Michael Palmer - Flashback

Suzanne nodded toward the window. "Good, good. You're learning, child.

You're learning."

The White Mountain Olde Curiosity Shop and Gallery occupied the ground floor of a half-century-old, red-brick structure two blocks from the center of town. Three years before, when she received word that an uncle had died and left the place to her, Helene was working in a dead-end advertising job in Manhattan and competing with what seemed like several million other forty-year-old divorced women for any one of a minuscule pool of available men. She took her inheritance as an omen for change.

Despite having "taken her act on the road, " along with her two children, Helene had never given up on the notion that Mr. Perfect was, at any given moment, just one man away. Perhaps, Suzanne reflected, that was why the woman always had a smile and an encouraging word for even the bleakest situation. "You okay? " Helene asked, setting the vases on a pair of lucite pedestals, and then reversing them. "Huh? Oh, sure, I'm fine."

"You look tired."

"I always look tired."

"You always look beautiful, " Helene corrected. "Today you look beautiful and tired."

"I'm fine. I'm just not sleeping too well."

The explanation was an understatement. Since her discharge from the hospital, she had been almost continuously restless and ill at ease, sleeping no more than an hour or two at a time and often awakening with an intense, free-floating anxiety. It was hardly the mood she would have expected, given the outcome of her surgery. "You need some sex, " Helene said. "I don't need any sex. That's your cure for everything."

"Well, have I had a sick day since you've known me? As long as there are ski lodges and contra dances and Thursday night single-mingles at the Holiday Inn, I intend to stay healthy as a horse. Don't you think it's time you-"

"No. No, I don't. Now let's change the subject. Besides-" She caught herself after that one word, but it was too late. Helene leapt at the opening. "Besides, what?"

"Nothing "

"Oh, yes." She squinted across at Suzanne. "You did it, didn't you?

The other night with that new doctor. What's his name?"

"Zachary. But-"

"Well, I'll be damned. No wonder you're so tired."

"I thought that was supposed to perk me up."

"Not when it's the first time in several years, it's not, " Helene said.

"You need to keep in shape for that sort of thing. Glory be. He must be something else, that's all I can say. Tell me about him."

"There's nothing to tell. He's a nice guy. I was frightened about my surgery and he was understanding, and things… things just… got out of hand. It was a mistake-just one of those things. We're not even going to see one another again outside the hospital."

"Glory be, " Helene said again. "You stop that."

Helene took Suzanne by the shoulders. "No, you stop that, " she said.

"Suze, you're like my sister. Bringing you in as a partner in this place is the best thing I've ever done-except maybe for that furrier from White Plains…"

She sighed wistfully, and Suzanne laughed. "If I keep putting my two cents into your life, " she went on, "it's because I love you. I know you had it rough with that jerk you were married to and all, but that's water under the bridge. He's gone.

You can't keep letting him rule your life."

"I don't let him rule my life. I'm doing just fine, thank you"

"And you've got a great job and a great kid and a lot of interests and you don't need anyone messing things up for you again. I know.

I know. You've said all that before."

"So…"

"So there's more. It's out there waiting if you'd just stop running scared and give it a chance."

"Helene, I'm perfectly happy, and my life is perfectly under control.

"Okay, okay. But if you ask me, you could do with a little less control and a little more-"

"Meyer, enough."

Helene held up her hands defensively. "Just trying to help, " she said.

"I know."

"So, this Zachary that you're not going to see again outside the hospital, tell me about him."

"Helene, I thought we-"

"Tall? Kind of a Clint Eastwood face? Great eyes? Dark brown "How did you-" At that instant, the door behind Suzanne opened. She whirled, and tensed visibly. "Hi, " Zack said. "I thought so, " Helene muttered.

"Glory be…"*** "I'm sorry to have popped in on you like this,"

Zack said, sipping the cappuccino Suzanne had made him. "I know you said Wednesday."

"That's okay. I needed a break."

They were perched on cherrywood stools on either side of a glass case that doubled as a sales counter and jewelry display. Following introductions, small talk, and a nudge that Suzanne had tried unsuccessfully to find annoying, Helene had gone off on "errands."

Across the gallery, a dowager tourist and her diminutive husband were eyeing a Gerard Morris, entitled typically, The Forest Is a Symphony.

Life in Itself. "How's the incision? " Zack asked. "No problem…"

The atmosphere between them was subdued, but not strained. And despite her efforts to pull away, Suzanne sensed that her connection to him, forged on the hillside behind her house and later in her hospital room, had not softened. Silently, she cautioned herself against giving off any encouraging signals. Helene meant well, but she simply didn't understand. "I'm sorry about Guy, " she said. "He was a nice man."

"Yeah."

Zack debated telling her about the envelope, but decided against it — especially since it still lay unopened on the seat of the camper.

"Are you off for the afternoon? " she asked. "Nope. I'm due at the office in a couple of minutes. I… um… actually, I came by for a consultation."

She eyed him suspiciously. "Seriously, " he said. She started to protest, but held back. Helene was right. He did have great eyes. Damn you, Paul, she thought. "Annie? " she asked. "No, thank goodness. Norman seems to be hanging in there all right with her. She doesn't care much for him, though. She says she doesn't trust him. No, I don't need advice from Suzanne Cole, cardiologist. I need it from Suzanne Cole, mother."

"Interesting, " she said. "In that case, let me just change my expression from knowledgeable and unflappable to disheveled, bewildered, and exhausted. Okay, you may proceed."

Across the gallery, the dowager and her husband had shifted their attention to Morris's Three Deer, a Stream, and the Cosmos, a garish rendering with luminescent stars and tiny sparkles in the water. "It's a consult I've got to do for Phil Brookings, " Zack said. "An eight-year-old boy."

"Name?"

Reflexively, Suzanne picked up a pen and doodled 8 years on the corner of a pad. "Nelms. Toby Nelms. The kid hasn't spoken more than a word or two to anyone in five months. Brookings is ready to enter therapy with him, but he wanted me to evaluate him first. I think he's terrified at the prospect of spending hour after hour locked in his office with a kid who won't talk."

"That does sound awful-especially for a shrink. But the child doesn't exactly sound neurosurgical."

"Probably not, but he might be neurological. Apparently he's been having some sort of psychomotor seizures."

"Psychomotor?"

"Sort of a grab-bag diagnosis, meaning, I don't have a handle on what's going on. Some variant of temporal-lobe epilepsy is as close as I can come, based on what Brookings told me. During the first seizure, just before he stopped speaking, he destroyed his room. There have been a number of others since then."

"So why isn't it temporal-lobe epilepsy?"

"Well, for one thing, although there is this rage component like we see in temporal-! obe patients, there's also an enormous fear component. The kid acts as if he's absolutely terrified of something. And for another-and this is what's really disturbing-the recovery time is getting longer and longer with each episode. It sounds as if these seizures, or whatever they are, are associated with some actual increased pressure in the boy's brain."