"Time! That's all you doctors want, time, and of course, money," she chastised.
I was silent,
"All right," she said. relenting. "But I want a weekly report now, If you can't do it yourself, have your secretary call me or a nurse,"
"Very good," I said.
"This teddy bear thing. It's inexcusable."
"I agree. I'm not giving up on finding it for her." I promised.
"Maybe she hid it herself somewhere," she suggested. "Maybe she wants to be crazy."
"I don't think so. Jackie Lee. No one could enjoy that sort of pain."
"In the state of mind she's in, anything's possible," she muttered.
Then she went into a rant about her own state of mind and how difficult things were for her.
"People know the truth, you know. I've done the best I can to prevent it, but they find these things out eventually. They know where she is and they talk about us. They even know about Linden. People feed on this sort of thing here. Now I don't know what will become of her."
I wanted to say I didn't, either, that perhaps Grace would be here a long time if not forever, but I kept my secret thoughts lacked in my heart and did the best I could to relieve her of her anxieties.
Soon afterward Grace began to accept the disappearance of her teddy bear the same way she had learned to accept the death of her father. She went into a period of deep mourning, retreating to the shadows in her room, spending hours and hours staring into space, occasionally permitting a fugitive tear to trickle down her cheek and off her chin. I was at her side constantly, trying to break through her sadness, trying to give her renewed hope.
Finally one day she turned to me and said. "He's gone."
I wasn't happy with this conclusion. She was hardened with the realization and the finality. She lost the softness and the innocence and optimism I had been able to restore in her, and in fact, in myself. It was as if some light had gone out of her eyes and a deeper, darker glint appeared through which she now saw the world in all its reality. She could no longer see angels. The clouds we once playfully imagined being this or that were now simply clouds. It was as true for the stars as well.
I hated what had happened to her and what was still happening to her. When I was first starting out in the practice of psychiatry. I used to fixate on the mental problems and see them as small, distorted, ugly creatures. I would focus on killing them, hunting them down through the darkest corridors of a patient's mind, pursuing them relentlessly with my psychiatric weaponry until I had either destroyed them or driven them so far underground, they could do no more serious harm. I hated none as much as I hated the one or ones plaguing Grace, my lovely, wonderful. beautiful Grace.
I know I was a different man at home because of all this. Willow. For the first time my temper was short with Alberta. I had little or no patience for any of her nonsense and everything she was doing those days seemed to me to be bigger and bigger nonsense. It got so she was afraid to come to my office to ask me anything. I would argue with her over trivia. What wasn't trivia to me, however, was her new insistence that we spend a small fortune on upgrading our landscaping. She had brought in a landscape architect who had created a project twice as costly as what the house was probably worth. It envisioned a pond that could qualify as a small lake!
"I can't touch the outside of this precious, historical building, but I can at least improve our grounds," she insisted.
She needed me to convert some investments into liquid cash for her to begin such a project and I resisted. Our normally strained relationship was hanging by threads. I took to spending even more time away from home just so Alberta couldn't harangue
As to Grace and her treatments. I did return to the earlier, heavier dosages of her medicine. I hated to do that, but for a while, it seemed to be helping. We spent hours talking about that curse again. The clinic wasn't as sacrosanct as she had come to believe after all. The demon would enter and it would get to me. too. I didn't know at the time, but she already knew she was pregnant and was keeping it a secret just as much because of these troubling ideas as anything else.
How, I wondered. can I turn this around? Why hadn't I realized how delicate her recovery had been? I began to think that perhaps I was not capable of helping her after all. Maybe Jackie Lee wasn't so wrong. Maybe Grace belonged somewhere else and my keeping her here with me was a purely selfish thing. Maybe I should get her away from me as quickly as I could. I thought.
These questions and thoughts troubled me so much. I know I began to show it in my face. Miles was asking after me constantly. He easily saw the differences in me and was full of concern. When I came home from the clinic. I went right to my office and perused case study after case study trying to find some clues, some technique, some method to make proess with Grace. I often fell asleep in my chair and woke realizing it was the middle of the night.
Obviously, this all had an impact on my relationships and my effectiveness with my other patients, Willow. It occurred to me that Grace might very well be right: my relationship with her was destroying me from within, destroying who I was supposed to be and what I was trained to do. Do you know that for a while there I actually considered the infamous curse?
Like a parasite my frustration fed off of me, draining me, sapping me of my otherwise high-octane energy. Ralston expressed concern and even Nurse Gordon commented about my workload and gave me advice. The irony was the more effort I put into helping Grace, the worse things became because she saw my struggle and my fatigue to be a direct result of my relationship with her. She refused to go on our special walks, and she began to talk more and more about leaving the clinic, cla
iming it would be better for both of us.
I appealed to her sense of guilt.
"If you do that now." I told her, "I'll feel like more of a failure and instead of helping me, you will hurt me deeply. Grace."
For a while that staved off her talk of leaving. Jackie Lee, however, continued her pressuring, her frequent phone calls, and her threats of simply sending a car and an attorney to pick Grace up. It actually reached the point where my heart would skip a beat whenever I saw a strange automobile make the turn onto our clinic driveway.
And then one night when I was doing
everything I could to postpone my returning home, delaying, finding- little things to take up my time, just so I wouldn't have to confront an increasingly belligerent Alberta, something terribly explosive occurred. I was making some notes on a report I was completing concerning another patient when Suzanne came running down the corridor to my office. She burst in crying. "Come quickly, Dr. De Beers, something horrible.'