Sneak Peak Hushed
Bastien
“Ibeg your pardon?” I manage.
The interrogator looks at me over her reading glasses. “Did you have sexual relations with Robert Reeve?” she repeats, coolly.
They’ve lowered the conference room to polar-expedition temperatures, and I have been in this chair nearly four hours; without the vest I’d be hypothermic by now. But the cold is nothing next to the shock. For once, English doesn’t come first. “Est-ce que vous venez de suggérer—”
At my left, the translator I never requested boots to life for the first time since our introduction, leaning forward, eager to prove the foreigner finally needs her. “Avez-vous eu des relations—”
“I know what she said.” I can barely contain my rage that they assumed I didn’t speak English to begin with.
She sinks back, pen still poised for my next linguistic failure.
“I’m appalled that I’m being asked this.
Madame”—I snap the word in French, and it takes everything I have to keep my accent from slipping the neutral Anglo one I’ve worn for work since I came to this country—“I have never had a sexual relationship with Mr. Reeve. How dare you?”
My lawyer puts a hand on my sleeve. He’s doing this pro bono and looks in over his head. “I believe Dr. Saint-Jacques would like to know the origin of this outlandish and deeply offensive accusation.”
“I bloody well would.” Only after it’s out do I remember Americans don’t say bloody. I don’t care. I’ve been humiliated since the moment this board sat down across from me, but this crosses a line.
Dr. Eleanor Whitman has been apologizing to me for four hours without once using the word.
It is in the way she reads every email out in full instead of summarizing, so that I can hear exactly what is being alleged.
It is in the way she looked at the thermostat when I first shivered, and then looked away, because there is nothing she can do about the building.
“He’d already decided to do an ayahuasca ritual in Mexico when he reached out to me—there’d been an article about my dissertation on the Purdue site.
My research is on ayahuasca’s efficacy against PTSD in combat veterans.
My only job was to record what subjects like him, who were already going to do the ceremony, self-reported before, during, and after. ”
Dr. August Chen leans in, light glinting off his glasses. “And did you at any point advocate that a vulnerable, depressed veteran with PTSD consume a Schedule I drug?”
“Absolutely not. He’d already decided. Every response I gave him was copied verbatim from a script vetted by Purdue’s legal counsel.” How many times am I going to have to say this?
Whitman removes a page from the stack. The sound is so loud it stops Chen mid-breath.
She reads it the way you read something aloud in a room where somebody has died.
“Let’s review the email from June 14.” She reads, but I hear Robby’s voice, the smile always hidden in it.
“‘Heya Doc. I think I’m getting to a new level with my journaling. These hands are good for a lot. Been drawing a lot. Good to have that back.’”
He’d attached a sketch—a rough, perfect rendering of the courtyard at the retreat. I remember being touched that he’d thought of me.
“Your response: ‘I’m so glad you’re having this breakthrough! And please—I’m not a doctor yet. Bastien is fine. I’ll lord it over you when I get the title, lol. When are you free?’” She sets it down.
My heart turns to stone. I know where this is going. “An appropriate exchange, supporting a veteran who’d had a breakthrough.”
“His reply, that evening: ‘I think I’d like to see you lord it over me. Bet you’re a tiger under those silk vests. How about that cantina near the Plaza Mayor?’”
I keep my face still. I remember exactly when that one came in.
I was at a mezcal bar in San Miguel with Gideon, who read it over my shoulder and laughed.
“Another soldier boy with a crush,” he’d said.
“I’m starting to wonder what you do in those sessions.
” A joke, I think—but by then the jokes had an edge.
“What’s baffling,” Whitman says, pointing her glasses at me, “is your response. You were in a position of responsibility.”
“And how did I respond?” I challenge her. “Did I invite him? Did I tell him it was welcome? No.”
“No,” she confirms, and reads it. “‘My boyfriend’s come down to Mexico, so I’m spending my evenings squiring him around. The office is too small for you, but there’s a park—the Jardín Allende. More comfortable, with trees and sky.’” She looks at me meaningfully.
“Mr. Reeve is—was—claustrophobic. We couldn’t use my office. And given what he’d just said, a neutral, public place seemed more important than ever.”
“And yet you didn’t tell him he’d crossed a line,” Whitman affirms.
“I chose to do that in person. Shaming a young man who was learning to trust me would have undone everything. But I did email him when he persisted.”
“Yes.” Whitman throws a look at Chen. “Professional. Well-crafted. It managed a difficult thing well.”
Chen leans forward. “Your sample was overwhelmingly young male combat veterans. The Reeves claim you seduced their son and convinced him ayahuasca would fix his deteriorating mental health.”
Somewhere in Indiana there is a woman who went into her son’s laptop three weeks after his funeral because she could not stop herself, and found four hundred emails from a man who had told her boy to call him Bastien.
I have thought about her more than I have thought about myself. She read every one of them looking for a reason, because if there is a reason then it is not simply that her son came home from Kandahar and could not find his way back, and that nothing anybody did was ever going to be enough.
I would have given her a reason if I had one. I don’t. So she has made one out of me, and I find that I cannot even be angry with her about it.
My lawyer answers first. “We have combed three years of emails, texts, and a dissertation. He never made any such claim to any subject, least of all Robert Reeve.” And then he stops, and looks back down at his legal pad, and that’s all.
That’s it? That’s the whole defense? I paid nothing and I’m getting exactly that.
Fine. I’ll do it myself. I went through a dissertation defense with, I think, the meanest external examiner I’ve ever heard of, who straight-out told me that my years of research were irresponsible and reductive.
This is no different. I straighten and meet Chen’s eyes, ready to be as reasonable, as transparent, as accommodating as it takes—because if I am only calm enough, only open enough, surely they’ll see I’m not what the Reeves are saying.
“Robby was fine the last time I heard from him,” I say.
“We had a follow-up scheduled in June. His answers gave no indication of a breakdown.”
“Until this.” Chen signals the last person at the table. “Play the clip.”
I want to beg them not to. Then Robby’s voice floods the arctic room, and this time there’s no sun in it.
He sounds lost. “Nothing works anymore, Doc. The memories are back, worse than before. That peace I found in Mexico feels like someone else’s life now.
Sometimes I think you were the only one who really saw me.
Not a soldier, not a patient. Just me. But I guess that was my mistake, wasn’t it.
Sorry for bothering you. Won’t happen again. ”
I clench my hands until all I can feel are the bones, and I imagine them breaking under the weight of it.
“I’ve listened to that message more times than I can count.
Those words are branded in my brain.” My grief gets out before I can stop it; I wipe my eyes.
“He is dead.” For a moment all I see is Robby the way I met him—laughing a beat too long, a little outrageous, mischief in his eyes. The man I always kept at arm’s length.
“Did you have feelings for Robert Reeve?” Whitman asks.
“Robby was a sweet boy who went to war and came back wrong. I wanted good things for him. But there’s a line, and I have never crossed it—not with a subject, a colleague, or a student.
The Reeves are a grieving family who got their son’s remains back.
They need a reason this happened, and I was the outlier—the strange thing he tried because something inside him felt broken. I did not harm him.”
“Did you love Robert Reeve?”
“No. But I liked him enormously. There were things about him that were extraordinary.”
“Such as?”
“He drew. Manga dragons and explosions in a notebook during our interviews—sometimes the dragons wore tiaras. He said every story, even the worst, needed a punch-line for the universe. After his third ceremony he told me, ‘Doc, I finally remembered what I liked about being alive.’”
“Dr. Saint-Jacques,” Whitman says at last, “no one here believes you meant harm. But intention isn’t outcome. The Reeves suggest your behavior could be a pattern—forming intense bonds with young, vulnerable veterans, creating dependency where there should be distance.”
All I can see is Robby flinging an arm around whoever was nearest; the first time I saw him he was standing on a table singing “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” I bottle the grief and tell it, later.
“And if you’re suggesting I have a type,” I say, before they can, “and that the type is young military-age men—my father and brother were both servicemen. I can give you the name of every boyfriend I’ve had since high school.
All of them white-collar professionals from middle-class homes.
That’s my type, if you want to call it one. ”
“That won’t be necessary.” She glances at her colleagues. “We’ll adjourn. The committee will deliberate and return findings in four to six weeks. We advise against resuming this line of research until then.”
Four to six weeks. By then I’ll be at Fairhaven.