“You will not get through this if you remain silent.” She is brutally direct.
Grief rises in my throat and I try to swallow it.
“You are traumatized,” Anna goes on. “Kay, you are not made of steel. Not even you can endure so much and just keep going as if nothing has happened. So many times I called you after Benton was killed, and you would not find time for me. Why? Because you did not want to talk.”
I can’t hide my emotions this time. Tears slide down my face and drop in my lap like blood.
“I have always told my patients when they do not face their problems, they are headed for a day of reckoning.” Anna sits forward, intensely leaning into the words she fires straight at my heart. “This is your day of reckoning.” She points at me, staring. “Now you will talk to me, Kay Scarpetta.”
I Wearily look down at my lap. My slacks are speckled with tears and I make the inane connection that the drops are perfectly round because they fell at a ninety-degree angle. “I can never get away from it,” I say in despair under my breath.
“Get away from what?” This has snagged Anna’s interest.
“What I do. Everything reminds me of something from my work. I don’t talk about it.”
“I want you to talk about it now,” she tells me.
“It’s foolish.”
She waits, the patient fisherman, knowing I am nudging the hook. Then I take it. I give Anna examples I find embarrassing, if not ridiculous. I tell her I never drink tomato juice or V8 or Bloody Marys on the rocks because when the ice begins to melt, it looks like coagulating blood separating from serum. I stopped eating liver in medical school, and the idea of considering any sort of organ as something for my palate is impossible. I recall a morning on Hilton Head Island when Benton and I were walking on the beach, and the receding surf had left areas of crinkled gray sand that looked remarkably like the lining of the stomach. My thoughts twist and turn where they will, and a trip to France unfolds for the first time in years. On one of the rare occasions when Benton and I ever really got away from our work, we toured the Grands Vins de Bourgogne and were received by the revered domains of Drouhin and Dugat, and tasted from casks of Chambertin, Montrachet, Musigny and Vosne-Romanee. “I remember being moved in ways I can’t say.” I share memories I did not know I still had. “The light of early spring changing on the slopes and the gnarled reach of cut-back winter vines, all holding up their hands in the same way, offering the best they have, their essence, to us. And so often we don’t touch their character, don’t take the time to find the harmony in subtle tones, the symphony fine wines play on your tongue if you let them.” My voice drifts off. Anna silently waits for me to come back. “Like my being asked only about my cases,” I go on. “Only asked about the horrors I see, when there is so much else to me. I am not some goddamn cheap thrill with a screw cap.”
“You feel lonely,” Anna softly observes. “And misunderstood. Perhaps as dehumanized as your dead patients.”
I do not answer her but continue my analogies, describing when Benton and I traveled by train across France for several weeks, ending in Bordeaux, and the rooftops got redder toward the south. The first touch of spring shimmered an unreal green on trees, and veins of water and the bigger arteries aspired toward the sea, just as all blood vessels in the body begin and end at the heart. “I’m constantly struck by the symmetry in nature, the way creeks and tributaries from the air look like the circulatory system, and rocks remind me of old scattered bones,” I say. “And the brain starts out smooth and becomes convoluted and crevassed with time, much as mountains develop distinction over thousands of years. We are subjected to the same laws of physics. Yet we aren’t. The brain, for example, doesn’t look like what it does. On gross examination, it’s about as exciting as a mushroom.”