The Chinese woman came in around one-thirty. “You can go now,” she said.
Milicia stood, trying to control her face. “If you keep your face serene in all circumstances, you won’t get wrinkles” was what her mother used to say. Milicia could hear Mother’s voice telling her that now. Okay, she knew how to keep her face serene. “I can go?” she said, her voice calm and low.
“Yes. Just write your name and address on this card and sign it for me, and we’re all done for the moment.” The Chinese woman held out a form.
Milicia was suspicious. “After you’ve kept me here all these hours?”
“Yes.” She handed Milicia the form.
Milicia took it, wondering if it would be better to make a scene or go along with it and just get out of there. She examined the form, waffling over her options. Maybe it would be better to be indignant at the way she’d been treated. She glanced at the card. It seemed innocent enough. Name, address, phone, work and home, social security number. Signature line. She panicked when she saw the blank places for a picture and fingerprints.
“I thought you said I could go.”
“Yes, you’re free to go.”
“What’s this for?”
“Don’t worry about that part,” the woman said, and handed her a pen.
Milicia took a deep breath, trying to calm down. It seemed okay, but she had a feeling none of this was okay at all. This was going to hell. She wanted to change her clothes. She could smell her own fear.
“What about my sister?”
“She’ll be able to leave soon, too.” The Chinese woman now opened the door all the way, showing Milicia that she was free to exit.
“Really, she can go, too?” Milicia hesitated over the card. Maybe it was a trap.
“Yes, we’ll be taking her home soon.”
“I want my sister. Why can’t I take her with me now?”
“I really don’t have the information on that. I’m just reporting on what I know.”
“I’m not a suspect?”
“Not at this time.”
“Then why do I have to fill this in? You already have this information.”
“It’s just routine. There’s a lot of paperwork. We keep information in lots of different places. Just complicates things, that’s all. You want to go, you sign the piece of paper. That’s the way it is.” She shrugged.
Milicia was still suspicious. “What about my sister? Is she a suspect?”
“Not as far as I know.”
Milicia snuffled through her nose. That was as far as she would go to express her disgust and disapproval at the whole stupid system. They didn’t know what they were doing. She filled in the form quickly, signed it, and pushed past the Chinese woman on her way out. Half of her day was gone, and she wasn’t sure what she should do next.
It was nearly two when she stepped out of the police station into the sun. It beat down hard, baking the city rot into the streets. Under her gray suit jacket, Milicia’s sweat-soaked silk blouse felt cold and reeked of emotion. Milicia knew the odor, strong as horse sweat, would never come out no matter how many times the blouse was cleaned. She headed home to throw it out.
73
Jason and Charles lived and worked in the same latitude on opposite sides of Manhattan. Charles’s office was on Seventy-ninth Street near the East River. Drawing a straight line across the island, Jason’s was on the corner of Riverside Drive, facing the Hudson River. Charles had a view of the sunrise and Jason had a view of the sunset, but there were differences between them much deeper than who could watch the day begin and who could watch it end. Charles knew whenever he had the slightest feeling of unhappiness and promptly dealt with its source. He was unable to tolerate a moment’s annoyance more than was absolutely necessary.
Jason often suffered vague uneasiness—even intense malaise—for weeks without acknowledging anything was wrong. He wanted everything to be all right with him so he could be strong for his patients and resisted giving his feelings of discomfort a name.
Since yesterday he had something new to be uneasy about. On the way across town in the taxi he kept worrying about the ethics of his situation. What was his responsibility in a case like this? This issue had come up with him before, once in a child abuse case and once with the unethical behavior of a colleague in treatment with him. Questions of patient confidentiality, a potential victim’s right to be protected, and a moral responsibility to uphold the laws of the land were exceedingly tricky to balance. The bottom line, he knew, was that there was no elegant equation for the proper management of these issues. To satisfy one moral imperative, it was sometimes necessary to disregard another.
As Jason evaluated the things Camille had told him, he could see a clear picture of the escalation of her illness over the years, especially the years after puberty when the sexual abuse continued until Milicia left for college.
Sibling rivalry was an old, old story. The lethal greed and self-interest of the daughters of King Lear, and the bastard sons Edmund and Don John, were only a few of Shakespeare’s dangerous, warring children. The Bible had many more. In fact, aside from temptation and lust, sibling rivalry was the Bible’s most-told cautionary tale. No invading enemy army could be as vicious, as insidious, or as dangerous as the voracious, grasping child desperate to be first and foremost in his parents’ hearts.
In dysfunctional families like the one in which Camille and Milicia Honiger-Stanton had grown up, with a great deal of illness, little love, and no one watching, a brutal and sadistic war could rage on undetected for years. In this case it was continuing still, even after the death of both parents. Jason felt as if he had been caught in the path of a tornado with no place to hide from the howling wind and flying objects. It was not lost on him that the second victim, Rachel Stark, had died during a gale.
Unrestrained by conscience, human emotions could be as wild and destructive as nature run amok in fire and storm. Jason heard the venting of savage and vengeful feelings in his office daily. He was accustomed to patients’ self-involvement so extreme, nothing else but their fury and desire for revenge mattered to them. Still, he did not find it easy to accept the possibility that someone he was treating could be close enough to that murderous edge to cross it without his awareness.
“You’re not God, Jason,” his first wife liked to scream at him. “Why can’t you accept the fact that even though you went to medical school, you’re not a king, you’re not a god. You’re just a man, and not a very good one.” His first wife had been surprised and embittered when their marriage ended. She had no idea how she sounded, never heard a word she said.
About five minutes early, Jason stood on Madison Avenue praying for his nausea and dizziness to recede. As he waited, horns erupted at a sudden gridlock in the intersection. The Seventy-ninth crosstown was closed. It had been closed for over two years now, but a clot of traffic still got stuck several times an hour because drivers used to crossing there refused to adjust to the change.
He caught sight of Charles down the block, hurrying toward him. Charles had his complaining face on; his handsome features were furrowed with offense. If Jason hadn’t felt so shaky, the sight would have made him smile.
“Where do you want to go?” Charles demanded without preliminaries when he reached him.
“How are you, pal?” Jason tried not to feel hurt that his old friend didn’t offer his hand.
“How do you think I am? I feel like shit. I can’t believe you kept me in the dark about all this. Brenda and I have been working with Milicia for a year. She designed our house. It isn’t even finished.…” His voice trailed off.