John Irving - Until I Find You

“You can trust me, Heather.”

“You have to go through me to get to him,” she said again. “I have to trust you with him. ”

“I swear to God—you can trust me,” he told her.

“You swear to God ? Are you religious, Jack Burns?”

“No, not really,” Jack admitted.

“Well, he is. You better prepare yourself for that, too,” his sister said.

“Are you religious, Heather?”

“Not so religious that I can ever forgive your mother,” she told him. “Not that religious. But he is.”

After Barbara Steiner’s death, William Burns and his daughter really learned to ski. They went only once a year, for a week or ten days, to one of those sacred-sounding places; they eventually added Davos and Pontresina to the list. Skiing, like music—like everything they did together—became a ritual. (According to Jack’s sister, she and her father became halfway-decent skiers.)

Heather told Jack that she’d started practicing the piano a year after her mother died, when she was six years old. William Burns encouraged his daughter to practice for five hours a day, alone. As a teenager, Heather took up the wooden flute. “The flute is more sociable,” she explained to Jack; that there was a lot of Irish music for the flute led her to do her doctorate in Belfast.

The Irish boyfriend was still in Ireland. Heather held out little hope for the future of any long-distance relationship. But they’d played together in a band in Belfast, and they’d traveled together—a trip to Portugal the previous Easter. (“I like him, in small doses,” was all Heather would say about him.)

As a junior lecturer, she made £22,000 a year. In Belfast, she’d paid £380 a month for a two-bedroom flat; in Edinburgh, she paid £300 for a single room in an apartment she shared with five roommates. However, Heather’s one-year contract had been extended; she would get a raise and be making £23,000 next year. For the time being, Heather liked Edinburgh and her job; if she stayed another five or six years, and if she was successful in getting published, she’d be doing well enough to start a family. But Heather doubted she would stay in Scotland. (All she would tell Jack was that she had “other plans.”)

Her last year in Belfast, she’d played the organ in a church. One of her senior colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, John Kitchen, had been the organist at Old St. Paul’s since 1988, when William Burns’s arthritis had forced him to retire as principal organist. For almost fifteen years, William had continued to play the organ at Old St. Paul’s—officially, he’d been John Kitchen’s assistant. Heather was the backup organist to John Kitchen at Old St. Paul’s now. Kitchen had long been their father’s friend, Heather told Jack. (He was “like an uncle” to her, she said.)

She played Irish music on her wooden flute one night a week at the Central Bar, a pub at the bottom of Leith Walk. “I’ll show you the Central when you’re here,” Heather told him.

“I want to know everything about you,” Jack said.

“You don’t know that yet,” his sister reminded him.

Jack parked the Audi at the curb on Montana Avenue; he was waiting for Elizabeth, Dr. García’s receptionist, to arrive and unlock the office. Elizabeth would be the first to play Jack’s I-have-a-sister message. Jack would give her time to play all the messages on the answering machine before he asked her if he could be Dr. García’s first appointment.

Jack never waited in the waiting room anymore. He waited in his car for his therapy sessions with Dr. García. When it was Jack’s turn, Elizabeth would call him on his cell phone; then Jack would put some money in the parking meter and go inside. His presence in the waiting room made the young mothers—and, occasionally, their friends or nannies—“borderline hysterical,” Dr. García had said.

Jack was listening to an Emmylou Harris CD, his fingers keeping time on the steering wheel to “Tougher than the Rest,” when Elizabeth came into view on the sidewalk. She shook her key ring at him, but Jack couldn’t hear the keys jingle—not over Emmylou.

“I’ll show you tougher than the rest, ” Elizabeth said, letting him into the office. She was a tall, hawk-faced woman in her fifties; her gunmetal gray hair was always in a ponytail. There was something of Mrs. McQuat’s severity in the tensed muscles of her neck.

“I left a message on Dr. García’s machine,” Jack said.

“I heard it. Nice message. I always access the messages from my car,” she explained. “I suppose you want the first appointment.”

“I would appreciate it, Elizabeth.”

He sat in Dr. García’s office, not in the waiting room, while Elizabeth made a pot of coffee. Jack had never been alone in that office; he took the time to look more closely at the family photographs, noting that Dr. García was much younger in the photos than he’d first assumed. If those children were hers, they were grown now—probably with children of their own.

“How old is Dr. García?” he asked Elizabeth, when she brought him a cup of coffee.

“Sixty-one,” Elizabeth said.

Jack was amazed. Dr. García looked much younger. “And the gentleman in the pictures?” he asked Elizabeth. “Is he her husband or her father?”

“He was her husband,” Elizabeth said. “He’s been dead for almost twenty years—he died before I met her.”

Perhaps this explained the older-looking man’s spectral presence in the photographs; he was a spirit who haunted the family, no longer a participant.

“She didn’t remarry?” Jack asked.

“No. She lives with one of her daughters, and her daughter’s family. Dr. García has too many grandchildren to count.”

It turned out that Elizabeth had been Dr. García’s patient before becoming the doctor’s receptionist. Elizabeth had been divorced; she was a former alcoholic who’d lost custody of her only child, a little boy. When she stopped drinking and got a job, the boy—who was then a teenager—chose to come live with her. Elizabeth credited Dr. García with saving her life.

Jack sat alone with his coffee in Dr. García’s office; he felt inconsequential in the company of her family, who were frozen in time. It was instructive to Jack that his therapist had chosen to decorate her office with those photographs of herself and her children that predated her husband’s death, as if she needed to be reminded that self-pity was not allowed. (Feeling sorry for yourself was not part of the healing process, or so Dr. García told her patients.)

Live with it, the photos said. Don’t forget, but forgive the past.

In her daughter’s house, where Dr. García lived as a grandmother—a somewhat stern one, Jack imagined—there were probably newer photographs. (Of her children as grown-ups, of her countless grandchildren—possibly of family pets.) But in her place of business, where she counseled those who felt terminally sorry for themselves, Dr. García had assembled an austere reminder of her earlier joy and abiding sorrow. She’d once told Elizabeth that she’d always known, when she married an older man, that her husband would predecease her. “I just never guessed by how many years!” she’d said, with a laugh.

“ With a laugh? ” Jack asked Elizabeth. “Did Dr. García really laugh when she said that?”

“That’s the trick, isn’t it?” Elizabeth said.

Here was another loose arrangement that would never have been tolerated in Vienna or New York, where Elizabeth’s candor to Jack would have been considered unprofessional—where, Jack suspected, Dr. García’s insistence on chronological order as therapy probably would have been considered “unprofessional,” too. But it was working, wasn’t it?