Man in The Woods (24 page)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Summer arrives early, full of temper—scorching blue-gray days, brooding starless evenings, and stormy, astonishing nights, with the sheets of rain falling with a furious rattle. In the middle of the workday, Shep sleeps in the cool air beneath Paul’s truck, with nothing of him showing but his paws. Next to the truck is Evangeline’s newly purchased Subaru Legacy, which, according to her, is the car of choice for gay women. Parked closer to the house, and somehow in more direct contact with the sun, is Kate’s Lexus, its chrome bumpers and door handles blazing with light, its tinted windshield a fiery greenish mirror in which an upside-down tree holds the white sun in its black leaves.

Inside the house, Ruby sleeps in her bed, after having been up most of the night, sick to her stomach, and full of manic energy after that, dispensing disquieting observations, such as
The floor is happy
or
Now it’s the stairs’ turn to walk up me
or
My fingers don’t want to be fingers anymore
.

While Ruby naps, Kate calls a woman named Dr. Joan Montgomery, who is the only child psychologist in the area. “I actually happen to have an opening for one thirty this afternoon—I just got a cancellation,” Montgomery says. Kate isn’t sure she believes her, but Montgomery has a pleasant, elegant voice and Kate is relieved there is someone in the area who can take a look at poor Ruby.

Kate sits now in the front of the house, ostensibly reading a thriller, but after half an hour with the book in her lap, she has read only the first paragraph and she had read it four or five times, gathering the words again and again with her eyes and attempting to thrust them into her mind. She has already crept up the stairs a number of times, once to more widely open Ruby’s bedroom door so any alarming noises would be easily audible down on the sofa, and a few times after that just to peek in, not that much can ever be gleaned by watching somebody sleep: they will look either ridiculous in their waxy seriousness or darling and vulnerable, but either way their bodies look like the shells left behind after their souls have been taken.

Now, an hour later, taking Ruby to the psychologist, Kate almost collides with the truck from the courier service as she is speeding up her own driveway. The driver, in shorts and a white straw pith helmet, as if he is going on safari, stops next to Kate’s car, hands her an envelope, and reverses out of the driveway so fast he looks as if he is on a strip of film running backward. Kate tosses the envelope into the backseat—it’s from her agent and she’s pretty sure what it is. A proposal from Heartland, renewing her contract.

It is not until she pulls into the parking area of the Windsor Counseling Center that Kate realizes this is the place where she and the last man in her life uselessly went for couples’ therapy after he fell in love with another woman. He never had any intentions of breaking it off with his new beloved, and the hour was a humiliating waste of time and money—even the therapist, a Dr. Fox, knew this and didn’t bother to ask them if they wanted to make a second appointment as he nervously escorted them out of his office.
Oh my Lord
, she thinks,
I was in a relationship so hopeless I was booted out of couples’ therapy!

That time she could at least vent her displeasure. Now, when she talks to this Dr. Montgomery she can only hint about the subterranean pressures Ruby might be absorbing back home. Her own frequent absences can be mentioned, but not that the new man of the house has killed someone.

Ruby has been essentially silent since her nap and now looks as if she might doze off again. Her eyes are heavy, and she leans her head against the side window. She is wearing yellow shorts and a white tank top, both of which are too small for her, but she won’t part with them. Her bare feet are squeezed into a pair of salmon-colored flip-flops, also too small. Kate is not certain what Ruby knows or understands about the nature of their appointment this afternoon.

“There’s someone in town who’s an expert at talking to kids and helping them with stuff that’s bothering them,” Kate had said, and Ruby shrugged as if it meant next to nothing to her. “Anyhow, I made an appointment,” Kate had said.

All Ruby had wanted to know was if Kate was going to come along, too, and when Kate said she was Ruby changed the subject.

“Well, here we are,” Kate says. She reaches over, releases Ruby from her seat belt.

“So this is a psychiatrist?” Ruby asks.

“I don’t think so,” Kate says, hiding behind a little hedge of pedantry—Dr. probably means PhD. Not MD, and so, technically, she is not a psychiatrist. “Anyhow, the important thing is the rules. Just about every place has rules—like no running in the halls when you’re in school, and no talking in the movie theater. Do you want me to tell you what the rules are here?”

“Probably bird rules.”

Kate furrows her brow, pretends to consider this, though these increasingly frequent non sequiturs from Ruby are making her frantic. Sometimes Kate is certain that the eruptions of nonsense are deliberate, a continuation of the child’s long infatuation with exaggeration and attention grabbing and a primitive sort of theatricality. And there are other times when she believes the nonsense is deliberate and involuntary both, that Ruby knows there are no bird rules yet she feels nevertheless compelled to say there are. And there are other times—and this third way is becoming dominant—when Kate believes her daughter is being slowly stolen away, seduced, perhaps, by an alternate reality that poor Ruby (the prefix is becoming permanent) has created because the one she has been living in is unsustainable. Or poor Ruby may be turning into a different person on the most basic cellular level, transformed into this sleepless, feverish creature by the drip drip drip of bad chemicals. If it is a chemical imbalance, a chemical solution must be found, in which case this Dr. Montgomery, whom Kate already imagines as a font of New Age drool, will not be of much use—she may be able to write a haiku but Ruby will need someone to write a prescription.

“The rule here,” Kate says, “is you”—she touches Ruby’s nose—“are allowed to say whatever you want, there’s no secrets, nothing to be afraid of, nothing to hide.”

The asphalt parking area is sticky beneath their footsteps, stinking of pitch, and hellishly hot in the sun. Ruby makes a move as if to scratch herself and Kate takes her hand. In the parking lot Kate reads the bumper stickers with dismay:
COMMIT IRRATIONAL ACTS OF KINDNESS
and
PSYCHOLOGISTS DO IT WITH UNDERSTANDING
. Poor Ruby, poor poor Ruby. She gathers the child closer to her.
Why are we here?
she wonders.
Why not a church, a minister, what about God? When was the last time I prayed for this child? When was the last time I prayed?

Kate pulls open the counseling center door to a blast of air-conditioning. There’s a reception desk but no one is at it, a waiting room with nobody in it, a couple of low tables with magazines, a couple of small sofas, and a white-noise machine whooshing away in the corner. The wall clock chimes the half hour and Dr. Montgomery emerges, a compact, conventionally pretty woman, vaguely familiar to Kate, with boyishly cut frosted hair and freckly arms. After a glance at Kate, she directs her attention to Ruby.

“Hello, Ruby, it’s nice to meet you.” She offers her hand and Ruby shakes it. “You can follow me, if you like.”

“Should I come, too?” Kate asks.

“We can all talk together, to begin with,” Montgomery says.

“Me want bathroom!” Ruby proclaims.

As Montgomery gives Ruby directions to the toilet, it strikes Kate where she has seen her before—many Wednesday nights ago, at the Leyden AA meeting. She attended only once, maybe twice, and Kate can remember she sat silently, her trembling hands and overwhelmed eyes her only eloquence. Kate follows her into her office, a large space with two child-sized chairs, a small trampoline, and a table upon which is a tray filled with sand and an array of figures made of painted rubber—a man on horseback, a woman holding a wand, a mummy, a groom, a king. Montgomery takes her seat in a stuffed armchair and Kate sits in the other adult-size chair.

“We can take this time and you can tell me what your concerns are,” Montgomery says, blushing deeply as she speaks.

“Basically what I told you over the phone. Agitation, sleeplessness, blurring the line between fantasy and reality, and reverting to infant behavior, especially in terms of hygiene.” Kate scans the walls, looking for diplomas, but all she sees is a picture of Einstein with his tongue out, and a photo of a huge, quivering sun setting at the seashore, the ocean a vast watery Wurlitzer of bright colors.

“She has a nice firm handshake,” Montgomery says.

“Then I guess we’re all set.”

Montgomery smiles. “I have to tell you something, Kate. I read
Prays Well with Others
a few months ago and it’s one of my important books. I haven’t heard your show on the radio yet, but that book is really something.”

“Thank you.”

“I just love your little mishaps. They’re quite funny, but there is always the moment, the lightbulb moment, when you get it. You’re inspiring—do you know that?”

“I’m not inspiring, or inspired, I’m just broken. But thanks, I am glad I wrote something you could use.”

“And I thank you. Most spiritual writers sort of stick in my craw. But you’re so honest and so human and so…you. I feel as if I know you.”

“I don’t really think of myself as a spiritual writer,” Kate says.

“You don’t?”

“Just more like a writer, a regular writer.”

“Mom?” Ruby’s voice, troubled and confused, comes from outside.

Kate clambers out of her chair. “Just very quickly?” she says to Montgomery. “I gave her a little cross, and she gave it to my boyfriend’s sister, for luck, and a while after that the sister had a pretty bad accident and Ruby is sort of blaming herself.”

Poor Ruby is three doors down, and when she sees her mother she drops down to the carpeting and scuttles toward her using both hands and feet, with her rump high in the air and her face red from exertion.
Sure
, Kate thinks,
let’s go for the full monty
.

Ruby crabwalks into Montgomery’s office, with Kate behind her. “Sorry about that,” Montgomery says. “That hall can be confusing.” She is standing at the sand tray, smoothing the sand down with an index card.

“What are you doing?” Ruby asks, still on all fours, looking up at the psychologist through the tops of her eyes.

“This is my sand tray. I use it to help kids.”

“Really?”

“I know,” Montgomery says to Kate. “I was once skeptical, too. But it works. The thing about sand, it’s been the essence of everything we’ve built, throughout history. Glass, brick, concrete—it’s all sand. The infrastructure of physical life is made of sand—and our inner world has an infrastructure, too.”

“Made of sand?” Kate asks.

Montgomery laughs. “Who’s to say? Anyhow, if you’d like to relax in front or run an errand in town for the next forty minutes or so, maybe Ruby and I can get to know each other.”

Ruby doesn’t seem concerned about her mother’s leaving her with a virtual stranger; in fact, as Kate departs, Ruby seems detached—Shep reacts with more emotion when Paul leaves the room. As Kate makes her way down the corridor to the front of the building she has vivid and unwelcome memories of walking this same narrow passageway with her treacherous boyfriend half a decade ago—coming in, she was in front; exiting, he was in the lead, so anxious to be on to whatever was next for him.

Kate sits in the otherwise empty waiting room but lasts there only a minute before she springs up, heads for the exit. She has a passing thought: go to the cool, cavernous Episcopalian church in the center of town, not because she favors that denomination but because she knows its doors are never locked, and she can sit there in the blue-stained shadows while her heart beats approximately twenty-eight hundred times and wait for grace to come to her and wait for wisdom, as if she were some sad woman in a trench coat sitting on a park bench waiting for the perfect man. She gets as far as her car, but then she realizes: she once
had
the Perfect Man, the Ideal Husband who could guide and comfort her in a time just like this, and now He has left her, or she has left Him, or they just gave up on each other, or the whole so-called relationship was nothing but a crock of shit in the first place. It’s difficult to say; they never really had parting words. Jesus went out for a pack of smokes and never came back. Was that it? Or did she just get sick of His friends? Or did someone come between them?

Yes, that was it. Of course. Someone came between them.

The car is so hot her ears begin to ring, and beads of moisture dot the down above her lip, yet she sits there for nearly a minute with her hands on the steering wheel before it occurs to her to start the engine and the air-conditioning.

As the car cools, Kate reaches in back for the envelope delivered by the courier service. She tears away the plastic wrap and unzips the paper zipper along the envelope’s side. The note, folded over a smaller envelope, is from her agent.

Dear K. We’ve been trying to get you on the phone. Enclosed is the royalty check from the second half of last year. T. says that the next check, reflecting Jan–June of this year, will be even better. I think the time to discuss another book and another contract couldn’t be more opportune. Maybe it’s time to cut down on the radio, which I fear is standing in the way of a sequel to PRAYS. I’m out of the office for the next couple of days but let’s talk next week. Promise? In the meanwhile, congratulations.

Kate opens the second envelope and looks at her royalty statement, which is essentially indecipherable. She very slowly and stealthily looks at the check. It is for $1,068,395. She holds it in her hands and stares at the numbers, and then she quickly opens the glove compartment and shoves it in with the maps, her insurance card, and the Lexus owner’s manual, pushing it to the back of the compartment with a frantic poking motion as if she were hiding contraband.