“He’s started on Prozac, and he’ll be seeing me weekly. But I’d like to be working in tandem with you. Give you the reins, so to speak. Truthfully, I can’t see anyone but you handling this boy.”
Stef glanced at Ronnie. “Don’t call me Obi-Wan.”
“I won’t,” she said. “And you don’t have to take him on.”
Stef smiled at the floor. “Yes, I do.”
Meeting adjourned, Stef walked Franklin down to the lobby.
“How’s your dad?” Frank asked, zipping his coat. He was an accomplished pianist, and when Stef’s father was still stateside, Stef had arranged a private tour for Frank at the Steinway workshops in Astoria. Frank still talked as if the tour were last week.
“Good,” Stef said. “I think he’s seeing someone.”
“Really?”
“He just got back from a river cruise up the Danube. Usually after one of his jaunts, I have to endure a two-hour recap of his itinerary. This time? He was awful quiet. And a little distracted.”
Frank laughed. “Good for him.”
A pregnant pause.
“I’m seeing someone myself,” Stef said.
“I wondered,” Frank said, smiling.
“Why? Am I distracted?”
“No. Just quieter than usual.” He reached and patted Stef’s shoulder. “It’s going to be a hard case.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t know,” Frank said, not unkindly. “Look at me. I talked to the Stockton police chief to get some background. He told me about two officers who were at the bust with him. One quit the force within days. The other had to be hospitalized with severe PTSD. Both cops said they couldn’t get the Caan boys out of their minds. Chief said he still has nightmares.”
Stef nodded, not looking away.
“Part of what makes you so good is your compassion,” Frank said. “You’ve got more empathy radar dishes than that big-ass array out in New Mexico.” The hand on Stef’s shoulder squeezed. “You’re still working with the Springer boy, too, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You protect yourself. We work in tandem which means if you need a break, you tell me.”
“I will. Always good to see you, Dr. Frankenstein,” Stef said.
“Want to hear a better joke than that?”
Frank told terrible jokes. Stef braced himself. “Lay it on me.”
“Did you hear about the merger between El Al Israel Airlines and Air Italia?”
Stef shook his head and rolled a palm up to the sky.
Frank grinned. “They’re now called Oy, I’ll Tell Ya.”
Stef closed his eyes. “I haven’t had breakfast…”
On work nights, Jav knew to give Stef a wide berth for at least an hour after coming home. He didn’t hover or chat or even ask, “How was your day?” If he could, he took himself out of the equation and went for a run or to pick up food. Or else he went benignly invisible and left Stef alone.
Stef came home tonight and hit the shower straight away. The bedroom door closed and soon Jav could detect the sweet, cedar smell of incense. Stef was sitting at the corner shrine, prying off his armor.
Jav had sent revisions of The Chocolate Hour back to Michael, which meant his time stretched out, empty and luxurious. He’d hit the gym hard this afternoon and now he was drained, not wanting to do anything more strenuous than read. He flopped on the couch’s short end, Roman curled at his feet. His nose was sunk deep in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere when Stef finally emerged. He rolled over the back of the couch and fell into the cushions, his head on Jav’s chest.
Jav kissed his brow and went back to reading. It was peaceful with just one circle of lamplight falling on them. A quiet evening at home. Roman sighed, his back paw giving a twitch. Jav read, the paperback balanced in one hand while his other fingers combed through the hair at the back of Stef’s head.
Then all at once, memory pressed him on all sides.
“My cousin used to lie on me like this,” Jav said.
“Mm.”
“Funny, I never thought anything of it.”
“It didn’t turn you on?”
“No. It just made me feel loved.”
Stef turned his face into Jav’s shirt. “Those last years of his life, he must’ve missed you like crazy. I bet he still does.”
“You think?”
“I do.” A warm yawn against Jav’s sternum. “You take a shower and I miss you.”
This was an odd, rather mushy side of Stef. Playing along, Jav closed the book and scooched down in the cushions. “I like being missed.”
Stef smiled. “I miss you when I close my eyes.”
“So open them.”
Stef shook his head and slowly the smile faded away. “I’m going to be starting a tough case,” he said. “I mean really tough. I can’t share the details but…”
“Bad?”
“I don’t have a word for what it is.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to do everything I can not to bring it home with me, but some of it’s bound to. I have a tendency to pull way, way inside during these kinds of cases. I may act like I don’t want you around, but I really do.”
“I appreciate the heads up.”
“If I’m distracted, or if I’m short with you or pissy, it’s not you. It’s me trying to hold boundaries in place. Or I might push at ours. Just because I can.”
Jav kept a straight face, long knowing Stef was one of those people who liked to name everything. “I got it,” he said.
“And since we’re on the subject, thank you for being low-maintenance.”
Jav put on his most insulted expression. “I’m low maintenance?”
Stef chuckled as he took the book out of Jav’s hand and tossed it aside. He pulled both Jav’s arms around his head. Jav held him and held still, staring at nothing, listening to Stef breathe.
“I have kind of a weird question,” Jav said.
“Hit me.”
“It might offend you.”
“I love when you offend me. Fire away.”
“Working with male sexual assault victims, I wondered if your being bisexual ever presented a problem.”
“Fair question,” Stef said. “It’s not typically something I put on the table with a patient.”
“It’s not about you.”
“Right. But I’ve had occasions in my career when it was discovered and ended up being a problem, sure.”
“Like they’d actually terminate the therapy?”
“Yeah.”
Jav affected a professorial tone. “And how did that make you feel?”
Stef smiled. “What can I do? A patient is only going to do well in therapy if they trust the therapist. If their gut is already on high alert and suspicious of my motive, we’re not going to get anything done. I can’t take it personally. The majority of male sexual predators identify as straight. Not that it’s much consolation to survivors. But it’s a fact.”
“Has a case ever affected you sexually? I mean, after hearing description of their ordeals, has it ever turned you off from having sex?”
“Sex with men or with anyone?”
“Both.”
“Is this curiosity or anxiety?”
“Slightly anxious curiosity.”
Stef rubbed a fold of Jav’s shirt between his fingers, thinking. Jav ran a fingertip over the wrinkled brows, trying to smooth them out.
“Sometimes,” Stef said slowly. “I come home with part of a case sticking to me, and I don’t want anyone or anything. I don’t want to be touched until I deal with it. But other times, the only way I can deal with it is being touched. Sometimes I can only shake off the echo of a sexual abuse story by making love. Like, this is crass, but I need to be fucked back to myself. Make sense?”
“I don’t know how you write books.”
“I make up bullshit. Your work is so much more important. You know how men make love with each other and you know how men make war on each other. You kind of stand at the middle of this range of male behavior and…” Jav chuckled. “There I go making up bullshit again.”
Stef nodded against Jav’s chest, mouth slightly parted and his gaze going far away, toward some horizon of revelation. “No, that’s true,” he said slowly. “You’re absolutely right.”
Stef took his time easing into Geno’s line of sight. The kid was following the rules and doing what he was told. His body was present, but his eyes often wandered off, leaving him in a blank trance. Withdrawing from the prescription pain meds and adjusting to Prozac left him struggling with nausea and complaining of an intermittent buzzing sensation in his head. By the end of the first week, Stef estimated Geno was down about four pounds, mostly in his face.
He had an interesting handsomeness, with cropped dark hair and hazel eyes. Some mix of Italian and German, Stef guessed from his name. He had yet to have an in-depth conversation with Geno. He hadn’t seen the boy smile, laugh or even slouch.
Geno held himself like a watchtower as his gaze went off to some far-away place in the distance, staring at the shitty black hole of death that used to be called his soul. This wasn’t a guy who’d want to draw pictures or practice mindful breathing. He was still in magic wand stage—looking for one lightning bolt fix that would make it all better.
Stef had to handle him carefully. Part of the handling was simply watching, dismissing the academic mind and letting his instincts guide him. Right now, instinct told him Geno was exhausted. Depleted. Not thrilled to be here but not entirely averse to being someplace safe where people made decisions for him. He was getting used to the space, the people and the meds.
Let him rest, Stef thought. Keep watching and keep making it safe for him to exist here.
Geno was required to come to the group sessions, and while he showed up in terms of attendance, his participation was nil. Usually he sat on the wide window sills and stared out at the High Line. Sometimes he flopped in one of the beanbag chairs and slept. At Stef’s request, the staff included him at the outset, then let him be. Stef covertly watched for any change in demeanor over the week. A whiff of awareness. It could be interested or contemptuous, it didn’t matter to Stef. What mattered was the absolute value removed from apathy.
“Well, he made it through the first week,” the EP director said, at a meeting she held with all Geno’s therapists. “Thoughts? Observations?”
Nolan, who ran EP’s group sessions, chimed in. “Minimal participation. Seems to be concentrating on holding himself together. He had a couple of severe panic attacks and one episode that looked like a vasovagal syncope.”
The facility’s young intern looked up. “What’s that?”
“It’s a loss or near-loss of consciousness when the vagus nerve is triggered.”
“Vagus runs from your brain to your gut,” Stef said. “Stress triggers nausea, which triggers the nerve. Blood pressure plummets and you either pass out or go into a really weird, surreal plane of almost passing out. Feels a lot like insanity.”
“Poor kid thought he was losing his mind,” Nolan said, sighing.
“He seems calm in the kitchen,” the EP director said. “He took a shift on Thursday and came back later to prep for four hours. He mentioned he did a lot of the cooking after his mother died.”
Which means he’s into food, Stef thought, or he’s a caretaker.
Toward the middle of the second week, the clouds in Geno’s eyes parted and he looked around the art room, expression curious. He still had no enthusiasm for the day’s activities, but he was slightly taken with the room’s materials, their organization and display.
Stef watched him wander. All the supplies were sorted and arranged by function and color, creating a visual inventory of possibility. Geno ran his fingers through the boxes of pens and crayons, or along the edge of paper reams.
Come play, said markers and clay and paints and pencils. Take us off the shelf. Touch us. Use us.
The art room had tons to touch. These survivors of sexual violence didn’t ever touch each other, but the touching of objects was fair game. They wanted soft, non-human things on their skin and they wanted to control how much softness and when and where. They ran dry paintbrushes along their hands and arms and faces. They drew on themselves with Sharpies. They liked to caress felt, wind pipe cleaners around their fingers, crumple tissue paper and smooth it again.
They liked controlling what the art supplies did, as well as knowing things would always perform a certain way. The red marker always drew red, the blue drew blue. Red and blue made purple, always. Glue smelled like glue and it stuck this to that and didn’t let go. Scissors cut and a heart-shaped hole punch made a heart, not a star. An eraser made a mistake go away.
Survivors liked to make a deliberate mess of their projects, and cleanup was as integral to the process as creation. At the end of a session, the muddy paint water could be thrown down the drain. Spills could be wiped up, scraps of paper swept up. It all got rinsed out in the sink and thrown in the garbage.
It could be made to go away.
Stef came into the art room one afternoon in the middle of Geno’s third week. It was free time, so he sat at one of the long tables with his own sketchpad and a cup of coffee. Geno stood at the tall windows, holding his hands in a puddle of western sunshine. He glanced back at Stef and his mouth twitched in a half-smile.
“Hey,” Stef said.
“Hey.”
“Are your hands cold?”
“Yeah.” Geno stuffed them in his pockets and stared a long time through the glass. He then turned and hitched up to sit on the windowsill. “I like your ink.”
Stef glanced down at his tattooed forearms. “Thanks.”
“You design it?”
“Yeah.”
After a moment, Geno slid down and came closer. Stef held his forearms out, palms to the ceiling. Showing all his horses on one arm, the Elvis Costello lyric on the other.
Alison, I know this world is killing you.
“Who’s Alison?” Geno asked.
“A girl who tried to commit suicide. I was working the hotline when she called.”
Geno crossed his arms. “She make it?”
“When I hung up she was with people and she was safe. Safer. It was a long time ago.”
“Never talked to her again?”
“No. Can’t even be sure Alison was her real name. But it sort of marked me as where I was going in life. So I decided to keep her close by.”
Geno pushed up the sleeves of his flannel shirt and showed Stef a few of his own tattoos. A lot of Hebrew lettering and mystical-looking symbols. Stef recognized the Kabbalah Tree of Life and the Flower of Life, but none of the others. He praised the work, but asked no questions about the designs themselves.
Geno pushed his sleeves down again and leaned on a chair back. “You know about me? I mean, what happened to me?”
Stef nodded.
The boy pushed his lower jaw out a bit, squinting at the table top. “Does all this stuff…” His chin jerked toward the shelves of art supplies. “Does it work?”
“Work is a relative term. Depends on what you want it to do. It helps. I’ve seen it help.”
“How?”
“It helps you say what can’t be said in words. Some things are too shitty, too heinous to talk about. But keep them inside and they’ll fester and eat away at your guts until you’re dead. I try to help people tell their story visually. To tell their story without talking.”
Geno’s fingers curled around the chair back. He
drew a long slow breath in. “How do you do that?”
Stef got up and brought back a box of pastels. “Sit down if you want.”
“I’ll stand.”
Stef sat, tore off a single sheet off his pad and laid it down. “Pick two colors. Any two. One for you, one for them.”
Geno’s nostrils flared. He leaned one palm on the table and with the other, picked out a blue stick. He made a small smear with the flat side. “Okay, that’s me.”
His fingers hovered over the colors, then he took black. He turned it on its side and dragged it down, making big curved lines all around the blue smear. A forest of menacing shadows.
Stef noted the lines stayed far from the edges of the paper. Geno probably wasn’t aware, but he was already letting art both express his experience and contain it. The beauty of a sheet of paper was its four edges marking a boundary where pain could not cross.
Geno dropped the crayon and pushed the drawing across to Stef. “There you go. Me versus them. Have at it, Freud.”
Stef didn’t need to turn the paper around. It was textbook. The victim small, the attackers large.
“Why blue?” Stef asked.
“Why the fuck not?”
“What do you think of when you see blue?”
“The fucking sky, dude. It’s blue.”
Stef nodded, not expecting more.
“And it’s clean,” Geno said, looking off over Stef’s shoulder. “It’s a clean color.”
“I think so, too,” Stef said. “Blue’s dependable.”
Geno pressed his lips together tight. “I don’t think I want to do anymore.”
“Do one thing for me. Just one and I’ll let you go.”
“What?”
Stef tore off a new sheet of paper. “Draw the exact same thing. Same colors. Same composition. But make one change. Make you big, and them small.”
Geno snorted. “Oh, that’ll make it all go away?”
“Nothing makes it go away.”
Geno picked up the blue pastel. His hand arced over the paper, making one or two practice swipes but not leaving a mark. Finally he let it touch and drew a line.
“Big,” Stef said softly.
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