The music in the background ended. As Anna turned off the radio the announcer said, “You have just heard a performance of the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives, by Ludwig van—” Then, her back hurting again, she went upstairs.
But instead of going to bed, Anna walked to one of the two doors she always kept locked. Using a key she took down from the lintel, she unlocked it and entered the room. Fifteen minutes later, her eyes wet and red, Anna emerged and went to her own bedroom.
That night she cried herself to sleep.
Anna woke abruptly from a nightmare, a scream strangling in her throat. She was driving their old Volvo on a dark moonless night along a lonely country road. On her right Chuckie was sleeping in his car seat. She glanced in the rearview mirror at the back seat of the car. Even Charles had dozed off, his mouth hanging open. Becky, their four-year-old, was also asleep, snuggled against her daddy.
Suddenly, in the glare of her headlights Anna saw someone standing in the middle of the road just ahead. It was Krueger, leering at her and playing with his crotch. After an instant’s hesitation her foot slammed down on the brake. As the car skidded toward him Krueger never moved. The leer was still on his face when the vehicle hit him and sent his body careening off into space. Then the car was spinning out of control, she screamed as it turned over and over—!
Anna finally stopped hyperventilating. Sitting up in the large empty bed, she clutched her knees and rocked gently, remembering…
They’d spent a wonderful weekend together at that resort by the lake. Early Sunday evening, Charles suggested they change their original plans and stay there overnight. Everybody’s tired, he’d said, especially the kids. We can drive back home in the morning.
But she insisted they stick to the schedule and go back that evening. “I have patients scheduled in the office tomorrow morning,” she said. “I have a responsibility to them!” And no, she wasn’t going to call Bill Skinner to cover for her. Her partner didn’t know the patients as well as she did. It wasn’t fair to Bill or to her patients.
Even now, four years later, Anna couldn’t remember exactly what happened. Maybe, like the rest of her family, she’d fallen asleep too—just long enough to lose control of the car.
They said that Charles and Becky died almost instantly. Maybe, sleeping in the back seat, they just never woke up—never suffered, never knew what happened. The airbag helped her escape with only a concussion, a compression fracture in her lumbar spine, and a few other broken bones.
But Chuckie was too tiny for even the special “ChildSafe” airbag on his side of the car to help him much. A week after the accident, they wheeled her to the pediatric ICU to be with him one last time. Anna knew all too well what the criteria for “brain death” were, and what had to be done. As the pediatrician solemnly turned off the ventilator, she’d clutched the hand of the still, broken body of the little boy on the bed and cried until they had to gently wheel her away.
Months later, Anna decided that going back to work was the only thing left for her to do. Though it was too late for her, at least she could salvage something from her life by helping other people. Or maybe it was just her damn obsessive-compulsive nature taking over again. A single-minded devotion to “duty,” “hard work,” and “being productive.” That personality trait had served her well for many years, helping her excel in college and medical school, making her successful and respected by colleagues and patients.
And that same personality trait had destroyed her life, and those she loved.
It would be so simple, so comforting, to blame her own biology for what she’d done. To say her brain was subtly “programmed” to act that way, so what happened wasn’t entirely her fault. But Anna wouldn’t let herself off that easily. She had made a foolish choice—not deliberately, but because she was careless, and had the wrong priorities. Her family had paid with their lives for her mistake. And now she had to live in a lonely hell of her own making.
The clock on her nightstand showed three in the morning. Sighing, Anna lay down again. There was no way she was going to find answers for the questions tormenting her right now. Better to just get some sleep.
Then she remembered something Bill Skinner said sometimes. In the light of day it always sounded trite. But now, with darkness all around her, it seemed strangely profound and comforting.
“Even psychiatrists get the blues.”
At ten o’clock the telephone rang and woke her up.
It was Mike, her secretary at the office. “Dr. Young, I wasn’t able to reach four of the patients you have scheduled for this afternoon and rebook them. What should I do?”
Without thinking she said, “That’s all right. I don’t want them to make a wasted trip. I can come to the office for a few hours and see them.”
After she hung up Anna remembered she’d promised to spend the whole day with Consuelo. Now she was going to break that promise. No, before she went to work, she needed to talk with Consuelo about it. After dressing, Anna walked downstairs to find her.
The house was deathly quiet. Consuelo wasn’t downstairs. Anna checked the backyard. She wasn’t there either.
Then Anna knew what had happened. Consuelo must have run away! She remembered the strange things the younger woman had said the night before, and suddenly it seemed inevitable. It just goes to show, she told herself bitterly, you can never really be sure what’s going on in another person’s head, or trust them completely.
But as she started to phone Krueger to tell him, Anna thought of one last possibility. Going back upstairs, she peeked in Consuelo’s bedroom.
Consuelo lay on her bed, sleeping peacefully. On her face was a look of angelic innocence.
Anna sighed in relief, then berated herself for her lack of faith. It was “reasonable” and “prudent” not to trust Consuelo completely. She still found it difficult to make the leap from “I think she’s cured,” to really believing in Consuelo.
Anna smiled slightly. Although she hardly thought of him as a theologian, maybe Krueger was right about that too. Wouldn’t it be nice to think that, of all the adults on Earth, the “new” Consuelo was the only one who was truly “good”? The only one whose—what did Krueger call it—“original sin” had been wiped clean?
She didn’t have the heart to wake Consuelo. So she wrote a brief note explaining she’d been called unexpectedly into work, and would be back soon. Anna quietly placed the note on a corner of the desk in Consuelo’s bedroom, and left.
But as Anna drove to her office, a nagging doubt tugged at the corner of her mind. She was doing the right thing, wasn’t she? She had an obligation to the patients scheduled to see her, and had to fulfill it. And she’d also taken care of her duty to Consuelo, by letting her know where she was going and that she hadn’t abandoned her. Yet, as reasonable as that analysis seemed, Anna still had a sense of foreboding. A feeling that, somehow, she was making a mistake.
Oh, arm yourself in steel, my heart! Do not hang back from doing this fearful and necessary wrong… first for this one short day be forgetful of your children, afterward weep; for even though you will kill them, they were very dear.
Consuelo woke up slowly, and looked at the alarm clock. Almost noon. Dr. Young—Anna, she corrected herself—must have known how bad she felt, and let her sleep. She forced herself to sit up on the side of the bed, carelessly threw on a bathrobe, and shuffled with eyes still half-closed toward the bathroom. As she passed the desk in her bedroom the edge of her robe brushed against a crisply folded piece of paper. The note fluttered behind the desk and fell to the floor, unnoticed.