Dennis Lehane: Since We Fell

Tess’s eyes widened slightly. “Is that what you remember him smelling like?”

Rachel shook her head. “He smelled like coffee.” Her gaze followed the splash of the raindrops out the window. “Coffee and corduroy.”

She rebounded from that first bout of panic and low-grade agoraphobia in the late spring of 2002. She ran into a boy who’d been in her Advanced Research Techniques class the previous semester. His name was Patrick Mannion, and he was unfailingly considerate. He was kind of doughy and had the unfortunate habit of squinting when he couldn’t hear properly, which was often because he’d lost fifty percent of the hearing in his right ear in a childhood sledding accident.

Pat Mannion couldn’t believe Rachel kept talking to him after they’d exhausted the limits of discussing the one class they’d taken together. He couldn’t believe she suggested they get a drink. And the look on his face when, back at his apartment a few hours later, she reached for his belt buckle was the look of a man who’d glanced up at the sky to check for clouds and witnessed angels passing overhead. It was a look that remained on his face, more or less, throughout their relationship, which lasted two years.

When she did eventually break up with him — ever so gently, almost to the point of convincing him that it was a mutual decision — he stared back at her with a strange, brutalized dignity and said, “I never used to understand why you were with me. I mean, you’re gorgeous and I’m so... not.”

“You’re—”

He held up a hand to stop her. “Then one day, about six months ago, it hit me — love doesn’t trump all for you, safety does. And I knew sooner or later you’d dump me before I’d dump you because — and this is the important part, Rach — I would never dump you .” He gave her a beautiful, broken smile. “And that’s been my purpose all along.”

After grad school, she spent a year in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on the Times Leader and then returned to Massachusetts and quickly moved up to the features department at the Patriot Ledger in Quincy, where a story she wrote on racial profiling by the Hingham Police Department garnered some acclaim and enough attention that she received an e-mail from Brian Delacroix, of all people. He’d been traveling for business and had come across a copy of the Ledger in the waiting room of a lumber distributor in Brockton. He wanted to know if she was the same Rachel Childs and if she had ever found her father.

She wrote back that she was the same Rachel Childs and that, no, she hadn’t found her father. Would he care to take another stab at the job?

Can’t. Slammed at work. Traveling traveling traveling. Take care, Rachel. You won’t be at the Ledger long. Big things await. Love the way you write.

He was right — a year after that, she made it to the majors and the Boston Globe.

Which is where Dr. Felix Browner, her mother’s OB/GYN, found her. The subject line of his e-mail was “Old Friend of Your Mom’s,” but once she responded to it, it became clear he was less a friend than someone Elizabeth Childs had utilized for medical purposes. Dr. Browner was also not the gynecologist her mother had been using by the time Rachel had knowledge of such things. When Rachel reached adolescence, Elizabeth had introduced her to Dr. Veena Rao, whom most of the women and young girls Rachel knew also used. She’d never heard of Felix Browner. But he assured her he had been her mother’s doctor when Elizabeth first came to western Massachusetts and had, in fact, introduced Rachel herself to her first taste of oxygen. You were a squirmy one , he wrote.

In a subsequent e-mail he wrote that he possessed important information he’d like to share regarding her mother but he only felt comfortable sharing it face-to-face. They agreed to meet halfway between Boston and Springfield, where he lived, and settled on a diner in Millbury.

Before the meeting, she researched Dr. Browner and the picture was, as her instincts had been telling her since his first e-mail, not a flattering one. The year before, in 2006, he’d been barred from practicing medicine due to multiple allegations of sexual assault or sexual misconduct by female patients, the earliest dating back to 1976, when the good doctor was only a week out of med school.

Dr. Browner brought two rolling file cases to the diner with him. At sixty-two or so, he wore his thick silver hair in the almost mullet, almost shag style of someone who drove a sports car and patronized Jimmy Buffett concerts. He wore light blue jeans, penny loafers without socks, and a Hawaiian shirt under a black linen blazer. He carried an extra thirty pounds around his middle like a statement of success and had an easy way with the waitress and the busboys. He struck her as the kind of man who is well liked by strangers but baffled if someone doesn’t laugh at his jokes.

After he’d expressed his sympathies for the death of Rachel’s mother, he reminded her what a squirmy little newborn she’d been — “Like you were dipped in Palmolive.” He then somewhat breathlessly revealed that his first accuser — “We’ll call her Lianne and not just because it sounds like Lyin’, okay?” — knew several of the other accusers. He ticked off their names and Rachel immediately wondered if he was using aliases or if he was violating the women’s right to privacy with cavalier indifference: Tonya, Marie, Ursula, Jane, and Patty, he said, all knew one another.

“Well, it’s a small region,” Rachel said. “People know each other.”

“Do they?” He shook a sugar packet before opening it and shot her a cold smile. “ Do they?” He drizzled the sugar into his coffee, then reached into one of his file cases. “Lyin’ Lianne, I’ve discovered, has had numerous lovers. She’s been divorced twice and —”

“Doctor—”

He held up a hand to silence her. “ And was named as the ‘other woman’ in a divorce. Patty drinks alone. Marie and Ursula have substance abuse issues, and Tonya — woo-hoo-hoo — Tonya sued another doctor for sexual assault.” He bulged his eyeballs in mock outrage. “Apparently there’s an epidemic of predatory doctors in the Berkshires. Heavens!”

Rachel had known a Tonya in the Berkshires. Tonya Fletcher. Managed the Minute Man Inn. Always seemed distracted and a bit perturbed.

Dr. Browner dropped a stack of paper the size of a cinder block on the table between them. Arched a triumphant eyebrow at her.

“What,” Rachel said, “you don’t believe in thumb drives?”

He didn’t acknowledge that. “I have the goods on all of them, you see. You see?”

“I see,” Rachel said. “And what would you like me to do with that?”

“Help me,” he said, as if it were the only answer in the world.

“And why would I do that?”

“Because I’m innocent. Because I didn’t do a single wrong thing.” He turned his palms over and extended them across the table. “These hands bring life into the world. They brought you into the world, Rachel. These hands were the first that ever held you. These hands.” He stared at them like they were his two great loves. “Those women took my name.” He folded his hands together and looked down at them. “I lost my family over all the stress and discord. I lost my practice .” Tears glistened in his lower eyelids. “And I didn’t deserve it. I did not.”

Rachel gave him what she hoped would be a sympathetic smile but suspected looked merely sickly. “I’m not sure what you’re asking of me.”

He leaned back from the table. “Write about these women. Show that they had an agenda, that they chose me to advance that agenda. That they set out to destroy me and now they have. They need to atone. They need to recant. They need to be exposed. Now they’re suing me in civil court. Do you know, young lady, that the average civil case costs a quarter million to defend. Just to defend . Win or lose, you’re out two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Did you know that?”