The Map of True Places. Brunonia Barry

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СКАЧАТЬ . . .” Mattei replied.

      “Nevertheless” was probably the best thing Zee had ever learned from Mattei. It was a word, certainly, but much more than a word, it was a concept. “Nevertheless” was what you said when you were not going to budge, whether expressing an opinion or an intention. It was a statement, not a question, and the only word in the English language to which it was pointless to respond. If you wanted to end a conversation or an argument, “nevertheless” was your word.

      Zee often thought that what had happened with her mother was another reason Mattei had hired her. Maureen’s case history might well be considered good material for a new book. But Mattei had never approached her about it. When Zee mentioned her theory one day, Mattei told her that she was mistaken, that she had actually hired Zee because of her red hair.

      Theory and research were still Mattei’s passion, and though she had a thriving practice, she also had that elusive second book to write and her new mother-daughter theory to document. So most of Zee’s patients were Mattei’s overflow. Her “sloppy seconds” is what Michael called them, though he was clearly unaware of the perverse meaning of his slang. He’d meant it to be amusing rather than pornographic. The truth was, anything Mattei did was okay with Michael. They had been friends since med school. When Mattei suggested that Michael meet Zee, telling him she thought she’d found the perfect girl for him, he was only too happy to oblige.

      Soon after that, Zee had found herself out on a blind date with Michael.

      Upon Mattei’s recommendation, he had taken her to Radius. He had ordered for both of them, some Kurobuta pork and a two-hundred-dollar Barolo. By the time they finished the bottle, Zee found herself saying yes to a weekend with him on the Vineyard. They had moved in together shortly afterward. Not unlike the job Mattei had given her, the relationship just sort of happened.

      What followed still seemed to Zee more like posthypnotic suggestion than real life. Not only had Michael easily agreed that Zee was the perfect girl for him, he’d never even seemed to question it. And exactly one year after their first date, a period of time most probably deemed respectable by Mattei, Michael had proposed.

      Zee had been grateful when Mattei chose to hire her. She had just received her master’s and was working on her Ph.D. when Mattei invited her to join her practice, giving her some group sessions to moderate and mentoring her as she went. By the time she’d earned the title of doctor, Zee had ended up in a corner office with a view of the Charles and a patient list that would have taken her years to develop on her own.

      The phrase “case closed” was one of Mattei’s biggest jokes. Though patients almost always got better under her care, they were never cured. There 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 СКАЧАТЬ