Primary Obsessions, page 13
* * *
As Annick pressed out of the front doors of the office building, onto the block perpendicular to Cambie with its mix of heritage residences and medical agencies, she checked her phone for messages even though she knew she hadn’t heard any notifications. It was nearly seven and the traffic had already started to slow down, the metered parking emptying along the block. Annick took only a second to ask herself why the large black SUV across the street was idling its engine before she turned towards the main artery two blocks away.
As she walked, the vehicle pulled slowly out of its space and crawled, at first just behind her, then alongside her. She looked up to see who was driving it, but the tinted windows were closed and opaque, and it wasn’t until she’d gone nearly half a block that she realized that the driver was openly shadowing her. She stopped for a second, and the SUV stopped with her.
“Can I help you with something?”
The motor hummed in response, the windows staring like a pair of sunglasses.
“What? What is it?” she yelled again, with more confrontation in her voice. Her mind pitched back to Halifax, to Gottingen Street, to bush parties and house parties where the girls, not far behind the boys, had preened and projected toughness. “What’s your fucking problem?” She felt the lips curling up over her teeth, baring more of her seething anger the longer the truck sat stupidly there.
Annick looked up and down the block, seeing no one on the side street with her, the closest people still a block and a half east, on Cambie Street. She stared back at the windows of the truck.
“Did she send you?” she hollered. “Is that what this is?”
She started walking again, a little faster but careful not to seem like she was running, and this time the SUV stayed parked where it was.
She turned to check that the street she was about to cross was clear when the tires of the SUV screamed in exertion, hurling the vehicle along the distance that she’d put between them, then jerking left onto the small street before Cambie, screeching to a stop right in front of her, blocking the way.
“You fucking asshole!” Annick yelled, extending a middle finger, then realizing that it was shaking. She stepped to the left in order to get around in front of the SUV, but it lurched forward; she walked a few steps to the right and it whirred in reverse.
Annick tried to maintain her stare into the driver’s inscrutable window, tried to camouflage her trembling. They stood for something close to a minute. The body and mind that had been so tired as she left the office were now alive with adrenaline and panic, every sound amplified, her pupils opening to let in more of the summer’s evening light. She felt the sweat break out between her shoulder blades and run down her back. She felt each in the litany of symptoms she explained to patients suffering from panic attacks; she explained the misfiring software of anxiety, the fight-or-flight instincts in the body firing up for what it thought was survival but was usually just a work meeting or a job interview or a date or a fleeting memory of the night a parent had died.
This time, though, it wasn’t misfiring. This really was fight or flight. And she didn’t know which to choose.
The tires squealed again and the SUV bolted away down the block, taking a hard and screeching right, roaring audibly for what must have been twenty seconds after it was no longer visible.
Annick wanted more than anything to sit on the curb, but she was afraid that they might come back. Instead she ran for the crowds on Cambie as though they were air just on the other side of the water’s surface. She was nearly vibrating as she joined the flow of humanity, hearing everyone’s conversations and seeing everyone’s faces but not able to make sense of any of them, dropping her wallet at the toll gates to the SkyTrain station as she fumbled with her fare card. She felt like she had to move until the very second that she sat down, at which point she knew she wouldn’t be able to—she avoided the escalator and trembled along the metal railings on the way down the stairs. She paced the platform until the SkyTrain arrived, pushing rudely past the people trying to get out, negotiating their luggage from the airport. She took a seat next to a window, but when a man sat down next to her she leapt up again, fairly scurrying along the aisle until she saw an old woman, sitting in front of two other women, and sat down next to her. She texted Philip to meet her in front of Waterfront Station, so that she wouldn’t have to walk home alone.
For now, at least, it would be flight.
19
“Can I talk to you for a second?”
Cedric was waiting at the threshold to his own office wearing a long, weary face.
Annick was emerging from a second consecutive sleepless night, only this time she was also chaperoned to work by Philip as though she were his daughter rather than his girlfriend, shepherded up the elevator and right into the reception area of the clinic. She could feel the adolescent sullenness on her own features, her jaw set in a determination not to be fucked with, a resentment both at being treated as though she were somehow not safe and her simultaneous awareness of the fact that she probably wasn’t. The travel mug was, thus far, the week’s only success story, having made it through several days of service now, but at this point it was empty, and hung limply from her fingers, dangling with Damocletian possibility. Despite their being peers, she felt like an ill-disciplined student entering the principal’s office as she followed Cedric and shut his door.
Still standing, Cedric picked up a newspaper that had been lying on his desk and opened it to the Letters page.
“Can we talk about this?”
Through the insomniac fog, it took a full three seconds for Annick to remember that she had written a letter to the editor in response to Andrew Murphy’s obnoxious column—a letter that, given the concentration of major media ownership in Canada, was probably running in as many newspapers as carried Murphy’s thrice-weekly pontifications. Annick raised her shoulders in deflection.
“What is there to talk about?”
“Annick, you shouldn’t need for me to tell you that this isn’t okay.”
“You are absolutely right—I don’t need you to tell me that it isn’t okay.”
“Can we start this again?”
“Why?”
“Because this doesn’t feel, to me, like a dynamic conducive to a helpful conversation.”
“Spare me your fucking sanctimony, Cedric, alright?”
“Okay, let’s talk about this later. You’re clearly not in any position right now to—”
“No, Cedric, let’s talk. You wanted to talk about it right now, you’re the one who was lurking in wait as I arrived—”
“That is absolutely unfair—”
“I don’t know how many times you’ll need me to remind you of this over the course of our professional lives, but I sure as shit hope it’s a shrinking number—you are not my boss, Cedric. You are not my superior. We are colleagues, we are equity partners in a practice—”
“Yes, goddamn it, equity partners in a clinic whose bloody name you signed to this juvenile, guttersnipe letter! Equity partners in a goddamned clinic whose good name has been marshalled for puffery and egotistic conflict in the pages of a major newspaper chain. Tell me again, Dr. Boudreau, how I have no right to be angry?”
Annick bobbed her head, shook the heel of her right foot, as she tried to think of an angle from which Cedric was incorrect. The walking embodiment of calm and equanimity made sinewy flesh, a “goddamn” from Cedric exploded with the conversational force of a string of motherfuckers from anyone else. She looked into the corner of the room, avoiding his steady gaze through square glasses, his stern but open face, and shook her head.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have written the letter. Or else I shouldn’t have signed the name of the clinic.”
“And so why did you?”
“Doesn’t it ever bother you, the flattening out of everyone’s opinions? I wanted to give the name of the clinic so that, I mean Jesus—so that people would know that for once, for one time, they were hearing from someone who knew what they were talking about.”
“Annick, I didn’t disagree with a word in the letter. It was smart, it was sharp. Hell, girl, it was funny.”
“Oh, sure—and since when do you have a sense of humour?”
“Easy now. Just because a wine is dry doesn’t mean you can’t taste it.”
Annick rolled her red eyes.
“But there are norms of both etiquette as well as ethics which have been compromised by your having written it,” he continued. “We’re not clergy, but our patients nevertheless approach us expecting a certain dignity, a removal from the fray. We don’t roll in mud, Annick.”
Annick nodded bitterly.
“And ethically,” Cedric said, waving his hand in something like a conjuring gesture. “Ethically, in my opinion, this letter places the confidentiality of your patient at risk.”
Annick was dumbfounded. “Excuse me?”
“He is your patient, isn’t he?”
Annick bluffed for time. “Who?”
“The young man, being held for murder. Sanjay Desai. I’ve seen the fellow in the waiting area, seen him paying for sessions at reception. And I think that if someone were to see you coming out swinging in such force for him, they could fairly easily deduce that—”
“No, sorry, Cedric. I’ll go with you on the norms of bullshit etiquette, fine, of dirtying myself in the fray. But nobody else reading that letter has seen Sanjay in this office, seen him paying up front. Anybody reading that letter would see a doctor taking perfectly understandable, whatever, umbrage at a loud-mouthed, Southern Ontario Cicero flapping his gums about something he knows sweet dick all about, and that she’s given her professional life over to.”
“That may be.”
“No, it is.”
“Fine.”
“I won’t write any more letters. Alright? Or if I do, I’ll write them as an individual. But the Ph.D. is mine, for the record. It’s my goddamn doctorate I’m signing next to my name.”
“No one ever said anything different…”
“No Cedric, you just implied it. Brought me in here like I don’t know my responsibilities to this clinic, to my patients—”
“Are you involving yourself in the legal difficulties of this young man?”
“Excuse me?”
“I think my question was quite clear, Dr. Boudreau.”
“Don’t you ‘Dr. Boudreau’ me, you pompous—”
There was a timid knock at the door to Cedric’s office, and suddenly Annick wondered how loudly they had been talking. All of her self-possession, her whole sense of calibration, had been worn down by the waking hours she’d spent over the past two nights.
“Yes?” Cedric asked of the door.
It opened slightly and Marcel, the delicately constructed receptionist who wore a thin, long-sleeved sweater even in these summer months, and who looked at them through tentative eyes that seemed like fragile glass bowls, leaned the large head at the end of his thin neck just past the threshold.
“I’m sorry to interrupt.”
“It’s fine,” the doctors said in unison.
“Dr. Boudreau, there’s someone here to see you.”
“Really? Who? I don’t have any sessions until ten today.”
“It’s a Mr. Blair.”
* * *
Lewis Blair leaned over the framed degree on the wall of Annick Boudreau’s office and made a face like the very idea of a school was funny. When she’d found him standing at reception, Blair had taken in her chest and her hips before meeting her at the eyes, his overly manicured silver beard framing the kind of smile that sent fingers reaching into purses for bear spray. Blair was tall, taller than Cedric, and wore a denim shirt with pearl snap buttons, untucked over a pair of tight black corduroy pants and blue leather tennis shoes that weren’t meant for tennis. He’d held a hand heavy with jewelry out for her to shake, and had taken the opportunity to inspect her chest again as he did.
“McGill University, huh?” He said stupidly, and just as stupidly, Annick answered:
“Yup.”
Lewis Blair turned, smiling. He jerked a thumb westward. “I went to Sauder,” he said, then added by way of clarification, “business school here at UBC.”
“I know it, yes.”
“Boudreau, Montréal—you a Frenchie?” Blair had given the question a bouncy jocularity meant to dull the bigotry, but Annick didn’t roll with it.
“I’m an Acadian.”
“Ah, Cajun! The real East Coast. Still, the accent’s cute as hell. One summer about a million years ago I worked in Ottawa and we used to go over to Hull on the weekends to drink and meet the French girls, learn about, oh, the solitudes…”
“Gatineau.”
“Sorry?”
“It’s called Gatineau now.”
“Is it? Well, I haven’t been in a while. I guess everything’s Frenched-up out that way these days, isn’t it?”
“You know, I’ve always thought it was so unfair.”
“What’s unfair?”
“Like you say—we sound so cute when we speak English. But you guys just sound stupid when you speak French.”
“Well, I don’t speak a word of the stuff. I just know that these little girls, the little girls in Hull? When those little girls said ‘Oui,’ we said ‘Wheeeeeee!’”
Blair sat in the patient’s chair, and Annick wished that her desk wasn’t up against the wall, that she could get it between the two of them, but instead she sat closer to him than she would strictly have wanted to.
“Miss Boudreau—”
“Dr. Boudreau.”
“Well that’s right, isn’t it? Why, we were just talking about that, weren’t we?” he said, pointing at her diploma. “Where’s my head?”
“We don’t find heads here, Mr. Blair, we just help clear them out.”
Blair let out a thunderclap of what sounded like genuine laughter. “That’s good. You’ve been waiting to use that one, haven’t you?”
“What can I help you with, Mr. Blair? I have a patient coming in twenty-five minutes.”
“Oh, well, I’m not going to snatch nearly that much from you, missy. I’m here because I’d like to make a donation, for the good work that you people do here.”
“Sorry?”
“I’m not going to beat around the bush—”
“Why would you? This isn’t Gatineau.”
Another explosive laugh. “Goddamn, sweet pea! You go right for the throat.”
“Why don’t you just state your business.”
Blair dropped his face in a pantomime of hurt and consternation.
“I read your little letter today, in the newspaper, Miss Boudreau. And I hope you won’t respond here in a way that’s prejudicial, but, well—little Mikey, Mike Collis? That’s my nephew.”
“And an employee, no? Doesn’t he work at your club?”
“Sure, I like to help my family. We don’t let him onstage though, the little retard has two left feet.”
“I’ve never much liked that word.”
“What, ‘little’? Me neither. But I think we might have that in common,” Blair said, running his eyes now very deliberately over Annick’s softer parts. “But of course just because someone is family, that doesn’t mean we see eye to eye on everything. I mean, hell, sometimes it can mean just the opposite. And though I love my sister’s son like he were my own, I don’t mind telling you that I was ashamed of what he wrote about that boy. The murderer.”
“Alleged.”
“Sure,” Blair said, smiling. “Anyhow, I wanted to, as it were, balance out my family’s karma in these things, and make a donation to your little clinic here, show you that the Blair family isn’t all as insensitive as our young, dumb ones. So I was thinking I’d like to write a cheque, just for a little something, say ten thousand dollars, to do our part. And I’d want you to think of it not just as coming from me, but from all my employees.”
“Well, that’s incredibly generous of you, Mr. Blair—”
“It’s just the way God made me.”
“—but we’re not set up to accept donations.”
“Well, you know, I figured you might say that, and so I figured I could just make the cheque out to you personally, and you yourself could just sort out the best way to put it to work for mental health.”
“No. Thank you.”
Blair stared at her for a second, let a switch get thrown inside his head behind a wry and angry smile, and he reached out and took a handful of Annick’s chocolate peppermints. He unwrapped them slowly, letting the foil drop to the ground. As he chewed, he giggled as though along with her, reaching a finger back into his mouth to dislodge the sticky bits from his teeth. His right index finger was covered in waxy, melted chocolate.
“That’s not the kind of operation you run, huh? You don’t take money from outsiders?”
“No, it’s not the kind of operation we run.”
“Just what kind of fucking operation do you run, sister? Because I tell you what, I’ve got a little girl who works for me—”
“Keep saying ‘little girl,’ Mr. Blair. See if this time, I clutch my pearls. See if this time, my skin crawls right across the room.”
Blair smiled like a shark. “There’s a little girl who works for me, a little Oriental girl, pretty as a Ming vase. Probably just as easy to break, too. And she says there’s some chubby little thing been pecking at her, bothering her. Harassing her. Setting up fake photo shoots just to talk to her.”
Annick smiled and shrugged her shoulders.
“So when she tells me this, the little girl in my care, I have to ask myself if she’s being hounded by some dyke slob who wants to get her snout wet, or else some bloodhound bitch who thinks she’s sniffing a trail for Sherlock Holmes?”
