The Reach

In the distance she could hear the buzzer and the sound of running feet.

--4--

The student lounge (or 'The Cave,' as it is somewhat affectionately called) is underneath the Thomas Ward main buildings, reached by a wide set of stairs from the street, which end at a triple set of glass doors. A converted basement, it holds a big-screen television and a small eatery with snacks and sandwiches available at outrageous prices, along with huge quantities of very bad coffee.

The two women had chosen a booth out of the way of general traffic.

'So you've seen her,' Professor Shelley said. 'What do you think?'

'She's heavily sedated, restrained, isolated in a padded cell. And she's immobile. I think she's buried inside herself somewhere. I just don't know how deep.'

'Do you feel that you're in over your head?'

Jess glanced at her murky coffee. She was afraid of what she might see when she tipped the cup. A rumor continued to circulate about someone finding a dead roach once among the grinds. Right now the whole thing seemed quite possible. 'I had a little run-in with Dr. Wasserman. He refused to show me Sarah's file. And I disagreed with his methods and I think he took offense to it.'

'What exactly did you say?'

'I told him Sarah's treatment was abusive and that I was going to report him.'

'And how did he react to that?'

'He basically said that I didn't know what the hell I was talking about.'

When Jess had burst into his office, Dr. Wasserman had looked up but did not seem surprised to see her. She did not slow down until she was at his desk, and a small juvenile part of her had wanted to go at him with her nails like a cat. Wasserman had seemed to regard the whole thing with amusement, sitting and watching her with an earpiece of his glasses tucked in one corner of his mouth, a half smile on his face.

She'd wanted to hit him. Only now had she calmed down enough to talk about it. It was a stupid, childish move, threatening to report him. She would be working with him for the foreseeable future, and this wasn't going to help their relationship.

But if she were truthful to herself, the part that really burned her was that he was right. She knew nothing about Sarah's violent side, or the kind of drug therapy the girl needed. There was only her intuition, and trusting in that was naive at best. And yet the image of that room stayed with her, and the look on the girl's face.

What more do you need to see?

Shelley's keen gray eyes seemed to appraise her carefully. 'You don't back down from anything, do you?'

'I was angry. I felt I had been put into a situation without being properly prepared for it.'

'What exactly bothered you the most?'

'She's just a little girl, and she's scared. She's all alone. There's nothing in that room that's remotely human.'

'So you feel that Sarah would be better served in a more friendly environment.'

'A child in this situation needs more intense therapy, interaction with peers. Schooling, if it's at all practical.'

'Yes,' Shelley said. 'That's true. But let me play devil's advocate for a moment. You can't know what she has available to her or how she's been treated. She's been Evan's patient for eight years, most of her life. There's no one else who knows her better.'

'Which is exactly why I asked to see her file.'

'Evan wanted to minimize any prejudices that might enter into your thinking.'

'If that were true, he wouldn't have told me anything about her condition.'

'Did it ever cross your mind that he might be testing you?' Shelley sipped at her coffee. 'You know that I chose you for a reason. There are plenty of talented students in my classes, but none of them have the gift that you do. I've read your essays, your case studies, and they're all first-rate.'

High praise indeed. Jess did not know how to respond. How could she talk about her secret doubts now, the strange disorientation, the helplessness she had felt when Sarah looked at her and mouthed those words? Had she mouthed them? Or was it just a figment of Jess's imagination, something she had wanted to see and created from nothing more than random muscle spasms?

'Quiet rooms are used in a lot of facilities like this,' Shelly said. 'As for the sedatives, those are very carefully monitored. There's nothing terribly unusual that you wouldn't see in another violent case, especially when the patient's violence is self-directed.' She reached out to touch Jess's wrist. 'I don't mean to confuse you. I have to admit, Evan's tendencies are a bit more extreme than my own, and you know how I feel about the diagnosis. I've been concerned lately with her treatment, which is another reason I decided to bring you into it. So I'm glad to have your thoughts. I'll ask you again. Do you feel like you're in over your head?'

Jess tipped her coffee cup once more, saw something swirling like oil across the surface, and set it down. She examined her level of confidence and found it sound. She could continue, but not with the odds stacked against her the way they were. 'I have to be honest with you. Without a proper understanding of her background I don't see how I could do Sarah any good.'

Shelley nodded. Wrinkles bunched around her mouth and eyes and she looked ten years older. 'All right. Stop by my office tomorrow afternoon. I don't care what Evan says. I'll do what I can to get you that file.'

--5--

Jess could not get herself to slow down. Her mind raced at warp speed, pulling up bits of fact and memory, expressing theories and then discounting them. These were things she had filed and then put away in her mind, where they had been gathering dust for years.

Always at the top of the class, even in elementary school, Jess had often been given special projects and work to complete on her own. The school was small, fifteen to twenty to a grade, a little brick building with a playground in back and temporary trailers to hold the overflow of younger students. Gradually she came to realize that the other children resented her special treatment, and it instilled in her a need to hide most of herself from the world.

Then there was Michael. Her brother's autism had been so severe he could not possibly relate to anyone. Cases like these tore people and families apart; she had seen it firsthand. Michael's condition had put a terrible strain on them all. It had caused her parents' divorce, her mother's slow and painful free fall from their comfortable farmhouse to the trailer in the poor part of town. Then came Michael's accident, and her mother's drinking binges, taking her to a deeper and blacker place than Jess could reach.

But that was ancient history. What she could not discount now was the feeling that the look in Sarah's eyes was nothing like her brother's disconnected gaze, that no matter how deeply sedated she was, Sarah's eyes were alive.

Back at the desk under the eaves in her cluttered little top-floor apartment, with the windows open to the breeze and her cat curled at her feet, she jotted down everything she remembered about the girl. The file was in her briefcase, but she did not touch it, not yet. She wanted to formulate her thoughts first. Traffic moved sluggishly on the street below, the train clacking by on its way downtown, filled with freshly scrubbed college students looking for some kind of nightlife. For a moment she wished she were with them. But she knew she would not be fit company for anyone. Once she had something in her teeth she had to worry at it until it was gone.

She flipped through her developmental psychopathology book, looking for anything on schizophrenia. Most of what she could find dealt with the adolescent transition; there was a frustrating lack of information about younger schizophrenics. She got up and went around the narrow counter to the stove. The real estate agent had sold her on the charm of the place, a long, narrow studio added into the attic of a three-family home; after living in it for a week, she'd come to understand that 'charm' meant hopelessly run-down and open to drafts. The best part of the apartment was the seat under the eaves near the west window. It overlooked a line of trees and grassy lawn, and it was where she kept her easel and paints. She painted to calm herself when life became too stressful. Bits and pieces of artwork, some freshly done, decorated the walls.

The rest of the apartment was like everything else in Boston. The kitchen counter was scratched Formica, the floors dull and battered hardwood and linoleum. Wind moaned around the closed windows at night, and the radiators banged and rattled at all hours.

But Otto loved it. There were mice.