Since We Fell Page 3

  She knew what he was driving at. She was the daughter of a psychologist, after all. “Fuck you, Connie. Don’t go there.”

  “Go where?”

  “It was an accident.”

  “A woman you’ve described as hyperalert, hyperaware, uber-competent? Who had no drugs or alcohol in her system the day of her death? That woman drives through a stop sign on a dry road in broad daylight?”

  “So now I killed my mother.”

  “That’s the exact opposite of what I’m suggesting.”

  Rachel gathered her coat and bag. “The reason my mother never practiced was because she didn’t want to be associated with half-assed quacks like you.” She shot the degrees on his wall a look. “Rutgers,” she scoffed and walked out.

  Her next shrink, Tess Porter, had a softer touch, and the commute to her office was much shorter. She told Rachel they’d get to the truths of her relationship with her mother on Rachel’s schedule, not her doctor’s. Rachel felt safe with Tess. With Connie, she’d always felt he was poised to strike. So she, in turn, always felt poised to parry.

  “What would you say to him, you think, if you found him?” Tess asked one afternoon.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Of him?”

  “What? No.” She thought about it. “No. Not of him. Just of the situation. I mean, where do you start? ‘Hey, Dad. Fuck you’ve been for my whole life?’”

  Tess chuckled but then said, “There was some hesitation there. When I asked if you were afraid of him.”

  “Really?” Rachel gazed at the ceiling for a bit. “It’s, like, she could contradict herself about him sometimes.”

  “How?”

  “Most times, she described him in effeminate terms. ‘Poor sweet James,’ she’d say. Or ‘Dear sensitive James.’ Lots of eye rolls. She was too outwardly progressive to admit he wasn’t masculine enough for her. I remember a couple of times she said, ‘You’ve got your father’s mean streak, Rachel.’ And I’m thinking, ‘I’ve got my mother’s mean streak, bitch.’” She gazed up at the ceiling again. “‘Look for yourself in his eyes.’”

  “What’s that?” Tess leaned forward in her chair.

  “It’s something she said to me a couple times. ‘Look for yourself in his eyes. Tell me what you find.’”

  “What was the context?”

  “Alcohol.”

  Tess gave that a thin smile. “But what do you think she meant?”

  “Both times she was pissed at me. I remember that much. I always took it to mean he . . . If he ever saw me, he’d . . .” She shook her head.

  “What?” Tess’s voice was soft. “If he ever saw you, he’d what?”

  It took her a minute to compose herself. “He’d be disappointed.”

  “Disappointed?”

  Rachel held her gaze for a bit. “Repulsed.”

  Outside, the streets grew enshrouded, as if something huge and otherworldly blotted out the sun and cast its shadow across the breadth of the city. The rain fell suddenly. The thunder sounded like the tire slaps of heavy trucks crossing an old bridge. The lightning was a distant crack.

  “Why are you smiling?” Tess asked.

  “Was I?”

  She nodded.

  “Something else my mother would say, particularly on days like today.” Rachel tucked her legs under her. “She’d say she missed his smell. The first time I ever asked her what she meant, what he’d smelled like, she closed her eyes, sniffed the air, and said, ‘Lightning.’”

  Tess’s eyes widened slightly. “Is that what you remember him smelling like?”

  Rachel shook her head. “He smelled like coffee.” Her gaze followed the splash of the raindrops out the window. “Coffee and corduroy.”

  She rebounded from that first bout of panic and low-grade agoraphobia in the late spring of 2002. She ran into a boy who’d been in her Advanced Research Techniques class the previous semester. His name was Patrick Mannion, and he was unfailingly considerate. He was kind of doughy and had the unfortunate habit of squinting when he couldn’t hear properly, which was often because he’d lost fifty percent of the hearing in his right ear in a childhood sledding accident.

  Pat Mannion couldn’t believe Rachel kept talking to him after they’d exhausted the limits of discussing the one class they’d taken together. He couldn’t believe she suggested they get a drink. And the look on his face when, back at his apartment a few hours later, she reached for his belt buckle was the look of a man who’d glanced up at the sky to check for clouds and witnessed angels passing overhead. It was a look that remained on his face, more or less, throughout their relationship, which lasted two years.

  When she did eventually break up with him—ever so gently, almost to the point of convincing him that it was a mutual decision—he stared back at her with a strange, brutalized dignity and said, “I never used to understand why you were with me. I mean, you’re gorgeous and I’m so . . . not.”

  “You’re—”

  He held up a hand to stop her. “Then one day, about six months ago, it hit me—love doesn’t trump all for you, safety does. And I knew sooner or later you’d dump me before I’d dump you because—and this is the important part, Rach—I would never dump you.” He gave her a beautiful, broken smile. “And that’s been my purpose all along.”

  After grad school, she spent a year in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on the Times Leader and then returned to Massachusetts and quickly moved up to the features department at the Patriot Ledger in Quincy, where a story she wrote on racial profiling by the Hingham Police Department garnered some acclaim and enough attention that she received an e-mail from Brian Delacroix, of all people. He’d been traveling for business and had come across a copy of the Ledger in the waiting room of a lumber distributor in Brockton. He wanted to know if she was the same Rachel Childs and if she had ever found her father.

  She wrote back that she was the same Rachel Childs and that, no, she hadn’t found her father. Would he care to take another stab at the job?

  Can’t. Slammed at work. Traveling traveling traveling. Take care, Rachel. You won’t be at the Ledger long. Big things await. Love the way you write.

  He was right—a year after that, she made it to the majors and the Boston Globe.

  Which is where Dr. Felix Browner, her mother’s OB/GYN, found her. The subject line of his e-mail was “Old Friend of Your Mom’s,” but once she responded to it, it became clear he was less a friend than someone Elizabeth Childs had utilized for medical purposes. Dr. Browner was also not the gynecologist her mother had been using by the time Rachel had knowledge of such things. When Rachel reached adolescence, Elizabeth had introduced her to Dr. Veena Rao, whom most of the women and young girls Rachel knew also used. She’d never heard of Felix Browner. But he assured her he had been her mother’s doctor when Elizabeth first came to western Massachusetts and had, in fact, introduced Rachel herself to her first taste of oxygen. You were a squirmy one, he wrote.

  In a subsequent e-mail he wrote that he possessed important information he’d like to share regarding her mother but he only felt comfortable sharing it face-to-face. They agreed to meet halfway between Boston and Springfield, where he lived, and settled on a diner in Millbury.

  Before the meeting, she researched Dr. Browner and the picture was, as her instincts had been telling her since his first e-mail, not a flattering one. The year before, in 2006, he’d been barred from practicing medicine due to multiple allegations of sexual assault or sexual misconduct by female patients, the earliest dating back to 1976, when the good doctor was only a week out of med school.

  Dr. Browner brought two rolling file cases to the diner with him. At sixty-two or so, he wore his thick silver hair in the almost mullet, almost shag style of someone who drove a sports car and patronized Jimmy Buffett concerts. He wore light blue jeans, penny loafers without socks, and a Hawaiian shirt under a black linen blazer. He carried an extra t
hirty pounds around his middle like a statement of success and had an easy way with the waitress and the busboys. He struck her as the kind of man who is well liked by strangers but baffled if someone doesn’t laugh at his jokes.

  After he’d expressed his sympathies for the death of Rachel’s mother, he reminded her what a squirmy little newborn she’d been—“Like you were dipped in Palmolive.” He then somewhat breathlessly revealed that his first accuser—“We’ll call her Lianne and not just because it sounds like Lyin’, okay?”—knew several of the other accusers. He ticked off their names and Rachel immediately wondered if he was using aliases or if he was violating the women’s right to privacy with cavalier indifference: Tonya, Marie, Ursula, Jane, and Patty, he said, all knew one another.

  “Well, it’s a small region,” Rachel said. “People know each other.”

  “Do they?” He shook a sugar packet before opening it and shot her a cold smile. “Do they?” He drizzled the sugar into his coffee, then reached into one of his file cases. “Lyin’ Lianne, I’ve discovered, has had numerous lovers. She’s been divorced twice and—”

  “Doctor—”

  He held up a hand to silence her. “And was named as the ‘other woman’ in a divorce. Patty drinks alone. Marie and Ursula have substance abuse issues, and Tonya—woo-hoo-hoo—Tonya sued another doctor for sexual assault.” He bulged his eyeballs in mock outrage. “Apparently there’s an epidemic of predatory doctors in the Berkshires. Heavens!”

  Rachel had known a Tonya in the Berkshires. Tonya Fletcher. Managed the Minute Man Inn. Always seemed distracted and a bit perturbed.

  Dr. Browner dropped a stack of paper the size of a cinder block on the table between them. Arched a triumphant eyebrow at her.

  “What,” Rachel said, “you don’t believe in thumb drives?”

  He didn’t acknowledge that. “I have the goods on all of them, you see. You see?”

  “I see,” Rachel said. “And what would you like me to do with that?”

  “Help me,” he said, as if it were the only answer in the world.

  “And why would I do that?”

  “Because I’m innocent. Because I didn’t do a single wrong thing.” He turned his palms over and extended them across the table. “These hands bring life into the world. They brought you into the world, Rachel. These hands were the first that ever held you. These hands.” He stared at them like they were his two great loves. “Those women took my name.” He folded his hands together and looked down at them. “I lost my family over all the stress and discord. I lost my practice.” Tears glistened in his lower eyelids. “And I didn’t deserve it. I did not.”

  Rachel gave him what she hoped would be a sympathetic smile but suspected looked merely sickly. “I’m not sure what you’re asking of me.”

  He leaned back from the table. “Write about these women. Show that they had an agenda, that they chose me to advance that agenda. That they set out to destroy me and now they have. They need to atone. They need to recant. They need to be exposed. Now they’re suing me in civil court. Do you know, young lady, that the average civil case costs a quarter million to defend. Just to defend. Win or lose, you’re out two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Did you know that?”

  Rachel was still stuck on “young lady,” but she nodded.

  “So, so, so, this coven has raped me. What other word could apply? They have wrecked my good name and destroyed my relationships with my family and my friends. But that’s not enough, is it? No. Now they want to pick my bones. They want what little money I have left. So I can spend my remaining years destitute. So I can die on a cot in a shelter somewhere, a friendless nothing.” He splayed his fingers over the stack of paper. “In these pages are all the dirty facts about these dirty women. Write about them. Show the world who they are. I’m handing you your Pulitzer, Rachel.”

  “I’m not here for a Pulitzer,” Rachel said.

  His eyes grew small. “Then why are you here?”

  “You said you had information regarding my mother.”

  He nodded. “After.”

  “After what?”

  “After you do the story.”

  “That’s not how I work,” Rachel said. “If you have information about my mother, just tell me and we’ll see—”

  “It’s not about your mother. It’s about your father.” His eyes flashed. “As you yourself said, it’s a small region. People talk. And the story about you, my dear, was that Elizabeth refused to tell you who your father was. We pitied you, you know, all the good townspeople. We wanted to tell you but none of us could. Well, I could have. I knew your father quite well. But doctor-patient confidentiality laws being what they are, I couldn’t reveal his identity against your mother’s wishes. But now she’s dead. And I’m no longer allowed to practice.” He sipped his coffee. “So, Rachel, would you like to know who your daddy is?”

  It took Rachel a moment to find her voice. “Yes.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Yes.”

  He acknowledged that with a downward flick of his eyelids. “Then write the fucking story, sweetheart.”

  3

  JJ

  The more Rachel dug—into the court records and the very files Browner provided—the worse it got. If Dr. Felix Browner was not a serial rapist he was giving the best impression of one Rachel had seen in some time. The only reason he wasn’t in prison was because the one woman who had pressed charges within the statute of limitations, Lianne Fennigan, had overdosed on Oxycontin the final week of his trial, just before she was set to testify. Lianne survived the overdose but was in rehab the day she was supposed to deliver her testimony, and the DA accepted a plea that included revocation of the doctor’s license, six years’ probation, six months’ time already served, and a gag order, but no prison time.

  Rachel wrote up her story. She brought it with her to the diner in Millbury, pulled it out of her bag as she sat across from Dr. Felix Browner. He gazed at the small sheaf of pages but remained still.

  “What,” he said, “you don’t believe in thumb drives?”

  She gave that a tight smile of acknowledgment. “You look happy.”

  He did. He’d shit-canned the Jimmy Buffett look for a crisp white shirt under a dark brown suit. His hair was slicked back and heavily gelled. His caterpillar eyebrows were trimmed. His face had color and his eyes gleamed with possibility.

  “I feel happy, Rachel. You look stupendous yourself.”

  “Thank you.”

  “That blouse brings out the green of your eyes.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Is your hair always so silky?”

  “I just had a blowout.”

  “It becomes you.”

  She beamed her own bright smile his way. His eyes pulsed when it landed and he laughed a small private laugh. “Well, Lordy,” he said.

  She said nothing, just nodded in a knowing way and held his gaze.

  “I think you can smell that Pulitzer.”

  “Well,” she said, “let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” She handed the pages to him.

  He settled into his chair. “We should order drinks,” he said absently as he began to read. As he turned the first page, he looked across at her, and she smiled with encouragement. He read on and his brow knitted as anticipation transmogrified into consternation, then despair, and finally outrage.

  “This,” he said, waving off the waitress’s approach, “says I’m a rapist.”

  “Kinda does, doesn’t it?”

  “This says the women’s chemical dependency and alcohol abuse and sexual piggery are due to me.”

  “Because they are.”

  “This says I tried to extort you into wrecking these women’s lives a second time.”

  “Because you did.” She nodded pleasantly. “And you slandered them in my presence. And I bet if I did even a little digging at your local watering holes, I’d find evidence you slandered them to half the male population in western Mass. Which would be a vi
olation of the terms of your probation. And that means, Felix, that when the Globe runs that story you are going straight to fucking D block.”

  She sat back, watched him go speechless. When he finally met her eyes, his swam with martyrdom and disbelief.

  “These hands”—he raised them—“brought you into the world.”

  “Fuck your hands,” she said. “We have a new deal. Okay? I won’t file that story.”

  “Bless you.” He sat up straight. “I knew the moment I—”

  “Give me my father’s name.”

  “I’ll be happy to, but let’s order a drink and discuss that idea.”

  She took the pages from his hand. “Give me my father’s name right now or I file this story”—she pointed at the bar—“from that phone.”

  He slumped in the chair, considered the ceiling fan that rotated slowly above him with a rusty squeak. “She called him JJ.”

  Rachel placed the article back in her bag to hide the tremors that ran from her hands to her elbows. “Why JJ?”

  He turned his hands up on the table, a beleaguered supplicant to fate. “What will I do now? How will I live?”

  “Why did she call him JJ?” Her teeth, she realized, were gritted.

  “You’re all the same,” he whispered. “You bleed men dry. Good men. You’re a pestilence.”

  She stood.

  “Sit.” He said it loud enough that two diners looked their way. “Please. No, no. Just sit. I’ll be good. I’ll be a good boy.”

  She sat.

  Dr. Felix Browner removed a single piece of paper from his suit jacket. It was old and folded in four. He opened it and handed it across the table to her. Her hand shook even worse as she took it, but she didn’t care.

  At the top of the page was the name of his clinic: Browner Women’s Health Clinic. Below that: “Father’s Medical History.”

  “He only came to my office twice. I got the impression they fought a lot. Pregnancies scare some men. Settle around them like a noose.”

  Under “Last Name,” in neat block letters and blue ink, he’d printed “JAMES.”