Chevy Stevens - Always Watching

I didn’t have any more luck with Robbie. Back then, he was living in a rental house with two guys in the village. They worked for the same logging company, building roads. I caught him alone a while later, changing the oil on his truck.

He stopped, lit a cigarette, took a long drag. “What’s going on?”

“I was just out at the ranch talking to Mom.”

“Yeah? What about?” He took off his baseball cap, ran his hands through his sweaty hair and jammed it back down, black tufts winging out by his ears. He was twenty-nine at the time and still handsome, in a tough don’t-mess-with-me way, though he was uncomfortable in his body, pacing restlessly, especially in social situations, like he couldn’t wait to escape. And he never seemed to date, or have a girlfriend, that I knew of anyway.

Since I’d moved to Victoria after high school, we didn’t spend much time together anymore, only seeing each other at family dinners and holidays, where I’d sit, depressed, staring at my father’s and brother’s beer cans on the table, their stony faces as they dug into their mashed potatoes and gravy. Mom, mixing wine with whatever pills she was taking, just picked at her food. If Mom and Dad hadn’t erupted into a fight by that point, she’d disappear to the barn after dinner, and Robbie would head outside for a smoke. I’d follow him, making small talk that hurt my heart as I babbled about my life, trying to find something that would interest him. Once in a while I’d make him laugh, then, mistakenly thinking that meant we were on the same team again, I’d say something about being concerned about Mom and Dad, who was having trouble keeping a job since he’d left the boats. Robbie would angrily butt out his smoke, and say, “They’re fine. Worry about your own life.”

Now I said, “I was asking her about the commune.”

He took another drag before he said, “She doesn’t like to talk about it.”

I didn’t know he’d tried to talk to Mom about the commune and wondered what they’d discussed, if anything.

“I know, but I’ve been seeing a therapist, and I underwent hypnosis, so I can—”

“You’re letting some guy hypnotize you?” He raised an eyebrow, a smirk playing at the corner of his lips.

“It’s called Recovered Memory Therapy. It’s a real thing. He thinks something happened to me when we lived there, and that’s why I have claustrophobia and have to sleep with the light on.”

“You were always freaked out about the dark. When you were little, I had to give you my flashlight to sleep with.” Now I remembered Robbie sneaking into my room when I was crying one night. He’d whispered, What’s wrong? I’d told him there were bad things in the dark.

“But it seems like it got worse when we came back.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know anything about that.”

I said, “Do you ever think about the commune?”

“Not really.” But he took another long drag and looked away.

I said, “Remember Willow?”

His face was blank, but his eyes narrowed, like he was wondering where I was going with my question. “What about her?”

“It was weird how she left. Did she say good-bye to you?”

He shook his head. “As far as I know, she didn’t say anything to anyone.”

“Don’t you think that was strange?”

“No. She probably knew everyone would give her a hard time.”

“Why do you think she left?”

Another shrug. “She was probably sick of the commune, being told what she could and couldn’t do. She was a free-spirited kind of chick.”

“She left her stuff, though….”

“She left one bag.” He sounded annoyed. “She probably forgot it.”

“I guess…. There’s some other stuff that’s freaking me out. Mom told me about some picnic we all went on and how Aaron taught me to swim, but I don’t remember any of it.”

“Shit, there’s tons of stuff I don’t remember from when I was a kid.” He took another long drag. “You gotta stop letting this doctor mess with your head. He’s giving you problems.” He blew his cigarette smoke out in a laugh. “If you weren’t fucked up before, you will be now.”

I went home that day more confused than ever, wondering if Robbie was right—my therapist was trying to make something out of nothing. A theory I started to believe more when he never could unlock my trauma. Instead he taught me some coping techniques for my claustrophobia, and I was eventually able to sleep with the lights off. We ended our sessions, and I moved on with my life.

In my last couple of years of earning my Bachelor of Science, I worked part-time at a vet clinic and fell in love with Paul. We married as soon as I graduated and had Lisa a year after. There were new challenges, raising a family, finishing medical school, commuting, but we were happy for the most part.

In the nineties, Recovered Memory Therapy was discredited, and I grew even more convinced that there hadn’t been any mysterious trauma in my past. But once in a while, when my claustrophobia was triggered, by a small room, someone standing too close, or even a busy shopping mall at Christmas, I’d think back to those sessions with my therapist. Was he right after all? Did something traumatic happen at the commune? I always managed to push the doubts away.

Now I remembered something else my therapist had said, that my psyche was protecting me, and when I was ready, the memories would come back. They might be triggered by a scent, photo, or even a voice or phrase.

If they were coming back now, I wasn’t sure I was ready.

The day Francine was admitted, I came home exhausted, and still confused by the memory that had surfaced that day. I needed to talk it out with someone, so I called Connie, my best friend in Nanaimo, also a psychiatrist. We met at university and have been close ever since. Even when we were both married, we tried to vacation together once a year. Sometimes we only managed to meet up at a conference, but we had fun together, spending as much of the time as possible in our hotel room, eating ourselves silly on junk food and watching bad movies.

Connie had been traveling in New Zealand for a couple of months with her husband and had just arrived back, so we caught up. We’d e-mailed while she was away, but I shared more about my move and new job. Then I explained about Heather, leaving out her personal information, but divulging that it had stirred up some memories of my time at the commune. I’d never shared that part of my life before with Connie, or that it could be the cause of my claustrophobia, so it led to another long conversation. I finished by telling her about my recent flashback of Willow. At the end, I said, “Many of my memories center around her.”

“She obviously meant a lot to you.”

“I was painfully shy then, and she was kind to me. We spent a lot of time in her greenhouse.” Another memory fluttered forward. I was in the greenhouse with Willow and she was explaining how the First Nations cured leather. I asked about her vest, if she had made it herself, and she told me it was a gift from her brother, who died in Vietnam, the only thing she had left of him.

I told Connie about the glimpse. “Strange that I just remember that now.”

“She’d confided in you about something important to her. You must’ve felt special—and probably very abandoned after she left.”

“It was confusing, I do recall that. So was that memory of being at the river with her and the horses. I don’t know why I reacted so badly.”

Her voice softened. “Do you think that Aaron may have done something to you? And that’s why you were so ashamed to talk about it?”