5

I had told myself that all I wished for Anna was happiness. If she was happy where she was, then I would leave her there.

She seemed very happy in her life. I drove out to see her every day. She worked in the kitchen, helping with the preparation of meals. She took her duties seriously, and I couldn’t get her to play hookey when she had chores to do.

But she did have plenty of free time in the afternoon, and the gentle autumn was designed for long walks and conversation.

Some of my questions were answered. She did, indeed, sleep with Walker.

“But she’s not in love with him,” I told Diane.

Diane had shaken her head sadly. “Jesus. How can you possibly know that?”

“Her manner isn’t that of a lover,” I said. “There isn’t any passion in the relationship.”

“Hmmmmmmm,” Diane said. She had little faith in my judgment in such matters.

Anna was happy in her new world, but there was a dark, troubled side. She was subject to paranoid delusions, odd, hallucinatory episodes. I came to recognize a certain waxy, wary expression that signaled the advent of one of these attacks. She would clutch my wrist and whisper urgently in a small, trembly voice, “David!” My heart would sink as I heard her announce that the hill we were picnicking on was hollow. She could hear voices underneath. “Hush.” She would listen acutely. I would try to comfort her, reassure her that there were no voices, no menacing creatures. Sometimes reason would prevail. She was aware that these episodes were not real. But sometimes the panic would get rolling, and I couldn’t do anything to calm her. I would take her back to the farmhouse, and we would sit on the sofa in the big living room, and I would hold her tightly until, satisfied that she was safe, she would laugh and talk of other things.

“Wow, I’m a baby,” she would say.

“I want Anna to see a psychiatrist,” I told Walker. I had been coming to the commune every day for fifteen days, and I was standing in Walker’s study, still shaky, but now righteously angry. Walker blinked at me, his expression unreadable, has hands folded in front of him on the desk.

“Please sit down,” he said. “And tell me why you think Anna will profit from going out in the world again.”

I didn’t want to be calm. I wasn’t calm. This phony avatar had been allowing Anna to grow steadily worse over the course of long years, benignly nodding his head, muttering platitudes about God’s will.

Two hours earlier, Anna and I had been hiking. Anna had become convinced that we were being followed. “Dead people are hiding behind the trees,” she told me.

I had brought her back down the hill, back to the safety of the farmhouse, but she had gotten worse in the long walk through the woods, and she was babbling incoherently by the time we reached the farmhouse. I was shaken by the force of this delusion. Anna’s demons may not have been real, but her terror was, and I had felt helpless, sick with pity. I calmed her down and went looking for Walker in a rage. I wasn’t going to let his smooth affability turn me around. I was prepared for a fight.

“Whatever Anna wants to do, that will be done,” he said. “Does she want to go?”

“I haven’t asked her,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows, spread the fingers of both hands. “If she wants to go, she is free to go. She is not a prisoner here.”

“She may not listen to me. I was hoping she would listen to you.”

Walker laughed. He stood up and came slowly around his desk and put an arm on my shoulder. “Surely you know Anna better than that. What Anna decides to do, she does. You overrate my influence. Go. Ask her what she wants to do.”

I had turned away and reached for the door handle when Walker spoke again, a quiet, reflective voice. “There is no good for her in that world. Of that, I am convinced.”

I didn’t say anything, didn’t waste the time. I was preparing my arguments for Anna. I was aware of how stubborn she could be, and I expected a battle.

She agreed to go without argument. “Yes,” she said. “I have to go.”

“It’s your own decision,” I said.

“Oh no.” She shook her head. “There isn’t any decision to it.”

“I don’t think I understand,” I said.

Anna smiled, and her large eyes were bright, the eyes of a shy, nocturnal creature. We sat on the couch in the living room, twilight drawing the light from the room, leaching it of color. “No, you don’t understand. And yet, you are the thing that has happened. You are the beginning of it. I knew you would come. And so it will all come. I can’t run away. I have to go forward.”

I still didn’t understand, but I didn’t ask for further clarification. I felt a greater darkness shudder over the both of us. Was I wrong in coming here? Was I the adder in her Eden? Then my rational systems kicked in and I told myself that Anna was getting worse, that her hallucinations and phobic attacks could not be comfortably ignored.

I was doing the right thing.

I have told myself this again and again.

I didn’t waste any time, since I didn’t want either Anna or Walker to have a change of heart. I got Diane to come with me, and we picked Anna up early the next morning and drove her over to Romner Psychiatric Institute. Diane had arranged for a resident, a Dr. Moore, to see her. Anna’s old psychiatrist, Parrish, was still at the hospital, but he was now the director, having married the boss’s daughter, so he no longer hung around the emergency room chatting up new arrivals.

Anna, who sat in the backseat, regally silent for most of the drive, spoke up when Diane mentioned Parrish.

“He’s the one I have to see,” she said. I glanced at the rearview mirror and saw her jaw thrust forward and her eyes narrow in the proscribed, Shockley combat face, and I watched her eyes move, reading each word, as Diane explained why Parrish would be unavailable.

“Well, I’ve got to see him,” Anna repeated, and then she turned, hunkered down into leaden silence and pressed her forehead against the car window. Diane looked at me. I smiled a what-are-you-gonna-do-with-the-girl smile, and we shrugged in unison. The day was gloriously bright, autumn-burnished. In contrast, the emergency room lobby was washed in yellow light and had the funky, bad-luck feel of a bus station in the low rent district. I had another stomach-clenching jolt of uncertainty.

Diane knew the admissions clerk and told her that we were there to see Dr. Moore, who was expecting us. Dr. Moore was paged. Handsome, blond-haired and boyish, Dr. Moore arrived and took the ungracious, glowering Anna (“I didn’t come to see you”) off to talk with him.

He came out later to tell us that he thought it would be best if they admitted Anna for a few days.

I left, disquiet flickering in my heart like a faulty light bulb about to settle into darkness.