by Joy Fielding
Chapter Twenty-nine
Maggie pulls into the parking lot of the upscale Royal Poinciana Plaza and turns left, away from the valets lingering in front of the Palm Beach Grill. She can park her own car, thank you very much. She has no intention of handing over her keys to a stranger. Taking back control of her life doesn’t mean taking unnecessary chances. Not being a zombie doesn’t mean being an idiot.
She parks under a lamppost close to the main road. There’s little chance of anyone jumping out at her here. Even so, she does a careful survey of the area before opening her car door, her hand around the outline of the gun inside her beige canvas bag.
“Don’t you have another purse you can wear?” Erin asked her as she was leaving the house. “That one’s kind of…ratty.”
Maggie smiles. This purse will do just fine. Maybe one day she’ll feel strong enough to leave her gun behind, but not yet. Despite her fresh resolve, some things are easier said than done. Now is not the time for wholesale changes. Now is baby steps. Now is one day, one thing, at a time.
She checks her watch as she approaches the small crowd milling outside the restaurant’s front door. She’s ten minutes early, which means she still has ten minutes to change her mind.
“Have a nice evening,” one of the valets says, opening the door for her to go inside.
Baby steps, she thinks, taking a deep breath, straightening her shoulders, and entering the noisy, dimly lit interior.
She approaches the hostess’s stand and takes a quick look around. A large, well-stocked bar runs along the wall to her left, followed by a bright, open kitchen. Every barstool is occupied, as are most of the tables in the main body of the restaurant. Lithographs by well-known artists—a swimming pool by David Hockney, a colorful abstract by Appel, a less colorful one by Jack Bush, among others—line the walls. The place is packed, as it always is. Maggie smiles, wondering how many of the diners are packing as well. More than a few likely have guns secreted somewhere on their persons.
The hostess informs her that Richard Atwood hasn’t arrived yet, and Maggie wonders if he’s changed his mind, which would be a blow to her ego but not the end of the world. More embarrassing would be having to face Erin when she got home, to admit that at least one of them came to their senses and decided to take a pass.
She checks her watch again. She’ll give the handsome accountant fifteen minutes and then she’ll leave.
Two minutes later, she feels the restaurant door open behind her and a rush of hot, humid air invade the cold, air-conditioned space. She takes a deep breath and turns around. “Oh my God.”
“Maggie?”
Maggie finds herself staring into her husband’s startled face. “Craig. Hi,” she says when no other words are forthcoming. What’s he doing here? Did Erin phone him, tell him of her plans?
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
“Same as you, I would imagine. Did Erin call you?”
“Erin? No. Why? Is everything all right?”
“Yes. It’s just that…nothing.” Why is she so surprised to see him? The Palm Beach Grill was always their go-to restaurant of choice. Damn it, of all the places she could have suggested, she had to pick this one.
Unless, of course, subconsciously she’d been hoping to run into him, and that was why she’d picked it.
“You’re looking well,” he says.
“Thank you. You, too.”
“How’s the job going?”
“So far, so good.”
“Well, it certainly seems to agree with you. You’re looking really…wonderful.”
“Hi,” an unfamiliar voice pipes up. Long red fingernails at the end of a delicate bare arm extend toward Maggie. “I’m Selena.”
“Sorry,” Craig says quickly, then again, “Sorry.” He pauses, regroups. “Selena, this is Maggie. Maggie, this is…”
“Selena,” Maggie acknowledges, shaking the young woman’s hand. “Nice to meet you.” She takes note of the woman’s thick, shoulder-length black hair, and the ample cleavage peeking out from her scoop-necked polka-dot dress. “How do you know Craig?”
“We work together.”
“Ah, the new sales rep. Of course.”
Selena looks from Maggie to Craig, then back to Maggie, dark eyes blinking confusion. “Yes, that’s right. And you know Craig…how?”
“He’s my husband,” Maggie says.
Craig stifles a smile. “Well, isn’t this fun,” he says.
“And speaking of fun,” Maggie says, as the door opens again and in walks Richard Atwood, wearing dark pants and a white shirt, looking even better than his picture on Facebook.
“Maggie,” he says, edging through the small crowd waiting to be seated. “Sorry if I’m late. I got held up forever at the bridge.”
“No worries.” Maggie motions toward her husband. “Rick, I’d like you to meet Craig and Selena.”
“Nice to meet you both.”
“Craig McKay?” the hostess calls out.
Craig raises his hand. “Right here.”
“This way, please.”
“Excuse us,” Craig says. “Good to see you, Maggie. You really do look…terrific.”
“Thank you.”
“Craig McKay?” Rick asks, watching him walk away. “Your…?”
“Yes.” Maggie lifts her palms into the air, as if to say, What can you do? Then says it out loud, “What can you do?”
“Would you prefer to go somewhere else?”
“No. I’m okay. You?”
“I’m happy if you are.”
Minutes later, the hostess leads them to a table underneath the Hockney litho. Maggie sits down, quickly locating Craig in a nearby booth. He is leaning forward, supposedly listening to what the lovely Selena is saying, but Maggie notes his eyes drifting repeatedly in her direction, and she can’t help smiling.
“What are you smiling about?” Rick asks.
Maggie shrugs. “I wasn’t sure you’d show up.” Not a lie. Not the truth either.
He laughs. “I was pretty sure you wouldn’t.”
The waitress approaches with their menus, rattling off the night’s specials. “I’ll give you a few minutes to think it over. Can I get you something to drink in the meantime?”
Rick orders two glasses of expensive chardonnay. “Your husband was right,” he says. “You look terrific.”
“Thank you. So do you.”
He smiles. “Thank you.”
“My daughter thinks you’re ‘hot.’ She looked you up on Facebook.”
He laughs. “It’s a good picture.”
“She also wondered what you’re doing wasting your time with me.”
His eyes narrow. “She sounds like a lot of laughs.”
“Yes, she can be quite the comedian,” Maggie acknowledges. “Unfortunately, she has a point. What are you doing wasting a good Saturday night and an expensive glass of wine on me?”
As if on cue, the waitress arrives with their drinks.
“Why do I think that your daughter had an answer for that?” Rick says.
Maggie ponders her response. What the hell? she decides. Might as well come right out with it. “To paraphrase, she thinks you think I’ll be an easy lay.”
“That’s some paraphrase.” He laughs. “But hell, I’ll drink to that.” He raises his glass, clicks it against hers. “To easy lays.”
“You do know that’s not going to happen.”
“Ever?”
“Well, never say…ever.”
Now they’re both laughing. Maggie sees Craig’s eyes shoot toward hers, and the laugh catches in her throat. She picks up her menu, buries her face inside it. “I think I’ll have the Dover sole,” she tells the waitress moments later.
“Prime rib,” Rick says. “Medium rare, with french fries and
coleslaw.” He hands the menus back to the waitress. “So,” he says as the young woman withdraws, “is he still looking?”
“What? Who?”
“Your husband. Is he still looking this way?”
“I haven’t noticed,” Maggie lies. Then, quickly, “Yes, he is. On and off. I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault he’s still in love with you.”
“Oh, no. You’re wrong about that. Believe me.”
“I don’t think so.”
“He’s the one who left me,” Maggie tells him, as she reminded her daughter earlier.
“Maybe, but he’s having second thoughts now.”
“He’s just surprised to see me with someone, that’s all.”
“Is he looking right now?”
Maggie pretends to push some hair away from her face as her eyes skirt toward Craig. “Yes.”
“Then you know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think we should give him something to look at.”
Maggie is about to ask what he means, but before she can get the words out, Rick is leaning across the table and kissing her full on the lips.
“Holy shit,” Maggie says as he falls back into his seat. She looks over at Craig, sees his head immediately turn away. “Holy shit,” she says again.
Chapter Thirty
One of Aiden’s most vivid childhood memories is that of the front door slamming.
He flips over in bed and opens his eyes as the memory expands to include what preceded the slam: his parents’ faces contorted with rage, their fists pounding at the air in frustration, their voices spitting fury into the narrow space between them, like venom from a pair of warring cobras.
Damn that new therapist anyway, dredging up all this shit. Like it’s going to do any good.
His problems, like his flashbacks, are the result of two tours in Afghanistan—the things he saw in that dusty wasteland, the things he did.
As his previous therapist explained, when faced with danger, your body gets ready to fight, flee, or freeze. Your senses go on high alert, your heart beats faster, and your brain stops normal function to deal with the threat. This is healthy. But with PTSD, your brain doesn’t process trauma the right way. It doesn’t view the memory of the event as being in the past, and as a result, it switches to danger mode and you feel stressed and frightened, even when you know you’re safe. This is called a flashback.
Something Aiden has been experiencing with more and more frequency the past few months. Especially since his old therapist retired and this new one—who insists on bringing up irrelevancies from the past—has taken his place.
How is talking about his childhood going to make anything better? Is it going to make the flashbacks stop or his nightmares go away? Is it going to make the insomnia disappear or improve his self-esteem? Is it going to save his marriage?
He stares at Heidi, asleep beside him, her deep auburn curls stretched across the whiteness of the pillowcase, like a series of incriminating question marks. He knows he’s losing her, that it’s only a question of time before she leaves him.
Like his father left him.
“Tell me about your father,” the therapist says, as Aiden watches this afternoon’s session play out in his mind.
“Nothing to tell.” Aiden hears the feigned indifference in his voice. “I hardly knew the man. He left when I was nine.”
“That’s old enough to have some idea what he was like.”
“He was a bastard,” Aiden says.
“What makes you say that?”
Aiden glares at the man sitting across from him. Dr. Stephen Patchett is close to sixty, but looks easily a decade younger. Probably helps that he has all his hair, Aiden decides, understanding that his father is roughly the same age, and wondering if he, too, has managed to keep from going bald.
Dr. Patchett leans back in his chair and waits, crossing one leg over the other to reveal a pair of yellow-and-black polka-dot socks peeking out the tops of his Air Jordan sneakers.
“Was he abusive?” the therapist asks when Aiden fails to answer.
“How do you mean?”
“Did he ever hit you?”
“No.”
“How about emotionally? Was he distant? Withholding?”
Aiden pushes a lock of invisible hair away from his face. “Not that I remember.”
“What do you remember?”
Aiden pushes aside the unwanted image of his father cradling him in his arms after he’d fallen off his bicycle. “I remember my parents were always fighting,” he says instead.
“Was there anything specific they fought about?”
“Not really.” Aiden pictures his mother and father sniping at each other from across the room. “She’d say one thing; he’d say the opposite. Just to be difficult.”
“You understood he was saying things ‘just to be difficult’ when you were nine years old?”
“I understood my mother was unhappy.”
“And it was important to you that she be happy?”
“Of course. Especially after he left.”
“It wasn’t your job to make her happy, Aiden.”
“Yeah? Tell her that,” Aiden snaps. “Sorry,” he apologizes immediately. “That was uncalled for.”
“Was it?”
“Yes. Can we talk about something else?”
The therapist nods. “When was the last time you saw your father?”
“I can’t remember. It’s been a long time. To be fair,” Aiden continues without prompting, “my mother didn’t make it easy for him. She was furious at him for leaving, and she was the one with the money—her parents had left her very well off—and she just inundated him with legal shit. When the courts insisted I had to see him, I made sure things didn’t go smoothly. After a while, he got the message and gave up.”
“What about now?”
“What about now?”
“Have you tried contacting him?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Curiosity, maybe. You’re older now. Circumstances change.”
“No, I haven’t contacted him.”
“Why not?”
“It would be too upsetting for my mother.”
“And not upsetting your mother is more important to you than seeing your father?”
Aiden feels his heartbeat quicken. He shrugs, says nothing. He fights the conflicting urges to bolt from the therapist’s office or tackle the man to the floor.
“He’s never tried contacting you?”
“He tried. Birthday cards, Christmas cards, that sort of thing. I actually got an email from him a few years back.”
“And?”
“I didn’t open it.” Aiden stands up. “Look. I really don’t get where you’re going with this. I thought the point of Cognitive Processing Therapy was to examine how I feel about the trauma I experienced in Afghanistan so I can figure out ways to live with it.”
“Exactly,” Dr. Patchett confirms.
“Well, my trauma,” Aiden insists, “was watching my friends and fellow soldiers get shot or blown to bits. My trauma was blowing the head off a twelve-year-old boy I thought was holding a grenade that turned out to be a rubber ball!” He swipes at the sudden appearance of unwanted tears. “It has nothing to do with my parents.”
Aiden moans and flips onto his other side as Heidi stirs beside him.
“What’s up, babe?” she whispers, her voice coated in sleep.
“Nothing.”
“You okay?”
“I’m fine. Go back to sleep.” Aiden closes his eyes.
The therapist is waiting. “Look,” Dr. Patchett begins, uncrossing his legs before re-crossing them in the other direction. “The point is that you’ve been blaming yourself for a long time about
things that were beyond your control.”
“Such as?”
“Such as your father leaving. Such as not being able to make your mother happy.”
Aiden sneers. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Aiden, you weren’t responsible for their arguments or the fact your dad left. You weren’t responsible for their divorce, or your mother’s persistent bitterness, or even your subsequent estrangement from your father.”
“I’m the one who threw tantrums every time he showed his face, who told him I thought he was a piece of shit,” Aiden argues.
“You were a child.”
“And now I’m an adult who sees a shrink every Wednesday afternoon because he can barely make it through the day. Again, how does any of this relate to my PTSD?”
Dr. Patchett uncrosses his legs, plants both feet firmly on the hardwood floor. “Listen to me, Aiden. This is very important.” He takes a deep breath. “Just as you aren’t responsible for the things that happened when you were a child, you’re not responsible for the things that happened in Afghanistan. None of what took place over there was your fault, despite the things you did or didn’t do.”
Aiden shakes his head.
“I want you to do something for me. Some homework, if you will.”
“More breathing techniques that are supposed to ease my anxiety but just make me dizzy?” He laughs to indicate a joke.
“I want you to make a list of all the things you’ve been avoiding,” the therapist says.
Aiden shrugs. “I’m not sure I understand.” What hasn’t he been avoiding?
“Take your time. Think about it. Make your list.”
“And what good will that do?”
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. I’m not going to insult you by pretending I understand the depth of the trauma you experienced in Afghanistan. I would guess that, at the very least, you felt afraid and helpless pretty much all the time, much like you felt as a child. To say you were stressed would be a gross understatement.” He leans forward in his leather chair. “And I suspect there are things happening in your life right now that are also making you feel stressed and helpless, and those things are contributing to your symptoms. I think you’ve been avoiding dealing with these issues, and hopefully, making a list of these things will help you learn how to face them.”