19

It took three-quarters of an hour to get to twenty-seven fourteen Windover Street. It was a little after three in the morning. I brushed snow off the mailbox to read the numbers. The house was hidden amid plump, snowy evergreens.

The house was dark, unwelcoming. There were faint indentations leading up the walk, footsteps the snow was quickly erasing. I didn’t see Anna’s truck. Maybe I had been wrong about her destination.

My original sense of urgency had fled. I felt tired, stupid. I was tired of chasing Anna down, of trying to shore up the walls of a dream that I had slapped together out of plasterboard guilts and adolescent yearning. It was no good anymore.

But I had come the distance, propelled by a crazy sense of purpose, and so I put my head down and waded through the snow to the door. I knocked and waited, vaguely wondering what I would say when the door was opened by an irate Dr. Parrish, routed from sleep by a lovesick stranger. He wouldn’t be happy.

I knocked again, louder. I waited, snow melting down my collar. I reached down and turned the knob and the door swung open. I entered the room.

“Hello?” I called.

I saw him in the armchair then, and I knew he was dead but the fear that jumped in me had nothing to do with Parrish.

“Anna!” I shouted. “Anna!”

I ran through the house, shouting her name, upstairs, then downstairs again.

I stopped in the living room, holding myself very still, listening, as though some revelation, some inspired thought, would speak in the silence. That’s when I heard it: the truck’s engine.

I found her in the garage.

Anna was alive. I carried her upstairs, opened a window. She started to come around.

“My head hurts,” she said. Her face was grey, almost blue under her eyes.

I lifted her onto the bed and pulled the covers up around her. I said, “I want you to rest for a few minutes. I’ve got something I have to do. I’ll be back soon, okay?”

I went back to the living room. I didn’t look at Parrish. I left the house and drove my car back down Windover and parked it on a parallel street. Nobody was apt to remark on a car abandoned in inclement weather. I cut through a yard and discovered that I had gauged the distance pretty well. I came out on Windover about two hundred yards from the house and I was back inside Parrish’s fifteen minutes after I’d left.

I looked at Parrish this time. He was pressed back in the armchair, eyes closed, grinning. Some G-force, some acceleration of sudden death, had shoved him back in the chair, straightened his legs. I picked up the sheet of paper in his lap and read it. I read it twice, and then I understood it.

“You met your match,” I said to the corpse. “I could have told you. I could have told you about Anna Shockley. But you didn’t ask. You shrinks never ask the right questions.” I felt something slipping in my mind, some gear failing to engage as I stood in the living room, speaking to a man with a dried snail’s trail of blood issuing from one nostril, cheeks mottled with death’s purple hickies.

I sighed. The gear engaged. A heaviness that was the last of my sanity descended. “Hey, I’ve got to get things cleaned up here,” I said. I turned away from the corpse and got to work. I put Anna’s letter in my pocket. I emptied the wine bottle in the sink and turned the tap water on. I decided to take the empty bottle with me. I cleaned up as well as I could and went back upstairs.

Anna stirred in the passenger seat as we drove back to Walker’s. The truck moved with assurance through the snow, which was still falling relentlessly.

“Don’t be mad at me,” Anna said.

The words alarmed me. I turned and blinked at Anna. I had almost forgotten she was there, intent on navigating the treacherous night.

I looked at her. She looked very small, a dark mass of troubled hair and those large, surprised eyes peering over her drawn-up knees.

“I was just trying to do the right thing,” she said.

I laughed. A single, short laugh, involuntary as a sneeze, but it hooked a vast, absurd chain and the laughter rushed out of me. The truck caught the mood and swooped off the road, and my foot on the brake spun us around and we lurched to a stop facing the way we had come and the laughter wouldn’t stop.

Finally, wheezing, feeling the reawakening of boyhood asthma in my aching chest, I stopped laughing. I felt shaken by some cosmic mugger, my pockets turned out, emptied.

Anna looked alarmed. But she didn’t say anything.

I caught my breath and said, “Sorry.” I turned the truck around and drove on into the storm.

“Why did you laugh?” Anna asked.

I looked at her. She looked wary, maybe offended. I didn’t want to offend her.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just had a sort of revelation. Everything struck me funny. I realized—this isn’t gonna sound like the funniest joke you ever heard—but I just realized I was out of my depth.”

“You don’t love me anymore,” she said.

I looked at her again, and she was actually pouting, lower lip thrust forward in classic, kittenish pique. She looked quite sweet, actually. I didn’t have any more laughter in me, however.

“Anna, I love you.” I said it sternly, a reprimand, and her lower lip retreated. Resilient Anna, she smiled.

When I reached The Home, all the lights were on in the main building. During the night, a nurse had discovered that the drug cabinet had been broken into. An inventory had revealed the missing, lethal drug—a bedcheck revealed the missing Anna. Dr. Simms had sheepishly admitted to being the recipient of some questions on the matter of doctors and drugs, lethal and otherwise.

Walker had abandoned his customary calm. “A suicidal patient asks her doctor what prescription drugs are lethal, and he tells her?”

It was then that I came to the young man’s defense.

“Anna’s got a way with her,” I said.

Walker looked at me like I was crazy. Being crazy, I didn’t take offense.

Walker and his staff were glad to see us.

They put Anna to bed, and I had a chat with Walker. I told him everything. I asked him if he could drive me into Newburg in a couple of days so I could pick up my car. He said he thought he could do that.

Later that night, Anna tried to kill herself. She had made only the most limited progress, sawing on her wrist with a dull scissors, when a nurse discovered her.

I stayed at Walker’s on into December. Parrish’s death was big news. It was being called a suicide. I felt that a close look would discover some problems with this assessment. I felt a sense of deja vu—Larry all over again. And, again, no hue and cry arose. In Larry’s case, no investigation had been initiated because no one gave a damn. In Parrish’s case, I suspected a powerful father-in-law might have had something to do with the limited scope of the investigation. Dr. Solomon had a daughter to protect.