by Jodi Picoult
I imagine my mother going after Wade Preston, and I smile. "I hope I'm around to watch that."
My mother squeezes my hand. She looks up at the stars on the ceiling. "Where else would you be?" she asks.
I lean over Lucy from behind and place the guitar in her arms. "Cradle it like a baby," I say, "with your left hand supporting the neck."
"Like this?" She turns in her seat, so that she is looking up at me.
"Let's hope when you babysit you don't strangle the kids quite like that . . ."
She lets up on her choke hold on the neck of the guitar. "Oh."
"Now put your left index finger on the fifth string, second fret. Put your left middle finger on the fourth string, second fret."
"My fingers are getting all tangled--"
"Playing the guitar's like Twister for your hands. Take your pick between your right thumb and forefinger. Press down on the strings with your left hand, and with your right, gently drag that pick over the sound hole."
A chord fills the small confines of the nurse's office, the space we are occupying for our session today. Lucy looks up, glowing. "I did it!"
"That's an E minor. It's the first chord I learned, too." I watch her play it a few more times. "You've got a really good sense of music," I say.
Lucy bends over my guitar. "Must be genetic. My family's really big on making a 'joyful noise.'"
I forget, most of the time, that Lucy's family attends Max's church. Vanessa had told me months ago, when Lucy and I started working together. Most likely, they know Max and Wade Preston. They just haven't done the math yet to realize their precious daughter is spending time with the Devil Incarnate.
"Can I play a song?" Lucy asks, excited.
"Well, with one more chord you can learn 'A Horse with No Name.'" I take the guitar from her and settle it in my lap, then play the E minor, followed by a D add6 add9.
"Wait," Lucy says. She covers my hand with her own, so that her fingers match the places where mine sit on the guitar. Then she lifts my hand off the neck of the instrument, and spins my wedding band. "That's really pretty," Lucy says.
"Thanks."
"I never noticed it before. Is it your wedding ring?"
I wrap my arms around the guitar. Why is a question that should be so simple to answer not simple at all? "We're not here to talk about me."
"But I don't know anything about you. I don't know if you're married or if you've got kids or if you're a serial killer . . ."
When she says the word kids, my stomach does a flip. "I'm not a serial killer."
"Well, that's a comfort."
"Look, Lucy. I don't want to waste our time together by--"
"It's not wasting time if I'm the one who asks, is it?"
This much I know about Lucy: she is unstoppable. Once she gets an idea in her head, she won't let go. It's why she picks up so quickly on any musical challenge I toss her, from lyric analysis to learning how to play an instrument. I've often thought that this was why she was so disconnected from the world when we first met--not because she didn't care but because she cared too much; whenever she engaged, it was bound to exhaust her.
This I also know about Lucy: Although I don't think she's particularly conservative, her family is. And in this case, what she doesn't know can't hurt her. If she accidentally reveals to her mother that I'm married to Vanessa, I have no doubt our therapy sessions will come to a grinding halt. I couldn't stand knowing that my own situation in some way negatively affected hers.
"I don't understand why this is such a state secret," she says.
I shrug. "You wouldn't ask the school psychologist about her personal life, would you?"
"The school psychologist isn't my friend."
"I'm not your friend," I correct. "I'm your music therapist."
Immediately, she pulls away from me. Her eyes shutter.
"Lucy, you don't understand--"
"Oh, believe me, I understand," she says. "I'm your fucking dissertation. Your little Frankenstein experiment. You walk out of here and go home and you don't give a shit about me. I'm just business, to you. It's okay. I totally get it."
I sigh. "I know it feels hurtful to you, but my job, Lucy, is to talk about you. To focus on you. Of course I care about you, and of course I think about you when we're not meeting. But ultimately I need you to see me as your music therapist, not your buddy."
Lucy pivots her seat, staring blankly out the window. For the next forty minutes, she doesn't react when I play, sing, or ask her what she wants to listen to on my iPod. When the bell finally rings, she bolts like a mustang who's chewed through her tethers. She's halfway out the door when I tell her I will see her Friday, but I am not sure she hears me at all.
"Stop fidgeting," Vanessa whispers as I sit beside Angela Moretti, waiting for the judge to walk into the courtroom and rule on Wade Preston's motion to appoint a guardian ad litem.
"I can't help it," I mutter.
Vanessa is sitting directly behind our table. My mother, beside her, pipes up. "Anxiety's like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you very far."
Vanessa looks at her. "Who said that?"
"I just did."
"But were you quoting anyone?"
"Myself," she says proudly.
"I'm going to tell it to one of my AP students. He actually had his car detailed to read HARVARD OR BUST."
I am distracted by the arrival of Max and his attorneys. Wade Preston walks down the aisle of the courtroom first, followed by Ben Benjamin, and then Reid. A few steps behind is Max, wearing another new suit that his brother must have purchased for him. His hair is too long, curling over his ears. I used to make fun of him when it got like that, used to say he was rocking a Carol Brady look.
If there's a physical component to falling in love--the butterflies in your stomach, the roller coaster of your soul--then there's an equal physical component to falling out of love. It feels like your lungs are sieves, so you can't get enough air. Your insides freeze solid. Your heart becomes a tiny, bitter pearl, a chemical reaction to one irritating grain of truth.
The last person in the entourage is Liddy. She's channeling Jackie Kennedy today. "Is she OCD?" Vanessa whispers. "Or are the gloves a fashion statement?"
Before I can respond, a harried paralegal rushes down the aisle with a hand truck and begins to stack reference books in front of Wade Preston, just like the other day. Even if it's all for show, it's working. I'm totally intimidated.
"Hey, Zoe," Angela says, not looking up from the notes she's writing down. "Did you know that the postal service almost put Wade Preston's face on a stamp? But they gave up when people couldn't figure out which side to spit on."
In a flurry of black robes, Judge O'Neill enters. "You know, Mr. Preston, you don't earn rewards mileage for coming to court more often." He flips through the motion before him. "Am I misreading this, Counselor, or are you asking for a guardian ad litem to be appointed for a child that does not and may never exist?"
"Your Honor," Preston says, getting to his feet, "the important thing is that we're talking about a child. You even just said so, yourself. And once this pre-born child comes into being, the outcome of your decision is going to determine where he or she is raised. To that end, I think you should have some input from a qualified professional who can interview the potential families and prospective parents and give you the tools to make that decision."
The judge peers over his glasses at Angela. "Ms. Moretti, something tells me you might have a different point of view."
"Your Honor, a guardian ad litem's responsibilities include interviewing the child at the center of the disagreement. How do you interview an embryo?"
Wade Preston shakes his head. "No one's suggesting that the GAL talk to a petri dish, Judge. But we feel that talking to the potential parents will give a good indication of which lifestyle might be more fitting for a child."
"Straw," I whisper.
Distracted, Angela leans close
r to me. "What?"
I shake my head, silent. The embryos are kept in straws, not petri dishes. If Preston had done his homework, he would have known that. But this isn't about being thorough, or accurate, for him. It's about being the ringmaster of a circus.
"With all due respect, Your Honor, the law in Rhode Island is clear," Angela counters. "When we discuss what's in the best interests of children during a custody battle, we are talking about children that are already alive. What Mr. Preston is trying to do is elevate the status of frozen embryos to something they're not in this state--namely, humans."
The judge turns to Wade Preston. "You raise an interesting point, Mr. Preston. I'm not sure I wouldn't appreciate exploring that concept further, but Ms. Moretti is right on the law. The appointment of a guardian ad litem presumes the existence of a minor child, so I am going to have to deny your motion. However, as concerns this court, it's in our best interests to protect innocent victims. To that end, I will hear from all the witnesses and take on the role of a guardian ad litem myself." He glances up. "Are we ready to set a date for trial?"
"Your Honor," Angela says, "my client is forty-one years old, her spouse is nearly thirty-five. The embryos have been cryo-preserved for over a year now. We'd like this resolved as soon as possible to ensure the best chances for a viable pregnancy."
"It seems that Ms. Moretti and I actually agree for once," Wade Preston adds. "Although the reason we want this brought to trial quickly is because these children deserve to be put into a loving, traditional Christian home as soon as possible."
"There's a third reason for this to be scheduled in a timely fashion," Judge O'Neill says. "I'm retiring at the end of June, and I damn well don't intend to leave this mess for someone else to clean up. We'll set the trial date for fifteen days from now. I trust both sides will be fully prepared?"
After the judge leaves for chambers, I turn to Angela. "That's good, right? We won the motion?"
But she is less enthusiastic than I would have expected. "Technically," she admits. "But I don't like what he said about 'innocent victims.' Feels slanted to me."
We stop speaking as Wade Preston approaches and hands a piece of paper to Angela. "Your witness list," she says, looking it over. "Aren't you proactive?"
He grins, like a shark. "You ain't seen nothin' yet, sugar," he says.
On Friday, Lucy is fifteen minutes late for our session. I decide to give her the benefit of the doubt, since we have been moved to the photography studio on the third floor--a room that I didn't even know existed. "Hi," I say, when she walks in. "You had trouble finding it, too?"
Lucy doesn't answer. She sits down at a desk, takes out a book, and buries her nose in it.
"Okay, you're still mad at me. That's coming through loud and clear. So let's talk about it." I lean forward, my hands clasped between my knees. "It's perfectly normal for a client to misinterpret a relationship with her therapist--Freud even talked about it being a key to finding out something from your past that's still upsetting to you. So maybe we can look constructively at why you want me to be your friend. What does that say about who you are, and what you need right now?"
Stone-faced, she flips a page.
The book is a collection of short stories by Anton Chekhov. "You're taking Russian lit," I surmise. "Impressive."
Lucy ignores me.
"I never took Russian lit. Too much of a wimp. I have enough trouble understanding all that stuff when it's in English." I reach for my guitar and pluck out a Slavic, minor run of notes. "If I were going to play Russian literature, I think it would sound like this," I muse. "Except I really need a violin."
Lucy slams the book shut, shoots me a look of death, and puts her head down on the desk.
I pull my chair closer to her. "Maybe you don't want to tell me what's on your mind. Maybe you'd like to play it, instead."
No response.
I reach for my djembe and put it between my knees, tilted so that she can drum on it. "Are you this angry," I ask, striking it lightly, "or this angry?" I smack it, hard, with my palm.
Lucy continues facing in the opposite direction. I begin to play a beat, thump-thump-thump-THUMP, thump-thump-thump-THUMP.
Eventually, I stop. "If you don't want to talk, maybe we'll just listen today."
I set my iPod on the portable speaker system and begin to play some of the music that Lucy has reacted to before--either positively or negatively. At this point, I just want to get a rise out of her. I think I've finally cracked her shell when she sits up, twists in her chair, and digs in her backpack. A moment later, she comes up with a ratty, crushed tissue.
Lucy tears off two tiny scraps of the tissue. She balls them up and sticks them in her ears.
I shut off the music.
When I first started working with Lucy and she behaved like this, I saw it as a challenge I had to overcome, the same way I faced challenges with all my other patients. But after months of progress . . . this feels like a personal affront.
Freud would call that countertransference. Or in other words, what happens when the therapist's emotions get tangled up with a patient's. I am supposed to step back and wonder why Lucy might try to elicit this anger in me. That way, I regain control of the emotions in our therapeutic relationship again . . . and, more important, I discover another missing piece of the puzzle that is Lucy.
The thing is, Freud got it all wrong.
When Max and I first met, he took me fishing. I'd never been, and I didn't understand how people could spend entire days bobbing around on the ocean waiting for a bite that never came. It seemed silly, an utter waste of time. But that day, the striped bass were running. He baited my hook and cast the line and showed me how to hold the fishing rod. After about fifteen minutes, I felt a tug on the line. I've got one, I said, excited and nervous. I listened to Max carefully as he told me what to do--move rhythmically and slowly, never let up on the pull of the line--but then, suddenly, it went slack. When I reeled in, the bait was gone, and so was the striper. I was utterly deflated, and in that moment I understood why fishermen would wait all day to catch something: you have to understand what you're missing before you can really feel a loss.
That's why Lucy's boycott of this session hurts so much more than it did at the beginning. I know her now. I've connected with her. So her withdrawal isn't a challenge; it's a setback.
After a few minutes, I turn off the music, and we sit out the rest of the session in silence.
When Max and I were trying to have a baby, we had to see a social worker at the IVF clinic--but I don't remember the questions being anything like the ones that Vanessa and I are hearing now.
The social worker's name is Felicity Grimes, and she looks like she didn't get the memo that the eighties are over. Her red suit jacket is asymmetrical, with enormous shoulder pads. Her hair is piled so high it could function as a sail in the wind. "Do you really think you'll stay together?" she asks.
"We're married," I say. "I think that's a pretty good indicator of our commitment."
"Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce," Felicity says.
I am nearly certain that, when Max and I met with the social worker, she didn't question whether or not our relationship would stand the test of time.
"That's true of opposite-sex marriages," Vanessa says. "But gay marriage hasn't been around long enough to really have any statistics. Then again, considering the lengths we had to go to to get married, you could argue we're even more committed than the average straight couple."
I squeeze Vanessa's hand, a warning. I've tried to explain to her that, no matter how stupid the questions get, we have to just stay calm and answer them. The objective here is not to wave a rainbow banner. It's to get a social worker's check mark, so that we can move on to the next step. "What she means is that we're in this for the long haul," I say, and smile tentatively.
We had to fight the clinic director to begin the process of in vitro--in spite of the fact that a court order held the frozen embryos
in limbo. She agreed to allow us to get the psychological components completed, and then--if the court ruled in our favor--to start Vanessa immediately on the drug regimen. But, she pointed out, if Max wanted Reid and Liddy to have the same privilege, she would have to give it to them.
We have already explained to the counselor how we met, how long we've been together. "Have you considered the legal ramifications of being same-sex parents?"
"Yes," I say. "I'll adopt the baby, after Vanessa gives birth."
"I assume you both have powers of attorney?"
We look at each other. Unlike straight couples, if I were in a car crash and dying, Vanessa wouldn't have the rights as my spouse to sit by me at the hospital, to make the decision to turn off life support. Because our marriage isn't federally recognized, we have to jump through all these extra legal hoops to get the same rights--1,138 of them--that come naturally to heterosexual couples who get married. Vanessa and I had been planning to sit down with a bottle of bourbon one night and ask each other questions no one ever wants to have to answer--about organ donation and hospice care and brain death--but then we were served with a lawsuit and, ironically, asking a lawyer to draft a power of attorney was moved to the back burner. "We're in the process of getting that taken care of." It's not a lie if we meant to do it, is it?
"Why do you want to have a child?" Felicity asks.
"I won't speak for Vanessa," I say, "but I've always wanted one. I tried for almost a decade, with my ex-husband. I don't think I'll feel complete if I don't have the chance to be a mother."
The social worker turns to Vanessa. "I see kids every day at work. Some of them are shy, or funny, or complete pains in the neck. But every single one of them is living proof that, at one point, their parents believed they'd have a future together. I want to have Zoe's baby so that she can grow up with two mothers who have moved heaven and earth to bring her into this world."
"But how do you feel about being a parent?"
"I'm obviously fine with it," Vanessa says.
"Yet you've never expressed a desire to have a child before now . . ."
"Because I wasn't with a partner I'd want to have kids with."
"Are you doing this for Zoe, then, or for yourself?"