Blameless Page 2

  Diana loved living in the city. When life began to close in on her, when she got claustrophobic from the suffering her patients heaped on her head, from the calls to make and the exams to grade, she would burst through the front door and into the roaring, anonymous city. She walked for hours, down her narrow tree-lined street to the grand breadth of the Christian Science Center, across Boylston and down Fairfield to window-shop at the trendy stores of Newbury Street. She crisscrossed the Back Bay, wandering along the park-like mall of Commonwealth Avenue, gawking at the white marble and brick mansions, drinking in the bustle and excitement as a nature lover drinks in the scent of evergreen. Rejuvenating herself.

  Diana looked out the dining room window at the silent, dawn-streaked sidewalk. All the houses on St. Stephen Street were small and narrow, their angles hard and no-nonsense; utilitarian homes well-suited to the sensible people who had built them, she liked to think. Although she and Craig admired the elegance and expanse of Commonwealth Avenue, they were more comfortable here. She turned and went into the kitchen, filling the coffee maker with the decaffeinated she had learned to tolerate over the past few months.

  As the coffee dripped, permeating the room with its thick morning aroma, Diana looked out the oversized mullioned window into their “back city,” as Craig called it—a couple of parking spots for themselves and Diana’s patients, and a fenced area just waiting for a swing set. Dead leaves from their one tree swirled around the base of a fence post, in a forlorn, lonely dance. Watching the leaves, Diana felt her conviction waver and wondered if she might be better off skipping the funeral after all.

  Feeling a light touch on her shoulder, she looked up as Craig wrapped his arms around her from behind. He rested his palms on her stomach. “Aren’t you supposed to be bigger by now?” he asked.

  She covered his hands with hers. “I just hope you learn to worry less after she’s born—otherwise you’re going to drive the child wild. I don’t even want to think about what you’re going to be like when she starts dating.”

  “Dating?” Craig cried in mock horror. “You think I’m going to let some pimply twerp paw at my daughter?”

  They stood silently, watching the swirling leaves for a while. Then Diana said, “I thought I’d go to the funeral, but now I’m not so sure.”

  “Oh?” He let go of her and reached for his favorite chipped blue mug. “Want some?”

  Diana nodded. “There’s no point. And I’m sure Jill will appreciate it if I don’t show.”

  He poured a cup and handed it to her. “So don’t go.”

  She took the cup. “I canceled the therapy group.”

  “The one James was in before you kicked him out?” Craig asked, referring to her borderline personality disorder group.

  “Terminated with him,” Diana corrected.

  Craig sipped his coffee and watched her closely.

  “I canceled out of respect,” she said. “But there aren’t that many of them left anyway. Borderlines aren’t exactly known for their stick-to-itiveness.” Diana smiled sadly. “With James gone and Ethan pulling another one of his disappearing acts, well, there’s just Terri, Bruce, and Sandy …”

  “Is it even worth your effort?”

  Diana sat down at the table and stared into her mug. “I need to go to the funeral. If I don’t go, I’ll never really believe it’s true.” She took a sip. “I’ll always think in the back of my mind that James is just playing one of his mischievous little games. That he isn’t really dead.”

  “But you saw him …” Craig’s voice trailed off. When Diana didn’t lift her head, he popped some waffles into the toaster. “So go.”

  Diana watched him in silence for a moment. “But I don’t want to.”

  Craig rolled his eyes dramatically at the ceiling. “So don’t.”

  “This isn’t a joke,” Diana said. “I’m struggling here, and all you can say is ‘go,’ ‘don’t go,’ ‘go,’ ‘don’t go.’”

  Craig sat down next to her at the table. “Honey, I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m just trying to help.”

  “Nothing,” Diana mumbled into her coffee. “Just don’t say anything.”

  Craig nodded and covered her hand with his for a moment. He gave it a quick squeeze, then stood up and walked through the dining room to get the newspaper off the front stoop.

  When he came back, Diana held out her hands. “Sorry,” she said.

  He leaned over and kissed her. “It’s okay.” He handed her the front section of the paper and pulled out the sports for himself. They sat in silence for a while, Craig eating and reading, Diana motionless, staring, unseeing, at the Boston Globe headlines. Suddenly Craig put down his paper and turned to her. “Do me a favor?”

  Diana just looked at him, saying nothing.

  “Go.”

  She blinked.

  “You need to go. To help you accept that James is really gone from your life.” He leaned toward her. “That you aren’t responsible for him anymore.”

  Diana looked at her husband, at his kind, earnest face, at his troubled eyes. She nodded. “I’ll go.”

  3

  AS DIANA CLIMBED THE WIDE MARBLE STAIRS LEADING to the funeral home, she thought how perfect James would have thought this day was for his funeral: dreary, rainy, cold. It was even October, “the month of looming death,” he had once called it. James had loved it when things matched, when everything was either black or white. He had hated the incongruous, the grays. And there was no incongruity here; everyone looked as miserable as the weather felt.

  They stood amid the oversized floral arrangements in small whispering clusters of edgy gloom, somber organ music pumping through speakers mounted on the walls. Three diminutive older ladies, their creased faces displaying the resemblance of age as much as of blood, inspected the card attached to a wicker basket. Nearby a circle of uncomfortable young people squirmed; the men pulling at their ties, the woman tugging at their skirts and fussing with their hair. “The nerve,” one of the older woman sputtered as the other two nodded sagely. “Nora hasn’t talked to the family in twenty-five years.”

  These must be the aunts on the mother’s side, Diana thought. And the cousins. She knew James’s mother was dead, and that there were three aunts who had more or less continued their sister’s negligible presence in James’s life in the years since her death.

  The father was long gone—dead or alive, no one knew for sure—but Diana guessed the fidgety bunch clinging to the wainscot in the corner must be his side of the family. They reminded her of James: tall, gawky, handsome, and nervous, playing with their rings, pursing their lips, looking from side to side. Obviously unused to being together, they avoided eye contact, while seemingly afraid to leave the security of one another. Could one of them be the infamous Uncle Hank? she wondered. He must have served out his prison term by now. Although she saw no sign of communication, suddenly, like a school of jittery lemmings, they moved in awkward unison toward the chapel.

  Diana looked around furtively for James’s sister, Jill, hoping she wouldn’t find her. Jill and James’s relationship had been tumultuous, to say the least, swinging from extravagant hurtful rages to claustrophobic binges of togetherness. Once they had lived six months almost literally not speaking to another soul besides each other; and another time—just recently—Jill had flushed all of the tropical fish in James’s carefully tended aquarium down the toilet.

  Jill and Diana’s relationship was equally stormy. Three years ago James had called Jill in the middle of the night, high on cocaine and threatening suicide. Jill, well-aware of the childhood horrors James had repressed and terrified that he really might kill himself, decided that her brother would never be safe until he remembered the awful past and dealt with it. Leaving her husband and his two children in Des Moines, she had rushed to Boston to get James some help. It was ironic that it had been Diana whom Jill had so painstakingly chosen from a large field of highly qualified psychotherapists—including both Alan Martinson an
d Adrian Arnold. For over the course of James’s therapy, as he had turned his devotion from Jill to Diana, Jill had decided that Diana was the personification of all that was evil, the reason for everything that was wrong with James.

  Jill was a strange one. She was sharp, astute, extremely competent—some might say as sane as they come. But she was angry. And unpredictable. A year ago she had divorced her husband and suddenly moved to Boston, resuming her role as James’s overprotective parent as if she hadn’t been gone for almost six years. Without telling James of her arrival, she cajoled his landlady into letting her into his apartment, where she snooped around under the guise of cleaning. A week later she charmed James’s boss into taking her to lunch and regaled him with fairy tales of their happy childhood—for what possible reason, neither James nor Diana could fathom.

  Diana glanced quickly around the room again, thinking about the last time she had seen Jill. It had been the previous spring. Jill was in a murderous rage, pacing in frenetic circles around the office, waving her arms and screaming at Diana. “I’d rather see him dead than see him the way he is with you!” Jill had shrieked. And although Diana calmly asked Jill to leave her office, informing her in a quiet and unruffled voice of the inappropriateness of her behavior, the crazed hatred in the woman’s eyes had stayed with Diana for weeks.

  Who knew what state Jill might be in now? Consumed with inconsolable grief? In a murderous rage? Diana was tremendously relieved that Jill was nowhere in sight. Perhaps if she sat in the back row, she could get through the service without having to confront the woman.

  Diana’s heels clicked loudly on the marble floor as she headed across the foyer to sign the guest book, as much from the desire to have a destination as to declare her presence. Even though she tried to walk softly, her footfalls reverberated through the high-ceilinged room, and she felt eyes turning to her. To quiet her shoes, she stepped onto the carpet leading to the chapel. She glanced in the large room. A shiny mahogany casket lay on a bed of flowers in front of the pulpit. The lid was closed. Diana shut her eyes. James really was dead. It really was over.

  “You okay, Dr. Marcus?”

  Diana’s lids flew open and she looked into Sandy Pierson’s narrowed but still stunning gray eyes. “It’s a tough blow for us all,” Diana said, glad to hear that although her voice was soft, it was also calm.

  “Looks like I’m the only one here,” Sandy said proudly. She was tall and reed-thin, working out her eating disorder every day for two hours on a Stairmaster. She looked like a model, which was just what she aspired to be.

  Diana glanced around the foyer. “Perhaps the others will get here before the service starts,” she said, although she didn’t believe a word she was saying. Sandy, along with James, Ethan, Terri, and Bruce, had comprised Diana’s borderline personality disorder therapy group. Borderlines—as they were not so affectionately referred to in the field—were volatile and not known for their responsible behavior, so Diana hadn’t expected any of them to show up for something as conventionally obligatory as a friend’s funeral. Social contrariness was a classic borderline symptom.

  “Ha!” Sandy snorted. “No way Terri or Bruce’ll show.” Although Terri and Bruce had the mildest cases of the five, they were also the most phobic; Terri’s fear of being in public places manifested itself in a full body rash, and Bruce’s blood-injury phobia, fear of illness or injury, caused him to faint if he was in the presence of any kind of sickness—let alone death. “Don’t you think?” Sandy demanded, glaring at Diana’s stomach and fingering the clasp of her omnipresent leather day-timer.

  “You’re probably right,” Diana said, ignoring Sandy’s glare, all too aware of the other woman’s jealousy. “You have everything and I have nothing,” Sandy had yelled when she discovered Diana was pregnant; Diana had stared at the gorgeous woman in wonderment, forever fascinated by the power of the mind to deceive. Now, as then, Diana knew her best tactic was mollification. “Sometimes I think you guys are more tuned in to each other than I could ever be,” she said.

  Sandy smiled. “Even though James and him hadn’t been getting along so great lately, Ethan’s the only other one besides me who might come.” Sandy’s tone was knowing and authoritative. “I haven’t seen him since before James kill—uh, you know. But I called his apartment a bunch of times.” She flipped open her day-timer and pointed to numerous days on which “Call Ethan” had been neatly lettered. “No answer.” She shrugged.

  “That’s Ethan’s style. He’ll turn up soon,” Diana said, glancing around the room, hoping that “soon” wouldn’t be today. Just the thought of Ethan at James’s funeral made her shudder. Yet another powerful and conflicted relationship in James’s life. She didn’t even want to think about what kind of scene Ethan might make.

  Sandy stared into the chapel. “He really did it, huh?” she said with admiration in her voice. “I never thought he had the guts. Guess we borderlines are full of surprises—even to each other.” She smiled broadly at Diana. “Never put anything past a borderline.”

  Diana nodded and turned. “See you inside,” she said, walking back into the foyer, oblivious to the noise her shoes made. She picked up the gold pen chained to the leather guest book.

  “How you doing, sweetie?”

  Diana was enveloped in her friend Gail Galdetto’s huge bear hug.

  “We came to give you moral support,” Gail added, pointing to Adrian Arnold.

  “Thanks,” Diana said, glad to see Gail and surprised to see Adrian. They were all in the same peer supervisory group—a half-dozen local psychologists who met every two months to discuss cases and give each other both professional and emotional support—and, although Diana and Adrian had been quite close at one time, their present professional disagreement had opened a rift in their friendship. Diana’s new research findings directly refuted Adrian’s classic text, Borderline States, currently used in hundreds of universities; Adrian was unnerved by her results and had been making disparaging—downright nasty, Gail said—remarks about Diana during their last few meetings. On the day of James’s death, Adrian had declared Diana’s methodology “unprofessionally flawed,” rendering her preliminary findings “unworthy of serious scientific consideration.” Diana looked at him closely, wondering if he had come to gloat.

  “Sorry about all this,” Adrian said. “Difficult not to feel guilty.” His eyes were full of sincerity—fake sincerity, Diana thought. But he had been a good supervisor during her post-doc, an extremely knowledgeable and busy man who had taken more time than necessary with a beginner.

  “Thanks.” Diana turned back to writing her name in the book.

  “He insisted on coming,” Gail whispered.

  “Makes no difference to me.” Diana shrugged. “As my niece Robin would say, it’s a free country.”

  “And maybe now you’ll be free too.” Gail looked knowingly into Diana’s eyes.

  Diana shook her head. “Give it a rest,” she said. Gail thought that Diana’s involvement with James—and with the rest of her borderline patients—was a disastrous mistake, both personally and professionally. She had launched a one-woman crusade to “disconnect” Diana, convinced that Diana’s “therapeutic talents” were wasted on borderlines, whose chances of recovery were slim. Gail pointed to the successes Diana had achieved early in her career with phobics, as well as her many well-received articles on agoraphobic avoidance, as proof positive that Diana should stick with patients whom she had a fighting chance of helping. “Those borderlines will eat you alive,” Gail had cautioned. And in many ways—especially where James was concerned—Gail’s warning had been all too prophetic.

  “Think about cutting yourself loose from them,” Gail was saying. “Now might be the perfect opportunity to disconnect.”

  “It’s not all that easy to—”

  “How nice to see you, Dr. Marcus,” a soft voice interrupted. “So thoughtful and considerate.” Jill Hutchins had come to stand next to them, her curly red hair even wilder than u
sual, her deep blue eyes—the exact same color as James’s eyes—dilated with grief. Adrian was behind her.

  Despite their turbulent past, Diana was touched by the raw pain on Jill’s face. “I’m so sorry, Jill,” she said, her voice breaking slightly.

  Jill nodded. “Yes,” she said, as if not exactly sure of what was expected of her. “Yes,” she repeated again.

  The four of them stood in awkward silence for a few moments and then Adrian walked away. Finally Diana cleared her throat. “We’ll all miss him,” she began. “It’s so sad—”

  “He was sick.” Jill sounded more like a robot than a person: stiff, vague, unconnected.

  Diana nodded.

  “We came to you for help.”

  “And I only wish I could have done more,” Diana said, growing uncomfortable with the conversation and the glazed look in Jill’s eyes.

  “And what did you do?” Jill continued quietly, almost conversationally. “You used him for your own perverse pleasures and then you threw him away.”

  Diana stared at the other woman in amazement.

  “Get out,” Jill said, her voice still slightly dazed, but becoming clearer and more vehement as it grew louder, as if her anger was blowing away her protective haze.

  “Now wait just a minute—” Gail said, placing an arm around Diana’s shoulders.

  “Don’t bother to deny it—James told me everything,” Jill spat, never taking her eyes off Diana. “I even have proof.”

  “Proof of what?” Diana demanded.

  “Proof that you used some psycho mumbo-jumbo on him. Proof that you two had a real sicko thing going.” Jill burst into tears. “And then you got tired of him. You used him and dumped him and then, then …” She angrily swiped at her tears. “Then you just threw him away!”

  “This is ridiculous,” Gail snapped. “I know that you’re upset—and rightly so—but you can’t go around saying things like this. Making damaging accusations against a respected professional—”