Part Three
Thirty-four
JULIA
June 8, 1958
Dear Emmy,
It’s been so long since I’ve imagined you being alive that I don’t really know where to begin.
My therapist, Dr. Diamant, said that I should pretend that I am writing you a letter. Think of you as alive and just start writing. It doesn’t matter how I start, she said; it only matters that I do. She feels that writing to you like this will allow me to move on with my life, put you to rest, so to speak, so that I will not be haunted by your memory anymore. Actually, Dr. Diamant says you do not haunt me, Emmy. I haunt myself with everything that is left undone between us. This journal will allow me to say what I need to, she says. It will allow me to move on.
I think that’s a very strange way of putting it. To move on. As if I were frozen in one place and therefore I must do something drastic to start moving again. When are we ever able to stop moving? You and I know better than anyone that the earth continues to turn, no matter what happens to you, and it takes you with it whether you want to go or not. You keep breathing, your heart keeps beating, the sun keeps traveling the sky, and the world just keeps spinning. When one day ends, you crawl into bed, and when you wake up, another day is there waiting for you. You really have no choice. If I truly had the power to stop things from moving, I would have exercised it a long time ago.
Dr. Diamant is not my first doctor, but she is my favorite. Simon likes her, too, and that’s good. I think you’d like Simon. He’s smart and kind and reminds me of Neville, except that he’s dependable and honest and alive. He has curly brown hair, eyes like chocolate, and he looks like he’s in a perpetual state of surprise. I think that’s the feature I like best about him. He seems always on the verge of discovering something amazing. He’s the one who found Dr. Diamant, actually. There was a long stretch of time when I didn’t have a therapist. I guess I thought I had outgrown the need for one. When I finally decided I was ready to move back to London a few years ago, I figured that was proof enough I was done with needing one. It had been eighteen years, after all. Good Lord, you’d think I would have a handle on it, wouldn’t you? But then I met Simon and fell in love with him, and the very prospect of being deliriously happy for the first time in my life just about drove me crazy. I nearly quit my job and moved back home to Granny’s. But Simon, God love him, convinced me to stay. He found Dr. Diamant for me. Simon knows everything that happened to me. Well, pretty much everything. I don’t think anyone knows everything. But Simon loves me despite my being a wreck and he says he will wait for me to be able to say that I’ll marry him. Quite the fellow, right?
That’s pretty much why he wanted to find someone like Dr. Diamant. He has also had a couple of appointments with Dr. Diamant himself, just so he can know what to say to me—and I guess what not to.
Dr. Diamant is probably forty, maybe older, smokes these skinny brown cigarettes, and wears wild prints that make me think of Morocco or Zanzibar. She’s not like any of the psychiatrists I had when I was little. The first one was a dreadful pug-faced troll named Dr. Nielsen. He was supposed to have been this brilliant doctor who knew exactly how to cure a child chained to fear and anxiety. There were times when I wanted to throw that man off a bridge, Emmy. All he ever wanted to do was talk about that day, the last day I saw you, over and over and over. That was the last thing I wanted to talk about with him. I didn’t want to talk about it with anyone. That was why I stopped talking, for heaven’s sake. You know, I look back on it now and I think, what in the world was he doing, wanting me to relive that day in his office every time I was dragged in to see him. How did he think I got to be the way I was? It was from having to live that day the first time.
Granny eventually decided Dr. Nielsen wasn’t helping me. She said it was because he was American and what did we expect? She didn’t say this to me. She said it to her fellow British expats when she assumed that because I wasn’t talking, I wasn’t listening.
The next doctor was just okay. The third one, Dr. Hunt, I liked very much, but he got married and moved away after only two years. I saw him from my tenth birthday to just before my twelfth. He had been able to get me to utter a few sentences the last few months we were together, and he told me before he left for Texas that I honestly didn’t have to worry about talking or not talking. It wasn’t a big deal. When I was ready to resume communicating verbally, I would know it. He had never met a person like me, who didn’t start talking again when she was ready. There wasn’t a magic formula for it. When I was ready, I would just start talking again.
I’ll never forget how I felt when he said he had met others like me. I even managed to ask him about it.
Yes, he said. There are many, many people like me. In fact, everyone is like me. We’re all susceptible to loss and the effects of trauma. There isn’t a one of us who could experience what I did and not struggle to find some way of coping with it.
I was so glad to hear that. I hated feeling like I was different. Weird. That’s what kids call you when you don’t talk, Emmy. They didn’t call me weird to my face. But I knew what they whispered about me.
That’s the English girl who doesn’t talk. Except when she counts things.
How come she doesn’t talk?
The Nazis killed her family and she’s not even Jewish.
How’d she get away?
No one knows. No one will ever know.
Why does she count things?
Because she’s cuckoo.
There were a lot of times I wanted to tell stupid kids like that the Nazis did not kill my family, but if I had, they might have asked, Well then, who did? I didn’t have an answer for that.
After Dr. Hunt, I didn’t want to see another doctor and I wasn’t made to right away. The war ended just a few months later anyway and Granny wanted to go back to England.
I didn’t want to come back initially.
In fact, the first time I had yelled anything in five years was when I told Granny I didn’t want to go back to England. She was happy to have me yelling, but after she got over her joy, we had our first argument.
But it’s where your home is, Julia, she said.
I don’t have a home, I yelled.
Your home is with me.
I don’t have a home!
Your home, Julia, is with me. I’m your family. Me and Gramps.
In the end, we went back. Of course we went back. We’re not Americans. Granny and Gramps have a nice house in Woodstock near Oxford where Gramps, whom I had seen only twice in five years, taught literature. He had missed us. He wanted us to come home.