Читать книгу The Family Tabor - Cherise Wolas - Страница 10

ROMA TABOR’S DREAMS ABOUT her baba Tatiana and her mother, Inessa, aren’t about what she has suffered and lost by their absence, or the bottomless sorrow that never dissolves; instead she dreams of their sufferings, their losses, their sorrows that they packed away after they found a way to escape.

For many years now, when she wakes, she thinks first about luck—about the terrible steps Tatiana had to take to find a shred of it in a world that decreed she should have none, and then about its constancy in her own life. From the time she was young, those strong women defied their experiences to teach her to trust in its tangible reality. She learned the lesson, but honors their before and after by remembering that believing one deserves luck doesn’t mean it won’t disappear in a flash.

This morning, there is Harry’s usual empty space next to her in the king-sized bed, and the sun’s heat on her face, and she thinks about luck, then puts it away, and waits to see what name is in her head. Today it is Noelani McCadden, a big name for a little girl who is only eight.

In the intake session on Monday, the mother, Jeanine, said, “One day my daughter was fine, the next day not. She’s an only child, and until a month ago, a couch potato. She didn’t like playing games during recess, wasn’t interested in taking gymnastics or ballet with her friends, or riding the bike we gave her for her birthday while her father and I took our regular after-dinner stroll. We tried to get her to go to camp this summer, where she would swim and learn how to trot on a horse, but she flat-out refused.

“Now, before dawn, she runs through our neighborhood, to the fire road, and keeps going. She’s eight. It’s not normal at that age to be running seven miles a day. And no matter what we do, we can’t stop her. If we try to stop her, she starts screaming, so we let her go, then follow at a distance in the car. Usually it’s Steve who does that, makes sure she’s safe.”

Roma pictured the little girl waking, dressing quickly, sneaking through the quiet house to the front door, carefully turning the locks, slipping out into air that had cooled overnight. So young, but needing to run, perhaps without any idea of why, running in the early-morning dark until light infused the sky.

“In the beginning,” Jeanine continued, “she’d come in all red and sweaty, and I’d be making her breakfast and tell her to sit down at the kitchen table. And she would, but she’d keep her mouth tight and turn away from the eggs and bacon or oatmeal I’d serve her. I went out and bought sugary cereals and donuts, but nothing. And last week, when I said, ‘Honey, you must drink enough water. You’re running so much and we live in the desert, it’s a hundred and ten and a body needs hydration,’ she smacked the water glass I’d filled out of my hand. Then every time I offered her water or fruit juice or even the soft drink she used to beg me to buy and I never would, she’d smack the glass out of my hand. Glass everywhere on the kitchen floor. So I went out and bought plastic and I keep trying to get her to drink, but she won’t. All day long I’m spying on my child, to see if she’s drunk something or eaten something without me noticing. Hoping and hoping. I’m checking if glasses are wet. I’m counting the pieces of bread left in the loaf, crackers in the plastic sleeves, cookies in the boxes, slices of American cheese in the fridge, fruit in the crisper; I even counted the Fritos in the bag, but she’s not touching a thing.”

Roma met with the girl every afternoon this week, two hours each time. It is the immersive approach she prefers with a case that has developed this swiftly, to see if she can get to the essence quickly.

The questions in Noelani’s case are: What has speeded this child up? Why is she running so far and so fast? Is there something monstrous she is trying to outrace, and if so, is that monstrous thing within or without? And how is a child so young overriding her natural hunger, imposing on herself an iron-willed discipline at which most adults fail?

Roma has seen elements of this many times over decades in practice, and the causes rarely reveal themselves easily. Noelani is not the youngest patient Roma has had with these symptoms, but what worked with her other patients will have no bearing here. Roma must start at the beginning, treat Noelani as she treats every patient, as the sui generis beings that they are.

When Roma asked if Noelani had any other new and uncharacteristic behaviors, Jeanine began to cry. “She lies about everything. I ask her, ‘Have you brushed your teeth?’ or ‘Did you make your bed?’ or ‘Did you feed your goldfish?’ and she says yes to everything, but it never turns out to be true. She lies about things that are verifiable as untrue with one glance, which Steve and I can’t understand.”

Naturally, the parents are scared and shaken. The cherished daughter they knew, whom they tucked into bed and kissed each night and roused in the morning with hugs, has disappeared entirely, as if she never were.

Everything Jeanine spoke about, Roma has seen in her meetings with Noelani, but she has also seen more. In addition to the girl’s obsessions with running and denying herself food and liquid, she has also seen in her anxiety, anger, and impulse control.

In yesterday’s session, their fifth, Roma was tough, clarifying that if Noelani does not immediately start eating and drinking, she will be hospitalized, sustaining fluids forced into her through a tube in her stomach. Roma pulled out a medical book with pictures of children in hospital beds with tubes jutting into their bellies. She pulled out from a box on her desk the medical equipment that would be used to invade Noelani’s body in that way. The impact Roma had intended to create was deliberate, and there it was—the young face soon covered in sprung tears, snot dripping from the little nose. But Noelani had not given in immediately. Thirty minutes discussing the only outcome had been required before Roma was able to wring out a promise, Noelani writing her name in blocky letters on the bottom of the food plan she agreed to maintain through the weekend. Together they had chosen what she would eat: a banana and yogurt for breakfast; a tuna fish sandwich and apple for lunch; salad, chicken, and rice for dinner; and each day she would drink five glasses of water.

“Just the weekend,” Roma had said, “that’s all you need to promise me now.” And the crying girl, her thin forearms laced with trails of mucus, had carried the handwritten food plan flat on her palms, as if it were an offering on fire, holding it out to her mother in the waiting room, who leaned forward in her chair, her cheeks as tearstained as her daughter’s, until the two were face-to-face. Noelani has her mother’s pretty features, although it will take a few more years for those features to fully emerge, arrange themselves on her face. But where the mother was nicely proportioned, the daughter was gaunt, nearly emaciated, and Roma was certain that Noelani has been running for far longer than only the month the parents believe it has been.

Noelani had tried smiling, a brave barely there smile, and waited for her mother to open the outer door to the parking lot, and then she was taking careful steps to their car. Jeanine had turned to Roma and said, “What now?”

“Make sure she follows the plan. She’ll cry, but remind her she promised. And though she won’t grasp this completely, explain she made this promise to herself, not to me or to you.”

Jeanine nodded and Roma said, “Leave me a few messages over the weekend, to let me know how it’s going. Remember, Jeanine, she chose those meals for herself, so give her only those meals, exactly. Of course, you and your husband, one or the other or both, will have to stand guard to make sure she eats.”

Jeanine nodded again, glancing out at Noelani, still crying copious tears, her careful steps replaced by a frenzied pacing around and around the car.

“What about the running?”

“We have to figure out what the running means to her before we can alter the behavior.”

“And the lying?”

“Health first,” Roma said.

It had taken Jeanine McCadden so much effort to extricate her car from its tight spot, backing in, backing out, turning the steering wheel every which way, that the car seemed to be heaving, as if mimicking the tears of its unhappy cargo inside, and Roma watched until Jeanine finally broke the car free, gave her a sad little wave, and joined the quick flow of late Friday afternoon traffic.

This morning, Roma debates the odds of mother and father having the courage to keep to the plan, of Jeanine leaving the updates she requested on her office or personal voicemail. Impossible to determine, but their actions or inactions will provide her with additional information: a child’s issues are rarely isolated, there is nearly always some sort of tangential cause and effect, and whatever Roma is dealing with here, with Noelani, she likely will have to address the parents’ problems as well.

She rolls onto her side, stares through the gap in the drapes, at the sun spreading across the marble floor, over her body beneath the light duvet. It is Saturday, her work week finished, the morning hours hers alone. By noon, everyone will be here. Phoebe and Simon and his family arriving separately from Los Angeles, Camille from Seattle. Her family all together to celebrate the accomplishments of husband and father. She wishes she had seen Harry this morning, to kiss him, to tell him how proud she is about this honor being conferred upon him tonight. How proud that he righted his ways back then, unwound his wrongs, moved again into the light. They have never discussed that time, but this morning, she would have liked to tell him what an inspiration he is, how she marvels at his devotion to his indispensable work, the magnanimity with which he gives himself fully to everyone who needs him and to those who love him.

Noelani returns to her mind, and then Phoebe pops in. As a psychologist, Roma is used to these jumps in her thoughts, aware there is always a logic to the unconscious leaps she makes, and she considers the connection between her eight-year-old patient and her thirty-eight-year-old daughter, her eldest.

On the phone yesterday, Roma asked whether Phoebe will be bringing the new boyfriend with whom she has been taking long weekend trips since February. No one has met Aaron Green yet, not even Simon, who checks in on Phoebe’s cat when this man whisks her away to the Outer Banks, to Santa Fe and Aspen and Nashville, to La Jolla and Catalina and Big Sur; last weekend’s trip was to the wine country up north.

From Phoebe’s descriptions, Aaron Green sounds like a paragon, but yesterday, her daughter had not been able to answer Roma’s question head-on, hemming and hawing, saying only that “Aaron’s hoping to be able to move some things around to free up his schedule.” And Roma was quickly concerned that Phoebe has again fallen in love with the wrong man, and that the qualities this Aaron Green supposedly possesses might be colored by Phoebe’s desperate desire to have a family.

Roma sighs. Oh, yes, she sees the connection now between Noelani and Phoebe. The lying the little girl is engaging in, the subterfuge Phoebe once used as a shield. Is that subterfuge, at odds with Phoebe’s otherwise straightforward nature, returning? Over a man named Aaron Green?

Fifteen years since the last time, since Simon’s high school graduation party, when Phoebe brought home a boy she insisted on calling her paramour. How irritated she had been with Phoebe’s use of that archaic word, her refusal to employ simple language to explain the facts, her preference for befuddling. All Roma had wanted to know was whether her driven daughter was having a romance that involved physical intimacies. How she had hoped for that until meeting the paramour, the boy Roma nicknamed “the prophet,” because he was actually named Elijah and seemed to have knocked Phoebe off her feet, her daughter taking Roma aside all that weekend and raising questions about the way she was living her life. She had decided to be a lawyer when she was in high school, would begin her third year of law school that fall, wanted the big firm experience after passing the bar, but, Phoebe had cried to Roma, weren’t her accomplishments meaningless, her desire for her routines, her nice apartment, her pretty things wrong and shameful, her need to have everything mapped out insane?

Roma had said, “Phoebe, we’re proud of all you’ve accomplished by this tender age of twenty-three, but if you’re not, or if you want something different, you can always explore un-mapping yourself.” By which Roma meant, Investigate other avenues that might interest you, try being spontaneous, cull your belongings and give all that bounty to charity.

Instead, some months later, Phoebe had nearly quit everything and run off with the prophet. In the end, at the last minute, she had pulled back and raced to the safety of home, had opened up to Roma completely, had told her mother that the love she had for Elijah had to be cut out of her heart or she would end up becoming someone she was not.

Roma sighs again. In a few hours either Phoebe will be here with Aaron Green, introducing him to her family, or she’ll be here on her own. And if she is here on her own, Roma will carve out time to sit alone with Phoebe, to apply her professional expertise to her own child gently, always gently, in order to expose the truth.

It is true a mother feels something more, or different, or extraspecial for her firstborn, but as a psychologist, she knows the importance of keeping things fair among siblings, and she’s lucky—that touchstone word again—because her children, uniquely different, are easy to equally love.

Camille, her social anthropologist middle child, is perfectly defined by her profession, which employs flat research language and mathematical statistics to disguise its romantic and obsessive nature, and the romantically obsessive nature of those bitten by the need to explore. She was thirteen when she decided she wanted to live with tribes she could study, and she accomplished that goal, spending two years living far away, on islands in an archipelago of coral atolls off the east coast of New Guinea.

Camille will be coming alone this weekend, as always, infrequently talking about someone named Valentine. Maybe this visit Roma will ask Camille directly who Valentine is to her, what is the nature of this unexplained relationship, why she never identifies Valentine by gender. In Roma’s experience with troubled children, those who are also gay and have not yet declared themselves often have a difficult time voicing the particulars of the person who has captured their attention. “They are so cool. They are really nice,” is what they say to her. A conundrum her daughter has solved by always referring to Valentine as Valentine or Val. If she has ever referred to Valentine as he or she, Roma somehow missed it, which strikes her as entirely unlikely.

If it’s a lesbian love relationship, it would confirm the supposition Roma’s held in her heart. With her patients, Roma doesn’t trade in suppositions, she asks them questions outright, knowing she will have to dig for the truth, but with Camille, a keeper of her own counsel since childhood, who even then averted her mother’s deliberately casual prying with a wise smile, Roma’s always had to be wary of even asking the questions, of horning in on the mental space her daughter refuses to share, of violating her fierce and innate sense of privacy. Thousands of patients and their parents have entrusted her with their secrets and fears, but not this daughter of hers.

Where Phoebe explored clothing and makeup, Camille only explored when coerced by Phoebe. Even today, her external appearance does not command much of her attention; she’s lucky in her natural beauty, somehow not tamped down by the baggy, old clothes she wears, by her refusal, most of the time, to use lipstick or mascara, a blush to brighten her cheeks.

Where Phoebe had boyfriends, Camille had friends who were boys. Roma has no idea who Camille dated in college, in graduate school, in her PhD program, or if she dated at all. Girls, boys, those who prefer the personal pronoun of them and their, or s/he and he/r, the intersex, the third gender, the transgendered—truly Roma does not care, nor would Harry, if Camille is gay, bisexual, pansexual, demisexual, or asexual. What she cares about is how Camille gates her inner life with Roma outside.

When her daughter’s little-girl desire for a penis of her own did not abate, as such desire usually does, she’d wondered for the first time about Camille’s sexual orientation. And then Camille convinced another little girl to remove every stitch of clothing. When Roma found them in Camille’s bedroom, Camille’s left hand was on the girl’s flat chest, her right hand between the girl’s thin legs. Roma had seen the Band-Aids on both girls’ knees, and wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry, because it might only have been the kind of exploratory game children play. Despite her expertise, she’s never been sure.

How old was Camille then? She was eight. Ah, the same age as Noelani.

Her youngest, Simon, worships Harry, is a lawyer like Phoebe, and somehow has become the family outlier. So young when he began college, so adaptable with intellectual heft and high emotional intelligence and the looks of a playboy—Byronic curls, soulful eyes, girls fell under his spell—Roma figured he would play the field for a long while, settle down in his forties. Instead, he is the first of her children to create his own separate family, happily married to Elena Abascal, father of her granddaughters, Lucy and Isabel. Nothing jumps out at Roma when she considers Simon in the context of Noelani, nothing ties them together, except that Simon has been on a running jag lately, putting in the miles, he says, every morning before work, either running the hills in his neighborhood, or in a foreign park across from his hotel when he’s litigating abroad. She’s never asked how many miles he runs, but given how often he’s out of town, and the way he works late into the nights, it seems unlikely he’s running seven miles at a shot.

The clock on her nightstand reads 7:20 a.m. Roma pulls open the drapes, smiles at the meditation pool, at the brightly colored desert flowers and the shrubs. Harry has his tennis this morning and then a stop at the tailor to pick up the new tuxedo he will wear tonight. He’ll be arriving back home just before the kids show up. Everyone will be hungry. She shopped yesterday, has only to put out the spread, but all that can wait. First her hour of laps in the big pool, then coffee.

In the bathroom, she stands naked, inspecting her reflected hair. Fernando did a nice job on the color this time. Last time it was much too light, bold in an odd and punkish way. Over the years she has undergone a slow but steady transformation, from boring, uncommitted brown to lighter and lighter hues, until she gave in, said to Fernando, “I might as well admit life is more fun as a blonde. Let’s do the whole head.” It wasn’t true that life was more fun as a blonde, but she was tired of fighting it, of facing daily the unfairness of her hair transmogrifying into old age long before Harry’s. She rubber-bands the honeyed chunks, brushes her teeth, then pulls on her bathing suit. She lifts her cap and goggles from their hook in her closet and shuts the door.

IN THE MAIN COURTYARD, the pool is a sapphire under the sun, shooting liquid rainbows into the house at oblique angles. How she adores submergence. She is a healer of human cracks and fissures, her days spent dealing with her patients’ struggles and agonies, the emotional and psychic often embodied in the physical. She uncovers all the states and syndromes that can spark and catch fire from infancy on, searing a being, those flames rarely sputtering out on their own. She works hard quenching the symptoms, providing parents with answers, and the toddlers, children, and teenagers with techniques to manage their frightening infernos, helping them douse the alarming heat and gain interior strength against what is burning them up. Resolutions if the sufferer and loved ones are lucky, cures if kind spirits are shining down, so that as they grow and mature their lives will be happier, sweeter, so that they will be saved from total annihilation. She gives them all of her time, but this hour belongs only to her, swimming with an uncluttered mind, feeling the expectant delight of having everyone together, remembering that however involved she will become with Noelani, she belongs by blood and love to others, and those others, by blood and love, belong to her.

How fortunate she and Harry have been that they and their children have never been afflicted with any kind of serious illness, not physical, emotional, or mental, everyone on their right paths. Closely knit all these years, enjoying being together, genuinely liking one another. Of course, there are the occasional, normal tensions and skirmishes among her children, and sometimes she wishes they didn’t force her to read their faces, would simply admit to what’s bothering them, but eventually, always, the issue is revealed, and she guides and advises them so judiciously they frequently think they have arrived at the solution on their own.

Head underwater, she holds her breath, then pushes off, stroking strongly to the other side of the long pool. One, two, three … fourteen long and solid strokes to reach the wall today before reversing course.

Half of fourteen is seven, and she’s thinking of Noelani McCadden’s toothpick legs racing her away from home, or toward something. In her session notebook, she had written: Does the actual mileage hold an unconscious significance for Noelani? Jeanine McCadden was adamant that her daughter runs exactly seven miles each morning, no more, no less, as if the girl were fitted with an internal mileage counter. Before her first meeting with Noelani, Roma had researched the number and discovered that in numerology, seven represents the seeker, the thinker, the searcher of Truth who knows nothing is exactly as it seems and is always trying to understand the reality hidden behind the illusions. Roma had realized that definition described herself as well, born on the seventh day of June. And in astrology, seven meant—

No, she is not going to break her promise, no pondering about Noelani, about any of her patients, while swimming.

She will think about … She will think about … Okay, yes, what sort of sea creature would she be? Not a shark, not a whale. Not a seal. What’s the difference between porpoises and dolphins?

Then a mental bolt to that weekend when Phoebe brought home the prophet. She heard moans coming from Phoebe’s bedroom, and had breached her daughter’s trust, carefully turning the knob, peeking through the crack, almost hoping to find Phoebe tangled naked in bed with that long-haired young philosopher whose pacific calm was threatening upheaval in Phoebe’s life, but that’s not what had been happening in there. Elijah had been at her daughter’s feet, washing them. Between his knees, filled with water and suds, was the irreplaceable silver bowl passed down to Roma from Baba Tatiana.

Roma, she says sternly, silently, no more, just swim.