“Brian, you do know that I love you, don’t you?”
“Yes, my love, I know. Give it time, Emily.”
It was Sunday yet again, and when Paul arrived, he found Brian busy at work in the kitchen, carefully assembling a beef Wellington.
Paul saw the culinary gymnastics underway and asked, “What’s the occasion?”
“I’m trying to tempt Emily to actually eat something for a change. She’s wasting away.”
Emily was napping in her room. She seemed to be reversing night and day, staying up reading the night away and then dropping off to sleep at dawn. As Brian thought about this phenomenon, his concern was plainly apparent to his old friend.
“How is she, Brian?” Paul asked.
“I don’t know. She sleeps a lot during the day but not much at night. She doesn’t eat. She cries often, talks very little. She has a sort of haunted look. I wish I knew what was going on with her. There’s a depth to her sadness that scares me.”
“It hasn’t been very long, Brian, you’ve got to be patient. Is she seeing John Whitfield?”
“Yes. She went Monday and then came home and cried all afternoon. She went Thursday and I had to take her home early because she was in pain from her ribs. She hasn’t said a word about how it’s going.”
“How about you? Are you getting any sleep?”
“Oh, I’m fine. I haven’t been so lazy since I don’t know when. I’m supposed to go back to work tomorrow, and I’ll probably be worn out.”
They transferred the beef into the oven and the conversation into the great room. Brian was expressing his reservations about leaving Emily alone all day when he went back to work when she walked into the room.
“Hello, gentlemen. My ears are burning. You all must have been talking about me.” She made herself comfortable in a chair, resting her broken arm on a pillow.
“Brian was just doing his worry wart number about how he doesn’t want to leave you all alone when he goes back to work tomorrow.” Turning to Brian, Paul continued, “What on earth are you going to do with her when you go to Montreal?”
As soon as the words were out of the psychiatrist’s mouth, he knew he had said something wrong as Brian’s countenance clouded over.
Emily immediately asked, “Are you going to Montreal, Brian? That will be nice for you.”
Brian was slouched in his favorite chair with his left leg propped on an ottoman. The only indication of his mood was a thoughtful rubbing of his temple, a gesture that looked perfectly harmless but which in fact indicated great agitation for him. “No, sweetheart, I’m not going anywhere.”
Emily looked back and forth between the two men and sensed the tension in the room. “Paul, is Brian supposed to be going to Montreal?”
Paul looked uncomfortable, “I thought I heard that through the hospital grape vine, but I guess I got it wrong.”
Emily shifted her gaze back to Brian, “What’s all this about?” Her voice was firm, and she sounded suspicious.
“It’s really not a big deal. There’s going to be a short seminar at McGill in Montreal, and I was invited to go up and give a series of lectures, but I have no intention of going.” He made it sound as if he were annoyed by the whole subject, hoping that she would just drop it, but she was like a dog worrying a bone.
“All right, Paul, now you talk. What’s going on?”
“Emily, I obviously shouldn’t have said anything. Don’t get me in trouble.” He spoke with a smile, but she was in no mood to be humored.
“You’re both going to have more trouble than you can handle if somebody doesn’t tell me what this is all about.”
Brian finally grudgingly filled in the details. “I told you. They have this three week seminar series up in Montreal. One of the big pathologists from Johns Hopkins was supposed to give these lectures, but it turns out he had a heart attack and they asked me to take his place. I have no plans to spend three weeks in Canada.”
Emily digested this information and then asked, “Isn’t it sort of an honor for you to be asked to do something like this?”
“I guess so, but I have other plans for this summer.” He could dig in his heels as well as the best of them when he set his mind to it.
Emily smiled stiffly, “I know all about your plans for this summer. You plan to sit around and watch my frantic attempts to grow up and get a life. Fascinating as that prospect no doubt is, I think the world of medicine might be better served by your going to Montreal.”
Brian’s pent up frustration began to ooze out a little around the edges. “So, you don’t need me at all, and I might as well just go off and leave you, is that it?”
Emily stood up suddenly, threw her pillow on the floor, and turned her back to both men. She was obviously struggling with some powerful emotions. She took a deep breath, turned, and walked slowly to Brian’s chair, lowering herself on to the ottoman next to his foot.
She spoke softly and very deliberately. “Every minute of every hour of every day for the rest of my life, that’s when I need you. But you can’t put your life on hold waiting for me to get myself straight. I have to learn to be alone sometime, and I know I can do it. Go to Canada, Brian.” Her voice suddenly changed and there was a forced smile on her face. “I promise I’ll eat three meals every day and be in bed by ten if you’ll agree to make your trip. Now, you have to admit, that’s a good deal.”
Brian looked at her intently and then shot a glance at Paul, “Would you check on her every day since it was your big mouth that started this?”
“You bet. Go to Canada, Brian.”
Brian was to leave for Montreal in three weeks. During that time, a pattern evolved. On the days when Emily went to see Dr. Whitfield, she was quiet and apprehensive all morning, jumpy and weepy all evening. On the other days, she was pensive, but seemed to have a better handle on her emotions. Brian went back to work at the hospital, and also worked long hours in the evenings getting ready for the lectures he was to give.
Emily’s recovery from her injuries was steady. She was scheduled to have the cast removed while Brian was away. As summer grew hotter, she was more and more looking forward to being rid of it.
Emily had never had a roommate. During her college years she had lived in her parents’ house. They had been killed in an automobile accident when she was a junior, and Emily had stayed at home as guardian to her sister, who was fifteen at the time. When she left Raleigh to take her job in the County library, she had moved to the apartment that she had just left. For her, it was strange to hear someone stirring in the next room in the morning, to smell coffee brewing that someone else started, to share cooking duties with someone. It did not take her long to realize that Brian was a very easy person to live with. He was tidy without being obsessive about it. From her vantage point on the couch, she could hear his distinctive footsteps as he limped across the kitchen floor, and she found the sound somehow reassuring. He was a great cook.
Brian had not shared living quarters since his time in the army, which he had hated. Even in college, he had disliked the noise and clutter of the fraternity house. With Emily it was quite different. She never made a mess she didn’t clean up, she liked doing laundry, and she never answered the telephone for him, even if it took him six rings to get to it. She had good taste in music, but she also enjoyed silence. The only thing about living with her that frustrated him was that it was no euphemism—they really were just living together. He was developing resources of patience that he didn’t even know he had. The thing he liked best about living with her was coming home from work to a house with her smile in it, even though he didn’t see as much of that smile as he wished.
It was on a Friday evening during this time that Brian came home from work late. He didn’t want the meal that she had kept warm for him. He was quiet and his face was pinched, and Emily knew that something was troubling him. Sometimes she could make an educated guess about what might be bothering him based on what she read in the newspaper. Several months b
efore there had been a house fire in which several children had been killed. Brian seemed especially grim for several days, and Emily knew that he must have been one of the pathologists involved in the autopsies of the victims. He had discovered that the children had been drugged and the police later concluded that the fire was intentionally set. Brian certainly saw some of the very worst examples of human behavior in his job.
On this particular Friday, she couldn’t recall reading about any deaths that seemed particularly gruesome. Of course, the School of Medicine was often consulted about cases in other parts of the state, and the local newspaper only carried local obituaries.
Brian was sitting in his favorite chair, his head back and his eyes closed, his feet up on the ottoman. Emily watched him from her perch on the couch.
“You look like a cold beer might be just what the doctor ordered. Would you like me to bring you one?”
“I’d like you to bring me six, and that’s why I’m not going to have any. Thank you anyway.” he answered.
“Must have been a grizzly day at work.” She hadn’t exactly framed it like a question, but it left the door open if he had something he wanted to talk about. He didn’t.
“What did you do with yourself today?” he asked politely.
Emily shrugged her shoulders a little. “Not much. I did some laundry, ironed a few shirts, and sewed on a button that you lost on your blue sport coat.” As she spoke she saw that he was staring at her. “Brian, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing, I was just noticing how pretty you are.” His words were jovial, but the sad look around his eyes that was always there was more pronounced. In a soft voice so low she could barely hear it, he added, “Get better soon, Emily.”
There were tears in her eyes as she answered, “I’m doing the best I can, Brian.”
Realizing how his words must have sounded, he quickly said, “Oh, sweetheart, I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sorry.”
Crossing to sit on the arm of his chair, touching his forearm softly, Emily was as close to him as she had chosen to be in weeks. “What’s wrong? What happened to make you so upset?”
In a tired voice, he spoke as if the weight of the world was hanging on every word. “They brought in a murder victim from one of the rural counties east of here. The medical examiner out there wanted help with some of the analysis of the evidence. It was a woman in her twenties, raped and beaten to death.”
The only response that Brain could detect to what he had said was that the hand she was stroking his arm with stopped briefly and then resumed its course. When she spoke, her voice was strong and even. “We probably should have seen this one coming. This is part of what you do. I’ll sound like Dr. Whitfield here, but I’ll ask anyway. How did that make you feel?”
His voice shook and there were tears in his eyes. “She hadn’t been hit as many times as you. Her perpetrator had just used a heavier object and swung it a little harder. All I could think was, it could have been you.” Seeing the pain in her face brought him to a sudden stop. With obvious energy, he pulled himself together and continued, “But it wasn’t you, that’s what counts. You’re right here, and you’re getting better.”
She smiled at him rather weakly and in her own mind knew that what he was saying wasn’t true. She knew she wasn’t getting better, she was getting worse. She felt like a swimmer who was slowly sinking, waiting to hit the bottom and kick off against it back toward the surface, but facing the possibility that she would drown before she got there.
It was with a growing sense of frustration that Emily continued her visits to Dr. Whitfield. She had in the course of their conversations remembered many incidents of abuse in her childhood, and she recognized that it was important to do so. She also saw the connection between being beaten as a child and being assaulted as an adult, and understood that the attack she had suffered had triggered the symptoms of unresolved anger that she was enduring. But what she didn’t understand was why her bad memories from childhood should have such a deleterious affect on her relationship with Brian. She still did not agree with her previous psychiatrist that Brian was a father-figure for her, so why was she suddenly afraid of him, of all men? She wanted all of this to make sense, and she wanted it all to get better.
She shared this frustration with Dr. Whitfield at the beginning of the last session she had with him before Brian’s trip to Canada.
“When do you suppose I can expect to start seeing some progress?”
“Don’t you think you’ve been making progress?” He spoke with his usual calm, slow voice. Usually, Emily liked the pace and pitch of Dr. Whitfield’s voice, but on this occasion, when he was asking things she didn’t want to answer, it grated on her nerves.
“I don’t sleep. I’m miserable to be around. My life is horrible. What progress have I made?”
“You’ve remembered a lot of things that you repressed for a long time. You’ve come to understand that the bad things that happened to you weren’t your fault. That’s progress, isn’t it?”
“I wonder if Brian sees it that way.” The annoyance in her voice was clear.
“Has he voiced any complaints?”
“Of course not, he’s too polite to complain. But now that I’m remembering all this stuff, even when I do sleep I have bad dreams about it.”
The psychiatrist seemed very interested in this. “When did you start having bad dreams?”
“Since the last time I saw you.”
“As I recall it, the last time you were here you remembered an incident when your father was angry because he thought there was money missing. You said he started with the oldest and worked his way down to you beating all the children one by one until someone confessed. After he had worked his way around twice, you confessed just to get the whole thing over with. Is that right?”
“Yes, it was like a sick sort of game with him. If he had thought about it for two seconds, he would have realized that I couldn’t have taken the money because it was in a jar on the top of the refrigerator and I couldn’t reach that high.”
“Is that what you dreamed, just a re-enactment of that incident?”
“Yes, I believe so. It’s hard for me to remember bad dreams.”
“How does the dream end?”
“I’m hiding in the closet. That’s when I wake up.” It was obvious from the look on her face that Emily was unsettled about something. “I always went and hid in the closet after I got a beating. It was really the only place I could be alone.”
“I thought you were afraid of the dark as a child?” the psychiatrist asked.
“That was after.”
“After what?”
“After the time the money was missing. After I hid in the closet that time.” There was the now familiar strange mix of puzzlement and vagueness on her face, as if she were confused and didn’t particularly want to be set straight.
“Did anything frightening happen in the closet?”
“No. I hid in there and it was dark.”
“Did anyone find you in the closet?”
“No, I was alone in there. It was dark. I don’t remember anything else about it.”
“Keep track of any other bad dreams you have, they might give us some ideas about what might be in some corner of your mind that you don’t remember.”
The rest of her visit was uneventful, and Emily felt somehow unattached to the conversation. What was it about the closet? There was something about it that was important. Weeks of pain, of fear, and of sleeplessness had begun to take a heavy toll. Emily had always been a person of order and self-discipline. And now there seemed to be no order in her life, no discipline at all. She felt that for weeks she had been out of control, that she was in a sort of limbo. She was disturbed by the idea that she was out of a job, out of her own home, and completely dependent. “I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t think.” In her own mind, it was all epitomized by the struggle to remember what was so terrible about that closet. “I really am losing my mind,�
� she thought in a panic.
She spent the remainder of that day even quieter than usual. She ate nothing and went to bed before nine o’clock. Brian told himself that it was just another of her bad days, but took little comfort in it. He resolved to stay up and work on his lecture notes for the seminar so that he could have the weekend free to spend time with Emily before leaving on Monday. He was engrossed in various pathological intricacies when he heard strange noises coming from the guest room. He was going to the door to knock when there was a sudden crash. Hurrying into the room, he saw Emily on the floor next to the bed with a look of absolute terror on her face.
“Emily, what is it? Are you all right?” He stepped toward her to help her up, and she scurried away from him across the floor. “Emily, it’s me. You must have fallen out of bed.”
She looked around the room in dawning comprehension of where she was. She was breathing heavily and took a minute to compose herself, “I was having a bad dream.”
“So I gathered. Are you all right now? Do you want me to help you up?” He was not about to make another move in her direction until he was sure she was completely awake and knew where she was.
“Yes, I guess I did fall.”
“Does anything hurt? Did you bang your arm when you fell?”
She was crying softly, “I’m all right, Brian. It was just a dream.” Something in her tone suggested that it was herself she was trying to convince. “You don’t have to worry about me anymore.”
He made sure she was comfortable and then wished her goodnight, all the while thinking about what she had said, “You don’t have to worry.” Worry was just another kind of fear. For weeks the fear had been like static interference between them. “We can’t communicate, we don’t hear each other. I’m afraid that she will be lost in the grief of it all, so I try to get close enough to comfort her, but my closeness only makes her more afraid.” The terrible waste of effort that constituted worry had drained him of any creative ways to respond to her pain.
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