Compulsion

20

Sunday, June 30, 2002

It was after midnight, but I didn't drive right home. I drove to the Suffolk County House of Corrections.

Luckily, Anderson 's friends were working the overnight again. Tony Glass, a spark plug of a man about thirty, thirty-five, wearing Coke-bottle lenses, ran the front desk. He asked me if I was there for another visit with Billy.

"No," I said. "I want to see Darwin Bishop."

"Strange, huh?" Glass said. "The father and the son in the same jail at the same time?"

"Not for long," I said. "Billy should be released in the morning."

"Good. He seems like a decent kid," Glass said. "A couple of the guards were saying so. They like him."

I smiled. Billy might be likable, but he was also destructive and manipulative. I hadn't forgotten that. "He can be charming," I said.

"The father's in protective custody," Glass said. "He got into it with another inmate, took a little beating. You might want to see him down on the cell block, if you don't mind."

"No problem." I wondered whether Bishop had had a run-in with another inmate, or whether he'd run into a guard who didn't stomach wife-beaters.

Protective custody was basement level in the jail, a cell block like the others, but without access to any common areas or recreational activities. It was also cold and dark down there, maybe to remind the inmates that protecting them was an additional burden for the system, not something that got them any warm fuzzies.

Only a few of the cells were occupied. A guard walked me to the last one in the row. Darwin Bishop was lying on a cot, wearing the same anonymous orange jumpsuit that Billy had been wearing. "Got a visitor, Bishop," the guard said. He walked away, leaving me there.

Bishop sat up. His lip was split, but he looked okay otherwise. "Dr. Clevenger," he said, sounding weak. "What brings you?"

What, indeed? Did I want to see with my own eyes that the truth had caught up with a man who had run from it for so long? Or had Julia sparked such a primal, competitive instinct in me that I wanted to savor a rival's defeat? I had planned to take her from him, after all. I had been planning it at some level since the day I met her. "I'm not sure why I'm here," I told him.

"I didn't go to the hospital to hurt Julia," he said. "I love her, probably more than I should. I lost control. And you're partly to blame. You've been seeing her."

"Terrorizing your family isn't a great strategy to keep them faithful," I said. "Having affairs of your own doesn't help, either."

"That doesn't excuse you," he said. "I never took something of yours."

"Is that why you sent your bodyguards to my apartment yesterday?" I said. "To even the score?"

"Yes," he said. "I wish you had been at home. You'd look worse than I do."

"Too late now," I said.

"Possibly." He ran a finger over his lip. It was bleeding. He looked at the blood. "You're not her first, you know. Your buddy North had her, too. She doesn't discriminate."

I said nothing.

Bishop looked at me. "You don't even care," he said.

"You want her anyhow. You're addicted to her, same as he was." He paused. "Same as I am." He looked at the ceiling, took a deep breath, and shook his head, as if he still couldn't quite believe what had happened to him. Then his gaze drifted around the walls of the cell. He swallowed hard. "I've been here before," he said quietly. "Alone. With nothing. I always come back."

The way he said those words, almost as a mantra, to soothe himself, made me feel something like pity for him. "No one can stop you from getting rich inside," I said.

Drake Slattery, Lilly's internist, called me just before 7:00 a.m. to tell me Lilly would be going home later that morning. I told him I'd be by to see her off.

She was dressed in street clothes-white jeans and a simple, light green blouse-when I got to her room. She had swept her blond curls over one shoulder and put on pretty pink lipstick and was seated in one of the armchairs by her bed, reading. I knocked. She looked up, smiled. "Come in," she said.

I took the other armchair. "Anything interesting?" I asked, nodding at the magazine.

She held up the magazine so I could see the cover. It was a copy of True Confessions. "Appropriate, huh?" she said.

I smiled. "I suppose so."

"Discharge day," she said.

"How are you feeling?" I asked.

"Honestly?" she said.

"Of course."

"I would love to do it again," she said.

"Inject yourself," I said.

She nodded. "I think about it most of the day. Sometimes I dream about it at night." She looked directly into my eyes. "This isn't going to be easy."

Lilly was describing something similar to the craving addicts experience when they try to put down a drug. For her, the injections and resulting infections had been intoxicants, after all. They had numbed her mind so she couldn't focus on her complex feelings for her grandfather. Now, with painful reality pressing in, her mind was pleading with her to keep the drugs flowing. "Have you thought a lot more about your relationship with your grandfather?" I asked.

"A little bit during the day," she said. "A lot when I'm falling off to sleep."

She seemed reticent to say more, so I chose provocative words. "What comes to mind while you're lying in bed?" I asked softly.

Her face flushed. "I have these dreams. They're different from the ones where I'm hurting myself. Very different."

"How so?" I said.

"I'm hurting… him," she said.

That didn't surprise me. The longer Lilly stayed away from her habit, the more she thought about the inappropriate relationship that had sparked it, the angrier she was likely to get. I wanted her to know that she didn't need to be ashamed of that anger, that she could talk openly about it-to me or her new therapist (my old one) Ted James. "How are you hurting him?" I asked her.

"It's awful," she said.

"They're just feelings," I said. "The only person you've really hurt is yourself."

She looked down at her leg for several seconds. "In the dreams, I'm in bed," she said, tentatively. "Grandpa comes into my room to kiss me good night." She looked back at me.

"And then?" I said, keeping my voice even.

"I pretend I'm asleep, but I'm not. He comes closer and closer. It feels like he's taking forever to get to me. Finally, I see his shadow on the wall. I watch it as he leans over to kiss me. And just as his lips are about to touch my forehead, I turn over and…" She closed her eyes.

"And…" I said, encouraging her.

She kept her eyes closed. "I have a knife."

"What happens?" I asked.

She looked directly at me again. "I cut his throat." She looked horrified.

"And then?" I said.

"Then he just stares at me with this terrible confusion in his eyes. Like he has no idea why I did it. And that's the worst part. That look on his face. It's even worse than picturing what I did to him-you know, the way his neck bleeds. I can't get his expression out of my head."

"Make sure she can keep it out of reality" the voice at the back of my mind said.

"You don't feel the impulse to strike out at your grandfather that way right now, do you?" I asked. "While you're awake?"

She looked at me as if I had two heads. "My God, no. I don't ever want to hurt him."

"I didn't think you did," I said.

Lilly's nightmare was transparent. Her grandfather had strung her along, seducing her for years. He had come closer and closer, without ever laying a hand on her. To an adolescent girl's unconscious mind, it must have seemed that he was taking forever to claim her. But such a girl's rage at being manipulated would grow in tandem with her erotic impulses, hence the fantasy of killing her grandfather as she lay in bed, just as his lips are about to touch her. Even the grandfather's confusion seemed on the mark. He may never have consciously intended to harm Lilly, acting automatically on his own bent emotional reflexes-his shadow-born of who knows what childhood trauma.

Something Ted James had told me years before came back to me. He'd been trying to help me let go of my anger toward my father, which I was never fully able to do. "Eventually," James had said, "you'll realize there's no one to blame and no one to hate. Your father was a victim, just like you."

I looked at Lilly. "Maybe the reason your grandfather looks confused," I said, "is because he never understood why your relationship turned toxic-the dynamics that drove it in a destructive direction. Maybe he didn't understand it any better than you did."

"In other words," she said, "he didn't mean to screw me up?"

"Maybe not," I said.

She seemed to be grappling with that notion.

"Do you say anything to him when he's looking at you with that confusion in his eyes?" I asked. "After you've cut him?"

"No," she said. "That's when I wake up."

"What would you say to him?" I asked.

She shook her head. "I don't know."

"Think about it," I said.

She smiled, then squinted past me, presumably imagining the situation. After a few moments, she looked back at me. "Sleep tight. Don't let the bedbugs bite," she said. She laughed.

I let myself laugh with her, to drain the tension from the moment. Were she a long-term patient of mine, her words and the tone of voice in which she had delivered them-combining innocence, rage, and something vaguely sensual-would have been a perfect launching pad for a longer flight over the terrain of her trauma. That was a very good sign indeed. "You're going to be okay," I said.

"Think so?" she said.

"I know so." I extended my hand. She took it. "Good luck," I said. "I'll be thinking about you."

Billy was scheduled to be released later that day, but the gears of the legal system always grind. He wasn't released that day, or the next. He and I joked about him being set free on Independence Day, but that didn't happen, either. It took ten days for the relevant paperwork to flow between the D.A.'s office and the jail. Finally, on July 10, I went to the Suffolk County House of Corrections and watched him walk through the two sets of sliding steel doors that pretend to separate good from evil. He glanced back just once as he half-jogged to me. "I can't believe I'm out of there," he said. "Thank you."

"If you really want to thank me," I said, "you'll worry with me."

"Worry about what?" he said.

"About yourself. The stealing, hurting animals, setting fires-it can't go on."

"That's past history," he said. "I'm not gonna screw up."

"Past is future, as long as you run from it," I said. "Losing your parents, leaving Russia, living with Darwin-I promise you every shortcut you take to avoid facing those things leads back here. I've seen it happen. Dozens of times. Kids with hearts every bit as good as yours."

He glowed with that last phrase. "Will you help me?" he said.

"I will if you want me to," I said.

"I really do," he said.

Treating a sociopath is much harder than treating someone with depression, or even psychosis. The trouble is that sociopaths don't think they're sick. Everyone else is the problem. If the world would just get off their backs, cough up what they've got coming to them, everything would be fine. "We'll give it a try," I said.

He held out his hand. We shook on it. "So where are we going?" he said.

The way Billy asked that question made it plain he remembered my promise that I'd consider letting him live with me. I remembered, too. It was easy to deliver on it, at least temporarily, because I had been staying with Julia and Garret at Julia's mother's West Tisbury house on Martha's Vineyard. Julia had been released from Mass General just three days before and was still feeling unsteady, physically and emotionally. "We're going to your grandmother's house on Martha's Vineyard," I said. "I've been staying in the guest cottage while things come back together."

"So we get to hang out, like you said," he said.

"Sure looks that way."

"Will Garret be there?" Billy asked.

"He's moved most of his things in," I said.

Billy nodded over his shoulder. "I have better memories of the House of Corrections than Darwin's house," he said. "At least everyone agrees this is a prison. You kind of know what to expect."

Garret testified before the grand jury two days later. Carl Rossetti was there, as was District Attorney Tom Harrigan.

Rossetti told me the scene was heart-rending. Garret had been a mess, trembling and sweating, needing much more reassurance than he had at Boston Police headquarters. Still, by the end of his testimony, he had nailed Darwin Bishop's coffin shut with an eyewitness account that put the plastic sealant in Bishop's hand and the bottle of nortriptyline in his desk. That complemented the fingerprint evidence perfectly. An indictment of Darwin Bishop for murder in the first degree, with extreme atrocity and cruelty (a special add-on in the Massachusetts courts), along with two counts of attempted murder (Tess and Julia) was issued within an hour of Garret stepping down from the witness stand.

"I've been in this business long enough that most things don't get to me, you know?" Rossetti had told me. "But when Garret broke down, crying how he still loved his father but couldn't understand why, I almost got choked up myself."

"Almost," I had said.

"Honestly, Franko, the only time I really lose it is when I lose at the track. I drop more than a grand, I cry like a baby. Anything else, it's no skin off mine, if you know what I mean."

"So you did get choked up," I said.

"Pretty much," he said.

When Garret returned home, I sat down with him. "I talked to Carl Rossetti," I said. "I know how hard it was for you today."

"I didn't think it would be," Garret said. "I thought it would be easier than last time. Maybe it's that we're getting closer to the trial."

"And the trial itself will be even harder," I said. "With everything Darwin has done, it's normal for you to feel a strange sort of devotion to him."

"That's what I don't get," he said. "Why would you worry about what happens to someone who's tortured you?"

The answer to that question brings up another strange human calculus. Most children would rather preserve the fantasy of a loving connection with their fathers and mothers, at all costs, even if it costs them their self-esteem. When you're three or seven years old, it's less frightening to think of yourself as an unlovable, disappointing screwup than to recognize the fact that you're living with a monster. "Questioning your love for Darwin would mean questioning whether he ever loved you" I said. "That's a tough one, at seventeen or forty-seven. Take it from me."

"Was your father… abusive?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. "He beat me."

"Shit," he said. "I'm sorry."

"Thanks," I said.

He shook his head, took a deep breath, let it out. "With everything Darwin did to me, I've always assumed he didn't really mean it. But he must have. He couldn't have cared about me. Not in any normal way."

I could hear the guilt in Garret's voice. He was about to put his father away for life, after all. "It's not a question you can figure out in one sitting," I said. "But if you keep coming back to it, you'll get closer and closer to the truth. And you'll be less and less afraid of it. Even when it hurts."

We sat for several seconds, without saying anything else.

Garret broke the silence. "I'm glad you're here-living with us for a while, I mean," he said.

I reached out, squeezed his shoulder. "I am, too," I said.