“Oh, that’s great. So your classmates know you’re going and everything.”
Cecelia hung her head. “I tell them I’m going to the orthodontist.” At this, she grimaced, displaying a fine rack of hardware.
“And they’re still buying that after how long?”
“Six months. No, they’re not. That’s part of why I told Daddy it’s bullshit to keep going.”
I pursed my lips and thought. “When are you supposed to go next?”
“Wednesday afternoon.”
“Okay, so you stay at school. I’ll just use your next appointment,” I heroically concluded, thereby putting myself on the hook for a visit with Melanie Steen, Ph.D.
FIVE
MELANIE Steen kept offices near St. Luke’s Hospital, just east of downtown Denver. Even though I was not the subject of her services, I felt fully conspicuous as I slid my finger down the building directory and strode purposefully across the lobby toward the elevator, my jaw set in rebellion against the status quo opinion of people who need to see shrinks. Let me tell you, back home in Wyoming persons who ply the psychotheraputic trade are thought to be somewhere between baboons and tax collectors on the chain of evolution.
The elevator dumped me off on the sixth floor, and I sloped down the hall to suite 63, two doors to my left. I let myself in and found myself in an unmanned waiting room. Just me, two stylish overstuffed chairs, an abstract painting, a philodendron, and a magazine rack. No buzzer to press, no sharp-nosed receptionist to get crosswise with, no nothing. I would have knocked on the inner door if I hadn’t been ten minutes early.
Instead, I chose a chair and sat in it, and, eschewing Smithsonian and Psychology Today, took advantage of the chance to indulge in People and Us. And wondered if I was being observed from the inside office through a hidden peephole or something.
Two minutes into my puerile perusal, the inner door swung open and a dishwater blonde hurried out, reddened eyes carefully averted. I was in the middle of trying to make eye contact to see if there was anything I could do to help the poor thing when it occurred to me that I must be trampling every major tenet of therapist’s-office etiquette. Embarrassed, I glanced away.
Right smack on the hour, the door opened again. This time, I was confronted by a very short woman with a ramrod-straight spine and spike heels. Her eyes were too big for her face. In fact, they would have met in the middle if her rather prominent nose hadn’t been in the way. As I was clearly not the party she expected to find warming her swanky side chair, she said in a tone that demanded a reply, “I’m Melanie Steen.”
“Em Hansen.” I stood up and extended a hand.
Melanie Steen reached up (which meant she was short, let me tell you, because I barely made five foot seven in the cowboy boots I was wearing) and grasped the tips of my fingers with the tips of hers, one of those “Have you washed your hands?” kind of shakes. Quickly releasing my hand, she waited for me to say something further.
“I’m here for Cecelia,” I offered.
She tipped her head a fraction to the left.
“Didn’t she call you?”
Melanie Steen’s eyebrows rose a notch. They were heavy black things that described very shallow, perfectly matching parabolas.
I lowered my eyelashes a notch and arranged my lips in a not very pleasant smile. “I’ll take that as a no. Okay, let me start again. Melanie, I’m a friend of Cecelia Menken’s. Her father asked me to give her a hand with things, and I thought the best move would be to come talk to you first.”
Her enormous eyes growing even larger, as if I were metamorphosing into a slightly disgusting insect as she watched, Melanie Steen said, “That’s very nice, Ms. Hansen, but you of course understand that there is a thing called ‘privileged information.’ I can tell you nothing without my client’s full permission. And as she’s a minor—”
“You’ve already told me one thing. You’ve confirmed that she’s your client.”
Ms. Steen’s lips tightened. “Ms. Hansen—”
“I’m sorry. You’re right, I’ve gotten into a fencing match with you already, not smart. Listen, as I’ve come all this way, why don’t you call Cecelia at school and get her permission? Please. Or feel free to call her father.” When she continued to show marked reluctance to budge from the doorway, I added, “I have both numbers.”
I could almost hear the gears in Melanie Steen’s mental machinery grinding toward a decision. I wondered if they might benefit from a little oil, and unkindly speculated that extravirgin olive might be her preferred lubricant. Suddenly, she stepped inside her door, pulling it to behind her, intoning, “Wait here,” just before the lock clicked shut.
She was back in four minutes. This time, her eyelids were lowered to half-mast, suitable to the mood of having an illicit meeting in a back alley, but her tone was still not friendly: “You may come in, Miss Hansen, although I am afraid there’s very little I can tell you. Cecelia Menken is rather a difficult case. We have been working for several months to retrieve her memories of a very traumatic event, and have gotten precisely nowhere. I must conclude that she’s not interested in accomplishing any such thing.”
And with that frail welcome, I took my first step through the doorway of psychotherapy and into the dark heart of despair.
When I’d settled into the stiff leather chair across the desk from Ms. Steen, I took a moment to collect my thoughts. It was a technique I’d learned in the board-room at Blackfeet Oil: always pause and take time to review what I want to put across, or, in this case, to learn. I’d found that pausing like that also served to put my opponents on edge. At length, I said, “Tell me about this amnesia thing.”
“That’s a poor term.”
I paused again. “And a better one is?”
Melanie Steen slowly shrugged her well-padded shoulders. “Memory loss.” Shrug. “Blocked memory.”
I leaned back, crossed one boot-clad foot over the opposite knee. Counted to four. “Fine. Tell me about that.”
Melanie Steen smiled coolly. “What is it you want to know?”
I made a mental note: a psychologist’s office is not the best place to engage in games of psychic poker. The creature had the dealer’s advantage.
I threw down my cards and sighed. “My friend is deeply distressed by what happened. I want to support her. I need to understand what’s happened to her, and what she’s going through now.”
Lowering the lids of her enormous eyes a tad, Ms. Steen said, “The human mind is a very complex organ. It must process an endless stream of stimuli, day in and day out. If we were to stop and consider each stimulus, make a conscious decision about how to respond to it, we would be quickly mired in minutiae. Instead, the mind develops defenses, ways of categorizing incoming information and standardized ways of reacting to it.”
“Such as deciding ahead of time to step out of the way of oncoming locomotives when you see them coming,” I suggested, letting her know I understood.
“Precisely. But what if the locomotive hits us anyway?”
I wasn’t sure where she was going with this. “We scream?”
She closed her eyes for a moment, as if in pain. When those twin lamps snapped open again, she said, “Some stimuli, some events, are too shocking to process, or at least not all at once. We register the shock perhaps, and then put the awareness of the event away for a moment, or a day, or longer, while we go about responding to the more immediate stimuli that flow in on top of it. We continue to look after our daily business, keeping ourselves warm and nurtured as best we can. When it’s safe to do so, or when the weight of the shock once again outbalances the urgency of more mundane events, we process the deeper layer.”
That was a lot to take in. “So how does that work with Cecelia?”
“Cecelia had a terrible shock. She was present in the house when her mother was killed. Perhaps she even saw it happen. Apparently at her mother’s direction, she called nine one one, her voice faint with shock and fear, to say that her m
other was dying. When the ambulance and sheriff’s deputy arrived, she let them in and took them to her mother, then stood by to assist in any way she could, although the woman was by then dead. The point is that Cecelia continued to function, to look after business, if you will.”
“Wait. When she called for help, her mother was dying? Not already dead?”
“Precisely. Her mother’s voice could be heard in the background.”
“Saying what?”
“Saying? She was screaming with pain.”
“Screaming words, or just screaming?”
“Words.”
“What words?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level.
“‘Help me, Cecelia, he’s killing me.’ Words to that effect.”
“And you know this how?”
“I’ve heard the tape of the nine-one-one call.”
“How interesting. I’ve heard endless discussion of the circumstances in recent months, and nowhere have I heard that the nine one one tape had been made public.”
Melanie Steen’s eyelashes dipped briefly. “I requested a copy of the tape to find out if hearing it would trigger Cecelia’s memory. The Sheriff’s Department in Douglas wouldn’t give me one directly, but they sent a copy to the Denver Police Department so that we could play it there, under official supervision.”
My mouth sagged open. The image of Cecelia sitting in a police interrogation room listening to a replay of the sounds of her mother’s death as strangers watched momentarily stunned me.
Blandly regarding my obvious shock, Melanie Steen said, “Cecelia has not, in fact, heard the tape. I listened to it without her first, and when it became clear that we would not be allowed strict privacy, I decided not to subject her to a hearing. They wanted to film her reaction,” she said with acerbity. “Hearing it under such circumstances would more likely have increased her trauma than lessened it.”
I exhaled slowly. “Right. Then to summarize: Cecelia remembers nothing.”
“Nothing until four days following, when she was safely back home here in Colorado.”
“Then is the memory of those days lost?”
Melanie Steen turned her head to stare out the window, giving me a crisp view of her classic profile, like something off a Greek vase. “No, memory is seldom truly lost. It’s just in there somewhere, hidden from the rest of her awareness. Locked up for safekeeping. There are soldiers and nurses who served in Vietnam who have no conscious memory of whole months of their tours of duty.”
I wondered how many other people had been treated to the drama of this psychologist’s pose. “That seems pretty convenient,” I said-peevishly. “So, case closed: Cecelia can’t remember. The vets can’t remember. Life goes on. Why bug them about it?”
Profile rotated slowly back to full face, two huge eyes set too close together staring at me like a goldfish trapped in an aquarium. “Perhaps you have trouble understanding this,” she said dramatically, “but there is a price paid for hiding.”
I didn’t like her choice of words, but I remained silent, braced to hear what might come next.
“Simply put, it takes energy to keep the door closed on memory. Energy that might better be used to do one’s school work, or to pay strict attention while driving a car. Or think of it like this: if the mind works to suppress extreme pain, such tension attenuates both the lows and the highs, making the mind unavailable for the experience of pleasure.” She leaned forward and tapped a long fingernail on her desk. “Just what would you choose?”
For this I wasn’t braced. I have one of those nasty uncomplicated minds that instantly moves to answer direct questions by the most candid means possible, making subtle inquiries like, “How are you today?” a workout. As an overly thorough answer featuring a detailed résumé of my life’s pains and disappointments sped through my mind, I just sat there, my mouth once again sagging open.
Melanie Steen leaned back again in her chair, head back, chest filled with victory. Tit for tat, she paused a nice long while, then laconically inquired, “Did you have any other questions?”
No I didn’t, but I pulled myself together and invented a few, starting with the foolishness of reiterating, “So she has no conscious memory at all of those days.”
“Correct.”
“What methods have you used to try to tap them?”
“Hypnosis.”
Gad, what eyes for that trade. “And no luck.”
“She is not a willing subject.”
“What does that mean?”
Ms. Steen extended her neck and flared her nostrils ever so slightly, suggesting a measure of defensiveness. “We are dealing with the unconscious mind. The subject must be willing to relax her conscious vigil and let the unconscious arise.”
“And if she won’t do that with you, what does that mean, in therapeutic terms?”
Now Melanie Steen’s lips tightened. “It means she failed to form a relationship of trust.”
“Or more simply put, she can’t let go with you.”
Melanie Steen’s face stiffened into a mask.
I wanted to say, Try climbing down off your high horse and make human contact with your client, but thought better of it. I wasn’t heartless; it must be hell to spend six months with someone whose heart is bleeding and realize that even with all your best intentions and fancy schooling, you’ve failed to help her.
SIX
OUTSIDE, the sun was shinning, and the scent of cherry blossoms wafted from a row of slender trees planted in the few small squares of earth left naked along the sidewalk. As it was getting on for late afternoon, I found my way downtown and sat in the lobby of the Brown Palace Hotel, where I could settle into one of its deep overstuffed couches, order a beer from the tuxedo-clad waiter, and listen to the harpist’s soothing notes rise into the serene heights of the hotel’s eight-story Italian Renaissance-style atrium. I leaned back into the couch, stared upward at the quiet expanse of antique stained glass high overhead, and wondered if I had gone insane. A healthier woman would have moved to distance herself from a relationship as certain to drag her down as was mine with Cecelia. A woman bent on survival might have phoned the girl’s father on the way out of town and told him there was nothing further she could or, in fact, would do for his darling daughter. Instead, here I was, lolling back in the lobby of my favorite old hotel, sucking down a beer while I tried to think up my next move.
Should I scour the Yellow Pages for a new psychotherapist for Cecelia? Surely I could make a better choice than had her school counselor. Or should I go fully overboard, drive up to Wyoming, and pump the sheriff for a shot at that 911 tape in hopes that it would give me greater insight into Cecelia’s reactions on that horrible night?
Leaving my beer for a moment, I chose option three (procrastinate), and dialed Menken’s office to tell him where I was. When in doubt, report to the chief.
Ten minutes later, the man himself strode in through the revolving glass door off of Tremont Place, his buttocks pulled up tightly, his face shining with well-groomed bonhomie, rolling out a trail of smiles and hellos as he acknowledged the doorman, the desk clerk, and miscellaneous other minions and acquaintances he passed. His actions said, J. C. Menken knows everybody worth knowing in Denver, big and small. J. C. Menken is connected.
As I watched his approach, I remembered briefly the other reason I was in Denver, the other half of our deal. He was supposed to be making me a few contacts, helping me find a job. Time for the Midas touch, old boy, I thought as I took another pull from my bottle of beer.
He descended into the soft leather next to me, just close enough that it felt too close, but not so close that I could politely move away. Turning sideways toward me, he draped an arm along the back of the couch, letting his hand come to rest just inches from my shoulder. He was dressed in a lightweight wool in honor of the spring day, a fine brownish gray, and the cool whiteness of his starched shirt collar set off the depth of his ever-present tan. I noticed for the first time that he had lost weigh
t since Miriam’s death, that he seemed trimmer, more fit. Seeing my eyes on him, he beamed. “What do you have to report?” he asked.
“Well, for starts I don’t like that psychologist,” I began. “She’s not stupid, not in the least, and I’m sure she’s earned her credentials, but as she said herself, the client has to trust the therapist, and having just spent half an hour in her presence, I can tell you all I wanted to do was run for it.”
Menken swatted the leather next to my shoulder. “That’s why I came to you, Emily! I always could depend on you to bring a woman’s intuition to bear on the job. So psychology’s out. What shall we do instead?”
“Whoa! Hold your horses. I didn’t say all shrinks were out, just this one.”
Menken’s lips crimped with amusement. “Good! So whom shall we use instead?”
“Well, I—”
“I’ll tell you what, Emily. You canvas the local talent; I’ll foot the bill for your expenses—you know, parking, gasoline, whatever preliminary meetings you might require to choose a replacement. Then Cecelia can start out fresh, with the benefit of your more informed judgment, not to mention your presence.”
“Um, I …” I was about to tell him that I might be able to make a few calls—maybe chat with another shrink or two if that was what it would take—but that I’d hoped to move onward with my job hunt, when we were interrupted by the arrival of another man. I looked up. He was short and stocky, indifferently dressed in expensive business attire, and his splotchy scalp shone with perspiration through the threads of his once yellow hair. He quickly looked me up and down with greasy, bloodshot eyes, then turned his attention toward Menken. “Joe!” he croaked, in a voice that would have made the biggest bullfrog in the pond jealous for its volume and the rumble of its phlegm, “how are ya?” He stuck out a red ham of a hand for Menken to shake, then swung it toward me for a brief tag of fingertips. “Where’s a man get a beer around here?”
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