Evan Hunter: The Moment She Was Gone

“He seemed like a doctor, yes. I mean, he wasn’t rattling bones and throwing them in the dirt...”

My mother actually smiles.

“... he seemed like a genuine doctor in a respectable linen suit, yes.”

“Did you see any diplomas on the wall? Any certificates? Anything like that?”

“No, Mom, I didn’t. But he was a doctor, he was a psychiatrist, let’s agree on that, can we? The question is what do we do now? A qualified psychiatrist has told us that Annie...”

“Does she look crazy to you?”

“No. But I’m not a...”

“She doesn’t look crazy to me, either.”

“Well, neither of us...”

“I think Annie is well aware of the consequences of what happened in Italy. If I can help her with enough money to live in decent housing, enough money for food and whatever supplies she needs to make her jewelry, maybe help her to open another little shop...”

“Aaron thinks she’ll be running off again.”

“Aaron is a wonderful son, but I don’t think he’s a very good brother. Don’t you dare tell him I said that, Andrew,” she warns and pats my hand playfully. “Didn’t they give you any potato chips?” she asks.

“I think we ought to take her to a psychiatrist.”

“Sure. While we’re at it, let’s take Hitler to a seder.”

“If only to clear the record,” I say, and suddenly my mother turns to me, her green eyes suspicious.

“And what else?” she asks.

“Nothing else. Set the record straight, get her a clean bill of health.”

“And if not?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Suppose a psychiatrist here agrees with this Bertuzzi, whatever his name is. What then? Do we put her in a strait jacket again?”

“They don’t put people in strait jackets nowa...”

“They did in Italy!”

I sigh heavily. The man running scales on the tuba pauses and then begins again. I realize he is running chromatics. For an instant, it brings me back to the days when all we needed to be rock musicians was an electrical outlet and three chords.

“So what do you suggest instead, Mom? Give her another potful of money, send her on her...”

“I never give her that much money. Just enough to get by on. If I cut off her funds, then what? Do you want her to end up in a homeless shelter? Do you have any idea what that’s like? It’s a nightmare of theft, abuse, and drugs, is that what you want for your sister?”

“I want her to be happy and well,” I say softly.

My mother turns to look at me again. Her eyes are relentless. Far away, the tuba player is doing the G scale.

“You do think she’s crazy, don’t you?” she says.

“I would like to find out if she is, Mom.”

“She’ll never agree to see a psychiatrist, forget it.”

We are silent for several moments. The tuba player falls silent, too, resting. We sit in silence in golden sunshine in a park gone suddenly Seurat.

“I’ve already spoken to someone,” I say.

“What do you mean?”

“A psychiatrist who was a friend of mine at NYU...”

“You talked to a psychiatrist without consulting...?”

“Just for advice, Mom, okay? He specializes in psychopharmacology. He told me a long-lasting drug was probably administered to Annie by injection when she first arrived at the hospital, which is why she’s still feeling so good. Plus the pills Bertuzzi prescribed. He said...”

“Yes, she is feeling good. In fact, I’ve never seen her...”

“He says there’s no way to convince someone who’s delusional...”

“Your sister is not delusional.”

“If she’s delusional, okay? There’d be no way to convince her she’s not experiencing reality. He told me about this case where...”

“Your sister doesn’t fit any of the...”

“Where this patient was convinced he was dead...”

“You’re talking about very sick people here.”

“... and his doctor tried to tell him otherwise, but the guy kept insisting he was dead, he was dead. So the doctor asked him if dead men bleed, and the patient said, ‘No, of course not.’ So the doctor pricked the man’s finger with a pin, and of course he started bleeding. So the doctor said, ‘There. Does that prove anything to you?’ And the patient looked at his finger, amazed, and said, ‘Yes. I was wrong. Dead men do bleed.’ ”

“I don’t see what that has to do with Annie.”

“My friend thinks the best thing to do would be to put her in a psychiatric hospital...”

“Absolutely out of the question!”

“... for a few weeks...”

“Not for a minute!”

“... where she could work with someone, and develop a relationship, get her on treatment and medication. She has to realize from someone she trusts that she was, in fact, medicated in Italy, and she actually feels better now. You see, Mom, paranoid people...”

“Your sister’s not paranoid.”

“If she’s paranoid, is what I’m saying. If she is, then she sees medication as just another plot to control her. He gave me the number of someone he thinks might be able to help her, a woman psychiatrist, he thinks she should see a woman...”

“She’d never agree.”

“I think we should try.”

“What you mean we, kemo sabe?” my mother says.

It is left for me to bell the cat.

My sister and I are drinking coffee in the Starbucks on Seventieth and Broadway. It is three in the afternoon on a bright day in July. Annie has walked over from my mother’s apartment. I have taken the subway uptown from my Chelsea apartment.

She is wearing a green sun dress that shows off to advantage the new tattoo on her left arm, a barbed-wire encirclement, or perhaps a ring of thorns, a tattoo I’ve seen on Puerto Rican gang members in the less than exemplary school at which I teach. Once, while I was serving on an after-school advisory committee two years ago, and trying to learn a little bit more about the kids we were supposed to be helping, I borrowed a book about juvenile delinquency from the library, and was surprised and delighted to learn that one of the chapters was titled “Twins: A Gang in Miniature.”

We truly were a gang once, my sister and I.

About her tattoo, though, she tells me she had it done in a little shop in Palermo, and I see no reason to disbelieve her. According to Bertuzzi, there are bigger things my sister has to lie about. Or at least not understand the truth about. Then again, according to Bertuzzi, my sister is nuts.

But this is now the eighth day of July. We have been home for ten days now, and Annie hasn’t tried to set fire to the apartment or shove anyone in front of a bus or jump off the roof. She is sipping a frappuccino. I am nursing a cappuccino without much foam. She seems perfectly all right. In fact, it is hard to believe Sicily ever happened. She seems to be the Annie I remember from our youth, a golden girl brimming with ideas, inventing word games, telling outrageous stories, doing hilarious and often cruel imitations of people we know.

On this sunny afternoon in July, she is telling me about a morning in Paris when she was having coffee at a little outdoor cafe in Montmartre, and seated at another table was this absolute stereotype of an Englishman, a Colonel Blimp if ever there was one — and here Annie puffs out her cheeks and raises her eyebrows and becomes this Englishman from Central Casting — this stout gentleman wearing a bowler, and carrying a cane, sitting there sipping his café filtre, his mustache bristling, sniffing the morning air and watching the French pass by on the sidewalk beyond. At long last, he turns to Annie, and says in round brown English tones, “Lovely morning, isn’t it?” and Annie says, “Yes, lovely.” He sips a bit more coffee, looks at the passing parade again, turns to Annie another time and says, “Lovely city, Paris.” My sister nods, agrees, “Yes, lovely.” He nods in return, studies the sidewalk again, turns to her yet another time, and says, “Lovely country, France.” She says, “Yes, lovely,” and he leans toward her and in a conspiratorial whisper says, “Pity it’s wasted on the French.”