The Halo Effect

8

I closed the manuscript. Felt the goose bumps on my arms. I had been so deep into what I was reading that for a second I was disoriented. Cleo had transported me to the hotel room. My lips had been on her client’s nipples. I was feeling his muscles stretch. And I was uncomfortable.

Looking out the window, I saw that we were already at Seventy-eighth Street. The rain had stopped, leaving the sidewalks glistening and giving the air a loamy scent.

I usually used the time it took to get home to morph from a therapist into Dulcie’s mother. I always came down more slowly than I’d like from my professional role to settle into mother mode. Perhaps because I’d had to learn mothering secondhand.

Some women became the mother their mother was. I did not have that luxury. Even before mine died, she was not the kind of parent that I wanted to be. There was no road map; I did this one blind. Too many mornings I woke up thinking, I’ll get it right today. I’d been doing it for so long I should have been comfortable with it by now. It will all flow naturally today, I’d tell myself. But it didn’t always.

Why did you have to go so soon? I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t old enough. Why couldn’t you have stayed with me until…until when? There never was a good time to become motherless.

Part of me was always watching from the wings, looking at the woman who I was, interacting with her daughter, judging, questioning, comparing this mother to another who was not as steady on her feet and a daughter who had grown up too fast.

The cab pulled up to the curb.

I thrust the manuscript back in its envelope, shoved it under my arm and reached into the side pocket of my bag to get my wallet.

Fifteen minutes later I was sitting in the kitchen drinking a glass of iced tea, about to begin reading more of the manuscript, when I heard the front door open. I saw the flash of blue jeans and white shirt as Dulcie walked by the kitchen on her way to her room.

“Hon? I’m in here.”

She doubled back, came in and dropped her bag on the floor. My eyes flew to the stark white bandage on her arm.

“What’s happened?”

“Nothing major. I burned my arm.”

I got up and went to her. “How?”

“Stupid hot soup at lunch. Gretchen tripped, her soup, tomato soup, went flying. My arm was in the way.”

“Let me see.”

As she lifted her arm I saw splotches of blood on her white shirt.

She saw my eyes widen. “Mom?”

“Is this blood?”

“Soup. I told you. Gretchen’s tomato soup. Don’t spiral over this, okay?” I ignored her exasperated tone.

My daughter was at the age where no matter how controlled my concern was, it was still overbearing.

I bent to inspect the bandage. “Does it hurt?”

“Nope.”

“No?”

“A little when it happened. But not enough that I cried or anything. It’s just a burn.”

“Okay.” I reached out and hugged her, carefully avoiding her arm. She let me hold her and then pulled back. I brushed her bangs off her face and let my fingers linger on her skin just a moment longer than I needed to.

She went to the refrigerator.

At twelve, Dulcie’s chest was still flat and her hips were still narrow, but there was a grown-up look in her eyes that hadn’t been there six months before and an impatience with me that went with it. I wasn’t sure if it was just her age or a reaction to her father and me separating or both.

“Maybe we should go see Dr. Kulick and have him look at your arm.”

“It’s not a big deal. I really am fine.” She opened the top of a container of blueberry yogurt. She let the fridge door slam and grabbed a spoon from the utensil drawer. “The nurse gave me a note to give to you,” she said between mouthfuls.

She fished in her backpack and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper with a prescription stapled to it.

I read it quickly once and then read it again more slowly. The drama school where Dulcie was spending the summer had a doctor on call. He’d come over and inspected Dulcie’s burn, said that it wasn’t serious, but had prescribed an antibiotic cream and some painkillers if Dulcie needed them.

My daughter looked at me with her huge eyes-the same cornflower blue as my mother’s eyes-and touched my hand as if she felt just the littlest bit sorry for me.

“Don’t worry about me,” she said, and tossed her head. Her hair, almost black like mine, was long and straight and gleamed in the overhead light.

I watched her eat the rest of her snack, searching for clues as to how she really felt, but she didn’t seem to be in pain or crisis. Her eyes weren’t swollen, there were no tearstains on her cheeks. I took her emotional temperature whenever I came into her presence, checking my daughter for signs of distress or sadness. And I was always mildly shocked that she rarely showed any. Despite everything I must have done wrong, my daughter was a secure and mostly happy preteen. Smart, charismatic and more than pretty enough, she had a large, extended family and friends circling around her, ensuring she was traveling through childhood with relative calm.

Dulcie plopped down beside me. “Is Gretchen a klutz or what?” She picked up Cleo’s book.

“Don’t,” I said, taking the manuscript from her.

“Why?”

“It’s not mine. It belongs to a patient.”

Dulcie nodded. One thing she understood was the sacrosanct relationship between a doctor and patient. She needed to trust something about me. Know, at least, that her mother never broke that commandment between her patients and herself. Maybe if she knew this, she would believe other things that I would not be so good at showing her.

“Oooh. A patient,” Dulcie said sarcastically. “One of Dr. Sin’s sinners.” And then she laughed. I joined in. Even if I wanted to be angry, I couldn’t. I understood her too well. I appreciated her too much.

My daughter was not unhappy with what I did for a living. She just wished it was more noble. “She’s a doctor,” I’d hear Dulcie tell her friends, not admitting what kind of doctor I was and what kind of help I offered my patients.

I looked from the white bandage on my daughter’s arm to the white first page of the book. For all the pieces of information I had added to my already crowded brain that day, the last two were twisting up like some double helix. Interwoven with my fear of what had happened to Dulcie was my fear for Cleo, and I flashed on the image of the tall man following her down the street.

Dulcie got up and fussed with the CD player, then put on something that she liked and that I could tolerate. She was sensitive that way, and it made me smile. I noticed the bandage again and thought it looked too large on her slim arm.

Suddenly a name popped into my head. Barry Johnson. He had to be the man lying on the bed in the hotel room who had paid Cleo two thousand dollars to tease him to orgasm. It shouldn’t have been that easy for me to figure out who he was, but I had. A media mogul who was in business with his father. In his forties.

“Besides the arm, how else was your day?” It was our routine. To go over the day. Usually we did it at dinner, but I was doing it now. The rule was we had to state one good thing for every bad thing. As many bad things as you wanted. But always a balance.

“Besides the arm…well, we had auditions for Our Town.” Her eyes grew wider. She’d been looking forward to these twelve weeks at the American Academy of Dramatic Art’s summer program since she’d been accepted back in February. It didn’t even matter to her that she hadn’t had much of a break between one school ending and the next one starting.

“I love this play, Mom.”

I smiled at her, picked up the manuscript and put the stack of papers in my briefcase.

“It’s a wonderful play, isn’t it. What part are you trying out for?”

“The main character. I didn’t think I should, but Mrs. Harte said she thought I was ready for it.”

I leaned over and kissed her. “I’m proud of you.”

My daughter preened. And then she picked up the thread of the game.

“And you, Dr. Sin? How was your day?”

The divorce papers dissolving your father’s and my marriage came today. You hurt your arm. You called me Dr. Sin, twice. I had to go to the morgue to see one of my ex-patients, a girl not even ten years older than you, laid out and cut open. And I figured out who one of my patients’ clients was and not because Cleo had told me herself, but because her description of him had been too clear.

But I couldn’t tell Dulcie any of those things. Not just because she was not old enough to hear them, but because I couldn’t think of anything at all that was good to counter them with. And the rules were the rules. You could only tell the bad if you found some good.

Later we took a walk together to the drugstore to get the antibiotic cream. I didn’t fill the prescription for painkillers. My daughter had my high tolerance for pain. And short of being masochistic, I encouraged it. Prescription painkillers were a godsend, but they were also a far more dangerous drug than I wanted to expose her to if I didn’t have to. Some people have a physical propensity for addictions. There was no reason to test my daughter’s ability with a codeine derivative when she wasn’t even in enough pain to take an extrastrength ibuprofen.

Afterward we stopped at her favorite place for dinner-the overpriced food shop and restaurant, E.A.T., at Eighty-first and Madison. She chose the same comfort food that her father would have picked: macaroni and cheese and a Coke.

I had my second salad of the day, hating every piece of verdant green. Dulcie was chattering about the classes she was signed up for at drama school when my cell phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Hi.” It was my now ex-husband. “I just got your message. How is she?”

“Fine.” I looked over at her and mouthed, It’s your father, and her face brightened. “It really is just a simple burn. We’re having dinner. She’s talking about drama school, nothing’s changed.” I smiled at Dulcie, who was listening intently to my conversation. She reached out her hand. I saw the bandage and winced. “Do you want to talk to her?” I asked him.

“First tell me if you are okay. I know how you panic about her.”

The problem with still being friends with the man I used to be married to was that he wanted to know how I was, too.

“Like I said, it’s really only a minor burn. Here’s Dulcie.”

I handed my daughter the phone, and while she told her father the whole story, from the moment of impact with the soup, I tried to figure out why Cleo’s book was as much on my mind as anything else. A distraction? Something to dwell on other than the randomness of fate and the horror that I had to go on sending my daughter off to school every day not knowing when something else would happen to her?

“And then the doctor came and he looked at it,” Dulcie was saying, still only halfway through the story. She was making it dramatic, stringing it out and turning it into performance art for one-half of her best audience.

I was surprised that Cleo’s book had affected me as much as it had. I listened to people talking about sex all day, about their issues with their bodies and brains, and how they functioned or didn’t function. What was different about this woman and what she was saying?

As I watched my daughter, I realized my own arm throbbed. Ever since my child had been a baby, I’d experienced the same pain she did. I knew that it was psychosomatic and that if I worked on it, I most probably could stop it from happening. But I didn’t mind. She was my girl. I would have preferred to take all of her pain than to stop feeling it.

I motioned to Dulcie to wrap it up.