Hanging Time (14 page)

“What were you doing in that boutique?” For the last ten minutes Milicia kept asking her the same thing. The tuna salad Milicia had ordered didn’t meet her specifications, too much mayonnaise. Two scoops of it sat untouched on a sheaf of pale green iceberg lettuce.

Camille’s hands twitched in her lap. She didn’t answer. She wanted to eat the toasted cheese sandwich on her plate but couldn’t reach for it with Milicia there. She was thinking that Milicia probably poisoned it. Even if Milicia left, she couldn’t eat it now.

“I saw you, Camille. I saw you in the window. Camille, I know you’re crazy. I know you think this boutique thing is a way to get back at me, but you’ll be punished. Do you understand? Look at me.” Milicia’s voice dropped to a furious whisper. “You’ll be punished worse than ever before.”

Camille turned her head. Now she could see Milicia’s red mouth moving again. She wanted to put a stop to it.

“Why don’t you leave me alone?” Camille finally formed the words. She found the words and her lips moved.

“You know why.”

Camille shook her head. She didn’t know why. She was trying on a dress. Just trying on a dress. She liked to go shopping when she could. Today she could. The sun was burning a hole in the deep blue sky. There was not a single cloud anywhere. No possibility of rain. Camille didn’t like to sit in the sun or let it touch her too deeply, but she could
walk in it. She had been having a good day. She’d moved from Bouck’s building out into the sun. A hat with a big brim hid her face from the dangerous rays. It was the hat Bouck liked best, straw with a lavender ribbon around the brim.

She remembered working on getting outside, sneaking away before Bouck could talk to her. Sometimes Bouck talked to her, bothered her, wanted her to do something. She couldn’t ever tell Bouck that she didn’t like that. He got mad at the tiniest things. She pressed her lips together to remind herself what would happen if too many words came out. Sometimes she sat in the basement, hiding all day, listening to the noises in the shop above, afraid to move. Sometimes she got in trouble with herself and didn’t know what she was doing. But today her head felt okay, clear enough to get out.

She had turned left on the street and headed north toward Bloomingdale’s. She passed Bloomingdale’s, though, couldn’t go in. It was too dangerous in there. She even turned her head away as she went by it. All that stuff and the black walls did bad things to her. In Bloomingdale’s sometimes she remembered her mother, stroking her head when she was little after something happened, and promising her everything would be all right. The memory gave her a headache. Other memories, too.

On Third Avenue and Sixty-first Street there was a shoe store. The boutique next to it had a dress in the window that attracted Camille. She wanted to try it on. Camille liked going into stores and trying things on. Bouck always gave her lots of money in hundred-dollar bills. She could have anything she wanted. She liked to think about the cash in her pocket. Sometimes she put her hand in her pocket, or the bag Puppy was in, to feel the money. The money, rolls of it, hidden in the house, shocked Milicia.

Milicia’s mouth was moving again. “Don’t you understand I’m trying to save you? Camille, you’re in terrible trouble. Do you understand that? I’m trying to figure out what to do.”

“Leave me alone.” Camille traced the words on the paper table mat:
leave me alone
.

“I want to help you.”

Camille shook her head. Milicia wanted to hurt her, had always wanted to hurt her. Milicia was there waiting to get her. Like today, when she was feeling better. Milicia came out of her office like a spider, looking for her, spying on her. Camille stared down at her knife on the table, imagined picking it up and driving it through Milicia’s hand.

Milicia followed her gaze. “Don’t even think about it,” she said.

Camille didn’t pick up the knife. It wasn’t the right kind of knife.

“You need help, Camille. Bouck can’t give you the kind of help you need. Only I can give you the help you need. I’m your sister. I’m the one in charge of your health.” Milicia’s eyes were slits.

“You don’t know what I can do,” Camille murmured.

“Yes, Camille. I know. I know very well what you’re capable of doing, and believe me, I won’t let this go on.”

Milicia’s voice was a razor, cutting deep with every word. Camille saw the razor at her throat.

“I know how you feel,” Milicia continued. “I know what you’re thinking. I know why you like Bouck, but he can’t protect you from punishment this time.”

“You’re afraid of him.” Camille found some more words, picked them out of the air, where they drifted around her mouth like the smoke from the cigarettes at the next table. Clouds of it hovered for a few seconds and then rose, dissipating in the air.

“I’m not afraid of him. He can’t hurt me.”

Milicia said it with her big red mouth, but Camille knew Milicia came to the house only when she thought Bouck was out of town. Last time she left as soon as she found out he wasn’t in Westchester after all. He was upstairs all the time. So Milicia couldn’t look for the money.

“I have to get back to work,” Milicia said, checking her watch.

Camille recognized the watch even though she hadn’t seen it in years. It had been their mother’s. Small rubies and diamonds surrounded the pretty face, and the band was a gold bracelet. Milicia told her it had been destroyed. She
said their mother had been wearing it the day their father drove the car off the road. Milicia told her the car flipped over and crashed in a deep, deep ravine. Their bodies were burned in the fire and there was nothing left of them. Camille’s eyes hardened. Milicia took whatever she could get, no matter whose it was.

“Are you all right?” Milicia asked suddenly.

Camille’s expression changed. She could see Milicia was afraid to walk back with her. Milicia was afraid of Bouck. Camille said nothing.

Milicia paid the bill, shaking her head. “I hate this. You’re all I have, and I don’t know how to reach you. What am I supposed to do? I don’t want you to be punished, Cammy. I really don’t.”

Camille could see there were tears in Milicia’s eyes, but they were fake tears. The bag moved by her side, almost tipping over. It was time to take Puppy outside.

J
ason had an hour and fifteen minutes until his appointment with Daisy. He hesitated for a second just inside the door of his waiting room, then went out into the hall, turned left, and returned home.

The little entry hall, with the polished wood floor and the table where Emma always put the mail, was empty. The doors to the living room were open, revealing a generous space lit by two windows that overlooked the tree-lined street. The room was painted a pale lemon yellow and decorated with comfortable tweedy sofas. Built-in shelves on two of the walls were filled with books, souvenirs, and five of Jason’s antique clocks. There were nine clocks altogether in the room. All were over a hundred years old and all were in working order. Jason never bought a clock that couldn’t be made to work. Unlike human hearts, they were mechanical and could be fixed when they broke down.

It was painful for Jason to come home. Every time he heard those clocks and looked around, his heart started to race with the memories of Emma’s kidnapping and his part in her ordeal. He didn’t want to brood endlessly about everything. But he did. He went over and over his failure to read her, his failure to acknowledge how hurt and neglected she felt. His failure to read the script of her first film, the little thing that came along and destroyed their life.

He brooded that his insensitivity to Emma’s unhappiness might have made the difference. If he’d been thinking of her needs instead of his own, they could have had a baby by now. They’d be living in the suburbs. Forty had always
meant the crossover to old on his life timeline. He’d be thirty-nine in a few days, and had no family except a set of parents he saw only a few times a year. Work was always the driving force in his life, but he loved Emma. Never wanted to hurt her. Never expected to be so desperately lonely. On the other hand, he knew that even if she had been happy, she might have made the film with the same tragic results anyway.

Jason brooded. He came from a long line, maybe five thousand years old, of serious brooders. There was a reason he was an analyst. He took in and processed information in big chunks, but it took him a long time to come around to action. He hung around the hall table, shattered by the emptiness of his home and the heat of the New York summer. The apartment was hot and musty. He turned to the kitchen, beginning to sweat. The inch of aged coffee in the coffeepot on the counter by the sink seemed a testament to his domestic misery. All around was the sound of clocks.

Living in this apartment in this building had always seemed to him like living in Europe in another century, when there were no telephones or faxes, no computers or copy machines. People communicated by mail which came twice a day, morning and afternoon. Men like Freud went home for lunch, and their wives tolerated them no matter what they did. In those days no one who ran away lived happily ever after.

Ask anybody, Jason thought bitterly, and they’d say that times were better now. He stood in the hall outside the kitchen, paralyzed with grief, wondering if his wife was finding happiness in L.A. after what happened to her. He didn’t think she could recover without his help.

The hall carriage clock chimed the hour. Emma used to say he spent more time with his clocks than he did with her. And it was true he had thought: of them as his friends, his link with the past and the future, his grasp on time. Now he knew they had been his little hedge against mortality, substitute for a lot of things.

Shaking his head, he shuffled down the hall to the bedroom. Emma had left most of her possessions and all of her souvenirs around the house, indicating a certain ambivalence
about clearing out for good. Jason didn’t know whether to hope for an eventual return or not.

Depression was a dangerous state for a psychiatrist. A dozen years of training had taught Jason all about the management of troubled people. The main thing was that every second of every session counted. There were no time-outs, no moments for the doctor to escape into his own dreams, his own thoughts, his own agenda. There could be only the patient and his needs, for even the silences spoke loudly and with meaning. An empathic lapse of even a few tiny moments could bring about a cataclysm in a patient’s life. Jason’s primary responsibility was to his patients. He knew he was depressed, and there was no one he could trust with it.

Never mind his years of training, his expertise at listening to the other voice in sick people. A lapse on his part could be fatal. He worried about the safety of his patients. Jason brooded about the past. He had left his first wife, his high school sweetheart, after five years of utter misery. Emma, his second wife, had left him even though it could be argued he had saved her life. There were no blessings to count when he tried to get to sleep at night. He didn’t have children to prove his ability to love and nurture. He couldn’t know for a fact that he was truly competent.

No matter how many patients he had had over the years, or the fact that those who had the potential to get better under his care always did, he was still afraid that the failures in his personal life made him unfit to advise others.

And yet he knew he was better than most. His patient Daisy was the daughter of a colleague he didn’t know, who had resisted and resented her getting help. Daisy’s father was one of those psychiatrists who practiced with deep cynicism, not believing in what he did and deeply suspicious of everyone in the field. He had done everything he could to prevent Daisy’s getting help even though she had been a very sick girl and might even have died of anorexia and depression years earlier if she hadn’t found someone to intervene.

At twenty-five, after five years of therapy, Daisy was finally in her first precarious year of college. But she was still so sick, she was unlikely ever to function on her own. She
was the only long-term patient Jason had who would never really get well. He would never take on another.

He put on a white Nike T-shirt and white shorts. His running shoes were two years old and needed to be replaced. He left the apartment and ran down the open staircase that spiraled down from the twelfth floor to the lobby. Jason lived on the fifth floor. Sometimes at the end of his run in Riverside Park, he staggered up the stairs. Sometimes he didn’t.

Downstairs he nodded at Pete, the tiny, balding ex-marine who manned the door.

“Hot out there, Doctor,” Pete said, opening the door.

Hot air hit Jason in the face. “Yes, it is,” he murmured, heading west toward the river.

He went out for the click, the moment after twenty minutes of loping along at four miles an hour when the endorphins kicked in and the black hole of despair lifted briefly. When he got back to his office forty-five minutes later, there was a message from Emma on his answering machine. She wasn’t in when he returned the call.

A
t nine o’clock in the morning on the third day of the Maggie Wheeler investigation, Sanchez followed Sergeant Joyce out of the Captain’s office. His expression was grim. Captain Higgins was new to the precinct, and it was common knowledge that Higgins had been recently promoted from Organized Crime Control in order to open up his former post for someone else. The Captain had almost no experience in administration and knew next to nothing about running a precinct. His arrival in June had been heralded with little enthusiasm. Since taking over the command, he had done nothing to raise anybody’s hopes about strong leadership in the future.

A taut, wiry man of middling height with gray skin, graying hair, and a nervous twitch in both brown eyes, Higgins looked like a hyperactive mole in expensive shirts. He was used to being on the move without a thousand eyes evaluating his every gesture. Commanding his own precinct seemed to have stamped him very quickly with the bewildered, unresigned expression of an innocent man sentenced unfairly to life inside The Big House.