You Are Not A Stranger Here (4 page)

She rubbed her half-smoked cigarette out into the tarnished silver ashtray on the coffee table.

"And I'm afraid of my son."

"Why is that?"

Her already rigid body tightened a notch further. "Like I said, if I take the pills, it's fine."

Noticing her strained expression, Frank decided to back off. "You were saying you'd been to college. That's unusual for most of the women I see."

Mrs. Buckholdt leaned back in the couch and gave a small frown of acknowledgment, as if to say, yes, it was a pity more couldn't go. As she relaxed, a remnant of what must have once been coquettishness surfaced in her face, and Frank glimpsed how she must have looked to the other high school kids, the ones who'd never dreamt of leaving.

"My parents were good Lutherans. We'd always gone to this big, very plain barn of a church over in Long Pine, whitewash walls, a simple cross. My mother--when she came to visit me at college--those Gothic stone halls we lived in, she didn't like them, found them suspicious. There was something Catholic about gargoyles on the head of a drain; she didn't like the smell of it. She'd been happy with my father 34

out here, couldn't imagine why a person would want to leave."

She gazed past Frank, through the window that looked out over the side yard.

"I'd always pictured heaven as a rather ordinary place, where you met the dead and people were more or less comfortable. I think I imagined the whole world that way, as an ordinary place. But those paintings . . . they were so beautiful. I'd never seen anything so perfect in my life. Do you know Gericault? Do you know his pictures of Arcadia, those huge, lush landscapes of his?"

Frank shook his head.

"You should see them someday. They're beautiful things to see." She spoke in a slow, reflective manner.

"You came home, then," he asked, "when you left college?"

"Yes, to my parents' house." She smiled. "Jack was just starting as an officer down at the bank. He'd spent a year at the state university, read a good deal. He didn't want to stay here forever. Kept telling me that, because he knew it had been hard for me--coming back. He'd drive me out to the lake in his convertible. And he'd talk about a house in a town out in California. Always California. An orange tree in the backyard, how you could drive with the roof down all year round, a porch with a view of the ocean. I kept thinking of being close to a museum. I could enroll in classes again; it wouldn't have taken many to finish. And near a city, I might do research. Jack--he'd nod at that. I was a college girl, you 35

see, a catch." She chuckled. "Twenty-five years ago, that ghost you saw out there--he was a handsome boy." Her eyes came to rest on the floor by her feet. "Are you married, Dr. Briggs?"

There was a familiarity, almost a caring, to the way she asked the question, as though she were inquiring not for her own information but to give him the chance to tell her.

"No," he said. "I'm not."

"Is it something you hope to do?"

He imagined his professors judging him unprofessional for answering these questions. "Yes," he said, "I'd like to."

She nodded but made no reply.

"You married soon after you returned?" he asked.

"That's right. Jason, my first son, he came early on. Of course, it made sense to save money for a while. Get a house here, just for a year or two, before the big move. I imagine you went to a Montessori, didn't you? Or a country day school--maps on the walls." She smiled at Frank, a wan, generous smile. "He was so bright, Doctor, from the very beginning. I
wanted
him to have all that. I really did.

"I'd kept my books from college, and there were the ones Jack had, and some I bought. So while the school taught him George Washington every year, I read to him. I wasn't a fanatic, I didn't throw the television out, we didn't ground him. I read him books after supper and when he got older he read them himself. And I showed him things. I played him records, drove him to Chicago once, took him to the museum. He liked the paintings all right, but you should have seen the look on his face when he saw the height of those buildings 36

and all the people in the streets--delighted, that's what he was, delighted. I couldn't stand the idea of him hanging around here, waiting for some dead-end job. Of course that made me a snob, wanting more for him. Those teachers down at the high school, they didn't like me. Too much trouble.

"Round about when he was fourteen, this place, it started doing its work on him somehow. I could see it happening. The little tough guy stance, afraid of anything that wouldn't make him popular. His father had started drinking by then. Everything was going to hell around here, prices dropping through the floor, all these farms that couldn't make a dime. Jack spent his days taking people's homes and property their families had owned for decades. So it didn't worry me at first, I figured the man deserved a drink or two when he came home. That was before the bank went under. And as for symptoms, yes, to tell you the truth, I was depressed. I was. Things hadn't gone like we'd planned. I kept thinking about the girls I'd roomed with, visiting Europe, standing in front of those pictures. I shouldn't have done that--let myself look back that way. It's the sort of thing kids notice, the way you're not really there in the room with them."

She paused. It appeared to Frank as though she were deciding whether or not to go on. Their eyes met briefly, but he said nothing.

"There was a kid," she said, eventually. "Jimmy Green. His parents had lost their house; the family was living with relatives out on Valentine. He and Jason started spending their time together. He rode an old motorcycle and they'd be out in that barn with it for hours, doing I don't know what, 37

fixing it, I guess. Since he was eight, I'd driven Jason over to Tilden for violin lessons. He'd gotten some grief for it at school, kids calling him names. He'd cried about it some when he was younger, but he loved that music. Used to sit in that wicker chair right over there by the door, his little legs bouncing, twenty minutes before we even got in the car, his eyes begging me to hurry. You know he stood in this room one evening after practice and played five minutes of Mozart for his younger brother and sister?
Mozart.
Can you believe that? In
this
living room." She shook her head, amazed.

"About a year after he started hanging around the Green boy, I was sitting in the drive waiting for him to come out--

he'd spent all day in that barn, we were late. Before he left the porch, he took his instrument out of the case."

Her jaw tightened, her lips barely moving.

"We'd bought the violin together. Years ago, on a trip to Saint Louis. His father had given him the money and he'd stood on his toes to hand it to the salesman. That day I was waiting in the car to take him to his lesson, he walked up and smashed his violin on the hood. Said he was tired, didn't feel like going that afternoon. That's what he said: tired. Just like that. Walked back into the barn."

In her voice, there was only the blankness of reporting. Not a trace of sorrow.

"You're a doctor in these parts," she said. "You must know all about methamphetamine."

Frank nodded. He'd seen some of it in the clinic, and heard more. It had become the drug of choice for kids out here, cheaper than coke and without the hippie connotations 38

of pot. In the end, it wasn't the drug itself that got people but the lack of sleep it caused. After three or four days of no rest the body collapsed or slipped into psychosis.

"I told his father he had to do something, had to go to the Greens, or down to the school, find out who they were getting it from. But Jack--he didn't have it in him. The bank had been shut three years, he was scared of everything by then.

"I suppose I should have put Jason in the car and driven him out of here, gone with him somewhere. I didn't, though. I just took it from him whenever I could. I searched his room every day for those little envelopes of crystals. I checked the pockets of his trousers, begged him to stop. You know, once I even told him I'd buy him marijuana instead. His own mother. When the police finally caught the two of them buying it in the parking lot down by the market, I was glad. I thought it would shake him up. He spent three months up at Atkinson, at the juvenile center." She caught Frank's look.

"You think that was a mistake."

"It's a rough place, but it was out of your hands."

"Well, you're right. It didn't help. He was worse when he got back, angrier, more confused. And he still did it. I don't think he even stopped while he was in there--how that can be, how they can run a jail where children can get drugs, I just don't know how that can be . . . and of course he was so young, just sixteen, boys at that age--" She broke off. "All those hormones in him . . . I suppose the drug--" She stopped again, covering her mouth with her hand.

"I was here, in the living room. It was a Sunday. Jack had taken the kids over to visit his sister. Jason had been so erratic 39

those last few days, we were trying to keep the younger ones away from him. He'd been out till dawn that morning and the morning before and then up there in his room all day, but not sleeping, I could tell he wasn't sleeping. I was waiting for him to come down to eat something. I kept thinking, just one more conversation, we'd talk and somehow . . .

"I was right here on the couch. I heard his door open, and then I heard him crying. It was like years ago when he was a boy and he'd had an upset at school and I'd sit with him out there on the porch with his head in my lap as the sun went down and I'd tell him how one day we'd take a trip on a boat all the way across the Atlantic and he'd see Athens and Rome and all the places where the stories I'd read him took place, and he'd fall asleep listening to me. When I heard him cry that day I thought maybe it was all over--that he had come back to me somehow. He hadn't cried in so long. I went up the stairs.

"My son. He was naked. He'd been rubbing himself. For hours, it must have been. He'd rubbed himself raw. He was bleeding down there. And he was crying, his tears catching in the little beard that had started growing on his cheeks, the soft little brown hairs he hadn't learned to shave yet. When I got to the top of the stairs he looked at me like I'd severed a rope he'd been clinging to for dear life, just like that, like I'd sent him down somewhere to die. What could I do?

"I got a towel. From the bathroom. A white towel. I got gauze and ointment, and I sat him down on his bed and I cleaned him and put Band-Aids on him and I tried not to weep."

Mrs. Buckholdt sat on the edge of the sofa, shoulders 40

hunched forward. Her words had drained her, her face gone pale now. She stared blankly at the floor.

"I was his mother," she said quietly, almost listlessly.

"What was I supposed to do?"

For a moment, there was silence in the room.

"The kitchen," she said. "I was in the kitchen. Later. Making him soup. He'd always liked soup. Maybe he'd taken the drug again. I don't know. I felt him behind me. Suddenly he grabbed my wrist, forced it down onto the cutting board, and he chopped my fingers off, the fingers I'd touched him with, chopped them off with a meat cleaver. Then he walked out naked into the backyard."

T H E T W O O F them sat there together a long time, the sun hanging low on the rim of the western sky, casting its giant columns of light down over the land, level over the yard, level through the unshaded panes of the windows, pouring over Mrs. Buckholdt's back, casting shadow over the coffee table and the tarnished ashtray and the rounded, dark center of the densely patterned wool carpet.

In the time she had spoken, it seemed to Frank as if Mrs. Buckholdt's body had sunk down into itself, leaving her smaller and more frail, her earlier, imposing demeanor exhausted. He experienced a familiar comfort being in the presence of another person's unknowable pain. More than any landscape, this place felt like home.

"How did your son die?" he asked.

"The two of them, he and Jimmy, they'd borrowed some 41

friend's truck. It was only a few days later--he never had come back to the house. They were out on the interstate, headed west. They crashed into the wall of an overpass. Jimmy made it with some burns. He still lives out there on Valentine. I see him now and again."

By dint of habit, the trained portion of Frank's mind composed a note for Mrs. Buckholdt's chart: Patient actively relives a traumatic event with intrusive recall; there are depressive features, hypervigilance, and generalized anxiety. Diagnosis: posttraumatic stress disorder. Treatment: a course of sertraline, one hundred milligrams daily, recommendation for psychotherapy, eventual titration off clonazepam. He wondered how his colleagues felt when they said these words to themselves or wrote them on a piece of paper. Did the power to describe the people they listened to save them from what they heard? Did it absolve them of their duty to care?

As the silence between them stretched out, Frank remembered the first patient he'd seen as a resident, a woman whose husband had died in a plane crash. Each hour they spent together she filled with news of her two children, her son's play at school, a job her daughter had taken at a hotel, right down to what they had chosen to wear that morning, and she said it all gazing out the window, as though she were describing events in the history of a foreign country. He could remember lying in bed on the nights after he'd seen her, alone in his apartment, her plight weighing on him like a congregant's soul on the spirit of a minister or a 42

character's fate on the mind and body of a writer. Often, lying there, he would remember an earlier night, lying in his bed as a child, soon after his family had moved to a new town. Their house was still full of boxes, and their parents had been arguing. From the other bedroom, he heard his older brother talking to their mother in a scared tone: he hated his new school, the unfamiliar kids, the way they pushed him around, and he wanted so very badly not to go back in the morning. The fear in his voice troubled the air like an alarm. Their mother's voice was lower, her reassurances muffled by the distance of the hall. Frank had wept himself to sleep, pained to tears that he could do nothing to prevent his brother's suffering.