was no such thing as case closed. Not in modern American society anyway, Mattei insisted. Not in a country that planted the most fertile ground for both mania and the resultant depressive episodes, the country that had invented the corporate marketing machine that left people never feeling good enough unless they were overextending their credit, buying that next big fix. Not that Mattei minded the corporate marketing machine. That machine had made her rich. But there was definitely no such thing as case closed. Case closed was decidedly un-American.
When Lilly Braedon came along, Mattei quickly handed her off to Zee.
In the past year, Lilly had developed the most crippling case of panic disorder. She’d been to local doctors, who had ruled out all probable physical explanations: thyroid, anemia, lupus, et cetera. Then, after watching an episode of The View, something he swore he’d never done before, her husband, who in his own words “loved Lilly more than life itself” (a quote that resonated on a very problematic level with both Zee and Mattei), went to the Spirit of ’76 Bookstore in Marblehead to purchase Mattei’s book, only to find that they were sold out. He immediately ordered two copies, one for himself and another for his ailing wife.
But Lilly was too troubled to read. The only time she left the house in those days was in the late afternoon, when the shadows were longer and the bright summer light (another irrational fear) was dimmer. In the late afternoon, her husband said, Lilly often took long walks through the twisted streets of Marblehead and up through the graves of Old Burial Hill, to a precipice high above Marblehead Harbor, where she sometimes stayed until after sunset.
“So technically she isn’t agoraphobic,” Mattei said to the husband when she finished her initial patient analysis of Lilly. “She does leave the house.”
“Only for her walks,” her husband said. “She says she does it to calm herself down.”
“Interesting,” Mattei said.
But Zee could tell she didn’t mean it. The reason Zee was in attendance at Lilly’s session was that Mattei had already decided she was handing her off. Mattei wasn’t interested in Lilly Braedon.
But Zee was very interested. From the first time she met her new patient, Zee suspected that there was much more to the story than Lilly was telling.
Every Tuesday, Zee had her own therapy session with Mattei. Mostly they talked about her patients, or at least the ones who required meds, which was most of them. If patients with panic attacks weren’t on meds these days, you could be pretty sure there was a reason. Perhaps they were in some kind of twelve-step program, usually for alcohol or drugs, or else they had the kind of paranoia that kept them from taking any medication at all.
This morning Zee had gone through “the usual suspects,” as Mattei called her list of patients. This one had improved, that one was self-medicating with bourbon and sleeping pills. Another one had taken herself off all meds and was beginning to show signs of a manic episode. When they got to Lilly, Zee told Mattei she had nothing to report.
“Unsatisfactory,” Mattei said. Normally Mattei didn’t seem to care one bit about Lilly Braedon. But something Zee had said at their last meeting had piqued her interest for a change and prompted a question. When Zee reported that nothing had changed, Mattei wasn’t having any of it.
“Does that mean that Lilly is in a normal phase?” Mattei was referring to Lilly’s bipolar disorder, which had been their diagnosis. Bipolar disorder was something Zee understood only too well. It was what her mother had been diagnosed with years ago, except that in those days it had been called manic depression, which Zee had always thought a better description. In most cases the disorder was characterized by severe mood swings followed by periods of relative normalcy.
“I wouldn’t say normal,” Zee said.
“Any more trouble with the Marblehead police?”
“Not lately,” Zee said.
“Well, that’s something.”
At 3:35, Lilly still hadn’t arrived. Zee walked to the window. Across Storrow Drive a homeless woman sat on one of the benches, but there was no one walking along the Charles River. It was too hot and humid for movement of any kind. Traffic was snarled, the drivers honking and agitated, trying to get onto roads heading north. The “cardboard bridge,” as Zee called the Craigie, looked like a bad fourth-grade art project. Years of soot had collected in the wrong areas for shading, and today’s haze made it look even flatter and more one-dimensional and fake than it had ever looked before.
At 3:45, Zee dialed Lilly’s number. It was a 631 exchange, Marblehead. It used to be NE 1, Lilly had told her when she’d scribbled down her phone number for the records. “NE for Neptune—you know, Neptune, the Roman god of the sea?”
Zee thought back to her school days. Neptune—or Poseidon, his Greek equivalent, god of the sea and consort of Amphitrite, which had been Zee’s mother’s middle name. Though Maureen Doherty was a decidedly Irish name, Zee’s grandmother had given all three of her children the middle names of Greek gods and goddesses. Thus Zee’s mother was Maureen Amphitrite Doherty. Uncle Mickey’s middle name was Zeus, and Uncle Liam, who had died back in Ireland before Zee was born, was Antaeus, a clear foreshadowing of the mythmaking violence in his future. Zee remembered Maureen teasing Uncle Mickey about his middle name. “Well, what mother doesn’t think her son is a god?” Mickey had answered. Indeed, Zee thought.
Zee willed herself back to the present. Lately her mind had been wandering. Not just with Lilly, but with all of her patients. They seemed to tell the same stories over and over until her job became more like detective work than therapy. The key wasn’t in the stories themselves, at least not the ones they told and retold. Rather it was in the variations of their stories, the small details that changed with each telling. Those details were often the keys to whatever deeper issues lay hidden beneath the surface. What wasn’t the patient telling the truth about?
“Everybody lies,” was another of Mattei’s favorite expressions.
And so as the weeks passed, Zee listened to Lilly, to the variations in the stories she told over and over. But on the day that Lilly had mentioned Neptune, the story she told was one that Zee had never before heard.
“Back in the day,” Lilly was saying, “before the phones in Marblehead had dials, way back when the operators used to ask ‘Number, please’ in a nasal four syllables, you would have to say ‘Neptune 1’ for the Marblehead exchange.” Lilly was far too young ever to have remembered phones without dials and operators who connected you, but for some reason she seemed to find this bit of trivia very significant.
“Does Neptune have a special meaning for you?” Zee asked.
Lilly’s face contorted. “I’ve always been afraid of Neptune,” she said. “Neptune is a vengeful god.”
At 5:20, Zee dialed her wedding planner. “I’m very sorry, but I’m going to have to cancel again, my five-o’clock is late,” she said, relieved that she’d gotten the machine instead of the person—who, she had to admit, scared the hell out of her.
Zee felt a bit giddy, the way she’d felt as a kid when there was a snow day. Michael wouldn’t be home from Washington until the last shuttle. Having come up with the winter image, Zee decided to treat this unanticipated block of freedom as a snow day. Never mind that it was ninety-six degrees outside. The evening stretched ahead of her. She could do anything she wanted with it. Zee couldn’t remember the last time she’d had an open evening. Between her work schedule and the wedding plans, there’d been little time for anything else lately. She hadn’t even seen her father in the last few months, and she felt guilty about it, though she knew he understood.
The wedding date was not until the late fall, but it seemed as if there was at least one major wedding item a day on her to-do list. Zee hated the process. Tonight they were supposed to be sampling sushi at O Ya, and three kinds of sake. Not a bad evening, all things considered. But Michael wasn’t going to make it back in time, and she couldn’t deal with the wedding planner alone. The problem wasn’t the planner, who was arguably the best in Boston.