Reunion at Red Paint Bay (12 page)

“Sounds right, I guess. Who said it?” Amy held up the book:—
Semrad: The Heart of a Therapist
. He figured
that he was supposed to know who Semrad was. She had probably mentioned him dozens of times.

“He mentored a generation of therapists in how to connect to their patients with their heart, not just their heads. But I think he got it backward. People don’t grow when they’re sad, they’re too busy
being
sad. The same if people are angry or depressed or in pain—they get trapped in these emotions.”

“You’re disagreeing with the eminent Semrad?”

“Daring, aren’t I?”

Simon wrote on his pad, and Amy let her book close over her finger. “Doing your column?”

“I’m taking to heart your suggestion that the postcard sender is a threat and making a list of all the people who might want to fold, spindle, or mutilate me.” He scribbled a name, and Amy leaned across the table to see.

“Who’s Ray Jefferson?”

“My first roommate after college. I told him he had to move out after his year was up.”

“Why did you do that?”

Simon tried to project back to his former self. “He seemed fake to me. He’d say things like, ‘I love the smell of winter, don’t you?’ and ‘Making music is like making love’—that’s another one. He was pretending to be sensitive.”

“Maybe he thought you’d like that about him.”

“Why would I care how sensitive he was?”

Amy shrugged. “Sensitivity is one of those positive qualities a person can have.”

“Not to a twenty-two-year-old male it isn’t.”

“Wait—he wasn’t gay, was he?”

“No, I didn’t kick him out because he was gay or I thought he was gay, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“So how did he react?”

Simon remembered the expression on Ray’s face, a strange mixture of embarrassment and disbelief with a dose of hatred. “He said he’d fall apart if I kicked him out, and I guess he did for a while, with cocaine, went to jail for eighteen months. I can imagine him blaming me.”

Amy reached her hand to stroke Casper, and the cat stretched out, exposing her belly. “You think twenty years later he’d still be blaming you?”

“I don’t know,” Simon said. “He
was
the kind to carry a grudge.”

When Simon called Davey
for dinner, the boy came rushing down the steps as always, one misstep away from plunging headlong into the front door. At the bottom he grabbed the post to turn into the hallway, and Simon saw a thin metal handle jutting from his back pocket. “Hold on, what’s that?”

Davey twisted around to see. “What?”

“Is that a knife?”

He pulled it out. “No, it’s a letter opener.”

“A letter opener is a knife.”

The boy rubbed his finger along the blade. “Not when it’s this crappy. It couldn’t cut soup.”

Simon put out his palm, and Davey handed it over, blade first. “Why did you take this off my bureau?”

“Why would I take your stupid old letter opener?”

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

“I found it on the stairs, okay? It was sticking out from the rug.” He pointed to the spot. “You shouldn’t leave your knife lying around like that, Dad, ’cause I could have stepped on it with my bare feet and got lockjaw.”

“I didn’t leave it on the steps, Davey.”

“Does your jaw really lock when you get lockjaw?”

“It can, if you don’t get a tetanus shot.”

“Then I better eat dinner fast.” He started for the kitchen.

“Wait, you didn’t take this out anywhere, did you?”

Davey hesitated. “Not really.”

“What does that mean?”

“I put the knife in my pocket and kind of forgot it was there when I went to Kenny’s.”

“Don’t tell me you took it out at Kenny’s.”

“Okay, I won’t.”

“Davey, did you take it out?”

“Not really.”

“Will you stop saying that? You either did or didn’t take it out.”

“It sort of fell out when we were fooling around.”

“Did you put it somewhere safe when it fell out?”

“Sure, Dad. You think I want to get sliced open by accident?”

“I don’t know what you’re thinking anymore.”

“Yeah, I’m kind of a mystery,” Davey said. “Can I go eat now?”

“Go,” Simon said as he stared at a place on the steps where the rug was pushed up a little, exactly where Davey had pointed.

In bed that night
, the yellow pad propped against his knees, he added to his possible threats. There seemed to be no end to the people who might want to do him in.

Amy let
Semrad
drop on her chest. “Your list is growing.”

“Eleven so far.”

“You can think of eleven people who might want to harm you?”

“Like you said, I’m the editor of a newspaper and apparently I have a knack for pissing people off.” He wrote down a twelfth name—Dana Maines.

Amy tilted the gooseneck lamp to shine on his pad. “What did you do to Dana?”

“We were going to take off to L.A. together after we graduated from Bowdoin. She wanted to be an actress, and I was going to write screenplays she could star in.”

“Sounds like you had it all planned out.”

“Yeah, well, everything seemed possible, if you got out of Maine first. But then I heard she was telling people we were eloping, and getting married was the last thing I wanted to do, since I was waiting for the perfect girl to come along.” He tapped Amy on her arm. “So I screwed up my courage and went to the coffee shop where we were meeting and told her I wasn’t going.”

“How did she take it?”

Simon pushed up the sleeve to his shirt and pointed at several small indentations just below his left shoulder. “She stabbed me with a fork.”

“I thought that was from a vaccination.”

“It’s from Dana. She got really loud saying how I was backing out on her and ruining her dreams. I reached over to quiet her down, and she stabbed me.”

“Bit of an overreaction.”

“I thought so. Anyway, I saw a note in the
Bowdoin Alumni News
a couple of weeks ago that she’s moved back to Portland. I was going to drive over there this week for Jack Monroe’s retirement party from the
Herald
, so I thought I’d look her up and see if she could be the one sending me weird postcards. She was definitely the type.”

“We decided the sender is male.”

“If your theory of penmanship is right, yes.”

“You sure you’re not just looking for an excuse to meet up with an old flame?”

“You’re the only old flame in my life.” He turned toward her to kiss, and as they did he shoved the yellow pad to the floor so that nothing would come between them.

Paul Chambers Walker
leans into the stiff breeze. It invigorates him, the feel of it against his face. To the east he can see a patch of blue between the distant trees, and he’s sure it’s the ocean. So many things are like that, he thinks, recognizable if you already know what you are looking at.

He turns to the small, square office building and scans the list of tenants. There she is—Amelia Howe, second floor. He pushes in the glass doors and takes the broad steps by twos. The first office at the top of the stairs has a gold-plated sign, L
EVIN AND
H
OWE
. He enters the waiting room, empty as he expected it would be at the end of the day. It’s a messy area, with the cheap blue vinyl chairs out of line and magazines
scattered across the coffee table. The large plant in the corner is yellowing and dropping leaves. The inner office door opens and Amy Howe appears, her shoes in her hand. Her hair is pulled back, all business. Close up she seems younger than he thought from the quick glimpses at the carnival, and prettier, perhaps.

She balances on one leg and then the other to slip on her shoes. “I didn’t know anyone was out here.”

“I didn’t mean to surprise you,” he says.

“You must be the one who called about a five o’clock appointment.”

He nods over his shoulder. “You’re overwatering the plant. You’ll kill it that way.”

“Thanks. I’ll watch that.”

She looks him up and down without moving her head, just the slightest shifting of her eyes, a talent she must have honed over years of assessing clients for whatever small mark or twitch that might hint at what is troubling them. They are alone here, a man and a woman. Does she feel their isolation as he does?

She holds out her right hand. “I’m Amy Howe.”

He takes it and shakes repeatedly, squeezing a little harder each time. “Paul Chambers, Dr. Howe.”

“Actually, I’m an LIC SW—a licensed social worker.”

“Sorry.”

She slides her hand gently from his. “I don’t normally see clients at this hour, Mr. Chambers. My last appointment is three to four.”

He smiles a bit sheepishly. “Your service said they would have to check with you about it, and since I didn’t hear back, I figured I’d come over.”

“They tried to reach you. The number you left seems to be wrong.”

“Really?” he says with the appropriate amount of surprise to his voice. “I’m staying over at the Bays-water Inn. Maybe I got the number mixed up. I do that sometimes, I have to confess, a bit of dyslexia with figures. If this is inconvenient for you, I’ll make an appointment for another time, of course.”

She looks indulgently at him, ready to make an exception for a poor soul who can’t even get a simple phone number right. What threat can there be from a man who so willingly offers to leave?

“Since you’re here,” she says, “please come in.”

Paul moves past her into the office and sits in the leather chair. He runs his hands over the smooth brown hide of the arm, back and forth, skin against skin. She goes behind her desk and pulls out a pad. He scans the wall and sees her professional certificate, University of Maine, Orono. A state school.

“May I call you Paul?”

“I prefer Mr. Chambers.”

“Okay, Mr. Chambers, what brings you here?”

Her directness appeals to him, no preliminary questions of who he is and where he comes from. Just
What brings you here?
“I’m having dangerous thoughts.”

His answer doesn’t throw her. No reaction at all, except for letting the pen slide between her fingers and tapping it against her desk, then turning it over and tapping again. Nervousness or stalling? Perhaps a former smoker needing continual stimulation of her fingertips. “What kind of dangerous thoughts?”

“What kind?”

“Your thoughts could be about some thing or person or yourself.”

“Some person.”

“How frequently are you having these thoughts?”

“Every day.” She writes this down on her pad. “Many times a day,” he adds. She writes this, too. “Virtually every moment.” He has her attention now, so why not go all the way? “I even dream dangerous thoughts,” he says. Surely that makes him a very dangerous person, doesn’t it? He leans back in his chair into the drift of cool air coming from the vent in the ceiling. It tickles his nose and makes him sneeze as he always does, three quick times.

“God bless you,” Amy says.

He pulls out his handkerchief to rub his nose. “Catholic.”

“Excuse me?”

“Catholics say God bless you. During the plague the pope ordered people to say that when somebody sneezed because a sneeze was supposed to expel the soul from the body.”

“I’m not Catholic, Mr. Chambers.”

“Not now, no, but how were you raised?”

She opens her mouth as if to answer, then looks down at her pad. He takes this opportunity to size up the small rectangular office, noting its spareness, its utility. There’s nothing diverting on her desk—no Buckyballs or Rubik’s Cube or magnetic puzzles to occupy one’s hands. On the walls, nothing to distract a patient. A thick curtain covers the window. It is the space of a no-nonsense person.

She says, “The dangerous thoughts that you’re concerned about, are you acting on them in any way?”

If he answers yes she’ll undoubtedly inquire as to what actions he has taken. If he answers no she’ll presume he’s just talk. He knows the drill. “Maybe.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t understand
maybe
.”

Of course she doesn’t. Ambivalence isn’t allowed here. He’s either acting on his dangerous thoughts or he isn’t. He’s either crazy or he isn’t. He’s either justified in his actions or he isn’t.

“It’s a long story,” he says. “How shall I begin?”