You Are Not A Stranger Here Read online

  She paused. It appeared to Frank as though she were deciding whether or not to go on. Their eyes met briefly, but he said nothing.

  "There was a kid," she said, eventually. "Jimmy Green. His parents had lost their house; the family was living with relatives out on Valentine. He and Jason started spending their time together. He rode an old motorcycle and they'd be out in that barn with it for hours, doing I don't know what, 37

  fixing it, I guess. Since he was eight, I'd driven Jason over to Tilden for violin lessons. He'd gotten some grief for it at school, kids calling him names. He'd cried about it some when he was younger, but he loved that music. Used to sit in that wicker chair right over there by the door, his little legs bouncing, twenty minutes before we even got in the car, his eyes begging me to hurry. You know he stood in this room one evening after practice and played five minutes of Mozart for his younger brother and sister? Mozart. Can you believe that? In this living room." She shook her head, amazed.

  "About a year after he started hanging around the Green boy, I was sitting in the drive waiting for him to come out--

  he'd spent all day in that barn, we were late. Before he left the porch, he took his instrument out of the case."

  Her jaw tightened, her lips barely moving.

  "We'd bought the violin together. Years ago, on a trip to Saint Louis. His father had given him the money and he'd stood on his toes to hand it to the salesman. That day I was waiting in the car to take him to his lesson, he walked up and smashed his violin on the hood. Said he was tired, didn't feel like going that afternoon. That's what he said: tired. Just like that. Walked back into the barn."

  In her voice, there was only the blankness of reporting. Not a trace of sorrow.

  "You're a doctor in these parts," she said. "You must know all about methamphetamine."

  Frank nodded. He'd seen some of it in the clinic, and heard more. It had become the drug of choice for kids out here, cheaper than coke and without the hippie connotations 38

  of pot. In the end, it wasn't the drug itself that got people but the lack of sleep it caused. After three or four days of no rest the body collapsed or slipped into psychosis.

  "I told his father he had to do something, had to go to the Greens, or down to the school, find out who they were getting it from. But Jack--he didn't have it in him. The bank had been shut three years, he was scared of everything by then.

  "I suppose I should have put Jason in the car and driven him out of here, gone with him somewhere. I didn't, though. I just took it from him whenever I could. I searched his room every day for those little envelopes of crystals. I checked the pockets of his trousers, begged him to stop. You know, once I even told him I'd buy him marijuana instead. His own mother. When the police finally caught the two of them buying it in the parking lot down by the market, I was glad. I thought it would shake him up. He spent three months up at Atkinson, at the juvenile center." She caught Frank's look.

  "You think that was a mistake."

  "It's a rough place, but it was out of your hands."

  "Well, you're right. It didn't help. He was worse when he got back, angrier, more confused. And he still did it. I don't think he even stopped while he was in there--how that can be, how they can run a jail where children can get drugs, I just don't know how that can be . . . and of course he was so young, just sixteen, boys at that age--" She broke off. "All those hormones in him . . . I suppose the drug--" She stopped again, covering her mouth with her hand.

  "I was here, in the living room. It was a Sunday. Jack had taken the kids over to visit his sister. Jason had been so erratic 39

  those last few days, we were trying to keep the younger ones away from him. He'd been out till dawn that morning and the morning before and then up there in his room all day, but not sleeping, I could tell he wasn't sleeping. I was waiting for him to come down to eat something. I kept thinking, just one more conversation, we'd talk and somehow . . .

  "I was right here on the couch. I heard his door open, and then I heard him crying. It was like years ago when he was a boy and he'd had an upset at school and I'd sit with him out there on the porch with his head in my lap as the sun went down and I'd tell him how one day we'd take a trip on a boat all the way across the Atlantic and he'd see Athens and Rome and all the places where the stories I'd read him took place, and he'd fall asleep listening to me. When I heard him cry that day I thought maybe it was all over--that he had come back to me somehow. He hadn't cried in so long. I went up the stairs.

  "My son. He was naked. He'd been rubbing himself. For hours, it must have been. He'd rubbed himself raw. He was bleeding down there. And he was crying, his tears catching in the little beard that had started growing on his cheeks, the soft little brown hairs he hadn't learned to shave yet. When I got to the top of the stairs he looked at me like I'd severed a rope he'd been clinging to for dear life, just like that, like I'd sent him down somewhere to die. What could I do?

  "I got a towel. From the bathroom. A white towel. I got gauze and ointment, and I sat him down on his bed and I cleaned him and put Band-Aids on him and I tried not to weep."

  Mrs. Buckholdt sat on the edge of the sofa, shoulders 40

  hunched forward. Her words had drained her, her face gone pale now. She stared blankly at the floor.

  "I was his mother," she said quietly, almost listlessly.

  "What was I supposed to do?"

  For a moment, there was silence in the room.

  "The kitchen," she said. "I was in the kitchen. Later. Making him soup. He'd always liked soup. Maybe he'd taken the drug again. I don't know. I felt him behind me. Suddenly he grabbed my wrist, forced it down onto the cutting board, and he chopped my fingers off, the fingers I'd touched him with, chopped them off with a meat cleaver. Then he walked out naked into the backyard."

  T H E T W O O F them sat there together a long time, the sun hanging low on the rim of the western sky, casting its giant columns of light down over the land, level over the yard, level through the unshaded panes of the windows, pouring over Mrs. Buckholdt's back, casting shadow over the coffee table and the tarnished ashtray and the rounded, dark center of the densely patterned wool carpet.

  In the time she had spoken, it seemed to Frank as if Mrs. Buckholdt's body had sunk down into itself, leaving her smaller and more frail, her earlier, imposing demeanor exhausted. He experienced a familiar comfort being in the presence of another person's unknowable pain. More than any landscape, this place felt like home.

  "How did your son die?" he asked.

  "The two of them, he and Jimmy, they'd borrowed some 41

  friend's truck. It was only a few days later--he never had come back to the house. They were out on the interstate, headed west. They crashed into the wall of an overpass. Jimmy made it with some burns. He still lives out there on Valentine. I see him now and again."

  By dint of habit, the trained portion of Frank's mind composed a note for Mrs. Buckholdt's chart: Patient actively relives a traumatic event with intrusive recall; there are depressive features, hypervigilance, and generalized anxiety. Diagnosis: posttraumatic stress disorder. Treatment: a course of sertraline, one hundred milligrams daily, recommendation for psychotherapy, eventual titration off clonazepam. He wondered how his colleagues felt when they said these words to themselves or wrote them on a piece of paper. Did the power to describe the people they listened to save them from what they heard? Did it absolve them of their duty to care?

  As the silence between them stretched out, Frank remembered the first patient he'd seen as a resident, a woman whose husband had died in a plane crash. Each hour they spent together she filled with news of her two children, her son's play at school, a job her daughter had taken at a hotel, right down to what they had chosen to wear that morning, and she said it all gazing out the window, as though she were describing events in the history of a foreign country. He could remember lying in bed on the nights after he'd seen her, alone in his apartment, her plight weighing on him like a congre
gant's soul on the spirit of a minister or a 42

  character's fate on the mind and body of a writer. Often, lying there, he would remember an earlier night, lying in his bed as a child, soon after his family had moved to a new town. Their house was still full of boxes, and their parents had been arguing. From the other bedroom, he heard his older brother talking to their mother in a scared tone: he hated his new school, the unfamiliar kids, the way they pushed him around, and he wanted so very badly not to go back in the morning. The fear in his voice troubled the air like an alarm. Their mother's voice was lower, her reassurances muffled by the distance of the hall. Frank had wept himself to sleep, pained to tears that he could do nothing to prevent his brother's suffering.

  He thought now how it had always been for him, ever since he was a boy sitting on the edge of a chair in the living room listening to his parents' friends--a divorced woman whose hands shook slightly in her lap as she told him with great excitement about the vacation she was to take, or the man whose son Frank saw teased relentlessly at school, talking of how happy his boy was--the unsaid visible in their gestures, filling the air around them, pressing on Frank. And later in college, at a party, drink in hand, standing by a bookcase, chatting with a slightly heavy girl hanging back from the crowd, tracked into every shift of her eyes, every tense little smile, as if the nerves in her body were the nerves in his, her every attempt to disguise her awkwardness raising its pitch in him.

  Sitting in front of this oddly compelling woman, he real43 ized more clearly than ever before this was why he'd become a doctor: to organize his involuntary proximity to human pain. He could use his excuse of debt to leave his position at the clinic; he could even leave his profession, move away, anywhere, but still there would be this opening in him. Mrs. Buckholdt rose from the couch and stood by the window. As she raised the shade, more of the waning sun flooded the room. Her shoulders tensed at the sound of a knock on the other side of the kitchen door. Frank watched her take a breath.

  "What is it, darling?" she called out.

  "Can I come in?" a quiet voice asked.

  She crossed to unlock the door. The boy edged his way into the room. Biting her lower lip, holding herself rigid, Mrs. Buckholdt managed to run her hand through her son's hair.

  "What is it, dear?"

  "When are we leaving?"

  "In a few minutes," she said. "Go ahead and get ready."

  The boy stared for a moment at Frank, his expression as mysterious as before. He turned back into the kitchen and they listened to his steps as he climbed the back stairs.

  "Mrs. Buckholdt," Frank began, knowing that by saying what he was about to say he was committing himself to remaining here, to finding some way to scrape by. People like this woman needed him, needed a person to listen. "In situations like yours, it can help a great deal if you have someone to talk with. I couldn't see you every week, but I could do it once a month, and if you were able perhaps to get down to 44

  my office, we might meet once every two weeks. We could sign you up for free care. The drugs can only do so much."

  She had remained standing by the door, her arms crossed over her chest. "That's generous of you," she said, taking a step into the center of the room.

  After a moment's pause, she looked again at the picture on the wall. "That print there," she said, "it was his favorite. He picked it out at the museum in Chicago. He loved all the different characters, the bits of activity."

  Frank turned to look. In the left foreground, a tavern overflowed with townspeople, drinkers spilling into the street, following in the wake of a large-bellied mandolin player wearing a floppy hat. In front of him, the obese leader of the carnival sat, as if on horseback, astride a massive wine barrel pushed forward by the revelers, his lance a spit of meat. Opposite him and his train, somberly dressed people stood praying in some rough formation behind a gaunt, pale man propped up in a chair--Lent holding out before him a baker's pole. He faced the leader of the carnival band, the two posed in mock battle. Behind these contending forces, the square bustled. Fishwives gutting their fish on a wooden block, boys playing at a stick and tethered ball, dancers dancing, merchants selling, children peering from windows, a woman on a ladder scrubbing the walls of a house. There were cripples missing limbs, almsmen begging by the well. A man and woman made love. Another couple, dressed in Puritan costume, their backs to the viewer, were led by a fool through the middle of it all.

  45

  "Certainly no Arcadia," she said. "Nothing lush about it, not the kind of painting I fell in love with. I've looked at it a lot since he's been gone. My professors taught me Brueghel was a moralizer, his paintings full of parables. But that's not what I see anymore. I just see how much there is, how much life."

  She looked at Frank. "The woman over in Tilden, she teaches Michael the violin now, and she won't let me pay her. He's not as good as his brother was, but he's good."

  She bowed her head. "You seem like a kind man, and you're kind to offer what you did. But I don't want you to come back here. And I don't want to come to your office. A few days a week I use those pills to get by, but there are days when I manage without them. Those are the better days. When I don't look back, when I'm not afraid--better for my kids too. If you feel like you can't write me a prescription, I understand. I'll survive without it."

  The boy could be heard at the top of the front stairs. Frank rose from his chair and took a step toward Mrs. Buckholdt. She turned to watch her son enter the room, carrying his violin case. Quietly, he took a seat in the wicker chair by the door.

  "Go and get your father," she said. "Tell him it's time to leave." He ran along the hall, into the kitchen, and out the back door.

  Frank's stomach tightened, the panic beginning before his mind could form the thought: he didn't want to lose her, he didn't want the telling to end.

  Mrs. Buckholdt took her handbag from the front table. 46

  "It really is recommended in almost all cases such as this that a patient undergo some kind of therapy, and given the extremity--"

  "Dr. Briggs," she interrupted, opening the front door to the view out over the yard and beyond to the empty road,

  "didn't you hear what I said?"

  47

  T H E B E G I N N I N G S

  O F G R I E F

  2

  A Y E A R A F T E R my mother's suicide I broke a promise to myself not to burden my father with worries of my own. I told him how unhappy I was at school, how lonely I felt. From the wing chair where he crouched in the evenings he asked,

  "What can I do?" The following afternoon, coming home from work the back way, he missed a stop sign. A van full of sheet glass going forty miles an hour hit the driver's side of the 48

  Taurus. According to the policeman who knocked on the front door in tears, my father died with the first shattering impact. An aunt from Little Rock stayed for a week, cooking stews and Danish pastry. She said I could come and live with her in Arkansas. I told her I didn't want to. As I had only a year and a half left of high school, we decided I could finish up where I was, and she arranged for me to live with a neighbor. Mrs. Polk was sixty, her mother eighty-five. They had between them a closet of fourteen blue flowered dresses, which the maid laundered on Tuesdays. They watched a considerable amount of public television and spoke in hushed tones of relatives in Pittsburgh. I was given dead Mr. Polk's study with a cot in the corner. The ladies paid no attention to my coming and going and I spent as little time at their house as I could.

  In industrial arts that fall, Mr. Raffello gave us a choice of projects: bookcase, spice rack, or a chest about the size of a child's coffin. I picked the last of these, and because we had to pay for our own wood, I used pine. I took exact measurements and sanded each board with three grades of paper. All the equipment was there in the shop: hammers and vises, finishing nails and glue, planers and table saws. The machines had shiny metal casings and made a deafening roar. If I had been allowed to, I would've stayed all day.

&n
bsp; I found the class entrancing for another reason: the chance to be with Gramm Slater, an angry, cherub-faced boy who wore steel-tip boots and a baseball cap pulled over his brow. He stood a head above the other kids, already as large framed as my father, his forearms covered in a layer of golden 49

  hair. His lips curled easily into a sneer and his eyes were full of mockery. When he caught me gazing at him, he'd smirk knowingly, like an angel. Twice our shoulders had touched in the cafeteria line.

  On a Friday afternoon a few weeks after my father died, Mr. Raffello began explaining the use of clamps. The thermos of gin I'd washed my sloppy joe down with at lunch made concentration a challenge but like a good student, I held on to my bench and remained upright. It struck me our teacher might be an inhabitant of some kingdom of middle earth, with his rickety frame and nose jutting over his mouth like a cliff above the entrance of a cave. His voice sounded like the bass notes of an organ.

  "The instrument is here in your hand. You've sanded your wood. You've applied your glue. The time for the clamp has arrived."

  Eyes in the class fluttered shut as his bony hands began turning the rod. Steel squeaked in the thread. I imagined the sound as the creaking of a ferry's oar in its lock as we pulled away from the shore.

  Leaning into the noise, I watched Gramm on the stool beside me. He sat hunched forward. Through his worn cotton T-shirt, I traced the perfect arch of his spine. I wanted him to look at me. I wanted him to touch me. I didn't care how. My foot reached out and tapped him on the shin.

  "What the fuck?" he whispered, his sneer coming to life. I suppose the incident could have ended there, but the expression on his face, the way his eyes narrowed and his upper lip flared off his front teeth, appeared to me so beauti50 ful I couldn't stand to see it fade. I swung my foot back and hammered him on the calf. This brought a wonderful color to his cheeks.