Treasure Island!!!

only possession I had.
    “You heard what I said” (after I walked out).
    For a few moments I stood quaking in the elevator, unsure of which button to press. Eventually a stoop-shouldered old lady stepped in and pressed “L.” Why were the simplest encounters complicated for me? I had trusted Dr. Klug with my personal history and she had repulsed me like she would have any other patient. It was enough to make a person feel . . . generic. I worked myself up to a high level of disgust as the elevator worked its way down to the low level of the lobby. When the doors chortled open, the sun-struck, airy atrium broke the elevator’s gloomy ambience. My elderly companion hustled out before I could even make a show of letting her go first.
     
    “I got a doctor’s bill for you from Rattner’s office,” my mother said. “I hadn’t known you were sick.”
    “No, I wasn’t,” I said carelessly. “I just wanted to go for a check-up.”
    “Well, next time, let’s talk about it first. You’re not on Daddy’s insurance. When you get a job—”
    “I’m fine now. Actually, I’m exploring alternative kinds of medicine.”
    For my mother the phrase “alternative medicine” registered only as some kind of youth-culture slang. “Really? Well, good for you. It’s so important to have a hobby.”
    Lars hardly understood it either. “Why are you going for a healing?” he said. At this point we no longer spoke openly about our schedules, but I had left a portrait of my new friend, crisply drawn, on a doodle pad, under which I’d written, absent-mindedly, in a fine cursive sprawl,
Beverly Flowers Personal Healer Beverly Flowers Personal Healer Beverly Flowers Personal Healer
. Also I had used the page to blot up some spilled coffee, and now, a few days later, Lars was finally getting around to cleaning up the mess.
    “She’s a remarkable woman, if you have to know.”
    I had known this the first time I set foot in her office. Bev Flowers looked to be in her early fifties, and her rooms were elegantly furnished in a grey and green color scheme, as if to suggest the mossy underside of a stone. She greeted me honorably, as if I were a soldier just back from the war, and as we faced each other on matching Indonesian chairs, she was so attentive I thought I might weep. So this is what it was like to be around a spiritual person. I fished
Treasure Island
out of my bag and laid it on my knees.
    “Every hour alone with this book helps fortify me. I’m cast away, like Ben Gunn on the island, only I’m in our apartment, and instead of powder and shot . . . ”
    “Maybe”—Bev pressed her hand against the book and cocked her head—“Maybe this book has a higher vibration.”
    “Exactly! Yes!” My relief was so intense, I wanted to stand up and punch a hole through the rice paper screen that divided the room. Instead I signed up for Beverly Flowers’s package deal, six one-hour healing sessions and three long-distance attunements.
    “But are you sick?”
    “You don’t have to be ‘sick’ to undergo a healing,” I told Lars. “You just have to be open to a life-source of positive energy.”
    “It’s big, it’s hot, it’s back!” Richard shrieked.
    Lars threaded his way through the apartment, collecting dirty plates and crumpled-up napkins.
    “Shut up!” I hurled an empty tuna can at Richard. It missed widely, but the way he carried on, you would have thought I punctured his crop, and Lars, who never threw anything at Richard, looked ready to reprimand me. Instead he turned around, picked up the can and tossed it into the garbage.
    “Stupid bird!” I said as the parrot pecked his dirty feathers.
    Lars gave a sort of sigh.
    “Idiotic non-stop-talking feather duster!”
    “Did you notice he’s not talking? You scared him.”
    I found this information hard to digest—and weirdly exciting, too. I had spent so much time being afraid of Richard. All these weeks he had seemed stolid and indifferent—capable of antagonizing me, but not capable of being hurt. Was it possible the tables were beginning to turn and he, in fact, was cowed by me? If a bird can be cowed, I mean.
    “Who knows?” Lars said. “Why don’t you run it by the healer?”
    I might have—despite his sarcasm, I truly might have—but the next time I saw Bev Flowers she didn’t want to chat.
    “Lie down on the table,” Bev said. “I want to check your energy fields right away.”
    Fieldwork promised great things. I’d been told