“What are you thinking?” She asked.
“I’m just thinking that you’re right,” I replied.
She smiled and turned off the light. “You should be getting used to that by now.”
At our next session, Dr. Koenig was running behind and so I had to cool my heels without him for several minutes. When he came in, he found me standing at the window looking out over that little courtyard, my hands behind my back. Today, an old woman sat on the bench eating popcorn from a small red-and-white striped bag. White-haired and hunchbacked, the she chewed with the slow deliberation of one with few teeth and nothing but time—although, from the looks of her, she didn’t have much of either. A stainless steel walker frame stood parked beside the bench. Her eyes stared into space.
Alzheimer’s, I thought. Dr. Koenig’s office occupied the first floor of a large building; she was probably an outpatient in somebody’s eldercare practice. Right now, a man or woman in his or her fifties or sixties was watching her from another office window I couldn’t see, talking with an entirely different doctor from mine about Mother’s options.
“Who’s that lady out there?” I asked.
“I have no idea.”
He joined me at the window. He had eschewed the informal attire this morning, and now his skinny neck poked out of a white collared shirt, the inverted noose of a necktie falling down towards his beltline. He had important obligations today, people to do, things to see. Drive over to the university in Chapel Hill, maybe, give a lecture to the next generation of psychotherapists so that they could adequately counsel the next generation of neurotic lawyers. Dr. Koenig had a life. When I wasn’t in his office, he probably didn’t even think about me. He ran marathons. He made organic salads.
“She’s got Alzheimer’s,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t,” I replied. “It’s a guess. More than a third of the population has dementia by her age. Maybe it’s not Alzheimer’s, but it’s something. Pick’s disease, Lewy Body disease, vascular dementia, could be anything, I guess. Look at her. Did I ever tell you I have a little experience in the mental health field?”
“You didn’t.”
“I do. When I first started at Carwood Allison, they really hadn’t figured out what to do with me yet, so they had me running around doing all this random shit for this partner or that. I used to tell people at the courthouse I was like a hooker, only I had seven pimps. One of the things they had me do was Guardian Ad Litem work, where you get appointed by the Clerk of Court to represent the respondent in an incompetency proceeding. You know, make sure nobody’s trying to take advantage of them or anything, look out for their best interests.”
The old woman chewed her popcorn. A pigeon lit on the sidewalk at her feet and she stared at it for several seconds before tossing it one white piece. The bird gobbled it whole.
“I get appointed to represent these people, and ninety-nine percent of the time, they’re out to lunch. They have no idea what’s going on.”
I paused, watching her and thinking.
“Once upon a time, I felt sorry for them,” I remarked.
“And now?”
“Now I’m jealous.”
I turned away from the window and walked to the suede sofa where I’d unburdened myself and gotten nowhere. Dr. Koenig took his customary seat. He reached into his briefcase and out came that legal pad, the one where he scribbled notes that he wouldn’t share with me, notes that ostensibly helped him reach a care plan that he wouldn’t share with me, either. I’d grown tired of not sleeping, but I’d grown tired of this, too, this talking. I was sick of talking.
I was sick of everything.
“You’re jealous of Alzheimer’s patients?”
I sighed and shook my head. You couldn’t say anything around a shrink. They’d take it and twist it, and before you knew it, they’d have you strapped into a straitjacket. “It’s just an expression.”
He looked down at his pad again. There came a long pause, as if he had to think hard about how to approach a difficult task.
Then he asked, “Have you talked to Allie about coming in to speak with me?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“A number of reasons. Main one being, I disagree with your little theory.”
“My ‘little’ theory?”
“That I could have laid unconscious for longer than I think—that Pinnix and Ramseur had their way with my wife, my daughter or both and I nailed them on their way out. I mean, don’t get me wrong; it’s an interesting point. And a valid one—the timing is one of the miracles that night. But I talked to them about it. Allie and Abby. It didn’t happen.”
“Do you think that if someone’s willing to go to the lengths necessary to block something out that they’re just going to tell you yes, this terrible thing actually did happen to me?”
I chuckled and shook my head. “No, Doc, I don’t. But I do think that there’d be some kind of cue when you confronted them about it. If a woman gets held down and raped in her own bed, aside from the obvious physical evidence that would exist immediately after the act, there would be… this thing in her mind that she’d have to cover up. I think that if Allie or Abby had been attacked that night in any way, I’d have seen it. The coverup, I mean.”
He studied me in silence, digesting what I’d said. He made a note on his pad and remarked, “Some people are very good liars.”
“Abby’s never been a very good liar. And Allie, well—I’ve known her for eighteen years. I’ve got eighteen years of baseline behavior, and I’m telling you, the only thing that’s changed is she’s into sex again.”
Another glance down at the pad. Due to the angle, I couldn’t see what he’d been writing on it and it occurred to me that it could be anything. I wondered if Dr. Koenig was doodling.
“So you don’t believe there’s a possibility that something else happened there that you’re just not aware of,” he said.
“No,” I replied. “I’ve considered it, I’ve given it a lot of thought and since I see absolutely no evidence to support it, I’m going to go ahead and discard it as a workable theory.”
“Fine. But why haven’t you brought your wife in to see me? I told you I wanted to meet her. She’s not here.”
“She’s not here because I didn’t bring her. I didn’t mention it to her.”
“Why?”
I shrugged and took a deep breath. Not a ki breath—this was just your ordinary, everyday sigh.
“This is kind of a… I don’t know… a weird process. Psychotherapy, I mean. Me coming in here, baring my soul to you. I’m supposed to confess and confront my insecurities. Lay out my fears. I will never look less like a hero than I do in here with you. If it’s all right with you, I’d like to avoid looking like a pussy in front of my wife. Bobby agrees with me.”
That seemed to catch his attention. “You consulted with Bobby about this.”
“I did.” I gave a half-smile. Outside, the old woman had disappeared. All traces of human misery and tragic endings had vanished, leaving behind only the concrete bench and the full, green trees. “Women, he pointed out, want a strong man. Especially women who came within inches of getting raped and probably killed—they don’t want to see you in a shrink’s office, crying about your feelings. They may act all supportive, but what they really want is for you to handle it and go on.”
“This is Bobby’s opinion.”
“It’s mine, too. I’m going to tell you something else; Bobby thinks that what I need to do is go ahead and find this Bald Man who called into the radio show and get in his face. I tend to agree with him there, too, by the way.”