Issue 23

Kenny Williams

She had just turned twenty-six when she was called to step in, at the last minute, as the attending at the Weatherall Home for Girls. Dr. Jaffey, whose place she was filling and whom she’d dated briefly in med school, was leaving with his wife, an ambulatory care specialist, on a mission to Ethiopia, in a move condemned in the liberal press as “a model of physician-enabled intervention,” and she, whose story this is, was just coming out of a contract massaging the numbers on some clinical trials at Pfizer.

The minute she got to Weatherall she started calling the inmates “the little princesses.” In front of the clinic building she and a nurse named Marianne would meet in the cool morning air, smoking and watching the inmates get off the shuttle and line themselves up like soldiers. She’d crush her butt under the toe of a Bruno Magli knockoff and say to the nurse, “The little princesses are here,” filling the words as much as she could with unreadable suggestion.

She didn’t know the first thing about kids but found she liked the job well enough. She got in about nine and got out no later than three most afternoons, and the chief never looked too hard at the paperwork when he was on-site, which wasn’t often, since he split his time between the region’s three juvenile detention centers, and it was nice not having to live her life around everybody else’s schedule, the way her friends in private practice did, since the little princesses never had anywhere to be but where Weatherall wanted them.

One day she was using a penlight to look down the throat of a tall quiet girl who had hit her mother in the head with a pipe and through the reinforced glass of the clinic window saw two little princesses slipping over the fence and into the woods like monkeys. Weatherall had them back within the half hour, with dogs at their heels and their jeans and sweatshirts ripped up by brambles—Weatherall didn’t do uniforms in those days—and the young doctor thought, Well, this sucks.

Then her old lover Dr. Jaffey and his wife got back from saving the world, with a baby boy in tow, no less, and they sent her to Lynnhaven.

Lynnhaven was the new public housing complex at the northern edge of the suburbs, controversially underwritten by the city’s Redevelopment Authority. Why exactly Lynnhaven had been built technically in the county using city money became a point of endless speculation in the conservative papers, who wanted to know who was paying for all this anyway and what the long game was and if the county had an invasion on its hands. The doctor’s new salary was a third more than what she’d been taking home from Weatherall, absent any negotiation on her part, but her schedule was a disaster. Friday afternoon through Monday afternoon, ongoing, she was to be at the mercy of a telephone answering service, which would dispatch her to this or that apartment unit at Lynnhaven whenever a mother or child or anybody called in. These were, by definition, not emergencies, but the good doctor was to treat them as such.

“They’re not,” the city said, “but you never know what you might find when you go in there. It might be twelve o’clock at night. When Dr. Jackson was working with us, it was just skinned knees and bumps on the head.”

“A bump on the head is a call to 911,” the doctor said.

“Right. Right. They can call 911 for that one. Also answer general questions about health and wellness and just … be there. In case they need to call 911. Dr. Jackson didn’t have any trouble. We’ve got a strict one-strike-and-you’re-gone No Drugs rule, and that, doctor, we do enforce, I assure you, so you don’t have to worry about any of that.”

“How many units is Lynnhaven total?”

They told her, with the qualifier: “But it’s only at about half occupancy. The two newest buildings haven’t been moved into, so you won’t have to worry about those, at least not at this point, and you may not ever if we can’t get the handrails on the staircases to code. The residents put some railings in themself and the city had to go in and take them out.”

The doctor was to have no office at Lynnhaven. Once the residents found out where it was, the city explained, they’d never leave her alone. She was to drive around in her car during the day when she wasn’t answering calls.

“Go to the mall if you want,” they said. “It’s not far. You can run home if you need to, but don’t get comfortable.”

“Can you show me a policy on this? Something so I know I’m in compliance?”

They’d been working on a handbook, they said.

“What did Dr. Jackson refer to?”

“Oh, she made the rules!” they said, then hurried to clarity: “You get to go home and sleep at night, of course. It wouldn’t do for you to overnight at Lynnhaven.”

“And I don’t have a background in social work”—they were already shaking their heads—“as you know. Just my time with the girls at Weatherall.”

They were nodding now, three steps ahead of her.

“The city said it had to be an MD. We tried a nurse, but she wanted somebody to go to for permissions every time. Doctors do it their way. Your work at Weatherall should more than cover it. In fact you’re ahead of the game. Dr. Jackson was just out of school. And Lynnhaven isn’t Weatherall, Lord knows. These are good people just getting started. Families, not criminals.”

What had been her predecessor’s challenges? The doctor wanted to know what she could learn from those. And for an uncertain second the interview room was seen in a mirror and the mirror was being tilted slowly upward on hinges and the image of the interview room and everybody in it was slipping onto the floor.

Oh, she did great, the city said, referring to Dr. Jackson. “She left because she’s having a baby. You’ve been great about stepping in.”

“Yes,” the doctor said.

It took her a single day on call at Lynnhaven to learn never to speak with anyone at TeleConnect directly if she was slipping on Benzos, which she almost always was. “Slipping” was a word she made up for what she knew was happening to her when she took them. She was lucid and in command while the world and everything in it wheeled slowly beneath her, free to make its own mistakes. She felt like the church of Mont St.-Michel when the tide comes in, anchored by its spire to the clear blue sky, slipping its wide foot over the surface of the flood. She’d seen it on a school trip with her French class in high school—a thousand dollars a head, her dad still jokingly reminded everybody at Thanksgiving and Christmas. The Weatherall schedule had allowed her to plan and plot her slipping, to mold and re-mold its contours as needed and to work within its moods, keeping herself always that luxurious inch or two above the tidal plain. But the Lynnhaven “schedule,” if you wanted to call it that, left most of the normal workweek open, with too much trouble to be gotten into, and asked everything of her on the weekends, even as it required nothing in particular.

The operator at TeleConnect, her voice full of hesitant pleasantries, knew the doctor was slipping that first time they talked. The doctor could hear it in the silences between them. Rather than communicate patient requests to her over various phone lines at Lynnhaven, then, the doctor arranged, by way of the city, for TeleConnect simply to page her with the three-digit unit designation of the family wanting attention.

“I’ll gather what information I need on-site,” she said.

“You want to go in blind like that?” the city said. “Oh my Lord.”

On the very first visit she made, to unit 08-C, before the door opened, she was thinking of the tall, quiet girl from Weatherall and what she, the doctor, had said to her on her last day attending.

“Even if you tried to hurt your mother, it’s nothing everybody in the world needs to know about. It happened. And? Don’t talk about it to anybody anymore, not even in here. Not even if you get out and start going with a guy. Don’t tell the guy. It didn’t happen. When you get a job never tell anyone. Your job can never know that you hit your mother. Just always say you were never very close and you just don’t talk to her much. There’s no reason you won’t be out of here when they say you will and your mother won’t need to know where you are, and by that time the law says they can’t tell her. They might tell her anyway, but it doesn’t matter. When you get out, don’t go near her again. If she comes to where you live, call the police and have her removed. No phone calls with her. If she writes you letters don’t open them. If you see her handwriting on the envelope, put the whole thing in the trash. If you get near her again, you’ll hurt her and that’ll be it. No more life outside for you. It’s nasty out there, but in here it’s worse: it’s nothing. Nobody but me is going to tell you this. They’re all going to tell you to patch things up, but it’s not going to work. Not in your case and not with her.”

The girl said she understood.

The door to 08-C had opened and a woman was telling her she must be the doctor.

“I’m the doctor,” she agreed, and slipped inside.

Over the next two weekends, the chilly end of March, it was just what the city said it would be—a bunch of skinned knees and bumps on the head. Too many bumps, she learned quick enough, for each to merit its own call to 911. Mostly the young Lynnhaven moms just told her how nice she was and said what pretty things she wore. One of the kids, remarking on the way she spoke, asked her if she was from England, where Pocahontas went to.

Her third Sunday evening at Lynnhaven she found herself at a watch party, standing room only, in a unit with three or four sets of residents and their aggregated offspring. A TV illusionist was going to make the Statue of Liberty disappear before your very eyes. When it finally happened, after an hour’s buildup, the smaller of the kids ran to their mothers, delirious with terror and glee, while the older ones, under the laughing eyes of their fathers, contained the instinct to cuss aloud in amazement and set their mouths instead in sudden O’s of surprise.

Everyone was having a good time except the doctor. She sat silent and polite, not moving much, just perceptibly breathing. She’d promised herself only half a blue Valium that night, since she was still so new to the job, but by the time of the party one half had become two whole ones. They asked her how the illusionist did it, and she told them how lovely it must be to be an illusionist’s lovely assistant, living for nothing but to take his cloak over your arm and step smilingly aside, leaving him alone with his multitudes.

To her relief, the residents of Lynnhaven left her alone most every night she was on call, and the two or three summonses she did receive on her pager after dark she pretended not to notice. The residents, she decided from the get-go, would need to understand she had her limits.

And then the complaints started. Not about her but to her.

The witch from 05-E, DeeDee, unique at Lynnhaven in that she lived childless and alone, was at it again, threatening to call 911 on everybody because their kids weren’t wearing coats at the bus stop.

“It’s April!” everybody said.

“It is a bit chilly still,” the doctor said. “And do the kids always wear shorts?” She hoped there was sunshine in her voice. “I’ve never seen so many skinned knees.”

“When you have yours,” they said to her, “you’ll see. I’m not trying for DeeDee to get my kids in trouble.”

“She’s just bored,” the doctor said. “Let her call 911 with it. They’ll laugh their butts off.”

Most of the complaints came to her by proxy of neighbors and the neighbors’ kids.

“My mom’s friend in G said the man downstairs keeps trying to spank her whole family.”

“Mr. Elwell next door pulled my brother out of the road when a car was coming and now my mom won’t stop thanking him and he says to tell you she’s freaking him out.”

“Miss! Excuse me! Can you let me know when you talk to Miss Shaw next, in E, because I’m sure she doesn’t mean to but she borrowed forty dollars from me and keeps forgetting to give it to me.”

“They think I’m lying about calling the city for them sending their children outdoors in the mornings with no coat on. They’ll see.”

“Germone and Becca were jumping on the bed and broke the bed and Becca hit her head! Can you come look at the bed before Germone’s mom gets home?”

“Wag has a knife in his room called a Texas Toothpick.”

“Wag has a bow and arrow he’s not supposed to.”

“Mr. B. told Wag not to come back until he learned to mind.”

“Who’s Wag?” the doctor said.

“Mr. B. pulled our treehouse down! He didn’t say we couldn’t.”

Mr. B. was the property manager at Lynnhaven. He appeared and disappeared like smoke and had a shuffling walk that looked like it never could have gotten him anywhere fast. The doctor said to him:

“The kids said you took their treehouse down?”

“Yes, ma’am. Because when they break their neck the city will want to know why I let them have it up.”

“I understand.”

She was going practically door to door in those days, from one end of the complex to the other and back again, with her alligator bag in her hand, like a traveling salesman with no new worlds to conquer. There was an endless supply of skinned knees.

“Maybe if they wore long pants? It’s still pretty chilly.”

The young mothers laughed. “When you have yours, you’ll see. Miss Williams’s boy upstairs was asking were you married. You might have a little admirer.”

“Uh-oh,” she said.

Some of the kids had tried tagging along with her on her visits. The potential for incurring bad blood with the residents by disowning the sweeter and more wonderstruck of their children worried her more than the annoyance of having them follow, so she made a rule that she, the doctor, could only have one helper per day, that it couldn’t be during school hours (if applicable), and that there was absolutely no coming with her into other people’s houses.

“Because everybody deserves their privacy,” she said.

She thought the kids might as well carry her alligator bag.

She started assigning days to particular kids but could barely tell them apart. Then she started assigning shifts, but by that time the kids had lost interest and she had lost patience and settled for working alone and slipping all day and finding herself now and then observed through cautious indirection.

“I could get a car phone,” she said to the city. “If the city paid for it or offset the cost.”

“They’d take it right out of your car, honey,” the city said. “Dr. Jackson asked the same thing.”

“That way,” the doctor said, “I wouldn’t have to ask the residents ‘May I use your phone?’ all the time. It’d also help with confidentiality.”

“They don’t have secrets,” the city said, “the people we help. They have their little crimes, but not secrets.”

But the doctor was sick of it and bought a telephone at Sears and installed it herself on the kitchen wall of an empty unit she found unlocked in one of the two buildings declared unfit for habitation for their lack of proper handrails. Mr. B., oddly not to her surprise, gave her a key to the place and got her a dial tone on the phone and said he wouldn’t say anything. She put towels, panty shields, and toilet tissue for herself in the bathroom. She tested every faucet in the place and flushed the commode and laughed at the idea that she might have taken some terrible wrong turn in coming to Lynnhaven. She stood as still as she could in the emptiness of the place and shut her eyes, listening hard to the dying whine of the commode, and in the silence that followed she could hear the hum in her ears of her own drugged systems in conversation with each other.

She brought the residents’ paperwork—two boxes—in from the trunk of her car and stashed it on the upper shelf of the bedroom closet. Then she thought better of it and put the paperwork back in her trunk. She didn’t want to get sloppy.

Then she dreamed she was pregnant. She and her friend White Ken were lolling like Romantics on a knoll whose turf was like carpet and she was big as a house. Cheek to cheek, she and White Ken gazed toward Lynnhaven. It looked like a castle in the distance.

“You’ll have to do something about it,” he was saying, “or the city will have to tell the City Fathers about it.”

“Thanks for the advice, Dad,” she said.

She felt heavy and at ease, then started hearing, distinct but faraway-sounding, coming from somewhere deep inside Lynnhaven, a man’s voice in an agony of objection, screaming No No No, and the sound of a sawblade touching bone. He was having his leg taken off. She couldn’t see it, but it was understood to be happening.

And another voice, that of the city as she knew if from the telephone, was ordering the surgeon to go deeper, faster.

White Ken said: “He’ll hate leaving there. He’ll be ready to stand up and walk! Was this planned, you think?”

“Most obviously it was not,” she said, and her voice in her dream was hoarse as a seal’s.

One Saturday morning, when her mother wasn’t around, a teenager a head taller than herself, a girl named Wynter, told the doctor that when she’d been in bed with her brother Mike he’d tried to do it with her and she was afraid of getting him in trouble.

“Did he?” the doctor said, and when the girl didn’t say no, the doctor said: “You know what I’m talking about.”

“No,” the girl said.

“Are you sure? You’re not in trouble if he did.”

“He didn’t. I told him to stop and he did.”

“Are you afraid of him?”

“No.”

“Do you have your own bed?”

“Yeah.”

“Was it his bed or your bed you were in?”

“His.”

“Did you get in his bed?”

“Yeah.”

“Because you wanted to?”

“Yeah.”

“Was he in the bed first?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you used to get in the bed with him like that before?”

“Yeah.”

“You can’t do that any longer.”

Wynter said that one time, once before, she had had a teeny-tiny baby in the bathroom but that it wasn’t because of Mike. The doctor’s time at Weatherall had gotten her used to these kinds of out-of-nowhere confessions. She used to wonder if Dr. Jaffey had heard similar ones, and thought—wrongly, I would add—that he probably hadn’t.

“And you’re sure it wasn’t Mike’s?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, Wynter, I need to talk to you like a grown woman now. Things mostly don’t ‘just happen’ to us. Things happen because mostly we’ve made choices that made them happen. From now on you can’t get in the bed with any man or boy unless you want to have sex with him, and if you do have sex with him and he’s not wearing a condom and you’re not taking birth control medication you will likely become pregnant and have a baby, so you need to decide now whether that’s something you want.”

Wynter asked if the doctor could give her the birth control medicine.

“I can’t, no.” (There’s likely no reason she couldn’t have.) “That’s not in my purview. But I can coordinate a private appointment for you. I think that would be good. For now, don’t say anything about it to anybody, including your mom.”

“You said ‘purview’?”

“Yes. That’s when … it’s what I’m allowed to do.”

“Why not say ‘what I’m allowed to do,’ then?”

“Did you ever tell anybody about when you miscarried in the bathroom?”

“No.”

“That’s good,” the doctor said.

“You can’t talk to these girls that way,” the city said. “They don’t understand a word of that.”

“While I’ve got you on the line,” the doctor said, “I wonder if the man in 01-G, Rod Harlon, is beating his girlfriend. She’s the mother of the younger of his boys.”

“Oh I’m sure she gives it right back to him,” the city said. “If you think it’s bad, tell her to call 911 on him. They’ll get him right out of there with that mess.”

By the start of the doctor’s next weekend on call, Rod Harlon’s girlfriend, Angel, was gone.

“911 come and got her,” the residents said. “Took her right on, kickin’ and buckin’. Yeah they did.”

The city asked the doctor why this had happened and she said, “They know to call 911 if it’s serious.”

“They don’t all have phones, though,” the city said.

“They have phones,” the doctor said.

“You’re our eyes and ears out there,” they said.

The stabilizing foot of Mont St.-Michel came down hard in the sand.

“They took her away on my off-day. At least they’re not beating the hell out of each other any longer.”

“Did they take her in an ambulance or the police car?”

“My understanding is she was placed under arrest. Seems she was the one doing the hitting. I imagine there’s a police report.”

“Who’s taking care of the kids?”

“Their father, perhaps? Assessing that’s not in my purview, as we discussed. I’m happy to talk to a social worker about things on the ground here if you send one over. I’d formally request it, in fact.”

There was to be no social worker, they said. At least not at this point.

A nice young mother named Marianne, like the nurse she had worked with at Weatherall, had her summoned to 07-J. Her boy Derrick, age nine, had fallen in the bathroom and hit his head. The boy’s father was interviewing for a big job in DC and it looked good. Marianne couldn’t worry him with Derrick right now. How many fingers was the doctor holding up? Derrick answered correctly every time. He said he was sleepy but could see how many fingers she had. The doctor was just complimenting him on his Lego project, an ambitious maze he’d built for his mother for Mother’s Day, when sleepy Derrick told the doctor about the flashdancer.

“Flashdancer?”

“He was dancing in the tub.”

“Who is this?”

“He’s me, from years from now, when I’m grown. I went into the bathroom first thing when I got back in … from playing. Outdoors. And there I was standing up undressed in the tub, but I had hair on my chest and I was tall and had muscles.”

“Derrick, now what are you telling me?”

“You know. I said it was me but how I will be.”

“You mean like your dad or your older brother was in the tub?”

“I know who they are. It was me.”

“Why was the man you saw a flashdancer?”

“He didn’t have nothing on. He wasn’t dancing for real, but he jerked back when he saw me and sorta … waved his arms. And swung around like he was dancing.”

“In the bathtub?”

“Yeah. Standing up. Like taking a shower but the water wasn’t on.”

“The curtain was open?”

“We don’t have a curtain. He said, ‘I’m naked and you’re naked too.’ But I only had my pants open to go to the bathroom.”

The doctor asked Derrick’s mom what this was about and she said she didn’t want to worry her husband while he was interviewing for this job.

“And Derrick jumped back and hit his head?”

“On the sink, he said.”

“He’s okay as far as that goes. Why is there no shower curtain?”

“They never got the showerhead on, so we just bathe. Asked Mr. B. about it for so long we forgot to ask any more.”

“And nobody’s been in the house? No man Derrick might have seen?”

“Better not have been.”

That Monday evening, after her three days on call, she let White Ken take her to Liberty Valance, a steak place on 680 they liked, and then they went to see Flashdance, with red wine on their breath and a Dexedrine each. Then she took him home and let him put on a rubber and fuck her brains out. It had been the first truly warm day of spring and she could smell in the air that something was beginning, but really nothing was.

At two in the morning they made coffee and sat up talking shop about brain structure, research incentives, and their hopes for the Orphan Drug Act.

White Ken was one of her contacts from Pfizer and she called him that to distinguish him in her mind from Korean Ken. Korean Ken taught forensics at the university downtown and she’d known him since before her work on drug trials. He didn’t seem to care for women. They were friends. He would devote a chapter to her—or rather, as he would tell you, to her actions—in his eventual study of the crimes of Waylon Williams, arguably the state’s most prolific serial murderer, depending on which victims you counted as exclusively “his.”

Korean Ken asked her how the new job was going. He hadn’t heard from her since it started and couldn’t believe they’d thrown her in the deep end like that.

“Right,” she said, “but what did you know about forensic science coming out of premed? I guess they figured it was close enough and you could learn the rest by doing, and what did they really care anyway? Everything’s next door to everything else. We’re getting too specialized. In a couple years, with a fresh crop of kids probably training as we speak in some social work shit and calling it science, I might not even have been hired for this job.”

Her friend said nothing.

“I like it,” she said. “I like the people. I don’t really have to do anything.”

He asked how Flashdance was. The kids at school were all talking about it.

She said: “I mean they obviously wrote this thing around the girl’s talents. The girl could move, definitely. They didn’t write the story and then go looking for somebody to act in it, that’s for sure.”    

She thought of the boy Derrick and his grown-up self in the bathtub. When she saw him again on the following Sunday she was slipping most unpleasingly. She heard a young woman using her voice to ask him how it was going.

“They have a movie out now about flashdancing,” Derrick reported. “Like what I saw.”

“It’s not what that movie’s about,” said the young woman who had hijacked her voice. That woman, correct and knowledgeable, unmarried but really quite approachable, making her rounds in cheap, pretty shoes, who wanted her interviews and interactions with the people of Lynnhaven to be at once friendly and serious, and who had a dragon’s anger lurking way down at the bottom of her, needed politely to get going (she had a page from TeleConnect telling her to get her ass to 01-G for a pair of ripped-up knees) but instead she said to the boy:

“Tell me what you think Flashdance is about.”

While Derrick was telling her, DeeDee, in 05-E, died. She had been the woman who hated the idea of kids at the bus stop not having coats on. Her heart stopped in her apartment just as she was bringing up a load of fresh clothes from the basement, carrying the laundry basket on her head. It had rained overnight and left the day gray and gusty, with a clean, warm scent, and she had had her windows open.

“It’s about a woman,” Derrick said. “She dances this wild dance but really is controlling every move. She goes from one person to another, trying to make them happy with it, even though nobody’s ever asked her to do it. It’s just what she does. She just knows when they need it. Need to see her dance to be happy.”

“That’s about it,” the doctor said. And: “What is flashdancing, though?”

“Dancing without your clothes on,” he said.

“Why would someone do that?”

“To make you happy.”

“Why would it make someone happy to see someone dancing without their clothes on?”

“I don’t know. It reminds them of something, but not something that happened. Just a way they used to be.”

Derrick’s mother thought the doctor shouldn’t try making too much sense of it. “He didn’t see anybody in there,” she said. “He just hit his head. He done it before.”

After tending to the tormented knees in 01-G, the doctor was called upon to settle a dispute over who owned a wheelbarrow. It had been seen first by Willie K., “just sitting there” by the trash cans, and he had gone up to ask Ray if the two of them had space for it in the unit they shared—everybody said they were in there playing The Newlywed Game—and Ray said they did and when Willie K. came back to get it Mr. Elwell was already making off with it.

The doctor said: “This is a medical emergency?”

“He threatened me bodily.”

“Are you stupid?” she said, sounding affable. “One of you just keeps it and lets the other use it when he needs it. God. Doctors are scientists. People don’t remember that. What would you even need it for? And you better check with Mr. B. before you get too attached. Nobody just throws a wheelbarrow away.”

That night, on call, the doctor met White Ken at Liberty Valance. He had news. Thirty million dollars and a promise of marketing exclusivity had fallen from heaven and Pfizer was taking it to Phase 2 with a compound for the inhibition of bone formation. She knew the compound he meant. The money wasn’t going to spend itself, he said, talking fast, and they’d be needing people to help eat it up if they wanted more for Phase 3 in a couple of years.

“You wouldn’t have to do anything,” he said, too fast. “Any fucking thing.”

He was way ahead of her on Dexies.

“No reg fees or none of that shit. We’re getting waivers for everything. It’s like the last days of Sardanapalus over there. Get your ass over there.”

There was a role for her at six figures to start, and all she had to do was monitor a single kid, to make him take his meds. He had soft tissues turning to fucking bone. The product was tentatively branded Cordovil. (“You have to take three if you really wanna fly.”) The kid had had a monitor but scared her off and besides, White Ken said, Pfizer wanted an MD who wasn’t afraid to use an iron hand.

“He’s some little psycho they’ve had on tap since he was four. All you have to do is make him take his meds and make the numbers look good. Keep everything tight.”

They ate and drank and she caught up with him on Dexies. In the backseat of her car they fucked like they wanted to die of it. Driving gingerly to Lynnhaven afterwards, for a call, it was to the doctor as if the imitation leather interior of her car were a living skin she couldn’t bring herself to touch. The people in 02-C were “freezing,” they said when she got there. The thermostat box on the wall was locked and they couldn’t get in to adjust it.

“It was a beautiful day today,” the doctor said. “Didn’t you have the windows open?”

She tried to open the locked thermostat box and it came off the wall in her hand, such was her strength. She looked at it, wondering where to put it.

“You’ll want to talk to Mr. B. about it,” she said, and went to put the box into her alligator bag, which she realized she wasn’t carrying.

She helped the good people of 02-C open some windows and retreated to the empty unit she had claimed for herself and stayed awake there all night, thinking of the good things in her future, too excited and nervous to sit and with no chair to sit in. She was about to walk into six figures. She was done with Lynnhaven and had barely started with it. The kids there, she knew, had discovered her lair but didn’t dare approach, not even on their knees. Her pager was screaming at her. She glanced at the unit number and ignored it and called Korean Ken from the phone she’d paid for and installed herself.

“It’s one in the morning,” Korean Ken said, not unpleased to hear from her.

“You’re up,” she said assuringly. “The kids know where I’m hiding out but they’re too scared to knock!”

By Monday midday she hadn’t washed and frankly stank. By three, the buses were bringing the kids back from school. No coats, she thought, with a twinge of satisfaction.

The afternoon was cloudy and warm, almost hot in disclosures of unexpected sun. Some of the kids had found an office chair on wheels and were hurling each other across the parking lot in it. One kid was organizing a shootout game. He was not uglier than the others in any obvious way, the doctor thought, or less so. The other kids were coming to him and “dying” at his command, for the only gun he held was made of air, and they were falling to their knees again and again before him on the pavement, raising their hands terrifyingly to the sky, asking to be allowed not to fall down finally or all the way.

The doctor understood that she hated her days at Lynnhaven but not Lynnhaven itself. That night an ambulance came and went away without a sound.

The next day, Tuesday, one of the young mothers told her the city was on the phone for her in her unit, strictly confidential. The city told the doctor that Darletta Watts, called DeeDee, in 05-E, had died in her unit over the weekend and what did she know about it.

“When was this?” the doctor said.

“Not know anything about it, but did you see anything funny at all?”

“No.”

Her denial itself had the force of an accusation.

“She had trouble with her heart,” the city said. “For a long time. Her sons told the police that. They found her under a pile of clothes she just brought up from the laundry.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” the doctor said, and it hit the right note.

Darletta Watts had been a short woman, with short dyed-red hair, somewhere in her late sixties. Her naming in the winter of 1916 had been an occasion of great seriousness, as the doctors had told her mother she would never bring a child to term. She had spent her twenties and thirties as a floorwalker for Murphy’s, watching for petty thieves. When many years later her husband died and she lost their house, she came to Lynnhaven. Her two sons were grown and had their own lives. Her funeral service was scheduled for that Saturday noon at Bliley’s, followed by internment beside her husband and an infant child, her firstborn, in Riverview.

“It would be good if you could go,” the city said.

“I don’t think it would be, frankly,” the doctor said. “It would be inappropriate. Her family doesn’t know me. The residents at Lynnhaven didn’t care for her. What is this?”

She was so high the phone in her hand was the only thing holding her to Planet Earth. She had the day off but no one, herself included, seemed to realize it.

White Ken had come through with more details about the Cordovil trial. He had an interview set up for her at Pfizer for Monday at two, perfunctory and quick.

“I already told them you’ll be on call for Lynnhaven. That makes it look good,” he said. “Looks even more pathetic—charitable or something. But turn the pager off. Take the batteries out or something.”

“Thanks for the advice, Dad.”

Early Friday evening, after clearing their mother’s unit of photo albums, a file cabinet, and some cash, DeeDee’s grown sons, a matching set, shocked and disgusted by everything at Lynnhaven, by the very idea of such a place, told whatever residents were on hand that they’d send a truck in three days, after their mother’s service, to take away what was left of her things. The residents in the meantime were to help themselves to whatever they wanted. The door was open.

Mr. Elwell and Willie K. were on the scene in a minute, fighting over the television set. It was the doctor, this time, who called 911. 911 got there and said with a smile: “Who wants to go to jail tonight?” The doctor said she was sick of this shit.   

Her pager had been going crazy all afternoon, summoning her to a unit she’d never been to before, and she hadn’t gone. “I don’t see any smoke,” she had said to some of the young mothers, who laughed. They were having a good time picking out what they were going to wear to DeeDee’s service. The doctor told them, as if passing on a secret, that even though she was technically on call that night, she was going out for a quiet dinner with her boyfriend.

Such a date seems never to have taken place, in fact, for reasons not presently recalled.

Alone in her lair, the doctor stood with her pants down and her panties stretched between her lower legs, airing everything out.

“They can call TeleConnect all night,” she was telling Korean Ken on the phone. “They can call fucking 911.”

Saturday morning, with the pager begging still for her attention, like a not-too-bright child who wanted oh-so to show her something for the hundredth time, the doctor smoked a cigarette and watched the residents of Lynnhaven getting ready for DeeDee’s service that noon. They made her think of people in the last frenzied stages of evacuating a city before it falls under siege and she felt suddenly very alone and thought the feeling might be one of heroism unrealized. She was sober and thought she might be high. With everybody gone there would be nothing to do but to visit the unit she’d been ignoring day and night, to find out whose knees were skinned or whose head was busted and to offer what comfort she could.

She lit another cigarette and smoked it to the butt before she made a move. Was she failing the afflicted through weakness or spite? She lit still another cigarette while she challenged herself for an answer and started across the parking lot in the new cordovan heels one of the Lynnhaven moms had told her looked a little “too old” for such a nice-seeming young woman as herself.

At the unit door she ditched the cigarette and knocked. Nobody answered. She tried again, using her knuckles, and only then the cheap brass knocker. She checked the pager to make sure she was at the right place. The door was unlocked. No lights were on inside. She said hello. The vertical blinds were all open and the soft edge of the day made shadows impossible. She spoke aloud. No one was home. She peeked in the kitchen and went down the hall. She smelled the familiar, colorless, many-layered smell of human beings having inhabited space. The bathroom door was open. The shower curtain was pulled back on the rod and the tub was empty. The doors to both bedrooms were open. In the first bedroom were clothes and crap everywhere and the window wide open. In the second was a kid sitting upright on the bed with a rifle across his lap. It was the kid she’d seen the day before, shooting the other kids to death with a gun of springtime air and granting them permission, one by one, not to drop all the way to the ground.

He didn’t say anything or look at her, but she could see he knew she was there. It was an adult’s bedroom and in good order. He asked her if she was going to just stand there and it sounded like an attempt at seduction. He asked her if she was afraid.

“Are you here by yourself?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“I mean in the house. Are your mom and dad going to the funeral today?”

“No,” he said, “but they’re not here,” and: “You can stand in the doorway if you want.”

She took three definite steps toward him and with the hand that wasn’t occupied with the alligator bag she took the rifle from his lap. He watched her do it and didn’t interfere. The neck of the gun looked to the doctor almost breakably slender but was strong and sure to the touch.

“Is this what she died of?” she said.

He was making fussy little adjustments all over his body. He said he wanted more than anything for the police to know what had happened and asked the doctor if they were supposed to call 911 for that. Was that an emergency?

“Are you the one who wanted the doctor last night?” she said.

“Yeah,” Waylon Williams said.

“What did you want with her? Is someone hurt?”

She had set her bag on the floor beside her high-heeled feet and was holding the rifle with both hands. She wore no rings to click against its metal or wood. It was long and very slender, like a toy, and heavier than it looked. The weight of it felt lopsided no matter which way she turned it, and she didn’t know what part of it to hold to keep the muzzle from pointing at anything. She looked at the window and half-thought she might see DeeDee’s face, which she couldn’t remember in any detail, pressed against the glass. But they were on the second floor and the glass had been slide aside.

She said: “If you can’t say why you did it … That’s the first thing the police would want to know.”

The boy’s eyes found her face and their two gazes were like stones striking, with an angry spark appearing and disappearing between them.

“Are you on any medications?”

He said: “They tried some for school but my mom didn’t like the way they made me feel so she stopped them. I’m hyperactive.”

“So nothing currently?”

“No.”

“What are your grades like?”

“What?” He jerked his shoulders back, trying to keep them out of a very particular plane of space. “I know what you’re trying,” he said. “You think I’m stupid.”

“I’m trying to make sure nothing urgently is wrong. So we can go from there.”

“I guess the city thinks you’re not doing a good job here.”

“I only just got here.”

“I called for you and you didn’t come.”

She wished violently she hadn’t ditched her cigarette at the door, that she could talk sense to this kid with it wagging from her mouth, holding the rifle in front of her like a baton twirler about to explode into action.

“You came here to do a good job,” he said. “To Lynnhaven. And we haven’t even gotten grades yet. You don’t even know that. I could see her in her house. She was carrying her wash on her head like she always did, holding it up with her hand, and I … aimed. At her underarm. And she just fell. It was easy to see her at night. She had the lights on. So at daytime … I thought I could just aim and not hit her, since I really couldn’t see her. I wanted to see if I could hit her but I didn’t want to.”

“No,” the young woman said, “you didn’t. It happened.” She looked at the dangerous little stranger whose company she kept as if she were someone he had always and only ever despised. “You’ve made up your mind to call 911?” She said it like it was the stupidest thing in the world.

“Just tell them I didn’t mean to,” he said. “When they come.”

“I don’t know you,” she said.

“So? You found me here with the gun that did it. You saw I was really sorry about it, too, right at first.”

“I’m supposed to just have found you?”

“Yeah, the way I am. The way anybody can see I am.”

“A murderer?”

“The way they say I already am.”

“Where’s your mother?”

“Working.”

“On a Saturday?”

“Yes!” He shrieked the word and it caught her by surprise. “People work.”

“Does she know about this?” she said, regarding the rifle and adjusting her tone.

“She thought it was a toy!” he said, impatient. “They tell her I’m crazy and that I’m wrong all the time!”

She could see he was making an effort not to let his shoulders dip forward into that dreaded plane of space.

She said: “They don’t always know what they’re talking about or what it is they really see.”

“That’s what I want 911 to come out here for. To really see. The gun is my mom’s boyfriend’s, but she thought it was a toy. I thought it was okay just to aim. I have to tell them DeeDee was evil, that she hurt people. I thought she was a witch and made Wynter have her brother’s baby. If I tell them all that, you tell them I’m crazy and didn’t know what I was doing.”

Here and now, the doctor decided, she would have to make her break with Lynnhaven, to see her definite separation from it even in the inmost belly of the thing. She made no pretense of telling Wag Williams he wasn’t bad. The fresh air pulsed through the room. The vertical blinds breathed slowly, like the gills of a great and terrible fish, and made faint clicking noises as they struck together, and through them, between the parallel backs of two buildings, the doctor lost herself for an instant down a slender corridor of sight, at the end of which was a window—DeeDee’s—that mirrored Wag Williams’s own. She could hear the uncommon quietness of the place and breathed in the earthy, healthful scent of the abandoned day. Alone with her patient, she felt her work at Lynnhaven was to reach the final stage of its perfection, where it would have nothing to do with her any longer, or how anyone who lived there might feel about anything she had or hadn’t done for them.

The little adjustments the boy kept making all over his body seemed to her not altogether unconscious.

“I’m not the kind of doctor you’re talking about,” she said. “Are there any other weapons in the house?”

“I have a Texas Toothpick,” he said. “It’s a knife about this long.”

He showed her with his hands. He sounded indignant, with cold tears on his face.

“You have to take your grief,” she said, “or whatever you want me to call it, and pull it way down inside you, where it will be your secret to keep. You have to feel it pulling at you down there, like you were going to break open at the bottom and come spilling out of yourself but never do. They’re putting DeeDee in the ground today. Her children didn’t care for her. She had a bad heart. They even said so. You can never tell anybody what happened. It happened, okay? Now be jealous of it. Jealous that somebody might find out about it and take it away from you, is what I mean. You know what I mean by ‘jealous’?”

He said he did.

She said: “It’s when you love something so much people want to take it away from you. You have to live with it for a long, long time for this to happen, until you can’t feel it pulling at you anymore. You think you’re going to tell the police what happened and you didn’t ‘mean’ anything by it because you thought DeeDee was ‘bad’ and they’re going to tell you to pack your bags and not give them any more trouble?”

She stopped herself from talking. She could feel the keen edge of sobriety about to make her say something ugly.

“But it didn’t just happen,” he said. “Are you deaf? The lady seemed sad, with her laundry basket on her head.”

“It wasn’t sadness,” the doctor said, hard and defeating. “It wasn’t anything like what you’re thinking about.”

“What happens when I do it again?” he said.

“God,” she said, “that would be dumb.”

She wondered what the soonest was she might take two Valium without risk of fucking everything up. She knew one day—but not this day, which was hers to waste as she pleased—she’d have to confess her liking for tablets to an audience, one of those recovery groups. With a dozen chairs drawn in a circle around her like an amphitheater and all those earnest faces looking to her for a good show, she’d have to exaggerate her liking for tablets, she supposed, for dramatic effect.

She wrapped the rifle in a towel from the bathroom and carried it down the stairs and away from the building, holding it slightly in front of her, like it might bite, with her wrist through the handle of the alligator bag. No one saw her. The place was dead. The rifle went straight onto the backseat of her car, where it lay for some days as she came and went. It would lay there so long, in fact, hidden in plain sight, that she’d get superstitious about it, afraid that if she tried to hide it or get rid of it, it would surely be found.

Leaving Wag’s, she guessed she had two hours before everybody started returning from DeeDee’s burial at Riverview. She left Lynnhaven and drove around. It was not quite noon. The weather had brought all the glamorous junk down from everybody’s attics and from under their beds and out to the curbs and cul-de-sacs south of the city, where Lynnhaven, as the more conservative papers would have told you, had no business being, and where the doctor saw what she needed: a BB gun—not a rifle, exactly, but a long-looking thing with a CO2 cartridge embedded in the handle. The handle was of a fake woodgrain cast in some sort of high-end plastic. She had put on big blue-tinted sunglasses and, pretending to browse around, slipped the BB gun into a box of pictures.

“How much for these?” she said.

She gave the woman running the sale six one-dollar bills for two reproductions of landscapes in the Dutch style and two empty frames. She could take them away in the box if she wanted.

“I grew up looking at those,” the woman said. “Glad somebody can enjoy them.”

The doctor parked under budding trees in an empty office lot. She removed the blue glasses and scrutinized the gun for the trace of anything like a serial number. She pulled a dead air cartridge from the handle and left it on the ground when she drove away with the two depressing landscapes and the two empty frames in their complimentary box. After about a mile she pulled over and put everything but the BB gun in a dumpster. She took the gun back to her unit at Lynnhaven and scrubbed it hard all over with a dry towel, then forced it crosswise into her bag—the body of it barely fit and the long, thin neck of it stuck out—and went to Wag’s and gave it to him.   

“If anybody asks about anything,” she said, “show them this. Probably they won’t.”

These were just words somebody had to say to somebody else to bring everything at Lynnhaven to a close.

On her way out, she saw the first of the residents returning from the funeral dressed like they were going to a job fair, laughing aloud in the friendly weather. They said to the doctor when they saw her with her beautiful bag:

“The Lord didn’t come to fix that old DeeDee. He come to raise her up.”

“Yes,” the doctor said.

And then the complaints resumed:

“I’m not trying to be blunt, but …”

“I’m not trying to blame anybody, but …”

“I’m not trying to say anything, but …”

When the doctor talked to the city, they said: “We’re going to need your help. The handrails in the new buildings are being put in over the summer and we’ll start assigning those units in the fall, after the bad heat is passed.”

The doctor said, “I’ve never seen anybody here so much as look at a handrail,” and hung up.

She enjoyed a brief daydream about Korean Ken, wondering if in a moment of offhand love for her he might see what he could see about DeeDee’s death certificate, and immediately she shook her head clear and laughed at the folly of the thought.

She consulted the indices of her home library. Tolerances of Soft Tissues, Projectiles. Tolerances of the Human Heart. Greenish color photos of .22 caliber entry wounds, the merest pinholes. Not a drop shed and nothing you’d notice if it wasn’t part of you.

She wouldn’t be able to quit Lynnhaven just now. She thought of the kid at Pfizer and his young flesh turning slowly to bone. She’d have to wait a bit before she went to him or it might look weird. She asked White Ken about a timeframe.

“Whenever,” he said, “but soon. What’s going on over there?”

She’d wait until the Fourth of July, she told herself, and tell the city she was pregnant. That sounded more plausible than getting married because it sounded more embarrassing.

“Well,” the city would say, “if that’s what you want.”

She reminded herself to talk to Marianne, Derrick’s mom, as soon as she could, in passing, to remind the good woman how she’d had Wag along with her as her helper that day she came back to check on Derrick after he’d hit his head.

“Not long after he saw the flashdancer in the tub, right?” the doctor would say, and: “How’s your husband’s job search going? Wag was my helper that whole afternoon and most of the morning.”

If, when rushing door to door on the last of her calls, she were quizzed by detectives, she’d throw up her hands in a gesture of supreme dismissal, a gesture she found harder to pull off in real life when eventually, yes, she was called upon to carry through with it, as she had her alligator bag in her hand, which hadn’t been there in her mind.

Wag Williams’s sentence for the murder of Darletta Watts was less than a third of hers for helping him cover it up, or rather covering it up for him. Waylon, his lawyers pled, had wanted to confess his mistake from the very start. The boy’s judge lashed out in every direction but his. Her judge was matter-of-fact, seemed very young to her, almost her own age, and looked at nothing when he spoke.

Through the glass wall of her confinement, trying to maintain a good humor, her father was saying to her, “… like that time we took you to the airport so you could run around France for a week.”

“Would you prefer I not have gone?” she said.

“Honey, no,” he said.

He was smiling, but his face was coming apart at the seams.

“Do you want me to just write you a check?” she said. “For a thousand dollars for it?”

“Honey …”

“Then shut up about it.”

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said.

“Then stop trying to mean something by it,” she said.

He brought her loose-leaf Xeroxes of an article put out by her old chief from Weatherall, who oversaw the clinics at the region’s juvenile detention centers. In the paper the old man cataloged some odd markings on Wag Williams’s body. The boy’s name was changed to “Freddie,” but she knew it was him, and she wondered if he’d been seduced by DeeDee and if maybe DeeDee really had been a witch, which is what people called her.

“Seems far-fetched,” her father said, and her hatred for the old man was like somebody dumping liquid indifference onto her brain.

Her liking for pharmaceuticals, starved to extinction, gave way to one for sweets, always in abundance at Three Hills Women’s Correctional, and when they let her out, she thought of the little princesses of Weatherall and wept for them in just the same way she would eat carton after carton of Toaster Strudels—without knowing it.

She could hear Ken Sagong’s students at the university asking him if he’d really known her, the doctor, in those days.

Casually, yes, he would say. Forensics was a small world. Everybody was right next door to everybody else.

And he never suspected a thing?

There was nothing to suspect. She answered a call only she could hear.

She had an abortion and called it a mercy. She had another and didn’t give it a name. She went to meetings and told her story and the audience didn’t know if they were supposed to applaud or what. She fed herself past the point of physical sickness and they threatened to take her feet off. She learned the date on which the boy, Waylon Williams, then twenty-three, was to die. He would be thirty-one when it happened, and she wondered what you had to do or who you had to be to get invited to witness.

He had gone on killing, by himself and with others. At her meetings, she told everybody she’d seen him for what he was before anybody else had, and now the prison was going to send a priest in who would take even that away from her.

She told the group about the Glorious Judgment she’d heard so much about in Three Hills. Everybody had hated DeeDee Watts, she said, but DeeDee Watts was sure to be raised up, whole and even beautiful, in the mellow light of the Last Day. She would clap her hands and shout for joy, and lodged in her heart, as a reminder of the bad times put behind her, would be the boy’s imperishable kiss.

Or would Forensics have removed it? Did the Resurrection count if Forensics got there first?

She was about to ask, sincerely wanting to know, when she noticed some of the group had gotten up to leave while others had started to clap.

 

Dedicated to Ashley Zapach