Stephen White - Critical Conditions

“Won’t they just arrest me if you let me out?”

“I don’t know the answer to that. They haven’t arrested you yet. Your lawyer says that’s a good sign.”

She sat forward. “What did Uncle Sam do? Tell me. Is it about Chaney?”

“Nothing is certain yet. Sam is still working on some things. We’ll know in the morning.”

“She’ll get the drugs? And the new heart?”

Despite myself, I smiled. “We’ll know in the morning.”

“I’m going with her.”

I nodded. “Now you see my dilemma. If it does turn out that Chaney is able to go to Seattle, I’d like you to be able to go with her, too. You have a remarkable relationship with her. But-”

“You need to make sure I’m not crazy.”

“I know you’re not crazy, Merritt. What I want to be certain of is that you’re not concealing a plan to try to kill yourself as soon as I give you half a chance. You’re a bright kid, you could fool me if you wanted to.”

She was taken aback by my frankness. “Whoa. I didn’t think you were supposed to say things like that to patients. That’s not too subtle.”

“What you did wasn’t subtle, Merritt.”

Her mouth widened and her eyes smiled sadly. “Oh, yes, it was, Dr. Gregory,” she said, “oh, yes, it was. It was a very good plan.”

She was waiting for me to react. I could tell. But I was too far in the dark to do much more than raise an eyebrow and shrug.

She exhaled and said, “You haven’t seen the videotape, have you?”

I shook my head and said, “No, I haven’t.”

“Good, I’m glad. That will make it easier to tell you what happened. A lot easier. Because I really can’t believe what I did.”

My sense right then was that she had crossed an important threshold and my work no longer had to do with inviting her to talk, or putting enough pressure on her resistance to cause it to fracture. My work now had to do with being patient enough to let her tell her story.

I smiled, warmly I thought, and said, “You know, it was all Madison’s idea.”

She laughed.

“When we left off, last time, you were telling me about Madison’s breasts.”

She smiled again, and then I watched her face dissolve into sadness. “I haven’t cried much about her yet. I think I will when everything else settles down.”

“Yes.”

“Madison thought we could blackmail him. Dr. Robilio. Trick him into doing something, you know, sexual, with her-Madison-and take pictures of it. Then, you know, we’d blackmail him. Make him give Chaney the treatment she needs or we’d give somebody the pictures. His wife or his boss or somebody. The newspapers, I don’t know.

“At first I thought she was kidding. Then, when I realized she wasn’t kidding, I told her she was crazy. Then I thought about it some more. I thought, Trent had tried to do something to help, and he couldn’t do anything. My mom had gone on the news, and she had begged for help, and she couldn’t do anything. I felt I had to try to do something, too. For Chaney.

“So I called Madison back and asked if she was serious. She was, she was ready to go. She’d already been thinking more about it, too. She said she was sure she could get him to come on to her. She was absolutely sure. All I had to do was get in a place to take the pictures. That was all.

“I said no, that I’d been thinking about how to do it, too. That Chaney was my sister. That I was the one who should seduce him and that she was the one who would take the pictures. She laughed. She thought I was crazy. She wondered what I knew about it. She meant,” Merritt paused and looked at her lap, “what did I know about sex…and seducing someone and…what did I know about men. I don’t even have a boyfriend, Dr. Gregory. Everybody thinks I’m kind of a prude.”

She shrugged. “I said I could do it. She could teach me. She said, ‘Fine, I dare you,’ and said she’d get her mom’s video camera.

“She gave me some ideas about what to do and say and the next day after school we went to his house and I waited till he came out for his walk, and after a block or two, I jogged after him. I ran up next to him and I asked him if he minded some company, that I didn’t want to run by myself anymore, some kids had been bothering me. He said he didn’t think he could keep up with me. I said I was just about done, it was okay with me, could I just walk with him, did he mind?

“I thought it was sort of cool. What I was doing-I mean, he didn’t know who I was. He didn’t know I was Chaney’s sister. He didn’t know I was setting him up. It felt kind of…I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“Powerful?”

“Yeah, powerful, but also scary. He asked me my name. I told him it was Merritt. He said he had a daughter about my age. I asked how old she was. He said she was twenty, can you believe it? I didn’t know if he was, you know, BS-ing me or what, but he didn’t come on to me. I was sort of hoping he would, it would have made it easier, I guess.

“When we got back by his house, he pointed at it from the sidewalk, and said, ‘I’m home.’ I acted impressed, said what a great house it was. I wanted him to invite me in, but I didn’t know if his wife was home, or if he really had kids, or even if Madison had a way to take the pictures we needed if I went inside with him.

“I got more scared then. All of a sudden, I felt like my plan sucked and I didn’t know what to do. I mean, Madison and I hadn’t thought this through as well as we thought. I saw the RV in his driveway. Have you seen it? It’s a big thing-I mean it looks like a rock star’s bus.”

“Yes, I’ve seen it.”

“I asked him if it was his. He asked if I wanted to see it. I told him I had always wanted to go inside one. He told me to wait, he would go in the house and get the keys.”

“Madison was there?”

“Yeah, she was sneaking around somewhere taking her video. I didn’t see her, she was good, you know, at staying hidden. Her mom’s car was parked a couple houses down. When Dr. Robilio went inside the house to get the keys I pointed at the RV behind my back so Madison would know where I was going next.”

I was flooded with feelings. Merritt’s motives were admirable. The story I was about to hear, I felt certain, was abominable, the outcome undoubtedly catastrophic. I was breathless, and inwardly anticipation was clawing at me. Outwardly, I pretended I was listening to a problem she was having at school.

“When he came back out, he had changed his clothes, put on these awful jeans and this big sweater with CU on it over this big brown buffalo head. Not a sweatshirt, a sweater. He said, ‘Come on, I’ll show you my baby.’ He was gross, I wanted to puke. He unlocked the door and climbed in. I followed him. He sat in the driver’s seat. He said something like, ‘You could live in this, live well, too. This thing has satellite TV, surround sound, full kitchen, big bathroom, king-size bed. Better than a yacht. Pretty neat, huh?’

“I can still hear him talking to me, Dr. Gregory. I was looking at this crazy, fancy bus, and I was getting so mad and I was feeling sick to my stomach, like I was gonna puke, I swear. That would have been cool, right? I asked him how much it cost. I didn’t care, I mean like I wasn’t impressed by it. I just had this crazy idea that maybe I could just steal the thing and trade it back to him for Chaney, that I wouldn’t actually have to…you know.”

I knew.

She was mimicking Dead Ed’s voice when she resumed her story, “‘It’s a ninety-six Holiday Rambler. Custom interior, totally custom. You want to know what it costs? Well, are you ready for this? After I put in a few special touches, this baby cost me four hundred and fifteen thousand dollars. And I wrote a check for it. You should have seen Manny’s face when I did that. Manny was the guy who sold it to me. He couldn’t believe I would just write a check for it like I was buying my wife a damn Hyundai.’