A History of the Present Illness Read Online Free Page A

in a neat pile on the table: a bedsheet cut in half, two towels, and two rubber pads.
    â€œSo your mattress doesn’t get wet,” Lenore said. “I’ll show you?”
    In the middle of the table, Lenore placed a rubber pad, then one of the towels, and, over it all, one of the half bedsheets. Finally, she demonstrated how the lump of cloth could be flattened by tucking the ends of the sheet into the sides of the bed.
    â€œWhen you wake up wet,” Lenore explained, “you can pull all this off, throw it onto the floor, and go back to sleep on the dry regular sheet. Okay?”
    Bopha wanted to ask Lenore if one end could be kept loose so she and Neary could sleep together again, but she didn’t bother. The towels would never end up on her bed. They were too beautiful, fluffy and yellow and soft, much nicer than the thin, scratchy ones hanging in the bathroom at home. The towels would be for her parents.
    She felt the wetness on her cheeks before she realized she was crying.
    â€œWhat is it?” Lenore asked, but Bopha couldn’t speak. The social worker led her to the sofa against the wall, sat down beside her, and held out a box of tissues.
    Bopha’s body shook and her nose ran. She turned her face into the cushions, but the harder she tried to stop, the worse it got.
    Lenore rubbed her back. “Good,” she whispered over and over. “Good girl.” And then, as Bopha quieted, Lenore began talking fast, her voice low and serious and without question marks. She said that sometimes people felt things that scared them, and when those things couldn’t come out the right way, they leaked out in other ways. She said that although Bopha might always have to be her mother’s helper and take care of her younger siblings, she didn’t have to get straight As or grow up more quickly than other children. She said that if there was trouble between her parents, it wasn’t Bopha’s fault and it wasn’t her job to make it better.
    Finally, Bopha quieted. She didn’t blame Lenore for not being able to fix her. Maybe the doctor was right and three sessions just weren’t enough. Or maybe hers was an especially bad case. Then again, Lenore had helped; Bopha might not get to use the new towels, but she could use the sheets and the pads and maybe even her parents’ old towels. If she had all that, she could clean up after herself, and it would be almost as if she didn’t have a problem at all. She crossed the room to the table and put the items back into the shopping bag. Then she walked to the door.
    Lenore met her there and put a hand on her shoulder. “You know this is our last session?”
    Bopha nodded.
    â€œAre you sure there isn’t anything you want to tell me before you go?”
    Bopha hugged the bag to her chest so no one could steal it on her way home. She smiled at Lenore. “Only thank you very much,” she said, and then she walked down the hall and through the clinic’s crowded waiting room with her chin on the bag and her eyes on the floor.

Giving Good Death
    In many ways, Robert’s arrest was liberating. In the county jail, he ate lunch sitting down, exercised regularly, and, with the benefits of 24/7 lighting and permanent lockdown because of what the pedophile one cage over called their VEP or very endangered person status, began tackling some of the great books, large and small, he had always meant to read but never quite seemed to have time for:
Middlemarch
and
The Magic Mountain
, William Carlos Williams’s
The Doctor Stories
and
The Collected Works of Anton Chekhov
. After his arrest, Robert had at most one appointment a day, and he was the patient.
    Twice a week at ten fifteen, a guard escorted him through the multiple locked doors of a facility that had been hailed in the
San Francisco Chronicle
as “a stunning victory for architectural freedom over bureaucratic stupidity” by a Pulitzer