“What happened to you?” he abruptly says, as if the need to know has broken through his uneasiness and given him the confidence to ask.
“It’s a long story, Donny Ray, and it’s not why we’re here.”
“I know why we’re here,” he says, voice sturdy with resolve that surprises me. “What happened to you?”
I feel my expression go slack. I take in his attentive gaze, those eyes of steel that have become pools of empathic awareness. Like something is tugging at him to crawl through that narrow, confined space and reveal his own pain.
While it would be very unprofessional to tell Donny Ray about my tragic past, I can’t deny there’s a piece of me that would like to. A piece that knows his pain so intimately and might even help him find a way out of it. If I could, I’d tell him that I understand how, once inflicted, the pain caused by a parent never leaves. How it becomes the biggest part of you.
But I can’t do that. I can’t, because we’re not here to talk about my problematic childhood. Still, for a moment I get lost in it all. The memories. The emotions . . .
When I refocus on Donny Ray, he’s watching me with concern and slowly shaking his head, and I see sadness. I see understanding and sympathy. But most of all, I feel as though he knows what I’ve been thinking. He parts his lips slightly, like he wants to say something but can’t.
I realize this session has slipped from my control. I’ve got to bring it back. But as I reach for my notebook, I find it’s not there. I look at my empty lap in bewilderment, and then turn my gaze around the room.
My notebook rests beside the computer about ten feet away.
I hear that strange noise again, then a shadow swoops down the wall and across my lap. I look toward the ceiling, and this time I catch a split-second glimpse of— No way. It can’t be.
“What’s wrong, Christopher?”
I turn to Donny Ray.
What just happened?
48
“Christopher?” Donny Ray says again.
I fight like hell to navigate through my fog of confusion, to regain normality, even though I’m fully aware there’s nothing about this situation that’s anywhere close to being normal.
Don’t you dare slide off the rails, I demand of myself. Jeremy is waiting. The MRI results are waiting. Focus now. Go crazy later.
Donny Ray is still staring at me.
“I was just . . .” I steady my voice and try to reestablish the flow we’ve lost, so I can move this session forward. “. . . I was just thinking about what we were discussing.”
“About all your pain?”
“No.” Flustered, I look at him. “About your mom. I’m wondering what it was that she pretended not to see.”
Donny Ray’s voice reveals nothing but anguish when he says, “Lots of things.”
“Can you tell me about them?”
He focuses on the door, runs his hand along a spreading five o’clock shadow. “I’m not sure I want to.”
“How about one of the things, then?”
“I . . . I’m . . . I don’t think I . . .”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to right now,” I say, thankful to at last find a toehold on lucidity. “I just want you to know that you can.”
“It’s just that . . . I’m so . . .”
“I know,” I tell him. “I get it. I really do.”
“He did things,” Donny Ray says.
“Who did?”
“My father.”
“What kinds of things?”
“To both of us. He did them to us both . . .”
“To you and your sister,” I confirm.
Donny Ray twists his body away from me. Now he is literally fighting for each breath, back heaving, broad shoulders rising and falling. “It was just Miranda at first, but I didn’t know. I . . . I didn’t know that was what he was doing to her.”
“When they left you alone.”
A fast nod.
Again, I think about the ice cream cone, and my stomach turns queasy.
“Then, after she was gone . . . after that happened . . . I figured it out, because he started doing it to me. I became her replacement.” Donny Ray turns back to me, tears welling, mouth trembling, and in a defeated whisper, says, “All that anger toward Miranda . . . I was so damned wrong, and it was too late to tell her.”
“Where would this happen?”
“The shed. I remember the shed.” He falters, then stops.
I hold to the silence. He’s on the verge of opening the door to his childhood nightmare, and I don’t want to shake him out of it.
“It was my safe place where I would go,” he continues, “and it was a good place, but he turned it into a really bad one.”
Gently now. “What did your father do to you inside that shed, Donny Ray?”
“There was this lightbulb . . . and it . . . it hung from the ceiling by a chain. And I’d concentrate on this dirty naked bulb, swaying back and forth while he did it to me. And I’d count . . . I’d count each swing until he was finished. One time I got up to two thousand and fifty-seven.”
Nearly an hour and a half of sexual abuse, I calculate. An hour and a half of deep emotional and physical turmoil, inflicted on an innocent child. Turmoil that was likely repeated until that child’s mind was broken. Destroyed. I swallow hard to fight back my nausea.
Donny Ray hunches over, face in hands, rocking his body to a slow and steady rhythm. Forward and back . . . forward and back. I know he’s still in that horrible place, and I have to take him out of it.
Very softly I say, “Those feelings you had of being alone? They must have been so much worse, after.”
His shoulder muscles pull taut—they are bulging with tension.
“And after losing your sister . . .”