Not Guilty

This is the first story in a set of linked short stories that I am currently revising. It re-introduces a familiar character from Hired Gun.

Not Guilty

“It’s just somethin in my brain, somethin biological, gen…genet…what you call it? …inherited. Got it from my bitter bad ass granpa, nothin I could do about it.” Bobby threw his hands into the stale air and grinned through the gap in his teeth. “So, what the fuck, man, I gotta stay here forever cuz of some chemical chaos?”

“We all did bad things, Bobby, we have to make up for our mistakes any way we can…if society lets us.” John, six feet of GQ handsome with the strong forearms and hands of a tennis player, who attended Harvard for one year before his foray into madness, shrugged at Bobby. Hospitalized the longest of any of the three patients, John pined for release to the cottages, where he could commute to college and retrieve his life.

“You been brainwashed, all this responsi…resp …all this ability shit.” Bobby’s frustration leaked through his archipelago of freckles, greasy red hair ponytailed by a rubber band. “Not my fault. Judge said so.”

Debbie glanced up from her bent over position in the wobbly chair closest to the door. She clutched her stomach as she studied the two young men across the therapy circle, unlike her in gender, background, marital status, yet parked together in purgatory. “John’s right, we’re evil. Husband divorced me; parents don’t visit.” Skeleton skinny and cheeks sunken, Debbie’s complexion was the translucent white of a ghost. Word from the women’s ward was she picked at her food and vomited every day. The thin remains of a twenty-five-year-old new mother who, late one night, immersed in delusions of devil possession, drowned her newborn in the bathtub.

These were David Lipman’s new patients, a group therapy experience he never imagined in graduate school.

…

David started at the Institute after getting his doctorate in psychology. He added this one day a week job to an already hectic schedule at the university teaching hospital. He needed a reprieve from medical school politics as well as to broaden his clinical experience and earn some extra cash. Still in debt from graduate school, driving a new-to-him beater, daunted by new faculty responsibilities of research, teaching, and therapy, this side hustle was a unique experience. It paid well enough to create a travel fund, allowing him to fly to Mexico this past January where he met a young woman wearing a barely-there bikini, a memorable benefit of extra cash.

Once a week, he drove forty-five minutes into the valley, pulled up to a crumbling Victorian-era psychiatric hospital surrounded by chain link fence, and showed his photo ID to the sheriff in the security shack. The main building was a faltering pile of faded red bricks with barred windows perched amidst cottonwoods and maples at the juncture of two rivers. The Coquitlam fed into the Fraser, which in turn drained into the Pacific twenty-five miles to the southwest. They both ran rough and muddy in the spring, breaching banks, flooding farmers’ fields, and sucking away cottonwoods. Up the rutted, potholed road half a mile outside the security fencing sat seven clapboard cottages with flaking paint and sagging roofs. The first stop on recovery road.

The Institute housed prisoner-patients wedged into the deep crack between criminality and insanity. Somewhere early in their journeys through the justice system, for anything from murder to masturbating at McDonald’s, these sad souls looked nuts enough to a cop, lawyer, or judge to be remanded for a mental health evaluation. Were they fit to instruct an attorney? Did they understand their crime?

These were not mere academic questions; the answers resulted in either a time-limited jail sentence or “getting off” on an insanity plea. Those judged not guilty by reason of insanity served an indefinite sentence numbed out on anti-psychotics in a cockroach-infested edifice. If the crime was sufficiently newsworthy, some publicity-hungry politicians would make it their mission that the patient rot inside forever. David’s initial role was to assess patients committed by the courts for mental health evaluations. Interesting work, but the outcomes were controversial, the headlines lurid, the misery heartbreaking.

Late one afternoon, a year into his part-time gig, as other professionals locked file cabinets and fled home, David sat in his office, pressed a tape recorder to his lips, and pondered his next comment on a miserable soul’s mental state.

A quick rap on the door caught his attention.

Robby Burns ambled in and plopped himself on a chair. “Davey, my lad, I hear you’re a crackerjack therapist.” Robby was the chief psychiatrist and got his medical and psychiatry training in the UK; just where and how was a mystery. He had a Glaswegian accent, a loose-jointed saunter, and the charm of a man experienced in pubs with stale beer and sticky tabletops.

“Don’t believe everything you hear.” David grinned, secretly pleased. “How are you, Dr. Burns?”

“Robby, call me Robby, please.” He slung one ankle over a knee and planted his elbow on David’s desk. “I think you’re just the man we need.”

“For what?”

“I tell you, Davey, this sad sack place needs some real therapy for our patients. We’re just hosing them with Haldol, not teaching them how to cope with the residue of their sins. Nor how to survive when they get out…if they ever get out.” His blizzard blue eyes crackled under an unruly drift of snowy white hair. “Our patients don’t really live; they exist in a dream. Line up for meals and meds, do what they’re told, stupefied by the tube.” He attacked the desktop with his forefinger.

“Good point.” David thought the patients’ lives were more like nightmares than dreams.

“I want you to develop a group therapy program for our long-term patients.”

“You mean those remanded not guilty by reason of—”

“Precisely, let me know your thoughts next week.” Robby popped up and sauntered down the deserted hallway, singing off key about some Scottish lass.

David found early career success by doing what his bosses wanted and doing it well. By the next week, he had a plan for weekly group therapy sessions for those patients serving indeterminate sentences for murdering family members. After eliminating patients still inhabiting hallucinations and those declining consent with their middle fingers, he found only three willing group members.

“What the fuck else I got to do, doc?” Bobby, missing his upper incisor and canine teeth, shrugged and grinned. David visited Debbie three times in the women’s ward to talk her into the group. Only John seemed enthusiastic. “I’ll do anything I can to improve, to reclaim my relevance to my family...”

...

“Thanks for coming to the group.” David poured gut-dissolving coffee into a chipped mug. His three new patients sat in a circle of creaking folding chairs around a cigarette-scarred table. A sofa rotted against the far wall. The ceiling was stained brown from decades of tobacco. Summer sun shone bleakly though a dust-streaked window. “Let’s spend this first session discussing the internal influences…like guilt, like possible psychotic breaks…and external factors like the responses of family, friends, or employers that will help or get in your way outside the hospital.”

“Got no family no more. Good thing, too, if my brothers still alive, they come for me.” Bobby cackled. “No more…”

Debbie shrank from Bobby’s presence. John rolled his eyes.

“Let’s be serious, Bobby,” David interjected. “Your crime—”

“Not a crime, Doc, innocent cuz I’m crazy…right?”

“Not guilty by recent of insanity, Bobby. Nobody would describe you as innocent. Like I was saying, your crime made you infamous. If…when you get out, employers, landlords, neighbours…they’ll all be scared. Your history will be impossible to hide, slapped in your face every day.”

“Wish I was famous…that what ya said? None of us rottin here famous for nothin.”

David’s lips turned down. “Right now, Bobby, when people think of you, it’s because you killed four members of your family. That’s what I meant and what will follow you around for a long time.”

“Oh, well…if ya knew my dad, good the ol bastard’s gone…”

...

I ruined my parents’ life when I ended my sister’s. John put down the novel he was reading and remembered today’s therapy session, trying to piece together the tangled dendrites of his delusions.

There’s something to what Bobby, the depraved guy who makes my skin crawl, said today in our therapy group. A crescendo of chemical chaos grew in my brain. Only nineteen, back from Harvard for the summer. Since early high school, I strained to make Mom and Dad proud, please all my teachers and coaches, seeking praise and seeing myself through their eyes. Maybe being so uptight, missing sleep from studying was the beginning?

His parents were desperate for an explanation after it happened, but he knew there was no rational answer, not in the moment, not after the fog of confusion lifted, not now, not ever. The murky nightmare started with other students whispering about him in the dorm.

“Did you hear about John?”

“Yeah, pretty crazy, eh?”

“Think he knows what we…?”

“Nah, he’s clueless, wrapped up in books, tennis, his own weird world. Never relaxes. Not human.”

“But look out for him, you hear, he could be…”

It got worse when he arrived home for the summer. The food tasted off when his sister Jenny helped his mother in the kitchen. Others stopped talking when he entered the room. He quit eating at home and camped out in McDonald’s, but a chemical scent infected the burgers, and the girls at the counter stared and whispered

John had read and re-read his incoherent statement to the police and the crime scene report. If you asked him what he remembered of that night, he had to check the written record. For weeks afterward, he had been numbed into an amnestic coma with anti-psychotics. The report said he had been pacing all night. At three in the morning, he crept downstairs, seeking escape from the voices. But their taunts continued. Whispered threats rose from the steps. The carpet under his toes squirmed with life. A smirking full moon shone through the window. He snuck into the dark kitchen arguing with the chief tormentor, a feminine voice that slithered like a snake. Fumbling blindly in drawers, his fingers grasped the carving knife. Whispers from the walls swirled in his mind as he slipped into Jenny’s bedroom.

...

David sat in his cubby hole office at the Institute early one evening, an inch of cold coffee in his cup, and scribbled summary notes from his group session. The evening sun shot shadows across the lawn and empty parking lot as cottonwood fluff floated in the air. He mused about heading home from the empty office building but stared out the window trying to understand his patients’ tragedies.

All of them killers. John had clearly been delusional. The reports for court showed nothing but a loving, high-achieving family and two teenagers destined for success. Nothing to predict he would go off the rails, no history of drugs or previous mental health problems. An arbitrary tragedy, no explanation, no justice, only pain.

But Bobby was a different story, so many causes to choose from. Starting from early childhood, his battered brain decayed into cortical compost. He was the youngest of three sons raised by a depressed mother and drunken father. His older brothers bullied him and father beat him. The old man, chronically unemployed, stole metal to resell at scrap yards, drove on a suspended driver’s license, and collected guns. The family’s rancher, rent payments always in arrears, oozed booze, resentment, and violence.

Debbie had been depressed since high school, challenged by frosty parents and a learning disability. Her parents’ interest in her future was one dimensional, pregnancy not so much desired as demanded by her mother. “All we want is a grandchild.” Left unsaid was their hope for better luck in the next generation. Her psychiatrist of several years was a wizened old man who intellectually retired years before his pension kicked in. His therapy for Debbie consisted of rotating anti-depressants, voyeuristic inquiries about her sex life but none about the voices screaming in her brain. Recognizing his indifference, she dropped out of therapy and flushed her meds. The shrink didn’t follow up or make a referral to another therapist, who might have asked what her devils demanded.

Reviewing these three files reminded David of the heartbreak of families, some arising randomly, some through parental abuse, neglect, or just intrusive stirring of the pot of their children’s misery. So many who should have never parented.

Like his own mother who had been mired in misery for as long as David could remember. An embarrassment to him as a child, now a burden and source of guilt to him as a young professional. David flew out of town every other month to check on her, deal with her medical and psychiatric care, solve problems with her caregivers. In between visits, he called her once a week but let his answering machine screen calls so he could choose when to talk to her. His father left four years ago to save his sanity. Now, years into crisis-managing his mother, David understood how he felt. His father struggled with high blood pressure for years; David wondered when his own turn would come. But like his father, responsibility for others was one of the reasons he got up in the morning based on his belief—or fantasy—that this would make him special to someone.

Shaking off rumination, he locked the files in a cabinet, escaped to his car, and searched for music to distract him on the rush hour slog home. A smile grew anticipating his next date with Katherine, the new woman he was dating, who mixed her career accomplishments, lust, and mystery into one package. She might be the one.

...

One day in July, the month when the rain retreated but the rivers still ran full, Bobby paced along the grassy bank of the Coquitlam River. His knees quivered from meds—or was it nerves—and tobacco-stained fingers gripped a roll-your-own. Fuckin Frank’s late. Can’t wait long, nosy nurses ask questions. Wors part of this fuckin hospital is people lookin over my shoulder. Bobby didn’t resemble the usual riverbank lounger. No tan, no fishing pole, no look of dreamy detachment. He fidgeted, paced, and squinted upstream. Finally, a blue kayak skimmed in and out of cottonwood shadows, headed downstream toward the Fraser. Fuckin bout time. The young man in a wet suit and ball cap could have been a recreational paddler enjoying the sun-speckled river. But he was just Bobby’s dealer, carrying a freezer bag of pills and weed in his forward compartment.

...

David and Debbie were the first to arrive for the group. “Debbie, how was the visit with your aunt?” Sitting more upright today, cheeks glowing pink, she looked to have gained a few pounds.

“Okay…well…good. We talked about her granddaughter…and about how I can live with them…when I get out.”

David gave a cautious smile. “Must feel good to know you have a place to stay. You’re close to Peggy, right?”

Debbie shifted in her chair and massaged the knots in her neck. “Yeah, since I was a little kid. Ran to her whenever Mom was mad.”

David nodded. “Your aunt was more of a support than—”

“Than my mother, way more, like night and day. Never could please Mom. But Peggy, she’s my mother’s little sister, had a lifetime to learn how to manage her older sister’s anger.” A brief smile flashed across her face. “Wish I had that talent, just spent my time waiting for Mom to blow up. Never took long. Only relief was when Peggy visited.” She leaned back and exhaled.

“So, some things are going right now. Peggy’s on your side.”

“Yeah, she’s coming to visit again next week.”

“And you’ve started eating again; holding it down.”

She blushed. “Yeah, sometimes I almost have an appetite, food doesn’t taste like cardboard.”

“And working in the kitchen at the big hospital up the hill. I see you got a good evaluation last month.”

“Don’t make too much of it.”

“Small steps, Debbie, but important ones. Connecting with family on the outside, taking care of yourself, getting back to work. All normal things, activities which help your mental health. Give yourself credit.”

She gazed at the linoleum floor. “Last night when I lay awake in bed, I got to thinking of what it would be like living on the outside, seeing Peggy and her family every day, going to work, feeling useful. But maybe it’s all a mirage, a daydream of normal life.”

“I prefer to think of it as hope and planning.” David looked up as the door opened. “Hey, John, welcome.” Bobby straggled behind, a smirk underlining his eyes.

...

The next week, Robby strode into David’s office, scowling instead of singing, tossing a paper on his desk. “Your fuckup patient fucked up again.”

David sighed. “What did Bobby do now?”

“Selling weed to other patients. Entrepreneurial little shit.”

David glanced at the incident report. “Where’s he get it?”

“Well, he’s not growing it. I’ve suspended his grounds privileges.” Robby grinned. “Got so pissed he put his fist through a mirror. Right hand’s slashed and stitched up. Serves him right.” He gazed out the window at cottonwood trees dancing in the breeze. “Take it he’s not your group’s star student, eh?”

“Despite Bobby’s limited education…” David opened the file. “Two years behind by grade eight, never made it through grade ten, mathematically and verbally challenged, but he’s no dummy, loads of street smarts. But intelligence isn’t the issue. Every session peels back another layer of his antisocial onion.” David shook his head. “Sometimes I feel so dirty after time with him, I need to wash my hands. Despite everything we do, he’s going to stay dangerous. But he doesn’t care. Not all patients we treat are going to be stars. Maybe the best we can hope for is for some of them to function safely outside the hospital.”

“Speaking of stars like that John, the tennis player, right?”

“Precisely.”

“We move him to the cottages next month.”

“Good thing.”

“But he’ll still come to group every week.”

“Okay, but I’m not sure that’s nec—”

“He insisted. Said, ‘Lipman’s my lifeline.”

...

“I hadn’t thought there would be flower gardens here.” Peggy strolled beside Debbie along a gravel path between beds of coneflowers, hydrangeas, and rudbeckia. Honeybees buzzed drunkenly between blossoms as the afternoon sun filtered through maples. “Such a beautiful place.” She glanced at Debbie who twirled a yellow flower with her fingers.

“Yes, it is. Patients from up the hill help the gardening staff.” Debbie stopped to smell a sky-blue hydrangea. “It’s peaceful out here.” She had put on weight, no longer complained of stomach pain, and her cheeks were more pink than white.

“Any progress…on getting out?” Peggy glanced to the side.

Debbie gazed at the flowers, not turning to her aunt. “Dr. Lipman thinks I’m ready for the cottages, but I need to wait for the review panel hearing. They make the decision.”

“Surely, they’ll release you. You’re no risk…”

Debbie cast her a sideways glance, then fondled the petals of a coneflower. “There are patients who die here from old age, never get out. All it takes is one person on the review panel who thinks what I did was unforgiveable…like I do…” She gazed at the Fraser meandering its muddy course to the ocean. “I’m like the river, destination predetermined, just putting in my time.”

...

“Hey, Doc, got somethin new for you.” Bobby’s tongue played with a chewed crumb lodged in the gap of his grin.

“Tell me something positive, Bobby.” David glanced at the late arrival. John and Debbie ignored Bobby, as they had for weeks now.

“Swore off weed, no more demon herb. Sober as a judge.”

“Really?” David grinned. “Did your dealer cut you off or…”

“Nah. I just seen the light…changed man.” He pointed to his file folder sitting on the coffee table. “Write that down, why doncha? Help me with the review panel.”

“Do you have a panel coming up?” David glanced at him quizzically.

“Well, you tellin them I’m off weed will help…won’t it?” The jitters from his legs sped up, finger jabbing at his file.

“I’ll write you told me you quit. Good enough?”

“Well…okay, but make it sound convincin.”

...

John now slept in a cottage outside the security fences and made his own meals. No more lining up for institutional food. Instead, he strolled through grocery stores, chose perfect produce, the juiciest orange, the crispest apple. No longer wakened by screaming voices or restless pacing of other patients. And, as of today, the first time since that pre-psychotic spring at Harvard, he was back in school. Free to come and go in a limited way, but still under threat of being reeled back into the hospital. No giving in to anger, no drugs, not even a beer. No missing evening check-ins or allowing suspicions to slither inside his brain. Any of these could consign him again to the hell he’d built for himself. The nightmares had eased but still lingered behind his eyelids.

“John, we know what you did…” the voices muttered in a menacing chorus, two voices or was it three, shifting from male to female, booming bass to shrieking soprano and back again, “we know…and you’ll pay. Taste something off in your meds?” The green tablet pulsed in his palm, the tumbler of water glistened with grease, his eyelid twitched in the mirror. Footsteps behind him. “Johnnnn…” He threw the pill in the sink and turned to run but the steel door was locked.

He woke, shivering and wet, hands clenched, fingernails digging blood from his palms.

In the afternoon, John slipped into his abnormal psychology class before all but two other students. The room gradually filled.

He had read half the textbook the previous weekend, staying awake all Saturday night highlighting key points, and rising at four this morning because he was so excited. Now he sat in the front row of the lecture hall; his textbook, a pad of paper, and a ballpoint poised on the writing surface. His knees trembled as he inhaled dust motes littering the air, lit by yellow ceiling lights.

John repeated what he read in the text—as many as ten percent of patients with a psychotic break never have another. Never have another, never have… Every moment of not hearing a conversation fully, every ambiguous facial expression squeezed his heart. No more, can’t take another. But insanity hadn’t returned in three years. Just a constant pall of worry whether the whispering voices would return. Dr. Lipman asked him to report on his first week’s classes, how they went, how he felt taking the bus to the college and talking with other students. As he looked around, it was clear he was the oldest by three or four years, too clean-cut with his shirt buttoned to the collar and new jeans. He nodded, acknowledging the mountain he had to climb. But I have a chance…a new chance.

...

In the meantime, ten miles away on a tree-shaded riverbank. “That’s right, ya little retard, suck.” Bobby browbeat Ricky, the mentally handicapped man, barely of legal age, to follow him down to the river. Red maple leaves blanketed the grassy slope. Not another person in sight, the only sounds lapping water on the muddy bank and whispering winds in the cottonwoods. Initially, Ricky resisted, but a hard tug on his ear and threat of more to come convinced him to kneel.

Bobby had his grounds privileges back. The old Scottish shrink gave him a forgettable lecture about “staying off the weed will be your first step getting an application to the review panel.” The old man looked serious.

“Yes, Dr. Burns, will do. I’m a changed man.”

“I mean it, son. You screw up again, it’ll be a long time without privileges.”

It was the first day of freedom, no nurses with snoopy eyes and gossipy gums nagging him. He strolled into the September sunshine, the scent of flowers and soil in his nose, warmth on his neck, looking for something to do. He spotted Ricky sitting at a splintery picnic table under a maple tree. “Hey, Ricky, whatcha doin?”

The boy looked up, vacancy and uncertainty painting his face. Pimply, plump, and uncertain, the handicapped kid occupied the lowest rung on the loony bin ladder, scared of everyone and everything. “Yeah, Bobby, what…what you want?”

“Let’s go to the river and get our feet wet, feel like we’re free. Sound good to you?”

“Uuhh, maybe not. I kinda…kinda like it here.”

“C’mon Ricky, cooler by the water. You’ll like it.”

Ricky rocked on the bench, hands clenching and unclenching, lips moving as he thought. “Okay, it’ll be…what’d you say…cool?”

…

At the end of term, John sat in a Starbucks reviewing his grades. All A’s…like the old days before my brain blew up. Just a community college, not a real university, but a start. He sipped his coffee, savoring the bitterness on his tongue, the nutty scent in his nose, gazing at girls giggling on the sidewalk. A trembling tension of desire, hope, and fear filled his mind. I could ask someone out…but I’d have to explain…maybe if it’s just for coffee…maybe not yet…never…ever…someday. Okay, someday.

In the last session, he’d told the group how well he was doing in his classes. Bobby yawned, but Debbie smiled and Dr. Lipman nodded. “Good job, John.”

He couldn’t wait to tell Lipman about his final marks.

Walking to catch the bus, basking briefly in contentment, he felt a hand brush his shoulder.

“Excuse me…sorry...”

He pivoted to see a girl with shoulder-length black hair, brown eyes, and dusky complexion.

Wearing snug jeans with torn knees and a black Bon Jovi t-shirt, she shifted her feet as if to flee. “You sit in front of me in abnormal psych, right?”

John recalled the girl asked lots of questions and frantically scribbled notes. He remembered the scratch of her pencil, the rub-rub of her eraser. “Yeah…” Fear sucked his confidence into the concrete. Why’s she want to know?

Her cheeks flushed pink and eyes took flight into the air. “Well…I sit behind you…and my name’s Rupinder. I could tell from looking at your textbook that you were reading chapters way ahead and writing notes in the margins.” She steeled herself and met his gaze. “I…well…this is kind of embarrassing, but I wanted to ask your final grade.” Her eyes warmed the air between them, then skittered away. “I’m sorry…so inappropriate…it’s just you seem so smart.”

“I got an A. Thanks for asking. I can guess what you got, asking so many questions, taking so many notes.” His fear faded as he exhaled. “I’m John, by the way.”

...

Bobby strode into David’s office, frantic-faced and trembling. “Doc, what the fuck, gotta tell em I’m crazy, not res…not responsible…”

“Whoa, Bobby, what’s the problem?” David studied the man in front of him. The stink of missed showers wafted across the desk as Bobby paced and slapped the wall’s cheap paneling. Fear was something different for Bobby, usually a cocky container of psychopathy. “And why’d you miss group and our individual sessions for the last two weeks?”

“That…that pimply little squirrel is a liar. Ricky told the fuckin nurses I did somethin to him I never did. They’re gonna charge me. Can’t do that, can they Doc, not if I’m crazy?”

“Sit down, Bobby, I’m getting dizzy watching you pace.”

“Little liar.”

“Sit down…” David pointed to the chair. “Now, Bobby.”

Bobby settled in a seething stew across from him, eyes darting wall to wall, knees knocking, tobacco-stained fingers clenching.

“Cops were here, can’t do anythin, can they? I’m crazy…”

“Bobby, what are they charging you with?”

“He lied.”

“Do you mean Ricky?

Bobby nodded and spat on the floor.

David grimaced in disgust. “What’d you do?”

“Nothin.”

“If you’re being truthful, nothing will happen to you.”

“But I’m crazy. Can’t convict me no matter what I done, right?”

David slowly shook his head. Bobby’s luck has just run out. “It doesn’t work that way. Not guilty by reason of insanity means you didn’t understand the specific crime you committed was wrong. It got you off when you killed your family, but it doesn’t get you off from other mistakes.”

“But…I’ll go to real prison.”

David glanced at his watch and stood up. “We can talk about this at next week’s—”

“I won’t be here. Cops gonna take me tomorrow.”

...

A week later, David escaped for three days of hiking. Wading through early snowfall around Mt. Baker and gazing at the views was a break from university politics, grant-writing, and teaching. But his three patients at the Institute still crept into his mind. John now lived in the cottages and thrived in college. Debbie was stable on her meds, had crept out of her depression, and was excited to get partial release to the same cottages. Bobby, his only failure, awaited trial in Oakalla Prison. He was going to have a tough time in a real prison going from bully to bullied. David bit his lip but realized that there wasn’t much he could do about Bobby’s situation. He contented himself with the thought that two out of three were returning to society. A pretty good batting average. Gazing east toward the turquoise waters of Baker Lake, he allowed himself a smile of satisfaction.

He stumbled into his townhouse at nine Sunday evening filthy, footsore, and grizzle-faced. He craved a shower and warm bed but glanced into the kitchen out of habit. The light on the answering machine flashed red. He reached across the counter and pressed play.

A message from Katherine, his new girlfriend who had become the one consistency in his personal life. “David, hope you had a good hike. Give me a call when you get in so we can get together…” The last word tailed off in a suggestive manner.

A warm wave of eroticism flowed over him. Sometimes Katherine fell off the radar for a while. She never revealed the reasons for her absences, whether she was seeing someone else, or just wanted to be alone, but when she was there, it was good. He listened once, rewound, and luxuriated in her voice. Call her tomorrow.

He played the next message. “Davey, it’s Robby. Sorry to call on the weekend, but we’ve had an event…unfortunate event…with one of your patients. Call me when you get this message.”

David froze and replayed it, searching for more detail. Dammit, Robby, which patient? Probably Bobby. I already know about the criminal charges. Maybe something’s happened to him in jail?

Monday morning dawned with painfully blue skies. The morning sun reflected off downtown high-rises. Leaves glowed leprechaun green, crows cawed in concert, traffic rumbled over the nearby bridge. David sat on his deck, groggy from lack of sleep and jittery from coffee.

He waited until nine to call the Institute. “Hi Sylvia, it’s David Lipman. Is Dr. Burns there?”

“Robby just walked in, I’ll put you through.”

He heard the rapid ring of the transfer.

“Good morning, this is Dr. Burns.”

“Robby, it’s David. You left a—”

“Davey…” He cleared his throat. “Davey, I’ve got bad news for you.”

“Is it about Bobby, something happen to him in jail?”

A long sigh. “Hmph, I wish. No, it’s really bad news. We moved Debbie to the cottages Friday. All signs were she wasn’t depressed, had support from her family, and most importantly you saw her as doing well…”

David gripped the receiver with white fingers.

Robbie hesitated, a click in his throat as he found the words. “Well, get straight to it. The first night by herself in her cottage, Debbie hung herself from the shower fixture. No warning…like she had it all planned.”

On David’s deck, the blue sky stabbed his eyes, the restless city roared in his ears. “Damn, she seemed so positive. I met with her aunt…”

“Davey, in this business we try to predict people’s outcomes from what they show us, but they often wear a mask. Anyway, the coroner’s office will look at her file and your notes. All standard, not to worry.”

“Robby, is there anything you need from me, anything I can do?”

“No, just thought you should know before you come out here again. Terrible shock, but not surprising really, our patients are so unpredictable.” Robby sighed. “And…and Davey, don’t blame yourself, you’re not guilty of anything but trying to help damaged people.”

After hanging up, David sipped from his mug and grimaced at the lukewarm bitterness. He poured an inch of coffee and grounds into the potted palm, gazed at the city skyline. Why did she? What if I had…He turned it over and over in his head, losing track of time. When he heard the morning mail plop through the front door, he realized he was late for the office and a full day of patients

.Photo by Alex Brisbey on Unsplash