'I talked with Wagner. He's all right. He's not awfully sophisticated about emotions, but he knows it and is glad for the help.'
'How about Caroline,' I said.
'She's home,' Susan said, 'Wagner released her while I was there and we took her home. She's going to take tranquilizers for about three months and then we'll slowly reduce the dosage.'
'Otherwise you get cardiac problems,' Hawk said.
Susan and I both looked at Hawk for a moment.
'That's right,' Susan said. Hawk smiled.
'You look like a scary Mona Lisa when you do that,' Susan said.
Hawk's smile broadened.
'How'd Caroline feel about you,' I said.
'Ambivalent,' Susan said. 'She's suspicious of shrinks. She'd rather you had been there.'
'Un huh.'
'She is under the impression that you can leap tall buildings at a single bound.'
'Well,' I said, 'not really tall buildings.'
'But whoever she'd prefer,' Susan said, 'she knows she needs help with this, and she seems to believe, at least partially, that help is possible.'
'That's encouraging,' I said.
'Yes, it is,' Susan said. 'Hopelessness is hard.'
'Did you make any arrangements?' I said.
'I'll see her tomorrow. Then we'll see. I don't normally do house calls. I don't know if she'll want to drive forty miles each way, twice a week, to see me.'
'You could refer her,' I said.
'Yes, for the long term. For the short term she's suicidal and you can probably help her as much as I can.'
'By doing what?' I said.
'By being there. By seeing her. By telling her she can count on you. She's fastened on you in the middle of a time when everything has collapsed.'
'Hell, I'm part of what caused the collapse,' I said.
'Don't matter,' Hawk said.
'That's right,' Susan said. 'It doesn't. It's a little like the baby geese that, new hatched, imprint on their keeper and act as though he were their mother. When tragedies like this hit people, they are nearly destroyed, the old order has, at least symbolically, died.'
'Or actually died, in this case,' I said.
'Yes. So that Caroline is, as it were, new hatched.'
'And she imprinted on you, babe,' Hawk said.
'Only because you weren't around, Mona.'
'Likely,' Hawk said.
'It's more than grief,' Susan said.
'What else?' I said.
'There's guilt,' Susan said.
'About what?'
'I don't know yet, I barely know there's a guilt. But it's there.'
'Lot of people feel guilty when someone they're close to dies,' I said. 'The better-him-than-me syndrome. The if-only-I'd-been-nice-to-him-slash-her syndrome.'
'The what- am-I-going-to-do-for-money-slash-sex syndrome,' Hawk said.
'Maybe any, maybe all of those,' Susan said. 'But she's already idealizing her husband. She's not idealizing her son.'
'Which means?'
'I don't know what it means. I know that it suggests a variation from the usual patterns of grief that I see.'
'It's atypical,' I said.
'Yes,' Susan said. 'It's atypical. Psychology is not practiced with the innards of birds. If you have experience and you've seen a lot of people in extremis, you see patterns. And then you see anyone in extremis whose behavior is different from the ones you've been seeing, and you say, in technical language, hoo ha!'
'And Caroline is different.'
