“I have to go to the bathroom,” he said after a few minutes.
He was too stiff to navigate, so they parked in the handicapped spot, hoping not to get a ticket. Realizing he wasn’t going to make it alone, she steered him toward the ladies’ room. If he noticed, he didn’t say so.
The door to the stall didn’t lock, and she held it closed for him. Several women came in and out.
“Do you need help?” she asked Finch.
“No,” he said.
She stayed, leaning against the door for what seemed a long time. After several more minutes, she let the door open slightly and peered into the stall. Finch sat, pants around his ankles, looking as if he were about to cry. The diaper he’d been wearing was now half on, half off and hanging into the toilet.
Oh, God, she should have been helping him.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay,” she answered. She gathered up the soiled diaper and stuffed it into the box marked FEMININE HYGIENE. She wiped him clean and helped him pull up his pants. “We’ll get you a shower when we get home,” she said.
He nodded.
When they exited the stall, Zee noticed a grandmother standing at the row of sinks with her grandchild, watching while the girl washed her hands. Zee walked Finch to the sink next to them and helped him with the soap dispenser.
“There’s an old man in the ladies’ room,” the little girl said to her grandmother.
Finch’s face flushed.
The grandmother gave Zee an apologetic look.
“Men are supposed to use the men’s room,” the little girl said to him.
“Be quiet, now,” the grandmother said.
“But they are.”
“Hush,” the grandmother said, trying to distract the girl.
“But they are!”
Zee had never wanted to slap a child before, but she wanted to now.
Instead she took Finch’s arm and walked him outside. As she let him into the car, she was trying hard not to cry. Things were hard enough for her father without her falling apart.
FINCH FELL ASLEEP IN THE car on the way back to the house. He refused dinner, saying he just wanted to go to bed. She felt bad about doing it, because he said he was too cold, but she made him shower first, not washing him completely, just using the sprayer to wash his lower region. It was the first time she ever remembered seeing her father completely naked. His skin hung in folds, no fat on his frame, his muscles rapidly disappearing. He was wasting away.
“I’m sorry,” she said as she toweled him off.
They walked together to the bed. Zee tucked him in and kissed his cheek.
He smiled up at her. “‘Life is made up of marble and mud,’” he said, quoting Hawthorne.
“Sleep well,” she said.
THERE WERE NO MESSAGES FROM Michael. He hadn’t called her back. She knew he was angry with her, not only about the wedding planner but about the fact that she’d told him not to come. She guessed that she was being punished.
She opened another bottle of wine and drank more than half of it before she was finally calm enough to sleep.
ON MONDAY MORNING SHE CALLED one of the other psychologists and asked her to cover her patients. Then she called Mattei and left a message on her voice mail.
“Hi. It’s Zee. I’ve forgotten, maybe you’re at the clinic this morning. I wanted to talk to you live. I’m in Salem with my father. He’s not doing well. He and Melville broke up, which no one bothered to tell me, and, long story short, Finch was having some kind of reaction to his meds, a really bad reaction with full-on hallucinations.” She paused, realizing she was saying more than was necessary. “Call me when you can. I need to take some time off. I already asked Michelle Berman to cover my patients for the next week, or to cancel them, which she said she was fine with.” A long pause. “I need to stay. At least until I can sort out what’s going on here.” She struggled for more words. “Just call me, okay?”
At one o’clock Mattei called back.
“What’s going on, Zee?”
“Did you listen to my message?”
“I did. How’s Finch?”
“Not good,” she said, her eyes filling up again as she heard her words.
“I figured something was wrong. Otherwise you would have been here. Michael is not being his normal, social self.”
Only as Mattei spoke did Zee realize why Michael had been so angry when she spoke with him on Friday night. It wasn’t wedding planning that they had scheduled for last weekend. They had planned a long weekend in Chatham with friends of Michael’s and Mattei’s from medical school. Everyone was taking Monday off. It had been in the works for months.
Damn, she thought. “Is Michael there?” she asked too urgently.
“Rhonda and I are on our way back to the house. They’re all at the nineteenth hole.”
“Will you ask him to call me?”
“I will,” Mattei said. “We miss you.” She was temporarily distracted by another conversation. Zee tried to recognize the voice but couldn’t. “Listen, take as much time as you need with your father,” Mattei said. “Just keep me posted, okay?”
Zee hung up. She’d been angry at Michael for being angry at her, first about the wedding plans and then for not understanding her need to be here with her father. When he said they had weekend plans, she’d thought he meant more wedding planning. He had a right to be angry about that, or at least annoyed. But in light of what Finch was going through, it seemed rather cold. Now she understood. This weekend meant a lot to Michael. The fact that she had completely forgotten it was unforgivable.
She called his cell and left a message. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’ve been so confused by this whole thing, first Lilly and then Finch. I completely forgot about this weekend.”
WHEN MICHAEL DIDN’T CALL BACK, her mind started in on her. She thought about what a bad fiancée she was. So bad he’d actually had to ask her if she really wanted to get married. A question she had never answered as it turned out. After that thought churned for a while, she started to think about Lilly. Bad fiancée, bad shrink. Two for two. She should have seen Lilly’s suicide coming, but she hadn’t. She’d seen danger all right, but she hadn’t seen suicide. She hadn’t been able to predict it any more than she’d been able to predict Maureen’s. Let’s see: bad fiancée, bad shrink, bad daughter, the Triple Crown.
There were similarities here between Lilly and Maureen, things that went beyond the obvious diagnosis of bipolar disorder and the suicide. There was something else, but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. The real similarity, of course, was a personal one, and one that Mattei had pointed out when she began to treat Lilly.
“Lilly Braedon isn’t Maureen Finch,” Mattei said.
“I know that,” Zee said.
“Yes, and I’m going to keep reminding you.”
As it turned out, Mattei should have reminded her more often. Not long into Lilly’s treatment, Zee began to see Maureen. In one of their sessions, Lilly had declared, “I should never have had children,” and Zee, without realizing, had nodded her agreement, something she had quickly covered. As time went on, Lilly became more and more important to Zee; it became increasingly important to help Lilly work out her relationship with her kids, important ultimately to save her. Still, when Zee should have seen the signs, she saw nothing. Even now, though she had seen the newscast and heard the eyewitness accounts, Zee was having trouble believing that Lilly’s death was suicide.
“Denial is a funny thing,” Mattei had said to her the next day.
“Not that funny, actually,” Zee answered.
THAT MAUREEN’S DEATH HAD BEEN a suicide was something Zee had never questioned. The image of Maureen’s last hour was so permanently etched in Zee’s memory that for years she had trouble seeing anything else about her mother except the brutal way she’d killed herself. It took five years of therapy as a teenager and another two with the famous Mattei for her to be able to see the more everyday images of Maureen and not just that last horrible day. Zee knew that the fact that these images were now merging with her images of Lilly was cause for concern. She knew it would take some serious therapy to untangle them, but she was not ready to begin the process. Not yet. She understood that at least part of the grief she was feeling at Lilly’s death was a delayed reaction, something she should have felt and didn’t when her mother died. When Maureen died, all Zee felt was disbelief.