Not in This Life
by Laura Loomis
It’s Roy, not his sister Angel, who is calling to deliver the news. That means the call is business, not a polite attempt at being social.
“Dr. Patel,” he is saying carefully. Roy never uses my first name, Krishnamoorthy, even though he can say it in a convincing Gujarat accent. “Dr. Patel, it’s Roy McLogan.”
“What can I do for you, Roy?” I can’t return the courtesy and call him Mr. McLogan; I’ve known him since he was ten.
“I’m not sure if Angel told you. Mom had a stroke a little while ago.”
“I hadn’t heard. I’m so sorry. How is she?” I am staring at the silver-framed photo on my desk, me with my wife Minda.
“She had another one, three days ago. The doctors aren’t holding out much hope.”
“I’m so sorry. What hospital is she at?”
“She’s here at home. I have a nurse coming in.”
Of course he does. Roy owns a successful business, and he’d have the best of care for his mother.
I ask a few medical questions about her condition, thank him for calling me, and tell him one more time how sorry I am. All while managing not to inquire about coming to see her.
I set the phone back in its cradle next to the picture. It was taken by a nephew with no talent for photography: Minda and I take up only half the frame, as if leaving room for more family members who should be there.
I’m a psychiatrist – Roy’s mother was one of my patients – but I’m not sure what he wants from me. Surely he can’t mean for me to come one more time and tear open old wounds?
I dig up Angel’s number and call, getting a recording that tells me this is no longer a working number. She’s probably staying at Roy’s house. I find her cell number, which is still working, and leave a message. “Hello Angel. Your brother let me know about your mother’s condition. Call me if you want to talk.” Then, unnecessarily, I add, “This is your father.”
*
Eleanor McLogan walked into my clinic twenty-one years ago.
She was a small, graceful woman with dirty-blond hair
chopped short for easy maintenance, and eyes that could
shift from blue to green to hazy gray. Roy had the same
narrow features, but his eyes were always a righteous blue.
I am picturing Roy leading her by the hand, but that’s
probably more embellishment than true memory. At ten, he
had already been his mother’s caretaker for two or three
years, ever since her husband’s death in a car accident.
Roy did his Spanish homework in the waiting room while
Ellie came in for therapy.
Ellie’s diagnosis was the subject of some disagreement
among the doctors who’d seen her before. Some form of
atypical dementia, or dissociative disorder; possibly some
form of psychosis. She would disconnect in the middle of a
conversation, forgetting how to finish her sentence or turn
off a burner on the stove. Roy helped her with shopping and
cooking, even showing her which bus to take to my office.
I tried not to get pulled into her habit of depending on
Roy, who was quick to finish her sentences if I let him
stay in the room. Her last doctor had taken Roy at his
word, that Ellie’s symptoms had started with her husband’s
death. I began to suspect the problem was organic, that she
was already ill before, and his influence had kept her from
decompensating too much. Roy insisted with a child’s
certainty that everything would have been all right, if his
father had been there.
There were times when relying on Roy was unavoidable. One
evening he called me just as I was about to leave the
clinic. “Mom’s doing it again!” he shouted without
introduction. “She’s just sitting on the floor laughing,
and she won’t stop!”
I grabbed a pen and paper. “Tell me how to get to your
house.” His directions were good, and I was there within
ten minutes. Ellie was no longer laughing, but was still
sitting on the floor, staring at her right foot.
Occasionally a tear would roll down, but she didn’t seem to
notice.
“Ellie? Ellie, can you hear me?” I thought I saw something
flicker in her eyes, as if she’d been gone and
surreptitiously returned. I laid a hand on her cheek, which
was hot to the touch. Ellie closed her eyes and rubbed her
face against my hand, like a cat. Finally she looked up at
me.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Patel. I don’t know what happened.”
Roy and I helped her up from the floor, and she sat on the
bed. Since there were no chairs in her bedroom, I sat next
to her. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Sometimes it’s
just like everything is shaken out of my head. I’m not
stupid. I was going to be a teacher, when Roy was older and
I could go back to work.”
“Of course you’re not stupid. Why would you be saying such
a thing?”
“This morning I couldn’t remember my husband’s name. What
kind of a person forgets that? What if I forget who Roy
is?” It wouldn’t have occurred to her to keep a question
like that out of Roy’s hearing.
“That won’t be happening,” I told her with more confidence
that I felt. “You’ve been doing better since we started the
medication.” Because I was the doctor, she believed me, and
so did Roy.
“She was laughing for a long time,” Roy told me, “and
singing.”
“The song just kept going through my head,” Ellie added.
She sang a verse, a hymn about being lifted on eagle’s
wings.
“That’s from Dad’s funeral,” Roy supplied.
“Do you believe in heaven?” she asked me.
“I’m a Hindu,” I told her, breaking a cardinal rule of
psychiatry at the time. Patients were not supposed to know
personal information about their doctors. “Not a very good
one, really. But Hindus believe that we have many lives,
that we are reborn in different incarnations.”
I didn’t know if this would offend Ellie, a devout
churchgoer. After a moment’s thought, she said, “That’s a
nice idea. So if you made any mistakes this time, you get a
chance to fix them.”
She looked at Roy with an unspoken question. He swallowed.
“Dad’s name was Andrew. You called him Drew.”
“Andrew.” She closed her eyes. “That’s your middle name.”
Roy’s face blurred with relief.
Ellie did seem to be getting better. She would come into my
office and announce some little accomplishment: three days
in a row without forgetting anything, or perhaps she’d made
a casserole for dinner without any help from Roy. Once or
twice she and Roy showed up on days when she wasn’t
scheduled for therapy, because she just couldn’t wait to
tell me.
Every achievement for her was an achievement for me too. I
was the one who had diagnosed her properly and found the
right medication. The senior doctor who ran my clinic
leaned toward psychoanalytic theories and talk therapy;
pharmacology was viewed with suspicion. I was young and
smart and new to the country, and I decided that the stodgy
older doctors didn’t know so much after all.
I noted in her file, “Patient is taking better care of her
appearance.” I didn’t add that, when she was putting on
coral lipstick and flowered dresses, she was doing it for
me. She wanted my approval, almost as much as I wanted
hers. I said nothing about it to her, except to compliment
how pretty her hair was looking, now that she’d let it grow
to her shoulders.
I started looking forward to her appointments. My
psychiatric tomes were glaring down at me from the shelves
above my desk, admonishing that it’s common for doctors to
imagine they’re in love with their patients.
This was different, I told myself. Perhaps some other
doctors got themselves caught up in egotistical fantasies,
but what I was feeling for Ellie was real. I could see
flashes of the person Ellie had been before she got sick. I
was setting her free, at first only for minutes, then for
days at a time. She missed her husband. She missed being
loved. No one but me was paying enough attention to her to
see that she was worthy of love.
That doesn’t make it right.
She was the one who kissed me first. That doesn’t make it
right, either.
I convinced her to take Roy to the zoo, let him do a normal
childhood thing for a change. Ellie and I went over the
instructions of how she was to take the bus, pack the
picnic basket, and so forth, all without help from Roy.
Ellie was fretting that she would get lost or bring on some
other catastrophe. I promised to make sure they arrived
safely, so I drove to the zoo and met them as they got off
the bus. Once I did, it seemed only natural to go in with
them.
Roy was moody at first. He was accustomed to being the man
of the house, and didn’t know how to let his mother take
the lead. Ellie gave me a conspiratorial smile and stopped
to look at the sign in front of a gray wolf’s cage. “Roy,
what does this say?”
“Canus
Lopus. It’s the
Latin name.”
“You remember that Spanish and French both come from
Latin?” she asked. Roy had just started studying French,
after testing out of the honors Spanish class.
Roy made the connection. “Lopus.
Like loup,
or lobo.”
“And a wolf and a dog would both be....?”
It took him a moment. “Canines!” He ran to the next cage to
read about the animals there. This was his game for the
rest of the day, puzzling out the Latin words and seeing
what they resembled. And since he was in a better mood, he
looked at the animals too.
In the reptile house, I pointed out a legless creature. “He
is looking like a snake, but really he is a lizard.”
“Why do you talk like that?” Roy asked. “‘He is looking,’
instead of, ‘He looks like a snake.’”
I hadn’t been noticing. “Just a habit from speaking Hindi.
It sneaks into my English sometimes.”
“But when you speak English, don’t you think in English? I
can think in Spanish and French.” Without waiting for an
answer, he added, “When I learn Hindi, I’m going to think
in Hindi.”
I looked around for Ellie. She stood a few cages back,
staring at a jeweled frog. “It’s beautiful,” she said. It
was, and I would never have noticed if not for her.
Ellie asked, “You know the story of the prince and the
frog?”
“Vaguely. The frog turns into a prince when the princess is
kissing him, something like that?”
“He started out as a prince, but then the witch turned him
into a frog, and only love could save him from....” Ellie
trailed off with that vague look she always got when she
lost her train of thought.
“Mom?” Roy rushed to her side.
“Just wait,” she whispered. She put a hand on the glass
partition, her eyes wandering the room. “The thing is...the
thing is, the prince was always in there, but everyone else
just saw the frog. And he couldn’t tell them, he could only
croak. Until they found each other.”
Roy’s mouth was open in awe. She’d never been able to pull
herself back from the edge like that before.
After all her careful planning to get here on the bus,
Ellie had forgotten to bring enough fare for the ride home.
Roy was grumbling that he’d have remembered, and sent me an
accusing look. I did what seemed the reasonable thing, and
took them home in my car, then walked them to the front
door.
I knew what Ellie was going to do, a moment before it
happened. She moved close to me, shut her eyes, and kissed
me.
I could have said no. I could have told her this was
inappropriate, she was my patient, I was married, she was
just having a transference reaction to the therapy. At the
very least, I could have gotten her a new psychiatrist.
Instead I took the key from her hand and opened the door,
and the next year Angel was born. My first and only child.
Roy and I kept an uneasy truce based on mutual fear. He had
the power to ruin me with the truth, and I had the power to
take him away from his mother. I could have said she wasn’t
competent to raise a child, which was true. Because I
couldn’t bear to be hurting Ellie, I condemned Roy to a
life with no childhood, raising both his mother and his new
younger sister.
Ellie’s improvement turned out to be one more temporary
digression in an endless cycle of ups and downs. The
periods of catatonia and hysteria increased, and nothing I
did seemed to be helping. I was trying different
medications, more therapy. I wasn’t her savior, just
another bystander to her illness.
Ellie slipped and called me by my first name once or twice
at the clinic, and her pregnancy was starting to show. I
imagined my colleagues were staring, though nothing was
said, and I don’t know now if I was being perceptive or
paranoid. What if the child looked like me? My choices
weren’t good: if I lost my job, I would lose my visa as
well, and my wife and I would have to be returning to
India.
On my next visit to her home, Ellie was completely lucid. I
sat her down in the bedroom. “This isn’t right,” I told
her, “this thing between us. I have a wife.”
“I know,” Ellie said. This conversation was months too
late. “Did you tell her?”
“No. She can’t find out. We need to stop seeing each
other.”
Ellie bowed her head. “What about the baby?”
“I will help you with buying food and diapers
and....whatever you need.” I wasn’t sure what supplies one
needed for an infant. “And I would like to be seeing the
baby sometimes, if that is all right.”
Ellie didn’t speak or move. She might have slipped away
into one of her unresponsive states again, but by now I
could tell the difference. I pressed on. “I have made
arrangements for you to see a doctor at another clinic. I
can show you how to get there.”
Ellie’s head jerked up, and her blue eyes were the clearest
I’d ever seen. “You already made arrangements? Before you
talked to me?”
She began to sob, not with hysteria as I’d seen her do
before, but with the ear-piercing grief of a woman
abandoned. Roy burst in to see what was wrong. “He’s
leaving us!” Ellie wailed.
Roy grabbed my arm and pulled me away from his mother. “Go
away! We don’t need you!” I tried to tell her I was sorry,
that I did love her, but the force of Roy’s anger was
propelling me toward the door. After it slammed behind me,
I heard Roy slide the chain into place.
Still, when our daughter was born, Ellie called to tell me.
At the hospital I found Roy standing by his mother’s
bedside, his new sister cradled in his arms while he
explained the importance of supporting the baby’s head.
Even then, Angel was more his child than mine or even
Ellie’s.
I hadn’t seen Ellie in months, and it was as if I’d just
put my glasses on and was finally seeing her clearly. Her
lost, tentative look was back.
“Hello, Dr. Patel,” Ellie said, giving me the same admiring
smile as always. “We’re calling her Angel. Angel Samantha
McLogan.”
McLogan. Angel would carry the name of Roy’s dead father.
My shame was tainted with relief.
Roy was coaxed into letting me hold her for a moment, but
reclaimed her as soon as she began to fuss. I realized with
a pang that I had missed Roy, his childish maturity and his
endless appetite for words.
He asked, “How do you say Angel in Hindi?”
“Pharista.”
“Pharista,”
he repeated, listening to the sound. He got the accent
right on the first try.
“Roy wanted to call her Samantha,” Ellie added, “that’s why
it’s her middle name.” I made myself look at her. It was as
if she didn’t remember how I’d hurt her, or that she used
to call me Krishna. “Will you come and see us sometimes,
Dr. Patel?”
“Yes. Of course.”
I didn’t stay long. When I left, Roy gave the baby back to
Ellie and followed me into the hallway. “We’ll be all
right,” he said. “You don’t have to come again, if you
don’t want to.”
“Of course I’ll be coming again. I’m her father.”
“I know.”
Perhaps I misunderstood; it’s hard to remember after twenty
years. Perhaps I was thinking Roy was afraid of my leaving.
As with Ellie, I was imagining a different relationship
than the one we had. “Sometimes I feel like you’re my child
too, as much as Angel is.”
Roy’s face hardened like a jailer’s. In his most adult
voice, he used an expression I hadn’t heard before.
“Not in this life.”
Throughout Angel’s childhood I remained what I had been
that day: an occasional visitor, no longer part of the
family. Ellie was still greeting me with a smile and a kiss
on the cheek. Roy took the money I offered for Angel’s
care, but otherwise pretended I didn’t exist. I meant to
take Angel to the zoo like with Roy, but somehow never did.
It was years later when my wife found out. She never told
me exactly how she learned, but I saw Roy’s handiwork in
it. I got home and Minda unfolded Angel’s birth certificate
and laid it on the table in front of me. I hadn’t even
known Ellie put my name on it, but there it was, letter
perfect like the diploma on my wall: Krishnamoorthy
Patel.
I said the things that men say: that I was sorry, that I
hadn’t meant to hurt her. Useless scraps that weren’t
shielding her from the blistering cold of my blistering
betrayal.
Minda put her hand under my chin and forced me to look at
her. I could see every line around her eyes, every black
hair left among the gray. “Three abortions, Krishna. Three
abortions because the test said they were going to be
girls. Why didn’t this woman have an abortion?”
This wasn’t the question I’d been expecting. “She doesn’t
believe in abortion. She’s a Christian.”
“And this Christian woman who is sleeping with other
women’s husbands, she can have your daughter? She can have
your daughter and I can’t?”
“It’s different in America,” I stammered. “She’s not
Indian. She doesn’t have to be thinking about dowries. You
agreed that the abortions were the right thing.”
“Is that the way you remember it?”
Is that the way I remember it? “We couldn’t afford a girl,
not back then.”
“Can you afford a divorce?”
Minda didn’t divorce me. She spent three weeks at her
sister’s, but was too ashamed to tell her family my
transgression. She came home and I tried to be a good
husband, as if there was really such a thing as making it
up to her, as if a living child could be unborn and
unconceived.
*
The second call comes on my answering machine, ten days
after the first. In his most businesslike voice, the now
adult Roy gives the time and place for his mother’s
funeral.
The funeral is confusing, as I’m not really familiar with
Christian services. Everyone else seems to know when to be
sitting or standing, and can say the prayers from memory. I
recognize the song about being lifted on an eagle’s wings.
Ellie’s casket gleams in dark wood and bronze hinges.
The minister is talking about heaven and the resurrection
of the flesh. Perhaps there is nothing beyond this life,
but I am clinging to that long-ago conversation about
reincarnation. I want Ellie to have a fresh start somewhere
in the universe, a chance for life to be treating her
fairly. In the next life, Ellie can thrive without her
illness, Minda can have her child, and I can... I don’t
know. Unlike them, I have no one but myself to blame for my
circumstances, so I’ll likely be making all the same
mistakes again.
After the service, I join the line of cars to Roy’s house
for coffee. The living room displays the success of his
translation business. It’s filled with elegant souvenirs of
the places he’s traveled, the Chinese tables somehow
harmonizing with the Mexican rug.
I hold back from the knots of people talking. I don’t
recognize anyone except Angel, Roy, and Roy’s wife; I’m no
longer connected enough to Ellie to know who is important
in her life. Most of them are from church, probably. Ellie
didn’t have a lot of other friends, and no family close
enough to keep her from being raised by her son.
I watch Angel with Roy. She has a lot of my face, round
features and dark eyes, even if she doesn’t have my name.
Her thick black hair is coming loose from its pins. Roy
kisses her temple, and I hear him call her
Pharista.
Angel stumbles in her high heels, and catches Roy’s arm to
steady herself. He helps her to a seat before moving on to
greet another group of guests. Angel looks like she’d
rather be alone, but I sit next to her anyway.
“I got your message,” she says. “Thanks.” Her eyes are
swollen and veined with red. She accepts my embrace. I
can’t remember the last time I touched her.
“How are you?”
I am wanting her to tell me how she really is, how she’s
coping with a shattering loss, but she gives a distracted
smile and says, “Fine, thanks for asking.”
A young man is approaching, with spiked hair and a black
nose ring that matches the one in his eyebrow. I have an
unsettling feeling that he’ll turn out to be Angel’s
boyfriend. Sure enough, she is reaching for his hand, and
he bends down to kiss her. “How you holding up, babe?” His
jacket smells like marijuana.
“I just can’t believe she’s gone.” Angel lets herself be
pulled up into his arms. She lets go slowly, then remembers
my presence. “Stuart, have you met Dr. Patel?”
“Hello,” I say, extending a hand. It’s too awkward to be
explaining that I’m her father when she didn’t mention it.
After shaking my hand, he tells Angel, “I need to go. My
band’s playing at Rusty’s tonight.” His tongue is pierced
too, with a big silver ball in the center. “I’ll see you at
home.”
Angel’s eyes widen with hurt. “Excuse us a minute,” she
says to me, and follows him outside. By the time she
returns alone, I’ve been captured in conversation with
Roy’s wife, whose name I’ve forgotten in a moment of
supreme idiocy.
“How long has Angel been seeing that young man?”
“Not long. He’s all right, I guess. You should have seen
the last one.” Roy’s wife is visibly pregnant. I’ve spoken
to Angel twice in the last few months, and she hadn’t
mentioned it.
I see Roy heading into the kitchen, so I make my excuses to
his wife – Julie, I remember belatedly – to follow him in
there. I manage to catch him alone, arranging trays of cold
cuts.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, and want to be adding more, but I
can’t imagine where to begin.
“Thank you for coming.” The accusation behind the words
slaps at me, though Roy’s still using the same businesslike
voice.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Not now.” After a moment, he adds, “We’ll be fine.”
After years of teasing out meaning from fragmentary
disclosures, I can say it for him. “I know how you feel
about me, and I know it took a lot for you to put that
aside and call me. I’m sorry I didn’t come to see her.”
“Too busy with some other woman patient?” The words are
carefully measured as anything Roy says, delivered on ice.
“No. I never crossed that boundary with any other patient.”
“Crossed that boundary.” Ever the linguist, Roy is trying
out the phrase. “I’m not exploiting a sick woman and
betraying my wife, I’m just crossing a boundary.”
“What do you want me to say? I know it was wrong. But I –”
“Loved her, right. But not enough to tell her you were
going to leave her with a baby and a bottle of pills. Not
enough to be any help when she was standing there with a
jar of baby food in her hand and a crying baby and she
couldn’t remember what to do next. Not enough to see her
when she was dying and she thought I was still ten years
old and we needed to go to your clinic. You mattered to
her, and I’m damned if I know why. I hope it was just
because of your daughter that I raised.”
Your
daughter. Angel isn’t
mine, except in some random biological sense. I’m not
important enough for her to hate me the way Roy does.
Roy’s not finished. “You know what else? Angel’s life is a
mess. She dropped out of college and she’s living with some
loser guy. She’s been through a half dozen boyfriends in
the last year, and there wasn’t one who treated her with
any kind of respect. I guess I didn’t do a very good job.
But what did I know, I was only a kid!”
“Roy – ”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
The silence lasts a long time. Long enough for me to hope,
when Angel walks in, that she didn’t hear any of that. “Oh,
hello.” Her shoes are dangling from her hand. “I thought
I’d come in here and hide for a few minutes. Too many
people.”
“Why don’t you go upstairs,” Roy offers. “It’s still your
room.”
“Thanks. Maybe I will.” But instead she sets down the shoes
and pours a glass of water, gulping it over the sink.
“I was just saying goodbye,” I tell her. I want to stay,
try to explain myself to Angel and Roy, why I did the
things I did. But I’m the intruder here. I offer
condolences one more time, and give my daughter a kiss on
the cheek.
I loiter in the living room for a few minutes longer,
sipping a cup of tea to avoid eye contact with anyone. Roy
and Angel come out of the kitchen and walk upstairs
together, talking softly. Without the shoes, she looks tiny
next to him. A minute later, Roy comes down, stopping at
the bottom of the stairs to wipe his eyes. I slip out the
door before he can see me.
I understand now that I want Roy’s forgiveness, even more
than Angel’s. Angel was still in preschool the last time we
spent more than an hour or two together. And while Angel
can’t hate me for bringing her into the world, Roy
understands the depth of my crime.
In the twenty years since Ellie, I’ve had other patients
who seemed to blossom under my attention. I never touched
any of them, but I saw myself feeding on their admiration.
Two of them claimed to love me, and I told them they were
having a transference reaction to the doctor-patient
relationship.
If I had gone to visit Ellie one last time, perhaps the
princess would still have shone through. I couldn’t bring
myself to risk seeing what the other doctors had seen, what
I saw the day Angel was born, a fragile woman who had made
me feel important. Wanting to believe in a love that was
outside other people’s rules, I was telling myself a fairy
tale. Roy knew this at eleven years old, and I will not be
forgiven in this life.
Copyright
2010 by Laura Loomis