The Map of True Places by Brunonia Barry Read Free Book Online

Zee had ever witnessed.
    Lilly’s feet were moving again. She never slept. She spent huge sums of money. Her food bills alone for the elaborate guilt feasts she was cooking for her family were running about $750 a week—for two adults and two children, both of whom were picky eaters. Lilly no longer remembered why she’d ever needed a nanny in the first place. She could easily handle two young children. And her trysts with Adam were getting more and more daring. With no nanny on board, Lilly had taken to sneaking Adam into her house in the late afternoons, claiming that the place needed some repair work, first on the playroom shutters and later on a crooked piece of crown molding in the living room that had bothered her for years.
    Lilly and Adam had sex on every horizontal surface in the house. Hearing their cries of passion one afternoon and thinking that someone was hurting the children, a neighbor called the police. As the cruiser pulled up in front of the house, Adam went out the back door of the basement, hurrying across the yard by Black Joe’s Pond and down Gingerbread Hill, pulling on his work clothes as he ran. The police were waiting for him at the bottom of the hill, where his red truck was almost always parked these days. He knew them all, had gone to high school with a couple of them.
    â€œEveryone knows what you’re up to,” one of the cops told him. “Why don’t you try to keep a lower profile?”
    There were some stifled smiles, maybe even a pat on the back from the cop he knew.
    â€œThey don’t exactly disapprove,” Adam had said to Lilly when she freaked out about the cops. “One of us? Messing with some rich guy’s wife?”
    It was the first time Lilly had felt uneasy about what she was doing and the first time she felt bad for her husband. Sweet William, who had never done anything to deserve this. For the first time during her long affair with Adam, Lilly felt shame. And the minute the shame cloud descended, things began to fall apart.
    At Zee’s direction Mattei wrote a script and added a sedative to take the edge off and a light sleeping pill to keep Lilly’s feet from wandering. When Lilly complained of weight gain from the lithium, they switched her to an antiseizure medication.
    It was difficult to say when Mattei started to become suspicious. “Tell me what’s going on,” she asked Zee directly. “I don’t mean with the symptoms, I mean in her life.”
    â€œShe’s been having an affair,” Zee confessed, feeling her face redden.
    â€œAnd you didn’t tell me this because…?”
    â€œDoctor-patient confidentiality.” Zee knew that this was a hot button with Mattei, who claimed to have enormous respect for doctor-patient confidentiality.
    â€œWhat’s the real reason?” Mattei said.
    â€œThat is the real reason,” Zee insisted.
    â€œIs the affair still going on?”
    â€œYes,” Zee said.
    â€œWhat else is she doing?”
    â€œWhat do you mean, what else?”
    â€œIs she drinking, is she doing drugs? What other kinds of risky behavior is our so-called Mrs. Perfect indulging in?”
    There was some triumph in Mattei’s voice as she asked. She’d begun calling Lilly “Mrs. Perfect” ever since William’s initial goddess-like description of her. No one was that perfect, Mattei had told him with Lilly right there. Perfect was a huge burden for any woman.
    â€œJust the affair.” Zee was aware that her stomach was churning. She wished she hadn’t said anything. Her face felt hot and red. She wanted to throw up. In all the cases she’d treated so far, nothing like this had ever happened to her. It was as if she had just confessed to the infidelity herself.
    â€œMaybe you should take back this case,” she said.
    Mattei seemed to think about it for a while before making her decision. “No,” she said. “I