A History of the Present Illness (3 page)

She arranged the crayons in a neat pile at the far end of the desk, the way her teacher had taught her, and waited.

“Are you finished?” Lenore asked.

“My dad's too big. I can't fit him.” She should have planned better. Maybe the social worker would make her start over.

Lenore pushed the crayons back into the center of the desk. “I think you can. Why don't you try?”

Bopha studied her paper. Usually she was good at tests, but also usually tests had answers and all you had to do to get an A was study.

The only white space left on her drawing started next to her mother's head and moved across the top of the page. She thought of her father on the couch, where he lay down after work and on weekends, stretched out and snoring even with the TV on and Pheak crying and Bopha and Neary playing keep-away from Heang. Sideways he could sleep just like in real life. She chose the purple crayon and drew. When she finished, her father looked like a giant purple cloud. Bopha liked the picture better before, but now Lenore smiled, and that was more important.

“Very good. Will you tell me who everyone is?”

Bopha pointed at each person and named them.

Lenore's lips disappeared into her mouth, then came back out red and shiny. “Aren't you missing someone?”

Bopha stared at the social worker. She had never met anyone so smart. Picking up the milk-chocolate-colored crayon, she drew the baby in her mother's stomach.

Lenore's head moved from side to side, then up and down. “Okay,” she said. “But what about you? Where are you?”

Bopha laughed. “I'm not my family. I'm just me!”

The social worker wrote something down on her pad. “Your parents,” she said. “Do you think they're happy?”

Bopha laughed again. She hadn't expected the clinic visit to be just playing and joking.

Lenore's mouth moved into a smile shape, not her great big
Hello, how are you?
smile, but a smaller smile that didn't show in her eyes. “What's funny?”

Bopha swung her legs under the table. Such a simple question had to be a trick, but she couldn't think of any answer except the truth. “Happy's for little kids,” she said. “My parents are all grown up.”

Lenore leaned forward on her chair. “Anyone can be happy, even adults.”

Bopha tried to think of happy grown-ups, but she could think only of fake ones on TV and in books. And maybe Lenore last week; this week she seemed upset.

Down the hall, a baby screamed. On the wall above the table, the clown clock tick-tocked, and when the second hand got to six, it looked like a long hair hanging from the clown's nose.

Bopha giggled.

“Do you know why you're here?” Lenore asked her.

She nodded.

“Tell me?” Lenore said.

Bopha rubbed her top teeth against her bottom lip. She wondered if the enormous stuffed giraffe in the corner of the room was the size of a real giraffe.

“It's because you wet your bed, isn't it?” Lenore asked.

Bopha thought a kid could climb on the giraffe. Her brother, Heang, would like that a lot, though she'd definitely have to give him a boost up.

Lenore put a hand on her arm. “Maybe we could talk about the last time it happened, about what was going on at home that night before you went to sleep?”

Bopha's nose itched, but she didn't scratch it. Maybe she could bring Heang the next time she came and he could ride the giraffe the way people rode horses on TV.

Lenore said, “Or maybe you already have an idea why you wet your bed?”

Bopha peeked at Lenore's face, which now seemed like a giant question mark, then looked down at her lap. She pulled a loose thread off her skirt, careful not to make the material bunch up. Probably she should tell about the water dreams, but they were all different, and anyway, she liked water, especially when she was helping her mother by washing the rice for dinner or taking baths with Neary when they got to use the soap that made big bubbles. Bopha looked at the clock again, but it still wasn't time to go home.

Finally, Lenore asked if she wanted to color some more. Bopha nodded, and the social worker passed her a clean sheet of paper.

The next week, after they shook hands and Lenore led the way down the hall to the therapy room, Bopha opened the door for herself and headed toward the play area.

“No,” Lenore said. “Over here.”

On the little table, a large shopping bag had replaced the paper and crayons.

“It's a present,” Lenore said, her voice rising, as if she weren't sure herself.

The bag was big and white and shiny, with writing on the side. Bopha eyed the long plastic handles. Her mother could use a bag like that for marketing.

“Open it?” Lenore said.

One at a time, Bopha pulled items from the bag and placed them in a neat pile on the table: a bedsheet cut in half, two towels, and two rubber pads.

“So your mattress doesn't get wet,” Lenore said. “I'll show you?”

In the middle of the table, Lenore placed a rubber pad, then one of the towels, and, over it all, one of the half bedsheets. Finally, she demonstrated how the lump of cloth could be flattened by tucking the ends of the sheet into the sides of the bed.

“When you wake up wet,” Lenore explained, “you can pull all this off, throw it onto the floor, and go back to sleep on the dry regular sheet. Okay?”

Bopha wanted to ask Lenore if one end could be kept loose so she and Neary could sleep together again, but she didn't bother. The towels would never end up on her bed. They were too beautiful, fluffy and yellow and soft, much nicer than the thin, scratchy ones hanging in the bathroom at home. The towels would be for her parents.

She felt the wetness on her cheeks before she realized she was crying.

“What is it?” Lenore asked, but Bopha couldn't speak. The social worker led her to the sofa against the wall, sat down beside her, and held out a box of tissues.

Bopha's body shook and her nose ran. She turned her face into the cushions, but the harder she tried to stop, the worse it got.

Lenore rubbed her back. “Good,” she whispered over and over. “Good girl.” And then, as Bopha quieted, Lenore began talking fast, her voice low and serious and without question marks. She said that sometimes people felt things that scared them, and when those things couldn't come out the right way, they leaked out in other ways. She said that although Bopha might always have to be her mother's helper and take care of her younger siblings, she didn't have to get straight As or grow up more quickly than other children. She said that if there was trouble between her parents, it wasn't Bopha's fault and it wasn't her job to make it better.

Finally, Bopha quieted. She didn't blame Lenore for not being able to fix her. Maybe the doctor was right and three sessions just weren't enough. Or maybe hers was an especially bad case. Then again, Lenore had helped; Bopha might not get to use the new towels, but she could use the sheets and the pads and maybe even her parents' old towels. If she had all that, she could clean up after herself, and it would be almost as if she didn't have a problem at all. She crossed the room to the table and put the items back into the shopping bag. Then she walked to the door.

Lenore met her there and put a hand on her shoulder. “You know this is our last session?”

Bopha nodded.

“Are you sure there isn't anything you want to tell me before you go?”

Bopha hugged the bag to her chest so no one could steal it on her way home. She smiled at Lenore. “Only thank you very much,” she said, and then she walked down the hall and through the clinic's crowded waiting room with her chin on the bag and her eyes on the floor.

In many ways, Robert's arrest was liberating. In the county jail, he ate lunch sitting down, exercised regularly, and, with the benefits of 24/7 lighting and permanent lockdown because of what the pedophile one cage over called their VEP or very endangered person status, began tackling some of the great books, large and small, he had always meant to read but never quite seemed to have time for:
Middlemarch
and
The Magic Mountain
, William Carlos Williams's
The Doctor Stories
and
The Collected Works of Anton Chekhov
. After his arrest, Robert had at most one appointment a day, and he was the patient.

Twice a week at ten fifteen, a guard escorted him through the multiple locked doors of a facility that had been hailed in the
San Francisco Chronicle
as “a stunning victory for architectural freedom over bureaucratic stupidity” by a Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic who'd obviously never experienced the place from inside its frosted windows. Unlike the architect, Robert's experience of the building had nothing to do with freedom. The guard marched him down the
corridors shackled at wrists and ankles, then shoved him into the windowless lime-green room where he was expected to spend a county-designated psychiatric hour—forty minutes—discussing his past. The room had two hardwood chairs that made Robert nostalgic for the comforts of his steel bunk, and a metal table screwed into the floor. The psychiatrist, who introduced herself simply as Dr. Sung, often worked for the DA, though in Robert's case she served as a mutually agreed upon consultant. She was businesslike, younger than he—he guessed late thirties—and wore the weary, harassed expression of a woman with too much to do. From a smudge on the hem of her skirt, he suspected young children, though he never found out for sure. She gave nothing away, which was okay by him. With little to do, he appreciated the challenge.

At their introductory meeting, Dr. Sung said that her job was to provide the judge and jury with an accurate portrait of the defendant and that they'd see a lot of each other because she wanted to understand how Robert came to be the person he was. Robert told her that most people saw what they wanted to see, and precious little in life couldn't be looked at from a variety of equally valid angles.

Though a tape recorder captured his every word, Dr. Sung wrote that sentence down. And so Robert added that one of the reasons he was a doctor and not, say, a lawyer was that suffering was universal while the law varied by state and country, and as a result, sometimes what was right wasn't legal.

Dr. Sung wrote that down too.

Earlier that week, Robert's attorney, Nick Barton, had told him that most prisoners didn't get wireless electronic readers or the time and attention he would get from Dr. Sung, and that he would get Dr. Sung's attention because he was paying for it, and he was paying for it because the usual rapid and ruthless
forensic psychology evaluation led to just one conclusion—crazy or not—which in his case wouldn't be useful.

“Why not?” Robert had asked.

“You're not crazy,” Nick replied.

“So why the psychiatrist?”

“The DA will try to argue that this sort of thing is always murder—”

“Nick, for Christ's sake, she was dying, and then she died. All I did—”

Nick held up a hand. “I know. Save the next go-round for the headshrinker.”

For their first real session, Dr. Sung wore a red suit that didn't quite fit at the shoulders and hips and two-inch heels that might have been weapons in a courtroom or bar but left her vulnerable on the worn, under-waxed floors of the county jail.

Robert was seated when she arrived, but he stood—an awkward, ungraceful effort because of the shackles—when the guard let her in.

“No, no—” she said, trying to wave off his gesture and failing because of the briefcase she carried in one hand and the stack of case files under the other arm.

She didn't look at him until she had deposited her belongings on the floor where he couldn't see them and extracted a blank legal pad and pen. Once settled, she seemed transformed, her body taut and attentive, her brown eyes lit with an intensity she could apparently turn on or off at will.

Interesting, Robert thought. So that's what it looks like.

His ex-wife, Cate, used to accuse him of shifting into doctor mode. He could yell at her one minute and answer a page the next, his voice calm and suffused with concern and compassion. “Why can't you talk to me that way?” she had asked
more than once, and for a while he'd try. But she wasn't his patient; she was family, one of the few people with whom he was supposed to be able to be his uncensored self.

“Okay,” Dr. Sung said. “Let's start.”

He told her he didn't know where to begin.

“Just start. Whatever comes to mind.”

For most of the last year of their marriage, Cate went to therapy twice a week and never said a word in her sessions. When Robert asked her why she continued going, she told him she kept hoping it would help.

“What comes to mind is that I don't know where to start.”

“Try the beginning.”

Beginning of what? he thought. My life?

Dr. Sung put down her pen and sat back. “It's simple,” she said. “What do you think of when I say, tell me how you came to be here with these particular charges against you?”

“I think it sounds like you want endings, not beginnings.”

Dr. Sung looked at him, her expression neutral.

Robert glanced at his watch. On average, doctors filled silences after just two seconds and interrupted their patients after less than twenty, but psychiatrists were different. Dr. Sung waited without apparent effort or impatience. After a thirty-six-minute standoff, Robert noted the faintest glow of sweat on her nose.

“When you're in training,” he said, “you think the worst possible outcome is if the patient dies. But it's not, not nearly.”

Dr. Sung slid the pen through her fingers. He could tell she wanted to write that bit down but was afraid to derail his train of thought.

He leaned forward. “Have I considered how I came to be wearing an orange jumpsuit and living in a cell? Of course I have. I have gone over the events dozens of times in my head
and several more times with Nick Barton in a room just like this one. I can list facts and events, miscommunications and errors in judgment, but what I haven't been able to do is find an answer to the most important question by far: Why doesn't anyone understand that I've done nothing wrong?”