The Halo Effect

5

I was back in my office twenty minutes later, sitting at my desk thinking about the still, pallid body, when Nina stuck her head in.

“Morgan?”

I turned, startled out of the moment.

Dr. Nina Butterfield, the owner of the institute, my mentor, my godmother and my friend, stood in the doorway to my office.

“You okay?” she asked.

I nodded.

“You look like you saw a ghost.”

I saw ghosts all the time and she knew that. No answer was needed. And she knew that, too. She spoke to fill in the silence, so that we could move past it.

As if I would ever be able to move past it.

“Did the paperwork come through?” she asked, referring, I knew, to the divorce.

I nodded.

“Well, weren’t we going to have lunch?” She was watching me carefully, as she always did. “You were hoping I’d forget. That doesn’t surprise me. You don’t want to talk about the divorce and you know I’m going to force you to.”

We both laughed at that.

When Nina laughed she looked much younger than her sixty-two years. She had shoulder-length, copper-colored hair, warm, caramel-colored skin and bright amber eyes that bored into you and dared you to look away. She had sculpted features that would seem masculine in a less sensual woman. Dressed in a honey suede jacket, black slacks and a rust silk shirt, she looked professional, but easygoing. And she was. The most fluid woman I’d ever met. With the biggest heart and the smartest head. She had swooped down and picked me up, opened her wings and sheltered me under them when I was too little to know how scared I was or how much I needed her.

Now that I knew, I was grateful every day that she was in my life. She’d given me support and helped me find my way. And for her, I was as close to a daughter as she’d ever have. For someone so maternal, so caring, Nina had never had children. And because of me, and my daughter, she said she never regretted it. We were her family, she said.

“Get your bag, we have a reservation,” she said.

“A reservation?”

Usually we walked during lunch. The point of going out together wasn’t necessarily to eat as much as it was for us to leave the institute. To spend time together. We walked Manhattan in every direction, often without any destination in mind: two pilgrims, not seeking a shrine, but the hour with each other. I’d grown up taking walks with Nina. She’d been my mother’s best friend-they’d met when they were both students at NYU and lived next door to each other in their Greenwich Village dorm.

After my mother died, when I was eight, Nina had stepped in, not trying to replace my mother, because she knew no one could do that, but to at least be there for me, to offer a hand, a hug and a heart. Even after my father remarried, Nina remained the most important woman in my life.

Grabbing my bag, I followed Nina into the hall. She stopped at the head of the staircase, put her arm around me and gave me a companionable hug. Her spicy, Oriental scent was familiar and, instead of smelling sexy, was reassuring in its constancy. Especially that day, I liked knowing that some things remained the same.

“It’s actually easier than I thought it would be,” I said as we separated from the hug.

“I’m glad.” Her voice told me she didn’t believe a word of what I was saying, but she was going to allow me the charade for at least a while.

Nina knew far better than I did what going through a divorce was like. She’d had three.

“Well, you don’t look like you’ve been weeping copiously in your office.”

“I haven’t had time.” And then I told her about my trip to identify Sheba Larcher’s body.

At the restaurant, Nina ordered us both glasses of champagne and I didn’t bother to protest. She always drank it, and after what I’d seen in the past hour, coming right on the heels of the call from my lawyer, I welcomed the aperitif.

She raised her glass. “I know you are still conflicted over the divorce, but I’m proud of how you handled it.”

Yes, the divorce could have dragged on a lot longer, it could have turned ugly and have hurt my daughter even more than it already had, but Mitch and I had worked hard so that hadn’t happened.

“There isn’t much I can do about what Dulcie is facing or how hard it has been on her already. The least I could do was not make it any worse,” I said.

“You have done everything you could. You have a strong little girl and an ex-husband who’s a good friend. Nothing is going to get worse anymore. It’s going to start to get better now.”

I nodded.

“The joint custody will work. It’s been working since the separation. Dulcie needs to be with both of you. I’ve seen her, Morgan. I know she’s going to be fine. Every kid struggles with something. This will be what she struggles with. But the way you and Mitch have worked it out, she’ll have less strife over it than many kids do.”

Custody had been the one issue that I wanted to fight. During the separation, Dulcie spent two weekends and one entire week each month with Mitch at his apartment. She’d handled it well and Mitch wanted it to continue. I didn’t. I wanted to grab my daughter and keep her with me every day and every night. Not keep her from him, but keep her with me because when he picked her up and took her with him, away from me, something in me wrenched. I could barely breathe for the first few minutes she was gone. The separation from her was the most painful emotion I’d experienced as an adult. If you can love someone too much, I loved Dulcie too much.

And yet, I knew, when I was logical instead of emotional, that Mitch was entitled to his time with our daughter. It was my problem that I couldn’t bear to have her out of my sight.

“He is a good father,” I said to Nina, and sipped at the tulipshaped flute.

“He is a great father,” she corrected.

“He is a great father.”

“There wasn’t anything else you could do. This was not your failure. Not anyone’s failure,” Nina offered.

I nodded.

“No one tried harder than you did. But it just didn’t make sense to keep it going.”

“It did to me. I was perfectly content with our life. He’s my friend. We had Dulcie. It was enough.” I was going over the same ground, but Nina didn’t remind me of that or sigh with impatience or boredom.

“I know, sweetie.” She paused, drank from her glass and then went on. “For some people it works. For others it doesn’t.”

“I have had more than my share of clients who were in marriages where the people drifted apart. Where the husband felt the wife was too connected to her work. Where the sex got boring. And I’ve helped those couples to stay in those relationships or leave them, but I just never thought… I guess it’s just that I feel like such a failure, Nina.”

“You aren’t. The two of you didn’t bring out the best in each other-except where Dulcie is concerned.”

“He says that when he is with me, all he can feel is the dark side of me, the side connected to my patients’ problems, that I treat him too much like a patient with a problem to solve.” I had repeated this, thought about it, obsessed over it and discussed it with Nina before. And yet I still needed to say it again. “But I’m not dark all the time. I’m not, am I?”

She shook her head. “That Mitch connects to that one part of you is as much his issue as it is yours. Another man whose psychology is different from his would identify with all the other parts of you. You know that. You just have to give someone else a chance to show you that.”

I picked up the menu. I was sick of talking about it. I’d tried to solve it alone in therapy, and then in marriage counseling with Mitch. I hadn’t been able to. We hadn’t been able to. That was that.

Following my lead, Nina picked up her menu, too, and together we read through the two pages of offerings.

“I’ll have the niçoise salad,” she said when the waiter appeared.

“The warm goat cheese salad for me.”

The waiter left.

“You have that look in your eyes, Morgan.”

“What look?”

“The I-should-have-done-better look.”

“No, I have the so-this-is-how-your-life-turns-out look.”

We smiled ruefully at each other.

“For two women who spend their working lives helping people with their sexual problems, we can be pretty pathetic.”

We both laughed.

“Better luck next time,” she offered.

We clinked glasses. She drank from hers, but I just held mine.

“Do you want a next time?” I asked.

“Sometimes I do. Other times…I’m not sure.” She shook her head.

“I know.”

“But we will.”

“Do we have to? Life is really much easier to deal with if you cut romantic relationships out of the equation.”

She burst into laughter.

Our salads arrived and we dove into the beds of lettuce, attacking the leaves with a voracity that was almost predatory.

“Freedom is just another word for being alone,” she said.

“But being alone means not having to make allowances for anyone else’s screwups.”

“And not having to deal with anyone else’s screwups means never having to clean up after them.”

Nina knew a lot about that.

“Sex and love and marriage and attraction and fantasy, and flirting and seduction, are all other people’s problems-at least for today.” I speared another lettuce leaf with the tines of my fork.

Nina put her lips around an olive and scraped off the meat with her teeth. “Passion is passé,” she said. Then, daintily, with her manicured nails, she put the pit on the side of her plate and just as delicately did not mention that tears were streaming down my cheeks.