You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [14]
“My son. He was naked. He’d been rubbing himself. For hours, it must have been. He’d rubbed himself raw. He was bleeding down there. And he was crying, his tears catching in the little beard that had started growing on his cheeks, the soft little brown hairs he hadn’t learned to shave yet. When I got to the top of the stairs he looked at me like I’d severed a rope he’d been clinging to for dear life, just like that, like I’d sent him down somewhere to die. What could I do?
“I got a towel. From the bathroom. A white towel. I got gauze and ointment, and I sat him down on his bed and I cleaned him and put Band-Aids on him and I tried not to weep.”
Mrs. Buckholdt sat on the edge of the sofa, shoulders hunched forward. Her words had drained her, her face gone pale now. She stared blankly at the floor.
“I was his mother,” she said quietly, almost listlessly. “What was I supposed to do?”
For a moment, there was silence in the room.
“The kitchen,” she said. “I was in the kitchen. Later. Making him soup. He’d always liked soup. Maybe he’d taken the drug again. I don’t know. I felt him behind me. Suddenly he grabbed my wrist, forced it down onto the cutting board, and he chopped my fingers off, the fingers I’d touched him with, chopped them off with a meat cleaver. Then he walked out naked into the backyard.”
THE TWO OF them sat there together a long time, the sun hanging low on the rim of the western sky, casting its giant columns of light down over the land, level over the yard, level through the unshaded panes of the windows, pouring over Mrs. Buckholdt’s back, casting shadow over the coffee table and the tarnished ashtray and the rounded, dark center of the densely patterned wool carpet.
In the time she had spoken, it seemed to Frank as if Mrs. Buckholdt’s body had sunk down into itself, leaving her smaller and more frail, her earlier, imposing demeanor exhausted. He experienced a familiar comfort being in the presence of another person’s unknowable pain. More than any landscape, this place felt like home.
“How did your son die?” he asked.
“The two of them, he and Jimmy, they’d borrowed some friend’s truck. It was only a few days later—he never had come back to the house. They were out on the interstate, headed west. They crashed into the wall of an overpass. Jimmy made it with some burns. He still lives out there on Valentine. I see him now and again.”
By dint of habit, the trained portion of Frank’s mind composed a note for Mrs. Buckholdt’s chart: Patient actively relives a traumatic event with intrusive recall; there are depressive features, hypervigilance, and generalized anxiety. Diagnosis: posttraumatic stress disorder. Treatment: a course of sertraline, one hundred milligrams daily, recommendation for psychotherapy, eventual titration off clonazepam.
He wondered how his colleagues felt when they said these words to themselves or wrote them on a piece of paper. Did the power to describe the people they listened to save them from what they heard? Did it absolve them of their duty to care?
As the silence between them stretched out, Frank remembered the first patient he’d seen as a resident, a woman whose husband had died in a plane crash. Each hour they spent together she filled with news of her two children, her son’s play at school, a job her daughter had taken at a hotel, right down to what they had chosen to wear that morning, and she said it all gazing out the window, as though she were describing events in the history of a foreign country.
He could remember lying in bed on the nights after he’d seen her, alone in his apartment, her plight weighing on him like a congregant’s soul on the spirit of a minister or a character