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.
She put a pot of water on the stove for tea. Otto came clicking over and curled himself around her bare legs. “You’re the first male to do that since I can’t remember when,” Jess said. She sighed. Men had always found her attractive, but there was something about her that put them off, some sense of distance. Or maybe she pushed them away intentionally. More than one man had described her as chilly, stuck-up, or spoiled.
But she was none of these things, far from it.
Several times when she was younger she had had unnerving experiences with first dates who would not stop pawing at her as soon as they were alone. By the time she was in high school her mother was a full-blown drunk, in and out of AA meetings, unable to stay sober, going through boyfriend after boyfriend. One of these had taken a special interest in Jess, cornered her in an empty room, and tried to kiss and touch her. She never told anyone about it, not even her mother. Especially not her mother. She took a few self-defense classes after that, bought pepper spray for her purse. Loss of control was something she could not tolerate, in herself or in others.
She studied herself briefly in the faux-antique pub mirror to the right of the door. Not so had, old chum. Her body had always been slim and athletic, stomach flat and tight without much effort on her part. Her face looked a bit worn down and puffy from lack of sleep, and her hair could use a brushing. But overall, the effect softened her features and made her look as if she’d just rolled out of bed.
Soft and full lips, her best attribute. Her nose held the slightest bump on its ridge, the result of a childhood injury and the one thing about her face she’d always wanted to fix.
“Gives you character, girl,” her friend Charlie would say.
She scooped the cat up in her arms and breathed in his fine, soft hair. He purred, stretched, and jumped down. “So much for cuddling,” she said. “You just want me for my can opener anyway.”
Otto meowed accusingly at her. She had come home late; how dare she? Jess fixed a can of food for him and waited for her water to boil.
Her mind drifted back to Sarah. Something was not making sense. What she was supposedly dealing with here was a fragmentation of the thought process, where so many unrelated topics intruded on directed attention that the patient became overwhelmed and simply withdrew. Delusions of grandeur and auditory hallucinations were common.
But was that really what she had seen today? Sarah was immobile, seemingly unresponsive, but in the end she had moved, she had responded.
Jess crossed the room and removed Sarah’s file from her briefcase. She set it next to her cup on the little kitchen table, poured steaming water over her tea bag, added milk and sugar. Then she opened to the first photocopied page.
Height and weight had remained within normal range, if closer to the small end of the scale. No distinguishing marks except for a slight scar, approximately three centimeters, near the temple.
She was being examined on the recommendation of Dr. Jean Shelley. The specific reasons for the recommendation were not given. Jess was surprised to see Shelley also listed as court-appointed guardian.
This was followed by a battery of tests, many of them medical and focusing on brain function and brain wave activity. Each opinion was backed by a second and sometimes a third. But the physicians’ notes were lacking any real insight, and the entire section seemed fragmented. She flipped further, into psychological testing. They had tested Sarah at various age levels for motor skills and language and found her ahead of developmental stages. Detachment and marked withdrawal were noted, which indicated an absence of a familiar caregiver. Sarah showed unusual cognitive abilities for her age. The phrase “unusual cognitive abilities” was not defined.