“Have a seat, and I’ll let her know you’re here.”
The chairs in the waiting area were arranged around a large glass-topped coffee table on which sat an array of magazines—Elle, Allure, GQ, Forbes, Entrepreneur. The chair I sat in was more comfortable than anything I’d ever bought for myself. I looked at Rainy, who’d spent the last several years in a cabin on Crow Point with no electricity, running water, or even an indoor toilet, and I wondered how in the hell she’d managed to pay for her son’s treatment in a place that probably catered primarily to the kinds of people who didn’t blink at the cost of a new Jaguar.
Rainy sat with her hands in her lap, her back straight, her eyes focused somewhere ahead of her. I wondered if maybe she was visualizing a good outcome to all of this. She reached into her purse and pulled out a photograph I couldn’t see. She handed it over to me. It was two kids in swimming suits, standing at the end of a dock, smiling at the camera. On the day it had been taken, the sky was seriously blue and the lake behind the boys looked cool and inviting. One of the boys had dark hair, a dark complexion, and Rainy’s dark, beautiful eyes. The other kid’s hair was wiry and red, and he had so many freckles his face looked like a bowl of cornflakes.
“Peter with Arweiler Bosch,” she said.
“Arweiler?”
“His family was from Germany. His father was an academic, doing some research on Native Americans of the Great Lakes. He brought the family onto the rez when Arweiler was twelve, the same age as Peter. Arweiler was an awkward kid, a loner, spoke with a thick accent, picked on by everyone. Peter took him under his wing, befriended him, got into fights with kids who tried to bully him. Arweiler attached himself to Peter. It got so Peter couldn’t go anywhere without Arweiler following him. He was always at our house, under foot. Honestly, I found the kid irritating, but Peter was so patient with him.”
She took the photograph back and studied it.
“Arweiler began to show up with bruises. Like I said, he was an awkward kid, and he had stories about falling off his bike, stumbling over rocks, credible stories. Then Peter was at his house one day, and Arweiler’s father was stinking drunk. He yelled horrible things at Arweiler’s mother. It was all in German, but Peter had picked up a lot of the language by then and he understood. The man began to beat his wife. Arweiler tried to intervene and got beat as well. Peter ran, came straight to the tribal clinic, where I was working, told me what was happening. I called the sheriff’s office, but got the runaround, so Peter and I headed back to Arweiler’s. The man had beat his wife senseless, Cork, but the boy, his son, Arweiler, he’d beat to death.”
She stopped her story and sat staring at the two boys in the photograph.
“Why did you keep that all these years?”
“I didn’t. It’s Peter’s. He kept it pinned to the wall of his bedroom. He blamed himself.”
“Why?”
“Because he ran to get me instead of staying to help.”
“It was the wise thing to do.”
“That’s not what his heart told him.”
“Why did you bring it with you?”
“I was going to throw it away. But I’m not the one who needs to do that.”
She put the photograph back into her purse.
A small woman came from the hallway off the reception area. She wore a colorful, flowing dress, with lots of turquoise on one wrist and about her neck. Her hair was silver-gray and, not unlike Rainy’s, hung very long down her back. Her skin was dark, the result, I figured, of a lifetime in the Southwest. It looked soft, not at all like the leathery flesh I’d sometimes seen on people who’d worshipped the sun for decades. I put her at fifty, but she could have been much older, her youthful look the artful work of a skilled plastic surgeon, maybe. The smile on her face at seeing Rainy, however, was all her own and genuine.
“Rainy,” she said, sweeping toward us and offering her hand in what struck me as a grand manner. “It’s good to see you again.”
“Hello, Jeanette. How are you?”
“Busy and content,” she said. The blue diamonds of her eyes took me in, then swung back to Rainy.
“My husband, Cork O’Connor,” Rainy said.
“New development?”
“April.”
“How do you do, Cork?” She held out her hand, and I took it and felt her soft, warm palm. “I’m Jeanette Saunders, the director here.” Her attention turned again to Rainy. “You’re asking about Peter. Let’s go to my office.”
We followed her down the quiet corridor. The walls were hung with impressionistic paintings whose bright colors suggested the Southwest. She stepped into her office, and when we followed, I saw that the far wall was all glass, overlooking the azure water of a very large swimming pool. I understood why everything inside the building seemed so quiet. All the action was at the pool. In the shade of umbrellaed tables, a lot of good-looking, partially clothed people sat together, sipping what I presumed, in a facility devoted to recovery, was iced tea or lemonade or soft drinks. Before she sat at her desk, Saunders took a moment with her back to us, admiring the view. The room smelled faintly of patchouli.
“They come estranged from one another and from the world. They find reconnection here, a healthy way of centering.” She turned to us. “I wish I could say that they all leave healed. But at least they leave knowing that they can be healed, if that’s what they truly want.”
I thought three months of iced tea and swimming in a little paradise away from the rest of the world would probably cure a lot of people of what ailed them.
“Please, sit down.” She gestured to a couple of cushy-looking chairs on our side of her big, polished desk. She folded her hands and looked sympathetically at Rainy. “Peter,” she said.
“The young woman in reception told me he doesn’t work here anymore.”
“That’s true.”
“When did he leave?”
“Over a year ago.”
“A year?” Rainy sat back, as if struck. “He didn’t say anything when I saw him in April. Did he resign?”
“He probably didn’t say anything because I had to let him go, Rainy.”
“Why?”
“When you saw him at your wedding, how did he seem?”
“Good,” Rainy said. “A little intense maybe, but happy.”
Saunders nodded. “I’m glad to hear that. When I let him go, he was different. He’d started coming in late, looking exhausted, as if he hadn’t slept. It affected his work. I talked to him about it.”
“You thought he was using again,” Rainy said.
“It was a classic symptom. He denied it. Of course. They always do. He told me he was simply having trouble sleeping. Bad dreams, he said, flashbacks to Afghanistan.”
“He’s had them before,” Rainy said.
“I know. So I asked him to see Dr. Jordan. She’s a staff psychologist with extensive experience in dealing with PTSD.”