The Halo Effect

38

I didn’t really have enough of the right kind of clothes for all the evenings I had to spend at the Diablo Cigar Bar. For my third excursion into the dark and smoky lounge, I scrounged through my closet before I went to work and tried to put together an outfit.

I could repeat the short black skirt and the Jimmy Choo pumps that showed more toe cleavage than any other shoes I had ever owned. But I’d already worn the off-the-shoulder Donna Karan black top twice. The fact that this was the best I could do would have been funny if it weren’t such a sad statement about how little sexy dressing up I did.

I pushed all the hangers to the right, the way you do when you go to a department store and see a rack of sale clothes, not wanting to miss anything. Taking inventory at the same time, I went through a dozen white, light blue, bone and black tailored silk shirts-the staples that I wore almost every day with gabardine, linen or wool slacks in black, gray or khaki. No emerald shantung bustiers, no cobalt-blue dresses with plunging necklines. No golden, almost see-through silk blouses.

No symbolic clothes of seduction were hanging in my closet.

Every day for the past thirteen years I’d faced women who were unhappy and frustrated by not measuring up. I had seen what the pressures of being attractive, of being sexy, had done.

There was no way we could compete with what we saw every time we opened a magazine, turned on a television or watched a movie. The media instructed us-albeit subliminally-that other people were better-looking, more successful, having more sex, better sex, were happier about their sexual selves and had figured it all out.

We were inadequate no matter how much we accomplished or how happy we might be with ourselves or our mates. In the world of more and more, it was all too common to feel less than enough.

And now I had to dress the part of a woman who bought into those superficial values.

Disgusted, I looked through the rest of my clothes, finally finding an Armani jacket that I’d gotten on sale. It was short and only offered two buttons. With one of my safe shirts it was not a daring piece of clothing. But when I put it on over the black lace bra that I’d bought at the lingerie store, it was perfect. The odd combination of classic design, which seemed to say one thing, and the exposure of too much skin, which said quite the opposite, would work.

I undressed, packed up my costume, got dressed again in my typical work clothes, grabbed my briefcase and left for the office.

As I walked downtown, I thought about the Healer, the one man Gil hadn’t been able to identify from my description as gleaned from Cleo’s manuscript. The man who Cleo said had a fixation on saving women and who had treated her so differently than all the others had. And I thought about the odd coincidence that two of the most telling things about him were shared by Midas and Judas.

The Healer had a money clip that I had seen Judas pull out of his wallet.

And like Midas, the Healer only drank champagne. And only Cristal.

What did that mean? That the Healer wasn’t real? Or that Cleo was so concerned about anyone recognizing him that she had completely disguised him by giving him other men’s likes and accoutrements?

At noon Nina stopped by my office. “You up for a walk?” she asked.

It seemed as if it had been weeks since we’d taken a walk at lunch. The argument we’d had over Cleo and my helping the police still hung between us. I hated the coolness.

Having her angry with me was very difficult to tolerate. I’d worked on this in therapy, but it was still an issue. Without a mother for so long, and so needy for maternal attention, I had never rebelled as a teenager, instead always trying to be a good girl, at least in Nina’s eyes. Considering who she was, that had nothing to do with sex, drugs or rock and roll, and everything to do with facing adversity head-on, being honest about my emotions and trying to come clean when she asked a question, no matter how tough it was.

I nodded.

“Good. I need to stretch my legs and we need to catch up.”

A month ago I would have welcomed the company. Now the last thing I wanted was to have her ask me anything. Anything at all. I was breaking about a hundred rules. Doing things that were just on the line where ethics were concerned.

But wasn’t I doing them so that I would not cross that other line? The most important one? The patient-doctor privilege. That was what was sacred. That was what had to be protected.

It was a lovely June day. Seventy degrees with a slight breeze lightly scented with the curious New York City smell of car fumes, expensive perfume wafting off the coiffed and well-dressed women on their way out to lunch, and the flowers blooming in hanging baskets, window boxes and planted in the sidewalk gardens up and down the street

“Madison Avenue, Fifth, or the park? Your pleasure,” Nina said.

“The park.”

“You always choose the park. I didn’t need to ask, did I?”

“No. But you always do ask.”

“Why do you think?”

“Occupational hazard? You get so used to working with patients, taking nothing for granted, knowing if you don’t ask you might miss finding out the one fact or the one feeling that could change the whole picture and offer up the missing piece.”

We crossed the street and entered Central Park through the zoo. Everywhere were children and mothers. Many of the little ones holding blue, red or yellow balloons that bobbed in the sky, swaying in the breeze. Other kids had messy faces from hot dogs smeared with mustard, or chocolate mustaches from ice-cream cones. I remembered Dulcie at this age and could almost feel the sticky fingers.

“No-o-o-o,” a child wailed in agony. He was standing rigidly, staring up at the sky, pointing with one small finger. Tears streamed down his face. “No-o-o-o.”

A bright blue balloon sailed upward, its white string trailing behind as it ascended above the treetops and then higher and higher toward the clouds.

How many balloons floated up from this part of the park every day? I wondered.

“Kelsey, don’t cry, we can get another balloon. Come on. Let’s go. A red one. Would you like a red one this time?” asked the exasperated mother.

“No-o-o-o.”

The smell of the zoo, animal and raw, was all around us, assaulting us. Nina’s nose twitched and she frowned, but I liked it and breathed in deeply.

Leaving the zoo, we walked deeper into the park, engulfed by trees thick and heavy with leaves. Up ahead a bed of delphiniums swayed in the breeze.

“You used to love balloons,” Nina said. “But only green ones. You were so stubborn. Never blue, never red. If they didn’t have green, you wouldn’t take a balloon.”

I laughed.

She continued to reminisce. “You were so stubborn about everything. When your father and I came to get you, you were sitting on the edge of your mother’s bed, holding her hand and telling her a story. She was deep into her drugged sleep, but you were still trying to reach her. And when we tried to take you away from her, you didn’t cry or scream or argue. You simply refused to move. You just held on to her hand and kept talking to her. Trying to save her with your story.”

I felt an old surge of loss come up and overtake me, the same way that a sudden spray of perfume can overwhelm your senses. And for an instant I could still smell my mother’s perfume-roses and lemon and lavender-a scent memory. The only real memory I had of my mother. I knew her face from photographs, and there were fragments of images and words, but they were never whole. A smile, her blue eyes glassy and unfocused. The mess of the apartment on Avenue A. The kitchen sink that always had dirty dishes piled in it. Her lovely hand, with long fingernails painted pink, trembling as she reached for the amber pill bottle. The feeling of her thin arms around my back. The whisper of her voice, My little lost girl.

I remembered the crystal bottle of perfume that sat on her dresser, still half-full, and the way she so carefully tipped it over every morning and wet her fingers with just enough to dab behind her earlobes and mine. It was her last vanity. No matter how broke we were or how pathetic the meals she managed to make for us were, the one thing that she never gave up was her French perfume.

The only thing I wanted to talk about less than what I was doing to help find Cleo was the year I was eight, when everything changed and I lost my bearings.

“Morgan, do you know why finding Cleo matters so much to you?”

“Because she is my patient. Because I was helping her. But I didn’t help her enough. Because I failed. Because I can’t fail.”

“Haven’t you ever failed with another patient?” Nina’s voice was a curious cross between doctor and mother. Probing but warm. Inquisitive but caring.

“You know I have.”

“So why this one? Why are you doing what you know is ethically questionable?”

“Because if I don’t, no one else will.”

“But you’re becoming obsessed with this.”

“Listen. There is a woman who confided in me. Only in me. And so I’m the only one who has what might be the clues to her disappearance. How on earth am I supposed to turn my back on her?”

“You need to be needed too much, Morgan.”

I stopped. She took two more steps until she realized that I wasn’t still by her side, and then she stopped, too, and turned around, smiling.

“You once did that to me-at Rockefeller Center when we went to see the lighting of the Christmas tree. You were what, thirteen? We got separated. Do you remember?”

“You do that, you know, play unfair,” I said. “Play mother one minute, supervisor the next, family member, colleague, confidante. I’m not the only one who breaks the rules.”

“I just use all the tools at hand. And they still aren’t getting me anywhere, are they? You’re still a stubborn rod of steel that I cannot bend.”

“Oh, I bend. Just not over everything.”

“Morgan, what are you doing?”

“Why do you think I am doing anything?”

“I know you. Whatever it is, I want you to stop.”

“I can’t, Nina. If I do that, if I give up, then…”

A trio of ten- or eleven-year-old girls ran by, screaming out to one another, laughing and shouting. The noise was too loud to talk over, but as soon as they had passed, Nina interrupted what I had been saying.

“Just stop. Get out of whatever you’re in the middle of and let the police do their own job of trying to find her.”

Smiling, I took her arm. “Yeah. Walk away from a patient. You didn’t teach me to do that. You know you didn’t. So in a way, you could say this is really all your fault.”

She moaned. I laughed.

“Oh, Morgan, only you could turn this around to make it all my fault.”

“I’m not making it all your fault. It is all your fault.”

And then she sobered. “What you’re doing is insanely dangerous.”

“Helping Detective Jordain?”

“Meeting Cleo’s clients.”

“I didn’t tell you I was doing that.”

“You told me you were thinking about it. And ever since you were a kid that has been code. You always had an oh-so-clever way of telling your father or me something you wanted us to know without actually telling us.”

What she didn’t say, what we both knew she was referring to, was the phone call I had finally made to my father when I was eight years old and watching my mother disappear in front of me.

“Daddy, maybe one day you could come over. Not today. But when Mommy is feeling better. But not yet. She’d be mad if I asked you to come.”

He hadn’t listened to me. Or rather he had listened to what I wasn’t saying and he had come. But he had been too late.