Mind Prey

moved through the living room, turning on the lamps. The room was furnished with warmth and a sure touch: heavy country couches and chairs, craftsman tables, lamps and rugs. A hint of Shaker there in the corner, lots of natural wood and fabric, subdued, but with a subtle, occasionally bold, touch of color—a flash of red in the rug that went with the antique maple table, a streak of blue that hinted of the sky outside the bay windows.
    The house, always warm in the past, felt cold with George gone.
    With what George had done.
    George was movement and intensity and argument, and even a sense of protection, with his burliness and aggression, his tough face, intelligent eyes. Now…this.
    Andi was a slender woman, tall, dark-haired, unconsciously dignified. She often seemed posed, although she was unaware of it. Her limbs simply fell into arrangements, her head cocked for a portrait. Her hair-do and pearl earrings said horses and sailboats and vacations in Greece.
    She couldn’t help it. She wouldn’t change it if she could.
    With the living room lights cutting the growing gloom, Andi climbed the stairs, to get the girls organized: first day of school, clothes to choose, early to bed.
    At the top of the stairs, she started right, toward the girls’ room—then heard the tinny music of a bad movie coming from the opposite direction.
    They were watching television in the master bedroom suite. As she walked down the hall, she heard the sudden disconnect of a channel change. By the time she got to the bedroom, the girls were engrossed in a CNN newscast, with a couple of talking heads rambling on about the Consumer Price Index.
    “Hi, Mom,” Genevieve said cheerfully. And Grace looked up and smiled, a bit too pleased to see her.
    “Hi,” Andi said. She looked around. “Where’s the remote?”
    Grace said, unconcernedly, “Over on the bed.”
    The remote was a long way from either of the girls, halfway across the room in the middle of the bedspread. Hastily thrown, Andi thought. She picked it up, said, “Excuse me,” and backtracked through the channels. On one of the premiums, she found a clinch scene, fully nude, still in progress.
    “You guys,” she said, reproachfully.
    “It’s good for us,” the younger one protested, not bothering with denials. “We gotta find things out.”
    “This is not the way to do it,” Andi said, punching out the channel. “Come talk to me.” She looked at Grace, but her older daughter was looking away—a little angry, maybe, and embarrassed. “Come on,” Andi said. “Let’s everybody organize our school stuff and take our baths.”
    “We’re talking like a doctor again, Mom,” Grace said.
    “Sorry.”
    On the way down to the girls’ bedrooms, Genevieve blurted, “God, that guy was really hung.”
    After a second of shocked silence, Grace started to giggle, and two seconds later Andi started, and five seconds after that all three of them sprawled on the carpet in the hallway, laughing until the tears ran down their faces.
     
    T HE RAIN FELL steadily through the night, stopped for a few hours in the morning, then started again.
    Andi got the girls on the bus, arrived at work ten minutes early, and worked efficiently through her patient list, listening carefully, smiling encouragement, occasionally talking with some intensity. To a woman who could not escape thoughts of suicide; to another who felt she was male, trapped in a female body; to a man who was obsessed by a need to control the smallest details of his family’s life—he knew he was wrong but couldn’t stop.
    At noon, she walked two blocks out to a deli and brought a bag lunch back for herself and her partner. They spent the lunch hour talking about Social Security and worker compensation taxes with the bookkeeper.
    In the afternoon, a bright spot: a police officer, deeply bound by the million threads of chronic depression, seemed to be responding to new medication. He was a dour, pasty-faced man who reeked of nicotine, but today he smiled shyly at her and said, “My God, this was my best week in five years: I was looking at women.”
     
    A NDI LEFT THE office early, and drove through an annoying, mud-producing drizzle to the west side of the loop, to the rambling, white New England cottages and green playing fields of the Birches School. Hard maples boxed the school parking lot; flames of red autumn color were stitched through their lush crowns. Toward the school entrance, a grove of namesake birch