I STARED AT THE SMALL DIGITAL RECORDER IN MYhand, paralyzed by the countless unspoken questions it posed, questions to which I had no answers. I was as paralyzed by the machine as I’d been by the man who’d loaned it to me: a Knoxville psychologist named John Hoover, highly recommended by my family physician. I’d phoned him for an appointment several weeks earlier, in hopes he could help me sort through some confusion and sadness. In doing so I was heeding the advice Miranda had given me, when she’d said to “take a sabbatical, write a book, see a therapist, get a dog—do whatever will help you heal.” Seeing a therapist had struck me as more efficient than the sabbatical or writing options and as less work (and probably less expense) than the dog option. But sitting in his office, I’d spent forty-five of my allotted fifty-minute session avoiding the real reason I’d come. I’d chattered about my work and about my past, but not about my present or my pain—not about Isabella.
As the final minutes of the session ticked away, Dr. Hoover rose from his overstuffed chair, walked to his desk, and took out a small audio recorder. “Here,” he said. “Maybe it would be easier to start by speaking what’s on your mind into this. You don’t have to share it with me; you can just erase it afterward if you want. But putting words to whatever’s troubling you—naming the parts, telling the story of your sadness—might help you get a handle on it.”
Now, at midnight, sitting in darkness in my living room, I realized I’d been staring at the recorder for forty-five minutes. Did that mean I had only five more minutes in the session with my digital therapist?
Summoning up my nerve, I pressed “record” and began to speak.
NOW IS THE TIME FORall good men to come to the aid of their country. I hate this. I don’t know what to say. I feel like a blackmailer whispering into this thing. How do I tell the story of my sadness? Right now that would be the story of Isabella. But where do I begin the story, and how? Do I begin the day I met Isabella? The day I walked into the Oak Ridge Public Library and she asked if she could help me? Do I begin with the World War II photos she showed me, the ones that helped me find the buried bones of a murdered soldier? Or do I go all the way back to the war itself, the race to build the Bomb, the relentless momentum to drop it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Do I begin that day in August of 1945, when a B-29 took off from the island of Tinian, crossed a thousand miles of the Pacific, and destroyed the city where Isabella’s parents lived? No. That would be her story of sadness, not mine, not ours.