By age twenty-seven, she was still living frugally in her single on Formosa and investing ten percent of her stipend in a conservative stock fund. After passing national and state licensing exams, she was asked to stay on at the V.A. as clinical faculty, an invitation she gladly accepted. The position was exactly what she craved: continuing education about people whose lives had been blown to bits, sometimes literally.
The V.A. had changed since Malcolm’s grad school days, when the typical patient was often cruelly libeled as an elderly chronic alcoholic for whom little could be done.
GOMERs, snotty medical residents called them. Get Out of My Emergency Room.
The V.A. that Grace encountered was a high-intensity facility where the evils of war manifested by the hour. Beautiful young American men and women, maimed and mutilated in hot, sandy places by fanatics and ingrates they thought they’d been sent to liberate. The physical wounds were profound. The emotional aftereffects could be as bad or worse.
The patients Grace saw struggled to adjust to missing body parts, permanent brain damage, blindness, deafness, paralysis. Phantom limb pain was an issue, as were depression, rage disorders, suicidal risk, drug addiction.
Which wasn’t to say every vet was damaged goods — a libel that raised Grace’s ire because she respected those who’d served at such a high level. Nor was post-traumatic stress disorder the default. That was a bum rap created by craven Hollywood types exploiting the misery of others for the sake of a screenplay. But even when the damage was subtle, it could impact daily living at a profound level.
Grace never presumed that her own childhood was even a close match for what her patients were going through. But she knew it gave her an edge.
Right from the start, she felt at home with them.
They sensed it, too, and soon, following her pattern, she was treating twice, then three times as many patients as anyone else at the hospital.
More important, she was getting results, with patients and families increasingly requesting her as their therapist. The V.A. staff took notice, happy to have someone carry the elephant’s load.
That didn’t stop some of her colleagues from viewing her as a spooky workaholic who cropped up on the wards at all hours, seemingly immune to fatigue. Was she, they wondered, bipolar? One of those adult ADHD types?
And why didn’t she ever hang out with anyone?
But the smart ones kept their mouths shut, enjoying how much easier she made their lives.
One night-shift RN began calling her “the Victim Whisperer.” A fellow postdoc, himself a Vietnam vet who’d gone back to school in middle age, led a support group for paraplegics with her, expecting to teach “the young cute chick” all about suffering.
Soon he was terming her “Healer of the Haunted.”
That one, Grace liked.
One evening, leaving the hospital and walking to the used BMW 3 that Sophie and Malcolm had “picked up for a song,” she spotted a middle-aged woman waving at her.
Stout, blond, nicely dressed. Working hard at pasting a smile on her face.
“Dr. Blades? Sorry, do you have a second?”
“What can I do for you?”
“I’m sorry to bother you — you probably don’t remember me, you’re treating my nephew?”
Confidentiality precluded an answer, even if Grace had known who the woman was talking about.
“Oh, of course, sorry,” the woman said. “My nephew is Bradley Dunham.”
Sweet boy, originally from Stockton, frontal lobe damage that had scrambled his emotional life. But still gentle, so much so that Grace wondered what led him to the marines. On their sixth session, he’d told her.
I graduated high school and there was nothing else I could think of.
Grace smiled at his aunt and the woman apologized again. “This isn’t about Brad. It’s about my own son, Eli. I’m Janet.”
Finally something Grace could respond to. “Is Eli a patient here, as well?”
“Oh, no, he’s not a vet, Dr. Blades. Anything but. He’s... for two years he’s had what I guess you people would call issues? Intense fears? Anxiety disorders? Also compulsive behavior that’s getting worse and worse, to the point where — not that I can blame him, Doctor, sometimes I’m a basket case, myself. Because of what happened.”
The woman sniffed back tears.
Grace said, “What happened?”
And that changed everything.
Eli’s parents, both CPAs, had been victims of a home invasion that left Eli’s father stabbed to death and his mother severely beaten. Eli had come home to find the massacre, called 911, and ended up as a prime suspect subjected to days of intense, borderline-abusive grilling by the police. The cops’ suspicion continued until three gang members attempting a similar break-in were identified as the savages in question.
By then, the damage was done: Eli, always a “sensitive boy,” had retreated to mute isolation in his room, adopting a growing array of odd tics and habits: pacing and retracing, curtain-pulling, hand-scouring with harsh powdered soap, skin-picking, near-constant eyeblinks.
For twenty-two months, attempts at treatment by a psychiatrist, then a psychologist, had brought no success; neither doctor was willing to make house calls and Eli’s attendance at their offices deteriorated from spotty to never as his condition worsened.
Janet said, “I’m at my wit’s end. I know what you’ve done for Brad. He says everyone talks about you. Money’s no object, I promise you that, Dr. Blades. If you could see your way to at least meeting Eli.”
“In your home.”
“He refuses to go out.”
“But he is open to a therapist coming to him.”
“You’d do that?” said Janet. Her face fell. “Honestly, I don’t know, Doctor, I’m grasping at straws.”
“You haven’t discussed this with Eli.”
“Eli won’t let me discuss anything with him, Doctor, he’s made himself a prisoner. I leave food in the hallway and he waits till I’m gone to retrieve it. But even if it doesn’t work out, I’ll be happy to pay you for your time. Including your driving time. With money up front, cash if you so desire—”
“We’ll work out the details,” said Grace. “Where do you live?”
Four months later, Eli, quirky since childhood and never destined for gregariousness or a conventional life, was able to leave his home, stop torturing his skin, and abandon his other tics. A month after that he was holding down a home job as a billing clerk for an online vintage clothing site.
Two months later, shambling through a nearby park, he met a girl as shy as he. Soon after, the two of them were having ice cream together a couple of times a week. That hadn’t lasted but Eli now saw himself as “datable” and was girding himself to try online sites.
“I know that can be a risk, but it’s a start!” exclaimed Janet. “You’ve done miracles for him, Dr. Blades.”
“Appreciate your saying that,” Grace told her. “But Eli’s done all the hard work.”
Three weeks after terminating with Eli, her second private referral came in. A woman Janet had met in a crime victims’ group.
No need for house calls on this one but Grace had no office for private patients. She asked her immediate supervisor about the ethics of using her V.A. office after hours. Knowing he did the same thing himself, to the tune of doubling his income.
He said, “Well, it’s... we’re in a gray area.” Lowering his voice: “If you don’t overdo it and your regular work gets done...”
By the end of her first year as an attending psychologist, Grace had amassed a private patient load that forced her to make a change: reducing her hours at the V.A. to fifteen a week and giving up all benefits. She rented an office in a medical building on Wilshire near Fairfax, walking distance from her apartment.