“From what?”
“Okay,” Rachel corrected herself, “she believed she was protecting me from myself, from what I might do with the knowledge.”
“Is that really why?”
“Why else?” Rachel suddenly wanted to dive out the window behind Connie.
“If someone has something you not only want but truly need, what will you never do to that person?”
“Don’t say hate them because I hated her plenty.”
“Leave them,” he said. “You’ll never leave that person.”
“My mother was the most independent person I’ve ever met.”
“As long as she had you clinging to her, she could appear to be. What happened once you were gone, though? Once she could feel you pulling away?”
She knew what he was driving at. She was the daughter of a psychologist, after all. “Fuck you, Connie. Don’t go there.”
“Go where?”
“It was an accident.”
“A woman you’ve described as hyperalert, hyperaware, uber-competent? Who had no drugs or alcohol in her system the day of her death? That woman drives through a stop sign on a dry road in broad daylight?”
“So now I killed my mother.”
“That’s the exact opposite of what I’m suggesting.”
Rachel gathered her coat and bag. “The reason my mother never practiced was because she didn’t want to be associated with half-assed quacks like you.” She shot the degrees on his wall a look. “Rutgers,” she scoffed and walked out.
Her next shrink, Tess Porter, had a softer touch, and the commute to her office was much shorter. She told Rachel they’d get to the truths of her relationship with her mother on Rachel’s schedule, not her doctor’s. Rachel felt safe with Tess. With Connie, she’d always felt he was poised to strike. So she, in turn, always felt poised to parry.
“What would you say to him, you think, if you found him?” Tess asked one afternoon.
“I don’t know.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Of him?”
“What? No.” She thought about it. “No. Not of him. Just of the situation. I mean, where do you start? ‘Hey, Dad. Fuck you’ve been for my whole life?’”
Tess chuckled but then said, “There was some hesitation there. When I asked if you were afraid of him.”
“Really?” Rachel gazed at the ceiling for a bit. “It’s, like, she could contradict herself about him sometimes.”
“How?”
“Most times, she described him in effeminate terms. ‘Poor sweet James,’ she’d say. Or ‘Dear sensitive James.’ Lots of eye rolls. She was too outwardly progressive to admit he wasn’t masculine enough for her. I remember a couple of times she said, ‘You’ve got your father’s mean streak, Rachel.’ And I’m thinking, ‘I’ve got my mother’s mean streak, bitch.’” She gazed up at the ceiling again. “‘Look for yourself in his eyes.’”
“What’s that?” Tess leaned forward in her chair.
“It’s something she said to me a couple times. ‘Look for yourself in his eyes. Tell me what you find.’”
“What was the context?”
“Alcohol.”
Tess gave that a thin smile. “But what do you think she meant?”
“Both times she was pissed at me. I remember that much. I always took it to mean he . . . If he ever saw me, he’d . . .” She shook her head.
“What?” Tess’s voice was soft. “If he ever saw you, he’d what?”
It took her a minute to compose herself. “He’d be disappointed.”
“Disappointed?”
Rachel held her gaze for a bit. “Repulsed.”
Outside, the streets grew enshrouded, as if something huge and otherworldly blotted out the sun and cast its shadow across the breadth of the city. The rain fell suddenly. The thunder sounded like the tire slaps of heavy trucks crossing an old bridge. The lightning was a distant crack.
“Why are you smiling?” Tess asked.
“Was I?”
She nodded.
“Something else my mother would say, particularly on days like today.” Rachel tucked her legs under her. “She’d say she missed his smell. The first time I ever asked her what she meant, what he’d smelled like, she closed her eyes, sniffed the air, and said, ‘Lightning.’”
Tess’s eyes widened slightly. “Is that what you remember him smelling like?”
Rachel shook her head. “He smelled like coffee.” Her gaze followed the splash of the raindrops out the window. “Coffee and corduroy.”
She rebounded from that first bout of panic and low-grade agoraphobia in the late spring of 2002. She ran into a boy who’d been in her Advanced Research Techniques class the previous semester. His name was Patrick Mannion, and he was unfailingly considerate. He was kind of doughy and had the unfortunate habit of squinting when he couldn’t hear properly, which was often because he’d lost fifty percent of the hearing in his right ear in a childhood sledding accident.
Pat Mannion couldn’t believe Rachel kept talking to him after they’d exhausted the limits of discussing the one class they’d taken together. He couldn’t believe she suggested they get a drink. And the look on his face when, back at his apartment a few hours later, she reached for his belt buckle was the look of a man who’d glanced up at the sky to check for clouds and witnessed angels passing overhead. It was a look that remained on his face, more or less, throughout their relationship, which lasted two years.
When she did eventually break up with him—ever so gently, almost to the point of convincing him that it was a mutual decision—he stared back at her with a strange, brutalized dignity and said, “I never used to understand why you were with me. I mean, you’re gorgeous and I’m so . . . not.”
“You’re—”
He held up a hand to stop her. “Then one day, about six months ago, it hit me—love doesn’t trump all for you, safety does. And I knew sooner or later you’d dump me before I’d dump you because—and this is the important part, Rach—I would never dump you.” He gave her a beautiful, broken smile. “And that’s been my purpose all along.”
After grad school, she spent a year in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on the Times Leader and then returned to Massachusetts and quickly moved up to the features department at the Patriot Ledger in Quincy, where a story she wrote on racial profiling by the Hingham Police Department garnered some acclaim and enough attention that she received an e-mail from Brian Delacroix, of all people. He’d been traveling for business and had come across a copy of the Ledger in the waiting room of a lumber distributor in Brockton. He wanted to know if she was the same Rachel Childs and if she had ever found her father.
She wrote back that she was the same Rachel Childs and that, no, she hadn’t found her father. Would he care to take another stab at the job?
Can’t. Slammed at work. Traveling traveling traveling. Take care, Rachel. You won’t be at the Ledger long. Big things await. Love the way you write.