Part 2 (1/2)
”I've been in therapy for three years. I've spent eight thousand dollars and hundreds of hours trying to heal myself, and I am sick of sickness and tired of healing. Everyone I know is in therapy, and no one's getting out. I need to do something different. I know what you're trying to say to me, and you're not the first person who's tried to warn me. But I also know that the twenty-nine-year-old woman can probably handle it.”
”Probably?” I raised my left eyebrow.
”Will handle it!” she fired back, showing a spark of the feisty survivor she must have been. ”Will you help me or not?” she asked defensively, leaning forward to stare at me, almost defying me to say ”no.”
”I'll help you,” I said. The simplicity of my answer seemed to startle her. Frankly, it startled me, too.
”But I have to know something first,” I added.
Her suspicion returned. I could see it in her scowl lines.
”Why don't you look yourself?”
She relaxed slightly.
She sat back on the couch and hesitated, almost as if she were carefully choosing her words so I wouldn't change my mind.
”I'm ready to know about the past, Kris, but I'm not ready to deal with all these people in the present. Does that make sense?”
Before I could answer, she continued, ”I want you to talk to people about Barbara and Peter Kenwood. I want you to talk to people who knew them and who knew me. I'm ready for that. I'm ready to find out more about the little girl I was. But I still need some distance from it. I'm not ready to try and relate to all these people as an adult, to hear them describe my life as a child. I need the s.p.a.ce to process all of this in my own way. Someone like Mich.e.l.le would probably just run out there and call all these people, invite them over for coffee and have the time of her life.”
I smiled in agreement.
”But I'm not Mich.e.l.le. I'm not like that. It's taken me this long to be able to want to know more. I'm years away from being able to ask the questions myself. That's why I came to see you.” She looked toward me for approval.
”One more thing before we start,” I said, jumping when a sudden s.h.i.+ver ran through my body, ”you'll have to be as honest with me as you can. The more I know about you today, the better I'll be able to understand yesterday. Are you comfortable with that? Do you think we can work together?” My heart beat faster as I waited for her answer.
”I trust you,” she replied after only the slightest hesitation.
”Are you sure?”
”There's something about you that's honest. I wouldn't have told you this much if I didn't trust you.”
”Okay then, let's get started.” I took a legal pad out of my top drawer and prepared to formulate a plan of attack. ”Tell me a little about your relations.h.i.+p with your parents, with the parents who adopted you.”
”There's not much to tell really. My parents are divorced now. I'm not especially close to either of them, at least not emotionally. But I see them often and we have a decent relations.h.i.+p. My dad's fairly easy-going and aloof.”
”And your mom?”
”She's a different story. She's overbearing and controlling, and she's always wanted me to be something more than I am. She does everything in her power to try to make me be what she thinks the ideal daughter is. When I was in college, I started studying English literature because she always wanted to be an English professor. When I fell in love with a woman and changed my major to feminist studies, she threatened to stop paying for college. That made me so mad, I said 'fine'. Instead of confronting her, my father called me at school and told me he'd find a way to get the money to me without my mother knowing. That kind of epitomizes their relations.h.i.+p and the way they communicate. Eventually, my mother came to her senses, and I managed to finish college without laundered money, but I've always felt like I've failed her. Even when I was a little girl, I felt like I wasn't the little girl she wanted.”
”What do you mean?”
”I'm not sure really. I just had this vague sense that she wanted me to be different, to be someone else.” As she spoke, her tone was neutral, but I could see the sadness in her eyes. Then, as quickly as it came, it pa.s.sed.
”Can I ask you something, Kris?”
”Sure!”
”It's personal....”
”Okay,” I said and cleared my throat.
”Are you in a relations.h.i.+p?”
I hesitated before I answered.
”Do you mean do I have a lover?”
She nodded.
”No, I don't. Why do you ask?”
”I wanted to know something about you, maybe so that it would make it easier for me to tell you about myself, or maybe just because I'm curious.”
”I see your point,” I paused again, trying to decide exactly how much I would tell her.
”I was in a relations.h.i.+p for three years. It ended a year ago. Her name is Gallagher. She's living in Provincetown now. She says she can't live in the same city with me if we're not in a relations.h.i.+p. I think about her all the time. Now you know something,” I said, the pain showing in the strain of my voice.
”Who ended the relations.h.i.+p?”
”I did,” I said softly.
”Why? It's obvious you still love her.”
”It shows?” I asked, a little embarra.s.sed.
She nodded.
”I do still love her. I just couldn't be in a relations.h.i.+p with her. Intimate relations.h.i.+ps are very, very difficult for me. Very difficult,” I smiled ruefully.
”Perhaps some day you can tell me about her,” Destiny said with more compa.s.sion than I'd felt from anyone in a long time.
”Perhaps some day I will. Now can we talk about you, Ms. Greaves?”
”Sure,” she said smiling easily.
With that, we made our plans.
I would gather as much information as I could, keeping track of it all, but only revealing it to her a bit at a time, according to how well she was able to handle it.
It all sounded so easy.
As I saw it then, Destiny's case wasn't so much a hunt for her parents as it was for a picture of her family, herself included, reconstructed through others' memories. She never quite stated it this way, but Destiny Greaves wanted me to find her childhood. It sounded easy, but I suspected it would be an awesome task, made bigger by the fact that I knew I'd be hunting for my own childhood as well.
I didn't tell Destiny this, but in agreeing to help her rediscover four lost years of her life, I was also making a commitment to myself.