by Kate Flora
Before I could move down the list, and ask about Heidi’s father, Peggy knocked on the door and entered without waiting. “Dr. Purcell is here,” she said. “Shall I bring her in?”
Elaine Purcell was tallish, slim, and had the kind of thick, sleek, gray chin-length bob I’ve always admired. My hair, when it reached that stage, would just be a wild gray mass. She was head-to-toe shades of gray, with a paisley gray scarf so perfectly arranged her stylist might have just stepped out of the picture. I didn’t have a stylist and the best I could do with a scarf was drape it around my neck and tie a knot, as I had done this morning. Suzanne, who despairs about me, was, until recently, my personal shopper, and Andre likes me without clothes, so I’ve never come to terms with sartorial challenges. Dr. Purcell had.
She looked smart and pleasant, and when she spoke, her voice had the rich resonance of someone who sang plaintive folk songs in her spare time. A pleasing voice to listen to, though in my limited experience shrinks didn’t talk all that much. Also a commanding voice, one that could compel a response.
She crossed the room in three quick strides, took Gareth’s hand between hers, and said, “Dr. Wilson. I was so sorry to hear about your situation from Dick. I hope I’ll be able to help.”
As Gareth introduced us, she shifted her gaze to me. She had eerily penetrating eyes, the odd light blue of a husky, and I felt like she could see through my skin. Maybe she could, because she took my hand between both of hers and repeated, “I hope I’ll be able to help.” A quick glance at my midriff told me she hadn’t missed my condition, either. A clever and observant woman. Exactly what we needed right now.
I didn’t know how Heidi would react to Dr. Purcell, but I wanted to confide in her. Some of the situations I’ve been called in on have left plenty of bad stuff going on in my head that she might have helped with. But she wasn’t here for me. I wasn’t here for me, either.
Gareth explained that I was there as a specialist in managing campus crises.
“I hope it won’t come to that,” she said. “But we all know what the press is like.” She dropped onto the couch across from me, took a scone, and smiled at Gareth. “If you could rustle up another cup, I would love some coffee. And then you can fill me in about your student.”
If I’m fairly confident, she took it to a whole new level. I finished my bagel, moved on to a scone—orange-cranberry and delish even if it did cover me in crumbs—and drank my coffee while he filled her in with the little we knew. Then I went to meet with the deans and the school’s communications staff while he took Dr. Purcell to the infirmary to meet Heidi. We really couldn’t do much without the results of her assessment. What she learned would help us to craft the school’s public message as well as help the administration prep for the student meeting to be held later that afternoon.
In the meantime, I could work with them on the basics—get family contact lists generated and designate the staff members who would be calling all of the parents with a prepared message about the campus situation. Help them with an outline of what would be told to the students at the all-school meeting. Begin working on a draft press release for distribution and to be posted on the school’s website that would represent the school’s official position on the situation to the world at large. Perhaps most important, having the Dean of Faculty send a reminder to all staff about not discussing the situation with anyone outside of school, and noting that discretion about discussing school business was part of their contract. It’s sad but true—sometimes the faculty can be more childish than the students.
I also spoke with the Dean of Students and the Head of Residential Life about ways they could support the rest of the students. A situation like this, where a student breaks the rules in a manner that’s shocking to her peers, can have all kinds of ripple effects through a school community. The students would need their advisors and their faculty (often one and the same) to be available and understanding. They would also need that universal staple of teen life—snack food—available in places they tended to congregate. They would need to know, and frequently be reminded, that counselors were available if they needed to talk. They would also need to be reminded that, if possible, they were not to discuss the matter outside the community except with their parents. That last was a long shot, but we had to try.
As I talked, I suppressed visions of the story exploding on social media before we even had an idea of what “the story” really was. With so little known and such an explosive event, I was walking around with what felt like ten pound weights pressing on my shoulders, with a sense of impending doom I needed to shake off in order to work.
It was wonderful news that the baby had been found in time and that she had survived and was doing well, but the threat of criminal prosecution still hung over us—a whole range of potential charges from neglect to attempted murder. I was disappointed that the school’s attorney was scheduled for so late in the morning, even though Gareth said they had spoken earlier, and concerned about when she would meet with Heidi. I’m a lawyer’s daughter, and while I know how unpleasant lawyers can be, in this case, both Heidi and the school were seriously in need of a lawyer’s protection.
That was something I could deal with when Gareth and Dr. Purcell returned. I needed to meet their lawyer myself. Another item on my checklist for protecting the school. It seemed unlikely, given the maturity of the baby, that she had been conceived at Simmons. Heidi had started the school year late, arriving in mid-September. Still, the fact that the pregnancy had gone undetected was a problem we had to anticipate. It could be seen as evidence that the school hadn’t taken proper care of Heidi, and, by implication, wasn’t caring for their other students. We were in an awkward position here—we had to protect the school while also protecting Heidi. At some point, the school’s interests and hers might diverge, and there would be choices to make. We would know more after Dr. Purcell had spoken with Heidi.
Though Gareth had been diligent and I’d gotten a good response to my preliminary advice, much of the situation was still very murky. And more murk lay ahead. None of us knew how the situation would develop when Heidi’s mother and stepfather arrived. And I still didn’t know whether Heidi’s father had been informed about the situation. I had seen noncustodial parents go ballistic when they felt they’d been slighted, however indifferent their behavior toward their children had been. Gareth said the mother was going to notify the father, but that was not something it was wise to count on in a divorce situation. Depending on the parents’ relationship, she might have deliberately neglected to tell her ex.
Gareth had noted that the father was hard to reach, but that didn’t let Simmons off the hook. I was going to have to get on top of this.
I made more notes about things to do on my pad, with “Heidi’s father?” at the top of the list.
Meanwhile, my vibrating phone had been rustling in my purse like a restless mouse. Gareth hadn’t come back yet, so I wouldn’t upset anyone by dealing with my own business instead of his. I pulled it out and scanned my messages. Crap! The easy immediacy of texting and phone calls, coupled with the way it feeds into peoples’ entitlement and impatience, means no one is willing to be put off any more. I had canceled, rescheduled, or postponed all of my other clients for today and tomorrow, but several people who still had questions weren’t waiting. Whoever advised us to “be here now” obviously hadn’t had a life that demanded being in several places at once. Maybe I’ll retire soon and write my own book: Be Everywhere Now.
Worse yet, in the course of efficiently postponing my business responsibilities, I had forgotten about my own mother despite the fact that my focus was all about mothers and children. More specifically, I’d forgotten to cancel dinner with my mother. We were supposed to meet half way between my place in Maine and her home south of Boston. Now the screen said she had called and left a voicemail.
We’d arranged to have dinner because my mother wanted my help planning a baby shower for my brother Michael’s toxic wife Son
ia, a task somewhat akin to agreeing to rub myself all over with sandpaper and then letting my skin be salted. Michael and Sonia carry such a miasma of dissatisfaction, arrogance, and entitlement that two meetings a year are about all I can handle. Helping my perfectionist, never-satisfied mother plan the perfect party for them fell somewhere below cleaning up after raccoons that have been into the sunbaked remains of a lobster dinner on my list of favorite activities.
Today’s dinner would have had one positive aspect: I’d planned to surprise my mother by telling her she was going to have two grandchildren. She’d be sure to find something wrong with how I was going about it, but at least news of my pregnancy would temporarily suspend her infuriating inquiries about my reproductive progress.
I would have to cancel. I had no idea when I would be done here, and didn’t need any more pressure on my day. I had time to cancel, it was still morning, but I would have to make actual voice contact. My mother doesn’t believe in texting. Or short messages. Nor does she read, or pay attention to, most texts or email messages sent to her. Before I called her back, I checked voicemail to see what she had to say. Maybe she had called to cancel. My stomach clenched as I listened through a series of complaints, problems, and slights before she finally got to the point. A point that drew an immediate sigh of relief. We would have to reschedule dinner.
My relief lasted exactly one inhale and one exhale before she delivered her reason for canceling. There was an emergency. She’d call me later to give me an update.
Three
The word “emergency” clicked me into panic mode—a panic mixed with extreme irritation. What sane person leaves the message that there’s an emergency, but fails to say what the emergency is? I tried her cell phone. She didn’t answer. She’s pretty good about answering, so that cranked my anxiety up a few more notches. Then I tried my brother. He wasn’t answering. Neither was Sonia. I tried Aunt Rita and Uncle Henry. No answer. Either the whole world was avoiding me, or, more likely, the whole world was busy helping her deal with her emergency, and none of them had thought to keep me in the loop.
I could hear my mother’s voice as clearly as if she was in the room. “Well, I tried to call Thea to let her know, but she’s always too busy to bother with me.”
I was busy. I have a demanding job. She doesn’t respect what I do because I don’t have an MBA or make a high six-figure salary, like the daughters of some of her friends. And of course, while she had all the time in the world to natter on with her complaints, she had not told me what her emergency was. My mother is organized in the extreme. She runs her volunteer organizations with an iron hand, so her failure to include relevant information scared me even more. Complaining was her MO, being evasive was not. There wasn’t much I could do about it, though. I left a message I didn’t expect she would listen to. Then I left texts and messages for everyone else. If no one called back, I would try again in a while.
Meanwhile, I called Magda, our office manager, gave her everyone’s numbers, and put her on the case. Magda is the epitome of efficiency and she intimidates everyone, including my mother. If anyone could get me the information I needed, it would be Magda.
The message had rattled me, though. As we all know, our imaginations fill these voids with the worst possible scenarios. And I needed all my concentration here. I pushed my own concerns to a back burner, trying to stay calm as I refocused on Simmons. Gareth and Dr. Purcell should be back soon, and the lawyer was due soon, too. I wanted to make one more call while I was still alone. To my partner, Suzanne. I wanted to run the situation—the one here at Simmons, not my mother’s mysterious emergency—past her, in case there were things I was missing.
“What about the student?” she said. “Have you met her yet? Got any idea what’s going on?”
“The psychiatrist is meeting with her right now. I expect we’ll know more once that’s done.”
“If the psychiatrist can talk to you.”
That raised an alarming possibility. I’d been naively assuming that since the school had contacted her, Dr. Purcell worked for us. What if Dr. Purcell came back and said she was sorry, but even though we’d contacted her and arranged for her to meet with Heidi, she could repeat nothing about what had transpired between them? What if we had no more information to work with than we had right now? That would complicate everything.
“I’m sure she will. She and Heidi must both understand that part of the purpose of this meeting is to help the Simmons community understand what’s going on.”
“We can hope,” Suzanne said. She didn’t sound optimistic.
I was still trying to be an optimist. Not easy, given what life keeps dishing out. We agreed to talk again in a few hours, and I went back to damage control. I was supposed to be the cool-headed professional, here to meet my client’s needs. I took my worries about my mother’s emergency and tried to shove them into one of those lock-boxes that Andre always tells me I need to use. Cops are good at that, but I’m a civilian. The door wouldn’t quite close.
Then Dr. Purcell and Gareth were back, and we sat down to discuss what they’d learned. It wasn’t good. Heidi had talked freely enough, but instead of providing concrete information that might help her fellow students understand the situation, what she’d said was pretty mysterious.
Affirming what she’d told her housemother, Gareth, and the police earlier in the day, Heidi insisted that she had never had sex and so she couldn’t possibly have been pregnant. Dr. Purcell talked about psychological reactions common to young teenage girls that led to denial and an ability to suppress reality to the point where their own truth became their reality. She also talked about fear and trauma and the resulting possibility of repressed memories if the pregnancy had resulted from an assault, and stressed the importance of trying to get more background on Heidi’s life before she came to Simmons.
“It is genuinely possible,” she said, “for Heidi to have not known she was pregnant, even to have delivered that baby and thrown it away, honestly believing she was just cleaning up a mess. Possible, in other words, if she was suffering some kind of traumatic amnesia, for Heidi to believe she was telling the truth when she denied being pregnant or delivering a baby.”
She fixed those penetrating blue eyes on both of us. “If there are traumatic circumstances involved in the events surrounding Heidi’s pregnancy, then we will need her parents’ help in figuring out what happened to her.” She hesitated. “Her parents and depending on what you learn, her local police as well.”
She sighed, like what she’d learned in her conversation colored her next question. “Gareth, what kind of a relationship do you have with her parents?”
“Sadly, not a strong one,” he said. “She’s new. This is her first year. And our contacts have been brief and infrequent. With one exception, those contacts have been exclusively with her mother.”
“Yet she indicated to me that she’s closer to her father,” Purcell said.
I made a note about that, which reminded me of my earlier question about whether Heidi’s biological father had actually been notified about the situation.
Before I explored that, because of what I’d seen in other campus populations, I had another question for Dr. Purcell about Heidi’s denial that she’d ever had sex. She was thinking about trauma and repression. My mind was running in a different direction. Along with the possibility of traumatic amnesia, I was wondering not about repressed knowledge but a genuine lack of knowledge—whether it was possible that Heidi had been a victim of date rape. She could have been drugged and assaulted and because of the memory distorting effects of the drug, not known that she had had sex. If she’d never knowingly had sex, of course she wouldn’t have suspected she was pregnant and of course she wouldn’t have understood what was happening to her in the night.
I asked about that.
“It’s possible,” Dr. Purcell agreed. “Certainly, she’s absolutely credible when she says she hasn’t had sex and couldn’t possibly be pregnant. But repr
ession could produce that effect as well.”
She turned to Gareth. “What do you know about her situation before she came here?”
“Too little, I’m afraid. She wasn’t happy at her school in California. And it seems she also was unhappy with her home situation. Her mother recently remarried and she appears to actively dislike her stepfather. Beyond that?” He shrugged. “We really don’t know much. With a transfer student, we’re usually looking at their academic record and potential, and whether they’ll be a good fit in our community. Heidi was a strong student whose interests and politics—to the extent they have them at her age—seemed to mesh very well with the values at Simmons.”
He spread his hands and looked from one of us to the other, as if he wasn’t sure if either of us would have any answers for him. “So now what do we do? What are we going to say at our school meeting? It’s supposed to start in…” He looked at the clock on the wall and flinched. ”…just a few hours.”
He looked at Dr. Purcell.
“Heidi wants you to tell them the truth,” she said.
“But we don’t know what the truth is,” he said.
It might be a long while before we had a clear view of the facts, and we had to make some decisions now. “Well, what do we know?” I said. “We know what Heidi’s truth is. She believes she has never had sex and couldn’t have been pregnant. We know that she has no conscious memory of delivering a baby, never mind having some intention to harm it. She doesn’t believe there was a baby.”
I realized that Heidi had probably never even seen her baby, except as something strange and bloody and painful happening to her in the dark. I pictured a child in pain, the mysterious behavior of her body and the sudden onset of a massive period, an embarrassed effort to clean things up, and a confused and uncomfortable retreat to her bed. All that followed by a bewildering explosion of medical and public safety personnel, people asking intrusive questions, and the threat of criminal action.