“Maybe the husband found out about the affair,” Emily suggested. “Maybe that’s what made him violent.”
“It’s not William,” Zee said again. “He’s not the type.”
Emily looked to Mattei for verification.
“I think Zee’s right,” Mattei said. “But I can’t say for certain that it wasn’t William.”
Zee shot her a look.
“I would have agreed with you until the other day,” Mattei said.
“What happened the other day?”
“There was an incident. We had to escort him from the office.”
“I think we have to cover all bases,” the psychiatrist said.
“What we really need is a formal complaint,” Emily said. “No matter which one it is.”
“You can try,” Zee said. “But I can tell you right now, she’ll never give it to you. She doesn’t want William to know about her affair. And she’s afraid of Adam.”
NOT ONLY DID LILLY REFUSE to file a complaint, but when she was released from the hospital, she decided she wanted to see another therapist. “One closer to home,” William told Zee.
The internist who had initially prescribed the Klonopin set her up with an old-school Freudian analyst who worked out of Salem Hospital. She had agreed to meet with him five days a week and to start analysis.
“You’re kidding me,” Mattei said.
But Zee was clearly upset. “We have to stop them,” Zee said. “She shouldn’t be starting over again. That’s not the right kind of therapy for her. And she won’t tell the new therapist the truth until it’s too late… We have to do something,” Zee said to Mattei.
“There’s nothing you can do,” Mattei said. “She’s not your patient anymore.”
IT HAD BEEN A TOUGH winter for Zee. She’d begun to dream about Lilly, and in her dreams the images of Lilly and Zee’s mother, Maureen, had become confused. They were still separate people, but in the dream she was unable to tell them apart and kept having to ask which one she was talking to.
“This is good,” Mattei said when Zee detailed the dream in her next session.
“Really? How so?” Zee asked.
“Let’s talk about the real reason you became a therapist.”
“It wasn’t the unfulfilled dream of my mother, I can tell you that much.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“Oh, please,” Zee said.
“What was the unfulfilled dream of your mother?”
“We both know what it was.”
“Why don’t you tell me again?” Mattei said.
“The Great Love. It’s what she wanted from my father-and what she never got.”
“So already there’s a similarity to Lilly.”
“And just about every other woman in America,” Zee said.
“True enough. Your mother was onto something when she started writing fairy tales about The Great Love.”
“Something that evidently killed her,” Zee said.
“Which?” Mattei said.
“Was it the fairy tale that killed her? Or The Great Love?”
“Aren’t they pretty much the same thing?”
“You tell me,” Mattei said.
When Zee didn’t take the bait, Mattei asked a different question. “What’s the other dream of the fairy tale?”
“Besides true love?”
“What are both your mother and Lilly looking for?” Mattei asked.
“My mother’s not looking for anything. My mother’s dead.” Zee was growing tired of this line of questioning.
“Bear with me for a moment,” Mattei said.
Zee folded her arms across her chest.
“What did your mother want from you then, and what does Lilly want now?”
“I don’t know,” Zee said.
“Think about it.”
ZEE THOUGHT ABOUT MATTEI’S QUESTION, and she thought about Lilly Braedon many times during the next few months.
It was William who finally contacted Zee. He was desperate. “She’s not doing well,” he sobbed into the phone. “I don’t know what to do.” He told Zee that Lilly had stopped the therapy within the first month. Convinced that the doctor was coming on to her, she had refused to step back into his office. “I don’t know,” William said. “She’s such a beautiful woman. Men can’t help throwing themselves at her. I tend to believe her.” He tried to compose himself before going on. “She won’t even get out of bed.”
Whose bed? Zee wanted to ask. But she didn’t. Instead she agreed to go to the house to meet with Lilly, and with that, Zee crossed another line.
THE HOUSE WAS A MESS. It hadn’t been cleaned for weeks, William told her. Finally, in frustration, he had hired a maid service, three women from Brazil who didn’t speak much English, which he decided was a good thing, because he was afraid of what Lilly might say to them if she started talking. But instead of speaking even a word of hello, Lilly had taken to locking herself in her bedroom and crying the whole time they tried to clean-huge, wrenching sobs that finally upset the maids so much that they quit. “What was she crying about?” he’d asked the women, but they didn’t know. Gesturing, they managed to communicate to him that Lilly had been talking on the phone with someone.
William thought that maybe the phone calls had been to Zee.
Zee didn’t tell him what she already knew, that the phone calls were to Adam.
“You didn’t break up with Adam, did you?” Zee asked Lilly at her first return session.
“I couldn’t,” Lilly said. Then she started to cry.
LILLY BECAME ZEE’S PATIENT ONCE more. And once again her meds were adjusted. Soon she was driving herself into Boston on a regular basis. She seemed better. Spring was turning to summer again, and Lilly’s spirits were lifting.
They didn’t talk about Adam anymore. Lilly wouldn’t, and there were clearly boundary issues that Zee had violated; she didn’t want to risk making things worse. For now it was important not to drive Lilly away again. It was enough that she was here and that she seemed to be improving. It was Lilly who finally brought up Adam.
It was about six months later, in one of her sessions. “We think we’re free,” she said, “but we’re not. We’re the product of every association we’ve ever made, and sometimes of ones we inherited from people we never even knew.”
“That’s very profound,” Zee said.
“So you agree?”
“It doesn’t matter whether I agree or disagree. What matters is what you think.”
“I just told you what I think.”
“So you did,” Zee said.
Lilly made a face.
“What?” Zee said.
“Did you ever want to get out of something but you didn’t know how?”
“What is it you want to get out of?”
“Just about everything right about now,” Lilly said.
