As he signed them in, Renee interrupted him. “Jake?”
“Yes?” He looked down and saw he’d been writing with his left hand. “Oh.”
He switched to his right and finished his signature. They barely had time to pick up magazines, Home Design for him and Entertainment Weekly for her, before they were summoned down the hall to Dr. Rheinsfeldt’s office.
“So,” the doctor said, taking the couch this time. The room smelled of potpourri and long-burnt incense. The furniture had been rearranged, and Renee wondered if a chair had been taken out especially for their visit. With only one chair in the room, besides the small chair at the computer desk, one of them would be forced to sit beside the doctor. Divide and conquer, maybe that was the doctor’s strategy.
That was fine with Renee. This outcome was already determined, so Dr. Rheinsfeldt could use whatever technique she desired. “We’ve decided to start over,” she said.
“That’s good,” the doctor said, pursing her Prussian mouth in a manner that suggested she was displeased. “Willingness is half the battle.”
Jacob sat beside the doctor. “I realized I was blaming myself for what happened,” he said. “And then I blamed my wife.”
“You realize there’s no blame here,” Rheinsfeldt said. “Just a tragic accident.”
Renee and Jacob exchanged looks. The doctor went on, oblivious of their feelings. “When we suffer a loss, we each must design our own grieving process. Some people cry their eyes out all the way up to the funeral, then calm down and never seem to be bothered again. Others show no emotion and go around cold and dead on the inside for months or even years. It’s not uncommon to slip into clinical depression”—she looked at Jacob over the top of her glasses frame—“especially if substance abuse is involved. And with your history, Jacob—”
“I’m done with all that.” Jacob tugged at his tie, centering the knot under his throat. “I owe it to Mattie and Christine to keep living.”
“The other thing,” Renee said, “is he’s coming to grips with his past.”
Rheinsfeldt ignored her, focusing on Jacob. “From your records, that seems to be the origin of your trauma.”
“I think Jacob and his twin brother were competing for their father’s affection, and Jacob always felt he never shined as brightly as his brother,” Renee said. “At least in his father’s eyes.”
“I’m aware of Warren Wells,” Rheinsfeldt said. “He was a consummate overachiever, apparently. And your twin brother?”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Jacob said.
“I sense anger,” Rheinsfeldt said.
“I have a right to be angry. Joshua played mean tricks on me all during our childhood. Even though we were physically identical, he was somehow stronger and more willful than I was. He always had the best-looking girlfriends, the star positions on the sports teams, the best grades. Even when I did his homework for him.”
“So you felt inferior to him?”
“At first. Then, when I decided that I was going away as soon as I was old enough to live on my own, it didn’t bother me anymore. Mom died and everything changed.”
“You felt abandoned?”
“No. I felt relieved. Dad was just distant and reproachful. Mom actively despised us.”
“Were you . . . physically abused?”
“No.” Jacob’s eyes fixed on the floor. “That would be too simple.”
“Jacob’s never been violent with me,” Renee said. “He wouldn’t spank Mattie. I always had to be the disciplinarian.”
“Does that cause you resentment?” Dr. Rheinsfeldt asked her.
“Maybe, but let’s focus on Jacob,” Renee said. “I think he needs it more than I do right now.”
“Tell me more about Joshua,” the doctor asked Jacob.
“I went away to college, determined that I was never coming back here. I even toyed with the idea of changing my name. I just wanted to forget that I was a Wells, especially after Dad put all this pressure on us to follow in his footsteps.”
“How did he do that? You said he was aloof.”
“He had his ways. He was a slave master, a plantation owner born in the wrong time. He was a conqueror, not a father. With him, it was all about winning.”
“And Joshua pleased him more than you did? Or, you at least perceived it that way?”
“Joshua had a way of . . . I don’t know, dodging responsibility, shifting blame. If a lamp was broken, it was always my fault. If the newspaper was rumpled, I’d be the one who had no respect for the property of others. A bad report card, and I’d be the one not performing up to my abilities, even if my grades were better than Joshua’s.”
Renee leaned forward and touched Jacob’s knee, encouraging him to continue. He was exposing his inner workings, the ones he’d always hidden from her. He was serious about wanting to start over. And getting the story straight was important.
“I started getting headaches, mostly when I was around Joshua,” he said. “We’d always shared the same room, though we lived in a big house. I think it made Mom happy. She liked the idea that her sons were close. Gave her a feeling that she had done a good job of raising us.”
“Did she?”
Jacob looked at the window, not seeing the curtains or the sliver of outside world between them. “Who knows? I suppose you judge your parents by how your own life turns out.”
“Do you blame your mother for leaving you?”
“I’m not angry with my mother,” Jacob said. “I guess I was angry at Dad. That’s why I tried so hard to get away. If it wasn’t for Renee—”
The sorrow slipped out of his eyes, replaced by a glint of determination. He would do it for her and their future together. Maybe one day they could start a new family. She loved him.
“She’s the one who turned me around, cleaned me up, made me take some pride in myself,” Jacob said. “It sounds strange, but she made me understand what it means to be a Wells.”
“Do you think you turned Renee into a mother figure?”
“I don’t think so,” Jacob said. “Renee is different from my mother in most ways.”
“Except the cleanliness,” Renee cut in again. “You always said we were both neat freaks.”
“But that wasn’t what attracted me to you,” Jacob said, talking to her now as if the doctor wasn’t in the room. “It was your atmosphere, the way you carried yourself. Like you knew what you were about.”
“And, being a bit scattered yourself, you saw a chance to impose some order on your life,” the doctor said.
“Maybe,” Jacob said. “That, and the conversation.”
“Sex,” Renee said. The sex hadn’t been great at first. Jacob had been tentative, restrained, as if carrying a burden of guilt. It had taken months before he really opened up and became considerate and expressive. It had started with the night he’d come home drunk and taken her forcefully, with an animal passion that receded into such deep tenderness that she had wept during her final round of orgasms. The night that Mattie had been conceived.
“I was trying to come off as a gentleman.”
“Remember that we only have one rule in this room,” the doctor said. “Absolute honesty at all times.”
Renee nodded at him. Jacob had never been a good liar. Despite his success at business, despite the long Wells tradition of deception, despite his hatred of his parents and twin brother, Jacob’s blood had never turned cold enough to qualify him as a sociopath. She knew him better than he knew himself. She gave him a smile of support.
“Let’s go back to your adolescent fugue states,” Rheinsfeldt said. “What happened during them?”
“I would experience periods of forgetfulness. Most of the time they would only last a minute or two. Like I’d be in school, listening to the teacher start a math problem, then all of a sudden I’d hear the bell ring and all the kids would be getting out of their seats to change classes. The chalkboard would be full and I’d look down at my paper and see all these notes to myself. Notes that had nothing to do with the class work.”