The Forgetting Place (9 page)

G
ood morning, Amber.”

“Morning, Lise.” She turned and snatched a paper cup from atop its patient stack of brothers and let the coffee flow. “Running late this morning,” she observed, fitting the beverage with a top and placing it on the counter. She selected a few chocolate-covered walnuts from behind the glass display window and plunked them into a sample cup for me to try. I offered her a weary smile, knowing she wouldn't accept “No, thank you” for an answer.

“I didn't sleep too well last night,” I admitted. After my unwelcome visitor, I hadn't been able to settle down and rest until about three in the morning. I'd circled the cramped confines of my modest living room—around and around the couch I went—debating whether I'd been right to not call the police.
Someone ought to know about the incident,
I told myself. But what information could I really offer? I hadn't gotten a look at his face, and the trench coat had masked much of his frame. He hadn't accosted me or done anything overtly threatening. So . . . what? Was it a crime to walk the public streets at night, to stand on the sidewalk near the park and smoke a cigarette? Technically, he hadn't
even littered, since he'd taken the cigarette butt with him. I could imagine the bored, placating expression on the officer's face as he stood in my apartment, taking the report.
We'll keep an eye out, ma'am,
he would say.
In the meantime, it might be a good idea to have someone walk you home if you're heading back late at night.
I'd nod, forcing a tight smile of appreciation for this condescending piece of paternalistic advice.
Yeah, thanks,
I'd think.
Thanks for nothing
.

Amber gave me a discerning once-over. “Well, you look like shit,” she said.

“Thanks.” I smiled, tucking a few wayward strands of hair behind my right ear. “I'm glad you like the new me.”

Amber looked doubtful. She gestured to my coffee. “You want a shot or two of espresso in that?”

I raised my eyebrows. “And take a nosedive in about three hours?”

“Just offering.”

“I know,” I said. “I appreciate that.” I started to turn away from the counter, but then paused and turned back.

“Reconsidering that espresso?” she asked.

I shook my head, glancing around the shop for a moment. It was only the two of us, but I leaned in across the counter just the same. “I don't know if this would be something you'd remember,” I started, “but about a week and a half ago there were two guys sitting at that table”—I pointed behind me—“one day when I walked in.”

“Two guys, sitting at a table,” she said, and I realized how stupid it all sounded.

“It was the day after the storm,” I prodded her. “The store's front window had been cracked the night before. I came in here
to get my coffee as usual,” I continued, “but there were these two guys—dressed in, you know, business attire and reading the paper—that I hadn't seen here before. They were sitting right at that table over there.” I gestured again. “I haven't seen them in here since then, but the other day on the street . . . I stepped off the sidewalk and they almost ran me over with their car.”

“Wow,” she said, looking alarmed.

“I wasn't hit, but it was pretty close. It scared me.”

“I'll bet.”

“Anyway”—I shrugged—“I was just wondering if you might remember them from the day they were in here.”

“You wanna report them?” she asked.

“No,” I replied. “It's just that, well, in your line of work you see a lot of people walk in and out of those doors—most of them locals. And I figured, you know, maybe you knew them.”

Amber gave it some thought, but a few seconds later she was shaking her head. “Sorry, honey. I can't picture them.”

“No,” I said. “I didn't expect you to.” I let out a small sigh, wondering if I should tell her about the guy who'd followed me home the night before. But what was the point of upsetting her when there was nothing she could do about it? I gave her a nod. “Thanks for the coffee.”

Her brow furrowed a bit, and she tucked the right side of her lower lip in as she watched me. “You okay, sweetheart?”

“Yeah,” I responded. “Fine.” I gave her a tight, self-assured smile and left the shop with a half wave, forgetting the dash of milk I usually added to my drink as part of my morning ritual.

And maybe it was just that, but I didn't feel right the rest of the day.

H
ow was your relationship with your sister,” I asked Jason, “following the incident in the woods?”

“Mostly, it was unchanged.” He wiped at his nose with the back of one hand. He seemed to be coming down with a cold. I offered him a tissue and he took it, but he held it absently in his hand, working it with his fingers. We'd elected to stay inside that day. “You must understand that she's
always
been protective of me, even when I was a little kid. I never really understood it, but she used to take the blame for things that I did, just so I wouldn't get in trouble.”

“Like what?”

He shrugged. “Like whatever. We'd be horsing around, throwing a Nerf basketball in the dining room, and I'd knock over something fragile—one of our mom's figurines she used to display on our windowsills—and my sister would walk right over to it and sit down next to the shards on the floor like she'd knocked it over and not me. One of our parents would come in, and she'd fess up immediately. She'd get sent to her room or sometimes even take a spanking, and all the while I'm just standing there knowing it was me who knocked the thing over.” Jason gave me a
half smile, but it didn't sit comfortably on his face. “Looking back on it now, I think things would've turned out better for both of us if she would've let me take some of those punishments for myself. But it was in her nature to protect me. It was almost a compulsion. You understand?”

“How did you get along with your parents?”

He shrugged. “Okay, I guess. Dad, you know, was a cop. He worked odd hours and often wasn't home in the evenings. Mom was a teacher. She took a few years off from work when we were younger but went back to work when I started kindergarten. She didn't seem very happy about it, but I think we needed the money. I remember her and Dad arguing about that—her need to work full-time, how we were spending more as a family than we were bringing in, and how that kind of life led to trouble sooner or later. So when I broke something, even something small and stupid like one of those figurines, I always thought,
Mom and Dad worked hard to pay for that
. It represented a piece of themselves, a span of time they'd sacrificed in order to afford it, and I was sorry as hell to have wasted it with my recklessness. I would often cry over stuff like that, and Dad would look at me with a touch of disgust on his face, scrunch up his nose, and tell me not to be such a goddamn baby all the time.” Jason took a deep breath and let it out. “I don't think he ever realized I was crying for him.”

“How much does your family know about your sexual orientation?” I asked.

“You mean, do they know I'm gay?”

I nodded.

“My sister knows,” he said. “Or she used to know.” He shook his head. “She's been gone for so long now . . .”

“And your parents?”

“My mother accepts it, but we don't talk about it much. My father . . .” Jason grinned. “I think he still hopes it's a phase I'll grow out of one day. Like skateboarding when I was younger.”

“How's
that
working out for the two of you?”

“I turned thirty last November,” he said.

“So it's a brief thirty-year phase.”

“And counting,” he agreed.

We were quiet for a while, watching patients mill about in the dayroom.

“Would it be fair to say that your sister took on a somewhat paternal role in your relationship?”

“I suppose.”

“Jason,” I said, feeling my heartbeat kick up a notch, “what happened to your sister?”

He shot me a look that I couldn't quite interpret. I could see alarm in his eyes, and . . .
was it fear?
This was uncomfortable territory for him, I realized, and I was pushing him into it. It struck me as I asked the question that it might be too soon. We were forming our therapeutic alliance, but it was still tenuous. If I leaned on him too hard, our relationship and everything I'd worked toward thus far could crumble. Still . . . here was a big piece of the puzzle that hung in the space between us, and I reached out for it, the edge of the thing brushing against my fingertips.

Jason's lips tightened, his blue eyes turning to slate. I could feel him pulling back, could feel the chasm opening up between us. I allowed the silence to sit fat and bloated between us for a full minute, then tried a different approach.

“Do you know why you're here?”

He looked at me, his eyes searching for how to proceed, as if the answer had been weighing upon him for many years and he wanted nothing more than to lay it at my feet so he could rest at last. For a moment, I was afraid. Of all the patients I'd sat with over the years—of all the secrets I'd heard, the demons I'd brought to the surface and helped my patients to confront—there was something hidden here that I did not want to know. I didn't understand why I felt this way, an unexplainable conviction that this thing he was carrying—this thing that continued to consume him like an infection—was somehow contagious and would consume me, too, if I let it. I wanted to stand up, to walk away and never look back. But it was too late for that now. Because already a door had been partially opened, and although I was afraid, I also needed to know what lay behind it.

This, I realize, so often leads to our downfall. We press forward not because we want to know, but because we
must
know. It doesn't matter how terrible that knowledge is, or what price must be paid for it. And it is not until the moment of revelation that we scurry back in horror and dismay, attempting to eradicate the image from our brain, to step back in time so that we might turn away from the door before it is fully opened, wishing—seconds too late—for the opportunity to walk away intact.

“I'm here because a man is dead,” he told me. “It was someone I cared about very much, someone I loved.” He put a hand to the side of his face, then dropped it back into his lap. “I can't change that now, although I wish to hell that I could.”

His eyes turned away from me, searched the corner of the room for a moment. When he looked back at me, his expression had softened.

“I lost her too that night,” he said, “only I didn't realize it at the time. I had no way of knowing she would disappear so completely. I was too distracted by my own grief.”

“Where did she go?” I asked.

“She went away. I . . . I don't know.” He sighed, struggling with his answer. “I'm here because one day she may come back, and until then it's
my
job to protect
her
for a while.” He brought his hands together, fingers interlaced in a gesture both desperate and familiar. “I have to believe that, you know—that she may come back. I have to trust that one day she'll find her way back. I can't lose both of them.”

“Are you helping her by being here? Is that part of how you're protecting her?”

“
God,
I hope so,” he said. “I don't know what else to do.”

I
sat in my office, moving sheets of paper from one pile to the next. My right hand opened the upper drawer of my desk, removed a notepad, and placed it on the wooden surface in front of me—but when I picked up a pen, the tip poised above the blank page, I couldn't remember what I'd been so intent on jotting down just a few seconds before. Instead, I allowed myself to doodle, my thoughts focused elsewhere, and when I returned my attention to the page I was surprised to see that I had written a name: Uncle Jim.

I mouthed the words, my tongue and teeth sliding forward in rapid succession, and then the press of my lips together at its final syllable. I did this without making a sound, like a child who is convinced that uttering the name of the bogeyman in the still of the night will somehow summon him.

But he wasn't the bogeyman,
I reminded myself. He was only my uncle, someone who'd been quirky and funny, cool to hang out with—someone who'd paid attention to me, who'd listened to what I had to say. In many ways, he was the antithesis of my parents.

“Y
OU AND
I got a lot in common, Lise,” he'd often told me, wrapping an arm around my shoulders and looking down at me with a sly wink. “We see things differently than other people.”

“We do?” I'd ask, and that really got him laughing. Me, too. When Uncle Jim started laughing, it was impossible for me not to join him.

“
Helllll, yes,
” he'd say. “What d'ya think this is, some dog and pony show?”

“Well, I've never seen a dog and pony show,” I told him earnestly, “but I really want to.” And at that he would just about split a gut, slapping his thigh with his free hand and clapping me on the back with the other.

“
Oooh, boy, you're a funny one.
Never seen a dog and pony show.”

“But I really want to,” I interjected once again, and that sent him peeling off into another fit. How the tears used to roll down his face as he bent over holding his gut from the strain of laughing so hard. It sort of became a routine between us during the three months he lived with my family. We'd go through that same bit of dialogue, him telling me how we had so much in common, how we saw things differently than other people, and when I'd feign surprise he'd tell me
helllll, yes,
and
what'd I think this is, some dog and pony show?
He'd look down at me, putting on a serious face for a second, but by then we both knew what I was going to say and, more often than not, one of us would already be giggling.

I
REMEMBER FEELING
truly happy during those early weeks. For the first time in my life, maybe, I had someone to talk to, someone who seemed to understand me. I could feel myself opening up, feel the tightness I'd grown accustomed to loosening more
each day, until I began to . . . well . . . until I began to forget what it had been like before. And in some ways, I think it might have been the same for Uncle Jim. Because when you're feeling good you start to forget the darker times in your life. Maybe it's because they seem less significant, because the power they once held over you has dissipated. You want to believe that those days were an anomaly, that they're never coming back. But it's a mistake to think that way. I recognize that now. Because the minute you lose respect for those days is the minute you start to slide back toward them.

Much of the problem lies with medication compliance. Patients with psychiatric conditions may stop taking their medications for many reasons, but three of the most important are lack of insight, side effects, and what I call the
blind spot
.

Mental illness impairs many things, and one of them is the insight that one has a mental illness to begin with. Patients with schizophrenia, for example, may not have insight into their disease. It can be difficult to convince them of the diagnosis, and many will be resistant to taking medication for a disease they do not believe they have.

Side effects become a factor for many: dry mouth, sedation, weight gain, tics and movement disorders, disturbance of sexual function, to name a few. In some cases, patients may feel that they lose touch with the essence of who they are. I've had patients tell me,
When I'm on that medication, I'm not myself anymore,
and if
that's
not an obstacle to medication compliance I don't know what is.

Then there's the
blind spot
. I equate it with that large space just a little behind the driver and to either side of a car, where big things that we don't see can hide. It's like that with mental illness.
Patients may know that if they don't take their medication, they have a tendency to become psychotic. They've been hospitalized several times before. But they're having a good month—a good year, even—and to stick with the analogy for a moment, the road ahead looks beautiful: just one straight open highway. They check their mirrors, see nothing but vacant blacktop behind them, and figure why not switch things up a bit—get off the meds and get over into the fast lane for a while where they can really open her up. So they let the car start to slide over a lane or two. But they forget to do a head check, and what they don't see is that last case of psychosis—the one that put them in the trauma center for a month because they thought they could fly—right next to them, just a little back and to the left, sitting there in their blind spot and ready to mess them up good this time. Maybe even kill them.

Looking back on it, I don't think it was lack of insight or side effects that made Uncle Jim stop taking his medication. I think it was the blind spot. He either didn't see it or refused to see it. But I did. I watched it bear down on him, overtake him. Still, I said nothing—and the guilt of being a part of what happened next may go a long way in explaining my choice of professions. But maybe in the end it was no choice at all. Maybe it was just part of my penance. And if all those years of training have taught me anything, it's that there are some things you can never undo, can never make better. Sometimes you have to allow yourself to forget.

Sometimes . . . it's the only way.