J. Robb - Divided in Death

“Look, Dr. Mira, it’s your job to dig under, and to use whatever tools it takes. I appreciate the help you’ve given me, the personal help as well as on the job. Let’s let it go at that.”

“I certainly won’t. Do you think I’ve been dishonest with you?”

She didn’t have the time, and less of an inclination to get into personal matters. But noting the set expression on Mira’s face, Eve calculated it was best to approach this as she had the treatment for her injuries: Strip down and get it over with.

“I think you… Okay, it’s a method, right, for the therapist to find or create a mutual ground with a patient? A kind of connection.”

“It can be, yes. And I did this with you by…”

“You told me, a long while back, you told me you’d been raped by your stepfather.”

“Yes. I gave you that personal information because you didn’t believe I could understand what you’d been through as a child. How you felt remembering being raped by your father.”

“It opened me up, and that was your job. Mission accomplished.”

Obviously baffled, Mira lifted her hands. “Eve?”

“Earlier this summer, you sat on the patio of the house, drinking wine, relaxing. Just a nice little moment. It was after I told you Mavis was pregnant. And you told me about your parents. Your mother, your father, how they had this nice, long-term marriage, how you had all these pretty memories.”

“Ah.” Mira let out a little laugh, and sat again. “And this has been troubling you ever since? Yet you said nothing.”

“I couldn’t quite figure out how to call you a liar… and what would be the point? You were just doing your job.”

“It wasn’t just the job, and I didn’t lie. Either time. But I certainly see why you’d believe I did and how it would make you feel. I’d like you to listen to me. Please.”

Eve fought the urge to check the time on her wrist unit. “All right.”

“When I was a girl, my parents’ marriage disintegrated. I don’t know why, except that there was some elemental problem, something they couldn’t, or wouldn’t resolve. They pulled away from each other, ripped the fabric of their relationship. They divorced.”

“You said-”

“Yes, I know. It was a difficult time for me. I was angry and hurt, confused. And like most children, self-absorbed. So, of course, I believed I was at fault. Believing that, I was only more angry, with both of them. My mother was, is, a very vital, attractive woman. She was financially well-off, had an important career. And she was miserably unhappy. Her way of coping was to surround herself with people, to keep busy. Mothers and daughters sometimes fall into a pattern of bickering, especially when they’re a great deal alike. We were, and we did. During this difficult and hostile time, she met a man.” Mira’s voice changed, subtly, went just a bit tight at the edges. “Charming, personable, attentive, handsome. He swept her off her feet. Flowers, gifts, time. She married him impulsively, less than four months after she and my father divorced.”

She rose, went to the coffeepot. “I shouldn’t have a second cup of this. I’ll be buzzing around driving Dennis to distraction half the night. But…”

“You don’t have to tell me this. I get the picture. I’m sorry.”

“No, I’ll finish it. Though I’ll shorten a long story for both our sakes.” She set the coffeepot down again, and spent a moment just tracing her fingers over the purple pansies that decorated it.

“The first time he touched me, I was shocked. Outraged. He warned me that she’d never believe me, that she’d send me away. I’d been in a little bit of trouble. Acting out, you might say.” She smiled, sat again. “Won’t go into that. But my mother and I were at odds, very much at odds. He was convincing, and frightened me. I was young, and felt powerless. You understand.”

“Yeah.”

“She traveled quite a bit. I think-well, it came out later, that she’d realized she’d made a mistake, marrying him. But she’d already had one marriage fail, and she wasn’t going to give up so quickly. She focused on her career for a time, and he had many opportunities to molest me. He used drugs to keep me… quiet. It went on for a very long time. I told no one. In my mind, my father had deserted me, my mother loved this man more than she loved me. And neither of them cared if I lived or died. I attempted suicide.”

“It’s hard,” Eve managed, “really hard to feel like you’re alone in all that.”

“You were alone. But yes, it’s equally hard to feel alone, and helpless, and guilty. Fortunately, I bungled the suicide. My parents, both of them, were in my hospital room, at their wits’ end. It came spewing out of me, all of it. The rage, the fear, the hate. It all came out, two and a half years of rape and abuse.”

“How’d they handle it?” Eve asked when Mira fell into silence.

“In a most unexpected way. They believed me. He was arrested. Imagine my surprise,” she murmured. “That it could be stopped, just by speaking of it. That saying it out loud could make it stop.”

“That’s why you became a doctor. So you could make it stop for other people.”

“Yes. I didn’t think of it then. I was still angry, still hurt, but yes. I had therapy-individual, group, family. And sometime during that healing period, my parents found each other again. They mended what was ripped. We don’t often talk of that time. I don’t often think of it. When I think of my parents, I think of them as they were before things began to unravel, and as they’ve been since they repaired the damage. I don’t think of the bitter years.”

“You forgave them.”

“Yes, and myself. They forgave each other, and me. We were stronger for it,” Mira added. “And I think I was drawn to Dennis because of his bottomless well of kindness, and decency. I’d learned the value of those things because I’d seen their opposite.”

“How do you find the way back? How do you find the way when a marriage crumbles under you, and you turn away from each other? When it’s bad, so bad you can’t talk about it, or think about it?”

Mira reached out, laid her hands over Eve’s. “You can’t tell me what’s hurting you, and Roarke?”

“I can’t.”

“Then I’ll tell you the simple and most complex answer is love. It’s where you start, and where, if you work hard enough, want hard enough, you end.”

She didn’t want to go home. It was, Eve knew, evasion at its worst, but she didn’t want to go home to a houseful of people. She didn’t want to go home to Roarke.

The answer couldn’t be love-simple or complex-she didn’t see how that could be it. She couldn’t find her way through this thing that was strangling her marriage. And if she loved the man any more than she did, she’d burn up from it.

She didn’t see how the answer could be evasion either, though it helped at the moment. Walking in the city on a balmy evening, the familiar ground, the familiar sounds of irritable traffic, the smell of overdone soy dogs, the occasional whoosh through the vents of a train zooming by underground.

Clutches of people, ignoring each other-ignoring her-as they went about their own business and thought their own thoughts.

So she walked, and it occurred to her she never did this anymore. Never simply walked around the city when she didn’t have a specific destination, a specific purpose. She’d never been the meandering sort. And she sure as hell wasn’t interested in browsing from window to window to study whatever was being sold.

She could’ve rousted a couple of the sidewalk grifters hawking knockoff wrist units, PPCs, fake python handbags-all the rage this season-but she didn’t feel quite mean enough to bother.