Emily was lying in her bed re-living her horrible dream. She knew that it was the memory of an actual event, and it was worse than anything she had yet remembered. She wasn’t sure what it meant, but she wished Dr. Whitfield were around to explain it to her, to make it make sense. Her memory had become a cruel enemy. She couldn’t remember being abducted and assaulted, and at first she had thought that it was a blessing not to remember. But she had come to realize that the pictures supplied by her imagination were devastating her peace of mind and could only be stopped by knowing the facts. On the other hand, she wished that she might never remember the terrible things she endured as a child, but those memories flooded her mind and tormented her. And always there were the questions without answers. “Why did this happen to me? Doesn’t it go to show that I really am worthless? Doesn’t it make me even more worthless than I thought I was?”
And along with all of her own pain, there was Brian. She knew only too well that her problems were also having a terrible effect on him. It brought a new wave of tears when she recalled what Brian’s father had said, “He’s never been as happy in his life as he’s been since he met you.” That certainly wasn’t true any more. He was so quiet, so tired all the time. “I can’t do this any more. I’m his tormentor,” she thought, “and it has to stop.”
It was a long, somber weekend they spent. On Saturday, Brian went in to the hospital to take care of the final details that would make it possible for him to leave on Monday. On Sunday, Emily said she still didn’t feel quite well enough to go to church. Brian knew that she didn’t feel comfortable going anywhere where people knew what had happened to her. Emily seemed lost in thought like a person trying to work out a complex logic problem. Whenever Brian spoke, she looked at him as if he were distracting her from something important that she needed to do. There was something about her behavior that Brian found disquieting, especially when he remembered what she said the other night after her dream, “You don’t have to worry about me any more.”
“What are you thinking about so intently, darling?” he asked as nonchalantly as he could manage. “You look like you’re formulating some sort of scheme.”
Again that distracted look, “I’m just trying to understand something. Tell me again why the man who attacked me tied me up.”
Brian was bewildered by the question, but strove to answer it. It was difficult to explain the nature of sexual perversion to an innocent like Emily, but he did his best. “Why on earth do you want to think about that?” he asked her.
There was a trace of annoyance in her voice when she answered, “I don’t want to think about it, but I have to understand. I have to know the worst of it. I have to hit the bottom of the barrel, if only so I can know whether or not I can get past it and go on.”
There was something much less than re-assuring in her words. To Brian’s ear there was an echo from another era in his own life. There was a time when he also had to know whether he could go on, and when he decided that he couldn’t. He was reminded of what he had said to Paul about Emily’s despondency, “The depth of her sadness scares me.” He struggled to find the right thing to say and finally just blurted out, “You know, Emily, I really couldn’t live without you.”
The look on her face made it very clear that she was aware of what was going through his mind. In fact they both knew the nature of the decision she was trying to make. But how to make that decision when logic and reason have long since fled, when whatever you do seems to be more wrong than right, when the only thing that still has any real meaning is fear--these were the thoughts that crowded through her mind. Afraid to go to sleep for fear of the dreams that bring more old horrors to light, afraid to get up in the morning and face another day of remembering. Afraid to do anything for fear of making things worse, afraid to refrain from doing anything that might make things better. Reverting to form, deciding the future course of your life based on what scares you the least. To go on, to keep trying, is terrifying because life as it is now isn’t worth living. But to give up is even more terrifying because despite the confusion, she knew that Brian meant what he said, that he really didn’t want to live his life without her.
Breaking away from the convoluted train of her thoughts, she asked him pointedly, “Is your life really better with me in it, even the way I am now?”
Without an instant’s hesitation, he answered, “Yes, absolutely. Nothing can ever change the love I feel for you, nothing can do that. But it’s even more than that. I’m a different person with you in my life, and I like myself better.” After a minute’s reflection, he added, “It would be patronizing, not to mention inaccurate, for me to say that I understand what you’re going through; but I can certainly see that you’re hurt and scared. I’ve been down that road. When I got hurt in Iraq and woke up with my hand gone and my leg so mangled, the pain I was in was scary. But it was when my leg stopped hurting that I knew I would lose it. I know we both hurt right now, sweetheart, but keep in mind that the pain is a sign that we still have a lot that’s worth holding on to. And try to keep in mind, too, that you’re not alone.”
For a long while, she stood quietly, staring out of the window at nothing. Finally he broke the silence himself. “I can’t leave you tomorrow, not like this. I don’t have to go.”
“Yes you do,” she answered and then turned to face him directly. “I’ll be all right. I’ll be here when you get back.”
Chapter 8
Brian fell in love with Montreal practically from the minute the plane landed. It was somewhat ridiculous to think that he never got to Canada the whole time he lived in Vermont, but now that he lived way down in North Carolina, he was making the trip. He rented a car and took in as much of the city as he could, starting with Old Montreal down by the harbor. There were cobblestone streets and historic monuments and sites. He noticed everywhere that the people strolled along the streets where there were cafes, flower kiosks, and art displays out in the open. It was incredible how clean everything was compared to any American city of comparable size. He spent a day at the Terre des Hommes, Man and His World, the international fair.
In between playing tourist, he worked on the lectures that were his reason for being in Canada in the first place. The sessions went very well, and Brian was well-pleased with the responses he heard. He grew a little tired toward the end of the third week, and he smiled as he told himself he was not as young as he used to be, but he knew that the time away was doing him a world of good. He was tempted to feel a little guilty about enjoying himself so much, but he kept in touch with Paul, who assured him that Emily was well and seemed in better spirits each day. Brian thought it odd that she insisted that he not call her at all while he was gone, but he knew she sincerely wanted him to have a vacation from her whole situation.
He thought of her often as he saw the enchanting sights of the unique city with its blend of European flavor and North American style. He went to the Place des Arts Comples and heard the Montreal Symphony Orchestra give a marvelous concert, and all he could think about was how much Emily would have enjoyed it. He went to the Musee des Beaux-Arts gallery and saw some beautiful portraits, and all the faces reminded him of hers.
The day before he was scheduled to go home, he received a package at the University guest house were he was staying. He opened it to find mail that Emily had sent as well as a large envelope on which she had written:
Dear Brian,
I thought reading your mail would give you something to
do on the plane tomorrow. Please do not read the enclosed until
you have spoken to me. I will stay home tonight and wait to
hear from you. Hope this finds you well, I’m fine.
Love,
Emily
He had one more lecture to give, but his mind was not on it as he wondered what was in the envelope. He certainly hoped it wasn’t some sort of farewell. It was a long day until he got back to his room and placed the call.
“Hello, Emily.”
“Yes, it’s been great, but I’ll be glad to get home. I’ve missed you. How have you been?”
She certainly sounded cheerful enough, “I’ve been fine. I’ve been getting a lot accomplished. That’s what I wrote to you about in the envelope I sent. I wanted you to know what’s been going on with me before you get here. Anyway, we don’t want to talk about it on the phone, so I’ll let you go. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
“All right, sweetheart. Goodnight then.”
He could hear the hesitation in her voice, “Brian...”
“Yes?”
“I really do love you.”
A contented sigh preceded his answer. “That’s good to hear. I love you too.”
The first thing that occurred to Brain when he opened the envelope as he lay in his bed was that he had only been gone three weeks, and Emily had written a whole volume. It felt a little strange to be reading her journal, but as those were her wishes, that is what he proceeded to do.
Monday, June 14. As I write this at the end of a long, tiring day, I wonder if in fact I will ever have the nerve to send it to you, dear Brian. Dr. Whitfield suggested I keep this journal as a way of communicating the things that I find difficult to say, and I agree with the idea on principle. Of course, there are a lot of things I agree with on principle that I have lost sight of in the last few weeks.
I suppose I should begin by filling you in on what has already been going on that I couldn’t tell you to your face. I can tell from things that you’ve said and things I’ve heard you and Paul say that you’ve both figured out that a large measure of the misery I’ve been feeling since I was attacked has to do with my childhood. You undoubtedly figured out even before I did that I was abused as a child. Much of the time I have spent with Dr. Whitfield has been invested in ferreting out what happened to me, and I’ve remembered some pretty terrible stuff.
Once I got used to the idea that it all really happened, I had to figure out why it was making me so miserable now. I especially had to know where the connections were between my childhood abuse, my recent attack, and my current problems with intimacy (actually, my problems with intimacy go way back, but you know that better than anybody).
I finally found that link the other night when I had the dream and fell out of the bed. There was an incident that I remembered that was often repeated in my childhood. My father had a habit of deciding that some infraction of the rules had occurred and just beating all of the children until someone confessed. He was an incredibly sick person. Anyway, the specific incident that I remembered was one that happened when I was eight. He determined that there was a dollar missing from a jar he kept on the top of the refrigerator. No one admitted to taking it, so he started with the oldest and beat on everybody, but no one said anything. He went through the whole group of us again, and finally I said I had taken it, which was ridiculous considering how small I was, I could never have reached the top of the refrigerator. Anyway, he had grown tired of his game and sent us all to bed. These family beatings were always at night. Instead of going to bed, I hid in the closet. I went there when I wanted to be alone because I shared a room with my sisters. I stayed in there and I heard my father go to bed. What I hadn’t realized until that night was that you could see into my parents’ bedroom through a hole in the wall in the back of the closet. When I looked through the hole that night after he had beaten all us children I saw my parents having sex. I hadn’t the foggiest idea what they were doing, but it seemed to me that my mother was simply getting her beating, that it was her turn, and that this was his way of hurting her. In my own mind, it explained why she always seemed so sad.
Today my session with Dr. Whitfield was all about that dream. I guess you can imagine what he said. It is the kind of thing, no doubt, that psychiatrists live to deal with. Even a naive fool like me realized that it must have been that my father was sick like the man who tied me up. So now I know that my problem is that I equate sex with violence, which strikes me as pretty dumb when you consider that the only man I’ve ever imagined myself having sex with is as non-violent and non-threatening a person as he could possibly be. Anyway, Dr. Whitfield assures me that now that we have a good idea what the problem is, we have a good chance of working it all out.
I stopped to re-read what I’ve already written, and it looks as terrible in print as it sounded when I said it all out loud to Dr. Whitfield. I wish I could still believe that things like that don’t really happen to people, and therefore couldn’t have happened to me. But I know that it did, and I know too that it makes me very angry. In one sense, it’s a good thing that you’re not here, because I don’t know that I could get this angry around you, I would be afraid that you would think that I was angry with you.
It has become obvious that I’m going to have to be willing to discuss these matters with Dr. Whitfield, and I’m uncomfortable with that idea. I asked Paul today if he thought it would make you uncomfortable to know that I was talking about intimately personal things with a psychiatrist, and he said he thought you would be supportive of anything that helped our situation improve, which does ring true. Of course, you’re always supportive of me.
So now you know that the lady in your life is a genuine neurotic. You probably figured that out a long time ago. I hope you also know that I love you, and that I want more than anything else to get well enough to be able to show you that.
Tuesday June 15. I managed to spend the whole night in the guest room last night and did not once get up to see if anyone was out in the yard or in the closet. Of course, I also did not sleep a wink, but we can’t have everything. It’s hard to explain how frightening it is to have an enemy out there somewhere that knows who you are, but you wouldn’t know him if he came to the door in broad daylight. He knows my name, he knows what my car looks like. It’s spooky. I always thought of myself as basically unimaginative, but I sure have imagined a lot of terrible scenarios for what happened to me. I could be hired out as a consultant to a horror movie. I remember when you first told me that you tried to kill yourself after you were injured in the war. I spent a lot of sleepless nights imagining how you did it. There were some pretty grim images in my mind. What a stupid thing to do, but I just couldn’t seem to get it out of my mind. Finally, of course, I stopped thinking much about it. (I begin to see why Dr. Whitfield suggested this as a way of communicating. I would never have had the nerve to tell you that face to face.)
I will probably never know what happened to me on May 12 and that’s hard to live with, but I’m trusting that as time passes, it will at least stop driving me crazy. I am at least beginning to understand that no matter how it was, it wasn’t my fault.
In one part of my mind, I am also trying to figure what you really feel about the attack on me. I wonder if there isn’t at least some small part of you that recoils at the idea of touching me. But I know better than that. I have seen the look in your eyes that I recognize, the look that tells me that you want me. Even though that look reminds me of how much I’ve frustrated you, I treasure seeing it in your eyes. When I look in the mirror, I feel awkward and ugly, but when I look in your eyes, I feel almost pretty.
Wednesday June 16 I’ve also been thinking about how wise you were when you pointed out to me the unhealthy way I have of compartmentalizing my thinking. I have to stop equating pleasure with guilt and pain with punishment. I guess it boils down to allowing the grace of God to permeate all of my thinking, to accept that God wants me to be happy and have pleasure in life. I was struck as much as anything by a conviction that I have been incredibly selfish over the last few weeks. It wasn’t just my wedding that got called off, but I acted as if I was the only one suffering. I let myself become the center of my own universe. How can you ever forgive me for shutting you out the way I have?
I used to think of myself as a forgiving person, but now I know that I’m not. Instead of finding a way to forgive my father for hurting me, I simply
denied to myself that he had hurt me. Now that I know what he did, I’m angry with him all over again. I will know that I have made real progress when I can think of the concept of ‘father’ and not be uncomfortable.
Thursday June 17 Today I had a session with Dr. Whitfield. He wanted to talk religion, which struck me as long overdue. He asked if I felt that my self-image had suffered as a result of abuse in childhood, and I said of course it had. I had terrible guilt feelings because I hated my father so much and felt that I was abused because I had in some way deserved it. He asked me what happened to change that, and I told him about my feelings in church. He looked at me as if I was speaking Greek. Theology and psychology are far removed disciplines in many ways; one has to do with our understanding of God, the other with our understanding of ourselves. Theology is about the perfection of God, and psychology about the imperfection of the human mind. As far as we are from God is the distance between psychology and theology. Perhaps it’s just that I didn’t explain it very well.
I have been tempted to fall into the heretical trap that says, “If you are a good person, really horrible things won’t happen to you.” There is so much wrong with that, it is hard to see why so many people believe it. I have had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t beaten as a child because I was a bad kid, but because my father was a sinner. I wasn’t raped because I was a bad person, I was raped because Mr. B Positive was a sinner. If I were going to believe that philosophy, I’d choose to look at it the other way around and say, “God sent Brian into my life. I must be a wonderful person.” I still believe that God sent us into one another’s lives, but it was because of His goodness, not ours.
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