No Time For Goodbye

Cynthia came over, kissed me on the cheek, and said, “A coffee run? What’s the occasion?”

“I had a free period,” I said. “Just figured, you know.”

Pamela excused herself to the back of the store, taking her coffee with her.

“Because of this morning,” Cynthia said.

“You were kind of shook up after the phone call. I wanted to see how you were doing.”

“I’m good,” she said, with limited conviction, and took a sip of her coffee. “I’m okay.”

“Pam said she tried to talk you out of doing Deadline.”

“You weren’t all that sold on the idea, either.”

“But you never mentioned her talking against the idea.”

“You know Pam isn’t afraid to offer her opinion on anything. She also thinks you could lose five pounds.”

She’d blown the wind out of my sails. “So that lady, the one who was trying on clothes? She’s a shoplifter?”

“You just can’t tell about people,” Cynthia said, taking another sip.

This was the day when we met with Dr. Naomi Kinzler after work. Cynthia had arranged to drop Grace off at a friend’s house after school, and then we headed over. We’d been seeing Dr. Kinzler once every two weeks for the last four months, after being referred to her by our family physician. He’d been trying, without success, to help Cynthia deal with her anxieties, and felt it would be better for her to talk to someone-for both of us to talk to someone-rather than see her becoming dependent on a prescription.

I’d been skeptical from the beginning whether there was anything a psychiatrist could accomplish, and after coming here for almost ten sessions, I hadn’t become any more convinced. Dr. Kinzler had an office in a medical building in the east end of Bridgeport that had a view of the turnpike when she didn’t have the blinds closed, as she did today. I suppose she had noticed me looking out the window during previous visits, my mind drifting as I counted tractor trailers.

Sometimes Dr. Kinzler met with us together, other times one of us would step out to allow her some one-on- one with the other.

I’d never been to a shrink before. About all I knew came from watching The Sopranos ’ Dr. Melfi help Tony work through his problems. I couldn’t decide whether ours were more or less serious than his. Tony had people disappearing around him all the time, but he was often the one who’d arranged it. He had the advantage of knowing what had happened to these people.

Naomi Kinzler wasn’t exactly Dr. Melfi. She was short and plump with gray hair pulled back and pinned into submission. She was pushing seventy, I guessed, and had been at this kind of thing long enough to figure out how to keep everyone else’s pain from burrowing under her own skin and staying there.

“So, what’s new since our last session?” Dr. Kinzler asked.

I didn’t know whether Cynthia was going to get into the crank call from that morning. At some level, I guess I didn’t want to, didn’t really think it was that big a deal, felt we’d smoothed it over in my visit to the shop, so before Cynthia could say anything, I said, “Things are good. Things have been very good.”

“How’s Grace?”

“Grace is good,” I said. “Walked her to school this morning. We had a nice talk.”

“About what?” Cynthia asked.

“Just a chat. Just talking.”

“Is she still checking the night skies?” Dr. Kinzler asked. “For meteors?”

I waved my hand dismissively. “It’s nothing.”

“You think?” the doctor asked.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “She’s just very interested in the solar system, in space, other planets.”

“But you did buy her the telescope.”

“Sure.”

“Because she’s worried an asteroid will destroy the Earth,” Dr. Kinzler reminded me.

“It’s helped put her fears at ease, plus she uses it to look at the stars and the planets,” I said. “And the neighbors, too, for all I know.” I smiled.

“How about her anxiety level overall? Would you say it’s still somewhat heightened, or is it dissipating?”

“Dissipating,” I said, as Cynthia said, “Still up there.”

Dr. Kinzler’s eyebrows went up a notch. I hated it when they did that.

“I think she’s still anxious,” Cynthia said, glancing at me. “She’s very fragile at times.”

Dr. Kinzler nodded thoughtfully. She was looking at Cynthia when she asked, “Why do you think that is?”

Cynthia wasn’t stupid. She knew where Dr. Kinzler was going. She’d gone down this road before. “You think it’s rubbing off me.”

Dr. Kinzler’s shoulders raised a fraction of an inch. A conservative shrug. “What do you think?”

“I try not to worry in front of her,” Cynthia said. “We try not to talk about things in front of her.”

I guess I made a noise, a snort or a sniff or something, enough to get their attention.

“Yes?” Dr. Kinzler said.

“She knows,” I said. “Grace knows a lot more than she lets on. She’s seen the show.”

“What?” Cynthia said.

“She saw it at a friend’s house.”

“Who?” Cynthia demanded. “I want a name.”

“I don’t know. And I don’t think there’s any point beating it out of Grace.” I glanced at Dr. Kinzler. “That was just a figure of speech.”

Dr. Kinzler nodded.

Cynthia bit her lower lip. “She’s not ready. She doesn’t need to know these things about me. Not now. She needs to be protected.”

“That’s one of the toughest things about being a parent,” Dr. Kinzler said. “Realizing that you can’t protect your children from everything.”

Cynthia let that sink in a moment, then, “There was a phone call.”

She gave Dr. Kinzler the details, offered up a near-verbatim account. Dr. Kinzler asked a few questions that were similar to mine. Did she recognize the voice, had he ever called before, that kind of thing. Then, from Dr. Kinzler:

“The caller said that your family wants to forgive you. What do you think he meant by that?”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “It was just a crank call.”

Dr. Kinzler gave me a look that I took to mean, “Shut up.”

“That’s the part I keep thinking about,” Cynthia said. “What’s he saying they forgive me for? For not finding them? For not doing more to find out what happened to them?”

“You could hardly be expected to,” Dr. Kinzler said. “You were a child. Fourteen is still a child.”

“And then I wonder, do they think it was my fault that it happened in the first place? Was it my fault that they left? What could I have done that would make them leave me in the middle of the night?”

“There’s part of you that still believes that it was somehow your responsibility,” Dr. Kinzler said.

“Look,” I said before Cynthia could respond. “It was a crank call. All sorts of people saw that show. It shouldn’t be a surprise that a few nutcases would come out of the woodwork.”

Dr. Kinzler sighed softly and looked at me. “Terry, maybe this would be a good time for Cynthia and me to speak one-on-one.”

“No, it’s okay,” Cynthia said. “He doesn’t have to go.”

“Terry,” Dr. Kinzler said, trying so hard to be patient that I could tell she was pissed, “of course it may have been a crank call, but what the caller said can trigger feelings in Cynthia just the same, and by understanding her reaction to those feelings we have a better chance of working through this.”

“What is it, exactly, we’re working through?” I asked. I wasn’t trying to be argumentative. I really wanted to know. “I’m not trying to be a jerk here, I guess I’ve just lost sight of the goal for the moment.”

“What we’re attempting to do here is help Cynthia deal with a traumatic incident in her childhood that’s resonating to this day, not just for her own sake, but for the sake of the relationship the two of you share.”

“Our relationship is fine,” I said.

“He doesn’t always believe me,” Cynthia blurted.