Diane Chamberlain - Secrets She Left Behind

I raced down our short street and turned onto the main road, glad now that the summer traffic was gone and I could go fast. I’d driven a half mile before I slowed down. Another half mile before my heart did the same.

I wasn’t free at all. Not even a little bit.

I was driving into Hampstead when I noticed the white van behind me. I couldn’t believe it! I should have been more careful. No way was I letting them follow me to the therapist’s office. Maggie Lockwood was seen walking into psychologist Marion Jakes’s office for her court-mandated counseling. I zigzagged all over Hamp-stead until I was a hundred percent sure I’d lost the van. I spotted the little parking lot behind the therapist’s building, but I drove past it to a nearby veterinarian’s office, where I hid the Jetta between a van and a pickup. I felt like I was in a movie. A thriller. By the time I walked into the therapist’s office, I was sweating.

The small waiting room was empty. I sat down in one of the eight chairs and picked up an old copy of Us from the coffee table, but I didn’t open it. I was thinking about the Web sites where I could post Sara’s information. Wow, so many missing people on those sites! It was discouraging, and I wondered if everything I was doing was for nothing. The whole situation didn’t make sense. Sara wasn’t the type of woman to just take off. At least, the Sara I knew before the fire wasn’t. But who knew how this year had changed her? It had changed me plenty.

An enormous man walked through the office door, and I figured he was another patient, maybe waiting for a different therapist. I glanced up just long enough to catch his eggplant-shaped body before quickly lowering my eyes to the magazine cover again.

“Miss Lockwood?” he said.

I was confused. Oh, God. I hoped he wasn’t one of the reporters. “Yes,” I said.

“I’m Dr. Jakes.”

“No,” I said. “Dr. Jakes is a—”

“A woman?” He smiled, and his eyes nearly disappeared above his round cheeks. “I’m Marion Jakes.”

Oh, no. I didn’t budge. The only thing that had made the idea of counseling tolerable was imagining a kindly, maternal sort of woman, maybe my mother’s age, as my shrink. This guy was not only obscenely fat, but he was ancient. The small amount of hair he had on his round head was gray. The buttons of his blue shirt strained at their buttonholes, and he wore ridiculous red, white and blue striped glasses.

“Come in,” he said.

What choice did I have? I got up and followed him into a room even smaller than the waiting room. This one had four leather chairs facing each other, and I sat down in the one closest to the door.

Dr. Jakes took up most of the space in the room. “How are you today?” He dropped into one of the big leather chairs. It creaked beneath him.

“Fine,” I said.

He looked like he didn’t believe me. “You’re very pale,” he said.

“I…I’m fine.”

“Well—” he folded his hands across his belly “—I know why you’re here, of course, since this is court-ordered psychotherapy. I know what you were convicted of doing and that you were released Monday after twelve months in prison. What I don’t know is how you feel about being here.”

He waited for me to speak, but I looked past him, out the window. I wanted to be outside again. I wanted to be home.

“Okay.”

“Just okay?”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,” I said.

“Have you ever been in therapy before?”

I shook my head. “Just…you know, the high-school counselor about college, but that’s not therapy, I guess.”

“You had college plans?”

“I was going to go to UNC Wilmington,” I said. “Before…everything happened.”

“Well,” he said, “here’s the way this goes.” He leaned forward and I was afraid he might roll right out of his chair. “We’ll be a team, you and me. Together, we’ll figure out what we should be working on. Set some goals.”

“I don’t really have anything to work on.”

“No?”

I shook my head. “I’m basically a normal person. I just got…sidetracked.”

“I don’t doubt that you’re normal,” he said. “But what you did was not, and it would be good for us to explore why you did what you did so you understand it. So you see the parts of yourself you need to pay attention to in order to prevent something like that from ever happening again.”

“It won’t,” I said.

He smiled, his eyes disappearing again behind his striped glasses. “I’m not a cop,” he said. “You don’t have to give me the answers you think you should be giving. What we talk about in this room stays in this room. The only time I would ever break confidentiality is if I believe you’re going to harm yourself or someone else. I’ll need to let your case manager know that you’ve kept your appointments with me, but not what our sessions are about. All right?”

He had to have some hefty psychological problems himself to be so fat. I couldn’t see how someone like him could help me, but I nodded. I would just nod my way through these sessions.

“What’s it been like for you since Monday?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Being out of prison? Being free?”

“Okay.”

He waited for me to go on. I stared out the window with its view of the parking lot until my eyes watered. Then I looked at my ragged fingernails. He wasn’t going to talk until I did. It was like a standoff. A war, but I had the feeling he could take the silence longer than I could.

“The reporters are everywhere,” I said finally.

“Ah,” he said. “What’s that like for you?”

I shrugged. “I hate it,” I said. “It’s not fair to my family, either. If it was just me…well, that’s bad enough, but I get why they have to be after me. I’m the story. But I want them to leave my brother and mother alone.”

“Tell me about your family.”

“You probably know all about them already. You know about Andy, for sure.”

“I know what everyone else who followed the news about the fire knows, Maggie,” he said. “But even when I listened to the news back then and heard all the details, I couldn’t help but wonder…It’s being in this business, you see.” He smiled. “I couldn’t help but wonder what it was like for you. For the young woman at the center of it all. So, yes. I know about Andy as he was presented by the news media. I want to hear about him—and the rest of your family—from you. ”

I sighed. “Okay,” I said, giving in. “Andy’s very sweet and cute and a perfect brother. He’s…You know about the fetal alcohol syndrome?”

He nodded.

I twisted my watchband around and around on my wrist. I was thinking, I almost killed my baby brother. But I wasn’t going to give this guy that much of a peek inside me. “So,” I said, “Andy’s learning to drive and he’s got a girlfriend. He’s really grown up while I’ve been away. And my mother…she’s nice. She looks older than I remember her looking. She and my uncle Marcus…He was my father’s brother—”

“The fire marshal.”

“Right. He and my mother have gotten together.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“Good.” I nodded. “Really good. He still has his own place. One of the Operation Bumblebee towers.”

“Ah.” He smiled. You couldn’t think about the houses made from the old towers without smiling.

“Yeah.” I almost smiled myself. “But he stays over our house sometimes. I guess he’s been there a lot this last year.”

“And how do you—”

“Feel about it?” I finished the sentence for him. “I told you. Good. Especially with the reporters around.” I thought again about Andy walking to the school bus that morning, maybe trying to make sense of the reporters and their questions. Struggling to figure out how to answer them. Before I knew what was happening, my eyes filled with tears.