The Hiding Place Read online

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know,” he replied. “But unfortunately any further information I provide would be difficult to integrate with what you already know.”

  He talks like a true administrator, I thought, constructing his sentences with the careful design of conveying as little useful information as possible. I scowled at him. “What in the hell does that mean?”

  He shook his head. “I know this puts you in an awkward situation.”

  “It puts me in an impossible situation,” I corrected him. “I mean”—I raised an exasperated hand into the air and let it fall like dead weight into my lap—“what am I not understanding here, Charles? Is this political? Are you protecting someone? Jesus, we have a responsibility—a professional and moral duty—to act in the best interest of our patients.”

  “I feel that I’m doing that.”

  “Do you? Do you really?” I asked.

  He regarded me impassively, his features unyielding. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you more.”

  “One thing is becoming clear to me,” I said, standing to go. “You’re allowing yourself to be manipulated by outside influences that have nothing to do with the medical management of this patient.” I went to the door, put my hand on the knob, but turned back to look at him one last time before I left. “Your judgment is compromised,” I told him.

  He had the audacity to turn those words back on me, as if somehow he were the righteous one. “So is y—” he started to respond, but I slipped into the hallway and shut the door behind me before he could finish.

  Chapter 11

  That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed staring at the wall, the images of newspaper articles I’d tracked down online that evening popping into my head like the small explosions of flashbulbs from a 1930s-era camera. For hours I’d hunched in front of my PC’s monitor, the index finger of my right hand clicking away, moving up and down along the mouse’s roller as my eyes darted back and forth across the paragraphs. It had been hard to concentrate. At the far end of the hall outside my apartment someone was yelling—the person’s voice wild, hysterical, chaotic. I was reminded yet again of the thin artificial separation between institutions like Menaker and the vast, untethered world beyond, and wondered how many souls had been misassigned to each. I got up, paced the room, considered calling the police. But already I could hear other voices—calm and authoritative—in the hallway, and I realized that someone must have beaten me to it. The yelling escalated for a moment, followed by the ensuing sounds of a brief struggle. Others in the complex—my neighbors—might be opening their apartment doors and poking their heads through the thresholds for a quick peek at the action. But not me. I saw enough of this type of thing at work. My days were filled with it. I had no desire to witness it here, in the ostensible shelter of my personal life.

  After the noise abated, I went to my computer again and sat down. Amir Massoud had indeed died on the night of May 12, 2010—stabbed to death in the front hallway of his townhome. He’d died at the feet of his domestic partner, Jason Edwards. The knife, bearing Jason’s fingerprints, had been lying on the floor next to the body when police arrived. I could imagine the blood on Jason’s shirt, his pants, his palms, already beginning to dry into something lifeless and irreparable. I could imagine the first arriving officers taking in the scene in a glance and, with hardened faces and practiced efficiency, pulling their weapons and ordering Jason to show them his hands, to move away from the body and to lie facedown on the floor while they pinned him down with a knee to the back of the neck. His arms would have been twisted behind him, his wrists ensnared in the uncompromising steel of the cuffs. In my mind, I could see him being led out to the street, the officer grunting, “Watch your head,” as Jason lowered himself into the back of the vehicle. I could envision him sitting at some table amid lime-green walls in the station’s interrogation room, could hear him being grilled by the detectives, could even imagine him breaking down under the emotional strain and confessing to it all. I could envision all that, but what I could not picture was the actual murder. I could not imagine the hand of my patient wrapped around that knife as he plunged it into his lover’s chest. I closed my eyes, concentrated on forming that image, but it simply wouldn’t develop. What appeared instead was the expression on his face the first day I’d met him.

  During my medical training, I’d seen that look from time to time. It was in the faces of some of the terminally ill cancer patients I’d treated as an intern: a surrender, an overwhelming fatigue, a desire to let go, to be done with it all, and yet the realization that there was something beyond their control that was holding them here still. They resented it, I knew, the indignity of that lingering existence. Jason had borne that look the first time I met him, and there were days when I noticed it still, as if he were stuck in some purgatory from which he might never be released.

  I switched off the computer and went to the bathroom, studying my reflection in the mirror. There were dark lines beneath my eyes and the corners of my mouth seemed to droop into an unhappy countenance. My face looked puffy and swollen, like I’d been crying, although I had not. The water was cold as I splashed it on my face with cupped hands filled from the faucet, harboring the hope that when I returned my gaze to the mirror I’d look different—somehow refreshed and unburdened.

  I did not.

  I climbed back into bed and lay there in the dark. An argument in the apartment next to mine could be heard through the thin walls. I sandwiched my head between two pillows, tried to ignore it, and felt like I was eight years old again, listening to my parents bicker in the other room.

  “HE’S GOT NO place else to go,” I could hear my mother saying, her voice low and meek in response to my father’s domineering presence. He was a man used to exerting his will over others, and it infuriated him when he perceived resistance to a course of action on which he’d already decided.

  “Well, living with us is not the answer!” he exploded, and I could hear something strike the common wall shared by our adjacent bedrooms. A shoe, I thought. It was just a shoe—not my mother’s head.

  There was silence in the house, and despite my fear I pulled back the covers, crossed the room, and padded out into the hallway. The brass knob of my parents’ closed bedroom door was cold in my hand.

  A quick sound of footsteps on the other side, and suddenly the door was yanked open, the doorknob wrenched from my grasp. My father stood in the threshold, glaring down at me. “What do you want?” he demanded, the sentence feeling more like an allegation than a question. Beyond him, I could see my mother sitting on the side of the bed, a forgotten article of clothing folded in her lap.

  “I … I heard something hit the wall,” I replied, too stunned to try for anything but the truth. “I just wanted to make sure you and Mom were okay.”

  “We’re fine,” he told me. “We were just having a little discussion about your uncle Jim. Your mother thinks it’s a good idea for him to come live with us.”

  “I like Uncle Jim,” I said.

  My father got down on one knee in front of me, looked me straight in the eye. “Let me tell you something about your uncle Jim that your mother is too chickenshit to mention. Your uncle Jim is crazy. He’s been in and out of institutions for years now, had his brain poked and prodded by all those quacks over at the psych hospitals in Baltimore, Springfield, and Ellicott City. And what good has it done him?” he asked, casting a challenging look over his shoulder at my mother. “He’s still as crazy as the first day I laid eyes on him. And now”—he turned his smoldering gaze back on me—“she wants him to come live with us. You think that’s a good idea, Lise? Do you?”

  I stood there, a deer in the headlights, not knowing how to respond.

  “Leave her alone,” my mother told him from where she sat on the bed. “She hasn’t done anything. You don’t need to yell at her, too.”

  “I’m not yelling,” my father said, standing up and turning away from me. He raked a hand th
rough his thinning hair. “I’m just trying to be the voice of reason here.” He crossed the room, put his hand on the nightstand. “He attacked a lady. Did you know that, Lise?” I shook my head, but he went on without waiting for a reply. “He attacked a lady in broad daylight. And now he’s got criminal charges against him.”

  “That they dropped,” my mother said, “because he’s ill, not dangerous. And they’re willing to release him if there’s someplace willing and able to take him in.”

  “Why does it have to be us?”

  “Because we’re the best place for him,” she replied. “The halfway houses, the hospitals, the board-and-care facilities—he doesn’t do well in those other settings. He needs familiar surroundings, people who truly care about him and who will make sure he takes his medications.”

  “A fat lot of good they’ve been doing him,” my father said, unsnapping the watch from his wrist, winding it, and placing it on the nightstand.

  “The medications help. But he has to take them, Roger. They don’t always make sure he does that at those other places.”

  “And you will?” he asked.

  “He’s my brother,” she said. “I want to see him well.”

  My father put his face in his hands, sighing his resignation. He dropped them to his waist, placing them on his hips as he considered the two of us for a moment. “This is a bad idea,” he said. “I’m telling you that now, and I want the both of you to remember this conversation when things go poorly. Because when that happens, it will be your responsibility, not mine.”

  “I love him,” my mother said, “and he needs us.”

  There was a shrug of the shoulders as my father walked into the bathroom and shut the door behind him. I could hear the click of the latch, and that was the end of the conversation. But he’d given in to her, I realized, and more than anything else, that was what surprised me. It was the only time in my life I’d seen my mother stand up to him. And despite how it all turned out—how my father’s admonition proved accurate—I really wish she had stood up to him more, that she had found her voice instead of curling deeper into herself over the years, becoming someone I could barely recognize and almost never reach.

  TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, I was thinking about it still. And behind some closed apartment door in the hallway beyond, I could hear the muffled cries of the screamer begin again. The police hadn’t taken him away after all, I realized. They’d merely returned him to the confines of his domicile, instructing him to keep quiet and to stop bothering his neighbors. Perhaps this was where he belonged then—with his family—not yet broken enough to be removed from society’s midst. I turned onto my side and pulled the covers up over my head, but sleep was a long time coming.

  Chapter 12

  Good morning,” I greeted Amber, stepping to the counter at Allison’s Bakery for my usual cup of joe. She smiled widely as she poured and, sliding the beverage across the counter, selected a few small confections and popped them into a sample cup for me to try. I picked one up between my thumb and forefinger, raising an eyebrow.

  “Cinnamon apple crunch,” she said, “with just a touch of hazelnut.”

  I took a sip of coffee, forgetting to blow on it first, and almost burned my lip.

  “Be careful,” Amber warned, but I held up a hand, accepting the blame. I knew better. The coffee here was hot. You had to give it a minute.

  “Don’t forget these,” she said, tapping the cup of apple crunch. I picked it up and took it with me as I crossed the bakery, stopping to add some milk to my coffee and to toss the sweets in the trash before temptation got the best of me. I waved to Amber as I exited the shop, heading in to work a little earlier than usual in order to review some charts and catch up on paperwork.

  I was thinking about the day ahead of me when a screech of brakes brought me around to the present, my body flinching as a dark Chevy sedan came to an abrupt stop at the crosswalk, its bumper only a foot and a half from my lower leg. My heart, responding to the threat after it was over, doubled its pace in the space of a few seconds.

  “Sorry,” I called out, shamefaced, realizing I hadn’t checked for traffic before stepping into the street. I stepped back onto the sidewalk, motioned for him to proceed. The car idled for a good ten seconds, enough time for people behind it to start tapping their horns. I wondered whether he wanted me to cross, but I couldn’t make out the driver through the glint of sun coming off the windshield. I decided to hold my ground, indicating again that he should go. The car sat idling for another few seconds, then lurched forward and passed me, hurtling down the street and hooking a right at the next intersection.

  I’d barely had a second to look through the side window at the occupants, but I’d taken in as much as I could. The faces of the driver and passenger had been turned in my direction, contemplating me with their slate-faced stares. It was the two businessmen I’d noticed in the coffee shop the week before, on the day after the storm. My mind moved from day to day since then, realizing their consistent lingering presence in the background of my commute: at the bakery that first day, in the doorway of the flower shop perusing the day’s offerings, at the newspaper stand a half block from here, on the park bench across the street, and now …

  I walked quickly up the hill toward the hospital, checking over my shoulder several times along the way. I’m just spooked by the near miss, I told myself, that’s all. Of course I had seen them many times before on my way to work. They were on their own way to work, weren’t they? There was nothing more to it than that. But always lingering, a small voice inside my head interjected. Never in a hurry. Never actually going anywhere. Until …

  Until today. And what’s different about today? Well, I was heading in earlier, that was one thing. Perhaps I’d caught them off guard, thrown off their schedule. But there was something else that was different as well. I thought of my confrontation with Dr. Wagner the day before. There’s more to this case than you’re prepared to handle, he’d advised me, but I had bulldozed ahead anyway, pushing him for answers that he was either unable or unwilling to give. In doing so, I’d raised my head above the water, called attention to myself as a possible threat to whatever or whomever he was protecting. In response, the incident today had been … what? An escalation? A warning?

  I passed through Menaker’s guarded gates with a palpable sense of relief. For the first time, I felt the full weight of the protection it had to offer—not to the patients hospitalized here or to the outside world, but to me personally. I looked back toward the fence, the iron posts standing shoulder to shoulder like sentinels.

  There are broader forces at work here than you can imagine, Wagner’s voice echoed inside my head. Suffice it to say that Jason is only tangentially involved.

  Perhaps, I thought, but he is involved. And now … so am I.

  I’ve mentioned before that, in the best sense of the word, Menaker is an asylum. It is about safety. But lately, it seemed, Menaker was also about secrets. Was it really possible that Dr. Wagner had been compromised, infected by whatever broader forces he was referring to? Could I no longer trust him? As I looked around once more—at the security cameras perched strategically near the corners of the buildings, at the two nurses engaged in hushed conversation as they shuffled along the walkway to my right, at the guard observing me with an innocuous smile from the booth near the facility’s front entrance—I began to wonder how far such an infection might spread, about how far it may have already spread.

  There was no way of knowing for sure, so I lowered my eyes to the concrete walk in front of me and headed inside.

  Chapter 13

  You were telling me about your conflict with Michael,” I reminded him. We were near the northern perimeter of the property, and as we talked I found myself frequently looking past the fence at the streets beyond, my eyes searching for idling cars, for the two men who’d nearly run me down earlier today. A few people shuffled by on the sidewalk, glancing toward us with interest, curiosity, or vague indifference
—I wasn’t sure. I had the persistent feeling of being watched, although there wasn’t much to be done about it. The perception, I knew, might not even be accurate. Most likely, it would pass.

  Jason’s eyes were focused on our shuffling feet. The spring breeze lifted a finger of dark hair from his forehead, and I could see the hint of a scar—like a reverse comma—on his left temple. It actually added to his appeal, giving his youthful face a touch of maturity. Maybe it was simply the intimacy of knowing his secret, of having been trusted with a view at the portions of the wound that ran much deeper than skin.

  “I don’t know if I lost Michael’s friendship completely that day—the day he struck me. But what I did lose was his willingness to express that friendship, to try to understand what I was going through. He told people what had happened. To this day, I can’t bring myself to believe it was something he did out of maliciousness. Maybe he was confused or hurt. He probably felt betrayed in a way—like everything we’d shared up to that point had been a lie. If he’d realized that I’d been as surprised by my actions as he was, that if this was an ambush it had been sprung on both of us … He would have scoffed, I’m sure. But it was true. Still, it didn’t matter. He told people, I think, because it was impossible for him not to. There are some things you can’t carry around on your own for very long. I don’t blame him. But once it was something beyond the two of us, there was really no stopping it.”

  “You were fourteen,” I said. “The fallout must have been—”

  “It was mild to begin with,” Jason said. “Michael wasn’t at our bus stop the next morning, and so I lurched up the bus’s steps by myself, crutches tucked into my armpits like two shotguns I was afraid might go off at any moment. I took an empty seat near the front, propped my head against the window, tried to make myself invisible.