Harold Edison stared thoughtfully at his client and considered the question with which she had opened the session.
“What would you do if you knew your child was a murderer?” she had asked, quite conversationally, but it was not a frivolous or rhetorical query to which he need only wait on her answer. He felt she was expecting him to reply.
Polly had not acquired any information when she took the phone call and made the appointment. Sometimes she would provide him with a whole scenario and at times he joked with his wife that she could successfully carry on his practice over the phone. She maintained that when people wanted to talk, and had made that first move to come and see a therapist, the flow of words was easily started. A dam breaking. Asking how Harold had been heard of often brought about the reason for the visit. Most of his clients came by word of mouth, some from doctor referrals, a few from police contact.
Ellen Dundee had made a vague mention of having heard of him from someone and that was all. And Polly was not one to pry.
Ellen was in her mid-twenties, plain but not unattractive, fair hair of a thickness that, tucked behind them, made her ears stand out. The question had been posed as soon as they were seated in the wing chairs in the front windows, before Harold had a chance to ask if she would like tea. It was made and waiting in a thermos tea pot in the kitchen, on a tray, with cups. He had chosen the more formal window seating this being her first time consulting him. The living room area was for those he knew who wanted a more personal setting. His small cottage/office at the foot of the garden was often his world.
With an effort he drew his eyes away from her hands which she was also staring at and stroking , each over each, as if she were easing on fine kid gloves. Harold had witnessed many repetitive movements in his clientele over the years and he delighted in the motions, would try them himself when alone, keep some for his own. One day he would do a book about them. A comic book, Polly had suggested.
What would he do if he knew one of his five daughters had committed a murder. He couldn’t imagine it. Thank god, he thought. And said, not unkindly but with a puzzled honesty, “I haven’t the foggiest.”
She glanced up at him and then away again, remaining silent. Her hands now lay in her lap, palms upward, fingers spread, oddly supplicant. Harold had a notion of striking each digit tip with a mallet to see if a tune of explanation would sound.
“Has someone you know committed a murder?” he asked, mildly, with the awareness that such an unnatural barrier of quietude was masking some major distress.
“My child,” she said. “My six-year-old child.”
Now her eyes seemed to be tracing the pattern of corduroy over the knees, up and down, of Harold’s trousers.
“Who has he killed?”
“It’s a she. Her father. ”
Harold detached and put a part of his awareness across the room where it could sit as a silent observer and think, “Oh man, this is really something.” It helped him to do this, gave him perspective. It let the engaged part of him stay open, listening, non-judgmental.
So he did not immediately ask the perhaps obvious question if she had informed the police and pass off responsibility to the law. He allowed the situation to remain in the room between the two of them.
Instead he said. “How awful.”
Now she did look up at him, make eye contact. “It is,” she said. The two words came out clipped, heavy, full of a history of meaning.
“Tell me about it,” he said. “But could I get us some tea, first. It is already made.”
An indifferent nod loosened hair from behind one ear and it swung forward to cover her left cheek. She raised her hand and rubbed it across her chest, as if warming herself, and then tucked the hair back.
Harold waited until she had completed these actions, thinking they might be an appeal but she still did not speak so he went and brought the tea tray, set it on the table to the side. A psychology professor many years ago had commented that any object a therapist put between self and client, be it desk or table, indicated unresolved issues on the professional’s part. Harold had gotten rid of the coffee table a year or so ago, with great satisfaction.
He poured the tea into the clay cups. She took hers, stared at it for a moment, then set it on the table to her left. Harold upped a notch or two his estimation of her upset. Clients who could ignore polite interaction were usually deeply disturbed.
Ellen was biting her teeth across her lips as if they were fabric, as if she were trying to pleat them. Harold fought the impulse to mimic her action. He was going to have a few interesting mannerisms to pass by Polly when this consultation was over.
“How did she kill him?” Harold asked.
This stopped the lip action. She swallowed. “They had gone for a drive. He – he wanted to get some gas because it was on cheap that weekend, a gas war, you know – and she demanded she go with him. He took her.” She suddenly ducked her head down and hair fell forward like a veil. For a moment she hid behind it and then raised up, rearranged, returned to view. The part was now crooked, Harold noticed.
“I decided to do this and I will go through with it,” she murmured. “Yes, he took her with him in the car. And she got mad because he refused to stop for ice cream and leaned over and yanked the wheel and they had an accident and he was killed.”
The part of Harold that was sitting over on the far windowsill thought, “Wow”. Harold said, “Good God!”
Ellen was staring out the window as if she were suddenly thinking of nothing more important than the line of cedar trees in view. At times clients would tell him something, then immediately act as if nothing untoward had been said. It was a means of coping, he had found. And he had learned to give them the time necessary to accept the disclosure. Usually it took only a few moments. With one man it had taken months, the person returning each week for an appointment, avoiding the issue that had been revealed. Harold had a feeling this would be a quick reckoning.
It was.
Ellen turned her eyes back to him and sighed. It was his turn.
“What did you do?”
She looked puzzled.
“When she told you.”
“She didn’t tell me.”
“She was injured?”
“No, she was wearing a seat belt. Her father was not.”
There was something out of kilter, something pending. Harold felt he was not picking up on his cue. He glanced over at the windowsill where he imagined his other self was perched but that image of himself shrugged and looked confused as well.
“How did you find out?” Harold asked.
Ellen started the glove-smoothing motions again, caught herself doing so, stopped, picked up her cup and steadied her hands. “Since it happened, bits at a time. She – she keeps having nightmares and from some of the things she says before she wakes up, I – I have put together what happened.”
Harold had been sipping his tea. He had a most peculiar feeling in his throat. He suspected it was the beginning of symptoms of a moral dilemma. He poured himself another cup.
“Have you told anyone?” he wanted to know.
“No.” It was emphatic.
Harold felt the self on the windowsill pacing back and forth. The material that served as night time curtains flung forward in a sudden breeze and they both put their eyes on the movement. Delay tactics.
Finally he had to ask. “What do you want from me?” He did not think it was medication; he had a medical degree but he was not licensed to practice as a doctor. He was not a priest or a policeman. In what role of therapist was she going to call upon him. It intrigued him, but for some reason he also felt frightened. Sometimes intuition was frustrating with its seemingly random aspects.
“My daughter has always been difficult. At times I have called her a brat, as have others. Perhaps she is – evil. I don’t like to think so. I suppose I have feelings that I wish it was she who was killed, not her father. I know I have those feelings. And maybe – “ She stopped and her lips formed two hard lines before she again spoke. “Maybe a part of me was hoping you could help me with those feelings. Take them away from me. But, I – I realize now – you can’t. I have to take care of those myself.”
He was about to say something – he wasn’t even sure what; sometimes he just needed to open his mouth and start talking and trust what he said was pertinent. Usually it worked. But she held up one hand, the other hand still holding the cup losing enough grip so that tea spilled onto her lap. He watched her and forestalled speaking. She set the cup down, scraped at the wet with her napkin. “I need to talk. To explain something.”
Harold took a deep, discreet breath in preparation. He knew something was coming. He could feel the tension so strongly it was making his stomach muscles knot.
“Not many people can imagine that a mother can hate her child enough to want to kill her. Well, maybe they can imagine that, but not that she will actually try. I can imagine. I can imagine it all too well. No, please, let me continue.”
Harold had made no motion, no sound. She was finally allowing herself to break her own denials.
“She has medication for headaches. Capsules. They are strong, very strong. I – I fiddled with some capsules and now four of them have three times the dose. I think she suspects that I have done something. I saw her watching me when I gave her a capsule when she had one of the headaches. It must have been something in my expression that alerted her.”
The woman now stared at Harold and Harold stared back. Suddenly he felt calm. His mind had leapt to overrule his gut feeling and was telling him there was no danger now. She would find those capsules and destroy them. She had told him as insurance that she would not kill her child. He would try to gently suggest that she get help for the little girl. He could imagine how horrible it must be for the child living with the knowledge of what she had done, living with the knowledge that her mother somehow knew, that she was in danger. She would not know that she was no longer in danger. He had to put this suggestion across in this session. He doubted he would ever see Ellen Dundee again.
She was speaking again. “She’s wily. I don’t think she takes the capsules when I give them to her, ever since she began to suspect. I think she hides them under her tongue and spits them out. Or throws up later.”
They continued to stare at each other. Harold felt pinned by her.
Finally the therapist on the windowsill spoke but the words came out of Harold in the chair. “I don’t think any of us have to worry about those capsules any more, do we?”
Now she was held by his eyes. And she sighed. “No, we don’t.”
Abruptly she stood up, took neatly folded bills from the pocket of her jacket, dropped them on the table by her cup. His fee. She had time left of her hour but he felt she had gotten what she had come for. Paid for it so there need be no bill. He was right – he would not see her again. Likely her name wasn’t even the one she had given.
She picked up her bag and started for the door. He stood and watched her go and then the therapist on the windowsill shouted for him to ask, “When did this happen?” and, not shouting, he asked it, surprised at the question. She stopped, turned slowly, looked back at him with the most incredible relief on her face and he realized that this, then, was once again a case of everything coming to the fore as the client went out the door. It was not an uncommon occurrence. A whole session would take place and then, as a person was leaving, the kernel of the matter would out. Give them both the clue they had been looking for. The permission to proceed. To work upon whatever issue needed to be worked upon. A starting place for the next session.
Next session? There would be no next session. He could see it in her eyes as she answered his question. “Twenty years ago this month, this very day.” She sounded so tired. And somehow exultant.
He was beginning to get it. The therapist on the windowsill held his breath. The woman on the doorstep reached into her purse, pulled out a small gun, pointed it toward Harold. For the first time in his life he knew the experience of blind terror. If he had died then he would have done so in blackness, protected by that darkness. But she did not shoot him and as she turned the gun on herself and pulled the trigger his vision cleared and he knew. This was not the mother of the daughter who had killed her father, twenty years ago, when she was six years old. This was the daughter.