All Is Not Forgotten(10)
Jenny was told about the rape by the counselor and psychiatrist at the hospital before her release. There had been very little follow-up with any mental health professionals. No therapy, no counseling other than routine checks. It had been recommended, but both Charlotte and Tom were against it. For Charlotte, what was the point of talking about the rape when they’d gone to such trouble to forget it? For Tom, who had not been in favor of the treatment in the first place, therapy sounded like another way of avoiding what needed to be done—and that was to find the rapist.
When the professionals and the Kramers convened at the start of the school year, there was a consensus that the treatment had been enormously successful. Jenny did not remember the rape. She had returned to her normal eating and sleeping routines. Her parents were hopeful she would join the flurry of college preparation that dominates junior year—SATs, AP classes, volunteer work, and sports. She showed no signs of PTSD, no flashbacks, no nightmares, no fears of being alone, and no physical reactions when she was touched by others. Her case was deemed so successful that a military doctor from Norwich, who was conducting an ongoing study of the treatment for combat protocol, had asked for her records.
There was just one thing—and that was the carving.
How was school?
Charlotte Kramer asked Jenny the question one evening in the following winter, eight months after the rape. The question broke an uncomfortable silence that was, apparently, present at any dinner when it was just the three of them. On this Monday night like the others all season, Lucas was at hockey practice. He was showing himself to be a natural athlete, and his mother had enrolled him in the holy trinity for suburban Connecticut—football in the fall, hockey in the winter, and lacrosse in the spring. This left Charlotte, Tom, and Jenny alone to bear each other’s company, something that had not been easy since the rape. Without Lucas’s adolescent chatter about the state of the boys’ bathroom at school, which of his friends liked a girl, or his flawless sports performances, the silence that had infected their house was always sitting at the head of the table.
Jenny recalled that the dinner was her favorite, a roasted chicken, rosemary potatoes, French green beans. But she had no appetite—something she had been hiding from both her parents. She swallowed a small bite of food, then answered, Fine.
Her father stared at her. I’m quite certain he was unaware of this, but Jenny said he’d been doing it since they returned from Block Island. She said she could feel him studying every muscle of her face for clues. She became acutely aware of her expressions, knowing each one would result in some conclusion. Was that a slight smile at the corner of her mouth? Maybe something good had happened today. Was that a twitch in her eye? A grimace? Was she feeling annoyed by their questions like every teenage girl at every table everywhere? And mostly was there anything there to evidence the unrest that she had not been able to chase away? She had become very adept at hiding it.
She looked up to give him what he wanted—a benign smile. He smiled back, and when he did, Jenny said she could see the anguish that had lived in his eyes since that night in the woods. She wondered if he saw hers, too. If he did, they both still smiled at each other and pretended not to see.
What Jenny did not know was that her father was not studying her face. He was staring at her face, that part is true, but only to mask the fact that he had again noticed her hand twisted behind her back, rubbing the small scar where she had been engraved like a trophy.
Her mother continued the conversation.
I saw the cutest dress at Taggert’s today! Maybe Saturday we can go and look at it? Unless you have plans with a friend? Any plans, sweetie?
Jenny believed, and I think she was mostly accurate, that her mother had moved on quite nicely. Though her frustration with the tension that Jenny and her father created could be deciphered by the slightly higher pitch her voice took on in moments like this one, she was living her life as she had before. Busy, social, upbeat. Yoga classes, luncheons, volunteer work at the school. She never noticed Jenny rubbing the scar, and even after it was finally discussed in the open, she claimed that she could not recall the behavior.
Jenny was not consciously aware of this behavior either, though Violet had asked her about it several times. It seemed to be akin to nail biting, or thumb sucking in small children. Something in her subconscious sent a signal to her hand to reach back for that place where she had been carved. I believed this to be the first indication that the treatment had not been as successful as the professionals believed.
The story of what happened that night in the woods had been carefully crafted, and the carving had not been one of the chapters. Everyone knew Jenny had been raped. No one knew for how long, or in what manner. Her memory loss was ascribed to shock and emotional trauma. This is the story Charlotte told. Tom said nothing to anyone, which he could get away with, being a man. And Jenny had no story to tell at all, except that she had received a treatment to make her forget. She had been uniformly diligent in keeping this to herself.
As tidy as everything had become, a different kind of monster had entered Jenny’s mind and body, stealing everything good and putting in its place a gnawing anxiety that had become quite severe.
Sweetie? What do you say?
Her mother wanted to shop for a pretty dress. Her father glared at her mother. No one spoke of that night; but from how Jenny described things, it seemed as though that night could be heard on every breath that left their bodies. Her father, she knew, regretted what they had done to her—making her forget. He wanted revenge, justice, something more than what they had, which was, even after all this time, nothing. But her mother never looked back. To use the analogy I gave earlier, the house had been repaired, and that was that. Given the choice between the tension that stayed within the walls of their fixed-up house and Jenny remembering that night, Charlotte was happy to take the former.