to the master bedroom and bath.” She tried to shake away the ghost of Mother lying in the bed, so frail and small that she looked like a child on the king-size bed. While Max explored the walk-in closet, Lindsey sagged against the wall and pressed her hands to her face.

These memories were only the residual effects of her own feelings of guilt about Dad’s accident and repressed anger about Mother’s illness. Mother had been dead for eight years now. Lindsey, away at Stanford, had not gone to the funeral, only compounding her negative feelings. Nothing she saw now could hurt her. Like a dream, she told herself. A nightmare really.

When Max got to the bathroom, Lindsey stood in the doorway to describe it for him. “It’s beautiful,” he said. She said nothing; not even a joke to deflect the pain came to mind. “Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” she said. She had never left.