Thank God! I kept saying that over and over again. I tried to hold her, but she was so fragile, her delicate arms with layers and layers of bandages, tied to the bed rails. I pressed my cheek against hers, smelled her hair and her skin. It wasn’t enough just to see her awake. I needed to feel her and smell her…. Christ, her face was so pale. It was different from the night of the attack. That night she looked lifeless. On this early morning, she looked dead. I never knew there could be a difference. But there is. There really is. Her eyes were open and she was looking at me and at the ceiling. But she wasn’t there. My beautiful daughter wasn’t there anymore. Dr. Baird came in with Dr. Markovitz. It was surreal, being back in the hospital with those two doctors again. I guess I had started to believe what my wife had been saying, that Jenny was better. That she would keep getting better, and that this dark moment in our lives was finally passing. I must have believed that. Thinking about it now, I must have started to take all my doubts and put them on myself. Like I was the one in the family who couldn’t get past it. Like maybe I was projecting my despair onto my daughter and that she really was okay. I was the one who couldn’t accept that this monster would never be found. And, God I can’t believe I’m going to say this out loud. I think I was mad at her, at Jenny, for not remembering. For not being able to help the police find him and punish him for what he’d done. Is that crazy? To be so obsessed with vengeance?
“No,” I assured him. “You are her father. It’s instinct.” I meant those words. And I fully intended to alleviate his guilt. I did so at the risk of encouraging his search for Jenny’s rapist, and for this, I have some regret that I did not direct him away from embracing his instincts without reservation. An instinct may explain a reaction. But that does not mean the reaction is the best course to pursue. In any event, Tom was relieved.
That sounds right! Like I couldn’t help myself! I found myself watching the news all day and every evening. I flipped between CNN, CNBC, Fox, waiting to hear about another attack. I had “rape” on a Google alert. Can you believe that? Part of me actually wanted this monster to strike again so there would be a chance to catch him. I’m a horrible person. I don’t even give a shit anymore, you know? It feels good to admit it to someone, let it do whatever it’s gonna do. Send me straight to hell. Send me to jail. Whatever. Being back in the hospital with those same doctors and my daughter again in the fucking ICU! Fuck it. Fuck me. I should have known she wasn’t okay. I’m her father, for Christ’s sake. But I know now from the shock I felt in that hospital that I had let myself believe it.
What Tom didn’t say on that day, but what he did finally admit to me weeks later, was that he also vowed to stop deferring to his wife. The first fault line had given way. The fracturing of their marriage, their family, had begun. And so it was, on that morning after Jenny cut herself open, that Charlotte became the new villain—both to Jenny and her father.
This was not a surprise to me. But the art of therapy is to allow a patient to come to his own conclusions. It must be this way, and as a therapist, it requires great patience to nurture this process without corrupting it. How easy it would have been for me to lead Tom to this conclusion, that he was angry at his wife for making him believe their daughter was recovering. A few carefully placed words. A sentence here and there. Reminders of the facts that would make this case against his wife. It was, after all, Charlotte who insisted Jenny have the treatment. And Charlotte who demanded they forgo therapy and remove her to Block Island, where she would be in relative seclusion. Charlotte who insisted and persisted in mimicking normalcy in spite of Jenny’s loss of interest in her life. Charlotte who reprimanded her husband whenever he brought up the subject of their daughter’s rape. I said nothing of the sort. I was very careful. A therapist has tremendous powers of suggestion. Tremendous powers, period.
I will not say whether or not Tom was justified in his feelings. Feelings do not require justification. On the one hand, Charlotte had been adamant in her version of the truth. The rape had been erased from her daughter’s mind. And so it never happened. It is obvious now to see that she was wrong. But she was not without the very best of intentions. Nor was she entirely delusional. Dr. Markovitz had administered the drugs, and Jenny’s memory had been compromised. She didn’t remember the rape. Charlotte cannot be blamed for not understanding the human mind and the devastating aftereffects of the treatment. Those were just beginning to surface. And that brings us back to Sean Logan.
Sean Logan was a Navy SEAL. He’d grown up in nearby New London, the same town as Charlotte Kramer. His father had been in the navy, and his grandfather had died a decorated marine. He had six siblings, three older and three younger, making him the lost middle child. He was a beautiful man to look at. I don’t care if you’re a man or a woman, straight or homosexual, young or old. You could not look at Sean Logan and not be struck by his physical beauty. It was not one thing—his light blue eyes, his thick dark hair, the masculine bone structure of his cheeks and brow. These things together created a perfect canvas. But on that canvas was always painted some kind of emotion. Sean was not able to hide them. His joy, which I did not see until years later, was boundless. His wry sense of humor, infectious. He could make me laugh like no other patient I have ever treated, even in spite of my efforts to remain stoic. The laughter would erupt from my mouth like lava from a volcano. His love was deep and pure. And his pain was intoxicating.
Sean did not go to college, although he had earned a scholarship to Brown University. He was that driven, that smart. But he could not sit still within himself. We are all (most of us) at times overwhelmed by our feelings. Think about the first time you “fell in love.” Or the first moment you saw your newborn baby. Perhaps you experienced profound fear in some kind of near accident, or extreme rage when someone hurt you or your family intentionally. You might go days without eating much, without sleeping through the night, without having control of your thoughts as they fixated on the source of the disruption to normal life. You might think you feel “happy” if the source of this disruption is positive—”falling in love,” for example. But it is not “happiness.” The disruption is created by the fear of not knowing how to assimilate this new situation into normal life, not knowing if it will stay or go. Your brain is actually in a state of adjustment, trying to figure out what it will need to do to accommodate the change in this new emotional environment. Actual “happiness” is when the relationship settles down and becomes stable. When you sleep through the night next to your new love because you know she is here to stay.
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