The Inconceivable Life of Quinn

by Marianna Baer

  “This is a safe space,” she said. “If you decide you want to keep working together, I’m not even going to tell your parents what we talk about, unless I’m worried you might harm yourself. I’ll be here for you, and no one else.”

  She had a steady, calm voice and seemed warmer than Quinn would have imagined from her appearance. Quinn almost wished she were more businesslike, more doctorly and authoritative. She didn’t need a friend or confidant; she needed answers.

  Dr. Jacoby asked what had brought Quinn to see her. “Your mother’s told me a bit,” she said, adjusting her glasses. “But I’d like to hear it in your words. Tell me what’s going on and what you’re hoping to get out of our time together, if you decide you’d like to continue.”

  “You know I’m pregnant?”

  “I do. But assume I know nothing. Start at the beginning.”

  Quinn told the story of the doctors’ appointments, and how she hadn’t even believed she was pregnant at all. “Now, of course, I know that I must have had sex, even though I don’t remember it, which is really impossibly weird. So I guess that I was probably raped and don’t remember, because I was drugged and blacked out, or because I have post-traumatic stress disorder.” After her bath, she’d spent a couple of hours researching online and making notes. She kept telling herself her father was right—there had to be a rational explanation. And those were the two rational options she’d come up with: raped while drugged or PTSD. With PTSD, your brain could apparently repress something that was too upsetting to know. “And I’m in therapy because I need you to help me remember. I’m not sure if we’ll be able to find the man and press charges, but just so we all know, me and my parents. For peace of mind.” She paused, and when Dr. Jacoby didn’t immediately respond, she added, “Is that enough?” Saying all of this out loud—the very idea of having been raped—made her stomach crawl up her throat.

  “If you’re finished.”

  “I guess.”

  “So, what I’m hearing is that you’ve found yourself in this seemingly impossible situation and you want to find out how it happened. That you feel you need to know both for yourself, and for your parents.”

  “Right,” Quinn said. “And I’ve already started doing some stuff.” She opened up her notebook. She’d gone through everything she could think of—old emails and texts and posts online and notebooks from school—and had filled out a chart of her activity those two weeks, as well as possible. “It happened during this time frame,” she explained. “So, if you hypnotize me and ask about those events, maybe I’ll remember.”

  Quinn had circled a few things on the chart, like her art teacher’s gallery opening and a music festival in Prospect Park that she’d been at with Jesse and their friends. She pointed at the entries. “Like, these two nights I don’t remember how I got home. So if I was walking alone, at night . . .”

  Dr. Jacoby spent a minute reading the pages. Quinn bounced her knee up and down, nervous, as if she was expecting her to immediately deduce what had happened.

  Instead, Dr. Jacoby handed the notebook back, saying, “Let’s put that aside for now. Okay?”

  “Uh, okay. I know that there are a lot of empty time slots, but I did the best I could.”

  “You remembered a lot, Quinn. And although we’ll definitely talk about what was going on in your life, and the work you’ve done will help, I’m not going to hypnotize you. I’m not sure if you know, but that’s something only certain therapists do, and I’m not one of them.”

  “But . . . isn’t that the way, you know, to get memories back? That’s what I read online.”

  “Memory is a slippery fish, Quinn. Very complex. If you really are forgetting what happened, we can try to help you remember in healthier ways.”

  “What do you mean, ‘if’ I’m forgetting what happened?” Quinn asked, her chest twisting.

  “Let’s talk about that. You say you have no memory of what happened, yet you sound pretty certain you were raped. I’m wondering how you came to such a firm conclusion?”

  Quinn thought of the ridiculous ideas she’d had. Alien abduction—please! “It’s the only logical thing.” She rubbed her pendant. “Right? What else would explain it?”

  “Well, the most obvious possibility is that something happened with your boyfriend.”

  “We’ve never had sex, I swear. Or even come close.” She was so sick of having to say that. “So since that really, really can’t be it, what other option is there, aside from rape?”

  “Does anything come to your mind?”

  “I don’t know. I . . .” This wasn’t what Quinn was here for! She needed answers, not more questions. “When my mom told you what was going on, what did you think? How did you think it might have happened?”

  Dr. Jacoby seemed to consider this for a second. “My first thought in a situation like this—about any girl in your position, not you specifically—would be that something accidental happened while she was being intimate with her boyfriend, as I already said. Or that she might not be ready to talk about something that happened with her boyfriend or with someone else.”

  “Lying?” Quinn said. “Why does everyone keep thinking I’m lying? I’m not. I swear.”

  “There are lots of reasons we all hold back the truth sometimes,” Dr. Jacoby said. “Good, valid reasons. It wouldn’t be any sort of reflection on you as a person, Quinn.”

  “But I’m not lying. I don’t know how it happened! How am I supposed to figure it out if I’m telling the truth and none of you want to hear it?”

  As Dr. Jacoby assured her that she wanted to hear whatever Quinn wanted to tell her, Quinn couldn’t get enough air. She pressed a hand on her collarbone. “I really need this to not be more complicated,” she said in a choked voice. “I just need us to figure out when I was raped, or whatever. Okay?”

  Dr. Jacoby offered her a glass of water Quinn hadn’t even seen her get. “Breathe a deep breath through your nose,” she said.

  Quinn did.

  “And another.”

  She kept breathing and drinking. Her face was so hot she had to resist an urge to pour the cold water over her head.

  “Quinn,” Dr. Jacoby said, more softly, “I can’t imagine how overwhelming this must be.”

  Quinn nodded, fighting back tears.

  “By no means am I saying that you might not have been raped. I just want to keep our discussions as open as possible. And I don’t want our sessions to only be about solving this mystery. You’re going through some major emotional and physical stresses. I want to help you develop coping strategies for all of that.”

  “So, if you won’t hypnotize me, what are we going to do?”

  “Talk. Follow trains of thought. See what comes up for you, both emotionally and as far as memories go. Not just from those two weeks, but from anytime.”

  “Wait,” Quinn said, agitated again. “Are you one of those therapists who’s going to spend the whole time asking about my childhood? Because that has nothing to do with this. I need to talk about those two weeks, not about being a kid!”

  “We’ll talk about whatever you want,” Dr. Jacoby said. “But our childhoods do affect how we react to later events, so we might find it useful to explore it.”

  “And you really think just talking will help? Because I need to know. Soon. Like, as soon as possible.”

  “I can’t make you any specific promises. All I can promise is that I’m going to do my best to give you a place where you’ll feel comfortable talking in ways you might not anywhere else. And I’m confident that will lead us somewhere.” She paused. “I don’t want you to get frustrated if it seems like things aren’t moving quickly. With repressed memory situations, if that’s what this is, there’s really no way of predicting when it will come back. It will happen when you’re good and ready.”

  “But I’m ready,” Quinn said. “I’m ready now.”

  ELLEN JACOBY

  The door closed behind her new patient.

  Ellen trie
d not to make snap judgments, but at the same time, she liked to stay receptive to her initial gut impressions. This time, her impressions started before she’d even met Quinn in person.

  Quinn’s parents had both gotten in touch with her, separately.

  When she called to make the appointment, Katherine Wells had made it clear that she thought it had to have been some sort of unlikely accident while Quinn and her boyfriend were together. “My daughter and I are very close,” Katherine had explained, “so I’d definitely know if something traumatic had happened to her. No question. And she’d tell me if she’d had consensual sex. I’ve always been very sex positive with her. There’s no reason she’d lie.”

  Gabe Cutler had left a message on Ellen’s voicemail:

  “A couple of points to cover here. First, I want to make sure you don’t keep notes about patients online that could be compromised. Our medical records were part of that recent HealthOne leak, so we’ve already had trouble with that. For Quinn’s sake, I want to make absolutely sure this will all be completely confidential. Also, this is probably unrelated, but I wanted to mention that my daughter had . . . an active imagination when she was younger. If she says anything now that seems upsetting or unusual, please let me know. I’m concerned about how . . . disconnected she seems. So . . . thank you, and please call me at this number if you need to discuss anything, not on the house or office lines.”

  Ellen’s impression here was strong: Quinn wasn’t the only one in the family who was, as Gabe had said, disconnected. It seemed that all three of them were—from one another, and perhaps from some aspects of reality.

  QUINN

  Quinn could tell her parents were disappointed—they’d been expecting one session with the amazing Dr. Jacoby to unbury the pristine truth from this shitpile of dysfunction.

  “You’ll keep seeing her, of course,” her mother said. “But in the meantime, we’re going to have you do a paternity test with Jesse. Okay, sweetie? I know you’re convinced it’s not his, but things happen.”

  Apparently, all they needed for the test was a single hair from Jesse—he didn’t even need to know about it—and a blood sample from Quinn. Trace amounts of the baby’s DNA would be in the blood. Her mom had already made an appointment for her to get the sample drawn later today. Fine. At least it would prove she wasn’t lying about one thing.

  Curled up on her bed, Quinn took out the chart of the two weeks she’d showed Dr. Jacoby and stared at it again. The answer was right there. How could she not see it?

  She considered the two options—blacking out or repressing the memory. She’d read a book once where a random guy drugged a girl at an airport café, so she supposed someone could have done that to her at a coffee place or restaurant. But wouldn’t she have realized the hours were missing when she woke up? How would she have gotten home?

  Although the other option, repressing a traumatic memory, was hard to imagine, the idea of a random rape somewhere in the city wasn’t impossible. This was New York: Being careful didn’t guarantee safety.

  There was the trip to Maine, too, but while she didn’t rule it out, there were a few reasons it seemed unlikely to have happened there. That weekend was the first time she’d been back to Southaven, her childhood home, since moving to Brooklyn nine years ago, so the trip had been special . . . memorable. Also, she’d been with Jesse or her family almost the entire weekend. The only two times she could think of when she wasn’t with one of them were those brief moments with Marco Cavanaugh, and later that same night during the midnight swim at Holmes Cove—events that were seared on her brain in vivid detail. (Not that the coincidence of that traitorous, inexplicable kiss with Marco falling into this time period didn’t give her a sick, sticky feeling. She didn’t want to think about it, but forced herself to scan her memory: rickety dock, wind and waves, the look, the kiss, the hurried parting . . .)

  Most of all, though, Maine seemed unlikely because Quinn’s memories of that weekend were intensely happy. Even with the Marco incident, it had been one of the best weekends of her life. She had a hard time imagining how a repressed rape could be part of that.

  So, for now, she concentrated on her days in the city. Thinking it was possible that whoever had done this had attacked other girls, too, she went online and skimmed through a year of weekly police blotters in the Brooklyn paper, looking for reports of rapes or attempted rapes in the area. There were a few—though nowhere very nearby—and she wrote down the details in her notebook, waiting for something, anything, to trigger even the slightest hint of recognition.

  When nothing did, she found herself getting more and more frustrated. More and more angry at her cowardly brain.

  Not remembering isn’t going to make it not have happened, she told herself.

  And whatever the truth was, it couldn’t be as bad as not knowing.

  In the middle of the night while trying to sleep, Quinn couldn’t stop thinking about those police reports, couldn’t stop imagining some random, faceless man following her down a dark street or a park path, hiding behind cars or bushes, waiting for an opportunity . . .

  And when a breeze came through the slightly open bedroom window and touched her bare arm, she realized that maybe her father meant a stranger could have climbed in that way and hurt her. Here, in her own bedroom. Could someone have come in that way? Eventually, knowing she wasn’t going to sleep, she slipped into the hallway, tiptoed past her sister’s room and down the stairs in the dark (paranoid, thanks to her obsessing, that she could hear someone else’s stealth footsteps on the stairs behind her own), into the kitchen and through the sliding doors into the garden. She looked up at the back of the house. The bottom section of the fire escape was slid up so that the closest rung was unreachable to anyone of normal height. If you were climbing down, you’d slide the section a few feet to reach the ground. But there was no way you could climb up on it from where Quinn stood. Unless . . . She supposed it could have been reached by standing on one of the patio chairs.

  She turned and studied the backs of the buildings on the adjacent block and on Prospect Park West, scattered windows lit up here and there. The buildings were row houses and larger apartment buildings, fully attached to one another, and formed a sealed perimeter, meaning the area of backyards was a self-contained environment, not accessible from the street, only from the other buildings.

  So even if someone had managed to climb the Cutlers’ fire escape, no one would have been back there who would have done that to Quinn. (You don’t know all your neighbors, a little voice said. How can you be so sure?) She took a deep breath. No. She refused to be scared in her own room.

  She was about to go inside when her glance darted up to Jesse’s dark window. The fact she’d barely been in touch with him for days was completely unprecedented. What was she going to tell him? She could keep lying and stick to the story that she had the flu. If she did, she’d have to go through everything—the abortion, therapy, trying to remember—without him knowing, which sounded impossibly lonely, not to mention logistically difficult. But if she told him, would he believe her story? What if he thought she’d cheated on him? What if she lost him?

  Shhh . . . the ginkgo trees’ rustling leaves said, trying to calm her. Shhh . . .

  And then a tiny thought sparked in her mind.

  Maybe the baby was Jesse’s. Maybe, by some fantastic, beautiful miracle, it was his. Maybe he had superhero sperm or something, able to swim their way through any barrier. Even before she and Jesse were together-together, they’d talked about what they would name their kids if they had them some day—twins, a girl and a boy, Scout and Spock. Maybe they’d brought one of these pretend kids to life just by dreaming, because they loved each other so much.

  Think of how relieved her parents would be if it were Jesse’s. How much simpler everything would become.

  She stood there, in the dark, listening to the reassuring whispers of the trees, and pressed a hand against her belly. Please, she thought. Please, be Je
sse’s.

  Once back in bed, she left her window open, determined not to succumb to fear. It kept drawing her eyes, though, and she kept picturing someone out there. A minute later, she collected up some spiky seashells from where they decorated her mantelpiece and placed them in a row along the windowsill. Sentries.

  LYDIA CUTLER

  Lydia curled her hand and used it like a telescope as she stood in the garden staring up at her sister’s bedroom. But she still couldn’t see exactly what Quinn was doing. Putting stuff on the windowsill? In the middle of the night?

  She’d followed Quinn downstairs, hoping to gather new information. Being the youngest meant Lydia was never told about anything that was going on. Her family either thought she was too young to understand or that there wasn’t anything she could do to help. She had to figure out everything for herself.

  Start with the things you know. That’s what her dad always said

  1. Quinn was sick with something that made her parents really worried and confused.

  2. Quinn had been sick a lot when she was little, and she’d never gotten completely better. Maybe this was part of that. Except . . .

  3. Her parents thought she caught it from Jesse, which meant it was probably something you got from kissing.

  Lydia had expected Jesse to meet Quinn in the backyard tonight, like he sometimes did. All he had to do was go through the gate in the fence that separated their backyards, now that he lived so close. (He’d only lived there for a year or something, after his parents got divorced.) But he hadn’t come tonight. Quinn had just stood there, alone. Looking around and around like a weirdo, rubbing her belly like she had a stomachache. After Quinn went back inside, Lydia had come out from her hiding spot in the kitchen to see if she could tell what her sister had been looking at. That’s when the light had gone on in Quinn’s room and she’d started doing whatever she was doing.

  Up in her own room, Lydia had a hidden bag of things she’d taken from Quinn over the last couple years. Little things like folded up notes from friends and ticket stubs from movies. Sometimes, Lydia would empty the bag and sort through them, like pieces of a puzzle, trying to figure out her sister, who always seemed to be full of secrets. (What if her secret meant that she was dying? Lydia had always been scared that whatever weird illness her sister had meant she wouldn’t live long.)