“Her brother died of a seizure,” I said. “Did your husband wonder if Claire’s career choice might have been related to her seeking an organic basis for Denton’s crimes?”
“That, too. But he worried that someday that defense would crumble. Because she wouldn’t find any simple answers, might grow disillusioned. Harry was a neuropsycholo-gist himself, but he was also a master psychotherapist. Along with his alcoholism research, he worked with MADD, treating the families of drunk-driving victims. He tried to teach his students the value of maintaining emotional balance.”
“Claire didn’t get the message.”
“The Claire we knew didn’t. She was such a… distant girl. Seemed to be punishing herself.”
“In what way?”
“All work, no play, never attending department functions, no friendships with the other students. I’d bet the dinners at our home were her main social contacts. Even the way she furnished her room, Dr. Delaware. Student housing’s never gorgeous, but most students try to do something with what the university gives them. One night it was especially cold, and Harry and I drove her home. The way she lived shocked us.
All she had was a bed, a desk, and a chair. I told Harry it looked like a jail cell.
He wondered if she might be trying, symbolically, to share her brother’s fate.”
Now I knew why Claire had refused to talk about her family to Joe Stargill.
Now I understood Rob Ray and Ernestine’s willingness to let Claire shut them out of her life: monumental shame.
No matter what was happening around her…
I’d wondered about family chaos, but my imagination hadn’t stretched far enough.
Like so many people who enter the helping fields, Claire had been trying to heal herself. Approaching it from a distance, at first, as she hid behind hard data and lab work. Working for Myron Theobold, a man who’d abandoned psychoanalysis for a
Ph.D. in biochemistry. I see myself as a humane administrator…. I don’t get involved in their personal lives. I’m not out to parent anyone.
Staying with Theobold all those years because he allowed her to remain a stranger.
Then something changed.
Professor Racano had suspected professional escape wouldn’t work forever, and he’d been right. Last year, Claire had gone looking for answers-going about it with characteristic academic detachment, scanning library files for rampages similar to her brother’s.
Why at that point in her life? Perhaps something had weakened her defenses…. The only thing that came to mind was the divorce. Because marrying Joe Stargill had been another sad stab at normalcy, and it had failed.
I thought of how she and Stargill had met. That afternoon in the Marriott bar, impulsive, just like the Reno wedding. Yet ultimately, Claire’s motivation for pairing up with Stargill had been anything but hasty, most probably unconscious.
She’d preserved the secrecy with which she’d encrusted herself since adolescence by selecting a self-absorbed child of alcoholics who could be counted upon to concentrate on his own problems and keep his nose out of hers.
Casual pickup, incredible sex. The semblance of physical intimacy, unencumbered by exploration. Stargill had described the marriage as the parallel movement of two busy roommates.
Claire had made a brief stab at decorating her home and her life. After Stargill moved out, she stripped the house bare. Not for serenity. Back to the cell.
Punishing herself, just as Professor Racano had suspected. Trying, once again without consciously realizing it, to replicate Denton Argent’s bleak fate in order to bond, somehow, with the brother who’d polluted her formative years.
She’d been twelve when Denton slaughtered the Brown-lees. But maybe much younger when she realized there was something different-maybe dangerously different-about her only sibling. Did she blame herself for not telling someone?
Or was she simply ashamed to be linked genetically to a monster?
I thought of how the Argents had refused to move. Remaining on the same block had to have been wrenching for them. For the entire neighborhood. Had Claire been shunned for the rest of her childhood?
When Denton seized fatally, she’d been seventeen, still living at home. An upbringing capped at both ends by trauma, shame, and loss. Adolescence was hallmarked by the quest for identity. What had happened to Claire’s sense of self?