Remembering the child she’d been, I found none of that surprising.

It’s Mother.

That opened up a realm of possibilities.

The most likely: She’d finally come to grips with her mother’s pathology- what it meant to her. Needed to put her feelings in focus, maybe get a referral for her mother.

So tomorrow’s visit would probably be a one-shot deal. And that would be it. For another nine years.

I closed the chart, comfortable with my powers of prediction.

I might as well have been playing the slots in Vegas. Or buying penny stocks on Wall Street.

I spent the next couple of hours on my latest project: a monograph for one of the psych journals on my experiences with a school full of children victimized by a sniper the previous autumn. The writing was more of an ordeal than I’d expected; the trick was to make the experience come alive within the confines of a scientific approach.

I stared down at draft number four- fifty-two pages of defiantly awkward prose- certain I’d never be able to inject any humanity into the morass of jargon, scholarly references, and footnotes I had no clear memory of creating.

At eleven-thirty I put my pen down and sat back, still unable to find the magic voice. My eyes fell on Melissa’s chart. I opened it and began reading.

October 18, 1978.

The fall of ’78. I remembered it as a hot and nasty one. With its filthy streets and septic air, Hollywood hadn’t worn its autumns well for a long time. I’d just given Grand Rounds at Western Pediatric Hospital and was itching to get back to the west side of town and the half a dozen appointments that made up the rest of my day.

I’d thought the lecture had gone well. Behavioral Approaches to Fear and Anxiety in Children. Facts and figures, transparencies and slides- in those days I’d thought all that quite impressive. An auditorium full of pediatricians, most of them private practitioners. An inquisitive, practical-minded bunch, hungry for what worked, with little patience for academic nit-picking.