“Emily?”
“I’m sorry. Sarah, can I ask you a hypothetical?”
“Hypotheticals are my favorite. Metaphors, too.”
“I remember that.” I’m transported to her home office, looking at her kindly face, the large earrings catching the afternoon light. “I wonder if someone might . . . Well, I’m wondering about your experience with severe repression. Someone pushing something down so far that it becomes unconscious. But then it . . .”
“What?”
“Comes out in other ways.”
Sarah is silent for a moment. “Freud warned that something like that would always come out. And the longer a person waited, the worse it would be.”
“Wasn’t he talking about something you knew? Suppressed consciously, not repressed.”
“They’re not very different, in the end.”
I think about it for a moment.
“May I ask you a question, Emily?”
“Of course.”
“Do you remember your reason for first coming to me?”
It takes me a moment. I’m partly aware that I’ve drifted back into the living room. The sun is shining hard on the lake, jeweling the small waves with a million scattered diamonds. “It was my father. Well, it was Paul. It was . . . I’d hit him. I felt like I was going to be . . . My temper was going to be a problem.”
“You were very concerned.”
“Is that what you wanted to know?” I sit down on the couch to await her response.
Sarah is silent a moment. I can hear a white noise background, like ocean waves. “You’d had your rock bottom, you said. You’d struggled with your guilt to the point you’d considered suicide.”
“Yes.” I’m getting that floaty sensation again. Five hours was not enough sleep, apparently. I lie down on the couch.
“But then you picked yourself back up. We worked on it. You processed your emotions about your father — he’d died in his forties, isn’t that right?”
“Forty-nine.”
Something clicks in the back of my mind, like pieces coming together. Wasn’t David Bishop forty-nine? I’ll have to check my case notes.
Sarah says, “You got yourself going in the right direction again. You married Paul. You went back to school and studied to be a therapist yourself.”
“That’s right,” I say, sensing that Sarah is leading me somewhere. Her voice is comforting. My eyes feel heavy.
“But we might’ve been too hasty to reduce our sessions. Do you think?”
My eyelids pull open. “What do you mean?”
But I can sense it, hear it, smell it — people crowded in a room, laughing. The sweet scent of alcohol, thick and pervasive. The heat of bodies. Outside, smokers under a cloud of nicotine. In the bathroom, a few furtive lines of cocaine.
“I mean that when we think we have it all together, we have to be careful. We have to stay on guard. Especially when we have destructive tendencies.”
I sit up again, the comforting spell having been pierced by anxiety. Guilt. Was there a young face somewhere in that crowd of people? A young girl?
“Sarah, what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that you had pressures. You weren’t seeing me as much, but you had pressures. From work, from parenting, from your social life.” She takes a breath. “And then there was the affair.”
The affair.
Of course there was the affair. It’s not like I’ve forgotten that. We were young, the kids were young; we’d built up a lot of pressure, like Sarah is saying. Paul worked long hours in the city, while I listened to people’s problems all day. When he came home, I was often tired, grouchy. I was at my limit and didn’t have the mental bandwidth to listen to his woes too.
Eventually, Paul sought comfort elsewhere. It’s not that I blame myself, but I had a role to play. Paul’s affair was brief, and we worked it out. Without a doubt, divorce was on my mind for some time. But we stayed together. For the kids. Until, eventually, we found each other again.
“I should’ve seen you more,” I confess to Sarah. “I know that. It probably would’ve made things easier.”
“I’m not saying anything is your fault,” Sarah says. “But I think it’s important to remember these things. To have someone else help you. When we remember, we’re not actually going back to the same event each time in our minds. We’re remembering the last time we remembered. And so things can get distorted over time. Bent one way or the other, toward our preference.” She adds, “All we really have is the present.”
“Of course.” I’m up again, ascending the stairs, resolved to get my day started. “But if we fail to remember the past . . .”
“We’re doomed to repeat it.” She laughs. A light, papery sound. “It’s a conundrum. Which is why I brought it up. I think what you’re going through now . . . It’s important to have your memories at full avail. This is as much about you as it is anyone else.”
That stops me. “Joni, you mean? The parties we had when she and Sean were little . . . ?”
“Well, that. You didn’t tell me everything, of course, but I think the affair took a lot out of you. Putting your marriage back together.”
“We always put the kids first.”
“Kids know.”
I tighten up in defense. “Well, yes . . . kids know. They know they’re loved.”
“Of course . . .”
“Sarah . . . thank you. Your calling me back is so appreciated. It means so much. But I might need to go now.”
She hesitates. “Of course. Call me anytime.”
“Let’s talk again very soon.”
She doesn’t respond.
“Sarah?”
“You were very good at closing things off,” Sarah says.
The words unnerve me. Tickle the back of my neck. Like electricity. “What do you mean?”
“I shouldn’t have said that. Listen, Emily, you can call me back if you need to. I’ll be here.”
“Thank you, Sarah. I will.”
I toss the phone onto the bed. Kids know. What is that supposed to mean? Of course kids know. But we loved our two children. We raised them right, and they never wanted for anything. I can’t go around blaming myself for Joni’s recalcitrance as a teenager. Without question, our home life factors in, but Joni is an individual. She made her choices; she makes them still.
I can’t be held responsible for every one of them, can I?
But it gets me thinking. Thinking about affairs. I sit down at the laptop and pull up my email, then find the last email from Frank Mills.
Frank is good at what he does. Not only does he have Doug Wiseman’s info, he’s got pictures. Both candid photos, like you’d see on social media. One of them is from a few decades ago, Wiseman looking younger. In that one, he’s on a boat, wearing a white-and-blue polo shirt. His hair is curly and a bit unruly. In the second photo, he’s sitting at an outdoor table, laughing. His hair is shorter. He’s holding a beer in his hand. It looks imported.
I study the first photo more closely. In it, he’s got a cigarette pinched between his fingers.