The Break(37)

Sylvie’s nodding slowly. “Keep breathing, Rowan. I’m right here with you, and you’re safe now, here in this office with your family and with me. It’s safe to remember.”

I don’t say anything for what feels like a few minutes. Gabe’s still patting Lila, sneaking glances at me. Finally, Sylvie asks in a gentle voice, “You were in the house when your father was killed, is that right?”

I hear Gabe suck in a breath. “W-what?” I stammer.

The clock ticks. Bile rises in my throat. And then, because I am polite and have been taught to answer questions posed to me by doctors, I say, “Yes. I was there. I was in my bedroom.” My fingertips prickle in a way they usually only do when I feel the urge to write, and then the prickle turns into a burn that spreads like wildfire over my skin.

“What else do you remember?” Sylvie asks.

“I was five,” I spit back, not wanting to give her the real answer.

She nods, calm as a saint, making me feel like a liar, like I’m trying to fool everyone with my act, like maybe I was there and killed him myself. Tears scorch my eyes, and when they run over my face I don’t bother trying to wipe them away. How does she know what happened to my family? At some point during our last session, I told her my father wasn’t around, that he’d been killed when I was little, but I didn’t say it was murder or that it happened in our house. Did she google him? Did she google me?

“You seem offended,” Sylvie observes.

Gabe pats Lila so quickly I almost scream at him to stop. The clock keeps up its rabid timekeeping—tick tock tick tock—and my brain starts to feel like it’s misfiring. Something seems so incredibly wrong; it’s like I can’t stay in this room, like a part of me is back there in our old shabby house and my mother is screaming bloody murder. I can feel the hot August air on the back of my neck—the way my nightgown stuck to my flat chest. We didn’t have air-conditioning; we always left the windows open at night, and I swear the smell of my mom’s backyard roses is filtering through the window, but that can’t be right, because you could only ever smell those from the back of the house and my bedroom was in the front.

“I am offended,” I say to Sylvie, wanting to snatch back my past and bury it six feet below the earth where only I can find it. “I don’t really know you well enough to be doing this with you, don’t you agree?”

She gives me a small smile. “This is therapy. My only goal is to help you move forward.”

“By speculating on my past?”

“Traumas from our childhood hold power over our present,” Sylvie says. “Especially those for which we never received any professional help. The big ones like death and abuse, but so many others, even things that as adults we might perceive as small can be traumatic for a child. So when you mentioned the knives on a table during your birth triggering you to dissociate and feel, in your words, that you were losing touch with reality, it seems natural to me that you’ve observed this event was a look-alike for another traumatic event in your childhood. It doesn’t get much more traumatic for a five-year-old than the murder of her father in her own home, while she was present, wouldn’t you agree?”



My heart pounds. I need to stall—I’m not ready to do this in front of Gabe. The truth is that I did see the knife, and I’ve never told anyone that, because frankly: I never told anyone anything. My mom said I would just go stone-faced and silent when the police tried questioning me. That night my dad died, the knife was on the floor right near his shoulder, too muted for me to catch sight of at first. It was there like an afterthought, like someone had forgotten a run-of-the-mill kitchen knife on a cutting board. It was barely bloody, just a few specks of something I didn’t recognize as parts of my father’s body.

“How do you know about my father?” I ask Sylvie.

She stares at me. I wait, ready to hear her admit that she looked into me: maybe she read my interviews, how I answer every journalist who asks me why it is I really write mysteries with some variation on the sick satisfaction I get when I expose the real killer, something no one could ever do for my father and my family.

“Gabe told me,” Sylvie says plainly.

I whip my head around to look at my husband. His cheeks are flushed—maybe from embarrassment?—and he’s bouncing Lila just slightly in his arms. Her tiny face is tucked into the warm skin of his neck. He looks at me, but I only see sadness. I turn back to Sylvie.

“I didn’t see my father killed,” I say. I should just tell her about the knife. “There was a scuffle, and then me running down the hall to see my mother on the phone with nine-one-one while my father lay at her feet.” I turn to look at my daughter, but my eyes won’t stay there. I look down into my pale hands, my nails that I painted bright red on the bathroom floor last night when I couldn’t sleep. “I did see the crime scene, and I remember every inch of it.”





SIXTEEN


June. Four months ago. July 6th.


I stick my key into the lock and twist. One smooth turn and then clank!—the key takes the clunky jump it needs to unlock my apartment each time. These little quirks are what make the apartment feel like my home: the pea-green paint peeled in a star shape in the corner of the bathroom; the way it always smells like bread because the old woman down the hall bakes a loaf each day; and the way the radiator comes to life every hour or so with a sound like it’s the Wild West and bullets are being set free inside a saloon.