Chapter 22
I had a friend in grad school—Marta, from Colombia—a single, middle-aged student who had a teenage daughter. At the end of our first semester, Marta’s daughter, Camila, was sent to an inpatient hospital program for anorexia, a condition Camila had suffered with since the age of eleven.
I remember asking Marta if she was doing all right, assuming that this latest turn was creating stress at the worst possible time, just as she was facing our first exams and term paper deadlines.
But Marta surprised me. She said that the moment her daughter was checked in to the program, she felt better than she’d felt in years, even though Camila was at her lowest weight and Marta had urgent concerns about kidney and liver damage.
“I was just so grateful to have someone else in charge,” she told me. “I could finally trust someone else to be watching and weighing and asking all the questions Camila hated me asking. Her life and her future had been in my hands, every minute for months. A person can only take that for so long.”
I’d always thought I’d understood hypervigilance, but I understood it even better now.
I couldn’t last an hour without thinking of Izzy and Sidney or googling for any news about the police investigations, and in between those moments I couldn’t stop listening for a knock at the door.
The sound of a closing car door inevitably sent me racing to the window, sure I’d see several patrol cars had pulled up—lights off, stealthy, ready with a warrant and a reason for carting Benjamin away, perhaps permanently.
But things would get better. Finally, I had help. Finally, we had a new routine. It started every day with a drive to Lake Forest.
“How’d it go?” I asked Benjamin after picking him up at Curtis’s office.
He shrugged.
It was the same reaction I’d gotten since day one, but now we’d made it through three and he was still attending afternoon therapy sessions without protest.
“Talk about anything interesting?”
“Not really.” He shifted in his seat, turning toward me, as if something had just come to mind. “Actually, we talked about how weird it is when people get fixated on things.”
“Like what?” He was smiling.
“Go on,” I said. “Tell me.”
“I told him about the time you came home barefoot, going on about some girl.”
I didn’t think Benjamin had noticed, especially given the larger drama happening that evening, when Robert had picked him up for breaking and entering.
Benjamin said, “I told him how you gave her your shoes.”
“Because she didn’t have any.”
“And how you took a photo of her and kept staring at it.”
I nodded. So this was how Benjamin was using up at least some of his time, evading more pertinent and personal issues.
“Can we go now?” he asked.
The car was running but I hadn’t backed out of my parking spot on Curtis’s long gravel driveway.
“In a minute. Did Dr. Campbell analyze my . . . what did you call it. My fixation?”
“That’s confidential.”
I laughed. “Confidentiality runs the other direction. He owes it to you. You don’t owe it to him.”
I had a feeling Benjamin knew that. He was just being a smart-ass.
I wasn’t going to overthink why Benjamin had brought up something so tangential, either to Dr. Campbell or to me. His new therapist would get wise to his deflection tactics.
I could deflect, too. I said, “Dr. Campbell’s got a nice place, doesn’t he? Three buildings.”
I looked past the spruce-green signboard with Curtis’s name etched in golden script next to the twin outbuildings.
One of them was Curtis’s two-room office.
The other was slightly larger, with clerestory windows up high near the roofline and a welcome mat at the side door.
A mother-inlaw apartment, maybe. Farther back on the lot, the main house was bigger, but not too big—a historic property, built before the days of McMansions, with ivy-covered stone walls.
“Those smaller buildings are called carriage houses,” I told Benjamin as we pulled away. “From the days of horses and carriages. Pretty amazing, huh?”
Evidently, Benjamin was not amazed. This time he didn’t even bother to shrug.
Curtis hadn’t been much more talkative. He’d briefly acknowledged my presence each time over the last three days I walked Benjamin inside.
His expression looked relaxed, content, even gratified.
I’d spent years learning to read the faces of day care staff and teachers.
Even when they said something nice about Benjamin—So smart!
So articulate! He certainly is ready to share his opinions with others—their smiles showed a degree of strain.
Not in Curtis’s case, though. Things must be going well.
I rolled down the window as we passed a fence-bound pasture that faced Curtis’s long driveway.
Behind it, a chestnut-colored horse raised its head as we passed, whinnying.
Therapy with a view. Here, one could almost imagine that life was beautiful and Benjamin would never see the inside of a police station again.
“Oh,” Benjamin finally said, halfway home. “Dr. C did have one message for you. He said you should take me for a hair trim.”
“That’s the message?”
Benjamin’s hair was short enough, not much past his ears. I thought it looked cute when the bangs got a little scruffy. He was neater than a lot of Summit boys.
“Yeah, he said it looks better. He said it wouldn’t hurt if I dressed nicer, too. In case the police talk to me again.”
“Did you give him reason to think they will?”
But the pipeline had closed, at least until we had passed downtown Pleasant Park. The last of Main Street’s shops and restaurants were in my rearview mirror when he said, “You never told me how you got pregnant.”
I shook my head once, like I’d just felt a fly buzzing around my ear.
“Sorry,” I said. “You surprised me with that one. Let’s see.”
There was construction ahead of us, just where Green Bay Road met our neighborhood. A pothole brigade.
“When you were thirteen, I did tell you about your father. I mean, I told you I didn’t know who your father was.”
With acid in his voice he said, “One-night stand.”
“Yes, sort of.” Zero-night stand was more like it.
I was drunk, screwing with a man who’d bought me drinks and was even more intoxicated than I was, in the grungy bathroom of a Clark Street bar.
Did anyone want their kid to know they’d done such things?
“I didn’t get to know him well. I made a mistake.
But you, Benjamin, were not a mistake at all. Not one little bit.”
“Is that what you told people? That you fucked a stranger but somehow, I wasn’t a mistake?”
I paused. Breathed. Smiled at the construction worker who had just turned his stop sign around to “slow.”
“I told them, from the very start, that I planned to have you. And life went on from there.”
He made a doubtful huffing noise. I made the turn onto our street. I could feel him staring at me, hard.
“You don’t talk about your parents.”
“I’m sorry you didn’t get to know them. My mom died when I was eight. My father had dementia and was institutionalized by the time I was fourteen.”
“But you had a stepmother, right?”
“Not for long.”
He said something under his breath.
“I’m not avoiding the question, Benjamin. I just didn’t get along with her very well. Nothing more to say, really.”
He turned toward me, staring. “The evil stepmother trope. That came up in my lit class. Cinderella. Snow White.”
I laughed. “I guess I’m a walking cliché.”
“I hate when you do that.”
“What?”
“Laugh when you think something isn’t funny.”
I parked at the curb. “Where are these particular questions coming from? Were you talking about your grandparents in therapy?”
“No. I was talking about you.”
I glanced over. “You mean, about you and me? How we communicate?”
“No,” he said, stony gaze diverted to the windshield. “Just you.”
For the rest of the day while I web surfed, looking for new jobs and cheaper apartments up and down the North Shore, Benjamin remained behind his closed bedroom door.
I knew, from the sound of the hectoring and lecturing male voices, that he was watching videos—never quite loud enough for me to hear.
He had earphones. Listening unplugged was a purposeful choice.
He wanted me to know—and yet not know. He was spending hours listening to things I’d find objectionable, things that would worry me if I could make out more than scattered words, but it wasn’t the words that mattered so much as the tone of anger and grievance.
When Robert called, I picked up and then almost immediately wished I hadn’t.
“I stopped by your place at lunch, in case you wanted to get a bite.”
“I wasn’t home.”
“So I noticed.”
I’d never liked the idea of a man cruising regularly past my house, even when we’d been dating. “You know I prefer people to call or text first.”
“Yeah, well, I happened to be nearby. With a lot of free time on my hands.”
“Speaking of that. Doesn’t your department have to do some sort of investigation before they can decide about your job?”
“They can if they want. I resigned.”
“I see. You quit before they could terminate you. It’s getting clearer now.”
“They don’t want me, Abby. They haven’t wanted me for a while. And if they don’t want me, I don’t want them.”
I wasn’t sure I believed him. Robert would have been giving up an awful lot by voluntarily quitting. The conversation flagged until he started asking about Benjamin’s therapy.
“Every day, huh?” he asked. “Is that normal?”
“Who says I’ve been taking Benjamin every day? If you’ve been driving by my apartment over and over—”
“I put two and two together. You’ve been too busy to return most of my texts.”
“I don’t like feeling watched, Robert. I’ve told you that.”
His tone grew serious. “Hey, did Jack Mayfield ever bother you again?”
“No.”
“Good.”
But I detected some disappointment. Without another person bothering me, Robert didn’t have enough reasons to insert himself back into my life.