“OK,” I said. “So who the hell did you kill? Or maybe sort of kill, or whatever?”
“Well,” Susanna said. She arched her back to brush something out from under it, settled herself more comfortably. “Remember how I told you the consultant who delivered Zach was a total shit?”
I remembered the conversation, all right, even if the details hadn’t stuck. “Yeah.”
“Tip of the iceberg. Basically, he really enjoyed forcing me to do things I didn’t want to do, and he really enjoyed hurting me. He did stuff, every appointment—I hadn’t had a kid before, and since I was so young none of my friends had either, so at the time I had no idea it wasn’t standard. It didn’t even occur to me to walk out and find another doctor. But when I was having Sallie I went somewhere else, because fuck him, and duhhh, revelation, apparently the shit he’d been doing wasn’t standard after all.”
“You never told me,” Leon said.
“It wasn’t exactly coffee chitchat. You really don’t want to hear the gory details.”
“I wouldn’t have cared. That’s awful, you dealing with that all by yourself—” He was bug-eyed stoned and looking really distressed. “Did you at least say it to Tom?”
“Nope. He had enough going on. So did I; I didn’t even really think about it myself, not then.” Susanna smiled up at him. “I was OK, Leon. Honest to God. I knew I could deal with it, once I got a chance.”
“And?” I said, reaching to take the joint off Leon; he had had plenty. I sneaked a glance at Melissa, who was presumably getting a lot more than she had bargained for here, but she was sitting quietly, cross-legged, with the blanket draped over her lap and her glass cupped in both hands, watching Susanna.
“And I dealt with it,” Susanna said. “Once Sallie was born and things settled down, I had a think about what I wanted to do. Obviously if this guy had done this stuff to me, he’d done it to plenty of others—he was in his fifties, he must’ve had thousands of patients. So I made an appointment with him, under a fake name so he couldn’t go after me—no way was he going to remember my real one, after three years. I told him I’d been a patient of his before and I was going to file a complaint. He laughed in my face—surprise. So I told him I’d tracked down a couple of dozen of his other patients through an internet mummy board, and we were all filing complaints, and eight of them had been recording their appointments on their phones.”
“Whoa,” I said. I could totally see her pulling it off: straight-backed and cool, ticking off points as meticulously as if she were giving a presentation. Susanna always had been a killer poker player. “What’d he say?”
“He lost it. Not scared; furious. That was the amazing part: he wasn’t putting it on, he was genuinely outraged. He was jabbing his finger right in my face, threatening to have me committed, call Child Services and have my kids taken away. I told him I could upload that footage to the internet faster than he could make phone calls, and I asked what was he planning to do about the other twenty-six women, have the whole lot of us committed? And all the ones I hadn’t found yet, but they’d come forward once they heard about it? So he threw me out of his office. And”—Susanna held out her hand to me for the joint—“five days later his death notice was up online. I don’t know if he had a heart attack or something, or if he did himself in. Either way, though, I’d say there’s an OK chance I had something to do with it.”
“You couldn’t have known,” Melissa said, although Susanna hardly looked in need of comforting. “It’s not as if you knew he had a heart condition or—”
“Well, I mean”—she held in smoke, waving a hand at us to wait, blew it out over the garden—“he was kind of fat, and he did get all red in the face a lot. But nah, I didn’t know anything for a fact. I thought probably the best I could expect was that he’d quit his job, and more likely he wouldn’t even do that but at least he might get spooked and stop pulling that shit on people. I was kind of hoping, though.”
“Why didn’t you just file an actual complaint?” I asked.
Susanna laughed out loud, and to my surprise Leon snorted too. Even Melissa was looking at me like I had said something regrettably silly. “Are you serious?” Susanna asked. “To a board of his mates? He’d have said I was a hysterical woman making stuff up, end of story. There’s a decent chance he genuinely would’ve got me thrown in a mental hospital, or had the kids taken away. I mean, I guess I could’ve actually tracked down other people and convinced some of them to record appointments and whatever, but this was quicker and a lot less messy.”
This conversation was turning out to be enlightening in ways I hadn’t expected. Apparently my image of Susanna—good girl, follow the rules, if anyone’s being bullied run and tell a teacher—was out of date.
“His face was good,” Susanna said, rolling over onto her stomach to pass Leon the joint. “When I said about uploading the footage. I enjoyed that a lot.”
I couldn’t figure out, through the muddle of booze and hash, just how horrified I should be. I felt like there was an excellent chance that she was exaggerating either the doctor’s villainy or his dreadful fate, or both, and a non-zero chance that she was making the whole thing up; but either way, the nonchalance got more unsettling the more I thought about it, and either way there was the question of why exactly she was telling this story. The only reason I could see was that she wanted me or Leon or both of us to hear, loud and clear: If you mess with me, I will fuck you up.
“OK,” I said. “So. If you did have something to do with him dying. Do you still figure you’re a good person?”
Susanna thought about that, chin on hands. “Maybe not,” she said, in the end. “But say I’d decided not to have kids, so I’d never needed to go to him. Or say I’d got lucky and ended up with a decent doctor. Then I wouldn’t have done it. But I’d still be the same person; the reason I hadn’t done it wouldn’t be because I was more virtuous, it would just be dumb luck. Would I be a good person then?”
This was way above my pay grade. Leon had made this joint even stronger than the first one; a weird fizzing sensation was traveling up my arms and I was suddenly very aware of my nose. I felt like there was something wrong with what she was saying, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. “I have no idea,” I said, after a long pause. “What you’re talking about.”
That started Susanna giggling. Once she started, she couldn’t stop, and it set the rest of us off too. The windows of the apartment building swung to and fro, bright rectangular pendulums, tick tock tick tock, and that felt somehow irresistibly funny, a marvelous joke straight out of Alice in Wonderland. I wondered if Susanna had been joking too, if her whole story had been one great big wind-up, silly me falling for it!
“So,” she said to Leon. “Beat that.”
Leon held up a palm. “Oh hell no. I’m not playing this game. You three knock yourselves out.”
“You have to play. Or I’m not giving you any more hash and you’ll have to go back to wandering around dodgy nightclubs.” She stretched out one leg and poked him with a toe. “Go on.”
“Stop it.”