Disintegration Part 7

Back under the suns.h.i.+ne of the parking lot, Jacob looked out at the vast green ridges that surrounded Kingsboro. The tops of houses were scattered among the slopes, and a few oversize displays of success rose above the tree line. He'd never blamed anyone for building up high, and the views allowed Realtors to demand outrageous lot prices. Jacob himself had put together a few cabin subdivisions, some of which had led to the slaughter of hundreds of old-growth hardwoods. Money didn't grow on trees, but paper came from trees and money was printed on paper. The progression had once seemed logical.

Instead of running through the forest and screaming at the top of his lungs, he had to walk with feigned dignity a couple of blocks to the counselor's office. He knew he should change his jacket, at least. He'd slept in the s.h.i.+rt for three nights running and the white collar had turned a dingy shade of ivory. His shoes were scuffed and muddy. The uniform was all wrong for the business at hand. But he couldn't muster the energy for a shower and shave, and most of his clothes had burned up in the fire. The real estate mogul's stage costume he once wore was now smoke, mingled with the melted electrical wiring and the ash of rayon carpet, entwined with the soul of his dead daughter.

If only he hadn't stopped by the M & W office in the middle of the night, drunk and looking for money. He'd cleaned out the petty cash drawer, flipped through his mail, and found her note: "Meet me at Total Wellness at 3 p.m. Wednesday. Please. I love you. Renee."

It was a waste of time, and he didn't want to expose their pain to a stranger. He'd had enough of counselors when he was a teenager. But he owed her something. He wasn't sure what, but if he gave her an hour, maybe she would shut up and leave him alone. She'd brought out the heavy artillery, the bravest lie or the most pathetic truth: "I love you."

Total Wellness was a two-story building set off the highway in a business park. It combined a daycare, substance abuse center, and counseling services and was subsidized by various government funds. The behavioral health care industry was booming in these days of escalating stress, all bright brick and painted columns, the sun and clouds reflecting off the windows. Jacob cut through the lawn, no longer a man for sidewalks and other ordinary routes.

Shouts arose from the daycare's playground. Jacob couldn't imagine a worse sound. The high-pitched laughter was broken gla.s.s in his ears. How dare those children be happy and healthy when all those tomorrows ahead were denied to Mattie and Christine? Through the whitewashed fence, he could see the swing sets, tangled hair, and pale, dirty faces.

He stopped, his lungs like stone.

Mattie stood behind the fence, her arm thrust between the tall pickets. Her upturned hand was curled into a small fist.

Her fingers slowly uncurled, and gray ash poured from her palm.

Jacob reeled, the sky spun, and he found himself on his hands and knees, his face pressed against the gra.s.s. Vomit sluiced up from his gut, razing a raw path through his throat and stinging his nasal cavity. Tears filled his eyes as he coughed and spat the dregs of undigested liquor and bile. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and looked back at the fence.

Mattie was gone. A dark red ball floated over the playground fence, hung a moment at the apex of its arc then fell as if gravity held a grudge. The giggles continued, an adult supervisor shouted, and one of the kids began bawling. Someone was watching Jacob from a window, and he forced himself to stand and head for the counseling center.

They would think he was just another drunk putting in a court-ordered visit. The disguise fit too readily. He swallowed and the acid burned its way back to his stomach. A drink would help, but he was dehydrated and knew the liquor wouldn't stay down. Jacob staggered through the double doors.

A woman with a pinched face slid open a gla.s.s window at the counter and sniffed like a rodent. "May I help you, sir?"

Help. That was a good one. "I have an appointment."

"With whom?" She flipped through a notebook. "Or are you looking for the AA meeting? That's in Room 117, down the hall to your left."

"I'm in no shape for quitting," he said. "I'm with Rheinsfeldt."

"Oh." The clerk checked the book. "Excuse me, Mr. Wells. I didn't recognize you."

Jacob was sure he'd never met the woman. But his photo was on file at the local newspaper, and between the Chamber of Commerce and the Kiwanis Club, he appeared in its pages at least twice a year. His development projects often came before various planning boards, sometimes bringing opposition from the neighborhoods where M & W's bulldozers disturbed morning sleep and residential character. And, of, course, the fire had been front-page news.

He licked his chapped lips. "Has Mrs. Wells arrived?"

"No, sir, but if you'll have a seat, I'll let Dr. Rheinsfeldt know you're here."

"That's okay, I'll do it myself." Jacob pushed open the door that led to the private offices, feeling the clerk's stare on his back. He wanted to show up for the appointment early and chat with the doctor for a couple of minutes, so that Renee would walk through the door already on the defensive. Jacob had learned from past experience that psychologists naturally gravitated to whichever side seemed most in need of "curing."

Jacob read the names on the doors as he went down the hall. A cadre of wise and caring souls sat behind those doors, with leather chairs and computers and rows of books on the shelves. Their heads were filled with questions and they deluded themselves into thinking they served a n.o.ble purpose. Their meat was anger and pain, their drink was pity disguised as sympathy. They had all the crude hunger of vampires and slightly less moral conscience.

The patients were perhaps even more complicit in the cycle of mutual dependency. They sat, wept, shared personal troubles that would be worthy of canned laughter if displayed in a television sitcom. The best part was they only had to open their souls for a single hour, and then they could stumble into the suns.h.i.+ne believing they had shed themselves of a bothersome skin. They could pretend they were a step closer to wholeness, but Jacob knew the whole was always less than the sum of its parts.

Because, where he went, so did Joshua.

He took a drink from a water fountain in the hall, then slipped into the rest room and swallowed as much of the whiskey as he could stomach. He rinsed his mouth and splashed water onto his face. A pale, pinched face stared back at him from the mirror. With his bloodshot eyes and swollen eyelids, he could easily pa.s.s for a crier. If you wanted to win a joint counseling session, imagined tears scored more points than honest and soul-deep revelations. He should know. He'd won all of his counseling sessions as a child.

Dr. Rheinsfeldt's office was the last on the left wing. The door was open. Rheinsfeldt was a shriveled, shrunken troll doll of a woman, her hair as wild and wispy as Einstein's. She pretended not to see him, as if giving him an opportunity to case the room. Let the rat sniff the cheese before you send it on a run through the maze Let the rat sniff the cheese before you send it on a run through the maze, Jacob thought.

Magazines were spread haphazardly across the coffee table in the center of the room, smart stuff: Science News Science News, Consumer Reports Consumer Reports, Smithsonian Smithsonian. A spotless gla.s.s ashtray lay on top of them, one virgin cigarette resting in a notch on the rim. A single shelf on the wall bowed under the weight of thick hardcovers. The dusty books looked as if they had been undisturbed since the days of Jung.

Rheinsfeldt closed the magazine she had been reading, unfolded her rubbery legs from beneath her torso, and reached for the cigarette. She put it in her mouth and spoke around its stem. "You must be Jacob Wells."

Jacob looked into the hall behind him. "Oh, you're talking to me."

"A sense of the absurd. I like that. Please come in and have a seat."

The room had two chairs and a small couch, arranged in a triangle. This was the first and most obvious test. Rheinsfeldt would slide his peg into a certain shape of hole depending upon where he sat. If he chose the chair beside hers, it would reflect urgency and desperation, a desire for an ally. On the other hand, if he sat on the couch, then Renee might be expected to sit beside him in a show of matrimonial support. He decided on the third alternative, the middle of the couch, which left no room for Renee on either side of him. When he sat, Rheinsfeldt's dark eyes glimmered with satisfaction, as if she had suspected such a move from the start.

"Most couples arrive for counseling sessions together," Rheinsfeldt said, removing the unlit cigarette from her mouth and placing it in her small purse.

"Renee believes in being punctual. I believe in being early."

"Ah. All relations.h.i.+ps are built on conflict. Why should marriage be any different?"

"Have you ever been married?"

"What, are you crazy?"

"Then why should we listen to anything you have to say?"

"Because, Jacob, I can't tell you anything. All I can do is help you hear yourself."

Jacob looked at the walls. Rheinsfeldt's gaze was like a hundred needles trying to pin him to a cork board. He looked out the window, but it was small and revealed only a square of boring blue. The room's walls and ceiling came at him as if he was in a trash compactor, and he closed his eyes.

Renee's entrance was heralded by her hair conditioner, a minty brand that used to arouse instant erotic feelings in Jacob. Now it was the stench of failure, as sickening as wood smoke. He forced himself to look at her, knowing those green eyes would remind him of Mattie.

He realized with horror that he couldn't quite recall the rest of Mattie's face.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

Renee looked around the room at the incomprehensible art, anywhere but at Jacob's face. She couldn't decide if Dr. Rheinsfeldt's tastes in interior decoration were personal or clinical. The woman herself was squat and toadish, eyes dark with looming advice. She gave the impression of someone whose interpersonal relations.h.i.+ps had been dramatic and brief.

"Where to begin?" Rheinsfeldt said.

"You're supposed to ask, 'What brings you both here today?'" Jacob said. He stank of liquor and a sour rot. "Didn't they teach you that in shrink school?"

"Don't mind him," Renee said. She could barely stand to look at him. If those police reports were true, she didn't know the man she'd shared the last ten years of her life with.

There you go again," he said.

"He's been drinking," she said to Rheinsfeldt.

"Have you been drinking, Jacob?"

"Maybe." He crossed his arms and slumped down in the couch.

"Okay. This isn't a treatment program," Rheinsfeldt said. "You can do that later if you need to and want to. Right now, let's get a dialogue going about this other thing."

"The thing," Renee said. Reduced to a single vague noun, The Tragedy seemed to have lost its power. She tried to see the two of them through Rheinsfeldt's eyes: a wild-eyed, frantic woman and a drunken, unshaven man in filthy clothes. Renee's right hand went to her wedding band and she twisted it until her knuckle was red.

"I read the papers," Rheinsfeldt said. "Everybody's heard of the Wells family and the fire. I think that's where we need to start. That's where the pain is. The death of a child--I can only imagine."

"No," Renee said. "The pain started before that."

"Tell me."

"Don't you dare," Jacob said.

Renee forced herself to look at him. His jaw trembled, cheeks still pink where the new skin had formed. He looked like an alien, a Hollywood stunt double with a lump of putty piled on his shoulders, broken marbles stuck in for eyes. He ran the back of his hand over his lips and jerked forward, as if wanting to beat her to the punch line of some pointless joke.

"She's always been like this," he blurted.

"Always?" Rheinsfeldt said. "When was that?"

"When we first got together," Renee said. "He pretended to open up, but there was always something hidden away. He didn't even tell me his family was rich until we had dated for half a year." "She was always after the money," Jacob said.

"See what I mean?" Renee said to Rheinsfeldt. "How can he even talk about money when our children are dead?"

"Jacob? That sounds like a pretty d.a.m.ning observation."

"I take half the blame for Christine."

"Christine," Rheinsfeldt said. "That was last year?"

Renee opened her purse and brought out tissues, ignoring the box of Kleenex on the edge of the table. The box was too perfectly positioned, its calculated alignment not matching the chaos of the room. She took off her gla.s.ses and wiped her eyes. "Christine was a SIDS baby."

"I'm terribly sorry. How was the marriage going before then?"

"It wasn't heaven but we were working on it, for the sake of the children."

"I hate to say it, but that's not the only reason for making a marriage work. You're not just a mother, you're also a human being, with wants and needs of your own."

"I'm not a mother anymore." Renee felt the familiar pressure in her chest, swallowed hard, and squeezed the damp tissue.

"And she wants way more than she needs," Jacob said.

"I understand your anger," Rheinsfeldt said. "You have a right to be angry for such a loss."

"Jacob hasn't been himself lately," Renee cut in, hating herself for defending him. "He was under a lot of pressure in his business. Jacob never talked much about it, but his partner told me the company was burned by a couple of contractors and--"

"You don't know anything about land development," Jacob said. "All you know is a big house and nice appliances, LL Bean and Nieman Marcus catalogs."

"Let's get back to Christine," Rheinsfeldt said. "I know you'd rather not talk about it, but--"

"It was a Tuesday," Renee said, and her hands grew cold even though the room was as stifling as a coffin in h.e.l.l. Jacob had never let her talk about Christine, and though Renee and Kim had cried together a dozen times afterwards, she still ached to spill it all again, as if the act of psychological spewing would purge the poison from her system. "I'd just got off the phone with my mother. Christine was down for her afternoon nap, she was as steady as a clock, naps at ten and three. I had soup on. I was trying to save money then, figuring with two children we had a lot of college to pay for one day. The soup was boiling over--"

"She called me at work that morning to gripe," Jacob said. "Said she was tired of cutting her fingers to get rid of leftover vegetable sc.r.a.ps and why couldn't she just put some groceries on the credit card--"

"Let her finish, Jacob."

Renee felt a sick but grateful smile slide across her face. Rheinsfeldt was as tough as any prison warden, and she seemed to be on Renee's side. "I burned my fingers," Renee said. "That's what the medics said when they arrived. I don't remember much after that, but I took the pot off and then went to check on Christine because it was nearly four and about time for Mattie to get home from school."

"That's when she found her," Jacob said.

"What did you see?" Rheinsfeldt asked Renee.

"You have to keep it a secret, don't you? I mean, patient-doctor privilege or whatever?"

"Yes. Everything you say in this room stays in this room. Except the parts you take with you."

Renee looked at Jacob, expecting to see hatred in those stranger's eyes, but he only nodded in resignation. She would tell it the way he wanted. She'd once promised in front of G.o.d to honor and obey him.

"I went in, and Mattie was standing over the crib. I didn't hear her, but she must have come through the sliding gla.s.s doors in back and up the stairs. She was pale and her lips moved but she wasn't making a sound. And neither was Christine. You have any children? No? Then you probably don't know babies are never absolutely quiet, no matter what. Even when they're asleep, they twitch or sigh or wheeze or kick the blankies."

"Christine was way too quiet," Jacob said. "Blue."

"It was the blankies," Renee said, and the words came easy, just as they had when she talked to the rescue squad and then the doctors and then the police. She's said them so often that the words were a recitation. "There's this new thing where you're not supposed to let babies sleep on their stomachs, so I had blankies in there to prop her up on her back. But somehow she turned and got under them. She--"

"Mattie knew something was wrong right away," Jacob said. "It was Mattie who called 9-1-1 while Renee tried to revive Christine."

"How terrible," Rheinsfeldt said, and the wrinkled troll-doll face looked almost sad. "Where were you?" she asked Jacob.

"On a job site. We were clearing for a subdivision. If it wasn't for the cell phone--"

"You mean Mattie didn't call you first?"

"I told Mattie to call 9-1-1," Renee said. "What the h.e.l.l is this? We had enough of that stuff from the police. We're the victims, remember?"

"I'm just trying to understand," Rheinsfeldt said, her eyes seeming to grow a shade darker and more obscure.

"It wouldn't have mattered anyway," Jacob said. "The ME fixed the time of death at around 3:15. Christine must have smothered shortly after Renee put her down."

"You know the only thing that's kept me from losing my mind?" Renee saw that Jacob was paying attention now. If only he'd paid that much attention in the immediate aftermath, when depression crushed her like G.o.d snuffing a cigarette.

"What?" Rheinsfeldt asked. The woman didn't take any kind of notes. Maybe she was arrogant enough to count on memory, but Renee knew that memory could lie. Memory told you all the lies you wanted to hear. You could count on it to deceive you.

"Because it seems like it happened to somebody else. I mean, I know I was there, I know I had the baby, but she was gone so fast, I can tell myself she was never born. And don't preach to me about denial, or the value of acceptance. This is how I grieve--by not letting it have happened, at least not to me."

Jacob put his head in his hands and spoke to the floor. "I tried not to blame her."