All Is Not Forgotten (10 page)

It was so intense, his need, and the way he was with me. It was so fast and powerful, even the way he kissed me. He made my lip bleed. I couldn't catch my breath. It was like I couldn't relax enough to make it happen. It would go on for an hour sometimes, and my heart would be pounding, and our skin was so wet with sweat, we were sliding against each other. I think my body spent every ounce of energy just trying to make sense of it. It was like trying to have sex while you're running a marathon. But it's different now. We know each other. I'm more comfortable. And the drugs are helping his anxiety. It's all good now. It really is. It was just a part of who he was back then.

That was where we left it. And I did not think about it again until I had a similar conversation with Charlotte Kramer over a year later. I suppose I should mention something about my work with the Kramers after they found me. I immediately began meeting with Jenny for two hours every other day. She would soon join my trauma group, and that, as you will see, would become a turning point in many ways. I saw her mother and father once a week, sometimes every other as it suited their needs. Jenny and Tom were open books. Charlotte was not. But her pain, and her guilt—both from her willful blindness to Jenny's despair and her relationship with Bob Sullivan—gave me powerful tools to dismantle her defenses.

It was perhaps three weeks into the therapy when I knew it was time. That she was hiding secrets had been obvious to me all along, and on this day, I decided to unearth them. I let a disconcerting silence come between us. I can't say how long it was. We think we know time, but in moments like this, one minute can feel like ten. It was when she nervously uncrossed her left leg from her right, then crossed the right over the left, that I finally spoke.

“Do you believe me when I tell you that I will hold your confidence? No matter what? That even the law cannot force me to betray you?”

Of course. I mean, yes. I know that.

I nodded. “Then why have you not told me?”

I did not know her secrets. And she is a smart woman. Before you begin to doubt this, it was not that I duped her into thinking I knew. Rather, it was that she desperately wanted a reason to tell me. And so I gave her one.

I don't know.
She said,
I didn't realize it was that obvious.

It was on this day she told me about her affair. And it was on this day that I recalled the session with Tammy.

“Why do you think you're having the affair?” I asked Charlotte. We had yet to explore her past, her second secret, and the alter ego that needed to be fed. And so this question was still open.

I don't know.

I asked her if she wanted to know, if she wanted to discuss this, and if it would be helpful to her family. She was hesitant but agreeable.

“Okay,” I said. “Let's start with the obvious. Is it the sex?”

She had to think about this before answering.
You know, it's strange. That's really all we do when we're together. And when we're apart, which is ninety-nine percent of the time, I find myself thinking about having sex with him. And yet, in the three years it's been going on, I haven't had one … you know.

“Climax?” I said. I am used to filling in the words. Men always use the word “come.” They use it routinely as though it were perfectly normal to talk about it that way. Come, cock, clit, ass, tits, pussy. Men are quite at ease with these terms. Women rarely know what words to use. They uniformly avoid the colloquial terms, but seem to find the clinical terms awkward as well. They usually pause and wait for me to rescue them. I have no problem finishing their thoughts and setting the appropriate boundaries for the conversation.

Charlotte nodded.
Yes. Not one.

“And with Tom?”

Almost always. At least when we used to have sex. It was somewhat regular before all this started. Maybe three times a week. I think that's pretty healthy for a marriage as long as ours. Isn't it?

I nodded with a tilted head, not really agreeing but more taking a pass on the question. The health of their marriage was another topic altogether, and I wanted to stay focused on her affair with Bob.

But I don't enjoy it. I don't know when that stopped. Years ago. There's more to sex than the … you know. Maybe not for men. But for women, it's more than that. The dynamic between us changed somehow. It felt mechanical. With Bob, God help me, I could close my eyes right now and imagine his hands on my face and actually get a shiver down my spine.

This is where the conversation with Tammy Logan came rushing back.

“So what happens with Bob?”

It's just, oh … how can I describe this? I get excited and I want him. He's larger than life, his personality. Have you ever met someone like that? Someone who just dominates? He can walk into a room and take it right over. He just has this energy. And when he turns that energy my way, when we're alone, it's so intense that I lose myself in him. It is so clear in those moments that he is the man and I am the woman in this very primal way. I feel like I'm almost too excited. Like I've moved beyond the normal physical … you know, climax to something bigger. It's not like that with Tom. It feels awkward when I try to let go. When I try to feel that primal. It's like I can't feel him as a “man.”
Charlotte used her fingers to make quotations around that word.

And then I asked her the same question I asked Tammy. “But if you aren't satisfied physically, then what you are getting from him is not sexual. It's filling some other need. Is that what you're saying?” They both had the same response.

Yes. It fills a need. He's like a drug and I'm an addict.

Tammy started feeling nauseated about a month after Sean left. Her friends wanted her to have an abortion, but she couldn't get herself to do it. She wasn't against the idea on moral grounds. It was Sean, and the thought of him being with her, inside her, even though he was gone, even though she hardly knew him. She didn't have to explain it to me. You would understand if you could meet him. I can't do him justice with my words, and this is where the similarities between Bob Sullivan and Sean end.

Tammy wrote to Sean and told him she was pregnant. A few weeks later, a small engagement ring was delivered to her office, where she worked as a dental assistant. That was all. Just the ring. She wrote him back a long letter, explaining that while she loved the gesture, it was not necessary, that they could work something out. He wrote back three words on a piece of plain paper.
Yes or no?
She answered right away.
Yes.

That is the kind of man Sean Logan is.

Still, this was not a romantic love affair. Sean returned to marry Tammy and be with his young infant son, Philip. But his anxiety, and the behavior he used to self-medicate, were not conducive to marriage and fatherhood. He had no patience with his child. And by that I don't mean that he lost his patience and was abusive. He just could not spend time with his family for more than an hour or so at a time.

I started to see that he wasn't normal. It was like he had this itch he couldn't get to and it tortured him. I wanted to just wrap him in my arms the way I did with Philip, wrap him so tight, he felt safe and would settle down. I loved him so much, but I couldn't help him the way I could help my baby. He was beyond that. I didn't understand about his anxiety back then. Neither did he. When his name came up again, we went to the base together, all of us. His mother was there, and two of his brothers. His father had said good-bye the night before. Everyone was crying, hugging him, making him promise to come home safe. I had the baby in my arms, and God help me, I couldn't cry. I wasn't happy to see him go, not exactly. But I was grateful that he was leaving.

Sean left for a fourth tour. He was on a sweep for a target in a small village. There were eight SEALs on the mission. He was the only one to come out. A platoon of marines found him unconscious, his right arm blown to shreds. He was dragged to the safety of an armored tank. His arm was amputated at a field hospital. It was there that they gave him the treatment.

 

Chapter Nine

Sean Logan became
my patient exactly seventeen months before I began my work with the Kramer family. He was referred to me by a physician at the Naval Health Clinic in Norwich. This is the same doctor who sought Jenny Kramer's records for her study of the treatment. She had followed Sean's case closely upon his return. She had supervised his therapy sessions, allowing the hacks assigned to his case to misdiagnose him with PTSD. The symptoms were not dissimilar. Anxiety, depression, anger, suicidal thoughts. But this young man had been given a drug protocol in the field that was new and unpredictable. It was meant to reduce PTSD, not create it. And no one bothered to factor in his history with anxiety. It was not even listed in his records.

People wonder what is wrong with our health care system that we have fallen so far behind the rest of the civilized world. People blame it on our laws, or the drug companies, on the areas that have become “socialized” or the areas that are not “socialized.” Excuses, excuses. I don't care what you're getting paid or how hard you're being worked. A patient sits before you. He has lost his arm in battle. He has lost his memory of the battle. Or, more precisely, it has been stolen from him. And now he has lost himself to his own mind. Is this man not worthy of your time? Is he not worthy of you taking a proper history—the kind I know you were taught in medical school, and again and again throughout your residency? There is no excuse. None at all.

Sean was asked one question:
Have you or anyone in your family ever suffered from any mental illness?
Sean answered no. He had never been diagnosed or treated for his anxiety and had spent most of his life believing it was just “who he was.” Until he came to see me.

I am angry. There is no use continuing the story without making this additional confession. I am angry that Sean Logan suffered for nine months before he was sent to me. I am angry that Jenny Kramer was given the treatment and that I was not employed to observe her in the months that followed. Surely the Kramers would have sought my help sooner had they known that right here in their little town a doctor was treating a man who had been given the same drugs and suffered as a result. What might have come to pass? I will tell you what. Jenny Kramer would have studied math instead of techniques for ending her life. She would not have taken a blade to her soft pink flesh and cut into her skin and then deeper into her veins until her blood spilled onto the floor.

Looking back on the months between the rape and the suicide attempt, it all makes sense to me now. Everyone in Fairview knew about the attack. But the use of the treatment to make her forget was not widely known. It was certainly not known to me. And yet, when I saw her around our town, the same way I had before, at the movie theater or the ice cream shop, I was surprised by her demeanor. Not that there is one way a rape victim should behave. I have treated victims of trauma for most of my career. I suppose it is odd, my work with the criminals in Somers and my work with victims of the same crimes they have committed—rape, murder, assault, domestic abuse. It makes perfect sense to me. Most of the men in Somers were victims before they were criminals. You would be surprised at how many people have been victims of trauma. Most of them (unless they have become criminals) seek help years later, when they have stopped moving and settled down into a family life. It is then, while they sit at their desks or drive their children to school, that the pain resurfaces. My practice in Fairview is thriving. The line outside the metal door in Somers grows longer each week.

I cannot pinpoint what it was about Jenny that did not ring true. Is it enough to say for now that after all my years as a psychiatrist, I know it when I see it? And while I am confessing things, I will add to the list that it bothered me. Knowing something was not right but having no business to inquire—it was not easy to sit with this. I wanted to know why no one was treating her. I wanted to know why she did not behave the way I would have expected. I wanted to know why I could not see the rape in her eyes. Not knowing was causing me to question myself and my professional competency. As angry as I was with the local medical community when I learned the truth, I was admittedly relieved that my observations had been correct. And I was beyond eager to help.

Charlotte Kramer came to see me while Jenny was still in the hospital. Dr. Markovitz had refused to release her without a course of therapy in place—a therapist on board and a plan for her care. Charlotte did not resist. Whatever responsibility any of us, including Tom and Jenny, might ascribe to her for Jenny's suicide attempt, Charlotte took it on tenfold. Soaked in her daughter's blood, she spoke to Detective Parsons about how she found her daughter. And while she managed to cover her tracks with regard to Bob Sullivan, I believe she was sincere about her feelings of remorse.

I sat with her in the family lounge. It was like déjà
vu. I couldn't believe something else had happened to that poor girl. But Mrs. Kramer was different this time. I remember on the night of the rape, she was all dressed up for some dinner party. Even after hearing the news, she kept her composure. Tom Kramer was another story. Christ, was he a mess. Both times. Just a sloppy wet mess. Mrs. Kramer sat on the couch, crossed her legs, and folded her arms in a very ladylike way. But she was shaking. I remember watching her right hand as it lay over her left wrist, both of them resting on her knee. She was fighting it hard. I asked her to just tell me what happened, start to finish. She nodded and said something formal like, “Certainly, Officer.” I mean, I'd been talking to this family for months, even before I found the blue Civic. Probably once every few weeks, you know, keeping them up to date on the investigation, asking about how Jenny was doing.