Robert Lennon - Familiar

“I don’t—” she says and then stops.

“It feels like sabotage. I am not saying that it is. I do not know your motivations. But it feels to me like you are trying to sabotage us. For some unseen purpose.”

“I’m not.”

“I don’t think I believe you.”

Eventually they arrive at a renovated farmhouse on a lonely stretch of road between villages. The driveway leads to a barn in back that has been fitted with sliding glass doors and a discreet wooden sign that reads AMOS FINLEY, MFT. Derek slides open the door and steps in, and Elisa follows.

They are in a bright carpeted room with wood paneling and an unmanned reception desk. From behind a green-painted door come plaintive voices. A clock reads 4:56. They are not late.

After a moment the door opens and a young man and woman walk out, the woman leading, red-faced, the man trailing behind with his hands in the pockets of his jeans. They pass by Elisa and Derek without a glance. A small bearded man emerges now; he is thin and long-faced, about fifty, dressed in tan pants and a big floppy cotton sweater. Elisa has never seen him before. He says, “Derek, Lisa. Welcome.”

They follow him through the door. The room is capacious, but comfortable. Wide windows look out onto a meadow. Rag rugs lie on a polished wide-plank floor. The man sits on a small sofa, tucking one shoeless foot under the opposite knee. Derek sits in an upholstered chair half-covered by a blanket, and Elisa takes a seat beside him, in a similar chair.

“How are you this week?” the man asks them.

Derek looks at her, and the man follows suit.

“Fine,” she says.

From Derek, a quiet exhalation.

The man gazes at him, then at Elisa. He says, “Lisa?”

“I forgot about our session today. I thought it was Monday.”

“She was on a trip,” Derek offers. “Over the weekend. So she missed work yesterday.”

The man waits, expectant. Derek doesn’t speak. Elisa is developing a headache.

“Is one of you forgetting the second rule?”

The man, the therapist, is almost smiling. He is filled with life — this conflict seems to delight him.

“Elisa,” he says, “perhaps you’d like to remind us of the second rule.”

At least, a question she knows the answer to. But she remains silent.

“Derek?”

“‘Blame yourself first, circumstance second, your partner last.’”

The man turns back to Elisa. “Elisa, Derek seems to think there is a problem this week. Do you want to claim it?”

The headache comes into focus just over and behind her left ear. She tips her head back. A crack seems to run diagonally across the skylight, then disappears. A twig, perhaps, blown by the wind.

Elisa could panic, if she wanted to give herself over to it. She hoped to be heading home around now — at least there she has already had a few small successes. She has made coffee, she has found her favorite nightgown.

But what is happening now seems impossible to navigate; it makes no sense. Of course they have been in therapy before, separately and apart. But that was about the boys. And it wasn’t with this man, this strange, almost jolly creature. She is inclined to think of him as sinister, the instrument of her impending downfall. But there is a part of her that likes him, liked him immediately upon seeing him. He feels to her like the closest thing to an ally she has in this room, maybe in this life, at least so far.

She’ll take the path of least resistance. To the ceiling, she says, “I broke a rule. A different one.”

“And which did you break?”

“I… refused intimacy.”

“You can refuse intimacy.”

Elisa tips her head forward and looks at the therapist.

“But,” he goes on, “you have to offer something in its place. Did you forget to do so?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps Derek would like to suggest a substitute for intimacy?”

Derek shakes his head. He is clearly annoyed by this avenue of discussion. “She is leaving things out.”

Amos Finley has continued to gaze at Elisa. “You have the floor now, Lisa, do you want to explain?”

She does. She wants to tell him everything. Instead she says, “Last night. I… panicked. I don’t know why. I thought something was wrong with me. That I was sick. So we went to the hospital. But it was nothing.”

Derek is agitated. It’s clear that he would like to leap to his feet, pace in front of the judge’s bench, take her story apart. But he resists.

The therapist stands up, smoothes his pants and sweater. He gazes over their heads, out the window. He sits down on the sofa again, this time with his legs crossed, Indian-style. He says, “Something has changed this week. Let’s get to the bottom of it. Lisa, you went to a conference?”

“Yes.”

“Did something happen there? Something that has caused your behavior to change?”

“No.”

Derek breaks in. “There has to be. You’re different.”

This is true. She can’t speak. She reaches down and rummages in her bag for her aspirin, but for some insane reason there isn’t any there. When she looks up, the therapist is holding out two tablets for her. She takes them. “Water?” she asks, and he stares at her a moment before pointing to a second green door in the corner. It’s a small restroom with a sink and toilet. In the mirror above the sink, she looks red and disheveled. She swallows the aspirin and comes back into the room.

“Thank you, Doctor,” she says.

The man laughs.

Derek rubs his forehead. “Are you mocking me?”

She has not sat down. She stands in the middle of the room and feels sweat blooming under her arms.

“No!”

“She said she had a stroke,” Derek says, gesticulating at the therapist. “She didn’t have a stroke! We went to the hospital, and we came back, and she made me tell the whole story of how we met. Of our entire marriage, the trouble with Silas, everything. She is forgetting, or pretending to forget, everything. She forgot the rules. She forgot about this appointment.”

The therapist is not looking at Derek, but at her, gazing at her with a strange intensity, as though for the first time, as though she’s naked. She is still standing.

“Lisa,” he says quietly. “Have you forgotten these things? Or are you trying to… make things difficult for Derek?”

“I’m not trying to be difficult.”

“Why did you call me Doctor?”

“It was a reflex, I’m sorry.”

Derek says, “She is doing everything differently. She sat at a different place at the table. She wore an old nightshirt.” He seems embarrassed at the last, as if suddenly aware of some deep pettiness once hidden from himself.

“May I sit down?” Elisa says, then takes her place without waiting for permission.

The exchange has changed the mood of the session. The fight has gone out of Derek. The therapist steers the conversation around to other things, he is talking more generally now, about trust in the marriage, restoring and maintaining trust. It sounds like a canned speech, some shtick from a book he wrote. Elisa ought to be paying attention, there is likely plenty to learn here, but her attention drifts to the window, to a cluster of whitetail deer browsing at the edge of the woods, and to the motion of the wildflowers and grasses in the breeze. The sky has clouded over, everything appears warm and lush. She longs powerfully for her real life.

The session is ending. Derek and the therapist are standing up and so Elisa does too. The therapist asks Derek to go out to the car so that he can speak with her alone for a moment.

Derek’s compliance is instantaneous and disconcerting. He turns and walks out the door and is gone. The room is very quiet now. The deer are gone from the meadow. There is a movement to her right and when she turns the therapist is standing there, holding his eyeglasses in his hand.