All Is Not Forgotten

by Wendy Walker

  At our very first meeting, we spoke for an hour. During that time, she began to trust me to treat her daughter, and I would later use that to open her own vault of secrets. I could sense it. It is essential, and every competent practitioner has acquired the skill to do it. It requires strict adherence to boundaries, compassion, and an appropriate degree of distance. I did not flinch when she told me about the rape, the treatment, the strained year, and the attempted suicide, even though my thoughts were spinning with all the implications, which I have already described. Jenny Kramer had been a puzzle I could not solve, and now I had been given the pieces.

  I met them all at the hospital the next day—Charlotte, Tom, and Jenny. I met with Lucas at my office sometime after that. He has gotten little of my attention as I recount the story. But I did speak with him and I did consult with both Charlotte and Tom frequently about how they should parent him during this crisis. It would take far too long to explore the deleterious effects events like these can have on siblings. Neglect, withdrawn love, and emotional denial are every bit as toxic as outright abuse. I made sure Lucas was spared that fate.

  Jenny had been moved to the psych ward, where she was under a mandatory forty-eight-hour watch period before she could be released. There was recognition in her eyes when she saw me, and she even smiled slightly to acknowledge this. I’ve seen you in town.

  She said this, and I realized that it was the first time I had heard her voice. She did not sound anything like what I’d expected. That may be a strange thing to say, but we all do this, we all impute certain missing variables to people we meet based on our preconceptions or past experiences. I was expecting Jenny’s voice to be high pitched, maybe even childlike. But it was not. It was deep, slightly raspy, as you might expect from a middle-aged blues singer. It is not uncommon. Think about it—you will surely have before you one or two people from your life who have this type of voice.

  She wore a hospital gown, tied in the back, and a robe her parents had brought from home. There was no sash, for obvious reasons, so it hung loosely around her in the wheelchair. I could see the white bandages poking out from beneath the sleeves.

  Tom was eager to meet me. He stood and shook my hand vigorously, as though he could shake the cure for his daughter from my limbs. We are so happy we found you.

  Tom was sincere. We all sat down and they looked at me, waiting for something brilliant to emerge from my mouth.

  “I’m happy to help, if I can.” I said, “But, Jenny. I have to ask you one very important question.”

  She nodded. Tom looked at Charlotte, who seemed to reassure him with the look she returned. They both nodded at me, and then I continued.

  “Jenny. Do you want to remember what happened to you that night in the woods?”

  I will never forget her face in that moment. It was as though I had solved the mystery of the universe, discovered the truth about God. She knew when I spoke these words what she hadn’t known before but what was suddenly crystal clear. And her expression carried relief and gratitude so profound—I will never have a more satisfying moment in my professional career.

  She nodded her head, choking back tears, but then they just exploded out of her. Yes! she said.

  Then she said it over and over as her father hugged her, her mother wrapping her arms around herself.

  Yes, yes, yes …

  Chapter Ten

  I suppose I should get to the blue Honda Civic and how it was found again in Fairview. If you recall, the Civic was spotted by a neighbor’s kid on the night of the rape. He said it was parked on the street along the side that bordered the woods. He thought it had New York plates. But that was all. He could not narrow down the model year or anything else that might have helped to locate the car.

  One thing I have to give to Detective Parsons is that he is very good at taking credit for things that are not exactly on his side of the scorecard. The blue Civic was one of them. Technically, Parsons was responsible for the acute awareness within the town to the importance of this car. Public notices appeared weekly in the local paper. Official police flyers were kept on community boards at every diner and coffee shop and nail salon. And Parsons reminded the force at every staff meeting. I pitied anyone who dared enter our borders with a blue sedan. There had been over two dozen false reports during the course of the year. Officers were pulled from their posts to drive by the pharmacy parking lot, or the line for the car wash, or someone’s driveway, only to find a blue Chevy or Saturn or Hyundai. Not one Civic.

  As you have likely ascertained, Detective Parsons worked not only for the Town of Fairview, but also for Tom Kramer. Tom’s single-minded obsession with vengeance, as he put it, had stripped him of any social inhibitions, and he hounded Parsons relentlessly. And Parsons was a nine-to-fiver at heart. Some people just are, and you can’t shake it out of them. He treasured his free time. He did not have a family and I did not know whether or not he had a girlfriend. Or boyfriend, for that matter. I had not been able to discern his orientation. He liked to play sports and stay fit. Recreational soccer, softball. He was an avid swimmer. Tom’s demands interfered with his life. It wasn’t just with the blue Civic. At Tom’s insistence, Parsons and the Fairview police force had reached out across the country, not only through various computer-based systems, but through actual personal contact as well. Tom advised me once that there are about 12,000 local police agencies in the United States. He said it was his intent to have Parsons call, write, or e-mail every single one of them.

  Rapists rarely strike just once. And this guy—well, he left some calling cards, didn’t he? The black mask. The way he shaved himself, wore a condom. And that thing he did with the stick.

  Tom spoke with a strained professional tone, like he had transformed from the victim’s father to a police investigator. He did this sometimes in our sessions, particularly when he would first arrive and was bursting at the seams to give me a status report. Still, it was telling that he would not use more precise language to describe the carving on his daughter’s back.

  I did not learn about the carving until I began treating Jenny and her parents. Detective Parsons had given me a copy of the entire police file, and so I first came upon it in a written document. This was very disconcerting to me. The scar from the carving was the only external physical manifestation of the rape. And it was the scar that Jenny reached for when the emotional memory from that night broke free inside her. It was in our second office session that she first showed it to me. It was nothing, really. Just a vertical, one-inch straight-line discoloration to the right of her spine. It was nothing. But it was the only thing.

  Getting back to Tom and the story of the Civic:

  You would be shocked by the inadequacy of our country’s interagency communications. No one can agree on one system, so not every agency has a system that’s compatible with any one sharing service. There’s no real Interpol equivalent, even after 911, when it became so clear that this type of sharing was necessary. I mean, efforts were made. But there are just too many cooks in the kitchen, twelve thousand agencies across fifty states. And there are even more that are nonlocal special forces. I get that it would be impossible to track down a hundred thousand car owners, and that even if we did, it’s not like any of them would ever admit to raping a teenage girl. But this was different. You put a few guys on it, have them spend an hour each day, calling, e-mailing … five days a week, and it gets done, you know? Now every department has the facts, specific facts, and maybe, just maybe, something similar happened in one of their small towns. Think about that. I mean, what do Fairview cops do all day? They find clever places to hide with their speed radars. Parsons gave me a hard time at first, but then he could see I was right. An hour a day on the phone instead of catching up on Facebook. That’s a small price to pay, compared to the reward. A very small price.

  I have to tell you that I felt proud of Tom. I have mentioned his anemic ego, as well as his deference to his stronger-willed wife. Anytime I see that dynami
c in a relationship, I am compelled to investigate the subject’s childhood. My findings are not uniform, but they do tend toward a finite group of childhood experiences. Tom was no exception. I have named his type of childhood “misguided intellectualism.”

  If you are a parent, I’m sure your eye catches the latest fad parenting book on the bookstore shelf or popping up on your Amazon page along with every other thing the headless beast knows you need. Wrinkle cream, hair-loss gel, diet plans, Cialis. I have had more than a few good laughs comparing pop-up ads with friends at dinner parties. One of my friends is named Kerry. He’s a man, but the Internet won’t believe it. You can imagine the folly that results. Reading parenting books—and all self-help books, as far as I’m concerned—is the equivalent of learning math from a dog. They should be gathered and burned. Every last one.

  Tom’s parents are educators and intellectuals. His father taught literature at Connecticut College for thirty years. His mother worked in the alumni office. They lived and breathed academia and prided themselves on being learned. This translated into everything they did and everything they were. Much of it was benign, or perhaps even beneficial for Tom and his younger sister, Kathy. Their vacations consisted of family camping trips. They were not allowed to watch television without supervision, and only on the weekends. You can imagine the dullness of the permitted content. They were required to read ten books every summer and did not attend camp. There were no sleepovers, strict curfews, and church every Sunday, although religion was discussed in terms of theory and sociology rather than passion and faith. Everything was evaluated and analyzed, stripped of the emotional influences that could lead to the belief of an untruth, or a misguided course of action. You have known people like this. For those less disciplined, they evoke the urge to shake them senseless until some emotion is set free. They seem inhuman, even in the presence of their extremely good behavior.

  What did this mean for Tom? When he brought home straight A’s on his report card, there was no elation, no hugs and kisses and calls to grandparents. There were no quarters handed out for his piggy bank or extra dessert or a pass on piano practice. The paper was not hung on the refrigerator. No—it was evaluated and discussed, and Tom was reminded that his grades were a reflection of his hard work and that he should not come to think he was somehow better or smarter than anyone else. And when he sang in the school play or hit a sloppy single at his Little League game or produced a painted clay animal from art class that only slightly resembled a giraffe—everything Tom ever did was given a dispassionate and honest review. You sounded a little off-key in the second chorus, Tom. You had a little luck getting to first, Tom—don’t think it will happen again, you need to practice more. Well, it sure looks like you had fun making this thing.

  Yes—exactly. They were ahead of their time, weren’t they? Ahead of the parenting advice that has been shoved down our throats in the last decade. We shouldn’t be proud of our children; they should be proud of themselves. We shouldn’t give false praise, because they will stop trusting our opinions. We shouldn’t send them into the world thinking they are better than they are. This will only lead to disappointment. True self-confidence comes only from truthful parenting.

  I have been an outlier in my rejection of these absurdities.

  We are small, inconsequential beings. It is only our place in the hearts of others that fills us up, that gives us our purpose, our pride, and our sense of self. We need our parents to love us without condition, without logic, and beyond reason. We need them to see us through lenses warped by this love and to tell us in every way that just having us walk this earth fills them with joy. Yes, we will come to learn that our clay giraffes were not masterly. But when we pull them out of our attics, they should make us cry, knowing that when our parents saw these ugly pieces of plaster, they felt ridiculously misplaced pride, and they wanted to hug us until our bones hurt. This is what we need from our parents, more than the truth about how small we are. We will have more than enough people to remind us of that, to give us dispassionate evaluations of our mediocrity.

  It is not surprising to me that Tom felt small and acted small. Or that he married a woman who made him feel small and worked for a boss who treated him like a small man. It is our destiny to re-create our childhoods in our adult lives. Then we wonder why we’re not happy. This is why I have a nice house and drive a nice car.

  What I came to admire in Tom was that he did love his children beyond reason. And while he subconsciously chose to subject his own ego to ongoing degradation, he did not do the same with Jenny and Lucas. His instinct to show them how much they filled his heart had not been beaten out of him. Nor had it been injured by Jenny’s rape and attempted suicide. In my mind, when I picture Tom at home, I see balls being thrown and caught, video games, laughter. He does all this with a clenched jaw and a broken heart. But he does it.

  To this end, Tom was not anywhere reasonable when it came to finding his daughter’s rapist. In spite of his guilt after the attempted suicide and the reconstructed reality he created, Tom never let up. He may have persisted with less conviction or a lowered emotional attachment to the process as he was lulled into believing that his wife was right about Jenny’s recovery and the need to “move on,” but he did persist. As far as anyone in the town could detect, Fairview remained fully committed to finding Jenny’s attacker, and the reports about blue sedans came in nearly every month.

  Now, the only things that resulted from those reports were distracted cops and a few moms getting away with speeding on their way to a school pickup. Until a year later.

  The car was spotted on a street adjacent to the high school by a pair of senior girls making their way to town. It’s only a half-mile walk, and the kids like to gather for milk shakes and mischief, though there’s not much trouble to be found in downtown Fairview. Still, this path is well traveled. The driver of the car obviously had no idea a virtual posse had been enlisted to secure his capture.

  Jenny had not yet returned to school. That made two spring terms in a row that trauma had caused her to abandon her life. Still it was my advice that she immerse herself in the therapy and acknowledge the gravity of what had occurred both recently and last spring. I hate the armchair psychologists who postulate that the best remedy for trauma is getting back to normal life. It’s nothing more than a wives’ tale, for lack of a more politically correct expression. At some point, that would be the right course for Jenny. But not until she had completed her work with me. It had not served her well thus far, agreed? Have you ever tried to concentrate on work after receiving devastating news? Or exciting news? What do you do? Do you go outside for a smoke or to call your wife, or cry or jump up and down? You do not sit at your desk and return to your work.

  Officer Steve Koper took the call. The girls had tried to be discreet, turning the corner before dialing 911 from a cell phone. The school had sufficiently scared the student body and their parents after the rape. E-mails went out monthly, reminding parents about the blue Civic, and about warning kids not to venture out alone in secluded areas. There had been speakers about rape and abduction, and pamphlets with safety measures children should take. And, of course, news of Jenny’s attempted suicide had gone “viral,” bringing everyone’s mind back to the rape and the blue Civic. I’m quite certain this is why the girls noticed the car. Everyone was again talking about Jenny Kramer.

  It’s a funny thing, teen culture. As ruthless as it can be, teenagers still take their cues from the adult world. Had Jenny not been raped, her story from that night would have resulted in merciless ridicule. She’d been jilted by Doug Hastings. She’d puked in the bathroom. She’d run away crying, alone into the woods. I have no doubt she would have lost some friends over it, been forced to turn off her social media for months, maybe even the year. I have several teenage patients. This is mostly what they talk about. But Jenny was raped, and the seriousness of her rape was made clear by the police, the school, and the local media. Jenny was suddenly the gi
rl everyone had to be nice to. She was invited to parties, sleepovers, ski weekends in Vermont. She was asked to join the school paper, Model UN, acting club. Everyone wanted kudos for showing kindness. Even Doug Hastings, who (can you believe this?) asked her to the movies.

  Jenny had floated through, accepting invitations, putting on an appropriately happy face, stealing pills from bathrooms.

  It felt like I was a celebrity or something. Like I had done something special, so now everyone liked me. What had I done? I was stupid to run into those woods. To get so drunk. To get so upset over a guy. Over a jerk like Doug Hastings! All the teachers and those people who came to talk to us, everyone was basically saying, “Don’t do what Jenny Kramer did. Don’t be stupid like Jenny Kramer.” I felt like saying to all of them, “If I’m such a stupid loser, why do you want to be friends with me?” It shouldn’t have been both ways, you know? And the thing is, if I had done something good, like made the Olympic track team, no one would want to be my friend. They would all be jealous and would find reasons to hate me. That happened to this guy a few years ago. He won some national math thing. He met the president and everything. He might as well have had Ebola. Everyone called him a geek, made fun of everything he wore and said and did. I don’t even know what I did or didn’t do. I don’t know if I fought him off or just lay there and let it happen. I don’t know, so they can’t possibly know. Except for one thing: That he won and I lost. That’s the bottom line, right? That I lost that fight.

  You can see the strength in this young woman, can’t you? Her irreverence, her sense of perception, which is well beyond her years? She even had a sense of humor. Remarkable.

  Officer Koper drove past the Civic and around the corner to where the girls were waiting. I’m sure his heart was pounding just a little faster after he saw the logo on the back of the car. They told him what he already knew, that they’d spotted the car a few minutes before calling the police. Koper took their names and numbers and told them to get home. Then he called Detective Parsons.