He licked his chapped lips. “Has Mrs. Wells arrived?”
“No, sir, but if you’ll have a seat, I’ll let Dr. Rheinsfeldt know you’re here.”
“That’s okay, I’ll do it myself.” Jacob pushed open the door that led to the private offices, feeling the clerk’s stare on his back. He wanted to show up for the appointment early and chat with the doctor for a couple of minutes, so that Renee would walk through the door already on the defensive. Jacob had learned from past experience that psychologists naturally gravitated to whichever side seemed most in need of “curing.”
Jacob read the names on the doors as he went down the hall. A cadre of wise and caring souls sat behind those doors, with leather chairs and computers and rows of books on the shelves. Their heads were filled with questions and they deluded themselves into thinking they served a noble purpose. Their meat was anger and pain, their drink was pity disguised as sympathy. They had all the crude hunger of vampires and slightly less moral conscience.
The patients were perhaps even more complicit in the cycle of mutual dependency. They sat, wept, shared personal troubles that would be worthy of canned laughter if displayed in a television sitcom. The best part was they only had to open their souls for a single hour, and then they could stumble into the sunshine believing they had shed themselves of a bothersome skin. They could pretend they were a step closer to wholeness, but Jacob knew the whole was always less than the sum of its parts.
Because, where he went, so did Joshua.
He took a drink from a water fountain in the hall, then slipped into the rest room and swallowed as much of the whiskey as he could stomach. He rinsed his mouth and splashed water onto his face. A pale, pinched face stared back at him from the mirror. With his bloodshot eyes and swollen eyelids, he could easily pass for a crier. If you wanted to win a joint counseling session, imagined tears scored more points than honest and soul-deep revelations. He should know. He’d won all of his counseling sessions as a child.
Dr. Rheinsfeldt’s office was the last on the left wing. The door was open. Rheinsfeldt was a shriveled, shrunken troll doll of a woman, her hair as wild and wispy as Einstein’s. She pretended not to see him, as if giving him an opportunity to case the room. Let the rat sniff the cheese before you send it on a run through the maze, Jacob thought.
Magazines were spread haphazardly across the coffee table in the center of the room, smart stuff: Science News, Consumer Reports, Smithsonian. A spotless glass ashtray lay on top of them, one virgin cigarette resting in a notch on the rim. A single shelf on the wall bowed under the weight of thick hardcovers. The dusty books looked as if they had been undisturbed since the days of Jung.
Rheinsfeldt closed the magazine she had been reading, unfolded her rubbery legs from beneath her torso, and reached for the cigarette. She put it in her mouth and spoke around its stem. “You must be Jacob Wells.”
Jacob looked into the hall behind him. “Oh, you’re talking to me.”
“A sense of the absurd. I like that. Please come in and have a seat.”
The room had two chairs and a small couch, arranged in a triangle. This was the first and most obvious test. Rheinsfeldt would slide his peg into a certain shape of hole depending upon where he sat. If he chose the chair beside hers, it would reflect urgency and desperation, a desire for an ally. On the other hand, if he sat on the couch, then Renee might be expected to sit beside him in a show of matrimonial support. He decided on the third alternative, the middle of the couch, which left no room for Renee on either side of him. When he sat, Rheinsfeldt’s dark eyes glimmered with satisfaction, as if she had suspected such a move from the start.
“Most couples arrive for counseling sessions together,” Rheinsfeldt said, removing the unlit cigarette from her mouth and placing it in her small purse.
“Renee believes in being punctual. I believe in being early.”
“Ah. All relationships are built on conflict. Why should marriage be any different?”
“Have you ever been married?”
“What, are you crazy?”
“Then why should we listen to anything you have to say?”
“Because, Jacob, I can’t tell you anything. All I can do is help you hear yourself.”
Jacob looked at the walls. Rheinsfeldt’s gaze was like a hundred needles trying to pin him to a cork board. He looked out the window, but it was small and revealed only a square of boring blue. The room’s walls and ceiling came at him as if he was in a trash compactor, and he closed his eyes.
Renee’s entrance was heralded by her hair conditioner, a minty brand that used to arouse instant erotic feelings in Jacob. Now it was the stench of failure, as sickening as wood smoke. He forced himself to look at her, knowing those green eyes would remind him of Mattie.
He realized with horror that he couldn’t quite recall the rest of Mattie’s face.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Renee looked around the room at the incomprehensible art, anywhere but at Jacob’s face. She couldn’t decide if Dr. Rheinsfeldt’s tastes in interior decoration were personal or clinical. The woman herself was squat and toadish, eyes dark with looming advice. She gave the impression of someone whose interpersonal relationships had been dramatic and brief.
“Where to begin?” Rheinsfeldt said.
“You’re supposed to ask, ‘What brings you both here today?’” Jacob said. He stank of liquor and a sour rot. “Didn’t they teach you that in shrink school?”
“Don’t mind him,” Renee said. She could barely stand to look at him. If those police reports were true, she didn’t know the man she’d shared the last ten years of her life with.
“There you go again,” he said.
“He’s been drinking,” she said to Rheinsfeldt.
“Have you been drinking, Jacob?”
“Maybe.” He crossed his arms and slumped down in the couch.
“Okay. This isn’t a treatment program,” Rheinsfeldt said. “You can do that later if you need to and want to. Right now, let’s get a dialogue going about this other thing.”
“The thing,” Renee said. Reduced to a single vague noun, The Tragedy seemed to have lost its power. She tried to see the two of them through Rheinsfeldt’s eyes: a wild-eyed, frantic woman and a drunken, unshaven man in filthy clothes. Renee’s right hand went to her wedding band and she twisted it until her knuckle was red.
“I read the papers,” Rheinsfeldt said. “Everybody’s heard of the Wells family and the fire. I think that’s where we need to start. That’s where the pain is. The death of a child—I can only imagine.”
“No,” Renee said. “The pain started before that.”
“Tell me.”
“Don’t you dare,” Jacob said.
Renee forced herself to look at him. His jaw trembled, cheeks still pink where the new skin had formed. He looked like an alien, a Hollywood stunt double with a lump of putty piled on his shoulders, broken marbles stuck in for eyes. He ran the back of his hand over his lips and jerked forward, as if wanting to beat her to the punch line of some pointless joke.
“She’s always been like this,” he blurted.
“Always?” Rheinsfeldt said. “When was that?”
“When we first got together,” Renee said. “He pretended to open up, but there was always something hidden away. He didn’t even tell me his family was rich until we had dated for half a year.”
“She was always after the money,” Jacob said.
“See what I mean?” Renee said to Rheinsfeldt. “How can he even talk about money when our children are dead?”
“Jacob? That sounds like a pretty damning observation.”
“I take half the blame for Christine.”
“Christine,” Rheinsfeldt said. “That was last year?”
Renee opened her purse and brought out tissues, ignoring the box of Kleenex on the edge of the table. The box was too perfectly positioned, its calculated alignment not matching the chaos of the room. She took off her glasses and wiped her eyes. “Christine was a SIDS baby.”