AT THE END OF her rope and harboring terrible thoughts of self-harm, Vanessa cornered her father in the hallway one morning.
“Daddy, I need your help,” she said. She knew how her father would react. Vanessa had never directly asked her father for anything. Since she was seventeen, she had made her wishes known to him only through Finn.
Her father reeled. They sat down in the quiet house.
“Daddy, I haven’t wanted to admit it to anyone,” Vanessa said, “not you or Mommy, or even Finn, but I’m afraid there is something wrong with me.”
“What is it, my darling?” said Walter, his gruffness gone. “How can I help you? Your mother and I have been so worried about you.”
“I know, and I’m sorry. I’ve wanted to fix it myself and believe me I’ve tried. I don’t know what it is. I’ve talked to Schumann about it. If I had an open wound, he’d be able to help me better. But the latest incident proved to me I cannot go on.”
“What do you mean, cannot go on?”
“I don’t want to live anymore, Daddy,” whispered Vanessa.
“Darling, darling, no! What are you talking about?” Walter looked and sounded unmoored. “We should get your mother in here—”
“No.” Vanessa blew her nose. “I can’t talk to anyone else about this.”
“It’s just a bout of nerves, my angel. Is this about the man in the house?”
“The murdered man in the house, yes.” Vanessa forced her fingers to bend backwards, wishing she were brave enough to break them. “Other things, too, I don’t want to go into. I want to be better, Daddy, I promise you, I really do. But I’m convinced I can’t do it without help.”
“Schumann is a doctor.”
“Another kind of doctor.”
“You mean like a sanatorium?”
“Yes, Daddy. Yes.” She breathed out.
He sat back and breathed out too. “You want to leave your family, leave your husband, your children, and go to live in another place?” he said, his brow curving away from compassion. “How long for?”
“As long as it takes,” said Vanessa. “Isn’t my health worth it?”
Walter sat quietly, his hands folded, studying his daughter through his glasses, twisting his mouth. “Vanessa, I don’t quite know how to say this, my dear, but . . . do you think that’s a good idea?” He looked deeply uncomfortable. “You leaving, I mean.” It was as if Walter couldn’t say out loud what he didn’t even want to think. “Maybe to stay would be better. Talk to Schumann. Maybe—”
“Daddy, with all my heart I’m telling you this is the last resort,” Vanessa said. “I have stayed. I have tried not to leave. But I can’t right this ship without external correction.”
“You mean like electric shock treatment?” Walter was aghast. “I heard they do that in some places. Sometimes they lobotomize women who have maladies they don’t know how to treat.”
“I don’t want to be lobotomized!” Vanessa was aghast herself. “I’m not being involuntarily committed. But before I get to a point where I need to be—and unfortunately I’m close to that point now—I need to convalesce somewhere . . . somewhere else.”
“Convalescence means recovery and rest,” Walter said.
“Like from tuberculosis! Yes, exactly, Daddy.”
“Isn’t there a step missing?” said Walter. “Isn’t there something between injury and convalescence? Like treatment, maybe?”
“I might need that too,” said Vanessa in a dull, numb voice.
“Darling, you well know we don’t have the money for long-term rehabilitation,” Walter said. “We have more than last year but sanatoriums are expensive. My friend Ralph Wheeler, do you remember him? He had emphysema and had to be on oxygen someplace in Maine. It cost $600 a month, Vee! Can you get better in two months? I have enough to pay for that. Finn too, we can scrape together six months possibly. Maybe we can ask Isabelle—”
“No, no, no, Daddy, that’s not what I want. Never—please.”
Walter fell silent, sad.
“I don’t know if six months will be enough time,” said Vanessa.
“Six months won’t be enough time? Ralph was only gone four months and he couldn’t breathe!”
“Sometimes I also can’t breathe,” Vanessa said. “You know professional people. You’ve had business relationships. Isn’t there anyone you can call on my behalf and plead for a favor? Isn’t there anyone at all who can help me?” She wrung her hands. “No one hears me anymore. I have no words left to speak to anyone. And even when I do speak, no one is listening.”
“I’m sorry, dear girl.” Walter sounded as helpless as Vanessa felt. “You should’ve come to me earlier. Let me think on it. Let me see what I can do.”
After a few days of pondering, Walter called his old friend and former investment client Percival Ford, who was the current president of Austen Riggs Sanatorium in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 150 miles away. Austen Riggs had an exclusive clientele and specialized in nervous maladies. The fees were outrageous—$1000 a month. But Percival said he would waive them for Walter if it meant his friend’s daughter could get the help she needed.
“Mommy is leaving us?” said Junie.
Mae yanked on her sister’s arm as they stood at the bedroom door and watched their father help their mother with her suitcase. “Not forever, June!” said Mae.
“That’s right, my darlings,” Vanessa said, distracted and remorseless. “You know I’ve been having a hard time, but I’m going to a wonderful place that will make me better.”
“Yes, June,” Mae said. “Mommy is going to a wonderful place that’s not this place. A different wonderful place.”
“Away from us?”
“Maybe that’s what makes it so wonderful,” said Mae, a grim shell of her former self.
Neither Finn nor Vanessa addressed their children. Finn said he would talk to the girls when he returned. Vanessa couldn’t offer even that much. “I’ll see you soon, darlings. Don’t forget to come visit me with your daddy.”
“Let’s go,” Finn said to her. “We’re scheduled for a noon check-in and it’s after nine.”
Vanessa forced herself to say goodbye to Isabelle because she didn’t want any gossip or questions about why she hadn’t.
“Goodbye, Vanessa,” said Isabelle. “I hope you get better soon. And don’t worry about anything. Everything will be taken care of.”
Somehow, saying a fake goodbye made it even more degrading. That things would be taken care of by her of all people! Frankly, Vanessa wasn’t in the least worried about things not being taken care of, and she suspected that Isabelle knew it.
During the three-hour ride to Stockbridge, she and Finn chatted about the girls, her sister, her father, how often Finn might be able to visit, how pleasant the weather was, how green the hills, how smoothly paved the country roads. Vanessa drifted out of the conversation when she realized that Finn—sitting behind the wheel, steering confidently, brushed, shaved, light, smiling, more handsome than ever, acting in other words as if what was happening wasn’t happening—believed with near-total certainty that Vanessa would never ask the question that was a hard one for healthy women and an impossible one for a woman in Vanessa’s condition. Her husband believed that the woman who didn’t ask about the stock market crash or about the failure of her father’s bank would never ask him if he was in love with someone else.
And he was right.
Vanessa felt like a dying bird in the open yard in darkness.