Chapter 15
From Wednesday through Friday, nothing happened.
No calls or emails from Summit, asking me to come speak to the board or informing me about my fall contract, or even answering my question about when I should come and finish emptying my office.
No major news about the investigation of Sidney’s and Izzy’s deaths, although there’d been one press conference, clarifying that they were being investigated as homicide cases, possibly linked.
No visits to the pool. Benjamin had stopped asking.
I was surprised that Curtis hadn’t emailed, as promised. He’d seemed so friendly. Flirtatious, even. But in my self-critical state I could find plenty of reasons he’d change his mind.
Still, I succumbed to the temptation to google him.
I found dozens of articles about his first bestselling book, How Children Grow.
It had come out when I was in grad school, drowning in academic reading, with zero interest in a parenting guide about preschool children, especially since my own child was a preteen by then.
My work and study schedule left no time for podcasts or magazine browsing during those years.
But this next time, he’d be harder to miss.
His publisher’s website said a sixteen-city book tour was already planned.
The cover and title were already uploaded to online bookstores: What Boys Learn.
That’s exactly what I needed to know—what boys pick up from the world around them, and what they carry within, and what any of us—mothers especially—can do to make sure our boys become decent, undamaged, and undamaging men.
I thought of calling Curtis directly and asking him to accept Benjamin as a client, but Curtis had already told me. He was shutting down his practice. End of story.
For nine years, I had juggled college and grad school with single parenting, and for the last year, I’d stayed busy learning the ropes of a new job.
Now, for the first time, I was unmoored, with too much time on my hands.
Aside from a few boxes of books and some unrecycled empties in the living room, everything was put away.
I’d even had time to organize better: spice bottles and spice refill packets coordinated, small toothpaste and dental floss samples from the dentist rounded up in one place, dry pens thrown away and good ones in a countertop jar where we could find them.
I still hadn’t located several missing things, but that was normal in a move.
Everything floats to the top eventually, my mother had always said.
One of the final things I emptied was the banker’s box from Summit.
Several thick books were in the bottom, including a DSM-5.
I lifted the psychological diagnostic manual in my hands, feeling its weight, and remembering how proud I’d been, buying it as a graduation gift to myself, to replace the previous, outdated edition I’d bought cheap as a first-year counseling student.
The field of psychology changes, after all. Labels, treatments, assumptions.
I stood in the living room, fully aware that our limited bookshelves were already packed so tight even a slim book wouldn’t fit, never mind this doorstop.
But then my gaze went to the low black bookcase next to the couch.
There was space, actually. A two-inch-wide spot on the bottom, in the middle of a shelf of college psych textbooks.
I wandered over and squatted, trying to understand what was missing, but all the old familiars were there—Abnormal Psych, Intro to Clinical, Child and Adolescent Development.
It bothered me. Stress had a way of doing that—of making everything seem equally significant, from an argument to a letter to shit gone missing in a new and disorganized apartment.
Then I heard the sound of a whistling mailman, heading around the side of the house to drop our mail. The mail came earlier to this apartment than our last one. I’d have to be vigilant. I put the question of the missing book out of my mind and hurried to intercept the mail.
On Saturday, the next letter from Ewan arrived.
Someone’s been asking me about you. I could give you hints. I owe you that, don’t I? You owe me a lot more, baby sister. A visit with my nephew would be a good place to start.
Someone was talking to him about me, or he wanted me to think so. And he wasn’t forgetting about Benjamin. I needed help.
I dialed before I could lose my nerve.
“Abby!” came Curtis Campbell’s voice after two rings. “I’m in my car. Can I call you from the house in fifteen minutes?”
“Perfect,” I said, trying to match his optimistic tone.
“Before I let you go. I sent that job posting to you but it bounced back. I must have entered your email wrong. First name Abigail, last name Rosso, at gmail dot com, right?”
Relief flooded me. “You forgot the middle initial.” I spelled out the full address again.
“Great! I’ll be home in a few minutes. I’ll send the email and call you then.”
When he phoned ten minutes later, I heard keys clattering, as if into a bowl. I pictured him in the cool hallway of an impeccable house: gallery-style lights positioned to show off framed artwork, fresh flowers, underlit kitchen cabinets.
“Really sorry about that mix-up,” he said, voice loud one moment and muffled the next. “Just a minute.”
He greeted someone or something, his pitch rising.
“You have a dog?”
“An old one with a weak bladder. But now that Sammy’s in the yard, I can pay better attention. There. Better.” He exhaled. “Abby.”
He said my name as if he was charmed to have a reason to talk. No hurry. No agenda. Just a caring voice.
He asked, “Have things gotten any better at your school?
Is there a professional question you’d like to discuss?”
“Yes. But it’s also personal. I’m calling about Benjamin. He was closer than I thought to the girl who just died—actually, both girls. I think their deaths are upsetting him in ways he’s not mature enough to confront.”
“That would be natural.”
“I’m afraid he’ll go looking for support or consolation in the wrong places. He needs to talk to someone, and the new counselor at school . . . never mind about him. School’s over now anyway.”
This time Curtis said nothing. I didn’t even hear an empathetic sigh.
“Dr. Campbell? My son needs help. You’d be the ideal—”
He cut me off. “Abigail, I’m very sorry. My book deadline is closing in.”
“You’re writing a book about boys. You’d be more likely to understand than anyone. And you know Benjamin, already. You’ve seen what he’s like. Intelligent, disciplined, but oppositional as well.”
In the pause that followed, I could feel him considering. “It’s not just my upcoming deadlines, unfortunately. I’m also spending more time every week near Fond du Lac, checking on my father. He’s determined to ‘age in place,’ but he isn’t doing well.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Of course. Benj and I weren’t the only ones with problems.
“Listen. We can find the right person for you, I promise. Someone with the right specialty.” In the background, a screen door opened and banged shut. I could imagine all the things Curtis Campbell had to deal with. A dog, a father, clients, research, a book. Somewhere far away: a daughter, an ex.
“That’s okay, I can google—”
“No, the wrong person is worse than no person at all. How about Raveena Adelman? Didn’t you take classes from her?”
She was another one of my college professors, a specialist in child development, her office only three doors down from Curtis’s own. I’d taken Benjamin to see her once and it didn’t go well.
“I tried her about five years ago. One session only. It wasn’t a good fit.”
“Not a good fit. That happens.” He seemed to be ruminating. “Eighty percent of psychologists are women now. Men are disappearing from the field—as practitioners and as subjects. Boys’ issues don’t get much attention these days.”
I’d managed to hit a nerve. “No, they don’t.”
“I sometimes think the world is afraid of teenage boys. What kind of message are we sending them?”
I let him mull that one as I stood at the counter, running a finger along the cheap laminate edge, staring at the letter from Ewan, with its strange, cajoling tone.
I’d worried a few times about the day Benjamin turned eighteen, if he would ever decide to visit Ewan’s prison.
I hadn’t worried about this: that they’d find a way to communicate even earlier, behind my back.
“Let me think about it,” Curtis finally said. “I’ll call you tomorrow?”
Around two in the afternoon, I was thinking about Summit’s graduation ceremony and all the students I wouldn’t be able to congratulate when I spotted one of Benjamin’s journals on the side table, next to the couch.
On the front cover, he’d written only his name.
On the inside cover in angry capital letters, he’d written: “I go out and fuck and I come back to her and I don’t care about her and I only love my girl. That’s not cheating, that’s exercise.”
I recognized the name of the person written on the next line. I couldn’t tell if Benjamin really thought the quote was clever or if he knew I’d riffle through his notebook and wanted to punish me for it.
After a late shower, I took a cup of coffee into the bathroom to sip while I detangled my ropy, wet hair.
I kept thinking about that asinine quote.
I knew what Benjamin was telling me. You didn’t like an actual author?
I can move down the evolutionary ladder.
Bring back some real Neanderthal shit. Which, frankly, wasn’t fair to the Neanderthals.