*****
College had sped by more quickly than Robert and Janie could have imagined when they first started at UTA. Four years felt like two. As planned, Robert and Janie had gotten married as soon as they graduated, had enjoyed a week-long honeymoon on a cruise ship in the Caribbean, and then moved to Virginia the month after their honeymoon so they could get settled in before Robert started law school. Then law school began. With a full semester under his belt, four “A”s and one “B,” enough to vault him to a class rank of 8 out of 152, they were well on their way to realizing God’s vision for their lives.
Their apartment was a very small two-bedroom unit. Rent was incredibly high in Virginia: almost $1,000 for a tiny apartment close to campus. The only benefit Robert could find from its Lilliputian status was the impossibility of one of them not knowing when the other came home. After his conversation with his grandfather that afternoon, he met Janie at the door with a long lover’s kiss. “I love you, hon,” he said.
“Love you, too,” she replied, just as happy as he was. “You packed?”
“No.”
They threw a couple changes of clothes into one oversized suitcase and were on the road in half-an-hour, looking forward to a weekend together. No school, no work at the nearby hospital for Janie, just two young married lovers renewing a commitment they had made to each other several months before when they married one month after their college graduation. They had promised to always find time for each other, no matter how many distractions their careers or even their family put in the way. This weekend was the first retreat they were taking since law school had begun the previous August, and it was together time they desperately needed.
Turning out of the apartment parking lot, Robert looked over at Janie and said, “I’ve missed you this semester.”
She gazed out the windshield, smiling as she thought about the time they would soon spend together, uninterrupted time walking hand-in-hand down the snow-dusted roads of Colonial Williamsburg, drinking apple cider, hearing the jingling of the bells hung on the carriages, and breathing in the aroma of the pine and balsam swags and wreaths decorating the homes and shops. She turned toward him and replied, “Me, too.”
“Do you regret marrying me?” he asked.
She reached over and grabbed his hand, squeezing as she did. “Of course not. I’m proud of what you’re doing.”
Robert glanced at her, then back at the road. He smiled broadly and thought, I can’t believe she married me. “I’m proud of you, too.”
Epilogue
“Dr. Jacobson is ready for you now,” the nurse had announced a few minutes earlier. Robert was lying on a cushy dark green cloth couch in the office of Psychiatrist Rebecca Jacobson, in Chesapeake, Virginia, pulling tissue after tissue out of the box Dr. Jacobson had given him at the beginning of their latest session. She was sitting in a brown leather and well-padded chair to his right, deep in thought, and both were facing a relatively large plate-glass window overlooking a thickly wooded park. The park had a calming effect on her mentally disturbed, issue-plagued patients. She was a middle-age woman, a little younger than Robert’s grandmother, and she had a grandmotherly appearance, slightly overweight and with hair that had just recently started to turn grey. She also wore dainty wire-framed reading glasses on the tip of her nose so she could easily glance over the top of the frames to look at her patients in between making notes in her notepad. Her disarming demeanor made it easy for even the most defensive patients to release their deepest, darkest secrets.
She was the best Christian psychologist in Virginia and Robert had issues that, despite the struggles he had after his near-death experience, had only recently come to light. And they seemed to have no connection whatsoever to that traumatic event.
The issues surfaced after his first semester of law school, after he and Janie returned from Williamsburg. Actually, they didn’t come to a head until he received his latest class ranking: third of one-hundred-and-fifty-two. Then suddenly, without any warning whatsoever, the nightmares began, which led to a couple of isolated events wherein Janie walked into his study to find him curled up in a ball in the corner of the room crying like a baby. The fear of failure didn’t seem to be the catalyst. He couldn’t have asked for better grades.
After half-a-dozen sessions with Dr. Jacobson, neither had any clue as to what caused the nightmares or the crying episodes. She was starting to believe that there was some medical reason for his near total mental breakdown, something that only psychotropic drugs could cure. One more session and if no breakthrough resulted, she was probably going to refer Robert to a psychiatrist for a medical evaluation.
As he sat on the couch silent for several minutes, Dr. Jacobson looked down at her notes. She tabbed through a few pages and scanned the contents. She closed her eyes and meditated on what she’d written down during the past few sessions. It wasn’t his performance in school or even the stress of law school that was the cause. It also wasn’t the secular psychologist’s old reliable fall-back position of a deep-seeded hatred of his mother or father that was at the root. It was something else. Something neither could put a finger on.
It was as if a latent memory had been rekindled by its Creator; a memory that had surfaced without any identifiable source. She had written her doctoral thesis on suppressed memories in child abuse cases, but the tags that were almost always present in those situations were wholly absent here. He loved his mom, but not weirdly so. He never knew his biological father, but his adoptive father was a much better dad than most biological ones, so that wasn’t it. He had never been molested, or so it seemed after many therapy sessions, many more than it typically took to ferret out such incidents. Robert’s case was truly, as Winston Churchill had put it, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”
“What sparks the nightmares?” she asked for the umpteenth time.
“I don’t know.”
“Describe it for me again, with more detail this time. Try to remember the end of it. If you can do that we might get somewhere.”
Robert closed his eyes and folded his hands on his stomach. He tried to concentrate, to force the disturbing visions to materialize in his waking mind.
“I’m in a doctor’s office, an exam room, I think. There’s a girl on the table with her legs spread open. They’re strapped to something metallic. Her wrists are also strapped down to the sides of the table, leather straps with buckles.”
“What’s she wearing?”
“It’s hard to tell. Maybe one of those backless hospital gowns they make you wear, but I’m not sure. It’s really messy. Blood, I think, is everywhere.”
His eyes were still closed. She had tried to get him to remember before, to tell her about his recurring nightmare, but it had never come out as clear as it was coming at this moment. Her senses were on alert as she leaned forward, suddenly realizing that they were about to have a breakthrough.
“What else do you see?”
By now, Dr. Jacobson was pulling the various recollections from this and previous sessions together. The vision of what Robert just described merged with his earlier descriptions: a health clinic, stirrups, dead babies, blood and gore. Finally, after three sessions, the picture he painted became disturbingly familiar to her, yet she needed more. Oh my God…
“Robert?” she prodded him again. “What else do you see?”
“Two men are at her feet. Both are in their fifties, one might be older, maybe his sixties. The younger one has wire-framed glasses and is wearing a doctor’s coat, one of those white ones with a nametag, and maybe a stethoscope. He’s got a knife in one hand, and he’s laughing.”
“What’s the other one doing?”
“Just standing there. I think he’s smiling, too.”
“What about the girl?”
His face took on a disturbing countenance, very grim and frightened, so scared he wanted to cry but couldn’t.
Dr. Jacobson sensed the change, though she wasn’t look
ing at him when it happened. She sat up straight—she had been leaning forward, taking notes as best she could, but most of her attention was focused on Robert, with the rest committed to writing down every detail of his macabre vision. She turned aside from he notepad and toward Robert, gently placing her hand on his shoulder, to comfort him. “What’s wrong?”
“She’s dead.”
Coming Soon
Has Robert Allen Baxter discovered God’s ultimate purpose in his life, or does God have something bigger in store for him? Find out in Book II of The Chronicles of Life: Restored.
Broken: A story of hope and forgiveness Page 67
