A Clean Slate (11 page)

“Is it?” I said, not caring that I might be fired.

The lines around his eyes seemed to deepen, and suddenly, Cole looked like a sad little boy. “You wouldn't
know anything about that,” he said, in a low, almost inaudible voice.

There was a weird, melancholy air around us now. I wasn't sure what had happened or what to make of it. I finished the mopping without comment from Cole, and spent the rest of the time breaking down the washing machine set. I didn't know what kind of shoot was happening the next day, and Cole had barely spoken to me except to tell me where to put things. After a few hours of silence, I actually missed the sarcastic snippiness.

“You can leave now.” Cole called to me from inside the darkroom.

“Okay, thanks,” I yelled back. Why was I thanking him? The silent hours had unnerved me, I guess. Still, I was excited to escape the place. Maybe I'd talk Laney into getting a margarita at Uncle Julio's Hacienda, or maybe I'd go see a movie.

But then I remembered that I had other plans. Ellen Geiger. I had half an hour to get uptown to see my shrink.

E
llen Geiger lived on the first floor of an elegant graystone on State Street, one of those places built at the turn of the century, with iron carriage posts out front and stone lions guarding either side of the door. At least I assumed Ellen still lived there and was still using the front room as her office. I checked the name by the doorbell just to be sure.

As I waited for her to answer, I glanced up the street toward Lincoln Park, which was lit up by tall round lights. I wondered if Ellen's practice was lucrative enough for her to own this house so close to the park and the lake. Maybe it was a family home, or maybe she had a wealthy husband. The problem with therapy was that the conversation was so one-sided you rarely learned much about the person hearing your deepest secrets. As a result, Ellen probably knew more about my last five months than I did.

I heard the soft tap, tap, tap of footsteps, then a golden glow came from inside as the hall light was turned on.

“Kelly,” Ellen said, opening the door. “Come in.”

She was probably in her late thirties or early forties, and she struck me as someone who could look totally sexy if she wanted to. For all I knew she broke out the leather jeans and fuck-me stilettos on the weekends, but for work she nearly always wore conservative, secretarylike attire. Today she had on a wine-colored cardigan sweater over a white blouse and straight black skirt. She wore low, tasteful black pumps. Her ashy-blond hair was pulled back by a velvet headband.

“How are you?” She gestured for me to come into her office, a small but stylish room with a huge bay window. I assumed that window overlooked the street, but the heavy silk drapes in front of it were always closed tight and the place lamplit, like now. I wondered if Ellen threw open the drapes after her last client left, tore the headband from her hair and headed for a pitcher of martinis in the fridge.

“I'm good,” I said, noting mentally that I was particularly curious about Ellen today. The few visits that I could remember with her after Dee had died, I'd just marched up the steps, fell into the couch and talked, talked, talked, not concerned about Ellen or her life. Maybe it was because I was feeling so much better now. I had more space in my thoughts for other people.

Another thought—maybe I was nervous about this meeting, about what Ellen might tell me.

She took a seat next to her desk and watched me in that expectant way of hers, waiting, I'm sure, for me to launch into a diatribe about all my issues. The problem was, I honestly didn't feel as though I had any that I wanted to discuss with her.

Someone had to break the silence, though, so I finally opened my mouth and said, “How are
you?
”

This caused Ellen to blink a few times. Apparently, she
didn't get asked that question very often. “Fine, fine, but I'm concerned about your loss of memory. Why don't you tell me about that.”

“I pretty much told you everything on the phone, and as I mentioned then, I feel great. Better than I have in a long time.”

“Mmm-hmm. What do you think caused this gap in your memory?”

A legit question. “I honestly don't know. That's one thing I am wondering about. Can you tell me about the different reasons that someone might lose their memory?”

“Well, psychologically and psychiatrically speaking there are a number of reasons. Trauma, alcohol abuse, senile dementia—”

“Dementia? Isn't that just another word for crazy?” I said defensively.

Ellen grinned. “We don't think of it like that, and I don't think you're crazy, Kelly.”

“Then what do you think it could be?”

“Well, first we'd have to rule out a physical cause for your amnesia. Have you had any physical problems?”

“Nope,” I said, deciding not to mention my alcohol-driven headaches.

“I'd still like you to see a colleague of mine at Northwestern. Dr. Hagar.” She leaned forward and handed me a business card.

I slid it in my bag without looking at it. “You're an M.D., aren't you?”

She nodded.

“So why can't you give me your opinion?”

“Why are you so anxious about the cause?”

“Wouldn't you be? I can't figure out why I don't remember the last five months. I know I was down, depressed, whatever you want to call it. My friend told me that I'd been seeing you a lot—”

“Who told you that?”

She'd stopped me in midthought. “Excuse me?” I said.

“What friend told you that?”

“Laney.” I watched her face for a reaction that I knew she wouldn't reveal. The woman should play professional poker in Vegas. “Why?”

“Mmm-hmm. Just curious. Keep going.”

I was frustrated now. “Can't I ask you some questions for a change?”

“Of course.”

“I'd like to know your opinion about why I can't remember.”

“Mmm-hmm.” She pursed her lips again. “Kelly, I wish I could give you that, but I can't possibly, based on the limited information I have. All I can tell you is that although I saw you a few times last January, I've been seeing you regularly since…” she looked down at the notes on her desk “…mid-May. During that time, we've been dealing with your very natural reactions to your sister's death, the breakup of your relationship with Ben, the loss of your job, your mother's move out west. You've had an extraordinary amount to deal with. Your anger and sadness over these issues are nothing to be embarrassed about.”

“I'm not embarrassed. Honestly.”

“Then why are you focusing so much on the whys and hows of your current situation, rather than what you've been dealing with for the last half a year?”

I looked down at my lap, and, realizing I still wore my leather jacket, shrugged it off. “Here's the thing. If we talk about those issues that I was dealing with, if we talk about the depression I had, I might remember it, right?”

“That's possible. Memory is very tricky.”

“Then I don't want to talk about it, because I don't want to remember any of it.”

“Mmm-hmm. Why is that?”

“Would you want to remember that kind of a time? A time when you could barely get out of your pajamas?”

No response from Ellen.

“Look at me,” I said, holding up my hands in sort of an offering. “I don't need a doctor. I feel great. Why would I
ever
want to recall that time?”

“I understand what you're saying, but I think it's dangerous to push that time away.”

“I'm not pushing it away, I'm just not trying to remember.”

Ellen looked at me for a long moment. “I think in your situation, that's the same thing. However, I see your reluctance to discuss this issue, and so I'm going to let it go. I just need to ask you a few questions for clarification.”

I took a breath and nodded, relieved that she was going to drop it. As I waited for her to talk, I noticed that one of the lamps on the desk was sending a yellow ring of light over Ellen's blond hair, and that the headband had some kind of glitter on it. Maybe she did have those stilettos in the closet, the martinis in the fridge, after all.

“Are you still taking your meds?” she said.

I thought of the prescription bottles I'd found in my apartment, the ones that still sat in the kitchen cabinet. “No.”

“You know, you really must wean yourself off those. You can't just stop.”

“Too late. I don't even know the last time I took one.”

“Just so I understand this completely. Do you not recall
anything
at all about those months?”

“Nothing.” Great, could we move on here?

Ellen read something in her notes. She seemed to be going over and over one particular entry.

“What is it?” I said.

“Something had been troubling you,” she said.

“I know, I know—Ben, Dee, the job.” I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. Were we going back to that again?

“Well, you were very caught up with Ben. You seemed
to think that if you could get back together with him, the rest of your life would improve, a notion I tried to rid you of. But there was something else that was bothering you, as well.” Ellen glanced at me, that expectant look on her face again.

“What was it?” I blurted out.

She shook her head slowly. “That's the thing. I don't know, either. I can't be sure, but I often felt that you were holding back something. In fact, you essentially admitted that you were. You said you wanted to focus on the other issues, primarily your breakup and your desire to reunite with Ben.”

I thought of what Laney had told me on Saturday—that a few weeks after my birthday something sent me from a sitting-around-in-pajamas kind of mood to an antidepressant-popping-and-stalking-Ben kind of mood.

“When did you first note that I was holding something back?”

She glanced down at the desktop. “May 22.”

A few weeks after my birthday.

“I didn't tell you anything else?” I asked.

“I wrote here that you were concerned about someone's opinion of you.”

My mind sped through a host of possibilities, the people whose opinions I cared about—Laney, Ben, my mom. But I'd talked to Ellen about all of those people.

“I got the distinct feeling,” she continued, “that you were focusing so much on the other issues that we've already mentioned because you didn't want to deal with this person or their opinion.”

“What was the opinion?”

“I can't say. You wouldn't tell me anything else about it, and ultimately, I had to respect that. It's possible that it was just a minor issue, and I'm making too much of it.”

She smiled at me again. Something about the sympathy
in that smile made me realize that she didn't think it had been such a minor issue at all.

 

The next day, as I rode the El to Cole's place (a starting time of ten instead of noon) I puzzled over my talk with Ellen. Whose opinion was I so concerned about, and what was that person's opinion of me? I gripped a silver bar for balance, the train careening around a corner, feeling a wave of dizziness, an ache in my head. The faces of the other commuters seemed terrifyingly blurry for a few seconds. I could see the red of a man's baseball cap across from me, but it was fuzzy, almost as if the bloody color was undulating. I increased my grip on the bar, afraid of falling to my knees. But then, just as quickly, the dizziness was gone, the other people on the train restored. The dull throb in my head was still there, though. It was just exhaustion, I decided. I'd been going over the same questions all night, barely sleeping more than a few hours. Laney had no guesses for me, but she agreed with Ellen that there was something I'd been concerned about, something I wouldn't tell even her, something that had made me more depressed than I had been.

The train lurched to a stop and a pimply, teenaged kid vacated a seat. I saw another woman about my age eyeing it, but I dived and managed to grab it before her, fearing another dizzy spell.

As I settled into the curved plastic seat, I couldn't help but notice a coolness inside myself. It was separate from my headache, and it wasn't due to the temperature in the train because they had the heat cranked up. The cold feeling was coming from something Laney had said last night.

“I don't know what it was,” she'd said on the phone, “but you hinted that someone had given you some news you didn't like, and it was after that you got worse.”

Some news you didn't like…
I'd gotten an opinion from
this mystery person, and according to Laney and Ellen, that opinion had sent me over the proverbial edge.

The whole thing scared me to death. I could deal with the other issues. I could hear about my birthday night with Ben and feel sad and pissed off. I could think about the fact that I'd lost my job and feel rightfully bewildered and, once again, pissed off. I often thought about Dee—crying when I found a sweater I'd borrowed from her or one of the little notes she used to leave me when she'd stayed the weekend. These issues produced all sorts of emotions in me—sadness, anger, confusion—but despite my hesitations, none of them threatened to return me to that dark place Laney had told me about. None of them truly scared me. This other thing, though, this thing I wouldn't tell Laney or Ellen or apparently anyone, terrified me. If it was enough to make me lose it at the time, couldn't it do the same thing now? As Ellen had said, memory is tricky.

The train stopped at the last station in the Loop, and most of the remaining passengers disembarked. An older, very dirty man with a collection of plastic bags stuffed with God-knows-what fell into the seat across from me and gave me a lecherous grin. I gave him a defiant stare before I looked away. That was my usual tactic—show 'em you're not scared, but don't tempt 'em.