Stephen White - Blinded

“Then where is he? The rescue people were at the bridge about ten minutes after he disappeared down that slope. He never called out for help. We never heard him. The rescuers had lights and boats, and they looked everywhere for him. They searched downstream for miles with dogs. They even had scuba divers out the next morning after the storm passed.” Mary Pat’s tone was slightly conspiratorial.

“And no one found anything, right? Not a trace?”

“Nothing,” Mary Ellen agreed.

I said, “It’s been my experience that occasionally people have a reason to want to disappear.”

Mary Ellen dropped her voice most of an octave. “Are you suggesting that Mr. Storey was one of those people who had a reason? Why on earth would a man like that want to disappear? An important job like he has, a wife who cares enough to send someone like you all this way.”

“Just between you and me?” I said. They nodded vigorously. “Mr. Storey is wanted for questioning about a murder.”

“Oh my,” said Mary Pat.

“So you think…?” asked her sister.

“He might have…?” Mary Pat again.

“Well,” I said, “you have to wonder.”

You do. Sometimes you have to wonder.

Viv, our Hmong immigrant nanny, worked part time, squeezing care of our daughter and us into her crowded school schedule. She saved our parental asses on most normal days. On crisis days, and those days were crisis days, her presence in our home was an undeserved gift from the parenting gods.

It was Viv who answered the phone when I called home after Gibbs’s appointment. Lauren was busy cleaning the master bathroom. I had to picture it in my mind: One hand was on her walking stick and one hand was in a vinyl glove, clutching a rag. She was scrubbing surfaces that an obsessive microbiologist would probably have already deemed surgically sterile. By the end of the day, I knew, the motor on the vacuum cleaner would need new bearings, our entire supply of cleaning fluids would be depleted, and virtually every square inch of our home would be a whole new category of clean.

I’d seen it before in the wake of previous exacerbations. I had a name for it. I called it steroid clean .

Steroids don’t provide virgin energy; they aren’t some gentle supercaffeine. No, steroids, especially megadose steroids, provide agitation with all the negative consequences of the word. Impatience? In spades. Irritability? God, yes. Steroids are pure rocket fuel. I knew from experience that Lauren’s management of the extra horsepower that was coursing through her veins would be relatively adaptive for about twenty-four hours-thus the steroid clean house-but after that the agitation and the resulting sleeplessness would overwhelm her coping ability, and she would take on a few of the assorted characteristics of the Seven Dwarfs on amphetamines.

Grumpy on Speed would be the dominant Dwarf. He-or in this case, she-would be around virtually the whole time, only reluctantly sharing the stage with Sleepy on Speed and with Dopey on Speed. If Sneezy on Speed showed up, we were all in a fresh mess of trouble; during a previous steroid treatment his arrival had caused my poor wife to sneeze something like thirty-seven times in a row with hardly time for an inhale in between. Emily, our Bouvier, hated human sneezing and had barked in concert with Lauren’s honking for the last dozen sneezes or so. It was a memorable duet.

Sadly, Happy on Speed would make only the briefest of cameo appearances. If history were a guide, the cameo would take place during a narrow window in the first act.

I felt a stab of self-pity. For the next couple of weeks I’d be married to a most distasteful subset of the Seven Dwarfs on methamphetamine. Fortunately, my corrosive self-pity was swiftly dissolved by the solvent of compassion: Lauren not only had to live with the meth Dwarfs for a fortnight; she had the misfortune to be possessed by them.

She broke from scrubbing the beleaguered bathroom germs long enough to tell me what time she was seeing her neurologist later in the day, then gave the phone back to Viv, who informed me that Grace’s cold was almost all better and that she’d even managed to add enough filament tape to Emily’s paw to keep the clacking sound from driving Lauren even closer to distraction.

Viv also told me not to worry; she would take good care of us.

I told her she was great. And I started plotting ways to thank her.

Since I’d seen Gibbs so early that morning, Sharon Lewis was my second appointment of the week, not my first. The continued media attention that her breach of security at Denver’s airport was generating still haunted her. As did the fear of imminent arrest.

“Am I really the most selfish person in America?” she demanded.

Needless to say, I didn’t cast my vote on the question.

Obsessing was one of Sharon’s things, so she obsessed. Should she turn herself in? Should she get a lawyer? Was what she did so wrong? Really? Wouldn’t other people have done the same thing? Wouldn’t they?

Would I?

I didn’t answer that one, either.

Once the legal part of the crisis was resolved whatever way it was going to be resolved, Sharon had a long stint in therapy ahead of her. I was responding to her in the short term so that I would be prepared for what the future would inevitably bring.

Jim Zebid was late for his rescheduled appointment. He didn’t arrive until half our allotted time had vaporized into the therapeutic ether.

“Damn prosecutors” was how he started. “I swear they argue things just to waste my time.”

I tried not to allow my face to reveal anything back to Jim. My wife was one of those “damn prosecutors.” I knew it and he knew it.

After that prelude he dove right into the topic of the day. “I need to tell you that it’s hard for me to believe that you weren’t indiscreet with that little tidbit I told you last week. My guy’s firm that he didn’t tell anybody about selling blow to the judge’s hubby. I tend to believe him; he has no reason to be shooting his mouth off. I certainly didn’t tell anybody other than you. So that leaves you.”

The pointed implication was that I did have a good reason to be shooting my mouth off: to gossip with my wife. “Are you asking me something, Jim? Or is that just a flat-out accusation?”

He shrugged.

I registered some surprise at the fact that he didn’t seem particularly angry. Although his words were sharp, his tone was the same one he might have used to order take-out Chinese.

What did I do? I took the bait.

“I will repeat my earlier assurance. I told no one-no one-about our conversation last week. And I will repeat my earlier suspicion, Jim, that your accusation about the incident has to do with something between us-something in the therapeutic relationship.”

“Like what might that be?” These words were delivered in a tone that was totally dismissive. Litigators, in my experience, are more skilled at being dismissive than most people on the planet. They are able to imbue layers of nuance into their dismissiveness that most of us can only dream of. A law school trick of some kind, I suspected.

“Trust, maybe?” I tried to keep sardonic echoes from my own voice, but I wasn’t totally successful.

“Trust?” He slumped back and crossed his ankles. His wingtips were the size of river kayaks.

I waited.

“Yeah, well. Like my client trusts me right now? That kind of trust? Sure, sure, we can talk about trust, Alan-after I somehow end up convinced that you’re not just covering your ass. How’s that?”

The remainder of my Monday was more or less routine from a patient point of view.

Midafternoon I reached Lauren again. Her neurologist was hopeful that the steroids would arrest the exacerbation and felt confident that her good history of recovering from previous flare-ups boded well for her this time, too. To boost prophylaxis even more he started her on a statin, something she’d been discussing with him for a while, and he gave her some Ambien samples to help her try to get some sleep until the Solumedrol loosened its grip on her psyche.