Blinded

THIRTY-TWO

The storm had departed and left the Colorado plains in bright sunshine, which was typically what happened after a fierce snowstorm along the Front Range. But our seventy-degree Saturday had become a high-thirties, low-forties Sunday. Less than a full day had passed, and we were in a whole different season.

Lauren slept most of Sunday, a bad sign. Grace and I ran some errands, played some toddler games for which neither of us understood the rules, built a snowman out of snow that was the consistency of a Slurpy, and the whole time I pretended that the big bad wolf wasn’t really at our door getting ready to huff and to puff and to blow our house down.

Once I succeeded in getting Grace into her crib for her midday nap, I checked my messages at the office. I was anticipating that I would be receiving a call from Gibbs seeking my compassion about her husband’s disappearance in Georgia. But the only voicemail wasn’t from Gibbs; it was a long message from Jim Zebid.

“Hey, Alan. It’s Jim. I assume you saw theCamerathis morning. I have to admit I’m a little concerned about it… um… you see, my guy-I’m sure you remember the one I’m talking about-swears he hasn’t told anybody about his, you know, his thing with the guy, the one in the paper. And I certainly haven’t told anybody about it but you. And now the cops know, obviously, and it’s in the news. So it’s a concern, obviously, and I’m left wondering whether-this is hard to say-you might have been a little indiscreet after we talked earlier in the week.”

His tone wasn’t belligerent. It wasn’t even heated.

“I’m not accusing you, believe me, but the position my guy is in right now is really precarious. I mean, if her husband talks, you know-about, you know, it could be real bad for my guy. Anyway, if you have any thoughts about all this, I’d love to hear them. I’m on my cell all day. I think you have the number.”

He’s not accusing me?What else would I call it?

I dialed his cell number. He answered after three rings. “This is Jim.”

“Alan Gregory, Jim.”

“Alan, hold on. I need to get someplace I can talk. It’ll take a minute, I’m downtown.” I heard the sounds of a soulful saxophone. I knew exactly where he was on the Mall. He was at the corner of Pearl and Thirteenth. Some cold air wouldn’t keep throngs away from the Mall on a sunny autumn Sunday when the number of shopping days until Christmas was dwindling away like Girl Scout cookies in a firehouse.

“Okay, this is better. Thanks for holding. So what do you think about what I was saying before?”

“What do I think?” I wasn’t about to start this conversation. That was going to be up to him.

“The article?” he said.

“Yes?”

“Were you, maybe, a little indiscreet?”

“No, Jim. Not even a little. Until I saw the paper this morning, I’d totally forgotten about that part of our conversation. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that before this morning I hadn’t given what happened with your client a thought since you left my office.”

“Yeah?”

“Totally.” I was determined not to sound defensive. I wasn’t sure I was pulling it off. Instead I feared I sounded callous.

Jim was quiet. From the change in the background sounds, I guessed he was walking around on Thirteenth Street, down from the corner where the old black guy played the saxophone weekends on the Mall. There wouldn’t be as many pedestrians on Thirteenth as there were on the Mall.

“Well,” he said, “my guy had no reason to talk. And he assures me that he’s told nobody but me what happened.”

“Cops have other ways of finding out things, Jim. I assure you that nobody heard it from me. Directly or indirectly.”

“What about your notes?”

“I don’t put things like this in my notes. Ever.” So much for not sounding defensive. Should I have told him that I wasn’t even certain I’d written any notes about the session? Nothing was to be gained by going down that road. “I think there might be something else going on here, Jim.”

“Good, I’d love an explanation. I’m planning on talking with my guy later on today.”

“I think it’s something we should talk about on Tuesday during our regular appointment.”

“This can’t wait until Tuesday. What do you have Monday?”

“I have a cancellation at eleven-fifteen. You want that?”

“Fine.”

“Jim, I suspect this has more to do with you and me-issues in the therapy; I suspect that trust is high on that list-than with whatever you told me during our last session.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No.”

“Jesus.”

He hung up. Or the signal died. Either way, the deadness in my ear let me know I wasn’t talking with him any longer.

The bedroom was dimly lit, blinds tilted to filter the western sun. The air had already taken on the stuffiness and stillness of an infirmary. Lauren didn’t lift her head from the pillow as I entered. But she said, “Hi, baby. How’s Grace doing?”

“Good. She’s down for her nap. She ate a good lunch.”

For a long moment I listened to her breathing, watched the bedding rise and fall above her chest.

She said, “Would you call the neurologist for me? Set up the steroids? I’m ready to start.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Here, or at the hospital?”

“Here.”

“He may want to see you. That’s cool?”

“Of course. And call somebody at work, tell them I won’t be in for-God, I don’t know-a few days.”

“Sure. Is Elliot okay?” Elliot was one of Lauren’s favorite people at the office.

“Elliot’s good.”

I touched her through the bedding. “I love you. Know that.”

“I know. I love you, too. And I’m sorry.”

I sat on the edge of the bed and placed my hand against her cheek. I said, “Don’t be.”

“I just am.”

The home care nurse the neurologist sent over to our house arrived at dinnertime. She was a young woman named Petra, and I tried to engage her a little as she was gathering supplies. It didn’t work. My clinical antennae said she was battling chronic depression. For some reason-maybe it was the barely restrained scowl she shot my way when she learned my profession-I guessed that she had already suffered through a bad stint or two of psychotherapy and had been the unfortunate victim of multiple antidepressant failures-a couple of tricyclics, some SSRIs, and maybe even an MAOI or two.

The good news is that what Petra gave up in gregariousness, she made up in efficiency. The IV was running and taped in place within ten minutes of her initial knock on our door. Moments after that she loaded the first gram of Solumedrol into a fat syringe and began pushing the liquid in it hard into the tube that led to Lauren’s purple vein.

How much is a gram of steroids? If a healthy person were to injure a shoulder, say, or a hip, and a physician determined that major anti-inflammatory drugs were required, the doctor might prescribe oral steroids. Over five days of treatment the dose would decrease from a high of maybe thirty milligrams a day down to zero.

Lauren had just received over thirty times that maximum dose, and she’d had it forced directly into her bloodstream all at once. And the exact same procedure-with the same megadose-would be repeated on each of the next three days.

As I watched the blood pressure cuff inflate on her arm, Lauren managed a smile. She mounted the smile, I knew, for me. The syringe had just relinquished its final drops of steroids into the IV tube. She said, “The first twenty-four hours aren’t all bad, you know.”

I touched her hair.And after that?I thought. After the first day became the second and the first gram of steroids was followed by another, and another, and then, damn it, another?

After that, well, after that we’ll just jump off that damn bridge when we get to it, won’t we?

It wasn’t until after Petra had departed-she’d left a buffalo cap behind affixed to the indwelling IV in Lauren’s forearm-that I realized that Gibbs had never called me about Sterling’s disappearance and possible demise in Georgia.

I usually didn’t waste even a solitary calorie of effort worrying about patients whodidn’tcall me after hours. My consistent message as therapist to my patients was that I expected they could handle life’s stresses without checking in with me. I expected them not to call me after hours.

But emergencies are emergencies. And missing husbands who are feared drowned are usually considered emergencies.

As I prepared Grace’s dinner, I couldn’t help thinking that Gibbsshouldhave called. Since I left her at her house during the search warrant execution on Friday, she’d had to endure an uncomfortable interview by Carmen Reynoso. Her husband had disappeared and was feared dead in some river I’d never heard of in Georgia. That had to be stressful.

I couldn’t help wondering why she didn’t call.

I thought of calling her, checking on her. I really did. The very fact that I was considering it was so unusual that it caused me to recall Diane’s admonition that I was treating Gibbs differently than I would treat some other patient, which for some reason caused me to jump to a very disconcerting association to Teri Reginelli andhachas en cabezas.

I had an appointment with Gibbs Monday morning near dawn. If she could wait until then, I could wait until then.