The Analyst

not far from the hospital, which Ricky knew instantly was in a very nasty part of the city. She’d had no health insurance and had been working as a part-time clerk in a grocery store. She was not a native New Yorker, but had family listed in the next of kin space from a small town in northern Florida. Her Social Security number and telephone listing were the only other completed items on the intake form.

He turned to the second sheet, a diagnosis form, and saw his own handwriting. The words filled him with dread. They were clipped, curt, to the point. They lacked any passion and sympathy.

Miss Tyson presents as a twenty-nine-year-old mother of three young children in a possibly physically difficult relationship with a man not their father. She states that the children’s father abandoned her several years ago to take a job working on oil rigs in the Southwest. She has no current health insurance and is able to work only part-time, as she has no funds to hire adequate child care. She receives state assistance from welfare, and federal AFDC, food stamps, and housing subsidy. She further states that she is unable to return to her native Florida, having been estranged from her mother and father by her relationship with the children’s father. She additionally claims no funds available for such a move.

Clinically, Miss Tyson appears to be a woman of above average intelligence, who cares deeply about her children and their welfare. She has a high school diploma and two years of college, having dropped out when she became pregnant. She appears significantly undernourished and has developed a persistent tic in her right eyelid. She avoids eye contact when discussing her situation, only lifting her head when asked about her children, whom she states are very close. She denies hearing voices, but admits to spontaneous eruptions of tears of despair that she is unable to control. She says she remains alive only for the children, but denies any other suicidal ideation. She denies drug dependency or addiction, and no visible signs of narcotics use were seen, but a toxicology screen is warranted.

Initial diagnosis: Acute persistent depression caused by poverty. Personality disorder. Possible drug use.

Staff recommendation: Outpatient treatment to state mandated limit of five sessions.

Then he’d signed the bottom of the page. He wondered, staring at his signature, whether he had signed his own death warrant.

There was another entry, on a second sheet, showing that Claire Tyson had come back to see him in the clinic four times, and had failed to appear for her fifth and last authorized session. So, Ricky thought, at least his old mentor, Dr. Lewis, had been wrong about that. But then another thought occurred to him and he flipped open the copy of the death certificate complete with the city coroner’s seal and compared that date to the initial treatment date on his own clinic form.

Fifteen days.

He sat back hard on the bench. The woman had come into the hospital, been directed to him, and half a month later she was dead.

The death certificate seemed to glow in his hand, and Ricky quickly scanned the form. Claire Tyson had hung herself in the bathroom of her apartment using a man’s leather belt, looped over an exposed plumbing pipe. The autopsy revealed she had been beaten shortly before her death and that she was three months pregnant. A police report clipped to the death certificate said that a man named Rafael Johnson had been questioned about the beating, but not arrested. The three children had been handed over to the Department of Youth Services for processing.

And there it was, Ricky thought.

None of the words printed on the forms in front of him came close to conveying the lasting horror of Claire Tyson’s life and death, he thought. The word poverty doesn’t come close to capturing the world of rats, dirt, and despair. The word depression barely suggests the crippling black weight that must have rested on her shoulders. In the whirlpool of life that trapped young Claire Tyson there had been only one thing that gave her meaning: the three children.

The oldest, Ricky thought. She must have told the oldest that she was going to the hospital to see him and get help. Had she told him that I was her only chance? That I held out some promise of something different? What did I say that gave her some hope, which she passed on to the three children?

Whatever it was, it was inadequate, because the woman killed herself.

Claire Tyson’s suicide had to have been the pivotal moment in the lives of those three children and in particular the oldest, Ricky thought. And it didn’t even register on his own life in the slightest. When the woman failed to show for her final appointment, Ricky had done nothing. He couldn’t remember even making a single phone call out of concern. Instead, he’d filed all the papers in a folder and forgotten about the woman. And the children.

And now, one of them was out to get him.

Find that child and you find Rumplestiltskin, he thought.

He rose from the bench, thinking he had much to do, pleased, in an odd way, that the pressures of time and deadlines were so pressing, because otherwise he would have been forced to actually consider what he had done-or not done-twenty years earlier.

Ricky spent the remainder of the day in New York City bureaucratic Hell.

Armed only with a twenty-year-old name and address, he was shunted between offices and clerks throughout the state Department of Youth Services offices in downtown Manhattan, trying to determine what happened to the three children of Claire Tyson. The frustrating thing about his assault on the world of clerkdom was that he, and all the people at all the offices he dealt with, knew there was some record somewhere of the children. Finding it, amid the inadequate computer records and rooms filled with files, proved to be impossible, at least initially. It was clearly going to take some persistent digging and hours of time. Ricky wished he were an investigative reporter or a private detective, the type of personality that had the patience for endless hours with musty records. He did not. Nor did he have the time.

Three people exist in this world who are connected to me by this fragile thread and it might cost me my life, he told himself, as he butted up against another clerk in another office. The thought gave him a shrill urgency.

He was standing across from a large, pleasant Hispanic woman in the records division of juvenile court. She had a massive flow of raven-black hair that she pulled back sharply from her face, allowing the silver-rimmed, oddly fashionable eyeglasses that she wore to dominate her appearance. “Doctor,” she said, “this is not much to go on.”

“It is all I have,” he replied.

“If these three children were adopted, the records were likely sealed. They can be opened, but only with a court order. Not impossible to get, but hard, you know what I mean? Mostly what we get are children all growed up, now looking for their birth parents. There’s a procedure we gots to follow in those cases. But this, what you asking, is different.”

“I understand. And I’m under some time pressures…”

“Everybody’s in a hurry. Allatime in a hurry. What so urgent after twenty years?”

“It’s a medical emergency.”

“Well, a judge likely gonna listen to that, you got some papers. Get a court order. Then maybe we could make some search.”

“A court order would take days.”

“That’s right. Things don’t work none too fast in here. Unless you know some judge personal. Go see ’em, get something signed real quick.”

“Time is important.”

“It is to most folks. Sorry. But you know how maybe you do better?”

“How’s that?”

“You get a little bit more information about these people you be looking for, get one of those fancy search programs on your computer. Maybe come up with the info. I knows some orphans looking for their past done that. Works pretty good. You hire a private investigator, that’s the first thing he gonna do after he takes your money and puts it in his pocket.”

“I don’t really use computers much.”

“No? Doctor, this be the modern world. My thirteen-year-old, he can find stuff like you