Jonathan Kellerman - Devil's Waltz

She dabbed at her face. Looked at the poster again, and forced back tears.

“I never stopped worrying about that boy. But after he grew up he accused me of not caring about him, saying I left him because I didn’t care. He even got on me for selling his dad’s bike — making it into a mean thing instead of because I cared.”

I said, “Raising a kid alone,” and shook my head in what I hoped was sympathy.

“I used to race home at seven in the morning, hoping he’d still be asleep and I could wake him up and pretend I’d been there with him all night. In the beginning it worked, but pretty soon he caught on and he’d start to hide from me. Like a game — locking himself in the bathroom...” She mashed the handkerchief and a terrible look came onto her face.

“It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to—”

“You don’t have kids. You don’t understand what it’s like. When he was older — a teenager — he’d stay out all night, never calling in, sometimes for a couple days at a time. When I grounded him, he’d sneak out anyway. Any punishment I tried, he just laughed. When I tried to talk to him about it, he threw it back in my face. My working and leaving him. Tit for tat: you went out — now I go out. He never...”

She shook her head.

“Never got a lick of help,” she said. “Not one single lick... from any of them. Your crowd, the experts. Counselors, special-ed experts, you name it. Everyone was an expert except me. ’Cause I was the problem , right? They were all good at blaming. Real experts at that. Not that any of them could help him — he couldn’t learn a thing in school. It got worse and worse each year and all I got was the runaround. Finally, I took him to... one of you. Private clown. All the way over in Encino. Not that I could afford it.”

She spat out a name I didn’t recognize.

I said, “Never heard of him.”

“Big office,” she said. “View of the mountains and all these little dolls in the bookshelf instead of books. Sixty dollars an hour, which was a lot back then. Still is... specially for a total waste of time. Two years of fakery is what I got.”

“Where’d you find him?”

“He came recommended — highly recommended — from one of the doctors at Foothill. And I thought he was pretty smart myself, at first. He spent a couple of weeks with Reggie, not telling me anything, then called me in for a conference and told me how Reggie had serious problems because of the way he’d grown up. Said it was gonna take a long time to fix it but he would fix it. If . Whole list of ifs. If I didn’t put any pressure on Reggie to perform. If I respected Reggie as a person. Respected his confidentiality . I said what’s my part in all this? He said paying the bills and minding my own business. Reggie had to develop his own responsibility — long as I did it for him he’d never straighten out. Not that he kept what I said to him about Reggie confidential. Two years I paid that faker and at the end of it I got a boy who hated me because of what that man put in his head. It wasn’t till later that I found out he’d repeated everything I’d told him. Blown it way up and made it worse.”

“Did you complain?”

“Why? I was the stupid one. For believing. You wanna know how stupid? After... after Reggie... after he had his... after he was... gone — a year after, I went to another one. Of your crowd. Because my supervisor thought I should — not that she’d pay for it. And not that I wasn’t doing my job properly, ’cause I was. But I wasn’t sleeping well or eating or enjoying anything. It wasn’t like being alive at all. So she gave me a referral. I figured maybe a woman would be a better judge of character... This joker was in Beverly Hills . Hundred and twenty an hour. Inflation, right? Not that the value went up. Though in the beginning this one seemed even more on the ball than the first one. Quiet. Polite. A real gentleman. And he seemed to understand. I felt... talking to him made me feel better. In the beginning. I started to be able to work again. Then...”

She stopped, clamping her mouth shut. Shifting her attention from me to the walls to the floor to the handkerchief in her hand. Staring at the sodden cloth with surprise and revulsion.

She dropped it as if it were lice-ridden.

“Forget it,” she said. “Water under the dam.”

I nodded.

She tossed the handkerchief at me and I caught it.

She said, “Baseball Bob,” with reflexive quickness. Laughed. Shut it off.

I put the handkerchief on the table. “Baseball Bob?”

“We used to say that,” she said defensively. “Jimmy and me and Reggie. When Reggie was little. When someone would make a good catch, he was Baseball Bob — it was stupid.”

“In my family it was ‘You can be on my team.’ ”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that one.”

We sat in silence, resigned to each other, like boxers in the thirteenth round.

She said, “That’s it. My secrets. Happy?”

The phone rang. I picked it up. The operator said, “Dr. Delaware, please?”

“Speaking.”

“There’s a call for you from a Dr. Sturgis. He’s been paging you for the last ten minutes.”

Vicki stood.

I motioned her to wait. “Tell him I’ll call him back.”

I hung up. She remained on her feet.

“That second therapist,” I said. “He abused you, didn’t he?”

“Abuse?” The word seemed to amuse her. “What? Like some kind of abused child?”

“It’s pretty much the same thing, isn’t it?” I said. “Breaking a trust?”

“Breaking a trust, huh? How about blowing it up ? But that’s okay. I learned from it — it made me stronger. Now I watch myself.”

“You never complained about him either?”

“Nope. Told you I’m stupid.”

“I—”

“Sure,” she said. “That’s all I needed, his word against mine — who’re they gonna believe? He’d get lawyers to go into my life and dig it all up — Reggie. Probably get experts to say I was a liar and a rotten mother...” Tears. “I wanted my boy to rest in peace, okay? Even though...”

She threw up her hands, put her palms together.

“Even though what, Vicki?”

“Even though he never gave me peace.” Her voice soared in pitch, teetering on hysteria.

“He blamed me till the end . Never got rid of those feelings that first faker planted in his head. I was the bad one. I’d never cared about him. I’d made him not learn, not do his homework. I didn’t force him to go to school because I didn’t care a hoot. It was ’cause of me he dropped out and started... running around with bad influences and... I was one hundred percent of it, hundred and five...”

She let out a laugh that raised the hair on the back of my neck.

“Wanna hear something confidential — kind of stuff you people like to hear? He was the one gave me that book about that bitch from New Jersey. That was his Mother’s Day gift to me, okay? All wrapped up in a little box with ribbons and the word Mom on it. In printing, ’cause he couldn’t do cursive, never mastered it — even his printing was all crooked, like a first-grader’s. He hadn’t given me a present for years, not since he stopped bringing home his shop projects. But there it was, little gift-wrapped package, and inside this little used paperback book on dead babies. I nearly threw up, but I read it anyway. Trying to see if there was something I’d missed. That he was trying to tell me something I wasn’t getting. But there wasn’t. It was just plain ugly. She was a monster. No real nurse. And one thing I know — one thing I’ve worked into my own head, without experts — is that she has nothing to do with me, okay? She and me didn’t even live on the same planet. I make kids feel better . I’m good at that. And I never hurt them, okay? Never . And I’m gonna keep helping them the rest of my natural life.”