“I don’t mind.” He smiles a charming smile and stares deep into my eyes. “I don’t need you to leave. And if you want to add me to your report, I won’t mind that either. Let me be the subject for your whole class to point fingers at and laugh.”
“Ha.” The sound I make is more of a faltering ‘heh’, but it gets the job done. “I won’t write anything embarrassing in my paper. Mostly, I think I’ll be discussing human behavior. It fascinates me, so that’s usually what I focus on while in these sessions.”
“Human behavior?” He sits back on the couch and crosses his left ankle over his right knee. “Like how your boyfriend marked his territory this morning when he saw us talking?”
Sonia’s eyes fire up and snap over to mine in accusation… or, well, intense curiosity.
“Yeah.” I clear my throat. “I guess. His behavior today was not at all uncommon among men his age, with his life experience. I find that, often, people react much the same way in similar situations, regardless of gender or upbringing. That’s not to say such behavior is acceptable. But it is certainly predictable.”
“I see. And what do you predict will come of my being here? How do you see this going down?”
“Ya know what?” I look to Sonia and fake a smile. Help me! “How about we discuss you, Jason?” I look back to him. “Why don’t we talk about why you’re here?”
“I agree.” Sonia switches on her therapist voice – if not a little extra, since she’s intent on protecting me – and picking up her cup of tea, she grabs a notepad and a pen. “Tell us about yourself, Mr. Donnerson. Tell us what led to you coming here today.”
“Oh, well…” He smiles and genuinely looks like he’ll make an effort to actually begin his therapy session. “My story begins a long time ago. I’m not yet forty, but the things that bring me here started a couple of decades ago. It all started with a girl.”
Sonia smiles and begins making notes. “It often does. Tell us about her.”
“Oh, she was beautiful. And funny. She was daring and always getting us into trouble.” As he speaks, he sheds a little of the intensity from the beginning of this meeting, and instead takes on a sweet air of nostalgia. “My high school sweetheart. Funnily enough, I was the Robin to her Batman, if that makes sense.”
“She was the instigator?” Sonia prods and writes. And while she does that, I shrink back and try to remove myself from this discussion.
I don’t want to be an active participant, but rather, an observer. That’s not because this is Jason the Slightly Too Intense. This is how I prefer it for all of Sonia’s clients – Luke being the only exclusion, of course. For as long as I’m here, for as long as I’m still a student, these are not my clients, and this is not my practice. So while I’m in this place, I want to be the observer.
If we could change locations and somehow host these meetings in an interview room in a law enforcement office, where I could sit behind one-way glass, that’s what I’d do. But since I can’t, I choose to be silent, I don’t move, I do nothing that draws the eye of either Sonia or the client. Instead, I make my own notes, but I don’t often describe what I’m hearing. Rather, I jot down what I’m seeing.
I describe Jason’s body language. His hands. His chest. I observe the way he looks over to me when he speaks of this girl, and the way he looks to Sonia when he speaks of losing her.
“She was certainly our instigator,” Jason chuckles and rubs a hand over his jaw. “She was the reason we were picked up by the police so often that we were on a first-name basis, but at this point, we were also minors, and our crimes tended toward silliness, rather than anything that would leave damage.”
“What things did you do together that would get you in trouble?”
“Oh,” he laughs and goes back into the recesses of his memory. “We’d sneak into places we shouldn’t. Like, where I used to live, there’s this open-cut mine where people once drilled for gold. It was deserted long ago, once they extracted everything of worth, but now that space remains. It’s around two-thirds full of water, and anyone who lives there knows about the healing qualities in the water because of the minerals and such.”
“It became a local swimming spot?”
“Yes.” Jason smiles so much that his cheeks push his eyes half closed. “But it was deemed unsafe by the town counsel, so it was fenced off. ‘Keep out’ signs had been posted for as long as we’d been alive, but for people like her – we’ll call her Maria – a warning like that is basically a flashing neon sign, beckoning her closer.”
“So you and Maria would sneak in and go for a swim?” Sonia’s words are gentle but prodding. Calm, but unshaking.
“Right. The number of times we were caught there, they should have just renamed the place in our honor. But while it annoyed the police, and technically, we were breaking the law, there were never any charges filed. We were just picked up and driven home, time and time again. Maria’s daddy was…” He barks out a laugh. “He was a strange egg, and he was not pleased by our continued shenanigans, but I swear, he thought I was the bad influence. Funny, since my parents held the opposite view.”
“Both sets of parents thought their child to be the angel, the other, the bad influence?”
“Yes, when obviously, the truth lay somewhere in the middle,” Jason explains. “When we weren’t swimming in an old mine, Maria and I would protest. She was a staunch feminist, but not the bra-burning kind. She was the kind who stood up for women’s basic rights. Often, I’d find myself standing outside of a politician’s home, holding a sign that read something about staying out of reproductive issues. Maria was faithful in her belief that her body was her own, as were her ovaries, and that no politician had a right to make decisions about that for her.”
Sonia’s brows wrinkle. “You didn’t agree?”
“Oh, no, I did. Very much so. But had I never met her, I doubt I’d have been holding picket signs that said so. Me telling you this is just my way of explaining how I was the Robin in our relationship,” he laughs. “And how our acts of defiance were mostly an inconvenience for others. Not true crimes.”
“I’m certain the babies you and Maria advocated for are thankful,” I ponder before I realize the words come from my own lips. My eyes widen as I look from Jason to Sonia. “I’m sorry. Go on.”
“No, you’re right,” he smiles for me. “I’m hopeful the women and children we spoke for somehow benefitted from our tiny act of rebellion. It wasn’t much, on the grand scale, but it made us happy. And in our young minds, it was the most we could do. We were minors, we had no money but a few dollars here and there. Her parents were solidly middle-class – they weren’t swimming in cash, but Maria never went hungry either. Similarly, my family did just as well – perhaps a little bit better off. Enough for a private education for my last few years in school. Both of my parents worked, to pay the mortgage on a house in the suburbs. We drove a station wagon that was about as old as I was.”
“I get the feeling your Maria is no longer with us,” Sonia says quietly and draws Jason’s eyes back to her. “Would you like to discuss that?”