The outer door clicked shut as Milicia departed. Jason returned to his desk and checked the skeleton clock. It was six o’clock and still running. He had a fifteen-minute break. A patient was due at six-fifteen and another at seven. His stomach rumbled. He had eaten the last English muffin for breakfast, and as far as he knew, his kitchen had nothing else in the way of food. After his last patient, he’d have to go over to Broadway or Amsterdam to get something to eat. He dreaded the prospect of sitting in a restaurant alone.
Evenings were the worst for Jason. The worst was going out the door of his office, turning right to the door of his apartment, twisting the key in the lock, and finding the lights off, the air still. No sounds of activity reached out to him from the kitchen or bedroom. No discernible human odors hung around to comfort him. At nine-thirty, when he finally went home, his patient hours over and his many procrastinations all used up, the soothing aroma of that morning’s coffee had dissipated some fourteen hours before. With the air conditioner off, the temperature rose to the eighties by noon, baking the dust and emptiness into a stuffy animal’s den that his return didn’t seem to diffuse.
Every day without Emma was a new shock. He had always felt a couple could negotiate for anything— lifestyle, time, attention, love. He had been wrong. There was more to a good relationship than tough bargaining for the satisfaction of needs. Some things had to be given gratis, with no expectation of return. Jason felt a little dizzy, even nauseated, as he remembered how resentful he used to feel at the banalities of domesticity. Now what he faced every night in the different rhythms of his many ticking antique clocks, and smelled in the nighttime gloom of his airless apartment, was despair.
He was comforted by the thought that he didn’t have to worry about going home for several hours. His work wasn’t over. He sat down at his desk and reached for the black notebook he had started for Milicia Honiger- Stanton.
There was the little look of triumph that came over her face when she asked him not to take notes and he slapped the notebook shut. Her expression did not escape him. He knew what body language and the order of words meant. He knew what to watch out for and what to ask. He did not need to take notes to remember what Milicia said, or the order in which she said it. He took information in and swallowed it whole, processing and saving it like a computer. He had fourteen minutes now to re-create what Milicia had told him about her family. He got to work, writing quickly.
Milicia and Camille Honiger-Stanton grew up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where, as she put it, “nobody was poor.” They lived in a big house on the road to the public beach. Milicia described their mother as German in origin, slavish, and depressed. Their father was an alcoholic. The father’s family was English. In Connecticut such things mattered. The Stantons were the ones with the culture and the money. Hilda Honiger, Milicia told Jason, probably started her career in America as a maid. She never conquered her accent. Milicia said she didn’t know when, or why, her parents’ names were joined by a hyphen. She thought it must have amused her father to annoy his family. He liked turmoil, she added.
“Did your mother or father ever get treatment for their problems?” Jason had asked.
Milicia laughed. “Are you kidding? They didn’t think they had problems. Camille had problems.”
“Camille is older or younger?”
“Than me? Two years younger. She’s twenty-eight now.”
“When did her problems start?”
“Eighth grade.” Milicia said it firmly.
Well, Jason had asked himself: if Camille had problems dating back to eighth grade, why the urgency now, more than a dozen years later?
“So what were Camille’s problems?” he asked.
“Oh, God. What weren’t?” Milicia pursed her lips. “She had screaming tantrums. Uses foul language. She’s sexually promiscuous, does kinky things with black men.”
Jason mentally noted the change in tense.
“She was accident prone, always hurting herself. She’s tried suicide. She drinks a lot. Takes drugs, too. What else?” Milicia shook her head. “I told you about the tantrums. Um, she screams at people and throws things, hits people. Of course, you wouldn’t know it if you looked at her. She looks beautiful, vulnerable. That’s her thing. But she’s really vicious. She thinks she’s ugly and starves herself. She’s been bulimic. I don’t know what else.”
“Does she hear voices, see things?”
“I don’t know. Uh, I don’t think so.”
“Does she feel anyone is out to get her? Strangers, or people she sees on the street?”
“Yes, yes. That’s probably so.”
“Who does she think is after her?”
Milicia thought about it. “Oh, you know, she gets really frustrated and hurt when a man dumps her. Resentful. She starts to look at men funny, really crazy. She says men are out to get her, hurt her.”
That didn’t sound so crazy to him. “You seem very convinced there’s something terribly wrong with your sister. What exactly is your concern?”
“She can be dangerous. There’s nobody to look out for her but me. What if she hurts someone? I wouldn’t want to be responsible.”
“What about your parents?”
“They’re dead.” Milicia had said it flatly, tapping her foot with impatience at him.
Why impatient, he wondered. Maybe it was her own perception that her sister was crazy. Maybe she was the one in need of help. “Both of them?”
“Yes, they died in a car accident about a year and a half ago.”
“That’s rough.”
Milicia chewed on her lips and nodded. He felt sorry for her then. She described having to sell the house she had grown up in and most of its contents. She told him about her fury at the IRS for expecting so much money. What was left would be split between her and Camille, but that was a ways off.
“You don’t get the money until the estate is audited. The IRS has three years after the death to do it. Anyway, the money is in trust. Camille can’t do anything crazy with it,” Milicia said.
Jason asked her if she was worried about that. Maybe her concern here was really money.
“No, no,” Milicia assured him. It wasn’t the money that bothered her. She was afraid of Camille herself, afraid of what she might do.
It was then that she told him how she’d seen Camille kill an animal. “We were baby-sitting together—I used to go with her sometimes. She didn’t have a lot of tolerance for little kids, so I’d go to keep a lid on.” She shrugged.
“This time one of them—it was a girl, about five—got to her while they were playing with a pet rabbit— Camille’s anger seems to be focused on girls. Well, she grabbed the rabbit and threw it at the wall so hard, it didn’t get up. Then she put it back in the cage and told the girl’s parents it died in its sleep. So, you see, I’m concerned.”
Jason did not have time to ask Milicia what her part was in that baby-sitting experience when her younger sister lied to the parents of her charge about the death of her pet. The forty-five minutes were over. He did try to get her to pinpoint her reason for coming to a professional, for choosing him in fact—apparently out of the blue— when their parents had died nearly two years ago, and Camille’s problems, if indeed they existed, were many years old. At this point he had no reason to either believe or disbelieve what Milicia told him. He was just listening, trying to figure out what it was all about.
Milicia was impatient at him for not getting it. He asked her if she would like to come back and talk about it some more.
“Well, I have to, don’t I? There’s this
“I can give you the name of a good psychiatrist for Camille,” he said.
She shook her head. “I need to talk to you. There’s more to it than that.”
“My fee is a hundred and seventy-five dollars an hour for consultations.”
“I told you I don’t care about money. I care only about my sister. She’s all I have left.”
Jason remembered all of this and a great deal more. What he wrote was:
