Critical Conditions

Thirty-three

Merritt was curled up on the loveseat in the consultation room, asleep, her hair falling over one eye like a spill of fine lace. She looked innocent and fresh and vulnerable, a huge child right then, not a young adult.

I considered letting her sleep. I also considered tracking down an empty on-call room and sleeping myself. Tempting, but not prudent.

I said, “Merritt?” She didn’t respond.

A touch to her shoulder caused her to twitch, but not to waken. I leaned my mouth close to her ear and spoke her name again. She sat up in a panic, the side of her head crashing into the side of mine just above my ear, the impact sending me tumbling across the room.

She woke dazed but with some recognition of what was going on. She touched her head with her hand and said, “God, I’m sorry.”

I asked, “Are you okay?” as I pulled myself to a sitting position.

She rubbed her ear. “I think so. You?”

“I’m fine. It woke me up. I guess that’s good.” I nodded toward the table. “I brought you a Sprite. Thought you might be thirsty.”

She popped open the can and took a tentative sip. Over the top of the can, she eyed me and said, “Thanks. What did you mean before? That you cared about me more than you cared about what happened?”

Like her uncle, she surprised me. “When I first saw you in the hospital in Boulder-remember?-your doctors weren’t sure you were going to live. Your suicide attempt was that serious. I haven’t forgotten that morning. Since then, it’s been difficult for me to, I don’t know, feel much confidence that you aren’t still planning to find a way to kill yourself. I’m not going to pretend that I don’t want to know what happened with you and Dr. Robilio, and what Madison had to do with it, because I do. But more than that, I need to know that you can be trusted, that you’re safe, that you’ve found a reason not to try to kill yourself again. And it’s important that I learn what I need to know tonight.”

“Why tonight?”

I frowned. “It has to do with your sister, Merritt. Your Uncle Sam is a remarkable man. I know you hardly know him, but he’s a special guy, believe me. Anyway, he’s been busy trying to help, and he may have managed to work some magic in regard to the insurance situation. Your whole family may get some long-overdue good news in the morning. If that happens, I’d like to feel enough confidence in your mental state to consider discharging you from the hospital so you can be part of it.”

“Won’t they just arrest me if you let me out?”

“I don’t know the answer to that. They haven’t arrested you yet. Your lawyer says that’s a good sign.”

She sat forward. “What did Uncle Sam do? Tell me. Is it about Chaney?”

“Nothing is certain yet. Sam is still working on some things. We’ll know in the morning.”

“She’ll get the drugs? And the new heart?”

Despite myself, I smiled. “We’ll know in the morning.”

“I’m going with her.”

I nodded. “Now you see my dilemma. If it does turn out that Chaney is able to go to Seattle, I’d like you to be able to go with her, too. You have a remarkable relationship with her. But-”

“You need to make sure I’m not crazy.”

“I know you’re not crazy, Merritt. What I want to be certain of is that you’re not concealing a plan to try to kill yourself as soon as I give you half a chance. You’re a bright kid, you could fool me if you wanted to.”

She was taken aback by my frankness. “Whoa. I didn’t think you were supposed to say things like that to patients. That’s not too subtle.”

“What you did wasn’t subtle, Merritt.”

Her mouth widened and her eyes smiled sadly. “Oh, yes, it was, Dr. Gregory,” she said, “oh, yes, it was. It was a very good plan.”

She was waiting for me to react. I could tell. But I was too far in the dark to do much more than raise an eyebrow and shrug.

She exhaled and said, “You haven’t seen the videotape, have you?”

I shook my head and said, “No, I haven’t.”

“Good, I’m glad. That will make it easier to tell you what happened. A lot easier. Because I really can’t believe what I did.”

My sense right then was that she had crossed an important threshold and my work no longer had to do with inviting her to talk, or putting enough pressure on her resistance to cause it to fracture. My work now had to do with being patient enough to let her tell her story.

I smiled, warmly I thought, and said, “You know, it was all Madison’s idea.”

She laughed.

“When we left off, last time, you were telling me about Madison’s breasts.”

She smiled again, and then I watched her face dissolve into sadness. “I haven’t cried much about her yet. I think I will when everything else settles down.”

“Yes.”

“Madison thought we could blackmail him. Dr. Robilio. Trick him into doing something, you know, sexual, with her-Madison-and take pictures of it. Then, you know, we’d blackmail him. Make him give Chaney the treatment she needs or we’d give somebody the pictures. His wife or his boss or somebody. The newspapers, I don’t know.

“At first I thought she was kidding. Then, when I realized she wasn’t kidding, I told her she was crazy. Then I thought about it some more. I thought, Trent had tried to do something to help, and he couldn’t do anything. My mom had gone on the news, and she had begged for help, and she couldn’t do anything. I felt I had to try to do something, too. For Chaney.

“So I called Madison back and asked if she was serious. She was, she was ready to go. She’d already been thinking more about it, too. She said she was sure she could get him to come on to her. She was absolutely sure. All I had to do was get in a place to take the pictures. That was all.

“I said no, that I’d been thinking about how to do it, too. That Chaney was my sister. That I was the one who should seduce him and that she was the one who would take the pictures. She laughed. She thought I was crazy. She wondered what I knew about it. She meant,” Merritt paused and looked at her lap, “what did I know about sex…and seducing someone and…what did I know about men. I don’t even have a boyfriend, Dr. Gregory. Everybody thinks I’m kind of a prude.”

She shrugged. “I said I could do it. She could teach me. She said, ‘Fine, I dare you,’ and said she’d get her mom’s video camera.

“She gave me some ideas about what to do and say and the next day after school we went to his house and I waited till he came out for his walk, and after a block or two, I jogged after him. I ran up next to him and I asked him if he minded some company, that I didn’t want to run by myself anymore, some kids had been bothering me. He said he didn’t think he could keep up with me. I said I was just about done, it was okay with me, could I just walk with him, did he mind?

“I thought it was sort of cool. What I was doing-I mean, he didn’t know who I was. He didn’t know I was Chaney’s sister. He didn’t know I was setting him up. It felt kind of…I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“Powerful?”

“Yeah, powerful, but also scary. He asked me my name. I told him it was Merritt. He said he had a daughter about my age. I asked how old she was. He said she was twenty, can you believe it? I didn’t know if he was, you know, BS-ing me or what, but he didn’t come on to me. I was sort of hoping he would, it would have made it easier, I guess.

“When we got back by his house, he pointed at it from the sidewalk, and said, ‘I’m home.’ I acted impressed, said what a great house it was. I wanted him to invite me in, but I didn’t know if his wife was home, or if he really had kids, or even if Madison had a way to take the pictures we needed if I went inside with him.

“I got more scared then. All of a sudden, I felt like my plan sucked and I didn’t know what to do. I mean, Madison and I hadn’t thought this through as well as we thought. I saw the RV in his driveway. Have you seen it? It’s a big thing-I mean it looks like a rock star’s bus.”

“Yes, I’ve seen it.”

“I asked him if it was his. He asked if I wanted to see it. I told him I had always wanted to go inside one. He told me to wait, he would go in the house and get the keys.”

“Madison was there?”

“Yeah, she was sneaking around somewhere taking her video. I didn’t see her, she was good, you know, at staying hidden. Her mom’s car was parked a couple houses down. When Dr. Robilio went inside the house to get the keys I pointed at the RV behind my back so Madison would know where I was going next.”

I was flooded with feelings. Merritt’s motives were admirable. The story I was about to hear, I felt certain, was abominable, the outcome undoubtedly catastrophic. I was breathless, and inwardly anticipation was clawing at me. Outwardly, I pretended I was listening to a problem she was having at school.

“When he came back out, he had changed his clothes, put on these awful jeans and this big sweater with CU on it over this big brown buffalo head. Not a sweatshirt, a sweater. He said, ‘Come on, I’ll show you my baby.’ He was gross, I wanted to puke. He unlocked the door and climbed in. I followed him. He sat in the driver’s seat. He said something like, ‘You could live in this, live well, too. This thing has satellite TV, surround sound, full kitchen, big bathroom, king-size bed. Better than a yacht. Pretty neat, huh?’

“I can still hear him talking to me, Dr. Gregory. I was looking at this crazy, fancy bus, and I was getting so mad and I was feeling sick to my stomach, like I was gonna puke, I swear. That would have been cool, right? I asked him how much it cost. I didn’t care, I mean like I wasn’t impressed by it. I just had this crazy idea that maybe I could just steal the thing and trade it back to him for Chaney, that I wouldn’t actually have to…you know.”

I knew.

She was mimicking Dead Ed’s voice when she resumed her story, “‘It’s a ninety-six Holiday Rambler. Custom interior, totally custom. You want to know what it costs? Well, are you ready for this? After I put in a few special touches, this baby cost me four hundred and fifteen thousand dollars. And I wrote a check for it. You should have seen Manny’s face when I did that. Manny was the guy who sold it to me. He couldn’t believe I would just write a check for it like I was buying my wife a damn Hyundai.’

“I don’t know if I should tell you this part, because I don’t even know if it’s true. Madison used to, she used to lie sometimes. But Madison…anyway, you would need to know her to understand. She was…I don’t know. Madison says she-don’t think of her this way, okay?-she says she hooked a little bit, you know-she did it for money. With some rich guys. They would buy her stuff if she slept with them. That’s what she said. She showed me the stuff-jewelry, a watch, and shoes, God, she loved shoes. She says the men bought it all for her just for doing it with them. She said I could do it, too, if I wanted. She would introduce me to this lady who sets it all up. Said it was easy.”

Merritt waited for a reaction. I eased back into statue mode. There wasn’t a way of knowing what a correct response might be. No response would have to do. I’d heard about middle-class girls hooking for spending money. I’d never run into it up close, though.

“Maddy told me to be shy with him, you know, like coy. She said they liked that better. She said to kind of accidentally let them see something, then not act bothered, and then wait.” She shrugged, shook her head. “So that’s what I did. You ever been inside this thing, this motor home of his?”

I was grateful for the non sequitur. “No.”

“The bedroom’s in back. The door was open; I could see in. There was this big bed with this gold bedspread on it. It looked like my mom and Trent’s room, but, I don’t know, tackier. I didn’t want to go in there, I really didn’t. Oh, I almost forgot, Maddy had given me a rubber. I had it in my sock. The night before, she made me practice putting them on a zucchini. This is all so weird.” She covered her eyes with her hand and shook her head. “I didn’t know how I was going to explain that to him, I mean, having a condom in my sock. I was about to seduce an old, ugly man, and I was worrying about the strangest stuff. You know how I kept going?”

I could have guessed.

“I thought about Chaney. I mean, how strange is this? I’m about to screw somebody for the first time in my life. Somebody I hate. And in order to make myself go through with it, I’m thinking about my baby sister.

“Anyway, he sits back on one of these leather sofas near the front and I start fumbling around in the kitchen. I mean, I’m so nervous and I ask if he has anything to drink. He tells me to look in the fridge. There’s a Coke. I grab a can and go to take a drink and when I do, I pour some down my front, you know, like an accident, but on purpose.

“I kind of squeal and pull off my T-shirt.” She closed her eyes and I felt three thumps of my pulse before she continued. “I know what I’m doing, okay. When I crossed my arms to pull up my shirt, I hooked my fingers under…” she lowers her head, her eyes still shut, “under…my bra, you know, it’s a running bra, and I pull everything over my head together, all at once. The T-shirt and my bra and everything.

“And I said, ‘Oops,’ and I laugh. And I let him look.” She opened her eyes and looked past me into someplace I would never visit and crossed her arms over her chest. “I let him look. I kept asking myself what would Madison do, and I knew she would laugh, so I just laughed some more and then I said, ‘Well, do you have anything dry?’”

I had the same useless urge I’d had when Merritt was telling me about her decision to go into Dead Ed’s house. I wanted to tell her not to. I wanted to tell her to run.