LITMIR.BIZ

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eyes glazed over.”

      “Your mother couldn’t resonate with your joy.”

      “Do you think she might have been depressed?” she asked.

      Do I think she might have been depressed? Hadn’t I suggested this very thing to Allison about a thousand times? But patients are deaf to an idea until they’re ready to hear it. Often the insight penetrates only as it comes out of their own mouths. I kept quiet and leaned forward in time to see Allison’s face thaw. Tears, carrying flecks of mascara, slipped down her cheeks, soaking the tissue on the pillow under her head.

      “Maybe my mother wanted to be there for me,” Allison said. “Like I do with my kids.”

      We were both silent then, and I saw in my mind’s eye a multi-layered family portrait. There was Allison, eleven years old, frozen mid-step in her baton-twirling routine, thrown by the sight of her mother powdering her nose. There was Allison in her shade-darkened bedroom telling her own daughter Abigail, who’s dripping water and excitement, that she’ll watch her dive off the board later. There was me filling in my Day Timer with Allison expectant on my couch. And there was my own mother, oblivious to my yearning presence, standing guard at the window, mindlessly caressing Buddy her always-in-arms Yorkie, staring into the night as if her diligence could generate a magnetic force to pull my father home. It was a powerful moment, an attuned moment, a moment encompassing the present and the past, the transference and the countertransference. It was the kind of moment that psychoanalysis is all about.

      Allison broke the quiet. “You need to know that I’m going to be okay. Killing myself isn’t an option anymore. I know you’ve worried over me.”

      Had I ever. I remembered weeks when her desperate and demanding calls came in every hour—calls that made my blood pressure shoot up, calls that robbed me of sleep, calls that set my psyche swinging between the terrified conviction that she that very minute was killing herself to the angry thought that she was killing me. I had indeed worried over her, but I’d worried over myself too—about what would happen to my practice if I became the psychiatrist who failed to prevent Allison Forsyth’s suicide.

      “Yes,” I said to Allison, “I’ve been concerned about you.”

      In retrospect, I might have been more analytic here as well, might have wondered aloud why she was bringing up those old suicidal feelings, might have raised some healthy skepticism about this “cure.” But I made none of these potentially productive moves, asked none of the called-for questions. Why so sloppy? Did I consider myself immune to further professional tragedy? Was I counting on Howard’s sacrifice to have appeased some fault-counting, psychoanalytic deity? Most likely, I just wasn’t up to wading into the muck.

      “I never thought I’d get here,” Allison said. “Maybe you wondered too. Don’t tell me.” She laughed and I didn’t recognize the sound. “I’ve needed to think at least you held on to some hope for me. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

      Usually Allison had to be pried off the couch at the end of her hour. Over the years, we’d devised a routine for that painful transition. I’d announce that our session was over. She’d sigh. I’d feel accused of not helping. She’d sit up, sigh again and begin a slow search of her purse for her keys. As the door closed, she’d shoot me the woebegone look that my dog Gizmo lays on me when I send her out in the rare Texas downpour. But that day, Allison popped up and was out of the office a minute early like she had somewhere else to be. I felt relief at not having to go through our guilty dance, but reminded myself that leaving early is as much resistance as coming late and made a note to talk with her about the quick get-away. Overall though, I felt we’d had a great session and that Allison’s psychic puzzle was finally coming together.

      Done properly, psychoanalysis can be a brutally slow process. Even the analyst comes to doubt that change is possible. Big breakthroughs happen in the movies. Real-life therapy is like hiking up a dense mountain trail. I knew from training and experience to regard apparent progress with skepticism, but that day, with Howard’s name still written in ink across my weekly schedule, I reveled in the feeling that Allison and I had made it to a clearing and could finally see the view.

      My good feeling about Allison carried me through John Heyderman’s session right up to my eleven o’clock appointment with Lance Powers. As usual, Lance was backed tight into the corner of the waiting room. He was the only patient who could come up my stairs and through the front door without making a sound. When he saw me that day, he sat up straighter and took a quick sniff of the air. His acute animal instinct had kept him alive in the jungles of Vietnam. Back in everyday Texas, it just made him weird. As always, his appearance was impeccable—every hair on his head preternaturally in place, his small moustache trimmed ruler straight, his polo shirt and khaki pants painfully pressed. He wasn’t wearing his reflective sunglasses though, and that told me he was in a psychologically safe place.

      To someone who didn’t know Lance, our meeting that day would have sounded like small talk. We covered ways to manage his younger son’s annoying antics, possible topics for his Sunday school class and problems posed by a slacker employee. But everyday stuff like this was foreign territory to Lance. In the seventies, he’d been an operative for a government agency he was still afraid to name. He’d been discharged from the military in body only, his internal world stuck in a perpetual cycle of horrific flashback, demonic guilt and deadening denial. He’d gone through the motions of constructing an ordinary life—marrying, going to church, spawning two children, building a successful construction business—but only recently had he started to get enough distance from the past to emotionally inhabit his current world.

      As we chatted, I felt like I was on a therapeutic roll—Allison, now Lance. For an instant, I forgot about my dead patient. Or so I thought.

      “You’re embracing your life, Howard,” I said, high on success. “This is meaningful.”

      Yes, Howard.

      My slip-of-the-tongue stunned us both.

      “That’s not my name,” he said, staring at me with a look that made me simultaneously shamed and concerned for my safety.

      He was out the door before I could think.

      Chapter Four

      “Tough luck,” Richard said. “The Westerman deal, I mean.”

      He was trying to make small talk while waiting for the kids for their off-decree Thursday evening with Dad. This spur of the moment behavior was typical of Richard, who tended to regard rules made by someone else—even if that someone happened to be Judge Negron who set the terms of our separation—as works in progress.

      “Hmm,” I said, using my body language to keep him penned in the foyer.

      “Stopped by their place on the way over here to give my condolences. I just couldn’t get out of New York in time to make the memorial service. Very important case.” My eyes did a reflexive roll—a bad habit of mine, I know. In the process, I took notice of his charcoal suit, one I hadn’t seen before, which was perfectly complemented by a shirt of the palest grey and a creamy silk tie. His understated, yet elegant, appearance seemed critical commentary on my own dated outfit. “Camille called me Monday morning as soon as she hung up with 911.” He shook his head in disbelief.

      “She called you?” I said. I hear about my patient on the news, and Richard gets a personal call?

      “We’d just that minute wrapped the show, so I was able to pick up. What a tragedy.” He did the head shake again. “But Camille is a strong woman. She’ll be okay.”

      “Oh, I’m sure she will,” I said.

      “Why the hostility here? She’s just lost her husband, and you know what she said? Are you listening? Said she was putting me up for membership in the San Antonio Country Club. That would include you too, of course, if we ever

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