You Are Not A Stranger Here Read online

  my Father's business? . . . My father's business . . . Open to any page. Here, take a book, Mr. Markham, yes there, that wetted paragraph, read the words.

  [end of final tape]

  M C L E A N ' S H O S P I T A L

  1 1 5 M I L L S T R E E T

  B E L M O N T , M A 0 2 4 7 8

  Office of Dr. Anthony Houston

  February 11, 1998

  Winston P. Gollinger, M.D.

  231 Pine Street

  Brookline, Massachusetts 02346

  Dear Win,

  You inquired about the progress of Daniel Markham. As of a week ago, he is no longer a patient at the hospital, having checked himself out.

  He was under my care for three months. After

  coming off his initial manic high, he was moderately to severely depressed nearly every day of his stay. I tried several drug regimens, some with partial efficacy. If there was any real progress, and I'm not sure there was, it came in our twice-weekly therapy sessions. 190

  Here he exhibited brief periods of animation. Once I'd read the transcript and listened to the tapes I was able to engage him on the topic of philosophy. This seemed to provide some bearing for him. A friend named Kyle Johnson brought him books and this appeared to boost his mood somewhat. The nurses report that on his better days he spent most of his time reading.

  Around Christmas, his father made an unfortunate visit to the hospital. He was in a full-blown manic episode, soliciting staff and nurses for investments in an offshore hedge fund. Needless to say, the visit didn't help Daniel, and a week later I increased his dosage of Depakote.

  We both know these refractory cases are out

  there. We did the best we could. Without medication, I'd be surprised if Charles Markham doesn't commit suicide within five years. Daniel's still young, the course of his disease difficult to predict.

  If I hear anything further I will contact you. If Daniel reenters treatment with you, please let me know.

  Sincerely,

  Anthony Houston, M.D.

  T H E T R A I N C L I C K S past the backyards of Bradford. One strewn with children's plastic toys. Another with its ground 191

  churned up, ready for the sod of a new lawn. Daniel leans his head against the glass, letting his eyes drop out of focus, the trees becoming a gentle blur. Without looking, he takes the papers from his lap and places them facedown on the seat beside him. Soon the train begins to slow. At Bradford Hills, he watches the father two rows up gather his briefcase under one arm, take his young son by the hand, and walk down the aisle. Emptier still, the train moves on, past the tennis courts and baseball fields where Daniel played as a child, past the supermarket where he bagged groceries after school and the police station where he and his mother used to file the missing persons reports.

  Have they picked him up, he wonders, dressed in a swimsuit in a supermarket aisle, pleading with a stranger to read a sheet of paper he clasps in his hands? Or is he at the apartment he mentioned the last time they spoke, some friend Daniel had never heard of, a woman who told fortunes? That he can sit placidly on this train and imagine any of this astonishes Daniel. That in this moment of reprieve he feels neither despair nor exaltation.

  Just behind the post office, the train comes to a halt at Bradford Square. He takes up the papers, the envelope, the empty soda can, lifts himself from the seat.

  The day has become warm, the dampness of the morning rain lingering in the air. He climbs the staircase into the parking lot and heads across it toward Washington Street. The sidewalks have been redone with brick, and there are new benches and lampposts, all painted the same dark green. There are even more Mercedes and Jaguars than he remem192 bers, even more wealthy young mothers with painted faces and gold jewelry, pushing strollers by restaurants and boutiques. He walks past the library. By the pay phone there is a garbage can, and into it he throws the file and all its contents: the test reports, the duplicate prescriptions, the blood levels, the doctors' notes, the interviews, the predictions of experts. At the Pond Street intersection, he waits for the walk sign and then crosses. The sun is nearly out, playing faint shadows on the sidewalk, beginning to glisten against the road's wet pavement. The tires of the passing cars make a swishing sound as they go by. A warm breeze drifts over the street and into the budding trees.

  Ahead, he sees the sign for Saint Mary's. A path leads up to the church's brick tower and then heads off down the side of the building. He follows the path around to the gate. The cemetery is no more than a couple of acres, crowded with headstones and flowers. At the back, they've cleared a copse of trees to make room for a few more parishioners. He sees the line of Kyle's shoulders hunched over a wheelbarrow, and closing the gate behind him, makes his way over the carefully tended grass.

  "Dan," Kyle says, looking up from his work on the grave,

  "you made it."

  For a moment, here, in the calm he knows is only the eye of the storm, in the center of a turbulence that, despite everything anyone has ever written or said, might not mean a thing, he can only stare into his friend's gentle face, and listen, with gratitude, to the sounds of the world around him. 193

  T H E V O L U N T E E R

  2

  I

  T H E B O Y H A S given her hope, a hope Elizabeth never imagined she'd have again. Seven weeks in a row he has come to visit her. An awkward teenager, lonely she suspects, curious in ways that will not help him defeat others in the competition for success. He comes with a pad and pencils and asks her 194

  what she would like him to draw. Her walls are decorated with his work: sketches of the woods behind his house, the view from this window, but mostly self-portraits, conventional at the outset by the mirror, growing more expressive as they progress across the wall, his eyes growing small, his forehead larger, the pencil's lead smudged to blur the lines. His visits have given her weeks a purpose. She spends hours imagining their conversation, thinking of questions she wants to ask, and then like a nervous mother forgets them when he arrives.

  From her window, Elizabeth watches the day ending out in the harbor. Cloud is filling the sky from the east, tarnishing the blue waves, leaving only a pale strip of light fading across the Atlantic horizon. Soon it will be time to eat. She will walk the tiled corridor, past the rooms of her fellow residents, into the dining hall, where Marsha, the cook, will wave to her, and she will take her seat at the table and consume the starchy food. If there is such a thing as a placid bell, then it is the bell that rings for supper at the Plymouth Brewster Structured Living Facility at five-thirty every day of the year. Hearing its soft chime, Elizabeth turns back into the room, and putting on her cardigan and slippers, commences her daily journey. Later, on her return, she sees the Primidone tablets waiting in their white paper cup on her bedside table, placed there as always by Judith, the staff nurse. For more than two decades, Elizabeth Maynard has done exactly as she is told and the voice of Hester, which has cost her so much, comes only quietly and intermittently. It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off. These last few weeks, 195

  try though she has, there have been moments during Ted's visits when Elizabeth got stuck in the medication's sludge, patches of time slowing to a halt. The boy has reminded her of what there is to miss. She only wants to know him as a person would. In her heart, she can't believe this is too much to ask. It might do her good to have a little break, she muses to herself, placing the tablets at the back of her dresser drawer.

  " S T O P F U C K I N G T RY I N G would you!" his brother yells from downstairs as Ted stands at their mother's bedroom door calling softly, "Are you awake?"

  "If you're not in my car in twenty seconds you're walking!" John shouts from the kitchen. Ted tries the handle, but as usual it's locked. He wants to see if she's okay, but there's no time now so he grabs his book bag from his room and skips down the stairs.

  In the car, his brother plays Rage Against the Machine loud enough to make the seats vi
brate. He runs two stop signs and doesn't speak the whole way to school. Finally, in the parking lot, Ted slips on his headset and a British rock star's lilting voice sweeps everything from his mind: She walks in beauty like the night, ba ba ba ba ba da da, followed, as he climbs the front steps, by words he can never make out, Mar- ilyn something, and then at last, as he turns into the corridor, the part he's been waiting for, I'm aaaaching to see my hero- ine, I'm aaaaching to see my heroine, his head swooning to the rise of the vocal line, a line of bliss, followed by a tap on the shoulder--Mr. Ananian's lips saying, "Turn that thing off."

  196

  The stop button clicks in his ears.

  "I'm not telling you again."

  Twenty-odd students slumped on their tan Formica desks, forty-five minutes of advanced algebra, not a hope of seeing Lauren Jencks. He feels ill.

  "Oh my God," he says, working a quizzical expression,

  "I totally forgot my notebook--I'll be right back," and he turns into the hall, walking quickly away, the door slamming behind him.

  "Way to go," Stevie Piper says, giving him a thumbs-up as he darts out of a chemistry class. "You got to come tonight, man--Phoebe Davidson's parents are outta town."

  "Sure," Ted says, hurrying down the hall toward the art wing, where Lauren has life drawing. He's nervous already about her spotting him at the door of the classroom, though he knows she knows he's been looking at her for weeks, even months, ever since she arrived at school the beginning of term. Mrs. Theodopoulos has a photograph of a dog set on an easel at the front of the class and she's using a pointer to direct her students' attention to the dog's ear. The kids, their backs to Ted, smudge charcoal on drawing paper, doing ears. Lauren's in the second row: faded orange cardigan with the pockets stretched open, a bar of sunlight slanting across her back, a patch of her short brown hair shining above her ear, no earring. He loves the fact she doesn't wear rings or necklaces or makeup and how large her eyes are and how she seems about ten years older than he is, as though she's traveled the world five times over and for some mysterious reason, bad karma or whatever, is being made to repeat life in 197

  high school. In his room at night, when he demurely puts his image of her aside to jack off to the cruder images on the Net, he thinks she must want to tell someone how that's been, to have to return from such distant places. If on certain rare occasions he does let himself undress her, she's always on top, her back arched, her eyes closed, this look on her face as though she's remembering another time, but then as he's about to come she opens her eyes and leans down and they stare at each other before he rises up to kiss her, exploding. From where he's standing, hard now thinking about her, he can't see her dog's ear. He leans his head in against the glass, trying to catch a glimpse of the side of her face, her hand, the drawing, leaving out of his field of vision the approaching juggernaut of Mrs. Theodopoulos storming the aisle, ballistic finger outstretched. She is halfway to the door when he sees her, the class turning now to watch, his heart thudding.

  Giddy, he dodges and runs.

  From the third floor walkway he can see across the courtyard, through the window, over Mrs. Theodopoulos's shoulder, and into the first two rows of the art room. Since Lauren's friends started laughing at the sight of him a few weeks back he's known there is no point in playing it cool. He stares at her without pretense. Bring it on, he thinks, bring on the ridicule, go ahead, call me pathetic and ugly and desperate, snicker at me, roll your eyes, say you'd never touch me in a million years, that you'd all rather sleep with a monkey, go ahead, shout it.

  No one seems to be watching him. They scrawl at their 198

  papers, minds still in bed, bodies drowsing through first period.

  Then it happens. She looks up over her easel, and squinting, sees him. She smiles. He is sure of it. Lauren Jencks has identified him at thirty yards, and she's smiling--at him or with him, he doesn't dare to guess. He plays it cool, waves casually, starts walking away. It is decided then, he will take his tray to her table today, giggling friends be damned. He knows he must calm himself before they meet. In the bathroom stall he tries reading a page on the battle of Shiloh but gives up and hurriedly imagines four blond girls licking his naked body, chiding himself as he goes for his lack of originality, but relieved, when he is done, to breathe deeply for the first time that morning.

  E L I Z A B E T H WA K E S T O colors more vivid: the Oriental carpet's swirls of burgundy and gold; dawn kindling the sky an immaculate blue. She puts on her bathrobe and moves to her spot by the window. Planes of the rising sun sparkle in the courtyard's frosted grass. It is the washed light of autumn that shone on the lawn of the hospital down on the Connecticut coast, the hospital where Elizabeth stayed a month the year before she and Will were married--this memory arriving now with unaccustomed ease.

  He would come down from Cambridge on Sundays in his father's old Lincoln Town Car. They'd take walks on the cliffs overlooking Long Island Sound. He was a bookish man, nervous. Like Elizabeth, he'd grown up in New England in a 199

  house of lapsed Episcopalians, raised like her on a liberal conscience, parents sighing resignedly over the New York Times, salvation--if there were such a thing--a promise of reform rather than redemption. Together she and Will managed hours of politeness with no mention of Elizabeth's reasons for being in an institution--her little confusions, as her parents called them--the occasional trouble remembering where she was, the rarer sense she was being spoken to. Will was completing his doctorate in sociology at Harvard and they spoke of that. They'd met in his discussion section the semester before she'd taken a leave from Radcliffe, a school her parents still hoped back then she might return to.

  Toward the end of her stay, Will had an appointment alone with her psychiatrist. Elizabeth behaved badly, listening at the door. "A mild imbalance," the man said. She has never known if he was merely a sexist who thought her hysterical or a kind man who understood what Will meant to her, perhaps even a man who let his kindness supervene his judgment. When Will asked him if they should still get married, the doctor asked if he loved his fiancee. Elizabeth never felt as safe as she did when she heard Will say, "Yes," without stopping to consider. "Then you should marry her," the doctor replied. After the wedding, they took her parents' summer home in the town next to Plymouth, an old saltbox by the river, where her grandparents had lived all their lives. Just for a year, it was said, while Will finished his degree. No rent for them to pay, and he only needed to be in Cambridge twice a week. She can remember her dislike of the idea of living, however briefly, 200

  in that house, away from the city, in a place she'd spent months of her childhood, a house one branch or another of her family had lived in or owned for more than three centuries. The weight of the past felt so heavy there, it was hard to imagine a future. Will set his desk up in the parlor, next to the four-foot-high mahogany radio in whose bottom cabinets the old 78s of Beethoven and Mahler gathered their dust. Trying to read a book on the sofa in the afternoon, she had to work hard to forget the sight of her grandmother sitting in the chair opposite, napping through a summer rainstorm.

  Before they were married they had talked about having children; they both wanted them. A bit of a strain, don't you think? her mother said when she brought up the idea, their life together having just begun, no job for Will yet. But Will didn't see any reason to wait. They were happy when she got pregnant. More than the wedding vows this meant permanence--a future they could predict.

  "Beautiful morning," Mrs. Johnson says, poking her head in the door. She has been the director of Plymouth Brewster all the years Elizabeth has been here. A gentle redheaded woman who sits with Elizabeth and discusses the books she is reading. "Don't forget you've got a visitor this afternoon."

  Elizabeth smiles and Mrs. Johnson passes on and Elizabeth gazes again over the harbor. She sees people, tiny at this distance, heading out along the breakwater, leaning into the wind as they go. Yachts bob in the marina, their chrome masts ticking back and forth like
the arms of metronomes. Sun glistens on the water. The scene is alive with motion. 201

  Nearly four hundred years since our family arrived on this shore, Hester begins, her voice cleaner and more vibrant this morning.

  "Here we go," Elizabeth says, taking a seat in her chair,

  "sing your little song." It's better when she's able to affect nonchalance. Signs of care are like flesh exposed to her companion's arrows. And what a beautiful season of suffering it has been. What principled wars. What tidy profit. And the machines, they are enough to take your breath away. And all the limbs and eyes and organs of the children bled and severed for progress. And the raped slaves and the heads of boy soldiers crushed like eggs. Why, the minister might even allow us a dance. Perhaps to celebrate you, Elizabeth, a flower grown from the seed of all this. What have you done to correct it? Do you suppose the divines would have liked your country club, Daddy coming down the back nine, dark hands fixing Mommy a cocktail? Jitterbug.

  "Lousy historian," Elizabeth mutters, trying to maintain the dismissive upper hand. "You're confusing all sorts of things." It's been years since she's had to argue like this. She has the energy, for now.

  I'd forgotten, Hester says. You always believed books and their facts could save you. Haven't done so well by them, have you?

  Elizabeth laughs. "If I'd only known what a harsh woman you were."

  What? You would have refused my help?

  202

  "Is that what you gave me?"

  And then the memory is there, the morning her contractions began: second day of the blizzard, 1978, the roads covered in ice and buried, the police saying no one was to drive, the hospital telling them they weren't sure when they could send an ambulance. She lay upstairs in her grandparents' old room, in the front of the house.