“You forced him to do what he did?”
“I know what you’re doing,” Hannah countered. “If I had been more aware I would have been able to do something prior to his leaving. Made things better somehow.”
“How do you know he wouldn’t have left no matter what you did?”
She looked at him and thought briefly about what he had just said. “Doctor Jenkins, I know you want to help me but I don’t think I can do this. I—“
“Did your husband say or do anything to you that indicated he was getting ready to leave you?”
She thought shrinks weren’t supposed to interrupt. “No.”
“Did he tell you he was unhappy?”
“No.”
Jenkins was matter of fact about it. “Sounds as if your husband made a conscious decision to leave and it might well have nothing to do with you. Why do you feel responsible?”
“He wouldn’t have left if he had been happy with me.”
“Were you happy with him?”
Touché, Hannah thought, but didn’t respond.
Jenkins shifted his angle of approach. “Tell me exactly what has happened since we last met.”
Hannah relayed the events, completely, for the first time to another person starting with waving bye to John as he headed off to golf. She wound up with the meeting with Brumley. It took her most of the allotted time for the session.
Jenkins had his hands folded neatly in his lap as he finally spoke, but through her own fog of emotions, Hannah was surprised to sense that Jenkins seemed nervous.
“Do you feel suicidal?”
“No.” Hannah remembered the knife and the tub. “Yes.”
A single eyebrow went up and Jenkins waited.
“I play with a knife sometimes.”
“Is this something new?”
“No.”
Jenkins waited, probably wondering why she’d never told him this before she knew. Finally he gave in. “Ever cut yourself when you play with the knife?”
“No.”
“Why do you do it?”
Finally the open-ended question, Hannah thought. She’d been a bit disappointed with Jenkins for a few moments there. “I think there’s a part of me that I want to get rid of.”
“And what part is that?”
Hannah shrugged. “The bad part.”
Jenkins was probably remembering that silence didn’t work well with her. “What do you think is the bad part of you?”
“The part that allowed me to end up in the situation I’m in right now. I should have known better.”
“Known better than what?”
“To entrust my life to someone else. It never worked as a child, I don’t know why I thought it would as an adult. I suppose I took the easy way and it’s turned out to be the hard way.”
“Other than that bad part, though, do you have a desire to hurt yourself?”
“No.”
“And if you get rid of that part of you?” Jenkins asked.
“Then I can control me.”
“And?”
Hannah’s eyes flashed with anger as she looked at Jenkins. “You don’t think I can control myself?”
Jenkins spread his hands wide, a giving up gesture. “That’s not my province. I think you have great un-tapped potential.”
She laughed bitterly. “Like a newly discovered oil field? That’s the area John worked in. Oil. They were always looking for the un-tapped potential.”
“You’re a person, not oil.”
Hannah’s narrowed her eyes and stared at Jenkins without saying anything. For the first time she really focused on him.
Jenkins shifted in his seat uncomfortably. “OK. Listen, Hannah. You’ve got to understand that you are under stress. There’s a lot going on in your head and in your gut right now. You’re feeling anger, guilt, relief, fear — every emotion in the book. And all within minutes of each other. Each emotion brings a new one on its coattails.
“There’s even a small part of you, and you don’t have to admit it to me if you don’t want to, that’s happy your husband is gone. Even the best marriage has its bad times.”
Hannah didn’t protest although she supposed it would have been normal to do so.
“The problem is that the feeling of relief probably immediately triggers a feeling of guilt,” Jenkins continued. “Guilt is the baggage women carry, while men wield anger.”
Not all women, Hannah immediately thought, but didn’t say. She didn’t feel guilty. She was shocked to suddenly realize it. Not in the slightest.
“Maybe—“ Jenkins drew the word out—“the part you’ve really wanted to cut out was your marriage. The life you were leading.”
That surprised Hannah. In all the years she’d been seeing him he’d never talked this much and had most certainly never taken a stand on anything. Jenkins eyes slid past her and she realized he was checking the time. “We can get together next week if you like.”
Hannah felt like there was a hole in her chest with cold air rushing through. Jenkins had said a lot in a very short period of time. The interesting thing was that none of it had particularly surprised her.
Jenkins slowly stood and walked over to the side of her chair, placing his hand on the back of it. She realized he was indicating that the time was up. She stood. “Thank you, Doctor.”
CHAPTER 8
The secretary's nameplate identified her as Lois Smith. She looked like the woman who sat behind the window at the DMV and administered those quick eye tests rather than Nero’s gatekeeper. She had a thick gray bun, reading glasses held around her neck by a thin black cord when not in use, and a bulky sweater of muted color covering the shapeless form of her body.
At the moment, Lois Smith was finding it difficult to maintain the mild indifference her job required. As Mr. Nero's personal secretary for over twenty-five years she was familiar with and personable to all his ‘employees’ and ‘contractors’. The exception was the man in front of her. He made her skin crawl. He could have been handsome but at some point he had let his inherent nature control his facial muscles to produce a haunting, feral quality. His head was completely bald, the lights gleaming off the white skin. He was tall and slender, but walked with a slight hunch, as if always protecting the front of his body from some undetermined blow.
Ms. Smith smiled with her lips tightly clenched. “Mister Nero is on the phone. Could you please take a seat, Mister Racine?”
Racine never did what a woman asked unless there was something to be gained from it. He remained standing, staring at her, enjoying her discomfort.
Nero hung up the phone. The report from Doctor Jenkins in St. Louis was encouraging but he didn’t feel any excitement. It was as he had predicted. It would have surprised him if he’d been wrong at this stage. More pieces needed to be moved into place and then set in motion. One such piece was waiting outside his office right now. Reluctantly, Nero buzzed his secretary.
Mrs. Smith nodded to the steel door behind her. "Mister Racine, Mister Nero will see you now."
Racine puckered his lips. To Ms. Smith's credit there was no outward reaction on her part. Accepting there would be none, Racine moved to the door and entered some numbers on the eye-level keypad, while Ms. Smith kept her finger pressed on the positive access button under her desktop that activated the keypad.
The door swung open and automatically shut behind him. Racine stood in a narrow hallway and started to walk to the door ahead. His footsteps activated the floor sensor and a somewhat female metallic voice filled the small enclosure.
"Identify please. Name, number and code. You have ten seconds." The voice went twenty decibels lower as it began the countdown.
Racine was in a hurry and the voice stopped at six. Racine didn't even bother to glance at the small portals that held the incapacitating gas should he fail to make the ten second countdown. He found it quite an irritating routine to go through.