Mercy (53 page)

Outside a quick wind rose up from the bayou and the sky darkened as the trees began to shudder and then toss, their upper reaches bending and springing as a heavy rain slammed down through their thick canopies with an ominous roar, as if high above them a ranging, angry wind was passing over the city.

Mary Lowe had stopped talking—one of her unpredictable silences—and was lying motionless on the chaise watching the changing tint of bruised light that suffused the woods in the wake of the brief torrent and whipping winds. The harrowing story of her stepfather’s sexual abuse, events that had haunted and distorted her life up to this very moment, had left Broussard completely unaffected. He had listened without empathy, staring at her exposed leg as though it were the physical equivalent of the Sirens’ song, a temptation of beauty so irresistible that it had bled him of compassion and simple dignity. Her child’s anguish that she had carried with her into adulthood like a night terror elicited no stirrings of tenderness in Broussard’s heart, at least none so strong as to override the quite different effect of her long naked thigh.

“There was a significant change in the way we related to each other once he began having intercourse with me,” Mary said. Her eyes were still on the darkened landscape, but they were dreamy rather than comprehending.

“He would come to me earlier in the night. I had gotten so that I closed my bedroom door every night, hoping that somehow that would discourage him. One time I actually locked it, but the next day he picked me up after school himself—I usually walked home with friends. He made such a scene of crying and whining and saying I didn’t love him, saying that I wasn’t grateful for the new life that he had given us, that he succeeded in planting in my mind the fear that he might abandon us if I wasn’t more accommodating. That night I left the door unlocked.”

Mary nodded her head slightly as if confirming a point.

“This was a new wrinkle, a new fear for me for the next few years. That is, if I didn’t let him have his way with me then he would abandon us. I didn’t want to have that on my conscience. I didn’t want to be the reason Mother had to go back to waiting tables and living in cheap apartment houses, crying herself to sleep at nights. I began to see myself as the glue that held the three of us together. My mother’s happiness, and the three of us being a ‘family,’ became my responsibility. If I wanted things to stay the way they were, then I had to give him what he wanted.

“In a way, really, I became the mother. I was the one who had sexual intercourse with him. I was the one who cooked in the kitchen with him and cleaned up after meals with him. I was the one who received his affection. But at nights I would turn my face to the wall and pray that I wouldn’t hear the doorknob turning, wouldn’t hear the little ‘chunk’ sound of the latch opening. I went to sleep every night with a knot in my stomach, fearing I would wake up to find him pressing his naked body next to me.”

In her agitation she now had gathered the hem of her skirt in both hands, wadding it, worrying it, apparently unaware that she was revealing so much of her body. She seemed not to regard the material as her skirt at all, but as some sort of security blanket that needed handling. Broussard hoped that she would work it high enough for him to get a glimpse of her panties.

“I began to have nightmares,” she said flatly. “They were vicious, horrifying episodes full of imagery I didn’t understand and didn’t want to remember. I thought, in my child’s mind, that I was being punished for what he was doing to me. That I was being punished. That’s how a child thinks, you know: I was being punished for what he was doing to me. I knew instinctively that what we were doing was sick, and because I felt dirty I automatically accepted the guilt. But there were moments of doubt about that…my guilt. To absorb that much guilt is a horrible burden, and I had to have some relief from it. So I began to question what was happening, and why. If I was being punished, who was punishing me? God? Was it God? Was he sending these nightmares? A child isn’t a fool, you know. I knew I was, or was intended to be, an innocent in the world. And I thought: God would do this to me? What about my father? What about his penis, his probing fingers, his tongue, and all that…semen he spilled on me at nights? And God was punishing me? That was when I quit believing in God. I decided that somebody had made a mistake about God.”

She stopped a moment. “And those night terrors. They got so bad I was staying awake all night to avoid them. I began falling asleep in classes; my grades began to drop. The dreams were almost unbearable for about six months, I guess, and then they began to taper off. The images were so vivid I could have drawn them. Certain creatures recurred so that I immediately knew them when they appeared and knew what role they would play in my torment. I dreaded them as intensely as I dreaded him creeping into my room in the dark. To this day when I have nightmares, they come back. The same ones.”

She grew still. “An astonishing thing happened years later, about those nightmares. The images, the creatures that came to me in those dreams, were particularly grotesque. They were…fleshy and viscous interpretations of genitalia, personifications that…slithered and bored and enfolded and suffocated. Incredibly frightening to me. And, in the morning, in the daylight, I felt all the more stained and corrupt because these creations had come from inside my own head. I was quite sure that no one in the world but me could have imagined anything like them. And then one year, while I was in college, I went to an art exhibit, a variety of works of contemporary artists, a touring exhibit from Britain. There, along one wall—I remember it was a gray wall against which they had hung the exhibit—were the creatures of my nightmares on the canvases of a woman named Sybylle Ruppert. I was stunned. Right there in the art museum, in front of Ruppert’s
The Third Sex
, I fainted.”

Mary had opened her hands, her fingers spread wide as she pressed them and the wadded hem of her skirt against her lower stomach. With her legs fully exposed, Broussard now noticed that her legs were not straight on the chaise, but that she had turned her knees slightly inward, was pressing her thighs together defensively. This was a subtle, unconscious gesture, and enormously telling. Then as he watched her, she slowly began relaxing the tension in her legs until they were straight again, and she continued.

“Anyway, as time passed, I found it more and more difficult to get involved with the girls at school. I don’t know, their…lives seemed so…unrelated, even trivial. They belonged to all sorts of extracurricular activities that I couldn’t participate in because my father wanted me to come straight home after school. He always wanted me at home, so I grew more removed from my friends, more distant, more isolated. You know, I think he didn’t want me to have any interests other than him. I mean, I was feeling smothered by him. He was kind…”

She cut her eyes at Broussard. Luckily, he happened to be looking out the window.

“I’ve said that a lot, haven’t I?”

“What’s that?” he asked. Broussard never feared sounding as though he wasn’t listening to his clients. It did not make them suspicious that he sometimes sounded distracted. They thought it was something to do with technique. Maybe they thought it was some kind of Socratic approach, some kind of Freudian technique for him to ask questions to which he should have known the answer if he had been listening.

“That he was kind to me.”

“Yes. Three or four times already.”

“Well, he was,” she said, turning her eyes to her busily fidgeting hands. “It was only that he was preoccupied with me. I mean, I was a little girl. I wanted to be with other little girls. But he was all over me, physically, emotionally, every way.”

She paused.

“I started lying to him. Nothing particularly important, but I just quit telling him the truth. It didn’t matter what it was, I just lied whenever I had the opportunity. Maybe he’d ask me something like: ‘What do you want to watch on television tonight?’ and I’d name a program that he knew I didn’t like. He’d give me strange looks at first, but I went ahead with it. I watched programs I hated. I’d lie to him about the kinds of clothes I liked when he took me shopping, and he’d end up buying clothes I didn’t like. And I’d wear them. I lied to him about food that I liked or didn’t like. I lied to him about where I’d laid the scissors or whether I’d closed the yard gate or wanted some more iced tea or whether I was too hot or too cold. I also started lying to my friends at school, even when I had to go out of my way to do it. Of course, I was found out a lot and that started alienating people, too.”

Mary put her right hand flat on her bare thigh, the other hand still holding the hem of her skirt, her wrist crooked daintily as though she were raising it coyly.

“I know why I did that. Lying. I’ve thought about it. It gave me a sense, a feeling of control over my own life. It was something that occurred only when I wanted it to, or didn’t occur if I didn’t want it to. It wasn’t something I did for anyone else, only for myself. It was a realm in which I wasn’t helpless. In fact, I was all-powerful. When I lied I became the master of little destinies. Things happened or didn’t happen because I said so, and I could exercise this power in front of everyone, and no one could usurp it. By reacting to my lies, other people did things they wouldn’t have done otherwise. It was a way to manipulate them, and I got to the point that I would rather lie than tell the truth. I would go out of my way to do it.

“But I went through a pretty bad period for a while, when I was twelve and thirteen. I grew introverted and isolated, daydreaming all the time. Daydreaming became a major preoccupation—another way, I guess, of exercising some kind of control over my own ‘world.’ It was the only thing to do, because the real world itself was getting pretty weird. Screwing your daddy will do that to you, turn your world into a hallucination.”

Broussard looked at her. Mary did not often use crude language. It was a sign of disdain, for herself and for what she had done. She delicately reached a long-nailed finger up under the edge of her raised hemline and scratched lightly along her groin. Broussard was suddenly desperate to see her naked hips.

“One night after I hadn’t slept for several nights in a row to avoid the nightmares, I couldn’t fight it any longer. I passed out, exhausted. I was too far under to wake up when I needed to go to the bathroom, and I wet the bed. Sometime during the night he came and crawled under the covers with me. He woke me, furious and disgusted, and stormed out of the room. Even half conscious, I realized what a discovery I’d made. The next night I wet the bed immediately, knowing I’d be safe sleeping in urine. It worked every night for almost two weeks. I was so starved for sleep that I got used to the smell and feel of it without any trouble at all. By the end of the first week, though, I’d developed a terrible, burning rash on my hips and thighs. Still, I didn’t care. I thought I’d found the solution to all my torment—my own urine.

“And then one night he came to me crying, whimpering, wanting to know how I could do that to him, didn’t I love him, didn’t I want it to be nice for us? Why did I pee on the sheets? He made me get out of bed, and he gave me a damp washcloth he had brought. He made me wash myself while he watched and scolded me for ‘acting like an animal.’ That night he did it to me on the floor, with the side of my head bent up against my toy box. And he was deliberately rough. It was the sort of message I’d become good at reading. The next night he came into a dry bed.”

The asymmetrical pucker at the corner of Mary’s mouth disappeared as she set her jaw, her expression as hard as Broussard imagined her heart. His eyes were fixed on the highest point of her naked thigh. He adjusted his position in his leather armchair, aware that his swollen member was an ignoble reaction, wishing that he could have remained objective.

It had been his failing as a psychoanalyst, his inability to stand aloof from the sensuality of the women who came to him. Of course, it was often their intention to seduce him. It was part of the process of transference, a roller-coaster ride in which the analyst was not supposed to let his heart leap into his throat at every breathtaking plunge. After all, he had been there many times before, and he was supposed to have his wits about him. But when it came to this kind of woman, he thought, never taking his eyes off her upper thigh where the sinew ran taut into the groin, he often found that clear thinking was as difficult to sustain as a dream in the sunlight.

43

N
o one rushed in to fill the silence this time, and the only thing that Palma could hear in her head was the sound of her own voice telling Sander Grant that the behavioral psychology model that the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit was using to analyze violent crimes was badly flawed. It would have been a gutsy and audacious charge under formal circumstances, but delivered as it had been, pointedly and in considerable heat, Palma was suddenly afraid that it had had the sound of lunacy. Then this weak-kneed fear rising within her like a contrite and groveling Victorian throwback infuriated her, and she summoned up an inner resolve that sustained her through what otherwise would have been a withering silence, enervating enough to have extracted some kind of garbled, equivocal, follow-up from even the hardest detective. But she remained silent, staring at Grant to whom she had addressed her last words.

She didn’t know how long they sat that way—it certainly couldn’t have been as long as it felt—with Grant’s heavy eyes lying on her like a great weight, a weight sure of its density, unperturbed by futile efforts to lift it off. Oddly, she felt that his broken nose gave his British rectitude a kind of humanity on the one hand, while on the other it reflected an integrity of knowledge that had been earned through experience, that means of learning most respected by the fraternity of her peers. Even as she stared at him she believed, almost against her will, that by his silence Grant had no intention to humiliate her. He was thinking, and she had learned from walking through the crime scenes with him that he didn’t care what kind of impression he was making when he was thinking.