His skin was gray, flesh hanging, eyes dead with medication. He moved as if carrying a great weight around his shoulders, a yoke—stooped, gait slow and dragging. For weeks, he only moved between the halfway house, a grim block building outside town, and the contractors’ office where he was the night janitor five miles away. A van drove him to his job and picked him up.
Then, one night, I watched as he left the office building on foot through the back door. He walked the mile and a half back to that house, the house where he brought Tess and me. He stayed there for nearly two hours. Just standing in the front yard, staring. What was he thinking? What voices was he hearing? Then he lumbered back, finished his work. The van picked him up at 5 a.m., hours before the workers returned for the day.
I knew what I had to do. I wasn’t about to let him hurt another living soul. That other part of me wouldn’t be able to live with it.
There is the world you live in, Lara, and there is the world I live in. You live in the light. Your happy family. Your friends. Your career ambitions. Yes, I know you still have those ambitions. That belly of fire to know, to understand, to dig in deep, find and tell the stories of humanity. You may be on a little domestic vacation, but this whole stay-at-home-mom thing? It’s not for you. Not that there’s anything wrong with it. Quite the contrary. The world would be a better place, I think, if someone stayed home, if it was someone’s full-time job to be there, especially in those early years when we are formed. What would the world be like if everyone had a loving parent at home, someone happy and contented, someone who loved and nurtured, cooked and cleaned? Of course, that’s not the world. Among the young people I see, there is so much horrific abuse—physical, verbal, psychological. More than that, there is neglect. A turning away from our children—as we indulge ourselves, succumb to our vices and addictions, worship our material goods, stare unceasingly at our devices, climb and climb that corporate ladder. We tell ourselves that we do it all for them. But we don’t. They don’t need the toys, and the iPads, and the Range Rovers. What they need is our attention.
I will say that I admire you, Rain. I see the way you are with her. Attentive, loving. I don’t see you staring at your phone like the other mommies on the playground. I saw one woman, glued to that thing while her baby clung to her leg and cried and cried. As if to say, what are you looking at? Why aren’t you looking at me? When she finally picked the kid up, the child reached urgently for the phone. What’s so special about this thing? she must have been wondering. Why does Mommy look at it more than she looks at me?
I watch you jog with your stroller, pushing her around the park. You are a beautiful girl, always have been. Not that plastic, Barbie blonde. Nothing revealing. Nothing flashy. Snow White. You beguile with your beauty, your goodness. I know why Kreskey watched you. Why he wanted to take you to his little house in the woods and keep you for himself. That, above all, is the fantasy of the neglected man. To be loved and cared for by beauty and goodness. To have that mother’s love that was withheld.
My mother loved me. She stayed home awhile, went back to work when I went to school. She read to me and held me when I cried. She bandaged my knees and taught me how to stand up for myself when the bullies brought me down. My dad played catch and took me to the movies. He checked on me at night. That boy, that Hank. He is well; he survived and thrived. It’s the other one, the one formed in trauma. He’s the problem.
My patient today is Grace, a bulimic. She’s also a cutter. With a razor she hides in her sleeve, she slices at the inside of her thighs.
“Why?” I asked her in one of our earlier sessions. “What are you thinking when you make the decision to hurt yourself?”
She seemed surprised, as if no one had ever asked her why she would do such a thing. It surprised her to think of it as a