I'd been putting off calling to schedule a time to finish my evaluation. Seeing him appear unexpectedly in my office, I was quickly reminded of how uneasy he made me feel.
“Did we have an appointment?” I asked, trying to keep my voice neutral.
“What did you do to her?” he asked.
“Her?”
“My mother. I went to Happy Acres to take her home.”
“Westbrook Farms.”
“Whatever.” The words were flip, but his body language conveyed hurt.
“What makes you think I did anything to her?”
“She wouldn't come with me.”
Why was this my problem? “I assure you, I didn't do a thing to her. Maybe she likes it there. Transitions are very difficult for people like your mother.'”
“âPeople like my mother'? What's that supposed to mean?”
“For older people with Alzheimer's disease, change is frightening.”
“But being in
there
is change. Going home isn't.”
“She doesn't know that. She lives in ânow.' Change is anything that's different from now. She's become comfortable with the staff, with the routine.”
“How do you know that?” His eyes sharpened. Did he think I was spying on his mother?
“Well, I'm just assuming she would be. You know I work with a lot of Alzheimer's patients.” His hypersensitivity was getting on my nerves. “If she resists leaving, then ⦔
“She belongs at home! Now that I'm back, I can take care of her there. I've always taken care of her.” He was building up a steaming head of self-righteousness. “You got her in there. Now you gotta help me get her out.”
“I did not
get
her in there. You got her in there yourself. Actually, you're the one who left her on the steps of a place that was in no way equipped to take care of her.” Immediately I regretted rising to the bait. This was only escalating the confrontation. And at some level, I admired Nick's devotion to his mother. Not many sons would do as much in the same situation.
“What are you saying?” Nick growled.
“I'm just suggesting that you think about what's best for your mother, not what's best for you.”
“I know what's the best thing for my mother,” he said, his voice rumbling. “I'd expect you, of all people, to understand that.”
“I barely know you,” I said, getting exasperated and wanting him out of my office and out of my face.
“You live with your mother too.”
I started to say, “She doesn't live with me. She lives next ⦔ I couldn't believe I'd been suckered into explaining my life to this man. And how the hell did he know who I lived with, anyway? I took a breath and tried to calm down. “Your best resource is the staff at Westbrook Farms. I'm sure they'll be more than happy to help you move your mother home.”
“The nurse over there suggested that I ask your advice,” he said. He stared into his lap. Asking for help stuck in his craw.
“You might have said that to begin with.”
“Once she's home, she'll be fine. I've already got someone to come in and help out.” He looked up at me. “You probably don't like me very much. People don't.”
Nick had just pushed the guilt button. It was working. “It's not my job to like or dislike you.”
“It won't take long. Just meet me over there. Help me out on this.”
Reluctantly, I agreed. “Oh, one other thing,” I said. “We didn't complete the test battery, and Chip feels we should finish up, even though you've been released.”
“I don't know why he thinks ⦔ Nick said, grumbling. “Waste of time, if you ask me. Can't it wait until I've got Mother home and settled in? I feel like I can't really concentrate on much until that's taken care of.”
Not a problem, I told him.
He stood and slowly scanned my office, tracing the line of the dormer, across the bookcases, my Wines of Provence poster, the table with its stack of journals and assortment of knickknacks
given to me by patients. Now there was a wet circle in the gray industrial carpet around my trash can where I'd stuffed the wet brown paper and bubble wrap.
He eyed the book my brother sent me, still on newspaper on the floor. It had started drying out. Too bad. It had been in beautiful condition. The book, with its watermarked pages, promised to be a potent reminder of what happened when I let paranoia get the better of me.
Then Nick's eye snagged on the yellow pad on my desk where I'd been doodling. Even across the desk and upside down, he'd be able to read what I'd written. “DNA results?” he asked, putting it together.
“You didn't know?”
“No, I didn't. They got him, didn't they?”
“Him who?
“Teitlebaum.”
While I was saying, “Dr. Teitlebaum's not the father,” Nick was saying, “That's just what I ⦔
Then he seemed to process my words. “No,” he said, and sat down so fast he almost missed the chair. It was as if someone had chopped his knees from behind. Then he narrowed his eyes. “Who did the test, anyway? Someone Teitlebaum hired?”
I opened my mouth and closed it. There wasn't anything I could say that would convince Nick that the test by a private lab was trustworthy.
“And one day, I'm sure the police will explain the miracle of the hard drive,” Nick went on, “how mine ended up in Dr. Teitlebaum's desk.”
That was the thing about Nick. He'd be off on some rant, completely paranoid about bogus DNA tests or me poisoning his mother's mind, and then he'd throw out something I'd been wondering about myself. The disk drive. At least the DNA test was something I was sure about. “Why would they fake the results?”
I asked, though I knew rationality couldn't make a dent in Nick's suspicions.
“He's a doctor. He knows people.”
“When a doctor's accused of murder, he's just like anyone else in the system.”
“Then who the hell ⦔ Nick's eyes darted about. I imagined him cataloging suspects.
I stood. “So when do you want to get your mother?” I said.
“I'll call you after I talk to them.” Nick got to his feet. “Maybe tomorrow?”
“After five.”
Nick nailed me with a dark look. “Doctor, it's not paranoia if they really
are
out to get you.”
He left without good-bye or thanks. I watched him scuttle down the hall, head down as if he were having an intense argument with himself. He turned the corner. Usually I can hear footsteps. But I couldn't hear Nick Babikian's. Just the ding as the elevator door opened, the ding again when it closed.
I shut my door. I didn't want colleagues or a patient to catch me as I did a careful search of my office shelves. I even poked up a few ceiling tiles to be sure he hadn't secreted any surveillance cameras up there.
I sat back in my desk chair, feeling uneasy. For every therapist, there's at least one kind of patient he or she shouldn't be treating. For me, that kind was Nick Babikian. Maybe I might have been less sensitive if it hadn't been for the special-delivery packages, or if Annie hadn't been getting lewd phone calls, or if no one had broken into my house. But there was a reality factor that made Nick's paranoia contagious. I could have called it by its technical termâprojective identificationâbut that didn't make it feel any less virulent.
Later that day, Nick left me a message. Something had come up. He'd be busy tomorrow and the next day. Could we meet Saturday instead? One o'clock. Westbrook Farms. I called back and told him fine.
The next day, I called Dottie Grebow at Westbrook Farms to get her perspective. “It was unfortunate,” she said. “He obviously cares a great deal about his mother, but he frightened her. Maybe it's that hat he wears. Or his perennial scowl. All I know is he filled out the paperwork for us to discharge her, went down to get her, next thing I know she's screaming. He's angry with us. Like it's something we did to her to make her the way she is. I tried to explain, it's not unusual for our residents to react like that. He just needed to be patient.”
“You suggested that he consult me?”
“Not me. Maybe Carole did. We could have helped his mother if he'd let us. A little advance warning wouldn't have hurt.”
I remembered Nick's mother with her salt-and-pepper frizz. How she'd howled when she first saw me, and then how she'd been waiting for her Nicky to come home so she could feed him milk and cookies. With patients who've lost their mental moorings, an old habit is a good starting point. “We'll be there Saturday one-ish. Would you mind having some milk and cookies on hand?” I asked Dottie.
“We always have milk and cookies.”
“THERE'S ANOTHER package from your brother,” Gloria told me when I arrived at work two days later.
Maybe he'd mailed them both at the same time and this one took longer. This time it was a box about a foot square and six inches deep. It was neatly wrapped, just like the last one, with typed mailing and return-address labels. This one felt too light to be books.
I was about to carry it up to my office when Kwan appeared. “Another present? Since when are you so popular?” He eyed the return label. “Something new from your brother? Let's have a look.”
This time I figured, hell, why not. I set down my other mail and started to work on the package. I ripped off the brown paper. Underneath was a brown cardboard box. It was taped shut. Gloria handed me a pair of scissors. I slit the tape.
I opened the box flaps, peeled back some tissue paper. A doll's leg and arm were on top. That was odd. I poked them aside.
Underneath was a half a doll body, cut up the middle. Inside the hollow of its chest was the doll's head, the eyes popped out.
I pushed the box away and gagged on the smell of vinyl and vanilla.
“Your brother's got a strange sense of humor,” Gloria said.
I spread out the paper wrapping. It looked just like the package I'd gotten earlier. But the postmark wasn't Pittsburgh, it was Cambridge. And the date was October. When I looked more carefully, the postage meter strip on the package looked as if it had been glued on.
“I doubt this is from him,” I said.
Gloria pulled out the doll's head. It looked sinister with its empty eyeholes. “This was a nice doll, once upon a time. I had one just like it when I was a kid.”
I felt like the floor fell out from under me. I remembered Annie's baby doll sitting in the chair in her kitchen.
“You okay?” Gloria asked, as she tucked the doll's head back in the box. “Want me to throw this out?”
I didn't reassure her that I was okay because I wasn't. I went up to my office and called Annie. I told her what had happened. She confirmed what I was hoping she wouldn'tâthat her doll was missing. She wanted to come right over.
When she got to my office, I made her sit. Then I handed her the box. She took one look, swallowed. Tears started down her cheeks. “Bastard. Lousy son of a bitch bastard,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.
I drew her up into my arms and held her tight. We rocked slowly, back and forth. She took a tissue and blew her nose. “My dad gave me that doll,” she said, “for my fifth birthday. I named her Jenny.” Annie gave a weak laugh. “Very original. Grandma made clothes for itâa pink polished cotton dress with a lace collar she crocheted herself. Jenny used to sit in a rocking chair in my room. I was sure that whenever I left, she'd climb down
off the chair and watch me from the windowsill.” Annie blew her nose again. “Sappy, I know. And I don't even like dolls!”
“When do you figureâ”
“I don't have to figure. I know. It was two days ago. I got home and my front door was closed but not double-locked. I'd left in a hurry that morning, so I thought maybe I'd forgotten. Nothing else was missing or looked like it had been touched even. You know how when there's something regularly there, you don't even see it? Wasn't until this morning when you called that I realized Jenny was missing.”
“I think it's that damned Ralston Bridges,” I said, “taunting us from jail. It wouldn't surprise me if the flyers in the bars were his handiwork too.”
“He's got to be getting help. Someone on the outside. Someone he knows.” She said this the same way a rock climber on a stony cliff face searches for a toehold. “A professional.”
“You should get an alarm system,” I said.
“I'll do no such thing. I hate having to live that way, like I'm in some kind of war zone.” Now she was sounding like Kate. “It's infuriating.” Anger was better than terror. Empowering rather than disabling. “Whoever's doing this,” Annie said, “we're going to get him.
I'm
going to get him. I've just got to figure out how.”
I called the police and dropped the package off at police headquarters later that night. It was dark when I pulled my car into the driveway. As I got out and started up the walk, I felt as if I were passing through a flashing strobe. Click, as the little video camera saw me come out of the shadows. Click, as I stepped up on the porch. Click, as I put my key in the door. For all the money it had cost, for all the work it had taken to install, it only made me feel more vulnerable.
Saturday I met Nick in the lobby of Westbrook Farms. The greeting committee of elderly ladies, mostly in lilac and pale blue pantsuits, gabbled at us from the sofa and chairs at one end of the lobby.
“Ooh, visitors!” one of them said.
“My Louie was tall like that,” said another.
“Young people today,” a third one said, sniffing. “Don't they know it's not polite to wear a hat indoors?”
“Maybe he's orthodox?” another suggested with a hopeful, upward inflection at the end.
Nick swiped the baseball cap off his head and stuffed it into a back pocket.
We went up to the second floor. Nick started down the hall to his mother's room. “Hold your horses,” I told him. “You asked me to help. Now let me help.”
He looked as if he were about to argue.
“Let me explain what I'm going to do,” I said. “Last time I was here, your mother thought you were still a little boy, and she was waiting for you to come home.”
“She does that all the time,” Nick said.
“That's typical of people with Alzheimer's. Often, they don't have access to recent memories, although their past remains readily accessible. As a result, they're overly responsive to the environmental cues in the present that trigger those past memories.
“I know that for your mother, milk and cookies bring back the anxiety of waiting for you to come home, but also the pleasure of having you return safely. I can use milk and cookies as a cue, use the promise of seeing Nicky home safe from school to put your mother in a receptive state of mind for going with you. In a sense, I'll be lying to her. But we do it so often working with Alzheimer's patients, there's even a word for it. A therapeutic fiblet. A little lie that's harmless and helpful at the same
time. You need to become little Nicky and follow my cues. Okay?”
“Okay,” he agreed, though he didn't seem convinced.
I found Dottie. She poured a cup of milk and gave it to me along with the plate of cookies on a little bed of napkins that she had ready. I asked her to keep anyone in a uniform out of the halls for the next half hour. She escorted Nick to the lounge to wait for me.
Just like last time, I loosened my shirt collar and rolled up my sleeves so I'd look as unofficial as possible. Armed with the milk and cookies, I headed to Mrs. Babikian's room.
She was standing at the window. She wore a loose house dress, her pocketbook clutched to her chest. As I drew near, I could hear, “My mother was a little girl when the Turks came to her house. The soldiers' eyes were empty.”
It was the story she'd recited last time I was here, told in practically the same words. This was another piece of the past that Mrs. Babikian had stuck in her present along with the milk and cookies.
I cleared my throat so I wouldn't startle her. Her voice died and she looked at me. Her eyes widened in terror, and I could hear the beginning of a howl working its way out of her belly. I held out the milk and plate of cookies. “Where's Nicky?” I asked.
Fear vanished from her face. “Nicky?” She looked at me, her eyes bright. “I'm waiting for him to come home.” Her face broke into a broad smile. “Milk and cookies! Nicky loves his milk and cookies.”
“Is he coming?”
“I don't know. He should be.” She turned back to the window.
I joined her. “Is that him?” I asked.
A couple was walking from the parking lot into the building.
“Oh, look,” I said. “There he is. He just came into the building.”
“Nicky. Nicky,” Mrs. Babikian keened, straining to see what wasn't there.
“He should be up here any minute,” I said. “Shall we bring him his milk and cookies?”
I handed Mrs. Babikian the plate of cookies. Then I took her other arm. “He's waiting for us,” I said, coaxing her out in the hall.
Once I had her started, it was easy to guide her to the lounge, the promise of Nicky propelling her forward. Nick was sitting in a corner beside an artificial ficus plant. He stood. “Mom!” he said.
“Nicky! You're home!” She brought the cookies over and stood beside him, beaming. “How was school?”
He smiled and shook his head. “Fine, Mom. It's always fine.”
“Those boys? They give you trouble again?”
“No trouble.”
She pushed the plate of cookies at him. “Eat! You're always so hungry when you get home.” Nick took a cookie and munched on it.
I went back to Mrs. Babikian's room and got the black, softsided suitcase that the staff had packed in preparation for our visit. When I got back to the lounge, it was Mrs. Babikian who was drinking the milk. She put down the cup. Nick took the napkin and gently dabbed at some that had dribbled down her chin. “Let's go home, Mom.”
Mrs. Babikian went happily along, out to the parking lot. She got into Nick's car without a murmur.
“You okay now?” I asked Nick.
“Thanks,” he said. Gratitude. That was a first.
When I got home, there was a note stuck to my door. It was my mother's handwriting: “You have company. She's with me.”
Maybe Annie had discovered something else gone missing and didn't want to be alone. Or maybe something more had happened. I knocked on my mother's door. When she answered I pushed past her and into the living room. No one was there. I whipped around. “Where's Annie?”
“Annie?” she said. “What happened to Annie? Is she sick? Did she have an accident? Is she all right?” My mother peppered the questions at me, her eyes sharp with anxiety.
I realized my mistake and tried to downplay it. “She's fine. Healthy and all in one piece. Nothing's the matter. I just thought she's who was here.”
“Nice try,” my mother said. “We'll talk more about this later. Right now, Mrs. Gratzenberg is in the kitchen.”
“Mrs. Gratzenberg? Why on earth?” It was the last thing I'd expected.
“She tried calling you at work, but she doesn't like leaving messages. I agree. Terrible inventions, answering machines. And she didn't understand how to beep you. Electronics, feh.”
Figured, a computer geek's mother would be a technophobe. But I wondered how she'd found her way here. Again, my mother anticipated. “She found my number in the phone book. I
answer
my phone.” My mother said this as if it were an accusation.
We'd had this problem before, someone looking for me and finding my mother. I'd tried then to get my mother to unlist her phone, but she didn't want to be out of reach of long-lost relatives, or friends who'd misplaced their address books or their glasses.
“You know I don't list my phone number because I don't want my work coming home,” I said.
“This,” she said, “I know. What else I know is how beside myself I'd be if you disappeared.”
“If I disappeared?” Then it dawned on me. “Jeff Gratzenberg is missing?”
My mother put her finger on her nose. I followed her into the kitchen.
Mrs. Gratzenberg was perched on a chair. A cup of tea was on the table in front of her. She stood. I remembered her as the shadowy figure who had emerged from the back of her house when I'd gone to see her son. She was about my mother's height but seemed much smaller. She held out a card, her hand trembling. I took it from her. It was my business card.
“You know my Jeffrey?” she asked.
“Yes. Remember, I met you at your house? I came and Jeff showed me some software.”
“Ah, yes. I remember now. I saw you, but for just a moment. Jeffrey hasn't come home.” She held her palms up in despair.
“Maybe he's staying with friends?”
Mrs. Gratzenberg set her mouth in a determined line. “No. He tells me if he's going to stay out.”
“When's the last time you saw him.”
“Day before yesterday. In the afternoon.” She peered up at me. “You had work for him?”
“I wouldn't have had any work for him. Why do you ask?”
“He was excited. He'd found work. He left. Said he was going to meet the people. I made him dinner but he didn't come home. Not that night. Not the next day. He always calls.”