All Is Not Forgotten (24 page)

I tried to smile politely as I studied her face. I could see it then. For the first time. I could see the rape in her eyes, running alongside the life.

“How have things been since Wednesday?” I managed to say.

Oh, what a horrible person I am! I could not believe what I had done. I could not believe that I had set in motion the most devious betrayal. I had opened up this path back to that night. The patient was on the table and I was about to infect her with the germs of a lie. I had the chance to give it all back to her, the truth in all its purity. But instead, I was going to go in with my evil plan and corrupt it to my own end. To save my son. To save my family. I told myself I could do just this little bit but keep the rest, find the rest, intact. But how could that be? This one corruption would be the end of the truth. The germs would cause an infection that would feed on the healthy flesh until it was all dead. The truth, dead. My despair was profound. The irony staring me in the face. If I pulled back now, my son would be questioned and I would be taken from my work. To save my son, I would have to defile my work. Do you see? Do you?

Jenny started to talk then, about the memory and how it had become clearer and clearer. The hand on her back. The hand on the back of her neck. The smell of the bleach. His penis entering her and the shock that followed as he pushed harder and harder, tearing her inside. The violation. The pain. The animal broken. Its body and its spirit. Broken. It was perfect, the way this memory was coming into focus. I am not sick to think this. But it was perfect because it was real. It had been there all this time, carefully preserved, and now it had found its way back. Not only as a series of facts, but in the past two days it had connected to the feelings it created. They were no longer floating inside her, the ghosts that Sean Logan had described. They had found their home, and now they could be recognized and, finally, processed. It was working! Jenny cried. She sobbed.
I hate him!
She screamed in my office.
I hate him!

“Yes!” I said. I wanted to cry myself. I was overwhelmed by the power of what we had unleashed inside her.

Why did he do this to me?

“Because he is nothing without the power he took from you. He is nothing, and you are everything. Can you feel that? How desperate he is to take your power? How hungry? He is the animal, Jenny. Not you. He has no soul.”

So he took mine. He stole mine.

“He tried to. But he took only a small piece.”

I want it back! Do you hear me? I want it back!

Oh, how her strength moved me that day! I nodded my head and said the only words that came to my mind.

“I know.”

I let her sit with this for a moment. And I allowed myself to enjoy that moment. To savor it. And then I swallowed every ounce of integrity I had left and pressed ahead with my plan.

“I want to focus on sound today. Maybe on a voice.”

She agreed. She trusted me completely. I had in my mind the events of that afternoon in the pool house. I did not have the investigator's tape by then, but I had Charlotte's recollection. She had told me what was said. How Bob had repeated over and over the same exclamatory expression.
Oh dear Lord!

“There are some things that might have been said. Things people say when they are highly emotional. I imagine this creature, this animal, was in a heightened emotional state. I'm going to say some of them to you. You need to close your eyes and just let the words float in like we did with the smells. Don't force them. Just see if any of them resonate.”

Jenny opened her bag and took out the props. She sat with them as she always did and then nodded and closed her eyes. I did not put on the music. I did not let her smell the bleach. I did not want her to go back to the night in the woods, but instead to that afternoon in the pool house.

Now we would see. We would put to the test the theories and studies about memory. Jenny had been unconscious as Bob Sullivan stood over her, wrapping her wrists, trying to save her life. Would his voice be in there somewhere? Would his words be lingering, waiting to be pulled from the stacks of files? Could I pull them out and refile them, not with that afternoon in the pool house, but from that night in the woods?

Jenny closed her eyes.

“Are you ready” I asked.

She nodded. I took a breath and shook my head with disgust at myself and what I was about to do. Then I started to say the words.

“Oh my God.… My God … Yes … Do you like that?… Yes … Oh my God … Mmmm.… Uhhhhh … yes!.… Oh my God … Good God.… Good Lord.… Dear Lord … Oh dear Lord, dear Lord, dear Lord…”

 

Chapter Twenty-two

Jenny did not
falsely remember Bob Sullivan's voice from the night of the rape. Did you think it would be that easy? That session was just the beginning. It was a little seed, planted in the fertile soil. It would take more than just our sessions. More than the gimmick of playing Bob's commercials right before our sessions. If this work were that simple, any moron could do it. It is not simple. Nor was my plan. But nothing more could be done until Monday.

I went home that night hopeful. And destroyed.

My son was waiting for me. He was annoyed at having been detained on a Friday night by his mother.

“Hi,” I said. He was in the family room playing on the Xbox. My wife remained in the kitchen after saying a nervous hello and kissing me on the cheek.

I stood in the doorway and did not go further. His back was to me and he could not hear anything with his headphones blaring. Soldiers were killing combatants in an urban village. My son was using a knife to cut their throats. He was screaming at his friends who were playing the game with him through the Internet. They were playful screams, followed by laughter. A combatant came up from behind and stabbed my son. He yelled, then laughed very hard. He told his friend,
You're a fucking idiot. Where were you? What? Stuck at the bridge. Dude, you have to get on the bus to get over the bridge. You killed me, dude. What the fuck. Hahaha
.

It had been less than two days since I learned that my son had a blue sweatshirt with a red bird. Since I realized that it must have been he who was going into the woods the night of the party. My wife and I had discussed what we would do to keep him safe.

I have always been fascinated by the bond between parent and child. I'm sure you have gleaned this already. It is in us. It is why we are here. To fornicate, to make babies, and then to die protecting them. In that respect, we are animals. And yet, we also have morality, and that is what distinguishes us from animals. I don't care what anyone says about animals. They do not have morals. Any animal behavior that mimics morality is nothing more than a coincidence. They are driven by the need to survive and this need, this raw instinct, sometimes causes them to act in a “moral” way. When they protect a vulnerable member of their tribe. When they band together in a herd to keep a lion from picking them off, one at a time. When they accept members from another tribe or herd into their own. All of that is about self-preservation. Something is gained by the herd. There are just as many behaviors that are immoral. Male pigs who kill their own offspring so the mothers will stop lactating and become fertile again. Old rhinos who are shunned by the herd because they are of no use being alive. Female dogs who literally eat their defective newborn pups. On and on I could go.

I see it at the prison, where the forces of socialization are stripped away. I see it with the Axis II disorders, people who lack empathy. Sociopaths. We are not far from the animals. The very thing that distinguishes us is fragile. But it is real.

I have been observing my wife and have come to the conclusion that she has not ruled out the possibility that our son raped Jenny Kramer. It has been difficult to accept this because I know he is innocent and am disturbed by her ambivalence. It is not that she does not love him. If I investigated, I know what I would uncover. She cannot explain his presence in the woods or the shaving or the bleach. I admit these are difficult hurdles to overcome. And so she has gone down a less strenuous mental path, the path of justification. Perhaps he was high on drugs. Perhaps it was a “date rape” gone wrong. Perhaps one of his friends followed him and was also involved, and maybe it was the friend who was so violent. Surely our son could not have done what they are saying. But the girl doesn't remember, does she? The “facts” of the rape are still just speculation. Anyone could poke holes in the story they had created.

She had spoken of the now infamous date rapes down in the southern part of the state. We both remembered when that teenage boy was on trial. We both remembered hearing the evidence at the trial, how the victims were persecuted, their stories broken down and torn apart. He had known them all from school. They had gone places with him willingly. He went to jail anyway, but there was always doubt. His loving parents had spent a fortune defending him. There was no question we would do the same for our son.

When the teenage rapist came up for parole years later, we watched the hearing on cable. He presented as such a nice man, repentant, remorseful. Rehabilitated. Then his victims spoke. For the first time, they told their stories without the interruption of clever defense attorneys. Julie and I were shocked at what we heard. They were horrible stories of violence, rape, sodomy, verbal obscenities, and strangulation. The press had not relayed the facts truthfully those many years before. It had all been spun to create an interesting he said–she said controversy. Parole was denied. The nice young man was transformed. He became belligerent. My wife said she could suddenly see the “crazy” in his eyes. I was disappointed in myself that I had not detected his Axis II condition. I would see that today, having worked at Somers these past few years.

My point is this: Julie had brought this up because she wanted to make sure I would protect our son the way that this family had protected theirs. She wanted to make sure I would do that even if we came to believe he had raped my patient. Even if he turned out to be a sociopath. She was reassured by my conviction. And I was disturbed by her assumptions.

I used to wonder about that family. I used to wonder if they knew he was guilty and didn't care. Or if they clung to every piece of conflicting evidence, convinced themselves the victims were just regretful sluts, so they could believe in his innocence and justify their actions. I admit as well, to acknowledging to myself, in a somewhat whimsical manner, that I would be extremely adept at justifications, given my deep arsenal of psychological knowledge. I did not have to answer those questions or put my theory about myself to the test. I did not share my wife's ambivalence toward our son.

I walked in front of the television and blocked his view. He tried to operate around me, looking left, then right, his fingers clicking away on the remote. Finally he looked at my face and knew the time had come for the talk his mother had told him was coming—the reason he was not out already on this weekend night.

I gotta go,
he said to his friends. He clicked more buttons, then put down the remote. His avatar disappeared. I turned off the television.

I won't bore you with the details of what each of us said. I will simply say that I told him about Cruz Demarco. The man in the blue Civic. I told him that he saw a person in a blue hoodie with a red bird go into the woods right at the time of the rape. I laid out the facts that would make him a suspect if they were ever known. The shaving. The bleach. The sweatshirt. It was the last one we could do something about.

I could see him processing the information. I could see his mother's brain and not mine inside his skull.

“Do you see what I'm saying? They will question you again.”

I know that. They're bringing in the whole swim team.

“Let's get one thing straight,” I said. “I know you didn't do anything to hurt Jenny Kramer.”

I didn't!
I could hear the fear in his voice.

“I know. But you can see how this will look. They will ask you if you shaved—not just your legs, but everywhere. And they will ask about the sweatshirt.”

He didn't say anything then, and that's when I knew. He had shaved everywhere. He had worn that sweatshirt to the party.

“Jason. You couldn't possibly remember that far back, could you?”

He looked at me strangely, but then he started to understand. I gave him my speech about the world being unfair. I told him the things that would be used against him, and I could see that he knew what had to be done. We discussed morality and the very few times it was acceptable to cross the line, to be an animal. Self-preservation was one of them.

“You are innocent and you deserve to be treated as an innocent. That's the bottom line.”

Okay, Dad.

“Now. I just want to know one thing about that night so we can make sure we have thought of everything. I need to know what you were doing in those woods.”

My son lied. He looked me square in the eye as he did it. He thought he could deceive me. I am underestimated in my own home.

I wasn't near the woods. I never left the house.

“Jason. Please. You were seen.”

I wasn't there! I swear!

“And there's not one person except that drug dealer who will say otherwise?”

No! I swear!

“And the sweatshirt. Why was it on the floor of your closet?”

I don't know. My room's a mess. I throw stuff in the closet when I get home sometimes.

I was again struck by the power of my bond to this weak, mediocre liar. I was disgusted by him in that moment. And yet I still persisted in my plan to protect him at all cost. At very dear cost. I could feel self-loathing creep into my bones. And I could not bear to think about the effort it would require to forgive myself one day. So I did not.