Flashback (1988) by Michael Palmer Page B

shadow fell across the table. He and Beaulieu looked up.
    Frank, smiling benignly, stood not five feet away from them, holding a tray of food.
    “Are you gentlemen having a heart-to-heart?” he asked. “Or do you have room at the table for one more?”
    Carefully, Zack folded the sheet of paper and slid it into his pocket, although he sensed the move was a fruitless one. Frank had heard at least part of their conversation. Of that, he was almost certain.
    A Bach fugue was playing on the small cassette deck by the sink. Barbara Nelms, staring glumly at the bathroom mirror, ran a finger over the furrows in her forehead and the crows feet at the corners of her eyes. The creases had, it seemed, appeared overnight. Instinctively, she reached for her makeup kit. Then, just as quickly, she snapped off the tape, turned and walked from the bathroom. If she was bone-tired, if she was stressed close to the breaking point, if frustration and fear had aged her six years in six months, why in the hell should she try to hide it anymore?
    The product of a perfectly uncomplicated upbringing in Dayton, Ohio, and four idyllic years as a business and marketing major at tiny St. Marys College in Missouri, she had always prided herself on being a model parent, wife, citizen, and member of society. She was a registered Democrat, a voting Republican, an officer in the PTO three years running, a scout leader, a reader at church, a better than average pianist and tennis player, and, at least according to her husband, the best lover a man could ever want.
    But now, after six months of haggard guidance counselors and harried school resource workers, of evasive, pompous behavioral psychologists and bewildered pediatricians, none ofthat mattered. She had dropped off all committees, hadn’t picked up a tennis racket in weeks, and couldn’t remember the last time she and Jim had had sex.
    Something was wrong, terribly wrong, with her son. And not only could none of the so-called specialists they had seen diagnose the boys problem, but each seemed bound and determined to convince her that it fell in someone else’s bailiwick.
    The violent episodes, occurring at first monthly, but now almost once a week, had enveloped Toby in a pall of melancholy and fear so dense that he no longer smiled or played or even spoke, except for occasional monosyllables in answer to direct questions—and then only at home.
    Situational depression; delayed autism; childhood schizophrenia; developmental arrest with paranoid ideation; acting out for secondary gain; the labels and explanations for Toby’s condition were as varied—and as unacceptable—as the educators and clinical specialists who had applied them.
    The boy was sick, and he was getting sicker.
    He had lost nearly ten pounds from a frame that had not an ounce of fat to begin with. He had stopped growing. He had failed to satisfy the requirements for promotion to the fourth grade. He avoided interacting with other children.
    He had been given vitamins, antidepressants, Thorazine, Ritalin, special diets. She had taken him to Concord, and then to Boston, where he had been hospitalized for four days. Nothing. Not a single objective clue. If anything, he had returned from the medical mecca even more uncommunicative than before.
    Now, as she prepared to drag her son to yet another specialist—this one a young psychiatrist, new in town, named Brookings—Barbara Nelms felt the icy, all-too-familiar fingers of hopelessness begin to take hold.
    Toby’s episodes at first seemed like horrible nightmares. Several times she had actually witnessed them happen—watched helplessly as her sons eyes widened and grew glassy, as he withdrew into a corner, drifting into a terrifying world he would share with no one. She had listened to his cries and had tried to hold him, to comfort him, only to be battered about the head and face by his fists.
    In the end, there was nothing she could do but stay close, try her best to see that