Confidential(19)

Dr. Baylor studied me. “Did Adam abuse your mother?”

“Not in the way you mean.”

“Did he abuse you?” he asked again, softer this time.

“No.”

“Let me ask another way. Did you and Adam ever have sexual contact while you were a child living in his house?”

“Define child.”

“Under the age of eighteen.”

I averted my eyes. “Yes.”

“Oh, Lucy.” He sounded so sad. “I’m really sorry.”

I felt the tears, but they had no business in this conversation. I’d done a terrible thing. I’d hidden that terrible thing. But now she knew, and she was surely destroyed, and I hadn’t even called her. She hadn’t even gotten an apology from me, because the words were so disproportionate to the crime. I couldn’t imagine how I’d begin to do penance. Yet here I was, accepting condolences from Dr. Baylor.

“I feel the weight of your guilt all the time,” he said. “You slouch, did you know that? That’s how heavy it is.”

“I don’t like being tall.”

“It’s a physical manifestation of the burden he caused you to bear. You were a child. He was in a position of authority. You couldn’t consent.”

“I said yes. Worse, I said please, come with me. When I’m eighteen, I said, leave my mother and we’ll be together.”

It was the most shameful declaration I’d ever made to anyone. It was unforgivable. Dr. Baylor was going to kick me out of his office. He was going to say, No more free sessions for you. No, you’ll pay double.

“Tell me why you said that.”

I was startled. He wanted to hear the whole sordid story? How Adam came into my life when I was a teenager, and I’d looked at him like a rock star, not a father, never a father? That I acted as adult as I could around him, because I didn’t want him to ever see me as a child? That we talked like friends, right from the start? That I wanted to be more, right from the start, and I never thought it would happen, that he could actually develop feelings for me, and that he tried to resist, and I didn’t want him to, I wouldn’t leave him alone? That I was the one who should have had the greatest loyalty and devotion to my mother?

Yes, he wanted to hear all that, and I needed to lay my burden down.

I did what Dr. Baylor had always urged: somehow, I found my voice.





CHAPTER 14





GREER


“Come in, come in!” Alexis’s enthusiasm seemed a bit strong for our employer/employee relationship, though she was out on maternity leave so maybe we’d entered a new phase. Maybe we were just a couple of gals hanging out.

Jesus.

I’d never been that kind of boss. In fact, I’d deliberately been the precise opposite of that. I was no ice queen—it was civility above all—but boundaries, people. That was my motto. When I didn’t have to spend my time asking about everyone’s weekend, I got a lot more done.

Now here I was in Alexis’s house, using her for in vivo research. It went against everything I stood for.

But after my therapy session five days ago, after spraining my ankle trying to get out of there, I decided I was quitting. I did it by voice mail last night, making a pact with myself to gather the information I needed somehow. This was the how that came to me.

Alexis’s baby boy was named Byron, and he was two months old. He had a strangely mottled complexion and a downy sort of fauxhawk. He was looking at me curiously from over Alexis’s shoulder, and I was pleased to find that while there was nothing objectionable about him, I was in no way moved to touch him, not even that angel hair of his.

Alexis was a little manic, offering me this or that, tidying with her free hand. “I meant to do this before you got here,” she said apologetically. “It’s just, I don’t know where the time goes, you know?” She let out an embarrassed laugh.

I really didn’t know and perhaps would never have to. There was a normal amount of furniture, but the living room felt cramped, with baby-related linens draped across every surface, plus a staggering variety of chairs for the baby, one of which played music and vibrated, sending Byron into a torpor that’s closest approximation might be an opium den. But he was out of the way, and now we could talk, and I had no earthly idea what to say.

I had time to figure it out, though, since Alexis was babbling nervously and sucking up all the oxygen. I was used to the highly competent, impeccably turned out Alexis from the office. Alexis’s doppelg?nger was wearing a T-shirt with a rainbow of stains that I couldn’t definitively identify, her hair up in a precarious bun. I’d never realized that she drew on her eyebrows every day until now. Their absence gave her a startled appearance, or maybe that was just my effect.

I probably should have given her more warning instead of just calling and saying I was in the neighborhood. I had assumed that she wouldn’t be as immaculate as if she were going to work, but I hadn’t expected this extent of degradation, either.

Somewhere in her soliloquy, as she went on about all the expenses and stresses of motherhood, I got it: she was afraid I’d come to fire her.

It saddened me that she could think I was the kind of person who’d do that to a new parent. That may have been the flaw in my management style. While I was always on guard against people knowing me too much, they wound up knowing me too little.