Easy Street, page 20
“I am here with Sunny Hergert’s daughter, Joanna. Sunny Hergert was your patient?”
“Yes, I have her file right here,” Dr. Reed replies.
“Okay, great,” I say. “Well, so here’s Joanna’s question. You signed a death certificate for Sunny Hergert on October seventeenth citing cardiac arrest as the cause of death, and I was wondering how you were able to determine that.”
“Let’s back up a moment, Maggie. Tell me, how are you related to Sunny Hergert?”
“Oh, sorry, I’m not . . . I was a, uh, friend, but now that she’s gone, I have become her daughter’s—Joanna Hergert’s—legal representative.”
“But not with power of attorney!” Joanna shouts into the call. “She doesn’t have power of attorney over me!”
This detail had always been quite important to Joanna, making me wonder if someone had exercised power of attorney over one of Joanna’s two brothers in a way she found frightening.
“Hi there, Joanna,” Dr. Reed says warmly, undisturbed by her outburst. “I remember your mother talking about you.”
Joanna is silent before mumbling through a bit lip, “No one has power of attorney over me. No one.”
“It’s good to meet you over the phone, Joanna.”
“Okay.”
“So, now, Maggie, you were asking about the cause of death?”
“You didn’t know she was dead!” Joanna erupts. “How could you know how she died if you weren’t even there? How could you know?”
“Ah. Well, Joanna,” Dr. Reed answers with a surgeon’s calm. “It was the paramedics, in this case, who determined the cause of death—cardiac arrest—based on their evaluation when they arrived on the scene.”
“But you signed it! You signed it, and you weren’t even there!”
“No, I wasn’t. That’s right. The death certificate was sent to me at Kaiser, as her primary care physician, for my signature. I was sorry to hear about your mother’s passing, Joanna. I always liked her jokes. She was a very funny lady—”
“But you didn’t know she was dead. You didn’t know it. You called and said she missed an appointment. How could she miss an appointment if she was dead?”
“I called?”
“You called from your office, the office of Dr. Reed, that’s you, and you left a message on the machine about her annual appointment. You didn’t know she isn’t here anymore.”
“Ah, I see. That must have been my receptionist. I’m sorry about that. Sometimes it takes a while to update records.”
“But they murdered my mother!” Joanna screams. “Plain and simple. It’s an open and shut case.”
“No, the paramedics are very thorough. You can be quite sure nobody murdered your mother, my dear.”
“It was Reyna! Reyna murdered my mother!”
“No, Joanna. Your mother was not murdered.” Dr. Reed repeats, in a sterner tone, attempting to set the question to rest. “I was treating Sunny for heart disease.”
We both hear a crash.
“Joanna?” Dr. Reed asks.
“Oh no,” I say, looking out the door to where the handset lies on the bricks, battery cover open and lights no longer blinking. “I think Joanna has . . . hung up,” I say. “Thank you for your call, Dr. Reed. Thank you for taking the time.”
“Poor girl,” he replies. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help.”
I think how the word girl is actually appropriate for Joanna despite her fifty-five years.
Of course it was his office that called. I didn’t think to ask if it was his receptionist who called. I didn’t think.
I walk outside and see Joanna, standing perfectly still in the shallow end of the pool, water up to her waist, elbows and yellow arm floaties pinned to her side. Her eyes are squeezed shut. She is shivering but is not trying to get warm.
“Oh, Joanna,” I say, “let me get you a towel.” I look around the patio for a stray that didn’t make it to the washer and find one in a sun-dried orange mound by the kitchen door. “Here,” I say, shaking it out. “Why don’t you get out of the pool?”
Joanna shakes her head.
“I’m sorry,” I say, squatting by the water and spreading out the towel to receive her. “I guess physicians don’t have to be at the scene to sign a death certificate. I guess they just send it back to the office. And I should have asked what you meant when you said Dr. Reed called.”
Joanna opens her eyes but looks past me, immobile, oblivious to the fact that her lips are quivering and blue.
“Come on out,” I say, standing up and shaking the towel as if I were enticing a reluctant bull.
Joanna complies, sloshing over to the steps and climbing out, her face drained and vacant. “Places like that are supposed to take care of people,” she says, turning around to let me wrap the towel around her as if we have done this ritual a thousand times before instead of just this once. “Pure Hearts Care did the opposite of that. Reyna did the opposite of that. It wasn’t taking care of people. It was the opposite.”
“I know you must be disappointed,” I say, pulling the towel tight around her shoulders, thinking of the little Anna and Ruby and Nerys wraps I used to make when they were small, those damp, squirmy little-girl burritos.
“She’s going to get away with it,” Joanna whimpers to the late afternoon sky, her arms swaddled into her torso with the orange towel. “She’s going to get away with it. And there’s nothing I can do.”
That night I lie flat on my back, perfectly still, because my nerves are hyper-tuned and any new contact with the bed or Jimmy or Holly will give me a jolt. It’s like that game at the carnival where you have to weave the metal hoop around the spiral without touching it to avoid getting zapped.
Joanna is still on my mind, but Auschwitz has returned with all its power, punishing me for straying from my task.
I simply need to remain steady. Just breathe, I tell myself. Sleep will come.
I think of how Joanna once said her body has always taken to sleep. My body has always taken to sleep too. But neither of our bodies, I think, are going to be taken away easily by anything tonight.
And then zap. Holly has poked my thigh, sending what feels like electricity stinging through my body.
I flash to a memory of shaking my classmate Eric Kirshner’s hand in fourth grade, the weird metal nugget in his palm and the buzzing that started in my hand and shot to my heart.
I think of my grandmother in the hospital after her shock treatments that one Christmas, gumming a candy bar, a strand of caramel dangling like tinsel from her mouth. I think of images composed by my ten-year-old self that now feel to me like fact, of her being wheeled into a hospital, of her wrists muscled into restraints, of her blue eyes searching up into the harsh fluorescent lights above for some sort of explanation, with her trademark red lipstick smeared across her cheeks and chin, slashing her face like a scar.
I see the nurses put grease on her temples before they place the electrodes.
“Ah,” I yelp.
Jimmy has rolled over and shocked me by flopping his arm over my chest.
“Sorry,” he says, rolling back.
“Don’t be sorry. I’m sorry. I’m just going to try to go sleep in the TV room,” I say, standing up, pulling a blanket over my head and staggering down the hall, feeling a zap that goes from my heel up to my skull with each step.
11
What a Pair
I thought you said your psychiatrist was a boy.”
“Well, the one I saw last week was a man,” I say, easing my Camry ten feet forward in the Beverly Boulevard stop-and-go traffic that is mostly stop, “but the one I’m seeing today is a woman.”
“Two psychiatrists?” Joanna’s scream pierces though the Camry’s hands-free phone system. “You see TWO PSCHIATRISTS?”
“Well, actually one is a psychologist and one—”
“Two psychiatrists? I can barely believe my ears, Maggie. I can barely believe my ears.”
“Well, it’s true. You can believe it.”
“But you’ve got everything! You’ve got everything a person could want. You live on Easy Street with Handsome Jim in his house he bought before he even knew you.”
“Joanna,” I spit out, only able to pull forward another ten feet before having to press the brakes again, “I don’t have it as easy as you think, okay?”
Joanna’s silence pointedly informs me she finds my assertion ridiculous.
“Okay,” I say, my frustration with her, and the West Hollywood traffic, rising. “I’ve got to go. I’ll meet you at my place at three, and we’ll go to Kaiser.”
“Okay. Three p.m. At Jim’s house.”
“It’s my house, too, you know.”
“Two psychiatrists,” I hear Joanna mutter, astounded, under her breath before the click of the phone.
Whoa, I am so tired, I suddenly think.
And then, whoa, my eyelids are anchors.
Whoa.
The cocktail from Dr. Nestor has definitely started to take effect.
I need to keep all of my concentration on the road, where the cars around me seem to be sailing on an ocean, swaying up and down. I’m managing the seas fine, but I’m desperate to pull over, dock, and take a nap.
I think of the story of the tortoise and the hare and how I’ve always wondered: Why in the world would the hare choose to take a nap right in the middle of a race that he had clearly staked much of his personal identity on winning? What was the hare thinking? Apparently the missing puzzle piece was that the hare was taking a cocktail of Seroquel, Remeron, Viibryd, Lexapro, and propranolol and was really fucking tired!
But I can’t pull over. I need to get to this appointment.
I can do it. I can stay awake. I have only ten blocks to go. I need to meet Kalene Hale. Kalene Hale is an ACT therapist who Dr. Nestor says is at the very top of her field. Kalene Hale could be the one who saves me. So I do what I always do when I’m driving and I need to stay awake.
I scream. I hold on to the steering wheel, hold my eyes open wide, and I scream. Loud and wild.
One block at a time.
At every stoplight, I scream.
Dr. Kalene Hale’s waiting room is long, narrow, and unpromising. The carpet is thin and hard under the fluorescent lighting. The pictures on the walls are aggressively corporate with generic ponds and paths through nondescript woods, which communicate the sentiment, Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t work in an office? It’s the type of holding area I imagine I might be sitting in if I were applying for a job at a Holiday Inn. It makes me feel like I should be holding a resume and rehearsing a speech about how much I love being a part of the hospitality industry.
Kalene’s door swings opens almost as soon as I sit down on the cold metal chair. It takes me a moment to realize that the woman standing in front of me is meant to be my therapist. Her hair has been bleached to a desperate fragility, leaving but a few clusters of strands loyally clinging to her scalp. She is wearing a jeans miniskirt, no nylons, cowboy boots, and a halter top.
“Maggie Rowe? I’m Kalene. Please come in.” I follow Kalene into her office and take a seat on another cold folding chair to begin my story, a story I’ve gotten down to a tight seventeen minutes. Kalene nods, tucks a few embattled blond hairs behind her right ear, then wordlessly reaches down to open a drawer by the heel of her left cowboy boot and retrieves a two-foot length of white nylon rope. She firmly wraps a fist of cherry-red acrylic nails around one end and, smiling gently, offers me the other.
Oh come on, I think, unable to prevent scorn from narrowing my eyes. Just tell me the point you want to make. Stay open, I remind myself. Don’t let fears become prophecies. Maybe Dr. Kalene Hale’s rope trick, whatever it might turn out to be, is good for more than I imagine. Maybe something magical will happen. Maybe this sorceress disguised as a woman who wants nothing more than to make offerings before the gods and goddesses of spring break will be able to break the spell that afflicts me.
I reach out with my right hand, grasp the rope firmly, and nod. Kalene begins pulling on her end, and I match her force. For a moment nothing happens except the two of us sitting on matching metal chairs in a demoralizingly generic office, playing silent tug-of-war with a two-foot stretch of soft nylon rope.
“What do you feel?”
“Tension.”
“Tension,” Kalene repeats, “that’s right. Now, what would happen if you dropped the rope?”
I allow a moment to pass before observing dryly and with a bit of an edge, “I would no longer have a rope in my hand.”
“Aaaah,” she says, as if she expects waters to part before us and my mouth to gape.
“What would happen if you stopped attempting to get rid of your anxiety? What would happen if you”—Kalene pauses here for dramatic effect, widening her eyes, allowing her spidery lashes to crawl up toward her overplucked eyebrows—“just . . . dropped the rope?”
Kalene glances pointedly at the rope between us, and I look down as well, then back up at her with anger I attempt to disguise as confusion. “You mean, literally? You mean literally drop this actual rope we’re both holding onto right now?”
“Why not?”
I raise an eyebrow to let her know I’m not exactly besotted with her clever little exercise and open my hand. The rope swings down and away from my hand and over toward Kalene.
Kalene, impervious to the articulation of my eyebrow and my tone of skepticism, looks at me eagerly. “How does that feel?” The rope sways back and forth in diminishing little arcs before coming to rest below her hand.
“Yeah,” I say, “that would be great if I could do that with my anxiety. If I could just drop the proverbial rope and be done with it, but I don’t know how—”
“Value-based living. You focus on value-based living.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Focus on the values that our life is based on,” she says, unhelpfully rearranging the words in her original statement.
“Okay . . . well . . .”
“What matters to you?”
“What matters to me is that I stop walking around terrified of the contents of my own head.”
“What if you were fine walking around terrified of the contents of your own head?”
But who, I think, could be fine with walking around terrified and living on the verge of a panic attack from the beginning to the end of each day?
“Is it going to hurt?” Joanna asks flatly.
“Is what going to hurt?” We are driving down Sunset Boulevard toward Kaiser Permanente hospital. I am sipping a triple cappuccino to stay awake.
Joanna holds on to her seat belt as if it is not up to the task. “When the psychiatrist examines me?”
Suddenly the car in front of me is inches away and I must slam on the brakes.
“Aaargh,” Joanna yelps, her body jolting forward, her hands flying up to the dashboard.
“Sorry, Joanna,” I say, “And no, of course nothing will hurt. He’s just going to talk to you.”
“But what about . . .” Joanna releases her hands, pulls back to her seat, and adjusts her seat belt. “What about . . . what about . . . what about the diagnosis?”
“Oh,” I say, feeling a wave of empathy, “the diagnosis is just . . . he’s just going to ask you questions and you’ll answer them and . . . and you can talk about anything you want with him. About your mom, if you want—”
“But how are they going to measure my brain?”
I realize Joanna thinks she’s going to be getting some sort of neurological examination. “No, no, Joanna, it’s not like that. The measuring is just by talking. He’s just going to get to you know you a little bit.”
“But they shock your brain.”
“Oh my goodness, no, Joanna that’s—”
“When they measure it. They shock your brain.”
“Where did you hear that? That’s something else completely. That’s electroshock therapy. That’s absolutely not what you’re doing.”
I lose focus on Joanna for a moment because of my own rising anxiety and when I continue speaking, I hear alarm in my voice. “And even electroshock therapy probably isn’t like you think, anyway. It’s called it electroconvulsive therapy now and they’ve made incredible advancements, actually, in the practice. The whole thing is way better than it used to be. It’s much more precise than when your grandmother got it.”
That stops me. I know nothing about Joanna’s grandmother, or whether Joanna ever met or was even told anything about her grandmother. I’m talking about my own grandmother. I’m talking about her early-generation electroshock treatments, her blank eyes and her listless body collapsed on a folding armchair in the Forest Ridge Hospital family and visitors’ lounge.
“Anyway,” I continue, shaken by the memory and my classically Freudian slip, “I promise there will be no shocking.” I expect Joanna to be relieved, but she looks down at her lap, grabs two fistfuls of hair, and pulls down, violently straightening her curls.
“What’s the matter?”
Joanna pulls the frayed ends toward her mouth and bites at different clumps. “They can’t take away my money?”
“No, I promise. The only purpose of this appointment is to get an up-to-date diagnosis so you can stay in a nice board and care—”
“Board and CARE!” Joanna bellows. “Board and CARE? I’m not going to a board and care! My brother was in a board and care before he died, he was on dialysis, and they took his entire check. They took his entire check! He didn’t even have enough money to go to the movies. He only ever knew about movies from billboards. From billboards—”
The light turns green, and I focus ahead. “No, no, this isn’t like that. I’ll be paying your rent out of our account. You’ll be able to see movies. I promise.”
“They won’t take my whole check?”
“No.”
“Because I want to see movies.”
“You’ll always be able to see movies.”
“Movies on billboards?”
“Movies on billboards,” I promise.
As I sit next to Joanna in the waiting room at Kaiser—held together by a magical medical mixture that weighs me down as if gravity’s force has been heightened, causes my hands to shake, dries out my mouth, and I would swear makes it possible for onlookers to observe me getting fatter in real time—Joanna checks out a man seated across from us. I follow her impolite stare to an Ichabod Crane–looking fellow drumming spindly fingers into hollow of his right cheek and speaking into the air.
