I studied the height of the letters, how much of each figure seemed pulled upward away from the baseline. Some of the uppercase letters had a careful pride to them. An educated author. I peered at the sample closely, planning what to say. It always occurred to me how much longer I spent reading samples than the author had spent writing them.
Second point: some pinching of the letters, which led me toward a diagnosis of narrow-mindedness. Typical of the kind of people who left threatening letters, whether they followed through with violence or not. I plodded through a few more features of the man’s handwriting and, when at last I couldn’t ignore them, I studied the curve of descending tails of g’s and y’s. Gaps.
Gaps in the strokes of those appendages meant that the poor jerk probably suffered more sexual frustration than anything else.
I felt a recurring sensation at moments like this: Who was I? What right did I have to dig into someone’s life this way? I hardly ever came down on the side of mercy, but I hated speculation when real crimes happened every day. When they involved people at the top of corporate boards, the FBI cared, they jumped. When they happened to girls too young or na?ve to know they didn’t deserve it, nobody blinked.
Me, my mother, maybe her mother, too. Maybe generations of women who weren’t allowed, or didn’t know how, or were trained not to think, react, fight. Was it biology? Did I have no shot at all? Because this was the question, the only question: Would any of my efforts with Joshua make any difference?
Maybe all the violence had already been passed down to him by biology, the anger marker on the chromosome I had passed him from my father finding a happy match in Ray. Or if not biology, then environment. Had I raised him too attached to me, so that now he would fight to free himself? Had I brought him up too strictly, so that now he could do nothing but rage against rules?
This was the science I didn’t know. It made no sense, and it was all guesswork, all what-if, until I woke to a late-night call from the police or saw his face in a grainy security camera film on the news. It was all speculation, until it all went one way or the other.
I went to the kitchen for a cup of tea and when I came back to the table, I ignored the email in progress and picked up the notepad from the night before, still open to the empty page. I brushed my hand over the smooth page and reached for a pen from a cup on the table. Joshua, I wrote, knowing that the curve of each letter gave away everything the word meant to me. I tried to free myself from thinking about my handwriting. Joshua, I wrote again, pouring myself into it.
I was enjoying the curve of the J of Joshua in my own hand when it came to me: I had to settle for reality. Joshua needed help, and I wasn’t the one he needed.
A psychiatrist? It was too much invasion. But—a good influence? A good, strong, intelligent, safe influence—who could help me guide Joshua through this rough patch? Some figure that Joshua could turn to, who could be a sort of spy in the house of adolescence, who could make certain there wasn’t any real trouble brewing? What if—
“Sure,” I said aloud to myself. I flopped back in my chair and threw aside the notebook. Because Joshua was making it clear that he was finished in the world of women. He was done with my coddling, my protection. He needed a man.
It had been a long time since a man had been in my life. So long that I tended to forget. No, that wasn’t right. It was more that the desire had become a low-grade buzz, a thin wire of white noise that was pulled taut along my spine. The noise was easily drowned out.
There had been offers. That neighbor and his jackass John Henry. And then in Ohio, the client who’d asked the right questions at the right time. For six weeks, twice a week at noon, like a therapist. He might as well have been a stranger—a string of one-night-stand strangers, actually, for how little we spoke of it before, during, or after. Quick, repeated, trying to seek the enjoyment I never fully felt. When his phone rang, his hand would reach for it without hesitation. His kids, calling from their mother’s. Too young to settle so completely, too old for a relationship built on film noir, I quit the project.
But the idea of finding a man for Joshua, a man who would crack the Joshua code for me, gave a clumsy strum to that wire of need. I found myself thinking of the sheriff. Then Mr. Jeffries. I stared at the open window on my laptop, tapping idly at the keys before hitting the send button on the email to Kent. One item off my list, but I felt no satisfaction, no possibility, no sense of hope.
Tap.
I glanced at the clock, then shut down the computer, letting Margaret’s messages grow more insistent. When I thought about it, when I really looked back on my life, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt much hope at all.
“YOU DRIVE TOO fast,” Margaret said.
“Here?”
“You nearly took out that mailbox—”
“Is this the place?”
“Slow down. Well, you passed it.”
I took a deep, steadying breath and pulled into the next entrance. “Here? Urogynecology?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.
“Fine by me.”
“They’re falling out,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“My lady parts,” Margaret said. “I think you parked over the line there.”
“It’s a handicapped spot. Hop out—”
“Young lady, you wouldn’t hop if you were here for what I’m here for!”
“—and I’ll meet you inside,” I said.
I took my time parking. Inside, everyone turned to see whose lady parts were falling out next. The waiting room held husbands of a certain age, daughters, one little girl sitting on her mother’s lap. The magazines were outdated and the television in the corner silent.
“Ma’am, I have a form for you.” The woman behind the desk held out a clipboard.
“Me?”
“You’re with Mrs. Percy?”
I tried to remember the name on Margaret’s mailbox. “I’m with Margaret. She just came in?”
“Yes, Mrs. Percy. We’ve taken her back already. I just need you to sign that you’re taking responsibility for her after her appointment.”
“A liability thing?” I walked to the desk and let the woman put the form in front of me. “Is this legally binding?”
The receptionist took a good look at me. “Your signature, phone number, and relationship to the patient.”
I read a few lines. Crazy legalese. I wasn’t adopting the woman, was I? “What are the options?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I don’t really have a relationship to the patient.”
Someone in the room behind me laughed.
The woman had color in her cheeks now. “Are you family?”
“No.”
“Then you are a friend,” she said. “Sign or I’ll have to go get Mrs. Percy from her exam room and reschedule her for when someone else can bring her.”
This bumped up against my concerns. In a lowered voice, I said, “I’m not sure she has someone else.”
“Apparently not.” The woman stared at the form until I picked up the pen and signed. After another second, I gave in. Friend.
“She’s going to be about an hour,” the woman said, taking the clipboard back.