Line of Fire (10 page)

16

T
he sudden interjection of the sexual into the dialogue of psychotherapy is one of the unexpected forces that can completely change the energy in the room. When the sexual interjection comes from the point of view, and in the distant voice, of a fourteen-year-old girl witnessing an erection for the first time in her life, the change can feel profound.

I prepared myself to be buffeted, though it didn’t happen the way I expected.

Amanda said, “As his dick got smaller, his pain got worse. He couldn’t hold his legs still. He started shifting around, trying to get comfortable. Couldn’t. He folded his pillow. He did it again. Rolled on one side. Then the other.

“The erection thing was distracting me, of course. I kept sneaking looks at it until it was gone. It felt like it was all in slow motion. Later, I knew more about teenage boys and erections, but that was my first and it felt like the world had slowed to a crawl.”

Amanda’s comfort discussing her brother’s erection was remarkable. I tried to make sense of it. I failed.

“Everything that night felt new to me. Powerful. Amazing. Fascinating.”

Not erotic? Or stimulating? Frightening?
I kept the questions to myself.

“Then I thought,
Oh my God!
Despite my ignorance—oh, I was ignorant—I saw the connection. I knew what he’d been doing while I was out of the room. He’d been masturbating as a way to distract himself.”

She wrinkled her nose. “It made perfect sense. I’d done it, too. Not because of pain, physical pain, but I’d masturbated when I wanted to be, or needed to be . . . someplace else. Boredom, being annoyed with my friends or my parents. Whatever. I had done it. I knew why he was doing it.”

She said, “I asked him if he wanted me to leave. If he wanted some time by himself. I told him it was okay if he did, that I understood.

“We weren’t a family open about much. Certainly not about sex. I couldn’t remember a single conversation I’d had with my mom about masturbating, or about boys, or erections. That I was even hinting about it to my brother must have . . .” A fresh tear formed in Amanda’s right eye. “He told me that he knew he could trust me.”

She wiped the tear and closed both eyes. “That,” Amanda said, “was a gift. Right? When he said that he could trust me. Big gift.”

She pulled back that one side of her lip and bit down gently before she spoke again. The act left her face pleasantly vulnerable, and completely disaffected. “But he was still embarrassed. He pretended he didn’t know what I was talking about. I almost said, ‘Uh, your boner,’ but I didn’t. He made a joke about something. I didn’t leave.

“We tried to have a regular night. We watched
ER.
We had this contest where we’d try to find all the medical things they got wrong in the show. I read to him. He listened to music. He was all Aerosmith and Pearl Jam. I hated Steven Tyler, and Pearl Jam made my eyeballs ache. It was just another bad night for us.”

I was cognizant that Amanda’s narrative had a momentum that hadn’t crested whatever incline it was ascending. I couldn’t see over that ridge, so I chose silence.

“Around eleven is when he would try to sleep. That was a mom-rule. She wanted him asleep when she got back. She didn’t do much that was selfish, but that was a selfish rule. She was so exhausted after work that she wanted to come back to some calm. I turned off the lights, like I was supposed to. That night he was too miserable to sleep. He was
writhing.
His stomach hurt, his back hurt. When I asked him where the pain was he just waved his hand and his arm over the middle of his body.”

Amanda leaned forward a few inches. She interlaced the fingers of her hands, with her palms toward me. She closed her eyes.

I felt as though I were standing right behind her as she approached that crest. She was able to look beyond the top of the ridge, but from where I was standing behind her, in her shadow, I still could not see what she saw.

“I couldn’t take it any longer. Watching his misery. Listening to his misery. Smelling—yes, I could actually smell his pain; don’t ask me how, I just could. For the first time, I knew—I was naïve, but I wasn’t stupid—I knew I could help.”

She unlaced her fingers. She opened her eyes. She dropped her shoulders.

“I wasn’t a bad girl. I knew the rules. All of them. Mom’s rules. God’s rules.” She laughed. “I even knew Ronald’s rules. I knew the big unspoken rules. I knew what I was thinking was something I wasn’t supposed to be thinking. I knew it was something . . . I was supposed to think was unthinkable.” Her voice had taken on an unmistakable Texas twang that I hadn’t heard before. “And not just a little wrong. No, sir.

“Wrong wrong. Wrong.

“But it didn’t feel wrong.”

The Texas melody receded from her voice as quickly as it had materialized. “That night? In the dark? With his pain? He cries out. I swear the sound is like a squeal in a catfight. I feel it vibrate like my flesh is the skin of a drum.”

I noted the abrupt change in tense, from past to present. I glanced at the clock. I hoped the remaining minutes would permit us some closure.

“I take a deep breath and I say a prayer that if God is having trouble with what I am considering, He needs to put down whatever else He is doing, and He needs to give me a sign. Something clear. If the nurse walks in, that’s God being God.

“But she does not walk in. God is not giving me the don’t-do-it sign.

“I give Him one more try. I whisper, ‘God, last chance,’ as I stand up.

“My brother hears that. He says, ‘What?’

“I say, ‘Just praying.’ I sit beside him on his bed, and then without hesitating for even one single second I reach below the sheet and I put my hand on his dick. I begin to move my fingers. I go right at it. I don’t let myself think. I just go.”

Amanda grew quiet. She seemed to regroup. When she spoke again the present tense was gone. “It was a . . . gonzo moment. Touching a boy was all
so
different than I’d imagined. I almost stopped because of my surprise at how it felt. But I didn’t stop. I just caressed his dick, or I did my fourteen-year-old clueless version of caressing his dick. I’m sure I was terrible at it.” She shrugged. “There, in the dark, in Ronald McDonald House, I was giving my big brother a handjob. I mean,” she said, “how . . . crazy . . . was that?”

Amanda continued to look past me. Was she afraid of what she would see in my face? Or was she disinterested? Was it possible that her life between that day in Houston and that day in my office had inured her to the odd majesty of her story?

“He was as overwhelmed as I was, I’m sure.” She widened her eyes and laughed. The laugh was just a little trill. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I’d never touched a penis and I don’t know what I’d expected to happen, but I hadn’t expected it to go from soft to hard as fast as it did. I don’t know why, but I expected the process would take a while. Like dough rising. But it was more like biscuits popping out of a can. Like that.”

Amanda stopped then, and she locked onto my eyes. “No judgment? Really?”

I was holding my facial muscles into a configuration that I hoped would appear neutral. Accepting. I had a lot of experience with that particular expression and I had some confidence that I could pull it off. The truth was that I had little to disguise. Judgment about Amanda’s behavior wasn’t on the list of things I was feeling.

“Well, he stopped me. Not right away, but almost right away. Five seconds? Ten. He grabbed my hand through the sheet and he held it there. He didn’t pull it away, though. He held it right where it was, wrapped around his dick. He said—I can still hear him—‘You do not have to—’

“I put my other hand on top of his hand. I was holding his hand, he was holding my hand, and below the sheet my other hand was holding on to his prick, which was still getting hard. I told him to shut up. It’s something I never said to him, so that got his attention almost as much as what I was doing. I told him I knew I didn’t have to do it. I was using the voice I would use when we were arguing about something and I would be telling him I didn’t care if he was older, he couldn’t tell me what to do. It was a funny moment, looking back.

“My girlfriends in Austin were doing stuff for boys already. Handjobs. Some of them were giving them to boys they didn’t even like, just to do it. We talked like handjobs weren’t that big a deal. Girls only a little bit older than us were doing a lot more. Oral sex. A couple girls I knew were screwing older boys.”

Amanda curled her lips, top and bottom, inward for a moment. She held them there, pressed together while she searched for something. She wetted her lips with the tip of her tongue before she resumed speaking. “I knew I was touching my brother sexually. But I wasn’t doing it . . . to touch him sexually. I was doing it to help him deal. It is so hard to explain, even now. This isn’t a story I have experience telling, but I can imagine it must sound pretty crazy.

“In the rule book of life—the rules of my family and my church and my school and my town and even of freaking nature—what I was doing was wrong. I knew it was somebody’s definition of incest. I knew that other people”—she spoke “other people” in a breathless, dismissive rush as though the couplet was a profanity she found as offensive as any in the language—“would be appalled, my motive be damned.

“And I knew that if we were caught my brother would be blamed, even though it was me starting it, me doing it. But after living on my own with my dad in Austin for so long I was becoming the girl who was good at not getting caught. I expected to get away with it. I considered it a challenge. That was the girl I’d become.”

At that moment I began to consider the possibility that Amanda’s story was heading in the direction of a conclusion that included the part about her not getting away with it. I wondered what form the apprehension would take. What the consequences she suffered would look like. What fallout, perhaps still radioactive to that day, she would be putting on display there in my office so that we could, together, find a way to accelerate the half-life of the decay.

“And if I didn’t get caught? If I just kept helping him until the end? That would be great. The end was coming. I knew that. The end would be the end of his life.”

She lowered her head for a few seconds. “Later I thought about him being sexually dependent on me, on his little sister. That wouldn’t be good, right? But who else was going to get him off in Ronald McDonald’s freaking house in freaking Houston, Texas? So what if he gets hooked on his sister giving him handjobs?

“He was dependent on narcotics. Why weren’t they worried about that? Because he was dying. That problem would die when he died. I felt the same way about what I was doing. He was dying. His death would end any consequences.”

For him,
I thought.
But what about for you, Amanda? This is about you.

Amanda was telling me this story so that she could explore the cave where she’d stashed the memories. The question in my head about the consequences for her would eventually be addressed. Until then I would trust her to do this exploration her way. I found her willingness to risk that vulnerability remarkable.

Amanda adjusted her weight on the sofa. She folded her hands in the same chaste manner she had the very first time she sat across from me.

She said, “That night? I lifted his hand away from my hand. I stood up. I checked the door. I checked the time to make sure that my mom wasn’t due back. I pulled the big heavy chair all the way around the bed, so I could sit with my back to the door so that I would be screening him if anyone walked in. And then I sat down, and I started touching him again. He was still hard.

“After a minute or so his body began to relax. His legs straightened. His shoulders fell back against the bed. His breathing became regular. Different, but regular.

“It changed him. I could see it. I could feel it. I could smell it. The writhing stopped. He became still. Quiet. I wasn’t trying to make him come—he would sometimes, especially at the beginning when I didn’t know what I was doing. The point was to prolong the distraction as long as I could. To allow my caress to become the focus of everything for him. When I had my hand on him he would go to a different place. For him different meant better. I felt like I had the power to lift him up and take him away.

“That night I became my brother’s handjob fairy.” Amanda smiled her one-dimple smile. “Truth is, it was never a big deal for me, some huge burden I carried around. It wasn’t my dark secret. I knew right away that first night, in my heart, that I was helping. That’s all I cared about. I had something special I could do that made a difference. No one else could do it, or would do it. It was me, or it was nobody.

“He slept better. Laughed more. My mom noticed the change. On her days off work, when she was caring for him, when he and I had no real time alone, she would ask me what my magic was with him. She told me once that she wished she could duplicate it.

“‘No magic,’ is what I told her.” Amanda paused before she added, “There were times I thought she knew. She’d look at me a certain way. Open her mouth to say something and then . . . not say a word.”

I gave Amanda time to feel whatever she was feeling. She held my gaze for about half a minute before she became entranced looking out the window. I wondered if she realized she was gazing south, toward Texas. “I never told her what I was doing.” I watched the muscles in Amanda’s jaws tighten before she added, “I can’t tell how you feel about all this. I thought I’d be able to tell.”

“Is that important?” I asked. “How I’m feeling about what you’re telling me?” I was redirecting her to our process. I was curious if she could spot the progression in her words. From wondering if her mother knew to wondering how I felt.

“Of course it is. I don’t know you, so I can’t trust—is that the right word?—how you feel about it. If you’re appalled then I’m not sure that you will be able to help me. So yes, it’s important. God. Yes.”

“You’re concerned that I might be appalled?”

“No,” she said. “Not really. I don’t want any judgment from you to get in the way.”