“Me, neither.” She sat back. “My main goal in school was to become a therapist, but I can’t remember the last time I actually did any real therapy.”
She smiled again and shook her head. The wave of hair covered her eyes and she flipped it back-a curiously adolescent mannerism.
“Anyway,” she said, “about what Detective Sturgis wants, I just don’t know how I can really help. I really need to safeguard our people’s confidentiality-despite what happened to Becky.” She folded her lips inward, lowered her eyes, and shook her head.
I said, “It must have been terrifying.”
“It happened too quickly to be terrifying-the tcrriftjiiig part didn’t hit me until after it was over-seeing her. .. what he. .. now I really know what they mean by posttraumatic stress. No substitute for direct experience, huh?”
She pressed the skinny upper lip with one finger, as if keeping it still.
“No one knew what he was doing to her. I was right here, going about my business the whole time he was-the treatment rooms are totally soundproofed. He-” She removed her finger. A white pressure circle dotted her lip, then slowly faded.
“Then I heard noise from the hall,” she said. “That horrible screaming-he just kept screaming.”
‘Bad love,’ ” I said.
Her mouth remained open. The blue eyes dulled for a second. “Yes.
.
.
he. .. I went out to Mary’s office and she wasn’t there, so I opened the door to the hall and saw him. Screaming, waving it-the knife-splashiiig blood, the wall-he saw me-I saw his eyes settle on me-focusing-and he kept screaming. I slammed the door, shoved Mary’s desk up against it, and ran back into my office. Slammed that door and blocked it. I hid behind my chair the whole time it was. .. it wasn’t till later that I found out he’d grabbed Adeline.”
She wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry, you don’t need to hear this.”
“No, no, please.”
She glanced at her message pad. Blank. Picking up the pen, she wrote something on it.
“No, that’s it-I’ve told it so many times. .. no one knows how long she suffered for a long time. That’s the one thing I can hope.
That she didn’t. The thought of her trapped in there with him. .
.”
She shook her head and touched her temples. “They soundproofed the rooms back in the sixties, when this place was a Vietnam veterans’ counseling center. We sure don’t need it.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because no one does much therapy around here.”
She took a deep breath and slapped her hands lightly on the desk.
“Life goes on, right? Would you like something to drink? We’ve got a coffee machine in the other wing. I can have Mary go get some.”
“No, thanks.”
“Lucky choice.” Smile. “It’s actually pretty vile.”
“How come no one does much therapy?” I said. “Too disturbed a population?”
“Too disturbed, too poor, too many of them. They need food and shelter and to stop hearing voices. The preferred treatment is Thorazine. And Haldol and lithium and Tegretol and whatever else chases the demons away. Counseling would be a nice luxury, but with our caseload it ends up being a very low priority. Not to mention funding. That’s why we don’t have any psychologists on our staff, just caseworkers, and most of them are SWAs-assistants. Like Becky.”
“On the way in I saw a doctor giving out prescriptions.”
“That’s right,” she said. “It’s Friday, isn’t it? That’s Dr. Wintell, our once-a-week psychiatrist. He’s just out of his residency, a real nice kid.
But when his practice builds up, he’ll be out of here like all the others.”
“If no one does therapy, what was Becky doing with Hewitt in the therapy room?”
“I didn’t say we never talk to our people, just that we don’t do much insight work. Sometimes we get cramped for space and the workers use the treatment rooms to do their paperwork. Basically, all of us use what’s on hand. As to what Becky was doing with him, it could have been anything.
Giving him a voucher for an SRO hotel, telling him where to get deloused. Then again, maybe she was trying to get into his head-she was that kind of person.”