The Gretchen Question

by Jessica Treadway

“No.” He sat down and wrote a check, then ripped it out of the book. The sound scraped me inside. “This is not a bribe. This is me giving in to your blackmail.”

  He handed it over. When I saw the amount, it was all I could do not to say Thank you.

  Recovering, I said, “How do you know I won’t still come after you?” I felt myself flush. “This check doesn’t change anything. I could still file a claim and force you to submit your DNA.”

  “But you won’t. Because what would that get you? Nothing that you want.” He smiled—it was the smile of a winner.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” I said, trying to sound threatening. But I don’t know how to sound like a winner, and this was obvious to us both.

  Why had I thought it possible that I would get a response from him any different from the one I had just received? Because I wanted it to be so—plain and simple. I wanted him to be the man I’d thought he was, before he raped me.

  But of course he is a different kind of man entirely, the kind of man I never want my son to know, or to fear he might be.

  He waved me off—shooed me is more like it—and I scrambled to open the door, slip through to the other side, then shut it behind me before he could follow, though of course he had no such intention. A patient waiting for some other therapist, under the bright abstracts, looked up from where she was thumbing through Vanity Fair and then shot me a look of understanding and sympathy: Tough session, huh? I clutched my purse tightly to my side as I huffed to the door of the suite, which was heavier than I remembered; it fell away from me and I reached for it again, but by then the other patient had gotten up from the couch and come over to open it for me. I thanked her, trying not to gasp again, and felt her watching me as I made my way down the corridor and toward the stairs.

  It’s the check, I thought—the check is what’s making this harder, my purse is heavier than it was before, it’s what’s weighing me down. Of course this makes no sense now, but at the time, it did. Finally I made it out to the parking lot and my car, where I yanked the door open and collapsed behind the steering wheel, which I used then as a pillow because I had to—I couldn’t help it—I had to take a little nap right there, before I could go on.

  In the car I had to sit longer than I expected, to calm down and clear my mind. Well, not clear, exactly—no way that was going to happen, after the scene I’d just left—but to give my heart a rest from the racing it had been doing the whole time I was in the therapist’s office.

  More from instinct than anything else, I called Grettie. I figured she wouldn’t answer—figured she was in the air over Brussels or Dubrovnik or some other equally exotic place Jack was whisking her off to for their anniversary celebration. But no, she said when she answered. As it turned out, he’d actually rented them a room in an inn on a lake in New Hampshire. Less than two hours north. “He knew I wouldn’t want to be that far away from you right now. What’s going on?”

  Oh, Jack, thank you. I breathed the words to him in my mind, the deepest relief I could remember ever feeling. Bless his Irish heart! Whatever resentment I’d ever held toward him, or he’d held toward me over the years (and who knows if I was even right about that, I was questioning everything now), he’d set it aside because he knew she would be distracted, couldn’t fully enjoy the occasion the way he hoped she would.

  Did I feel guilty about this? Well, yes. But to be honest, the good feeling it gave me was more distinct, stronger, than the bad. And it was not lost on me—as it was not lost on Jack, I’m sure—that every anniversary after this one would be his and hers alone, no chance of my interfering.

  Though I wanted nothing more, I couldn’t answer her question. I couldn’t tell her I’d gone to see my old therapist, or what he had said. What he’d threatened me with. In fact I couldn’t say much of anything for the first minute or two, just had to sit there behind the steering wheel and catch my breath. Finally, when I could manage a few words—“I’m scared, please help”—she told me not to worry, and to hold on. She asked where I was and said I should stay right there. But I couldn’t, I had to move while I had the energy, while I could still make it to the bank.

  I had sweated all the way through my tee-shirt, and for some reason my eyesight was dim; maybe it was because of the fluorescent lights in the therapist’s waiting room, I wasn’t used to them. It was so hot that the flowers I’d thrown onto the passenger seat were already dying, and it took more energy than I would have guessed to open the car door and drop them in the space I was leaving. By the time I pulled out of the parking lot, things looked a little brighter, but not as bright as they should have. I slowed down for what I thought was a speed bump, but it turned out to be just a shadow—of what, I couldn’t tell. All of that made me decide to be more cautious in my drive to the bank. I went slower and found myself gripping the wheel more tightly than usual, even though I remembered from Driver’s Ed that this isn’t really a good idea, it just makes you tenser. I tried to relax, and when I got to the bank I sat for a while in that lot, too, before making sure I still had the check in my purse, and then getting out.

  Typically I do my business using the ATM, but because of the check’s weight, its enormousness, I knew this would be too risky—I had to go inside and give it to a teller. And what would he or she make of a check in that amount, drawn on a physician’s business account, especially when it was submitted by a woman who tried but failed to hide her distress during the transaction, and smelled of garbage to boot? Tellers are no doubt trained not to show any reactions, I’m sure. And, of course, not to ask any questions about what a check is for. Yet they’d wonder, I knew—looking at me through the window, and maybe watching me after I left.

  Well, what did I care? I did care, but I knew I shouldn’t, and knowing this provided a little relief.

  This was a good outcome, wasn’t it? This check. Even though it wasn’t the one I had asked for. I tried to persuade myself of the upside. Now Will would have enough money to finish college, even some left over for graduate school, though he was aiming at fellowships for that. Maybe the therapist did not want to acknowledge fathering my son (let alone raping me—at this point, he was right, I would not get anything out of his acknowledging that), but the check was a form of child support—right?

  It was—for God’s sake!—the least he could do.

  Inside the bank, I was glad to see that there was no one else in the line. Two teller windows were open, a woman and a man. I chose the woman out of instinct, even though I know from experience that it didn’t necessarily mean she’d be the more sympathetic. She was older than me, but not that much. Her name badge said Stephanie Lee. I was tempted to tell her I had a sister named Stephanie, then decided not to. What would she care?

  She waited for me to state my business. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I reached into my purse to remove the check, and one of its corners slit my finger. Who knew a check could cut that deep? Even in the state I was in, I recognized it for the metaphor it was—the therapist’s money would hurt me, hurt my son. It was already doing so, before I had even put it in my account … “Look,” I said to the teller, “I’m bleeding.”

  She peered through the space between us, then plucked a tissue and handed it to me. I pressed it against the wound. It seemed to me that she frowned as she observed this, though I couldn’t be sure, I was concentrating too hard on a very simple task. “Would you like some water or something?” she asked quietly. “Would you like to sit down? There’s a bathroom in back.”

  I thanked her and shook my head. I thought about saying Why would I want water for a paper cut?, but I didn’t, because she was only trying to be nice.

  I put my purse on the counter. Inside it, I saw that the check showed a little spot of blood. “Is there anything I can do for you?” Stephanie asked. Behind me, I could feel that a small line had formed, of people who wanted her to get rid of me and take care of them.

 
All I had to do was pull the check out, sign it, and hand it over. I knew this, but my mind would not issue the instruction, my body had an objection to the plan. “Maybe I’ll come back later,” I told her. Could she hear me? It seemed I was whispering. “Thank you. I’m sorry for the trouble.”

  My saying this made a certain softness appear on her face. “No trouble at all,” she said. “Just come right back to me when you know what you want to do.”

  I thanked her again, then on impulse said, “I have a sister named Stephanie,” to which she smiled more than I’d thought she might.

  “Well, tell her hello for me,” she said. “We have to stick together.” It made me feel happy, her saying that silly thing, and I told her I would. I turned and made the mistake of seeing some of the faces in line as they looked up from their phones—I had expected them to appear irritated, but instead I saw something else in them, pity or fear or fascination, I couldn’t be sure which. Maybe all. Exiting the bank I felt genuinely calmer, not the false calm I’d earlier tried to persuade myself to feel. I drove a little faster toward home than I had leaving the therapist’s office, less afraid now that I’d make a mistake.

  Let him see that I have not cashed his bribe. Let him worry about what it means. Let him dread a phone call, an email, a new patient—a young man—arriving for his first appointment, sitting down in that chair to accuse him of being his dad.

  Dad: how much I know Will longs to say that word. If the therapist isn’t going to offer that, I’m not going to give my son the consolation prize this check represents.

  Besides, what would it say about me if I accepted money from a person who did what he did?

  He’ll be all right without it, he’ll find a way to support himself and pay off his loans and earn a living, the same as I did. If worse comes to worst, Jack and Grettie will help him, until he can stand on his own two feet.

  There’s a reason I named you Will.

  Thinking all this made my chest feel light. I gripped the steering wheel even tighter, so I wouldn’t float away.

  I’d thought that all I wanted to do was get home, change into comfy clothes, and lie down with my book; it was what I had been aiming toward all day. But before I reached my own street, I realized there was something I wanted—needed—to do first. Had it been brewing in my mind the whole time, and I’d just forgotten? It didn’t seem so, but lately I wasn’t a good judge.

  I knew the address by heart, but I didn’t know where the street was, so I pulled over to turn on the GPS. I was six miles from my destination, it said. The route looked straightforward, going on back roads. Ten minutes later I found it—where Celia Santoro lives.

  It was a side street, so I could slow down in front of the house. The inside was dark, which I found disappointing. But of course—she was probably still at work, right? Most people still went to offices.

  If she had returned to work, that is. I couldn’t remember the date of her heart maze procedure. Maybe she was still recovering, taking a nap in her bedroom. Did she live alone with her little boy? It was a small enough house that she might have. If there had been information about this in her file, I’d forgotten it. I found myself hoping she had someone to take care of her—if not a partner, then at least a friend like the kind of friend Grettie has been to me.

  Even if there had been lights on inside the house, it didn’t mean I would catch a glimpse of her. For that is what I’d been hoping, I realized: I wanted to see this woman whose health I’d been tracking and coding all these years, whom I’d come to see as some kind of psychic twin. It was silly, I knew. I also knew that in allowing myself finally to take this trip, I’d lost that fantasy. Maybe that was my motivation—I recognized that the time had come, I’d reached the point at which I must give things up.

  None of this was conscious, of course. But sometimes the unconscious things are the ones we know best. The therapist had told me that once and I believed him, though now I can’t be sure what, if anything, he should have been trusted about.

  But wait—here was a car pulling into the driveway of Celia’s house. I could see even before it parked that it was a woman driving, with a child in the rear booster seat. Though the light was dim, I could make out his face at the window, absorbed in a daydream. This was the son she’d had six years ago; seeing him in person, rather than as a detail on my computer screen, gave me goosebumps. But it wasn’t the kind of shivering I’d done in the therapist’s office—this was a far better kind.

  The driver had to be Celia, didn’t it? I’d never seen a photograph, but it seemed to me I could make out that this woman’s nose had undergone surgery, as I knew Celia’s had. As always with such things, she didn’t look anything like what I had imagined. On another day this would have disappointed me, but I didn’t have the energy for that now. Instead I allowed myself to think There she is, with the same pleasure I might have felt encountering Grettie or my sister when I hadn’t expected it. Instead of the long, dark hair I had pictured, Celia’s hung in a blunt blond cut. I’d assumed for some reason that she’d be short, like me, but this woman was tall and lithe, like volleyball players I’d known in college. She had a pale face, no blush or lipstick as far as I could tell.

  But even without lipstick, it was easy to make out her smile. The boy in the booster seat behind her must have said something, because she turned to him and laughed and was still smiling when he unbuckled himself and they both got out of the car.

  Now I smiled, too, because he was wearing a faded red tee-shirt with Santa Claus on the front, over a pair of polka-dotted pink shorts. This meant, no doubt, that his mother had allowed him to dress himself, which I wish I had done more of with Will. I’m ashamed to say that if he’d put on a shirt with Santa on it in June, I would have made him change. I would have told myself it was because I didn’t want him to be mocked, and yes that would have been part of it, but it also would have been because I knew people would think he had some kind of crazy or negligent mother, to let him go out like that when the season was wrong.

  Celia’s son lugged his Batman backpack out of the car, first dragging it on the driveway, then hoist-swinging it up to his mother, who took the bag and slung it over her own shoulder as if it contained hardly any weight at all. The boy ran ahead to the house and waited, and Celia followed without rushing, holding the bag to her side like something precious. (I knew it was.) Then they both vanished inside the house.

  Before turning toward home I sat for a few minutes, savoring what seeing Celia made me feel. Why had I sought her out, at last?

  A few reasons, I realized. Because—despite what I was doing my best to believe—I was not okay, and I wanted to make sure she was. Because it didn’t matter anymore in terms of my work, I’d never code her file again. Because I wanted to see for once beyond the code, to what it stood for.

  Thank you, I whispered, though I was not sure to whom.

  The boy’s backpack reminded me that it was the end of the school year. Maybe even the last day. Almost a year ago, after the canceled commencement, Will received his diploma in the mail. I was so happy then, and hopeful, celebrating the anniversary of my surgery and Will’s acceptance to the school he wanted. I was recovered, and he was almost launched. That was a phew, indeed—the biggest one of all.

  But my circumstances are revised now. My access has been amended. In front of Celia Santoro’s house I turned the car around and headed, finally, toward home. My heart felt full, and not in the bad way it has so often lately.

  As I drove down my own street, I saw a woman running toward me from one of the houses, waving with both arms for me to stop. Shit! I didn’t feel like stopping. All I wanted to do was get home and relax and read my book—was that too much to ask?

  Well, I guess so, because here came this woman, trying to flag me down.

  This was the runner, I realized. She ran the loop of the neighborhood in good weather and bad, never very fast
but with a loping determination it was hard to ignore.

  I myself had been a runner, as a young woman, but I stopped during my pregnancy and never resumed. I wouldn’t have been able to explain my reasoning; it just struck me as unseemly, somehow, the idea of a mother running.

  But: I had enjoyed it. Running used to calm me down, after Grettie finished her degree and moved to Boston, and before I followed her. I worked a support job in a doctor’s office back then, sitting at a word processor and, as I listened through headphones I controlled with a pedal at my feet, entering onto the screen the notes my boss had dictated. Not every day, but when I could make myself, I got up early to run a loop of the neighborhood cemetery. I liked passing the graves, imagining from their names and the dates of their lifetimes what the people were like, wondering if they were at peace now, and what that might mean. When I got to that part of the route I turned the volume down on my Walkman, out of respect. I always slept better the nights after I’d run. I dreamed about people at work, or the curtains in my childhood bedroom, or about being pregnant. In my dreams, I gave birth to birds.

  I considered pretending I hadn’t seen the woman waving for me to stop. But then, I thought, it might be a real emergency … The way she looked was the way I felt so often, including as recently as an hour ago in the therapist’s office: desperate and panicked, wishing to be swooped in upon and saved. I pulled over and turned the engine off.

  “Oh, thank you,” she said, stretching forward with her hands on the car’s hood in a child’s pose while she caught her breath. “I need your help. My cat’s on the roof again and I can’t get him down by myself.”

  I breathed out more loudly than I’d intended. “That’s all? The way you were running at me, I thought somebody was having a heart attack.”

  The woman said she was sorry. “It’s just that I can’t do it alone.”

  I considered telling her I wasn’t in any condition, after the day I’d just been through, to help rescue a cat. But then I thought, what if I need help with Scout someday? So I decided to get out of the car. Though I passed this house every day on my way in or out of the neighborhood, I noticed only now the circular stained-glass window above the front door. Had it been there all along? Whether for a decade or a day, I was sure that I was seeing it now for the first time. Will told me once that most people don’t notice most of what is around them, most of the time. From a psychology class he took in high school, he described an experiment in which subjects were asked to count the number of ball exchanges among a group of six people on a basketball court. During the action, the scientists conducting the experiment sent a person wearing a gorilla suit onto the court among the players. About half the test subjects reported never seeing the gorilla, so intent were they on their assigned task of counting how many times the ball got passed. “It’s called intentional blindness,” Will said. “A failure of awareness, because you’re choosing to focus on something else.”