I shut my eyes and listen to the soothing noises of the mother comforting the child, who sounds like she is hacking up a lung.
I wonder if Angel ever felt this kind of love when she was sick, when she was sad, when she lost an eye. I pretend the woman is talking to me, too. Everything will be all right. I’ve got you. When my leg is quiet, I use toilet paper to wipe the sweat off my face, and change into the slim-tight black workout gear from the duffel I brought from the truck.
The little girl and I emerge at the same time. In the mirror, our faces are the same pale ghost. She points at my shoe. A couple of shreds of toilet paper are stuck to the bottom. I smile a thank you.
I pick off one piece, filthy. Then another. Not toilet paper. I’m staring at the two halves of the phone number from my father’s drawer. It fell out of my jeans pocket when I was changing in the stall.
I stuff it in the trash.
I wash my hands in cold water until they are numb.
I wait until I’m inside the truck before I dial it.
I curve the truck onto a lonesome, rugged piece of property with a shimmering ribbon of the Brazos cutting through it.
The first time she answered, it was such an electric jolt that I hung up. Dr. Andrea Greco always had a particularly distinctive voice, high and unexpected for all that intellectual stamina. It took just her single musical hello to hurtle me back to the blue chair where I sat ten years ago with a hollow stomach and a skyscraping view.
I haven’t talked to my childhood therapist since I was sixteen, when my fingernails, chewed and bloody, felt as raw as my leg. Based on our final encounter, it shocks me that my father would ever even think about calling her—that her private phone number would be hoarded in his drawer of precious things.
Fifteen minutes later, after a little online research, I dialed again.
It was a short conversation. I said I needed to see her. She recited an address in the middle of rocky nowhere, a two-hour drive away, as if we had seen each other last week.
Now her house looms in front of me as ominously as her therapy used to: steely railings, long falls, opaque windows, lookouts that cannot be defended. An end I cannot see.
She’s standing up on one of the decks, peering toward my truck as it crunches to a stop. Hair, loose and messy. Now she’s making a careful descent on a staircase that juts its way to the ground in a series of tight right angles.
No more Prada pumps. No more tailored suits so she would fit in with the big boy psychologists, or soft blowouts to impress juries more charmed by a “fixy” Texas woman.
The power pantsuits, the friendly Tina Fey glasses, a degree from Brown—she said they were all part of her armor. “Everybody needs armor,” she’d assured me. “We’ll figure out yours.”
Kind of ironic since, two years ago, she fled her corner tower office in Dallas that made ants of people below and made an ant of herself on an empty landscape.
She’d paid a high price for taking on infamous child cases.
I knew from my brief search that she was addicted to restraining orders.
Abusive parents she testified against. A psychotic teenager who tried to run her down with a motorcycle. Another who left love letters with hearts colored with his blood. Her ex-husband, who apparently liked to sneak into her Turtle Creek home after their divorce and move the furniture around while she was gone.
She told a reporter that she retired to write a book.
I wonder what I look like to her, out of the truck, metal leg bared, a black spider against all that rock and sky. Maybe like an apocalyptic assassin.
A thin cotton shirt is billowing over faded jeans as she reaches the bottom step. I wonder if she still carries a gun.
Her small Ruger flashed at me just once. It was strapped to her waist. She was reaching on her office bookshelf for the translation of the ancient Indian poem about Vishpala, a warrior queen who lost a limb in a battle and returned to fight again, fitted with an iron leg.
“The whole thing is total myth,” I’d spit at her. “Nobody could lift an iron leg to walk, much less run. Nobody back then would think a woman could fight. They don’t even think that now.”
“This poem about Vishpala was the first written mention of a prosthetic in the history of the world,” she’d replied. “Thousands of years ago.” She sat beside me on the couch and laid a hand on sacred territory, the thigh of my amputated leg. Nobody did that, which is why I remember.
“Think about this,” she’d said. “Knights wore suits of armor that weighed a hundred and ten pounds. It took two times as much energy for them to walk around, much less fight to the death. A modern soldier in Afghanistan hauls around sixty pounds on his back in brutal desert conditions. But he does it. Your new leg feels heavy, but it weighs, what? Five pounds? Much that shouldn’t be possible is, Odette. Most of the time, the difference between my patients who push against all the odds and the ones who do not comes down to something inside that cannot be defined. You define yourself.”
Get the fuck up. Don’t whine. That’s essentially what she was telling me in session two. You’d think my father would love her. Over the next month, she became relentless with EMDR—Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing—a technique being used aggressively on cops and combat veterans with PTSD.
My eyes tracked the blue pencil she moved from side to side. I closed them and listened to her fingernail tap-tap-tap against glass.
What happened next, what happened next, what happened next? How do you feel, how do you feel, how do you feel? Why, why, why? The more I processed my scary movie, she promised, the less of a rough cut it would be. The more it would feel like any old movie I’d seen a hundred times. I’d be able to recite it and not feel like I’d been hurled around in a dryer.
Except I always left her office red-eyed and limp, feeling every bit.
The day after session seven, I overheard my father on the phone: “You’re destroying her. What the hell are you trying to get her to say?”
He never took me back.
I always wondered: What if I’d watched the reel of my movie with her one more time? Two more times? Three more times? What else might I have seen through the crack of the door that Wyatt held open for seconds? Would I be able to recite the license plate of the sedan that sat in the dark by the barn? She had been adamant to me, to my father, that this wasn’t hypnosis.
Did she always think I knew something?
Did she believe I played a part in killing Trumanell?
That guilty little worm is always there. Every night, every day, I wonder if underneath the smiles and platitudes, everybody thinks I’m something more.
24
Johnnie Walker can cut through any crap. Dr. Greco has poured us two fingers. She’s going to sit back and wait, like always.
We’re seated on a back balcony that extends ten feet over a rocky drop-off. Dizzying. I can’t fight the sense that if I set my glass down just a little too hard, the back half of the house will crack off and us with it.
The whiskey bottle was in place, my chair adjusted and poised to look straight into the bitter lemon of the sun, before I even pulled in. Her own chair is a good five feet away, a sign of well-earned paranoia about the human race.
After, Hello, Odette, the first thing she asked was if I was still a cop. The second was if I had a gun on me. I had turned slowly on her porch, full circle, arms extended. Her eyes scoured my Lycra workout gear, where there were no secrets to hide. I nodded to the truck, the host of my small arsenal, and that seemed to settle her mind.