All Is Not Forgotten(44)
I feel him. I feel his hand on my shoulder, pushing me to the ground. I feel another hand on my neck, like I’m an animal and he’s riding me. Oh God!
“Okay, Jenny.” I could barely get the words out. “What else do you feel? What else do you see? Do you smell the bleach?”
She shook her head. There’s nothing else! Where did it go! I want to see him. Who did this? Who did this to me?
Rage seemed to have taken over her body. She got up from the sofa and looked around the room, frantically.
“What do you need, Jenny? What is it?”
Then she found it. The bleach disk. She picked it up and pressed it to her face. It made her gag—it’s too strong to be that close.
“Jenny, stop! It can burn you, your nostrils and throat…”
She breathed it in again and then dropped to her knees. I could see it on her face then. It was beautiful but also profoundly devastating. We had found it. She had found it. One small memory of that night.
“What is it, Jenny? What are you remembering?”
It hurts so much. I can feel him, he’s tearing me, pushing harder and harder. I can smell him. I smell it on him. He’s on me like I’m an animal. Oh God! I feel him! I can’t stop him! I can’t stop it from happening! I feel him inside me. I can’t hear him, but the way he is, I don’t know! The way he’s moving. I’m an animal and he’s just riding me and it’s making him … I don’t know!
“You do know. What is it you know about him right now, at the moment he’s inside you?”
Oh God! Oh God! I can’t say it!
“Just say it. I already know, Jenny. So just say it.”
I know he feels satisfied.
I had no more words that day.
Chapter Seventeen
By the time Charlotte came for Jenny, we were both emotionally exhausted. I told Charlotte that it had been a productive but difficult session and that we would talk about it later. I suggested Jenny take a pill and get some sleep.
Tom and Charlotte met with me the next day. In the eleven weeks I’d been treating the Kramer family, I had conducted just one session with both parents, and that had been to discuss Jenny’s treatment. Seeing them separately had proved immensely useful to their family, and to each of them individually, and I fully intended to stay this course. I have already told you how I feel about couples therapy. However, I made an exception, given the extraordinary progress Jenny and I had made in recovering this memory of the rape.
Tom’s primary concern was with the search for the rapist and how we could use this new information in the investigation. He also wanted to know why I had not asked Jenny about the blue sweatshirt with the red bird. Charlotte was more concerned with what this memory was doing to Jenny. After her breakthrough about her meeting with Bob and her acceptance of the guilt she was carrying for not seeing Jenny’s death march during the months after the rape, she was keeping her eye on that ball.
I explained to Tom, to both of them, that I was not about to introduce the blue sweatshirt into the memory-recovery process with Jenny after what had happened. I had come to believe three things after her sudden recall of the moment the rapist penetrated her. First, was that the memories had not all been erased. Of the different scenarios for “forgetting” that I have explained, it was clear that Jenny’s “forgetting” had to do with the inability to recall the memories from that night. The treatment she was given, the combination of drugs, had caused the memories to be filed in a place that was disconnected from any emotion, and from the other memories of the party. Without having these trails of crumbs to lead her back, the memories of the rape were lost inside her brain. The missing car keys.
The second thing I believed was the deduction that if the memory of this one moment had not been erased, none of them had. The events from that one hour were so close in terms of spatial proximity and emotional significance that there was no reason to believe that only some would have been spared the treatment. My own thoughts were spinning that day, thinking about what this meant for Jenny, but also for Sean. I wanted to tell them both to clear their schedules, to work with me day and night, until we found every last detail of what had happened to them. But I am a patient man, and I respect the process of therapy. Too much too soon could cause more harm than good. It’s like inputting data into a computer. I didn’t want the hard drive to crash.
The third thing, and the most important to convey to Tom, was that Jenny was like a patient having surgery. She was, metaphorically, on the table, cut open, exposed. Given the reconsolidation research and the uncertainty about memory recovery, we had to keep the operating room perfectly sterile so our patient did not become infected with harmful germs. Her brain was starting to find the missing files and put them back into the right place—the place with the story about that night, the songs and the clothes and drinks and Doug with that other girl. How easy it would be to allow a false fact to be added to that story while it was being reconsolidated. Like the subjects who were made to “remember” being lost in the mall.
“Do you understand, Tom? If I ask her or even suggest that a man in a blue sweatshirt might be a suspect, she could put that with other memories of that night and believe it to be true even if it’s not—and then we’ll never know. If we can just be patient—”
Charlotte understood. She might remember it on her own, and then we’d know for sure. My God. It’s been almost a year. Unless she remembers his face, I don’t see how any of this is going to help.