We Are Water. Wally Lamb

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СКАЧАТЬ you believe me?”

      “I do.”

      “Then are you willing to—”

      “Personally, I’m with you. But professionally? I’ve got to remain neutral on this one, Orion. I’ve got to be Switzerland.”

      “Yeah? Really? Then screw you, Switzerland,” I said. I turned back to Marina. “And screw you, too, if you think you’re the one who’s stuck between a rock and a hard place.”

      “But Orion, the thing is—”

      Rather than listen to their lame excuses, I turned my back on them and stormed off in the direction of my car. Looked over my shoulder and saw them both standing there, staring at me. The problem was, I couldn’t find my goddamned car. Kept walking back and forth from row to row, on the verge of tears and thinking, Shit! On top of everything else, someone’s stolen my fucking car? Eventually, it hit me that the Prius was in the shop being serviced. That I’d driven to work that day in a loaner. A red Saturn. I found it, kicked the bumper, unlocked it. Driving out of the parking lot, I looked over at the two of them, still standing there, talking. Justifying their reasons, no doubt, for not having my back the way I would have had either of theirs, no questions asked.

      The following week, in the midst of my attempts to defend myself at humiliating meetings with the dean, the school’s at-large ethics panel, and lawyers representing the university and the union I belonged to, Seamus McAvoy, a twenty-year-old engineering major with a history of clinical depression, died on my watch. A sweet kid who carried his illness around like a backpack full of rocks, Seamus had been my counselee for four semesters. I’d had to cancel our previous appointment because of one of the aforementioned ethics meetings, but I have a vivid memory of our last appointment.

      So you feel you’re pulling out of the quicksand then? He’d told me more than once that his depression felt like being stuck hopelessly in quicksand.

      Yeah. I think I’m finally getting over Daria. I joined Facebook? And me and this poly-sci major named Kim have been messaging back and forth. She might be potential girlfriend material. His posture wasn’t slumpy for a change. His hygiene and coloring had improved. For forty-five minutes, he sat there pumping his right leg up and down as if, now that he was feeling better, he was waiting for the starter’s pistol to go off so he could run out of my office and reengage in life.

      There was a debriefing, as there is whenever there’s a suicide—a departmental review of Seamus’s case. These meetings are meant to be supportive of both the therapist who’d been treating the victim and the department as a whole. Suicide is hard on all of us, no matter whose patient it is. Several of my colleagues, including some of the ones who’d been shunning me, commiserated. Even Muriel, who was running the meeting, looked right at me when she said how much easier our jobs would be if we psychologists all had crystal balls. She and Dean Javitz had talked to Seamus’s parents, she said, and from the sound of it, they weren’t holding the department or the university responsible. “No inquiry, no malpractice charges, thank goodness,” she said. But absolved or not, I couldn’t forgive myself for having been so goddamned distracted by the Jasmine mess that I had missed the red flag Seamus had waved that morning. When a potentially suicidal patient exhibits rapid improvement—becomes suddenly energized—what it can mean is that he’s finally arrived at a plan that will free him permanently from his unbearable gloom. But I hadn’t probed that possibility. I’d accepted Seamus’s emergence from his emotional “quicksand” at face value. The “what-ifs”: they’ll do a number on you.

      I went to Seamus’s wake. His father stood there, stoop shouldered and dazed. His mother hugged me and thanked me for all the help I’d given her son. “He spoke so favorably about you, Dr. Oh,” she said. “He appreciated how kind you always were to him.” Unable to look her in the eye, I looked, instead, over her shoulder, mumbling that I wished I could have done more. Then I walked out of the funeral home, got in my car, and drove away in tears.

      That evening, I called my own kids to make sure they were okay. Safe. Ariane said she’d had a tough day—that one of her soup kitchen regulars, a meth addict, had come in agitated and gotten so verbally abusive that she’d had to call the police, something she hated to do. Andrew, who’s enrolled in a nursing program at Fort Hood, told me he was “stressed to the max” about an exam he was taking the next day and didn’t have time to talk. Marissa told me she was bummed because she hadn’t gotten the small part she’d auditioned for: a legal secretary on Law & Order: SVU.

      “But everything’s good otherwise? That disappointment aside, you’re okay?” She said she guessed so. Why?

      Ariane was the only one I told about Seamus’s suicide. I’d kept all three of them in the dark about the Jasmine situation. Hadn’t said anything to their mother, either, although Annie and I still talked every couple of weeks or so. I mean, why drag them into it? They all had busy lives, problems of their own. And frankly, I was too ashamed to say anything about Jasmine. She’s twenty-nine, not that much older than the twins. Not stopping her? Not getting the hell out of there? It made me sound so pathetic.

      I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t concentrate. I kept forgetting to eat. In the middle of the night, a week or so after Seamus’s funeral, while I was wandering around from room to room in the four-thousand-square-foot home where I now lived alone, I took on my future. Did I even want to keep my job? Even if I stayed and fought it, beat the charge, it wasn’t like I’d ever be free of her accusation. There’d still be whispered rumors, assumptions of guilt. I’d be walking around that campus wearing the proverbial scarlet letter. And anyway, I was guilty, up to a point. Not guilty of what she accused me of, but guilty nonetheless. I couldn’t stop seeing her withdrawing her hand from between my legs, my semen between her fingers … Whatever was going to happen—whether the university would show me the door or not—my license to practice would still be intact. Maybe I could rent an office someplace and go into private practice. But I was weary. Dogged by self-doubt about my ability to help others fix their lives when my own was in shambles. And when a kid I might have rescued now lay buried at a cemetery up in Litchfield … No, I decided, screw the 80 percent I’d be able to retire on if I stuck it out for four more years. I’d quit. Just fucking quit. Relieved, I got back in bed and began to doze. That night I slept the sleep of the dead.

      My resignation was handled discreetly, classified by Human Resources as an “early retirement,” rather than a resignation. None of us wanted to see it played out in the press, least of all the school, whose enrollment numbers were down in the wake of a run of negative publicity: a sports program scandal under investigation by the NCAA; a Journal Inquirer exposé about the epidemic of alcoholism on campus; a third consecutive downgrade by U.S. News & World Report in its annual ranking of colleges and universities. The agreement I signed in exchange for my willingness to go away quietly left me with a twenty-four-month extension of my health insurance coverage and a severance check that was the equivalent of two years’ salary.

      The Counseling Services secretaries organized a little farewell gathering for me. Coffee, cake, and testimonials from several of my colleagues who had until then maintained their silence with regard to my sexual harassment charge. That’s what was reported back to me, anyway. I boycotted my own get-together. And since I wasn’t there to receive my “good-bye and good luck” card and the engraved pen and pencil set with the university’s logo, these were slipped into my mail slot. I retrieved them the following Sunday morning when I entered the building to pack up my office. Walking down the corridor, listening only to the sound of my own footsteps, I assumed the building was empty. Then Dick Holloway poked his head in the door and nearly gave me a heart attack. “So you caved, huh?” he said. “Well, sayonara.”

      Unmoored from my life as I’d known it, СКАЧАТЬ