Keith Ablow - Compulsion

Friday, June 28, 2002

I started driving Julia back to Mass General at 1:30 a.m. We had fallen asleep again, after making love. I checked my rearview mirror a few times to make sure we weren't being followed.

"Worried about Win?" Julia asked.

"Shouldn't I be?"

"I've worried about him for so long, I sometimes forget to."

"Why do you think you married him in the first place?" I asked. "You've said you thought you were in love, but why did you fall for him? What attracted you?"

She took a deep breath. "I'm not sure it was about Win," she said. "He was charming, handsome. All that. But it was more about me. I think I was actually using him."

That sounded pretty up-front. "How so?" I asked.

"I come from a large family," she said. "Four brothers and myself. Dad was an attorney, but not a real name in his profession, nothing like that. My mother was quiet. A homemaker. She didn't have any dreams to speak of and she never seemed terribly interested in mine. Darwin was larger than life-certainly larger than my life seemed at the time."

"Your relationship with your father?" I asked. "How was that?"

"I loved him, but he spent most of his time with my brothers-their athletics, their schooling. I started modeling at fourteen, probably to compete for his attention. It grew into a lot more than I expected, but he never really cared about it. And I never developed real self-confidence from it."

"Your marriage provided that?"

"In a way," she said. "Or it seemed to. Being Win's wife meant I didn't have to figure out what else I was. Mrs. Darwin Bishop was a good enough label for my parents and friends. For most people. And for a long while, it was good enough for me, too. I borrowed his success. I even fooled myself into thinking I was contributing to it. The power behind the throne. That kind of thing."

"But you had achieved a good deal of success yourself, in modeling," I said.

"I always understood that was skin-deep, and that it would end." She looked out the window at the Boston skyline as we crossed the Tobin Bridge. "I knew from the first time Darwin hit me that our marriage would end, too. But I was… paralyzed. I never took the time or had the strength to find my own way."

"Yet," I said.

"Yet." She smiled. "Enough about me, already, Dr. Clevenger. How have you happened to stay single?"

"I was with a woman for years who was ill-mentally," I said.

"Who was she?"

"A doctor," I said. "An obstetrician."

"Is that what brought you together?" Julia asked. "Medicine?"

"That was part of it. But, in a certain way, I was using her, too," I said. "She was fragile, so I was the one in control. My being with her gave me the chance to say I was in a relationship when I was really avoiding relationships. Hiding out."

"Why hide?" she said.

"Because I had to hide-emotionally and physically-in the house I grew up in. I guess it got to be a habit."

She looked at me as if she wanted more of an explanation.

"My father used a belt, just like Darwin," I said.

"I'm so sorry, Frank," she said. "I had no idea."

"It was a long time ago," I said.

Julia was silent several seconds, sitting and looking through the windshield. Then she turned to me. "You don't have to hide anything, anymore," she said.

I wanted to believe the heart of what Julia had said- that I could be known and loved at the same time. Because, deep down, I had always suspected the two were mutually exclusive. I glanced at her as she looked at me, with eyes full of acceptance and warmth. And I felt, truly, as though I had arrived at a new and better place.

I parked in the MGH garage and walked Julia the two blocks to the door of the hospital. We played it safe-no parting kiss, no long good-bye. She walked into the lobby, and I turned and started back for the truck. It was just before 2:00 a.m.

The MGH garage is a five-story cement structure, the back of which overlooks the Charles River. The building runs two city blocks, with the wall furthest from the hospital sitting on Cambridge Street and the wall closest to it bordering a darkened alleyway that leads to Storrow Drive. I had just started to walk across that alleyway when someone pushed me, hard, from behind. I lurched forward and, struggling to stay on my feet, felt a sudden and odd twisting sensation at the bottom of my rib cage, about halfway between my spine and my side. It burned red-hot for the first second or two, then flipped into a penetrating ache so severe it made me double over and fall to the ground. I tried reaching for the Browning Baby in my pocket, but my arm didn't seem to be taking instructions from my brain.

"What could she have done," a husky, peculiar-sounding voice said, "being what she is?"

I struggled to see the figure jogging away from me, but only caught a glimpse of black, army-style boots. I groped for the painful place on my back that was making me see double. I felt something warm and slick. Then everything went black.

"Frank!" Colin Bain called to me. "C'mon, man, stop ignoring me." I felt my sternum being assaulted by Bain's knuckles-a sternal rub, they call it, which is actually more of a brutal sternal raking, designed to wake the unresponsive and separate them from the dead.

"Christ! I'm fine," I muttered, twisting away from him. I opened my eyes and tried to sit up, but a searing pain reached through my back and yanked me down to the mattress by my ribs.

Bain was standing by the bed, wearing his round wire-rimmed glasses. He swept his longish red hair away from his face. "Welcome, friend," he said.

I was naked to the waist. Bandages circled my torso like a half-wrapped mummy. "What the hell happened to me?" I said.

"Someone jumped you in the alleyway near the garage," he said. "Stuck you good. A five-inch blade, so far as I can tell. At least, that's how deep it went." He smiled. "You slept through the best parts. I already explored the wound, cleaned it up, sewed you shut. You were so out of it I didn't even have to use lidocaine."

"The mind is a wonderful thing," I said. "Thanks for the help."

"No problem," he said.

"Did they catch the guy?" I asked.

"Not even close," he said. "They didn't find you for five or ten minutes, judging from the amount of blood you'd lost."

I checked out the space around me and spotted a unit of packed red blood cells hanging from an IV pole. A length of red IV tubing ran into my arm. I shook my head.

"Hospital security said they thought you were some homeless drunk napping on the pavement," Bain said. "They didn't notice the blood all over your jacket until they flipped you onto a gurney to sleep it off in the lobby." He winked. "I do have their names, if you want to catch up with them."

I started to chuckle, but choked on a bolt of pain that shot straight through my abdomen, then up into my throat.

"You're gonna be in a fair amount of discomfort for a couple days," Bain said.

"Discomfort's a nice word for it," I said, catching my breath.

"An MRI showed the blade sliced through the latissimus dorsi and internal oblique," he said. "I threw in about sixty stitches. The tip just missed your portal artery, by the way. If that had been severed, you'd have bled out for sure. You're lucky to be alive."

"Thanks for letting me know."

"It wouldn't be a bad idea to be admitted overnight, for observation. Just to make sure nothing got nicked in there that we don't know about."

"No way," I said. "I don't have the time."

"You were almost out of time-for good," he said. "What's a day or two?"

Now it was a day or two. "I'm in the middle of a forensic case," I said. Saying those words helped my still-foggy brain make the obvious connection between the Bishops and my being stabbed. "This probably has something to do with that."