“No. Well, yes. She was at Fernley. But she wasn’t there like me, or even like you. She was in a cage, Alice. A glass cage that was literally shrinking, with her in it.”
Alice’s face changes, and she laughs out loud. “You’re not serious!” Alice is strange that way—she can switch in an instant from jealousy and anger to perfectly normal conversation. Her laugh is hard to read.
“It’s not a joke, Alice. She was in serious trouble.”
I tell her about the endless corridors, the locked doors. I tell her about the interview with Gordon. “They just kept asking me all of these questions about JoAnne.”
“Why would they ask you about her, Jake? So help me God, if you fucked her again, we’re finished. There’s nothing you or The Pact or anyone else can do to make me stay—”
“I did not fuck her!”
But I can see it in her eyes: She doesn’t entirely believe me.
I look over to the table next to us. A couple around our age are sitting with a bucket of fried shrimp between them. They’re picking at the food, clearly tuned in to our conversation. Alice notices them too and scoots her chair closer to the table.
I tell her about the sole occupant of solitary confinement. I tell her about JoAnne’s matted hair, her nakedness, her obvious fear. I don’t leave anything out. Okay, maybe I don’t mention JoAnne spreading her legs, but I tell her everything else. Alice’s face registers confusion, then horror. And I can see we’ve moved past the jealousy, and now we’re in this together again, Alice and me against something bigger.
She’s sitting in stunned silence when her phone goes off. The vibration on the table makes us both gasp. Immediately, I fear that it’s The Pact calling. Dave, maybe, or even Vivian.
“Just the office,” Alice says, answering. She listens for a minute or more, then just says “Okay.” She hangs up. “I have to go into work.”
“Now?”
“Now.” Nothing more. Before, she would have told me why. She would have confided in me about the case, complained about office politics. But instead, she tells me nothing. I can tell she doesn’t like me very much right now.
When we get to the car, she asks me for the keys. She drives fast, making abrupt stops and rough turns. All the way home, through the tunnel, up past Pacifica and Daly City, I can tell that Alice is still trying to process what I’ve told her. She dumps me out front of our house, clicks the garage door open for me to enter, then heads to work.
I take a shower and change. When I open my overnight bag, I realize that my clothes smell like Fernley. It’s a mix of desert air, cleaning fluid, and five-star cuisine. I turn on the TV, but I’m too wired to watch anything, too stressed about the tension with Alice. Things have never been this way with us before. I mean, we’ve had episodes, but not like this.
I throw on my coat and head over to the office. Huang frowns when he sees me. “Bad news, Jake. We lost two couples today. The Stantons and the Wallings called to cancel their appointments.”
“For this week?”
“No. Forever. They both filed for divorce.”
The Wallings don’t surprise me, but I had real hopes for the Stantons. Jim and Elizabeth, married fourteen years, both super-nice, well matched. I sulk down the hallway, feeling the weight of failure. How can I save anyone else’s marriage if I can’t save my own?
59
The study that interests me the most is about the effectiveness of marriage counseling. Does counseling correlate with a higher or lower likelihood of divorce? In my own practice, I’ve seen mixed results, though it seems that the couples who persevere through at least eight to ten weeks of sessions tend to emerge with a stronger bond than the one they shared on the first day.
There’s one interesting study from several years ago, involving 134 couples whose marriages were in serious distress. Two-thirds of the couples showed significant improvement following a year of therapy. Five years later, one-fourth of the couples had divorced, while one-third reported being happy together. The remaining couples were still together, though not necessarily happy. The deciding factor seemed to be whether both spouses really wanted to improve their marriage.
60
That evening, I text Alice about dinner. I didn’t really eat anything at Barbara’s Fishtrap, and I’m famished. Twenty minutes later, she responds, Eat without me. I’ll be late.
Usually, that means she’ll be home around midnight, so I hunker down in my office to take care of paperwork. Ian finishes with his last patient at eight, and I am left alone in the quiet office.
Sometime around eleven, I head out. The house is dark and cold. I turn on the heater and wait for the whoosh of air pushing through the old pipes, but nothing happens. I don’t have the energy to start a fire or get something in the oven to warm the place up. The issue with Alice feels like a black cloud over me, and the Stantons’ divorce makes it worse. I don’t even want to think about The Pact. Certainly, there is trouble ahead. But at the moment, I don’t have the energy to formulate a plan or even consider the next step.
I sprawl on the couch, exhausted. From the back bedroom, I can hear three bell tones—email arriving on Alice’s iPad. Strangely, it doesn’t make me worry about Eric the bass player. Why did I even look at that previous email? It all seems so stupid and insecure.
Still, I have to admit that it irritates me—Alice is treating me badly for a meeting I had with an old girlfriend, and yet at the same time her iPad is probably pinging with multiple emails from her old boyfriend. Of course, the jealous mind rarely interprets one’s own actions in the same light as the actions of others.
I think about the Stantons and our nine meetings together. Therapy is unlike other human interactions, the calculations entirely different. In nine hours of serious, direct, unwavering discussion, you get to know a person deeply. I rarely heed my training to stay disconnected, simply an observer. No, with the ones I truly have hope for, I spend many hours thinking about how I can help them get to the place they need to be.
I think back on the sessions: What did I say, and what could I have said differently? Unfortunately, I remember it all, and so I’m able to critique my sentences, edit and revise them. Now that it’s too late for the Stantons, I know what I should have said, the questions I should have asked.