Broken Together

by Cassie Beebe

  Jacob shook his head. “I guess she was in town,” he said, and the doctor raised a suspicious eyebrow. “Oh, I forgot to mention, she’s from around here. I guess her mom’s moving, so she was in town helping her out.”

  “So… what happened?” she asked.

  Jacob’s memories flitted back to the brief encounter, and an echo of the pit of anti-climactic disappointment that rocked his gut on that day sprang up in the present. He shrugged, looking down at the Starry Nights inspired mug in his hands. He went with a more colorful piece, this time. Part of his new vow to Live Life.

  “She’s engaged,” he muttered at his half-empty cup. After a moment, he peeked back at the doctor, and she just gave him a sympathetic half-smile. He sighed. “So, anyway, naturally I spent the rest of the day moping.” He let out a humorless chuckle. “And the next day.”

  “Mmm,” she murmured, waiting for him to continue.

  “But then, the next night, I was reading through Maggie’s journal, and…,” he trailed off, shaking his head. “I realized that all she ever wanted was for me to be happy. To be… free. And now that I actually am, I’m afraid I’m taking it for granted,” he admitted, pausing to take a gulp of his lukewarm coffee. “So, I decided I’m not going to anymore,” he declared, punctuating the statement with a firm nod. “I want to live my life. Really live it. For her.”

  “Wow,” Doctor Summers grinned. “Good for you, Jacob,” she beamed. “So, where do you think you want to start?” she asked, her eyes bright with the excitement of the new beginning.

  “Well… I kind of already have started,” he admitted.

  She raised her eyebrows, inviting further clarification.

  “I went to a party that night,” he muttered softly, like it was a grave admission, and she gave him an impressed look. He chuckled. “And…,” his thoughts drifted back to Jenna. “I kind of met someone.”

  She gave him a sly grin. “Oh yeah?”

  “I mean, not like a girl,” he attempted to clarify his misleading introduction. “Well, I mean, she is a girl…,” he continued, confusing himself in his explanation, “but she’s just a friend.”

  “Well, that’s nice,” she said, still retaining her smile.

  “Yeah,” Jacob replied hesitantly, wondering if she would still say the same if she knew about the details of that night.

  He thought about her sequin-covered dress scratching his arms as he helped her hobble her way back to their building, tried not to think about the man lurking in the building behind them, and mulled over the meaning of the last few words she mumbled to him before drifting off to a deep sleep.

  He ended up sleeping surprisingly well that night, despite the lack of space. The extra pill must have done the trick. But long before his alarm was set to go off the next morning, he was woken by a loud ruckus.

  “Shit,” Jenna muttered under her breath, and he could feel her weight leave the mattress.

  He opened his eyes, blinking the sleep away and seeing her crouched on the floor, trying to quietly gather the items that had spilled from her purse.

  He propped himself up on his elbow. “You leaving?” he asked.

  She was facing away from him, but he saw her flinch a bit at his question.

  “Um, yeah,” she said, gathering her items more quickly before rising to her feet and turning around. “I have a –” her sentence cut off when her eyes focused on his face, and he thought she looked momentarily disappointed before she composed herself again. “Um, I have an early class, so, I have to go,” she gestured to the door. “But I’ll see you around, I guess,” she finished, making her quick exit before he had a chance to respond.

  Initially, he wrote it off as her worries about being late for class, but when he got up, he noticed she left her coat on the floor, and he headed up the stairs to return it.

  With a full night’s sleep and no 120-pound girl to carry, he headed down the second-floor hallway, searching the name plates on the doors for one that said “Jenna.” After a few minutes of looking, he found one that read “Anna and Jenna’s humble abode” and knocked softly.

  The door swung open, and she was standing before him, already in pajamas. She had headphones around her neck, and he noticed her laptop open on the bed. Her eyes were wide as he looked between her, the laptop, and her new attire, trying to make sense of it.

  “Um… my class was cancelled, so…,” she blushed, shaking her blonde bangs out of her eyes and tugging the ends of her long-sleeves to cover her hands.

  “Oh,” he nodded, certain that wasn’t true, but not understanding why she would bother to lie about it. Her expectant gaze snapped him out of his musings, and he held out the jacket. “You left this,” he said.

  “Oh. Thanks,” she said, grabbing it and clutching it close to her chest.

  They just stared at each other for a long minute, and those few softly muttered words she had let slip the night before kept running through his mind. He searched her expression, and she looked embarrassed.

  “Look…,” he started, hoping to ease her mind. “About last night….”

  “Yeah, it was great,” she said with a plastic smile.

  His eyebrows pulled together. “What?” he asked.

  She kept her face smooth. “I had a great time,” she said, putting a hand on his arm with familiarity. “You were great.”

  The clarification of her new phrasing only confused him more. “I don’t…,” he shook his head. “Do you… remember what happened last night?” he appraised her through narrowed eyes.

  Her fake smile faltered a bit, as she realized she said something wrong. “Um…,” she paused, and he waited for her to continue, but she just stared at him.

  He noted the way she shifted on her feet and tugged absently on her sweatshirt sleeve, clearly trying to come up with a face-saving explanation for her lack of memory. He didn’t want to bring up the alcohol of it all, so he simply said, “Nothing happened,” with an easy shrug.

  She looked up at him, slight skepticism lurking beneath her smooth mask.

  “I mean, we didn’t like… you know,” Jacob elaborated uncomfortably. He cleared his throat. “I just, um, wanted to make sure you got home safe from the party, so I walked with you.”

  Her shoulders sank in what looked like plain relief, but then her eyes flitted back to the room behind her and narrowed in confusion.

  “Well, I mean, I tried to walk you home, but you passed out before you could tell me your room number, so,” he chuckled, hoping she would believe his story, as it was sounding flimsy even to him.

  Her cheeks flushed.

  “So, anyway, um,” he ran a hand through his light brown hair. “I should probably get ready for class.”

  “Yeah, totally,” she quickly agreed, straightening up, ready to close the door as soon as he walked away.

  He wanted to say more, to broach the subject of her drunken admission of being lonely, or sad, or both, but she seemed eager to retreat from their conversation, so he just lifted his hand in a wave and said, “See you around.”

  She gave him a brief smile and shut the door.

  Doctor Summers was staring at him with skepticism, and it snapped him out of his memories. “You sound hesitant about this girl,” she commented, waiting for an explanation.

  Jacob let out a small sigh, shaking his head. It was impossible to get anything by this woman. “I don’t know,” he began, leaning forward to rest his arms on his legs. “She kinda has some problems. But, I mean, who doesn’t? Maybe she just needs a friend,” he added.

  “What kind of problems?”

  “Well, for starters, the last time I saw her she was drunk,” he said. “Like… really drunk. This guy was trying to take her back to his room, so I interceded, and –”

  Jacob stopped short when he met the Doctor’s eyes and saw the concerned questions there.

  “I’ll circle back to that,” he reassured her. She didn’t seem appeased, so he rolled his eyes added, “Don’t worry, I used my
words.”

  Doctor Summers swallowed her concern and nodded her head. “We’ll come back to that, but continue,” she said.

  “Well, anyway, I walked her back to…,” he trailed off, trying to choose his words wisely, “to our building,” he decided, not technically a lie, “and she told me something…. I don’t think she meant to, but… she kinda told me she was sad, or lonely or something.”

  Doctor Summers nodded empathetically, remaining silent.

  Jacob shook his head. “And I don’t know, between the drinking, how quickly she ran out of my room the next morning, and what she clearly thought we had done the night before, I got the sense that this wasn’t exactly a first-time experience for her.”

  He met Doctor Summers’ surprised eyes, taking note of her raised brows. For a moment he didn’t understand her reaction until she spoke.

  “The next morning?” she asked.

  Shit.

  “I… forgot that I was leaving that part out,” Jacob answered with a blush.

  Doctor Summers just chuckled. “Look, Jacob, you know this is a judgement-free-zone,” she said, gesturing around the room with the pen in her hand. “But I can’t help you with anything if you aren’t open with me, so why don’t we go back to the beginning.”

  Jacob sighed and leaned back in his chair. “I ran into her at the party. Kind of literally, actually. She was in pretty bad shape, so I asked if I could walk her home, and she said yes. But then this...,” he trailed off, trying to think of a less vulgar noun, “guy… came up and said that he was taking her home. At first, I thought he meant that he was walking her back to her dorm, but it quickly became clear that he had… other intentions,” he spoke the last two words with a slight grind in his teeth.

  “And… this is when you ‘used your words’?” she asked.

  Jacob chuckled once. “Yes. I used my words, and eventually convinced him that it would be better if I walked her home.”

  “So…,” she paused, pursing her lips and tapping her pen against her notepad for a lingering moment. “When you came upon this drunk girl, in a precarious position, potentially about to be taken advantage of… how did that make you feel?” she asked, resting her chin on her hand as she awaited his response.

  The memory drifted through him again, and he huffed out a breath. He was still angry, even now, but the anger stayed in his mind. It no longer travelled down through his fingers and toes, provoking his heartrate to rise and calling him to action.

  “Angry,” he replied.

  She nodded. “How angry?”

  He scoffed at the question and shrugged. “How am I supposed to answer that?”

  “Well, how did you feel? Were you prepared to let the issue go, if he didn’t comply with your request, or were you ready to use action if you deemed it necessary?” she elaborated.

  He sighed again, looking down at the last sip of coffee swirling in his mug.

  “If words weren’t enough, what would you have done?” she challenged.

  He shook his head. “I…,” he started, thinking back to the rage he felt pulsing through his veins, how firmly he clung to Jenna, not just to keep her upright, but to keep himself grounded. “I don’t know,” he admitted in a small voice, keeping his eyes safely on the swirling colors on his mug.

  He could see Doctor Summers writing something down from the corner of his eye, and then she interjected with a new question. “You’ve been taking your medication, yes?”

  “Yeah,” he replied, happy to have something positive to say. “I mean, I usually take them earlier in the night, but since I was out late, I had to wait until I got back from the party.”

  “Hm,” she pursed her lips again, considering that. “Did that help?”

  “Yeah, definitely,” Jacob answered, still happy to have moved on from her previous line of questioning. “I felt a lot calmer afterward.”

  “Good,” she nodded to herself, looking down at her notepad and chewing on her bottom lip. She jotted something down, and said, “You know, I think I may have spoken too soon about changing up your medication so early. I think we should keep things as they are, for now.”

  Jacob didn’t want to be off his medication in the first place, but now that the option had been presented and subsequently removed, he felt like he was taking a step backward. Peeved by the over-reaction, he clarified again, “Nothing happened.”

  She looked up at him and placed a smile over the top of her concern. “Of course,” she said. “We’d just like to keep it that way, yes?”

  She always used the formal, plural pronoun when addressing the tough topics, as if to distance herself from whatever bad news or criticism she was delivering. He wondered if that was intentional, to keep up their pleasant relationship, or if she just didn’t like to be seen as the bad guy.

  Either way, he just said, “Yes,” and she gave him another smile.

  She tapped her pen on her notepad again, and it looked as if she was trying to solve an elaborate algebraic equation in her head. With a sigh, she closed her notebook and set it in her lap.

  “Jacob… it occurs to me that we haven’t talked about what happened to your sister,” she said in a delicate, professional tone.

  He raised an eyebrow. “That she died?” he asked doubtingly. “I’m pretty sure we’ve touched on that a few times,” he quipped, as it was a common topic of conversation in their weekly meetings.

  “Well, we’ve talked about her death, yes,” Doctor Summers replied, still retaining her mild voice. “But I’m referring to what happened before that.”

  His heart raced when the words sank in. “What does that have to do with anything?” he muttered, turning his eyes to his hands.

  “I just think we should talk about it,” she replied.

  Familiar, gruesome pictures flashed through his mind – crime scene photos he snuck a peek at while the police were busy comforting the fabricated despair of his father after breaking to him the tragic news of Maggie’s murder. The junior officer had carelessly left his files on the kitchen table unattended, and Jacob flipped open the front flap without much thought. He stared at the images through blurry, water-filled eyes, but the picture cleared when he blinked his tears away.

  His sister’s nude, dirt-covered body, sprawled out atop leaves and twigs that left scrapes across her pale skin. Her limbs were twisted unnaturally, and her long, dark hair tangled into the leaves and dirt until it became part of the earth beneath her.

  His ears rang and he tuned out the officers speaking quietly to his father in the other room as he stared at the photo, not wanting to see it but somehow unable to look away. The word “rape” burrowed past the filter of his ringing ears, and his stomach sank into a nauseating twist. Not unlike the one it was spiraling into now.

  With the heave of his gut, Jacob lurched to his feet and strode to the open window. The cool breeze attempted to calm him as he gazed out at the parking lot of the therapist’s office, seeing nothing.

  Calmly, as if he hadn’t moved at all, the doctor continued, “I think we should discuss how you felt when you learned that your sister had experienced sexual assault prior to her death.”

  “Fuck,” Jacob grumbled, squeezing his eyes shut and massaging his forehead and the bridge of his nose. “Do we have to talk about this?” he demanded, still facing the window.

  Doctor Summers remained seated. “I think it’s an important part of your past that needs to be addressed,” she explained. “I understand it’s very difficult to bring up these memories, but let’s just take things slow. Why don’t you come sit down?” she suggested.

  Jacob took in a deep breath and blew it out forcefully, rubbing his hands across his face again. After a moment of concentrated breathing to calm his nausea, he shuffled back to his chair and sat down, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees and his chin on his fists.

  “That’s good,” Doctor Summers encouraged. “Now,” she began, putting on a gentle tone. “It seems like you have a lot of feelings
about this subject.”

  Jacob glanced at her, fighting an eye roll. “Of course.”

  She nodded. “Well, why don’t you tell me about that? Tell me how you’re feeling right now.”

  He let out a long sigh and tapped his foot silently against the carpet. “I don’t know what you want me to say. That I don’t like to talk about my sister being…,” he trailed off, punctuating the fragment with shake of his head.

  “I want you to tell me what you feel,” she explained. “Do you feel sad? Disgusted? Angry?”

  “Angry,” he replied instantly.

  She nodded. “Angry with whom?”

  He shook his head again, speaking in a rush now that the barrier was broken. “I don’t know. Everybody. The guy who did it, my dad, myself.”

  “Yourself?” she interjected. “Why do you feel angry with yourself?”

  He scoffed. “Because I didn’t do anything,” he snapped, like it should be obvious. “I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I wasn’t there for her.”

  “You didn’t do anything, or you couldn’t do anything?”

  He raised an impatient eyebrow at her. “What’s the difference?”

  “Well, one is out of your control. The other is a choice,” she explained. “That seems like a pretty significant difference, to me.”

  Jacob mulled that over for a second, as much as he would allow himself to, without diving fully back into the memories of that night. Instead, he settled his thoughts on the safer place of Maggie’s journal, all of the things she wrote about their lives together, how miserable she was, how much she wanted to get away.

  “I should have seen it,” he muttered, struggling to keep the emotion out of his voice. “I should have seen how miserable she was. If I had seen that, if I had done something to get her out of there sooner…,” he stopped, unable to admit the last half of that statement aloud.

  “Then what?” Doctor Summers prodded.

  He sighed, aggravated over her forcing him to say it. “If I had gotten her out of there sooner, she never would have had to run away in the first place. She wouldn’t have been in the woods that night, and… that never would have happened to her.”