All Is Not Forgotten(43)

I placed the paper strip that smells like vodka under her nose. She inhaled and let the smell sift through her brain. The music was playing. We know what song it was. “I Knew You Were Trouble” by Taylor Swift. Jenny remembered this all very well. She explained to me that this song is about a boy who breaks a girl’s heart and how the girl is singing that she should have known better. This song was still playing when Jenny and Violet walked into the family room and she saw Doug there with another girl. They were definitely “together.” We discussed briefly the irony of the song.

I felt dizzy. It wasn’t the drink, either, because I’d just had a couple of sips. I felt like the world had just exploded, my world. My entire world.

Jenny and I have discussed this many times. I am an “old man” by her standards, but I can remember what it felt like to be rejected by a girl when I was fifteen. We all know that feeling, don’t we? Don’t you?

Violet stares at me and then Doug and then back at me. She tries to make me laugh by saying she’s gonna go kick his ass. She says she heard he has a little dick anyway. She makes fun of his hair, how it’s sticky with gel. She calls him metro. None of it matters. I could not sit with the feelings I had, so I went to the kitchen and started chugging vodka.

Jenny had begun to adopt “therapy speak.” It’s very common. We talk about “sitting” with our feelings. Being able to process them and redirect them with thoughts so they lose their power over our bodies. It is then that we are able to live our everyday lives.

Jenny continued with the parts she remembered. They ended with her vomiting in the bathroom.

Violet was holding my hair. I could hear people talking about me, laughing at me. Someone was pounding on the bathroom door. Violet yelled at them to go away. She told them to f*ck off. This song was playing, and I hate this song.

“Moves Like Jagger” was playing when they were in the bathroom. It was playing in my office as she was talking about the bathroom. It is here that we stopped to smell the strips. It was my suspicion that the strong odor she recalled was something in that room—the vomit, or bathroom cleaner, or one of those toilet disinfectant disks that turn the water blue. I had strips for the vomit (yes, they do have those) and for the cleaners. I have an actual blue disk—the same brand used by the family in that house on Juniper Road. None of them had a greater reaction than any other beyond what would be expected (the vomit strip making her cringe).

But on this day, I had added one more. Bleach.

I had not thought of it originally. I do not clean our bathroom. It was my wife who had this thought when I was confiding in her our failure with the memory of the odor. I went through the list of things we’d been working with. The family had given me a list to the best of their recollection. But remember, nine months had passed. My wife thought about it for a few seconds and then blurted it out—Bleach! The irony of this will soon be apparent.

I went through our strips and the blue disk with Jenny. Then I introduced a bleach disk. Bleach smells the same (unless it’s scented) in all forms—liquid, powder, granules, pressed-powder disks. She looked startled and opened her eyes.

“It’s something new. Just let it come in,” I said.

She closed her eyes, then inhaled deeply. The reaction came in a matter of seconds, but I can recall the progression as if it were happening right now in slow motion.

It started in her shoulders. They rose almost to touch her ears. It reminded me of a cat when it becomes afraid, how its back arches up and its hair stands on end. Her face then contorted, forehead collapsing into her eyebrows, lips pursing together, then her open eyes, wide with terror. She jumped from the chair. Her arms flailed, fists closed, swinging at my hand holding the bleach and then at me. She caught me in the face, sending my glasses to the ground. My cheek began to swell instantly. I would have a bruise for several days.

But it is the scream that I remember most.

She stood in the middle of my office, holding her stomach, buckled over in half. Her back rose and fell with the overpowering heaves of her breath as the cries of agony poured from her body.

I have treated hundreds of patients and I have seen breakdowns of all kinds. Men have punched holes in my walls. Women have sobbed. Men have sobbed. Teenagers have yelled at me with obscenities that rival my patients in Somers. This was something beyond anything I had ever witnessed. And I knew Jenny was back in those woods.

I did not hold her. That would not have been appropriate. But I did grab hold of her arms to steady her. She pushed me away; her arms were still swinging wildly.

Stop it!

She screamed at me over and over. She was looking at me but not at me. I kept trying to grab hold of her until she finally let me. I walked her to the sofa and helped her lie down in fetal position. I texted her mother that we were ending early and to please come back from her errands.

“Jenny,” I said cautiously. “Where did you go? Can you tell me?”

She held herself, still crying, but calmer. Her hand was on her back, rubbing the scar.

“Close your eyes again. Take a deep breath. Let’s not lose this moment. What are you feeling? Can you tell me? Do you want to stop or keep going?”

She took a breath. She closed her eyes. Tears were streaming, pooling on the leather beneath her skin. She was so strong. So incredibly determined. And when she spoke, the way she said the words, and the raw emotions that were escaping the confines of her body and filling the room—I felt not only that I understood her. I felt like I was her that night.