When Tom gets home, Jackie is waiting up for him. She’s upset and wants to talk. Tom sits down next to her in the bed, and holds her while she cries into his armpit.
“How could this have happened?” she asks.
“Seth was a very disturbed person,” says Tom.
“I know, I know. But it’s just… Was he? Really? And in our pool? Why in our pool?” she moans.
Tom pulls his arm away and swings his legs off his side of the bed.
Jackie kneels behind him and rubs his back. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry. It’s not your fault.”
Tom recoils. “I know it’s not my fault!” he snaps, and goes to brush his teeth.
Several days pass and Tom is deteriorating. He can’t sleep and on the rare occasions when he does drift off, Amelia is there, whispering something to him that he can’t decipher, coming to him in dreams and nightmares both.
And so, when he can no longer bear it, he knocks on the door of the Victorian. She is wearing a tight skirt, a silk blouse, and high heels-all of them black. Her straw-blond hair is tied up in the style of an earlier decade, and her eye makeup is heavy and dark. Dangling from her ears are two large turquoise-and-silver earrings. The weight of the jewelry stretches her pierced ears, making the holes look like tiny twin urethras.
“Tom?” she asks, without smiling. She is only vaguely surprised, as if she’d known he would come, but hadn’t expected him before noon.
“Hello, Amelia.”
“Come in,” she says, almost as an order, and pushes back the door.
She leads him into the parlor. There’s a Persian rug, a baroque sofa with matching armchairs, a sculpture of Buddha, Flemish-looking paintings, and African pottery. The coffee table appears to be covered in Turkish tiles.
“I see you’ve been doing some traveling,” Tom observes.
“Here and there.” Amelia gestures to one of the chairs. Tom sits, and she perches nervously on the center cushion of the sofa across from him. Couch and armchair, just like the old days.
Tom tries to find his practiced voice of authority-empathetic, but stern. “Amelia,” he begins.
She winces at the sound of her own name. “Marianne, please. I’m going by my middle name these days. I never did like
“All right, then. Marianne,” Tom continues, as if he’s talking to a child who insists on being treated like a grown-up. “I am not going to pretend that I’m not here for a reason.”
“I assumed as much,” she says. She takes out a cigarette.
“You smoke?” asks Tom accusingly.
As an answer, she lights her cigarette. “Look,” she says, “I knew Seth was seeing a therapist, but I didn’t know it was you, okay? I had to read it in the paper.”
It occurs to Tom that now that she’s gotten this out of the way, she expects him to console her with his professional opinion,
So he asks questions. He makes her comfortable and earns her trust as he would with any patient. This doesn’t take long. It seems that the minute he walked in the door her trust for him was renewed, on principle alone. He indicates that Seth told him about the nature of their relationship and invites her to talk about it. She is immediately forthcoming. So forthcoming, in fact, that Tom is taken aback. She tells him how it began, about the first time they had sex, about many times after that. She goes into great detail. She tells him how Seth was a virgin and how she made him into the lover she wanted.
With every detail she gives, Tom swallows his jealousy like a sword, one after another. He doesn’t know quite how to respond; it was her reckless honesty that had attracted him to her in the first place-her titillating descriptions of her sexual encounters, and her eventual shameless acknowledgment of the tension between them.
Completely disarmed, Tom falls back on an old therapist standby. “Did you have reason to believe that Seth wanted to hurt himself?”
“No,” she answers unequivocally. “I’m still in shock. I know he was depressed and was seeing someone, but we talked about it and it seemed within the range of reason for a seventeen-year-old boy.”
“So you were comfortable with Seth being seventeen?”
“Yes, of course. I never asked him to be anything he wasn’t,” she says.
Tom is quiet, watching her. The old therapy trick, only she says nothing further. Unlike his patients, she is not bound to him for a full fifty minutes.
At this point, Amelia stands. She looks at Tom and waits for him to stand as well. “Look, Tom-”
“It’s okay,” he cuts her off. Whatever it is, he doesn’t want to hear it.
“You are just the picture of professionalism. That’s all,” says Amelia.
Tom doesn’t take this as a compliment. “I should go.”
Amelia nods, and sees him to the door.
“I am sorry for your loss,” Tom offers awkwardly.
“And I for yours,” says Amelia.
Tom asks if he can come back sometime, to continue the conversation.
Amelia hesitates. “As a friend maybe. I don’t need a therapist. Anymore.” She smiles gamely. He’s seen this look before. Tom wants to say something, but can’t. She closes the door.
Tom stands on her porch and surveys the neighborhood. Children are coming to and from the playground, running ahead of their mothers and babysitters who call out for them to wait when they near a corner.
Reluctantly, he starts down the steps. A young man is mowing the lawn next door. He stops and waves to Tom, but Tom pretends not to see.
Rather than walking by the playground, Tom turns right and takes a shortcut down what the kids of Narbrook Circle call the “secret path” but what is really a short, wood-chipped foot trail between yards that isn’t a secret at all.
From across the stream, Tom can see a black town car parked in front of his house. He hesitates, and contemplates turning around. But where would he go?
Tom crosses the little cement footbridge and starts up the hill to his house. As he draws near, he sees Jackie standing on the front porch. She has the same terrified look on her face she’s worn since she found Seth. All she wants to do is close the pool; drain it, cover it, and forget it all ever happened. The detective on the case won’t let her; he says that for now, it’s still a crime scene. For as long as she looks out the windows of their house and sees the clear blue water collecting leaves and pine needles, as long as the caution tape stays strung around the fence line, she will continue to turn that terrified look on Tom. What pains him most about the look isn’t that she’s afraid he’s capable of doing something awful, she’s afraid he’s incapable of doing something good.
“Hello, sweetheart,” he says when she’s within earshot.
“Did you enjoy your walk?” she asks, softening a little.
“Yes, although I probably should’ve driven out to Wissahickon and gotten some real exercise.”
“Well, anyway,” says Jackie, “it’s good you didn’t. Detective Hendricks is here to see you. He’s waiting inside.”
Jackie sets them up in the living room, each with a cup of coffee.
“Dr. Middleton,” begins the detective. He pauses, presumably waiting for Tom to say,
“No,” answers Tom, “you have his file.”
“Yes, it’s true, we do have his file. It’s been very helpful, thank you. But what I’m wondering, Dr. Middleton,” the detective leans forward on the floral couch cushions, “is if there is any information that didn’t make it into Seth’s file.”
Tom repeats the spiel he gave at the station. “I don’t take notes while I talk to patients. It unnerves them. After they leave, I write down all the important aspects of our conversation. It is not a transcript. They’re meeting minutes, more like. We even recorded our moves when we played chess, sometimes. You can have those too, if you want.”
