Primary Obsessions, page 15
“I’m fascinated by the history of the Acadians,” Supriya said, staring out the window as Annick pulled off of the Lougheed Highway onto the Trans-Canada. “The reversed fortunes of settlerism, dislocation. This grammar of non-white Whiteness.”
Annick nodded, for the most part following what Supriya was saying.
“And here we are now,” said Supriya, “two women from homelands disrupted by the British Empire, embodying positions of relative class privilege, on unceded, stolen Indigenous territories…”
She really talks like this, Annick thought again, smiling, all the time.
“… and facing down an edifice of colonial justice constructed to imprison brown bodies. Like Sanjay’s.”
Without taking her eyes off the road, Annick laid a hand on Supriya’s knee and squeezed. For a few seconds, Supriya didn’t react, and just as Annick was about to pull back, Supriya laid her hand over top of Annick’s.
“Thank you,” she said.
Annick returned her hand to the wheel, and they rode in silence, and in the silence the question that Annick wanted to ask kept growing until its urgency was electric, a strong and burning current running through every part of her. She began stealing sidelong glances at Supriya, at first camouflaging them against highway sign readings, then hoping to get caught.
“Supriya…”
“The envelope you gave me.”
Annick nearly jerked the car off the road.
“Yes?”
“Did you know that it wasn’t sealed? Maybe you wanted me to read it?”
They drove in another silence just as long as the last.
“I don’t know,” Annick answered hoarsely. “I asked myself the same question, Supriya. I didn’t realize it as I was handing it to you, but, I—it did occur to me, afterward, that maybe… I don’t know. Maybe I wanted you to read it, to know that I could help. I felt—I don’t mean this as a self-justification of any kind, but I felt coincée, um, pinched… cornered. I felt like two aspects of my commitment to care were being set against each other. I—I don’t know.”
Annick felt the redness rising in patches on her skin, her neck, face and chest, but the heat didn’t distract from the fact that Supriya hadn’t told her anything about what she’d done with the letter.
“Did you?” she asked, and Supriya looked out the window again. Annick’s stomach clenched.
“No,” Supriya said finally, and Annick allowed for a tentative confidence and optimism to creep in around the fringes.
“No?”
“No. I very much wanted to, when I saw that you had—that I had been given the choice. But my son has a sovereignty in his life, one compromised institutionally in every other corner of it. Right now he has lost even the basic, physical sovereignty over his own body, his own bodily functions. He’s been caged. The animals who’ve imprisoned him have stolen the dignity of his privacy. I couldn’t heap another theft on top of that.”
Annick looked out at the road in front of her.
“But when I gave him the envelope, I told him what I thought. I recounted your reaction to his letter, the urgency of your bearing in response. I told him that I could tell that you were a good doctor and that I trusted you, and that I believed that he should trust you too. And I told him that if a good and decent and talented person like you were taking so active an interest in his liberation, that he had to know that he, too, was good.”
Supriya took Annick’s right hand again, clutched it firmly between both of hers.
“My son told me about his thoughts. The violence against me. He told me that he’d been worried that he was a monster, worried to tell me lest I thought so, too. And I thought of the moments when he was just a small thing, three years old, four years old, and he would scream in the night from a bad dream. Some parents will tell you that there is nothing so difficult as watching one’s child in fevered sickness, to feel the overwhelming desire to trade one’s own place for theirs. To take the sickness. But I would feel that desire most acutely when he woke screaming. That was when I felt most powerless, because I knew that I would lay my life down to save him from anything that ever threatened him from the outside. But I couldn’t dream his dreams for him.”
* * *
The Surrey Pretrial Services Centre looked like what it was: a large, mid-aughts public works commission whipped up by a right-wing provincial government running competitively in several surrounding electoral districts. The architectural style was Kafka-Ikea, and the counsel for the defence, Terry Chu, was waiting for the two of them next to a concrete flowerbed where no one had thought to plant anything.
The lawyer had a thin moustache, kept short, and the rest of his hair was long and pulled back in a loose ponytail. Even behind sunglasses, he winced into the sun, bouncing his head in welcome instead of waving his hand.
“Dr. Desai,” Chu said, nodding at Supriya, then thrusting a hand out to Annick. “Dr. Boudreau. I’m Terry, I’m Sanjay’s lawyer.”
“I’m really glad to finally be here,” Annick said, with measured frustration. Terry Chu smiled under his thin moustache.
“Our jobs are very similar in some ways, Dr. Boudreau. We both have ethical obligations to Sanjay. There was no way that I could bring you in without compromising Sanjay’s privacy and without potentially compromising the case. If it did turn out that your notes, your opinion, if subpoenaed—if all that was in Sanjay’s favour, then it would have been better for you to have been brought in by the other team. We coulda made them look bad that way, not only neutralized your notes but made them work for us.”
“I understand that.”
“You’ll be able to meet with Sanjay one on one, but so you know, once you have, the conversation is fair game. They can ask him about it, they can ask you about it, and me too—I can ask you guys about it.”
“Sanjay spoke to Terry after my conversation with him,” Supriya offered, letting Annick know that the seal had been broken.
“Okay.”
“He told me about your course of treatment, the OCD. Is it true that the diary, the notes—is it true that was something you made him do?” asked Terry.
“Well, that’s not exactly how I’d phrase it but yes, it was part of our course of therapy. We’ll often ask patients to note the frequency and intensity of intrusive thoughts. And especially towards the beginning of treatment, it can help to know the content as well.”
“Right, and you’ll say as much in court?”
“Yes, of course.”
Terry smiled again. “Good, good. Jesus. It’s nice to have a bit of reason for optimism here. They won’t like that his story changed, but you’d say it was natural, eh, given stigma et cetera? Mental illness?”
“Of course.”
“Good, good. Well, let’s go in and sit you guys down together. I think he’s very excited to see you.”
“Sure, can I ask, though—”
“Yeah?”
“What’s going on with the investigation?”
“What investigation?”
“Into who actually killed Jason.”
“Again, what investigation? As far as the VPD and Crown are concerned, they have their guy.”
“What about the third person’s blood?”
“Oh, you know about that?”
“I told her,” said Supriya.
“Right now that blood is both the carrot and the stick. When they want to soften him up, that’s the blood of an accomplice that he can flip on for leniency. They figure he can admit he killed MacGregor, but if he tells them who helped him he’s out sooner. But when they want to scare him, I mean scare him even more than he’s already scared, they pretend they think it’s a second victim, out bleeding somewhere, a loose end.”
“Mr. Chu—”
“Terry, please, Dr. Boudreau.”
“Terry, I think I know who actually did it.”
“Annick!” Supriya shouted, eyes widened in betrayed shock. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because—” Annick started, before Terry took her by the crook of the arm and marched the three of them out into the parking lot.
“What do you mean you think you know who did it,” he asked now, more seriously than he’d been speaking since their arrival. Supriya crossed her arms.
“The reason I haven’t said anything, to you, either, Supriya, is that I don’t know for sure. I’m trying to get it sorted out. The kid, Jason, he had a girlfriend. A model and dancer, maybe more, at Babylon Rivers, the club where Jason worked. Where his friend Mike still works. They had a very up and down relationship, lots of fighting, Mike even denied that they were together. And when I confronted her about it—”
“Jesus Christ…” said Terry, and held his forehead in his hand. Without taking his sunglasses off, he slipped his knobby fingers up behind the lenses and rubbed his eyes.
“She acted incredibly suspiciously, and then I started getting threats.”
“Annick,” said Supriya, quietly and with frustrated empathy.
“Get the fuck out of here,” said Terry.
“No, it’s true.”
“No, I mean get the fuck out of here,” Terry said angrily, pointing at her car. “Get the fuck back into your vehicle and get as far away from this case as possible while I try to figure out what to do with this.”
“Do with what?”
“Is it even humanly possible that you’re this stupid?”
“Listen, I don’t have to—”
“Knowing full well that you could be called as a witness in this trial, you went out and poisoned your testimony with some Nancy Drew bullshit harassment campaign against the dead kid’s stripper fucking girlfriend? Do you realize that you’re useless to me now? Useless to Sanjay?”
“Terry, please be calm. Annick thought she was helping.”
“I don’t give a fuck what she thought!”
“Excuse me, you incompetent dickhead, but I had no reason whatsoever to think that I was going to be called as a witness in this trial, because you were waiting to do some Johnnie Cochran jiu-jitsu on the prosecutors, like they were going to try to get Sanjay to fit a leather glove around his serotonin. I went out, at great risk to my own personal safety, by the way, because the cops were ready to railroad my patient and his dipshit Clarence Darrow cosplay lawyer was sitting on his hands!”
The two of them seethed in Supriya’s calm presence, the sun baking the asphalt underneath them.
“I’m sorry,” Terry said finally. “I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that.”
“Okay,” said Annick. “I’m sorry too.”
“Terry, can we address the implications of this after Dr. Boudreau has spoken to Sanjay?”
Terry smiled hopelessly. “Dr. Desai, I wasn’t speaking in, whatever, hyperbole when I said that the testimony is poisoned. I need her as far away from Sanjay right now as possible. At the very best, I mean off the top of my head, I can bring in an expert who has no relation to the case, none to Dr. Boudreau, who can comment on her session notes, talk about OCD in general. But even the session notes are tainted now. Dr. Boudreau’s reliability is going to be a punching bag. You like OJ metaphors? If I’m Johnnie Cochran, you just became Mark Fuhrman.”
Annick felt sick.
“But what about this sex worker woman?” Supriya asked.
“What about her?”
“Can’t we ask the police to look into her? At least test her blood against the third person’s?”
“Based on what?” Terry said, now somewhere between hysterical and resigned. “Based on the hunch of my now-toxic witness, we’d like the police to start digging into a grieving woman’s affairs? This is still a democracy, Dr. Desai.”
“It’s not just a hunch,” Annick said lamely.
“Well, at this point,” Terry said, “You’d better hope not. You’d better hope that she was mastermind enough to carry this thing off, but enough of a fuck-up to let it slip now. Because if somebody can’t prove that the girlfriend did it, this woman’s son is going to prison.”
22
Getting drunk on white wine wouldn’t have been Annick’s first choice, but it was summertime, and the only bottle of red in the house had been a gift from Philip’s father that they were saving for a special occasion. The deep, leathery drunk of a red wine felt better suited to the particularly melancholic version of oblivion that she was looking for, but there were three bottles of white on hand—two of them already chilled and one now sitting in the freezer—and so she made do.
She had poured the first of it into a stemless water glass, drinking it at a clip better suited to an iced tea. When Philip arrived home, he found the first bottle empty on the counter, Annick splayed on the couch and pouring from the second, with the Cyndi Lauper version of “I Drove All Night” playing on repeat from the Bluetooth speaker positioned in the middle of the glass coffee table.
“Hey,” he said, putting the keys down on the granite counter of the kitchen island. “What’s going on? Is it about your dad? Are we celebrating?”
“Hey, you’re a science—if I lef’ that bottle in the freezer and it explode?”
“Jesus Christ, Annick.”
“Because how come I had a friend that keeped vodka in the freezer and—because vodka doesn’t freeze and the bottle always come out so cold.”
Philip poured a tall glass of water for her, cut up an orange for the electrolytes and set them in front of her on the coffee table, removing her wine glass and the second bottle after she’d pre-emptively finished it, batting his hand away. He leaned down to where she was, resting her head on the hard arm of the couch, and kissed her on the forehead. She smiled stupidly as Philip returned to the kitchen and set the kettle to boil, clicking the large blue flame to life under the water.
“Be honest, you miss my hair. The shaved it makes you feel like a lesbian.”
“Actually, my wanting to have sex with you does not make me feel like a lesbian,” Philip said with patience, leaning on the counter. “Given my penis and testicles and all that stuff. Not to be a gender reductionist.”
“I had such beautiful long hair.”
“You did. You’re also beautiful now.”
“It’s not the men that change—they keep looking because of tits. They don’t care. But I miss how little girls used to look at my hair. Like a princess.”
Annick closed her eyes for a second, and Philip thought that she’d fallen asleep.
“And then I could tell ’em,” she said, springing suddenly back to life, sitting up on the couch, “I could tell ’em that fuck that, I’m not a princess, I’m a psychologist. You don’t have to be a stupid princess.” Annick giggled, and Philip smiled with deep condescension.
“At the very least, I won’t have to hold any hair back for you when you’re puking later. Eat your orange, love. It’ll help tomorrow.”
“I fucked everything up.”
The kettle whistled on the stove, and Philip removed it from the heat, pouring it into a large, handmade pottery mug that he had partially filled with lemon juice and several black tea bags. He carried it over to Annick, his face riven by confusion.
“Annick, what are you talking about?”
As he sat next to her on the couch, she nuzzled her head drunkenly between his neck and shoulder, then stood up with the sure-footedness of a baby giraffe tumbling out of the birth canal.
“Easy,” said Philip. “Sit down, love.”
“I fucked everything up,” she said. She took the mug from Philip’s hands and began sipping at it despite the heat. “I tried to help, but not in the way of I actually could.”
“Stop beating yourself up, okay Annick? Let’s just lie down—”
“No!” she blurted with a drunk’s screeching U-turn, a tonal shift that made Philip jump back in his seat. “You were right, you said so. He needed me to be a doctor, and now I can’t be his doctor to help him.”
“We don’t have to talk about this, Annick.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” she smiled. “I’m just a fuck-up. I can’t help him.”
“That’s not on you, Annick. I don’t know if you ever could have helped him.”
Annick bit her bottom lip at him, and gave him another heavy-lidded smile. “You’re cute, but you don’t know anything.” She giggled, put down her mug of tea and lay on the couch with her head in Philip’s lap.
* * *
When she woke up, the apartment was dark. Philip had disappeared except for the sheet that he had draped over her, the couch cushion that he had placed underneath her head and the sliced oranges from earlier—half an hour ago? Two hours? Six hours?—in the evening. There was a sickly sweet tang in the back of Annick’s mouth, but she felt like she could make it without throwing up, except for the buzzing, against which Annick braced the sides of her head with her fingers, until she realized that it was coming from her phone on the key table next to the front door.
The phone kept buzzing as Annick stood unsteadily, trying to sort whether she was still drunk or already hungover, squinting into the microwave clock to see that it was three forty-five a.m. Annick’s body began to feel an apprehension about the call before her mind did, and when she picked up the phone she saw that it was, at last, her mother phoning. Her father was dead.
Annick felt the third set of tears in several years, or the last week, ready to start again.
“Maman?”
“Allo, ma chouette.”
“Il est mort?” Annick’s sentence trembled into an upward inflection.
“Qui?”
“Huh?”
“What?”
“Papa, Maman!”
“Non! Why you would say even that!”
Relief and anger elbowed each other in a race to fill Annick’s chest. “So why are you calling me at three forty-five a.m.?”
Thérèse tutted shamefully. “Ah, mon Dieu. Bébé, I’m sorry, I complete forgot what time it is t’ere. Fais dodo, go back to sleep.”
