Compulsion

16

Anderson flew to Nantucket. I took a cab from State Police headquarters to Mass General. While we needed space and time to make sense of how to go forward together, we both knew we had to keep moving. With all the complications in the Bishop case, one thing hadn't changed: Someone had tried to kill five-month-old Tess Bishop-and might well try again.

As the taxi sped down Storrow Drive, with the Charles River off to my left and the Boston skyline to my right, I began to wonder who had placed the photographic negative in the medicine bottle. The obvious candidate was Garret, given his penchant for island photography and the fact that he had turned the bottle over to Anderson and me. But it was also remotely possible that Darwin Bishop had put it there-storing away part of his motive for attempting to kill Tess right along with the means he had used to try to kill her. The answer was on its way; Leona would be dusting the negative for prints.

It was after 6:00 p.m. and getting dark when I walked through the hospital's main entrance. I had the fleeting impulse to stop in at the emergency room and grab a Percocet prescription from Colin Bain, to dull the pain from the injuries to my body and psyche-my savaged back, my hurt pride, my broken friendship. Any addictions counselor would forgive me the slip, given the circumstances. Luckily, I realized that staying sober might be one of the few things still within my control. No sense burying a knife in my own back when other people were doing such a good job of it.

I took an elevator up to the PICU and instinctively walked toward Tess's room. But I stopped short, noticing that a five- or six-year-old Asian child was lying in that bed. I scanned the other rooms around the PICU perimeter, but Tess wasn't in any of them. My mind jumped to the most dire conclusion-that her heart had given out. I stopped a young, female nurse walking by. "I'm a doctor working on the Bishop case," I said. I couldn't bring myself to ask the obvious question. "She was here yesterday," I said.

"Do you have identification?" the woman asked.

Her response seemed to confirm my fear. She wanted proof I was a staff member before delivering bad news. I felt lightheaded.

"Are you all right?" she said. "Do you need to sit down?"

Before I could answer, John Karlstein strode through the PICU's sliding glass doors. "Frank!" he called out, from behind me.

I turned quickly, without thinking, and stretched my lacerated muscles. "Jesus," I muttered, between clenched teeth.

"My mother thought I was," Karlstein said. "Nobody since."

I straightened up, as best I could.

"It's good to see you," Karlstein said. "Bain told me what happened in the alleyway out there. You should sue."

The nurse apparently got the idea I was part of the team. She smiled and walked away.

"Sue?" I said. "Who? For what?"

"They've had trouble in that spot before," Karlstein said. "Remember? A mugging less than a year ago. They should have lighted it like day. Sue the hospital, man."

"I think I'll pass," I said.

"It's a payday from some goddamn insurance company," he said. "What do you care? They've been sticking it to us pretty good, haven't they? You should give me a finder's fee for suggesting it."

Karlstein was probably joking, but I could never quite tell with him. My mind focused back on Tess. "What happened to the Bishop baby?" I said. I steadied myself for the worst. "Bad news?"

"Only for my census," he said. "We transferred her to Telemetry. She's out of the woods. Pacemaker's working like a charm."

Telemetry is a "step-down" cardiac unit where patients' hearts are still monitored, but in a more laid-back setting. "Thank God," I said.

"We did have a little trouble before she left," Karlstein said.

"What sort of trouble?"

"The billionaire. He wanted to see the baby-badly."

"Who was stopping him?" I asked.

"Your friend. She turns out to have some real backbone of her own."

"My friend…"

"Julia. The mother." Karlstein winked, making it obvious he had intuited she was special to me. "She had already hustled down to Suffolk Superior Court a couple hours before her husband arrived. Picked up a temporary restraining order against him. She had all the paperwork in a neat manila folder. Security showed him and his bodyguards to the door."

"He came here with his bodyguards?" I said.

"I assumed that's who they were. They were bigger than I am."

I knew we hadn't heard the last of that confrontation. "How did Julia handle things?"

"She was a rock while her husband was here. Then she fell apart. Just wracked with tears. I had Caroline Hallissey visit with her again, just to make sure she would be able to pull it together."

"And?"

"Hallissey is her own person," Karlstein said evasively.

"What did she have to say?" I pressed.

"Nothing sensible."

"C'mon, John. Just tell me."

"She thought Mrs. Bishop was acting upset," he said, "manufacturing her emotions to manipulate us into doting on her."

"Did you think so?" I asked.

He shook his head. "If that was an act, she deserves an Academy Award. You know me, I'm no bleeding heart. For me to call in a psych consult, twice, you have to be in pretty bad shape."

"Well, thanks for letting me know Hallissey's take on things, anyhow," I said. "The more information I have, the better." I paused. "And thanks for helping Tess."

"Don't thank me. Sue the hospital and cut me in." He smiled in a way that made it clear he was pulling my leg. Then he leaned closer and dropped his voice. "Get some rest," he said. "You look like you're about to collapse. And we really can't afford to lose you around here."

I took the stairs up to Telemetry, a unit that looks a lot like any other inpatient ward, with private rooms off a central corridor. I stopped at the nurses' station, found Tess Bishop's room number, and walked to the doorway. Julia was seated by Tess's bedside, watching her intently, just as she had been in the PICU. I monitored my internal reaction to seeing her. The expected anxiety was there, along with a flash of anger, but those negative emotions were eclipsed by another feeling, which I hadn't anticipated-an edgy sort of comfort. It was something you might experience arriving home in the midst of a family tragedy, when you know things have gone bad, but you also know they are your things, together. Owning a share of trouble can be an oddly warm and centering experience.

As for Tess, she looked more like a normal infant than before, with fewer leads and lines emerging from her extremities. Her sleep seemed substantially more restful than in the PICU. Her respirations were less labored and more regular, centered in her chest rather than her abdomen. And her color had moved toward pink from ash.

Julia turned and saw me in the doorway. She stood up, took her own deep breath, and smiled. "How long have you been standing there?" she asked.

"I just got here." I walked into the room. I nodded at Tess. "Dr. Karlstein told me she's doing well," I said.

"He was remarkable," she said. "I couldn't have asked for anything more." She looked down at the ground, then back at me. " Darwin came to the hospital. Luckily, we were the second item on his agenda, as usual. He called before he went into a board meeting at some company headquartered here in Boston. That gave me time to go to court and get a restraining order."

"Karlstein told me about that, too," I said. "Good for you."

She started to smile, catching her lower lip between her teeth. "There's no way I would have had the strength to do anything like that if it weren't for you."

I wanted to believe her, which told me how hard I had fallen for her. I was fresh from learning of at least one other romance of hers, with North Anderson. And there was probably a third man in the mix, assuming the letter Claire Buckley had shown us was intended for someone other than North. Yet I still felt like her relationship with me was of a different order and exponentially more important to her. "Didn't you ever see The Wizard of Oz?” I said. "No one can give you courage-or a heart or a brain. You must have had it all along."

"Hold me?" she said.

I walked closer, coming within a few feet of her, then stopped and just stood there.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"We need to talk," I said.

She tilted her head. "What about?"

" North Anderson," I said. "For starters."

She nodded, as if she had known we would eventually arrive at this moment. "He told you we spent some time together," she said.

"Yes," I said. I held off mentioning the photograph.

"And I hope he told you that nothing happened," she said. "Because it didn't. I mean, we didn't…"

"But you got close, emotionally," I said. "And maybe you still are. I don't know."

"No," she said. "We're not. Not the way you're thinking. I still care for him, but not in a romantic way."

I shrugged, unconvinced. "All right," I said.

"Can we sit down, please?" she said.

I took one of the armchairs by Tess's bed. Julia took the other.

"You know how difficult my life has been with Win," she started. "I mean, you believe what I've told you-what I've been through?"

"Yes," I said. "I do." And I did. But I also found myself thinking about Caroline Hallissey's assessment of Julia as someone who manufactured emotions.

"I met North at a fund-raiser for the Pine Street Inn in Boston," Julia went on. "I thought he might be able to help me with a project I wanted to start-reaching out to kids who were into drugs. There are more of them on the island than anyone will admit, and I thought, with North having come from Baltimore, he would be a lot less naive than his predecessor."

I noticed how little I liked hearing Julia use North's first name, not much more than I liked her referring to Darwin as her husband. "There's nothing naive about him," I said. "He's seen it all, at least twice." I gestured for her to continue.

"We started meeting about the drug issue, and I started feeling drawn to him," she said. "But we never connected in anything like the way you and I do." She leaned closer. "You have to believe me. I felt safer with North in my life, and I admired him, but I wasn't in love with him."

Meaning, she was in love with me. I heard that loud and clear. And I still liked hearing it. "I saw a photograph of the two of you on the beach," I said.

"On the beach?" she said.

"You were holding one another," I said. "Kissing." I cringed at my own tone of voice, which reminded me of a jealous high school kid hassling his girl about going parking with someone else.

She looked at me in disbelief. "Win actually gave you that photograph?" she asked.

I stayed silent. I wanted to hear Julia's version of where the photograph might have come from, without any prompting from me.

"I can't believe he'd do that," she said. "He's so sick."

"Tell me what you mean," I said.

"One of Darwin 's security guards took that photograph," she said. "Win was having me followed. He actually used it to try to force me to have an abortion."

"What?"

"He said if I didn't terminate my pregnancy, he'd turn the photo over to the newspapers and let them have a field day with it," Julia said. "That scared me. Obviously, I didn't want to be embarrassed myself, but I was also worried North would lose his job or his marriage or both. So I booked an appointment at a family planning center."

I felt relieved that Julia's story sounded at least remotely credible. "Did Darwin talk about divorce once he knew you had spent time with North?" I asked.

"Never. I think he actually liked the fact that he had something to hold over my head. It gave him even more control over me," she said. "He feeds on that."

"And he never turned the photograph over to the press," I said.

"I should have known that was a bluff," she said. "Advertising my infidelity would have hurt his ego more than it would have fed his need for revenge." Her eyes filled up. "I guess he just waited to get back at me-through Brooke and Tess."

I hesitated to push Julia further when she was close to tears, but I needed to ask her about the letter Claire had given North and me. "There's something else," I said.

She wiped her eyes. "What? I'll tell you anything you want."

That was a disconcerting turn of phrase. Was Julia, I wondered, just telling me what I wanted to hear? "A page of a letter you wrote surfaced," I said.

"Surfaced?" she said.

"Maybe when the police searched the house," I lied.

"Really," she said.

I didn't feel right lying to her. And I figured turning up the heat between Julia and Claire might not be such a bad idea. "Actually, we got it from Claire Buckley," I said. "She found it-in your closet."

"A letter I wrote," she said, without any trace of anger.

"Yes," I said.

"What did it say?" she asked.

I had made a photocopy of the letter at State Police headquarters. I reached into the back pocket of my jeans and took out the sheet of paper. I unfolded it and handed it to Julia.

She looked at it for several seconds, her face a blank. "What did you want to know?" she said finally. There was no anxiety in her voice.

"It certainly sounds like a letter you would have written to someone you were involved with," I said.

"It is," she said matter-of-factly. "And I am."

/ am. Her use of the present tense felt like an assault. My hope that Julia would explain everything away evaporated. My back started to ache again. "Who was…" I stopped myself. "Who is he?" I said.

"She" Julia said pointedly.

It took me a moment to convince myself I had heard her correctly. "You're… seeing a woman?" I said.

"Does that shock you?"

"Well, yes. I mean, not that she's a woman." Now, I had lied. "That you have someone else in your life. And it doesn't sound like something casual or meaningless to you."

"Not at all," she said. "She's sustains me. Like the letter says: From the day I first saw her."

"When did it start?"

"Six or seven months ago."

"And it's still going on?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked. "Is she from the island?"

"She lives in Manhattan. I fly to see her once a week during the summer, when I can." Julia smiled. "Otherwise, we talk by phone, for fifty minutes."

"For fifty…" I stopped short.

Julia shook her head and looked at me as if I was being foolish. "She's my therapist," she said. "Marion Eisenstadt. That's who I wrote the letter to. I never sent it because I thought it was… well… inappropriate, and a little morbid."

I was stuck back on the punch line. "The letter was to your therapist?" I said skeptically.

"I can give you her number if you want to check it out," she said. "I've written to her before."

Could it be? I wondered. Might Julia simply have been reaching out to anyone she could, including North and her therapist? Was it possible that she really had chosen me for a different and much more complete role in her life, the same way I had chosen her? I desperately wanted it all to be true. "I don't need her number," I said.

She read over the letter, then looked up at me. "I was feeling really down that day," she said.

That comment gave me a nice bridge to the second half of my concern. "The verse you wrote at the end makes it sound like you might have been dwelling on death," I led.

"Is that an elegant way of asking me if I was thinking about killing my daughter?" she asked.

"Please understand. I need to ask these…"

"I felt like my life was over, Frank. I felt like I had sold myself to Darwin. Does that answer your question? I didn't know how much worse things could get-until…" She was fighting back tears. "Until I lost Brooke," she said, choking on the words.

"We can talk about this later," I said.

She cleared her throat. "Maybe I asked for this," she went on. "Maybe God is trying to teach me a lesson. All I had to do was leave. But I was weak. Pathetic. And I cared about the goddamn house and the art and all that garbage."

"And you've learned what matters," I said. "You got further than most people get in their lives." I marveled at how quickly I had started taking care of her again.

"If I've already lost you, you should tell me now," she said.

That felt like an ultimatum. Or maybe Julia was simply putting me on notice that she couldn't cope with uncertainty from me. She had lost Brooke. Her marriage was over. Billy might be imprisoned forever. Tess's health was fragile. Wasn't it understandable that she needed to know if she could count on me? Why should I be coy when my heart had an answer for her? "You haven't lost me," I said.

She moved into my arms, running her fingers gently over my back, holding me in a way no other woman ever had, something on the razor edge of raw sexuality and pure nurturance. Each force spoke to a deep and equal need in me. "Stay with me tonight?" I asked.

She glanced at Tess. "I want to stay here a while longer," she said. "I'll grab a cab later and meet you in Chelsea."

"I'll see you later, then," I said.

I was dead tired, but decided I should visit Lilly before leaving the hospital. I planned to be on Nantucket the next day and, with the progress Lilly had already made, I wasn't sure how long she would be an inpatient.

I found her seated in an armchair by her bed, staring out the window. Her blond, curly hair was tied back with a little black bow. I knocked at the door to her room. She glanced at me, then resumed her vigil.

"Mind if I come in?" I asked.

She shrugged dismissively.

I felt as though I might have done something wrong, something to shake Lilly's trust in me. But I couldn't imagine what that might have been. I hadn't breached her confidence by talking to her family members. I hadn't even shared detailed clinical impressions of her with her internist or surgeon. I'd shown up every time I had said I would. Was she still upset I hadn't agreed to continue seeing her as an outpatient?

"Just because you feel she's lost trust," the voice at the back of my mind said, "doesn't necessarily mean she's lost trust in you."

That was true. Even during the briefest psychotherapy, the psychiatrist is a blank screen onto which a patient will project feelings he or she harbors for other important figures in their lives. Lilly's silence and standoffish body language might be meant for me, but might be a reflection of her anger toward someone else, like her husband or grandfather.

I walked in. I saw that Lilly was connected to just two IV bottles. Her leg was still wrapped in gauze, but it looked less swollen. She was less pale. She was getting better.

Without turning her gaze from the window she took a deep breath, let it out. Her sky-blue eyes thinned in a way that hinted at stormy thoughts. "That fucking bastard," she said. "All those years. He really screwed me up."

I sat down in the armchair next to her. "Who are you thinking about?" I asked, already pretty sure of the answer: Lilly's mind had begun to channel her self-loathing into rage at her grandfather.

She shook her head. What looked like a wave of nausea swept over her beautiful face. She swallowed hard. "I was a little girl," she said. "He was getting his rocks off manipulating a child."

"You've been remembering your grandfather," I said.

"His stupid comments," she said, still looking straight ahead. "The way he checked me out."

I waited to see if she would share her memories.

She looked at me. Several seconds passed without a word.

I didn't break the silence. I wanted her to know she was the one in control of what she revealed and what she kept private.

"My friend Betsy was turning nine," Lilly said finally. "I was nine, too. I remember getting dressed for her birthday party. It was summer, and my mother helped me put on a pale yellow, blowzy dress. It had little butterflies embroidered on it in white thread. I guess you could see my underwear through it. Pink cotton underwear." She rolled her eyes. "I remember my grandfather looking at me, some stupid smile on his face." Her hands closed into fists. "And then he said, 'Keep wearing dresses that show your panties, and all the boys will be staring at you. I know I would be.'"

He would be. He would be staring at his granddaughter's panties. "Do you remember how you felt at the time?" I asked.

"I've been trying to bring it all back," she said. "Because you told me to run into the images, not away from them." She paused to collect her thoughts. "Partly, I think I felt foolish, because I didn't really understand what the hell he was talking about. Why would anyone care about my underwear? But the way he looked at me, I knew I was doing something he liked, or at least something that got his attention. And I was sort of proud of it, but embarrassed, too." She shook her head again, in disgust. "The way he said panties. I remember that. He lingered on the word, like he was… tasting it."

I wanted Lilly to keep her disgust flowing, to keep her emotional wound open and let her infection drain. "He liked saying it," I said. "It excited him."

She closed her eyes. Instead of growing angrier, she blushed. "Here's something weird: It's one of the things that my husband likes, too, I guess. On the honeymoon, he asked me to let him look at me in… my panties."

"Did you let him?" I asked.

She nodded bashfully.

"He just wanted to look at you dressed that way?" I said, inviting her to divulge more.

Her cheeks turned crimson. "While I touched myself," she said quickly.

I felt as though we were only halfway to the core of the problem. Lilly hadn't attacked her husband for admiring her body. She had assaulted herself, injecting herself with dirt. The trigger for her pathology was her shame. "How about you?" I asked. "Did you like it when he watched you that way? When you were touching yourself?"

"I guess I did. I mean I…" She stopped herself mid-sentence. "You know."

"You had an orgasm," I said.

"But then, like a minute later, I felt so disgusting," she said.

"Right," I said. Lilly's trouble was in separating her adult sexuality from the confused, frightened, disgusting sexual intimacies shared by word and glance with her grandfather. "It's going to take time to get enough distance on your past experiences with your grandfather to feel good enjoying the present with your husband. You've got to expect a lot of conflicted emotions. And you've got to give yourself the time to feel them and to get over them."

"But I will?" she asked. "I will get over them?"

"Yes," I said.

"I called Dr. James's office," she said. "We have an appointment in a week."

"I'm glad." I felt gratified that she had followed up with Ted. I also felt a pang of regret that I hadn't continued seeing him myself. I missed him-his clear thinking and steady hand. I would have liked his advice on Julia. "He can help you as you remember more. You can trust him completely."

"I'll try to," she said. She looked at me in a way that showed she was still very needy and very vulnerable. "Will you stop by before I leave?" she asked. "They told me I'll be here a few more days. It would just help to know I'm not on autopilot until discharge."

"You'll handle the controls better and better," I said. "But, yes. I'll see you before you leave."