Free A Fatal Debt by John Gapper Page A

and I’d been afraid to hurt her, but she’d realized it and she’d left. She’d saved me the heartache of jettisoning her.
    I’d been having a recurrent dream about Rebecca. I was on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, standing next to my mother and seeing her gray hair and her soft, kind face. We were talking—I didn’t know what about, but it made me happy. Then I glanced up the steps and saw Rebecca wearing a summer dress. “Come on,” I said to my mother, and we set off after her. We couldn’t find her inside, and we started hunting through galleries, my mother now leading the way. Then we came to a gallery where there was a party, with a crowd of people drinking champagne around a painting.
    I walked up to the painting and saw that it was a nude of a woman lying on a sofa. She was beautiful, and I reached forward and felt one of her breasts, which was soft and warm to my touch. Then mymother called to me, pointing toward a window through which Rebecca had climbed. I saw that Rebecca had scrambled down a rope into Central Park and was running across the grass to a clump of trees.
    “Becca!” I shouted, but she didn’t turn round.
    That was how the dream ended.
    We’d met at Episcopal two years after I’d arrived in New York, so my mother had never known her. I’d always believed they’d have got on well—both of them were sweet and loyal. On our first date, she told me I was different from the other shrinks, which I took as a compliment. We were sitting in a restaurant on the Upper East Side, one of those Italian spots that are institutions, although they don’t deserve it anymore. I spent most of the meal enjoying her presence, and as we left, she turned to me to be kissed.
    I’d chosen psychiatry despite the questions it raises. They screen for a degree of empathy when they admit you to medical school: they don’t want scientists who can’t talk to other people. But the competitive spots are for cardiology, radiology, or ear, nose, and throat, the entry point to plastic surgery—anything that involves expensive procedures and minimal chat. Other residents suspected the psychs of being lazy or crazy. Lazy because psychiatry involves little night work apart from emergency shifts. Crazy because many were drawn to it by some affinity with their patients. Either they were odd themselves—working out an inner demon by finding one in others—or they had a family history. Guilty on both counts.
    After a while, with no sign of Anna wanting to break the silence, I did. I was puzzled by what she was doing in East Hampton, especially given her skepticism about the place. It didn’t appear to be her natural habitat.
    “How come you work for the Shapiros?” I asked.
    “How long have you got?”
    “Until we reach the city, I guess.”
    “It shouldn’t take that long. Let’s see. Grew up, went to liberal arts college in Massachusetts. Very pleased with itself, but I thoughtit was kind of crappy. I came to New York, got a job as an assistant to a magazine editor, and turned out to be good at that, weirdly good.”
    “That’s great.” I noticed that she’d taken one open-ended question and given me a brief rundown of her entire adult life.
    “Except I was working so hard, really hard, and holding myself to such an insanely high standard that I started to go a bit nuts. I was having panic attacks in my cubicle, sweating and freaking out.”
    “Did you seek treatment?”
    “I took drugs. They calmed me down a bit, but I knew by then that I wasn’t happy, so I quit.”
    “That was brave.”
    “Brave, reckless, stupid—all the things I’ve always been. Anyway, I thought I could teach yoga instead, so I took a course. That’s how Nora found me. I was covering a class for a friend at the Ninety-second Street Y and she came along. It went from there. Now I’m everything—housekeeper, cook, indentured servant. My job is to make things easy, whatever that takes.” Her voice was lightly