Oh yeah. I’m sorry I lost it. Shit. I never cry, Doc. Never.
“And can you imagine just having that powerful feeling and not knowing why?”
Sean laughed. Yeah. I’d probably think I was in love with you or something, right, Doc?
I joined him in his laugh. “Indeed. Or a stranger on the street, perhaps. That would be very awkward.”
Yeah, I get it. I wouldn’t mind if this were one of the ghosts. This ghost could stick around.
“We could all use a little more spontaneous joy, I suppose. Do you want to work more on the memory recall?”
Yeah. Let’s do it.
I got up and walked to my desk to grab my laptop. We always worked with the simulation playing. “Okay. Can I ask you first … are you coming to group this week?”
I watched his face carefully. Group was where he saw Jenny. Neither of them had missed a session in the months since she joined.
Sure, yeah.
He was conspicuously nonchalant.
I had suspected they were growing closer. Not to disregard my efficacy, but there had been a drastic change in both their moods that did not correlate with the progress, or lack thereof, of the memory work. I had asked Jenny about him. Too often, I feared. She had started to wonder if what they were doing was wrong. I could hear the hesitation in her voice.
It wasn’t wrong. How could it be when it was helping them both? But they had progressed from texting and Skype to coffee and long walks. Sean was working odd jobs. Jenny was not in school. She rode her bike to town, and they were meeting there, in Fairview, then driving to places where they wouldn’t be recognized. Charlotte thought she was shopping or meeting friends. She was eager to see Jenny leave the house. She’d told me that Jenny seemed happy, truly happy, when she was going to town, so she never worried about her then. She was always back home in a couple of hours.
Jenny had confided these secret meetings to me, and I felt obligated to keep her confidence. Still, Sean was twenty-five. He was married. Jenny was sixteen. It was one of those dilemmas that sits in the back of your mind, like a small crack in the ceiling. You forget about it in the midst of everything else going on. But once in a while, your eye catches it and you think, has it gotten worse? Is it time to fix it? I would not let their relationship become sexual. I would not let the ceiling collapse entirely. But then, we never know when the crack will finally give way, do we? We can’t see behind the plaster.
Sean was feeling love for his son because of his connection with Jenny. Jenny and Sean shared something unique, an understanding, that went beyond the empathy that I and the other people in their lives could provide. And within this understanding came a connection. And that connection gave Jenny a home, a safe place to be. And it gave Sean power.
When Sean called Jenny in the middle of the night, his rage tearing through him, his hand in a fist, she knew what he was feeling. She didn’t have to say anything to him. She just had to listen. Sean did the same for her. Before she recalled that one small memory of her rape, she had told me what it was like to be with him.
I think about it for hours. I close my eyes and I picture us sitting at the diner or walking by the lake. I can see his face and I go through everything I want to tell him. Like I’m rehearsing for a play or something. I can’t think about the homework I have to do for the tutor or my mother’s schedule or anything at all. I imagine that I’m taking all the bad feelings and putting them in a garbage bag, like a giant black plastic bag. One by one, the burning in my stomach, the pounding in my chest, the fear of everything and nothing, that feeling that nothing is what it seems, the disorientation—everything we talk about in here and everything that made me so crazy I tried to kill myself—I start shoving it all into a bag. And then I carry that bag on the back of my bike and then I see his car and he gets out and then right away, in a second, he takes the bag and puts it in his trunk and then it’s just gone the whole time we’re together. It’s really, really gone! And whatever happens, whether we just talk about stupid stuff or I cry the whole time or he goes off on things that made him angry that week—it doesn’t matter at all, because the bag of garbage is locked in his trunk.
“And what happens when you go back to town and he parks his car and you get out and unlock your bike? Does he give you back the garbage bag?” I asked her. I usually know the answers to my questions. This time I did not.
He doesn’t give it back to me. He would never do that. But there’s always more garbage.