(I)
Patricia, of course,
had forgotten. It had been five years, hadn’t it?
Five years since her
return to Agan’s Point.
The Cadillac cruised
silently, comfortingly, but as the city had faded behind her, and
the interstate highways had eventually given over to long, winding,
and very rural county roads, the words began to haunt
her:
Oh, my God, girl. How could you let something like that
happen?
They were her
father’s words, less than a week after her sixteenth birthday. . .
.
The look in his eye,
and the words he’d chosen. Like I let
it happen, she thought now in an
overwhelming mental darkness. Like I wanted it
to happen . . .
She’d never been more
hurt in her life.
She’d felt good,
hadn’t she? Her wonderful, if selfish, love session with Byron last
night might have had something to do with it, but when she pulled
away from the condo, knowing full well where she was going, she
felt good, and that was something she didn’t expect. Watching the
sun bloom as she drove, opening the Cadillac up on Interstate 95,
and moving forward . . . It seemed to clear her head of all the
city’s stresses and the endless intricacies of work. Indeed,
Patricia felt clean, new; she felt purged. Until . . .
Her mood began to
wilt in increments. She knew what she was doing. Putting it off. But I can’t put it off. All I can do is dawdle, procrastinate.
She wound up driving through the historic district in Richmond, and
blowing an hour looking for a place to have breakfast. Same thing
through Norfolk, for lunch. She was turning the three-hour drive
into an all-day journey, as if getting to Agan′s Point later would
ease some of her distress. But she knew it wouldn’t. I’m torturing myself, she thought.
Hours later familiar
road signs began to pop up, signals that she wasn′t so much driving
away from her exhausting lifestyle in Washington, but instead
driving to something much more stressful. The far less traveled
Route 10 seemed to throw the signs in her face as she raced past,
towns with names like Benn’s Church, Rescue, and Chuckatuck. More
and more of her frame of mind began to melt. Then a sign flashed
by:
DISMAL SWAMP—10
MILES.
And more signs, with
stranger names:
LUNTVILLE—6
MILES.
CRICK CITY—11
MILES.
MOYOCK—30
MILES.
Oh, God, Patricia thought.
She was beginning to
feel sick, and with the sickness came a resurfacing. She hadn’t
thought of the psychologist in a long time, a keen, incisive bald
man named Dr. Sallee. And she’d seen him only once, just after her
return from her last trip to Agan’s Point five years ago, when her
despair seemed insurmountable.
“We bury traumas,”
he’d told her. “In a variety of different ways, but the effect
remains the same. Some people deal with their traumas by
confronting them immediately, and then forgetting about them, while
others deal best by forgetting about them first and then never
confronting them because there’s no apparent need. That’s what
you’re doing, Patricia, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
There’s no apparent need because you relocated yourself from the
premises of the trauma.”
The premises of the trauma. She thought over the
odd choice of words. But he’d been right. I
moved away as fast as I could. . . .
“What happened to you
will always be there,” he continued, fingering a paperweight shaped
like a blue pill that read STELAZINE. “I’m a behavioralist
psychologist; I’m not so liberal in my manner of interpreting human
psychology. Other professionals would tell you that it’s unhealthy
to leave your traumas because they
remain in your psyche whether you know it or not. That’s not true
with regard to how we must function in our lives, in our society,
and in the world. If not living in Agan’s Point restores you to
that kind of functionality, then you’ve done the right thing. Your
trauma becomes neutered, ineffectual—it becomes a thing that can’t
affect you anymore. It no longer has any bearing on your life, and
never will . . . unless you let it. You don’t need a regimen of
antidepressant drugs and costly psychotherapy to deal with your
trauma; all you need is to be away from
the area of the occurrence. Your life right now is validation.
You’re a fabulously successful attorney enjoying a fulfilling
career and a wonderful marriage. Am I right?”
Patricia splayed her
hands on the couch. “Yes.”
“You aren’t
traumatized by what happened to you
when you were sixteen, are you? You aren’t a psychological
basket case; this event in your past
hasn’t ruined you. You can’t tell me
that this twenty-five-year-old tragedy still rears its head and
exerts a negative force in your existence, can you? Can you tell me
that?”
Patricia almost
laughed. What he was forcing her to admit to herself was now
replacing a creeping despair with a frivolous joy. “No, Doctor, I
can’t tell you that at all.”
He looked at her with
a blank expression. “So your problem is . . . ?”
She conceded to him.
“You’re right. I don’t have a problem anymore.”
He raised a finger.
“Proximity to the scene of the trauma is your only problem.
Whenever you return to Agan’s Point, your despair recommences. When
you’re away from Agan’s Point, your mind functions as though the
trauma never occurred. We know I’m correct about this because every
aspect of your life verifies it. Let me put it in the most
sophisticated, clinical terminology I can, Patricia. Fuck Agan’s Point. Shit
on Agan’s Point. To hell with Agan’s
Point. How’s that?”
Now Patricia was
laughing outright.
And he finished,
“Your despair is activated only when you return to Agan’s Point, so
my professional advice is never to go back there. You don’t have
to. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want. If you want to
see your relatives, then they can come to you. You don’t have to go
to them. Agan’s Point is a bowel movement that you flushed down the
toilet years ago. Solution? Don’t go back to the
sewer.”
And that was that.
Not only had Patricia gotten a great laugh from Dr. Sallee’s
acumen, she’d needed to see him only that one time for all to be
set back to rights. When she’d gone home from her sister’s wedding,
it all returned to her—indeed, like a toilet backing up.
Now that I’m away from that hellhole . . . I
feel great. . . .
And she continued to
feel great . . . until she’d received the call from Judy reporting
her husband’s murder.
I’m going back to the sewer, she recalled the
doctor’s metaphor as the Caddy brought her closer and closer.
I don’t know what else to do. She’s my
sister. . . .
This was all she
could do, and she knew it. “And I’ll
just have to make the best of it,” she said to herself. “It was so
long ago anyway. I’m acting like a baby.″ Admitting that to herself
was easier than admitting her optimism was forced.
She let more of the
road take her, the Cadillac almost too quiet and smooth as more
roads turned rural, and more turnoffs took her farther away from
her metropolitan world. The wilds of southern Virginia were an
opposite world—farms instead of
skyscrapers, old pickup trucks and tractors lumbering along quiet,
tree-lined roads, quite unlike the manic traffic streams of the
city. She knew that home grew ever closer by still more telltale
signs: AGAN′S POINT CRAB CAKES, boasted a roadside restaurant. Then
a market: WE SELL AGAN′S POINT CRABMEAT. Her sister’s crabmeat was
locally renowned. Eventually the scenery began to calm Patricia’s
nerves, and she actually smiled. Would she really be able to forget
about her trauma of decades ago? Maybe it’s
all just worn off, she hoped.
Then another sign
swept by:
AGAN’S POINT—3
MILES.
She steeled herself
behind the wheel. It’s no big deal, no big
deal. I’m over it!
And then the awful
words came back to haunt her just as effectively as she was being
haunted by her past:
Yes, her own father’s
words . . .
How could you let something like that
happen?
Patricia’s eyes
suddenly flooded with tears. She couldn’t control herself; she
couldn’t even remember what she was doing, her sensibilities
jerking away from her like something being stolen. Without even
realizing it, she pulled the Cadillac to the shoulder and got out,
her heart hammering, sweat pasting her red bangs to her forehead. A
passerby would’ve dismissed her as a crazy woman about to run amok
into the woods. Tears blurred her vision. Her feet took her in a
blind run away from the car. When she fell to her knees several
minutes later, she looked up, choking through sobs, and then saw a
smaller sign just before the turn onto a narrow country road. She
had to squint through her tears to focus until she could finally
read the sign, a right-turn arrow and the words:
BOWEN’S
FIELD.
Patricia shrieked,
vomited into the grass, and passed out.