The Murderer's Daughter

Chapter 45

Twenty-one-year-old Grace lived in a studio apartment on Formosa Avenue in L.A.’s Wilshire district.

She’d raised the issue of independence three weeks after returning to L.A. from Harvard. Grad school would begin in a month and she wanted as much settled as possible.

She waited for the right time to bring up the topic with Malcolm and Sophie; at the end of a pleasant, quiet Sunday brunch at home, expecting surprise, maybe barely concealed hurt feelings, even gentle debate.

She’d prepared her tactful rebuttals, drawing upon her own flood of gratitude and their desire, of course, to do what was best for her.

Malcolm and Sophie showed not a trace of surprise. Nodding in unison, they assured her they’d pay rent for anything reasonable.

Three and a half years in Boston and they haven’t missed me?

Or, to put a benign slant on it, like so many older couples, perhaps they, too, craved a bit of freedom.

Still — idiotically — Grace felt a bit... empty at the lack of debate. Then she saw that Sophie’s beautiful blue eyes had grown damp and that Malcolm was avoiding looking at her and his jaw was knotted.

Leaning across the kitchen table, she touched both their hands. “I’ll probably be here all the time, anyway. Mooching food, schlepping laundry, not to mention all the contact you and I will have day-to-day, Malcolm.”

“True,” he said, fidgeting.

Sophie said, “Any laundry you schlep will be welcome. Though you should probably look for a building with on-site machines. For your own convenience.”

“Get a place with top-notch facilities,” said Malcolm. “That’s of the utmost.”

Sophie said, “And of course you’ll need a car.” She laughed. “No new clothes, though. Your current wardrobe is far too elegant for your future peers.”

Malcolm said, “Oh, the students aren’t that bad, Soph.”

“Oh, they’re dreary,” said Sophie, laughing again, a smidge too loudly. Using the moment to sneak a swipe at her eyes. “I refer to my department as well as yours, Mal. No matter what their circumstances, our young scholars pride themselves upon coming across as starving martyrs.” She turned to Grace. “So, alas, no cashmere, dear. The Tenth Commandment, and all that.”

Grace said, “You bet.”

No one spoke. Grace found herself fidgeting and now Sophie was engaging her with a solemn stare and Grace realized she’d been talking about more than attire.

Thou Shalt Not Covet. Reminding Grace she’d be entering grad school laden with baggage.

Of all the schools, Professor Bluestone had to bring her here?

Adopted or not, she’s still his family, it’s corrupt.

Her acceptance means someone else fully qualified was rejected. If she’s as smart as they say, she could’ve gotten in at plenty of other places, why hog a space here?

On top of that wouldn’t some distance be healthy for both of them?

On top of that, they say she’ll be working directly with him. Talk about lack of boundaries.

Now Malcolm was also regarding her oh-so-gravely.

The same unspoken warning from both of them: Be smart and keep a low profile.

Sage advice, to be sure. Grace had figured it out a long time ago.

Resentment was understandable. Clinical psych programs at accredited universities were limited to students for whom grant funding was available, leading to tiny classes — USC accepted five first-years out of a hundred as many applications.

The program was rigorous and laid out clearly: three years of coursework in assessment, psychotherapy, research design, statistics, cognitive science, plus a minor concentration in a nonclinical field of psychology.

In addition, students assisted faculty with research and saw patients under supervision in the department’s campus clinic, leading to six twelve-hour days each week, sometimes more. Off-site externships for which SC students competed with applicants from all over the country were mandatory, as well. By the fourth year, a faculty doctoral committee needed to be in place, comprehensive exams passed, research proposals approved.

Then came the crucial final chapter, the step that could end in disaster: conceptualizing and conducting significant, original research and writing it up as a dissertation. Only once that was under way were candidates allowed to apply for a full-time internship at a facility approved by the American Psychological Association.

Grace figured she could do it all quicker, without much sweat.

Her plan of attack was simple, replicating her experiences at Harvard: be polite and pleasant to everyone but avoid emotional entanglements of any kind. Especially now; entering under a cloud, she couldn’t let interpersonal crap get to her.

But her classmates, all women, three with Ivy League B.A.’s, turned out to be a pleasant bunch, exhibiting not a trace of resentment. So either she’d earned their acceptance quickly or everyone had worried for nothing.

Faculty were another matter, a definite chill wafted toward her from some quarters. No problem; compliance and subtle flattery went a long way with academicians.

She didn’t lack for a social life, what with casual lunches with her classmates during which she listened a lot and said little, and the customary Sunday brunches with Sophie and Malcolm, plus dinners out at white-tablecloth eateries twice a month.

Toss in the occasional off-campus lunch with Sophie, sometimes followed by shopping trips for “appropriately casual garments,” and her plate was full.

Her relationship with Malcolm changed, as their contact increasingly centered on research and personal chitchat eroded. That ended up suiting both of them. She’d never seen Malcolm so animated.

Solo jaunts to campus movies and museums — LACMA was walking distance from her apartment — supplied all the extracurricular culture she needed.

Of course, sex played a role during those years, as she stuck with the familiar but lowered the frequency because it took less to satisfy her. Pulling out the cashmere and the silk, heels, and all the other good stuff, she had no problem snagging well-dressed attractive men in upscale cocktail lounges and hotels.

Many of her targets turned out to be traveling from other cities, which was optimal. Others were escaping marriages gone stale or simply tired of domestic obligation.

To Grace they were all temporary playmates, and for the most part, everyone walked away happy.

With drama neatly sidestepped, she was free to ace every course and treat twice as many patients as anyone else at the campus clinic. The same went for research projects, and by the end of her second year, she’d co-published three articles with Malcolm on resilience and three of her own on the aftereffects of trauma, one of which saw light in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.

Simultaneously, she was analyzing the best places to extern, with an eye toward making contacts where she might want to intern. The choice quickly became obvious: the Veterans Administration hospital in Westwood, for all the problems with the system, one of the premier training facilities in adult psychology.

More important, a V.A. placement would give her experience in the treatment of terrible things. Because neurotic angst — dilettantes and sluggards trying “to figure it out” or pay for friendship — bored and annoyed her.

She craved the red meat of real psychotherapy.

After a year as a student therapist, she’d gotten to know everyone who mattered at the V.A., was perceived as the best and the brightest, her internship application a formality.

Four years after enrolling in grad school, she had her Ph.D., presented to her personally by Malcolm, Harvard-robed and beaming, at the doctoral ceremony in Town and Gown Hall. She’d also been accepted for a postdoctoral fellowship at the same V.A. If it ain’t broken don’t fix it.

By age twenty-seven, she was still living frugally in her single on Formosa and investing ten percent of her stipend in a conservative stock fund. After passing national and state licensing exams, she was asked to stay on at the V.A. as clinical faculty, an invitation she gladly accepted. The position was exactly what she craved: continuing education about people whose lives had been blown to bits, sometimes literally.

The V.A. had changed since Malcolm’s grad school days, when the typical patient was often cruelly libeled as an elderly chronic alcoholic for whom little could be done.

GOMERs, snotty medical residents called them. Get Out of My Emergency Room.

The V.A. that Grace encountered was a high-intensity facility where the evils of war manifested by the hour. Beautiful young American men and women, maimed and mutilated in hot, sandy places by fanatics and ingrates they thought they’d been sent to liberate. The physical wounds were profound. The emotional aftereffects could be as bad or worse.

The patients Grace saw struggled to adjust to missing body parts, permanent brain damage, blindness, deafness, paralysis. Phantom limb pain was an issue, as were depression, rage disorders, suicidal risk, drug addiction.

Which wasn’t to say every vet was damaged goods — a libel that raised Grace’s ire because she respected those who’d served at such a high level. Nor was post-traumatic stress disorder the default. That was a bum rap created by craven Hollywood types exploiting the misery of others for the sake of a screenplay. But even when the damage was subtle, it could impact daily living at a profound level.

Grace never presumed that her own childhood was even a close match for what her patients were going through. But she knew it gave her an edge.

Right from the start, she felt at home with them.

They sensed it, too, and soon, following her pattern, she was treating twice, then three times as many patients as anyone else at the hospital.

More important, she was getting results, with patients and families increasingly requesting her as their therapist. The V.A. staff took notice, happy to have someone carry the elephant’s load.

That didn’t stop some of her colleagues from viewing her as a spooky workaholic who cropped up on the wards at all hours, seemingly immune to fatigue. Was she, they wondered, bipolar? One of those adult ADHD types?

And why didn’t she ever hang out with anyone?

But the smart ones kept their mouths shut, enjoying how much easier she made their lives.

One night-shift RN began calling her “the Victim Whisperer.” A fellow postdoc, himself a Vietnam vet who’d gone back to school in middle age, led a support group for paraplegics with her, expecting to teach “the young cute chick” all about suffering.

Soon he was terming her “Healer of the Haunted.”

That one, Grace liked.

One evening, leaving the hospital and walking to the used BMW 3 that Sophie and Malcolm had “picked up for a song,” she spotted a middle-aged woman waving at her.

Stout, blond, nicely dressed. Working hard at pasting a smile on her face.

“Dr. Blades? Sorry, do you have a second?”

“What can I do for you?”

“I’m sorry to bother you — you probably don’t remember me, you’re treating my nephew?”

Confidentiality precluded an answer, even if Grace had known who the woman was talking about.

“Oh, of course, sorry,” the woman said. “My nephew is Bradley Dunham.”

Sweet boy, originally from Stockton, frontal lobe damage that had scrambled his emotional life. But still gentle, so much so that Grace wondered what led him to the marines. On their sixth session, he’d told her.

I graduated high school and there was nothing else I could think of.

Grace smiled at his aunt and the woman apologized again. “This isn’t about Brad. It’s about my own son, Eli. I’m Janet.”

Finally something Grace could respond to. “Is Eli a patient here, as well?”

“Oh, no, he’s not a vet, Dr. Blades. Anything but. He’s... for two years he’s had what I guess you people would call issues? Intense fears? Anxiety disorders? Also compulsive behavior that’s getting worse and worse, to the point where — not that I can blame him, Doctor, sometimes I’m a basket case, myself. Because of what happened.”

The woman sniffed back tears.

Grace said, “What happened?”

And that changed everything.

Eli’s parents, both CPAs, had been victims of a home invasion that left Eli’s father stabbed to death and his mother severely beaten. Eli had come home to find the massacre, called 911, and ended up as a prime suspect subjected to days of intense, borderline-abusive grilling by the police. The cops’ suspicion continued until three gang members attempting a similar break-in were identified as the savages in question.

By then, the damage was done: Eli, always a “sensitive boy,” had retreated to mute isolation in his room, adopting a growing array of odd tics and habits: pacing and retracing, curtain-pulling, hand-scouring with harsh powdered soap, skin-picking, near-constant eyeblinks.

For twenty-two months, attempts at treatment by a psychiatrist, then a psychologist, had brought no success; neither doctor was willing to make house calls and Eli’s attendance at their offices deteriorated from spotty to never as his condition worsened.

Janet said, “I’m at my wit’s end. I know what you’ve done for Brad. He says everyone talks about you. Money’s no object, I promise you that, Dr. Blades. If you could see your way to at least meeting Eli.”

“In your home.”

“He refuses to go out.”

“But he is open to a therapist coming to him.”

“You’d do that?” said Janet. Her face fell. “Honestly, I don’t know, Doctor, I’m grasping at straws.”

“You haven’t discussed this with Eli.”

“Eli won’t let me discuss anything with him, Doctor, he’s made himself a prisoner. I leave food in the hallway and he waits till I’m gone to retrieve it. But even if it doesn’t work out, I’ll be happy to pay you for your time. Including your driving time. With money up front, cash if you so desire—”

“We’ll work out the details,” said Grace. “Where do you live?”

Four months later, Eli, quirky since childhood and never destined for gregariousness or a conventional life, was able to leave his home, stop torturing his skin, and abandon his other tics. A month after that he was holding down a home job as a billing clerk for an online vintage clothing site.

Two months later, shambling through a nearby park, he met a girl as shy as he. Soon after, the two of them were having ice cream together a couple of times a week. That hadn’t lasted but Eli now saw himself as “datable” and was girding himself to try online sites.

“I know that can be a risk, but it’s a start!” exclaimed Janet. “You’ve done miracles for him, Dr. Blades.”

“Appreciate your saying that,” Grace told her. “But Eli’s done all the hard work.”

Three weeks after terminating with Eli, her second private referral came in. A woman Janet had met in a crime victims’ group.

No need for house calls on this one but Grace had no office for private patients. She asked her immediate supervisor about the ethics of using her V.A. office after hours. Knowing he did the same thing himself, to the tune of doubling his income.

He said, “Well, it’s... we’re in a gray area.” Lowering his voice: “If you don’t overdo it and your regular work gets done...”

By the end of her first year as an attending psychologist, Grace had amassed a private patient load that forced her to make a change: reducing her hours at the V.A. to fifteen a week and giving up all benefits. She rented an office in a medical building on Wilshire near Fairfax, walking distance from her apartment.

Her income doubled, then trebled, then doubled again. Her patients got better.

Free enterprise. It fit her beautifully.

Shortly after her twenty-seventh birthday, during one of the Hancock Park brunches with Malcolm and Sophie, which she’d continued to attend without fail, Malcolm chewed and finally swallowed a chunk of bagel layered with glistening gravlax and asked if she’d be interested in teaching part-time at USC.

That threw her; she figured the university was happy to be rid of her and the boundary issues she’d raised. On top of that, her relationship with the people she’d come to view as her parents had evolved in an interesting manner.

She and Sophie were sharing more purely social girlie stuff but distance had interposed itself between her and Malcolm.

Perhaps some of that resulted from a young woman and an old man having little in common. But Grace wondered if part of it stemmed from Malcolm’s disappointment at her decision to bypass academia for private practice.

If so, he disguised any chagrin with compliments that could be taken as double-edged:

You were such a brilliant researcher. But of course the core of our discipline is helping others.

Grace thought: Blame yourself. It might’ve started out as a project for you, ’Enry ’Iggins. But your kindness and humanity took over and molded the hell out of me.

When Malcolm looked wistful, Grace made a point of kissing his cheek and smelling his bay rum aftershave. It had taken a long time to manage snippets of physical affection for both him and Sophie but she’d worked on it and now she felt comfortable.

She told herself she loved them but didn’t spend much time figuring out what that meant.

The key, after all, wasn’t words. It was how she treated them and that she knew she’d aced, making sure she was unfailingly cheerful, courteous, agreeable.

Sixteen years had passed since Malcolm had plucked her from juvenile hall and in all that time, nary a cross word had ever been exchanged, and how many families could make that boast.

When Malcolm offered her the teaching position that Sunday morning, she smiled and kept her voice even and squeezed his now liver-spotted hand. “I’m flattered. Undergrad?”

“No, graduate classes only. Clinical One, maybe some neuropsych testing if you’ve stayed current with that.”

“I have,” she said. “Wow.”

“Of course I think you’re overqualified, if it was up to me the offer would’ve come the moment you got your license. But you know... anyway, the idea originated with the rest of the clinical faculty, I’m simply the designated messenger.”

He ate more bagel and cured salmon. “You may meet up with other alums. There’s a new attempt to exploit the abilities and the experience of our more gifted students.” He blushed. “Also, there are fiscal issues.”

Grace chuckled. “They think I’ll work cheap?”

Sophie said, “Cheaper than a full-time tenure-track person.”

Malcolm said, “Yes, yes, but that’s really not it, in terms of you, specifically. You’re their first pick. You’ve acquired a reputation.”

“For...”

“Effectiveness.”

“Hmm,” said Grace. “What exactly would this entail?”

Malcolm’s big shoulders dropped. Relieved. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

By twenty-eight, Grace was making a serious six-figure income in private practice and enjoying her one day on campus as a clinical assistant professor of psychology.

The secondhand BMW functioned smoothly, her single on Formosa continued to suit her, and her stock fund was growing safely and steadily.

Cocktail lounge trysts continued around L.A. and extended abroad, as she began treating herself to high-end, bi-yearly vacations. She toured European and Asian cities, returned home with selected bits of couture and erotic memories that fueled her solitary hours.

Life was coasting along just fine. Grace figured she could do this for a while.

Fool that she was.

Shortly before her twenty-ninth birthday, she was yanked out of sleep by pounding on her front door.

Forcing herself alert, she threw on sweats, selected a butcher knife from the block in the kitchen, and approached the noise warily.

“Grace!” hissed a voice on the other side. Someone stage-whispering. Trying not to wake the neighbors?

Someone who knew her name...

Keeping the knife ready, she unlatched the door an inch but kept the chain-lock in place.

Ransom Gardener stood in the hallway, looking ancient and unkempt, white hair flying, eyes red and raw, lips trembling.

Grace let him in.

He hugged her fiercely and broke down in sobs.

When he finally pulled away, Grace said, “Which one of them?”

Gardener howled: “Dear God, both, Grace, both of them! Sophie’s... T-Bird.”

Grace’s mouth dropped open. She stumbled back as Gardener stood in her living room and his body was racked with heaving moans.

She felt frozen. Enveloped by a hard shell — an insect’s chitin.

Visualizing the small black convertible speeding somewhere.

Exploding into bits.

She tried to speak. Her larynx and lips and tongue had apparently fled her body. She was certain that her trachea had departed as well because it didn’t feel as if she was breathing but somehow she was... existing.

Respiring through her pores?

Ransom Gardener continued to sway and sob. Grace felt herself grow dizzy and gripped the wall for support. She managed to totter into her kitchen, groped wildly for a chair. Sat.

Now Gardener had followed her in, why had he done that, she wanted him gone.

He said, “Fucking drunk driver. He was killed, too. Fuck him to hell.”

Suddenly, Grace wanted to ask where, when, how, but nothing south of her brain was working. And even that — the electrical jelly in her head — felt wrong. Fuzzy, soggy... impaired.

Now she was one of her patients.

For what seemed like forever, Gardener hugged himself and cried as Grace sat there, inert, plagued by insight:

Empathy was the biggest lie of all.