Excerpt from The Worst of Us (coming in January, 2015)

It was late once again by the time Lisa had gotten all the notes in, dealt with test results for other patients, reviewed logs and prescriptions. Outside the hospital, rather than use the bus or train, she hailed a taxi.
The hospital was right downtown, and the address in her pocket was just a few blocks away. The cabbie didn’t speak any English so Lisa just handed him the card. He turned on the dome light, looked at the card for a moment, handed it back. The light went off and the car eased into movement.
Minutes later, Lisa climbed from the back. She gave the driver a twenty because it was all she had. If he was grateful for the nine dollar tip, he didn’t say so. The address was a brownstone, an old house carved up into several offices. There was a buzzer on the door. A bunch of names next to little lighted buttons.
She found the one that said “Dallas, H.,” jabbed at it with a finger. The intercom came on and made the sound of a phone ringing. Nobody picked up but, after the sixth ring, the door buzzed and the lock retracted with a click.
She went through two doors, steel and glass, into a brightly lit atrium. The house was a hundred, hundred-twenty years old, but the interior was all modern. There was a black leather couch, a metal coffee table covered in books, modern art on the walls. Black and silver tile on the floors and a tin drop-ceiling that might be the room’s only nod to antiquity.
Lisa looked for the staircase, found it behind a folding screen of a style that belonged in an old dressing room but painted in Anime themes. It seemed to tell the story of Kagemusha in Manga-style cartoons.
A door opened upstairs. There were footfalls along a creaky wooden floor, then a man came down the stairs. He was tall, taller than Hanrahan. Dressed in a gray suit, he had long gray hair, gray eyes behind little round spectacles, hands like spiders. He didn’t look up or make eye contact, just walked across the room and out through the two sets of doors.
Then, from upstairs, a woman’s voice: “Lisa?”
“Yes,” she said, and started up the staircase. On the wall to her left were pictures of women and men, couples and families, seeming to stretch back to the dawn of photography. Previous owners of the home? Most were pretty old, and the newest looked to be from the sixties. A man in a turtleneck that awful brown-yellow color characteristic of that decade had his arm around a woman with a short beehive haircut and horn-rim spectacles.
“The Masons,” came the voice from above. “They were the last people to live here.”
Lisa looked up, saw a figure silhouetted against the light from the hallway up there. “Is that when this got turned into offices?”
“Oh no,” said the woman. “Wasn’t until oh-eight. Place was derelict until then.”
“Shame. Why?” She was almost to the top of the stairs now.
“Haunted.”
“You’re kidding?”
“No. Mister Morris killed Missus Morris. In sixty-nine. Said the spirits made him do it. It was the eighth murder in this house. I’m Hilde. You’re Doctor Jayne. Welcome. My office is down here on the right.”
Lisa followed with a backwards glance at the photos on the wall below. How many of those faces were of murdered people?
Hilde sat in a plush-looking office chair, more of a captains’ chair really. She sat directly under a fluorescent light as if volunteering to be looked over. She was average height, maybe five-six or five-seven. White heels, long black slacks, white silk blouse. She had on a ring of little blue flowers. Cornflowers? Her hair was black and steel though her face said thirty-five or so. She had on a silver bracelet set with all kinds of stones, semi- or non-precious. Onyx, jade, rhodochrosite, others.
There was one other seat, a loveseat with too many pillows. The room was too warm and even warmer down in that seat. Lisa looked around the office: Indian rug, pictures of stylized, idealized Native Americans on the walls, incense burner, laptop computer on a desk made of salvaged wood.
When it was obvious Lisa had looked around sufficiently, Hilde said, “Welcome. It isn’t much, but this is my place. David said you needed my help.”
“Yeah. Actually... I went through something pretty bad. I’m OK with it, but work needs to know I’m talking to somebody. I’m not sure this is all my speed...”
“I get it,” Hilde said. “This looks like a crunchy kind of place. I’ve been at this a long time now and I know the look. But you don’t need my help with an employee certification.”
“I don’t?”
“You could get that anywhere. You saw my business card. You could have tossed it in the garbage.”
“David was good to me,” Lisa said, leaning forward. Her palms were hot and she scrubbed them on her slacks.
“He’d never have known one way or another. He can’t. You know how this works. You could have gone anywhere, but you came here. I suspect I fit your expectations.”
“A little.”
Hilde smiled. Her eyes agreed with her mouth, a real smile. “So, as long as you have to see someone, maybe you can decide to make the best of it.”
“I’ve told patients the same.” Did I say something like that to Elbert?
“Let’s start with your hand.”
“My hand?” Lisa’s hands were pressed against the tops of her knees.
“The right one is best. Are you right-handed? Yes, I thought so.” Hilde held out one of her own hands, waited for Lisa to comply.
“I don’t believe in any of that stuff,” Lisa said, but extended her right hand anyway.
“Me either,” Hilde said. She touched, prodded, felt, then just held Lisa’s hand between both of hers for a minute. It was warm, comforting. “You need that,” she said.
“What?”
“Comfort. There’s nothing in your life. It’s empty. You live in an empty place, and it doesn’t get fuller when you get there, does it?”
“You can tell that from my hand?”
“No, dear,” Hilde said. “I can tell that because you’re crying.”
***
“And then he died. My brothers didn’t help with anything. They never did, not once. Not when Daddy got sick and not as he declined and not as I had to take care of him. I think Roger sent a check once for a couple hundred bucks like that could get him off the hook. Like it could buy him out of the grief or the guilt for not grieving, all the grieving I did on all our behalf. And I can’t believe I just told you all that.”
“Lisa, you’ve done so well. You came in really guarded, I was worried for you.” Hilde straightened up, moved a little closer. Their knees were almost touching. “You’re so close to it now.”
“Our time’s up. Isn’t it?”
“We don’t do it that way here. By the hour like whores. Come on. Finish the job. It’s what you came for.”
Lisa leaned away. Her palms were sweating again. The back of her neck felt like there was a cold breeze on it. “I can’t.”
“I think you can. Anyone who did as you have done, who has borne up as you have... You can do anything. Come on, finish the job you came here to do.”
“I have to go to the toilet,” Lisa said, but she didn’t stand up. “No, I don’t. I do, but I want to run away. That would be a good reason to disappear for a minute and come back with the moment destroyed.”
“Yes.”
“So, here goes.” She took a deep breath. Two. Then let it go, blurted it out like spoiled food that the stomach has rejected: “He’s still with me. He’s behind me, all the time. He’s behind me right now. My father. I killed him, and now he’s damned to be with me until I myself die. And he killed that man on the subway.”
Hilde put her hands on Lisa’s knees. “Good. Good, Lisa. Our dead cannot leave us, not until they’ve had their say. And they can never talk to us so long as we pretend they aren’t there.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Lisa said.
“Neither do I, dear. You know better than to reify such concepts. You don’t think Freud really meant we wish we had penises like our fathers.”
“Of course not.” She thought, and when Hilde sat back, took away her hands, Lisa wished she’d put them back. “But whatever stabbed that man on the train wasn’t a metaphor. Whatever was behind me in the mirror. My eyes in the mirror. And Dana Smith, she was a real person. Elbert didn’t invent her.”
“Let’s just stick to you for the time being, shall we? You know, I can see him back there. He’s really angry.”
“I thought you said he was a metaphor.”
“No,” said Hilde. “I said not to make your abstractions too real. You know why he’s angry?”
“Yes. I murdered him. In hot blood or cold, what difference does it make? Now he’s damned. Who wouldn’t resent damnation?”
“He’s not the one who’s damned,” Hilde said. “That’s why he’s angry, dear. Because he loves you, and he has to watch you damn yourself every day.”