Silent Victim - C. E. Lawrence [86]
He was irritated with the fact that once again Dr. Williams was right, but he was even more irritated at his own reaction. For God’s sake, it was Therapy 101. Hit a nerve, and the patient will respond emotionally. Good Lord, he’d done it scores of times with his own patients, and knew all the signs, but when it came to his own unconscious … Physician heal thyself, indeed.
It was only now that he made the connection between his father’s disappearance and the odd satisfaction he took inflicting pain on himself—as though the physical pain lightened the heaviness inside him. It was exactly the same mechanism with the “cutters"—teenagers who nicked their skin with knives or razors until the blood flowed. They too were suffering, whether from garden-variety adolescent angst or something more sinister. But somehow physical pain was preferable to the emotional kind and served as a distraction—the cutters had figured this out, and, bizarre as it looked, were actually self-medicating.
He passed the Cooper Union building, its square, redbrick facade stately and solid against the dimming evening sky. He felt a drop of rain on his cheek as he rounded the corner and swung out onto the Bowery. As he headed toward Seventh Street, he felt another drop, and then another. This was no misty autumn rain—the droplets were fat and full, falling faster and faster as he hurried toward his apartment.
A stooped old Asian woman scurried along the sidewalk, trailing a garbage bag full of plastic bottles and soda cans behind her in a rickety shopping cart. He wondered how many hours she had spent rooting through trash bins and Dumpsters in search of bottles and cans to recycle at five cents each. Her face was weathered, wizened, worried looking. Her thin brows were drawn together in a frown as she bent her head under the rapidly increasing rain.
So much misery in the world, he thought, so much suffering. He looked at the woman’s retreating figure, her thin chicken legs and scrawny body, her feet stuffed into cheap shoes. She stopped to fish a battered green raincoat out of her shopping cart before continuing on her way. As he trudged through the rain to his building, he wondered what she was going home to. What kind of life did she have? What twists of fate had brought her to collecting discarded cans and bottles on the Bowery in the rain on a Friday night?
Later that night he sat at the piano struggling with the left hand of a Bach prelude. His right hand lay useless in his lap, and the notes winding around each other on the page made his head ache. Normally he found Bach profoundly illuminating, but tonight the scramble of black notes on the page reminded him of raindrops—and of the unending, inscrutable suffering that was mankind’s lot. He forced himself to grapple a while longer, but gave up just as a clap of thunder shook the skies, as the storm settled in, rattling the windowpanes in its fury.
He got up and looked out the window. The droplets hurtled themselves at the panes just as the moths had that childhood summer so many years ago, with equal determination to get inside, it seemed. He thought about Drew Apthorp, and wondered what had become of her. So many people who touch our lives and who we never see again. He didn’t like loose ends. He knew that life is full of them, but he still didn’t like it. His sister’s death was just another kind of loose end, and he ached to solve the gnawing question in his soul.
He and Drew had shared a kiss out in her grandmother’s summerhouse, at the end of the long narrow lawn, on the edge of the woods. They sat on the marble bench until their legs stiffened and their bare feet got cold, as the sun settled over the tree line and the mourning doves cooed softly to each other