All Is Not Forgotten (15 page)

Glenn also had a form of autism. I say “form” because he was never assessed by a trained professional before his borderline symptoms began to surface. Autism is also a spectrum. I detected the characteristics from his mannerisms. He was a brilliant man, very adept at mimicking normal behavior. But I was, thankfully, skilled enough to make this diagnosis. Intelligence, by the way, is often seen in patients having either of his conditions.

His parents had an abusive, explosive relationship. He was beaten himself, and subjected to witnessing the beatings of both parents by one another. His mother was tall and strong, as was Glenn. They had neither the time nor the inclination to notice the ways he was different from other children. His aberrant behavior was the trigger for much of the punishment his parents inflicted.

Before landing in prison, Glenn had been self-medicating the overstimulation caused by his autism with a variety of street drugs. When he ran out of money, he used a toy gun on a cashier at a bodega in Watertown. Glenn could not hold down a job for long. His intelligence was appealing at first, but he made people uncomfortable and was typically fired within a few months.

I had done my best for Glenn. My very best. He refused to accept medication. He did not think he was ill. What he sought was therapy—a chance to have a safe connection with another human being, which can be a dangerous endeavor in prison. I was eager to provide this to him. He was the subject of abuse by other inmates because of his odd disposition and how he sought emotional intimacy in an environment where such a thing is perceived as deceptive. I imagine some of the inmates had succumbed to his talents, confiding more than they should about their crimes to this strange man. He was frequently accused of being a “rat.” I believe it was his physical size and strength that kept him from being killed.

Glenn Shelby was the one patient I was not able to save. His life ended with suicide. This is certainly why I have dwelled on him here. Why I dwell on him, period. The several months I treated him was not enough time for me, in my ineptitude, to understand the depths of his conditions.

I was thinking about the patient I had just seen on the drive home that day, and trying to get myself around the profound disappointment it triggered. Disappointment in myself. How easy it was for me now to see through this sociopath. He was beyond help. But Glenn, I do not believe that about him. If he walked through my door on that same day, I would have been able to help him. Save him. The world is not a fair place.

You may wonder why I choose to immerse myself in such filth every week. My wife believes it has to do with my upbringing. My parents used to take in foster children. I think it was because they had only two children themselves, and for ten years only me. My sister was a miracle, they said. The doctors had believed that my mother's uterus was damaged by my difficult delivery and could no longer hold a fetus. She suffered many miscarriages. We were given a great deal of information about this so we would understand why they opened our home to strangers. I do not even remember all of their names or even their faces. I did not enjoy sharing my home with these strangers. I resented them for taking resources that should have been mine—the love of my parents, money, food, space. But I was just a child, and children are selfish that way. And yet my wife tells me, as do my parents when we see them for our annual visit, that it is their generous spirit that lives within me. I think about that every time I drive up north to Somers.

The radio was on. A Knicks game had just ended, and a newscast was airing. I heard the name, but it did not mean anything. Then I heard the description of the car and the reference to the rape in Fairview last spring. They did not mention the Kramers, as that is the policy of the media with regard to rape victims. But everyone knew. There had been only one rape. There was only one blue Civic. And now they had the driver.

My distress over Glenn Shelby and the injustices of the world were instantly gone from my mind, and I was listening to every word. I called in to my voice mail. I had several messages waiting, which is very common, and I usually wait until the evening to listen to them, as I am sometimes required to take notes. Changes in appointments and the like. Today they were all about the arrest—Tom Kramer, Charlotte Kramer, Detective Parsons—they all called to tell me what had happened. The Kramers said that they were anxious to see me to discuss what this could mean for Jenny, whether we could use Demarco's face or clothing to try to recover her memories. The thought of that was horrifying, and I listened impatiently because I wanted to call them back and urge them to keep Jenny away from any images of this man. The power of suggestion was anathema to our work. It would undermine everything. But then I got the last message, and my thoughts shifted one last time. It was from my wife.

 

Chapter Thirteen

My wife's name
is Julie Marin Forrester. I love my wife. It feels disingenuous to use this phrase after I have proselytized to such a degree about how nebulous love is. How it means nothing except in the context of the person who is “feeling” it. How it means something different to each of us and is therefore meaningless in some respects. How else can I describe it? I do not admire her. She is not particularly skilled at any one thing, though she is highly competent at running our family. She attended college (I won't say which one, so as not to offend any of you who may be alumni), but I don't think she learned much. She was very social. Lived in a sorority. Majored in English, which basically means she read a lot of novels. It was mostly a passive exercise for her.

It is strange having to think about it for this long, my feelings for my wife. If I ask myself the same questions I ask my patients, it certainly does not sound like love. I feel intellectually superior to her. There's no point hiding that truth. I rarely have patients who don't know how they feel on this subject. I make all our decisions that involve reasoning and the weighing of costs and benefits. How much of our retirement to invest in the stock market. When to refinance our mortgage. Which contractor to use to fix the roof. She makes the decisions that involve the likes and dislikes of our family. What kind of flowers to send my mother on her birthday. What color ski coat our daughter would like for Christmas. What movie our son might like to see on his birthday. I make the decisions involving discipline and motivation of our children. That falls squarely in my court.

She is very attractive. We met in New York when I was doing my residency. She worked as a waitress while she interned at a publishing house. She would read manuscripts all day in a windowless office, then serve wealthy businessmen at a Midtown steak house until 2
A.M.
Julie made an excellent living for a young college grad in those days. She was not above using her looks to boost her tips. She was not above an occasional hand brushing her behind as she passed by a table, or a stroke of her arm as she leaned over to clear a plate. I am not disgusted by her Machiavellian attitude. I believe it correlates with the simplistic way she approaches nearly every aspect of life. She never gave a second thought to the unwanted touches of self-entitled assholes with wedding bands and deficient consciences. It was just easy money to her.

Perhaps that is what I mean when I say I love her. She is simple. She sees things simply. I never wonder if she is hiding a secret agenda or manipulating me in ways I won't understand for months to come. All day, I hear about lies, secrets, plots, and distrust. And those are just my days in Fairview. When I walk through my front door, feeling pride for a day of hard work, feeling satisfied that I have provided this house and all these things for my family, Julie is there, tending to our kids, tending to our house, tending to me. She generally ignores me until the kids are fed and their homework is done and we've done the dishes together. But then she sits with me for a glass of wine and she tells me about her simple day and I see that she is happy. The comfort this provides me is indescribable. I, in turn, feel happy in her company. I feel appreciated and cared for. And so I love her.

Before you think I am stuck in the 1950s, my wife spends her days teaching a class at the community college in Cranston, seeing her friends to play tennis or have lunch, and treating herself to a few hours of reading or a pedicure or something else that she finds enjoyable. She is not a servant in our family. She is free to do whatever she wants. In fact, I have encouraged her to pursue a master's degree so we might engage in more sophisticated conversations.

There is one aspect of life that is not simple for my wife. I have mentioned before her fear of bad things happening to our children. How she makes herself feel the worst possible outcomes before she can move past the fear. My wife lost both her parents when she was in her thirties. They'd had her when they were in their midforties, so their deaths were not untimely. One went to heart disease. The other to a stroke. I have considered the possibility of genetic weaknesses, as these would affect my own children and might be cause for some early precautions. But I have concluded that these ailments were more a result of time and the sedentary lifestyle her parents maintained. The loss, however normal from an actuarial standpoint, was difficult for Julie. Her one brother lives in Arizona with his wife. They have no children. Our immediate family is all she has, and her parents' deaths have made her acutely aware that people we love do in fact die. It's amazing how we all lose sight of that. Maybe life would be unbearable if we did not.

I knew right away from the tone of her voice that she was worried. It was breathy and of a higher pitch than usual. She was trying, but failing, to hide her panic.

Hi, sweetheart. Hope your day is going well. Just wanted to know if you'd heard the news about the arrest. I'm sure you have, it's been all over the TV. Probably on the radio as well. Anyway … apparently they now want to speak to all the kids again, you know, the ones who were at the party that night. I'm sure they just want to see if any of them can confirm that the man they arrested was the same one parked out on Juniper. No big deal, right? Call me, though. Laura Lyman said they might hire a lawyer to go in with Steven. Mark Brandino is his name. Maybe we should think about that for Jason? Anyway … call me, okay, sweetie? I love you. Drive safely. Give me a call. Okay … bye-bye.

Her words were like a cold shower. I had not thought much about Jason being at the party that night. There were over a hundred kids there, nearly half the school, including most of his varsity swim team.

Jason is a swimmer. He's an excellent swimmer, actually. There's been talk of an early college offer from Michigan, maybe even Penn. He's going to need the swimming, being a B+ student. He works hard, so this really is his limit academically. I knew it might be an issue when I married Julie. I would put her IQ at around 100 to 110. I have found a negative correlation between exceptional IQ levels and emotional stability. The same is true with nurturing instincts. There seemed no point in having brilliant children if their mother couldn't give them the proper amount of affection. And, indeed, my children are well adjusted, attractive, popular, athletic, and highly competent intellectually. I believe this will give them a kind of happiness that always evaded me.

Jason is a wonderful young man. You can believe me or not believe me. It is the objective truth. If I told you he was the greatest seventeen-year-old kid on the planet, then you could call my objectivity into question. And you would be right. I do not believe he is the greatest seventeen-year-old kid on the planet. I just feel like he is, and like everything he does and says (almost—he is a teenager, after all), is precious, and I find myself soaking it in so I have a full reserve of it when he goes off to college in a year, as my daughter did two years before. That is the parent in me. The objective person in me sees that he is a wonderful young man.

He is kind to others. He sits with us at dinner and talks about the world with compassion and understanding. We discuss everything from the Middle East and terrorism to the economy. Sometimes I smile at the conclusions he's come to because he is so young and has so much to learn. But at least he cares enough to think and draw conclusions. He gets up every morning with a smile on his face, cracking jokes at breakfast, humming some new song he's downloaded. He goes to school, goes to swim practice, comes home for dinner and then to study and sleep, only to start all over again. Yes, he is sometimes glued to his phone on the social media or video games, but this does not alarm me the way it does some people. This is their world, and they might as well become acclimated to it. It will not serve them well to treat their technology like a vice and limit their exposure. They will end up without the skill set that is already becoming necessary for the workplace and social environment of their generation.

I know I belabor this analogy, but I have come to see these teenage years as a construction project. I tell my young patients, and my own children, that this is not their life. Not yet. What they are doing now is building a house. It is a house they will have to live in for the rest of their lives, so they'd better get it right. They will be able to remodel, redecorate, and repair. But they can never rebuild. Everything they put into this house, every emotional scar from a bad relationship, every sexual perversion they give in to, every opportunity they secure for themselves, every drug they allow to interrupt the maturing of their growing brains, will be forever in the foundation of that house. The neuroscientists keep moving their conclusion, but the human brain winds down its developing around age twenty-five. What happens between puberty and the midtwenties in the brain, while it is finishing its development—its hardwiring—involves increased risk taking and peer influence. The reward center is trying to sort out what behaviors lead to rewards so it can lay down some wires, some bricks. Those bricks become part of the foundation, and they are there to stay. If those bricks tell you to like alcohol or cocaine or deviant sex acts, you will be fighting those cravings for the rest of your life. And of course, a child who blows off her grades and winds up at a subpar college will have to move to the back of the line when it comes to finding a job. It all matters.