Page 9 of For Her Own Good

Chapter 3

Starla

It’s been a week.A week since Lowry called me. No, not just called me. Called me twice. And I cannot stop thinking about it. The first call would have been enough to distract me for days. The second call…short-circuited my brain. And my brain doesn’t need any more of that, thanks.

As much as I would’ve liked to take him up on his offer to…I don’t even know what that was. There’s no way he was asking me out on a date. Was there? Of course not. He would never do that.

I don’t know what the rules or ethics or whatever are about dating your ex-patients—especially when you’re a psychiatrist, and they were aminorfor most of the time—but I can’t believe that would be okay. Even if it technically were, Lowry strikes me as the kind of man who takes his professional responsibilities even more seriously than he’s required to. He loves his job, cares very deeply for his patients, and to throw that away on…anything? No, I don’t think so.

Definitely not a date. He was being nice. Because he’s always nice. Which is what I tell myself as I drive out to Harbinson. It’s a pretty drive. I could’ve switched to the other hospital in metro Boston that does ECT, which is closer to my apartment downtown, but… Whatever, I didn’t. And now I like the drive because I get to see more trees, and green things, or as is the case at the moment, heaps of fallen leaves and skeletal trees. Come on, snow. This is perhaps my least favorite time of year here. After the foliage and before the white magic of snowfall.

I’m doing okay, though, considering. My next ECT is coming up on Friday and I suppose I could’ve skipped seeing Lacey this week, but I have my routine and I like to stick to it. I see Lacey every Wednesday at ten thirty in the morning, and I have ECT every six weeks. You could set a clock to it.

I find a parking spot and head into the building. This place is almost as familiar to me as my childhood home, which shouldn’t be surprising given I’ve been coming here regularly since I was eleven. Wow. Twenty-two years of my life. I suppose it could’ve been worse, which is what Lowry always reminded me of when I got to be a grumpy asshole about doing ECT. “Better than the alternative,” he’d say, and yeah. Doing ECT and being alive and functional is way better than…doing none of that stuff, which is almost certainly where I would’ve ended up. Where I was headed by the time I turned fourteen.

Which is when I met Lowry. Who was definitely Doctor Campbell then. I remember in vivid detail my father yelling at Lacey when she told him she thought I might do well with this young, brand-new doctor.

“What the fuck, Lacey? You’re going to send my child to your junior varsity squad? Have you given up on her? Because I can’t think of any other reason you’d hand my seriously ill daughter’s care over to some goddamn Doogie Howser type.”

He’d gotten so loud, and more furious than I’d ever heard him. Even though I’d felt half-dead at the time, I remember thinking he shouldn’t yell. Doctor Gendron really did do her best, had tried all the things with me. Any kind of psychotherapy you can think of, I’d done it. Acupuncture. Yoga. Meditation. Drugs, all the drugs: SSRIs, SNRIs, TCAs, MAOIs. Herbs: St. John’s wort, gingko. Diet: gluten-free, dairy-free, caffeine-free. Seriously, if it was a thing, I’d done it. It wasn’t her fault nothing worked.

Wouldn’t it be easier if it all stopped? Wouldn’t it be easier if they let me go? So much time and money and effort and stress and for what? I still had only a lukewarm interest in being alive on my best day.

I’d sat outside Lacey’s office pretending not to hear, pretending I wasn’t feeling increasingly guilty for being the source of the yelling, pretending I wasn’t feeling like an even bigger disaster because even Doctor Gendron—the head of the whole department at the best psych hospital in metro Boston, of course, because my father insisted on the best—couldn’t help me. What the hell kind of fucked-up mess was I if evenshecouldn’t help me? If she was, in fact, sloughing me off to one of her Triple-A players for… I couldn’t even think of for what. Learning experience?This is what a hopeless patient looks like. Good luck!Or maybe it was meant as a hard lesson: how to cope when one of your patients—inevitably—kills themselves.

And then a man had come by, looking like he worked there. Barely. Disorderly reddish-copper hair, five o’clock shadow at ten thirty in the morning. But he had one of those ID tags all the staff wore. He plopped himself into the seat next to me and leaned over like we were kids waiting outside the principal’s office.

“What are they fighting about, do you know?”

He’d had a nice voice. Some kind of accent. Not English, but I couldn’t tell then whether it was Irish or Scottish. I’d given him a sidelong look, which was a vast improvement over the reaction most people could pull out of me in those days, but I didn’t answer his question. Seemed, frankly, like a lot of work. And for who? Some rando? Not worth it.

“Aye, no, you’re right. Nonna my business.”

Sat back in the chair, crossed his arms over his chest, and my gaze followed.

“But if you do know, it’d be grand if you shared, because that’s my boss in there. I’m new here and I’m hoping this isn’t about me, that I’m not going to get sacked. You’d tell me if that were it, right?”

I had liked the look of his face, the way he talked to me like he assumed he would get an answer because clearly I was a person capable of holding a normal conversation. I didn’t get a whole lot of that in those days. It didn’t feel as though anyone sawmethen. I was a problem to be fixed, something fragile teetering on the edge, and everyone was convinced I was going to fall and break. Why should I bother trying to hang on if that was the outcome they were banking on? And it was so fucking hard. To get out of bed. To get dressed. To do any goddamn thing. So, I wasn’t sure what to tell this man but I appreciated, at least a tiny bit, that he was asking.

“It’d probably help if I introduced myself. Then you could nod if it was me they’re caterwauling about.”

We both looked toward the door because something crashed. Wow. I’d never known my father to throw things, but I couldn’t honestly say I was surprised. He could lose his temper sometimes. And when you’re one of the richest men in Boston, in the country, it must’ve been very frustrating to not be able to get your way. Perhaps I’d been sent to him as a lesson in humility.

“I’m Lowry Campbell. Doctor Campbell,” he amended. Arms still crossed, he tilted his head, again insinuating that we were in on some conspiracy together. “So, this is about me. Isn’t it? Can you give me even one wee hint?”

I should’ve been disgusted. Or insulted. Or something other than what I was. I felt bad for him, trying so hard, but also grateful he was trying so hard when it seemed like everyone else around me had about given up. What would be the harm? Letting a word or three out? Would I be giving my father false hope if I did? Should I walk into a pond with rocks in my pocket, or out into the woods like a dog who knows it’s going to die? I was going to hurt him anyway. What did it matter if I took pity on this man—who smelled good, I realized—and answered him? It wouldn’t.

“Me. They’re yelling about me.”

* * *

Lowry

“Tony.”

He looks at me, and something about his expression sends chills up my spine. My patients all look very different—God knows mental illness comes in all shapes and sizes. But there’s something the ones with the worst depression have in common. I can’t say what it is precisely, but there’s a look, a tone,something, that pings a wary part of my brain, makes the hair on my arms and the back of my neck rise. It’s the most disturbing sensation and I’m having it now.

“Tony. I know things are bad right now. I know you’re hurting, and you’ve had a time of it lately. I know you’re in a dark place and you can’t see the light, but you know there’s always light. There is. You have a wife and two daughters who you love and who love you back, and I know you don’t want to hurt them. Emily and Portia and Clara would be devastated if anything happened to you.”

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