Mary, Mary

Chapter 112

A PORTER, MAC, who looked as though he lived in the basement of the hospital, brought me two archive boxes filled with tape-bound composition notebooks, the kind a child raised in the fifties might have used in school. Mary Constantine had written far more in her years here than I would ever have time to read today I could requisition the whole collection later, I was informed.

“Thanks for your help,” I told Mac the porter.

“No problem,” he said, and I wondered when it was, and how, the response “you're welcome” seemed to have disap peared from the language, even up here in rural Vermont.

For now, I just wanted to get a sense of who Mary Con- stantine was, particularly in relationship to the Mary I al ready knew. Two archive boxes would be enough for a start.

Her cursive was tidy and precise. Every page was neatly arranged, with even, empty margins. Not a doodle in sight.

Words were her medium, and she had no shortage of them. They slanted to the right on the page as if they were in a hurry to get where they were going.

The voice, too, was eerily familiar.

The writing had Mary Smith's short, choppy sentences, and that same palpable sense of isolation. It was evident everywhere I looked in the notebook.

Sometimes it just seeped through; other times, it was right on the surface.

I'm like a ghost here. I don't know if anyone would care whether I stayed or left. Or if they even know I'm here at all.

Except for Lucy. Lucy is so kind to inc. I don't know that I could ever be as good afriend to her as she is to me. I hope she doesn't go anywhere. It wouldn't be the same without her Sometimes I think she's the only one who really cares about me. Or knows me. Or can see me.

Am I invisible to everyone else? I truly wonder-am I invisible?

Reading through and picking out entries at random, I also got a picture of someone who stayed busy while she was kept in the mental hospital. There was always one project or another going on for Mary. She'd never given up hope, had she? She seemed to be the resident homemaker, as much as a person could be in this environment.

We're making paper chains for the day room. A little babyish, but they're pretty It will be nice for Christmas. I showed all the girls how to make them. Almost everyone participated. I love to teach them things. Most of them, anyway That Roseanne girlfrorn Burlington, she tries my patience sometimes. She truly does. She looked right at me today and asked me what my name is. As f I haven't already told her a thousand times. I don't know what kind of somebody she thinks she is. Shes just as much a nobody as the rest of us.

I didn't know what to say to he so I just didn't answer Let her make her own decorations.

Serves her right. I'd like to smack Roseanne. But I won't, will I?

Somebodies and nobodies. Those words, and that idea, had shown up more than once in the e-mails out in California. The inclusion of it here jumped out at me like an identification tag. Mary Smith had been obsessed with somebodies - high-profile, perfect mothers who stood out so clearly against the negative space of her own nobody- ness. Something told me that if I kept looking, I'd find it as a long-running theme for Mary Constantine as well.

What was missing was any mention of her children. In context, the journals read like a chronicle of denial. The Mary who lived here at the hospital seemed to have recorded no memory or awareness of them at all.

And the woman who lived as Mary Wagner - the woman Mary Constantine had become - could think of nothing but those children.

The common thread as she had evolved was a lack of consciousness around Brendan, Ashley's, and Adam's murder.

The A's and B's.

I could only hypothesize at this point, but it seemed to me that Mary was on a crash course toward a fuller realization, and wreaking havoc along the way Now that she was in custody again, the only person she could harm was herself.

Still, if she was in fact moving toward the truth, I hated to think what might happen to her when she got there.

Chapter_113 IT WAS HARD TO TEAR MYSELF AWAY from Mary's journals - her words, her ideas, and her anger.

For the first time, it seemed possible to me, even probable, that she had actually committed the series of murders in L.A.

When I looked at my watch, I was already half an hour for a meeting with her lead therapist, Debra Shapiro.

Shit. I need to hustle over there.

DL Shapiro was actually on her way out when I got to her I was full of apology Shapiro stayed to speak with me but was perched on the edge of a couch with her briefcase on her lap.

“Mary was my patient for eight years,” she told me before i even asked.

“How would you characterize her?”

“Not as a killer interestingly I view the incident with her children as an aberration to the larger arena, if you will, of her mental illness. She's a very sick woman, but any violent impulses were subjugated a long time ago. That's part of what kept her here; she never moved through anything.”

“How can you be sure?” I asked Dr. Shapiro. “Especially given what's happened.”

Maybe Mary wasn't the only person in denial around here.

“If I were testifying in court, I'd have to say I can't. Beyond that, though, I think eight years of interaction is worth something, Dr. Cross. Don't you?”

I did think so, of course. But only if the therapist showed me some insight.

“What about her children?” I asked. "I didn't Find any mention of them in her journals.

But for the short time I've known Mary they've been all she can think about. They're very much alive in her mind now. She's obsessed with them."

Dr. Shapiro nodded while she looked at her watch. "That's more difficult for me to reconcile. I could offer a theory, which is that maybe Mary's therapy was finally actualizing. The memory of those children was slowly slowly bubbling up.

"As the children came into her consciousness, one way to avoid processing twenty years of repressed guilt all at once would be to keep the children alive, as you put it. It could explain what drove her to escape when she did - to get back to her life with them.

Which, to Mary's experience, is exactly what happened."

“And these murders in California?” I was going very quickly on purpose; Dr. Shapiro fidgeted as though she might jump up and leave at any moment.

She shrugged, clearly impatient with the interview. I wondered if her therapy sessions felt like this to her patients. “I just don't see it, It's hard to know what might have happened to Mary once she left here, but as for the woman that I knew?” She shook her head back and forth several times. “The only part of the story that makes sense is Los Angeles.”

“How so?” I asked.

“There was some interest in her story a few years ago. Some movie people came and went. Mary permitted the interviews, but as a state's ward, she didn't have the autonomy to grant any farther-reaching permission. Eventually they lost interest and went away During her last couple of years here, I think they were the only visitors she had.”

“Who?” I took out my notebook, folded it open. “I need to know more about this. Are there records of the visits? Anything?”

“I don't actually recall any names,” she said. “And beyond that, I'm a bit uncomfortable with the level of disclosure here. I might refer you back to Dr. Blaisdale if you want more specific information. He'd be the one to release it.”

I wondered if she was feeling protective of her patient, or maybe just late for something on her social calendar. The clock said 5:46.

I realized I might do better elsewhere, in which case, I had to get going as well. I thanked Dr. Shapiro for her time, and help, and headed back to the administration building.

I was running.