Tuesday Night Miracles (4 page)

From the very beginning, she has done this. A purging of any ideas, thoughts, or notions that may have been obtained from her manila files with the dots on them, or from little photos taken moments after a life-altering event.

It is absolutely crucial to Olivia that she remain centered and balanced, and that she look at these women as if she knows absolutely nothing about them. It will not matter what they wear or how they sit, although those things scream for attention, and she will get to them eventually.

One step and then another, and then before she turns left and walks into the room she always—every single time—remembers how someone once looked at her and wrongly judged who she was in an instant.

Then she crosses into the room and does not even know that she has stepped over a solid-oak threshold that was hand-carved in 1928 by a man who died putting in a window just down the hall. Olivia has stepped over the masterpiece hundreds of times, but she has always focused on what is about to happen the moment she walks into the tiny gray room when everyone in it stops breathing.

This time she holds her own breath, because she’s taking the biggest professional leap of her life. It’s a risk that she hopes will lead this sorry group of women back into a lovely garden of happiness. And maybe she’ll follow them right down the yellow brick road.

6

Truth or Dare

T
he moment Dr. Olivia Bayer steps into Room 394 in the Ellington County–owned Franklin Building, the three women inside freeze in place.

They turn only after they hear her clogs hit the rough wooden threshold, and see a woman in her mid to late sixties with salt-and-pepper hair, tiny dark eyes, and dressed in swaying cotton from head to toe. The half-spectacles resting on her nose look as if they have been there since the beginning of time and if Jane had the courage to speak out loud she would say, “She’s an old hippie, for God’s sake.”

“Hello, ladies,” Olivia says quietly, looking from face to face. “I’m Dr. Bayer. Thank you for coming.”

“Did we have a choice?” Kit asks and then, as always, realizes she should have simply said hello.

Dr. Bayer ignores the comment but knows immediately that Kit is the green dot. “Thank you for setting up the chairs. Let’s take a seat and settle in.”

Olivia has thought long and hard about what to say to these women. All the ideas she has never been allowed to try as a therapist during her long career are moments away from being put into practice. Damn tradition and damn protocols. Damn the way it’s always been done and damn the parts of the system that too often fail people, because people are not all made from cookie cutters.

Suddenly, it doesn’t matter that her supervisor has thrown up his hands and told her that if she fails it will all be on her. No one will back her up. No one will rise up and agree with what must surely be an outlandish way to counsel angry women. She may lose her pension, professional respect, any chance at post-retirement work. “Everything, and I mean everything, is on the line,” Olivia was told when she begged for this chance. “There’s a reason we’ve always done group therapy and have a set way to treat angry people,” he went on. “Talking, writing down what causes the anger, opening up in a group setting. And you think you have better ideas?”

Olivia knows that three women like these, “nontypical offenders,” could have been thrown into the mix with everyone else. The moment Dr. Bayer saw their files she knew that could not happen and she forged what she hopes will be enough courage to help put their lives back on course. She knows that if she can’t, these three women will be balancing on a cliff much steeper than the one they are already on. They must pass this class or they will end up serving jail time. Their jobs will be affected. Their names will go into a registry. No one will ever look at them the same again. Instead of their lives being changed in the positive ways Olivia believes they can be changed, they will be ruined.

“Have you all met?”

Three heads shake.

“All right. Please, tell us your names. First names are fine. But they should be your real names. I know there is not a Fifi or a Brittney here.”

“Good one,” Kit says, laughing. “I’m Kit.”

“Kit?” Olivia looks hard at Kit. “Please, I don’t have a file for a Kit.”

“Oh, shit,” Kit says without thinking. “Sorry about that shit. You need my legal name?”

“Just for starters. I need to know the right person is here. After that, we can call you Kit.”

Kit turns red, which is something to behold, considering her skin is a lovely Mediterranean olive. She closes her eyes; she’s obviously trying very hard not to swear again, or possibly to throw her chair through the window.

“Agnes,” she manages to say without opening her mouth.

“Seriously, Agnes?” Jane has never met anyone named Agnes. Who would name a baby girl Agnes? Thankfully, she manages not to laugh.

Before Kit can respond, Olivia quickly, and with her voice a few octaves higher and louder, asks Jane for her name, and then Grace.

Then she asks each of them for the slip of paper with their court orders, which she must sign, and which they must then photocopy and send back to the courthouse. She’s not surprised that all three papers look as if they’ve been through shredders.

The women are sitting like statues. There’s something about Dr. Bayer that commands it. The way she sits with her ankles crossed. Her size—she’s short, but those glasses make her look like a female Einstein. The way she looks at them with her dark blue eyes and says “Sit down and shut up” without saying a word. And, oh yes, Dr. Bayer also holds the key to their freedom, to their reputations, to their employment, to present and future personal relationships, to the exit door at the very end of the path to forgiveness.

Now come the rules. Well, most of the rules. Dr. Bayer will save the bombshells for the end, when she can run for cover. She begins to recite. No smoking. No drinking. Come to class sober. No physical altercations. Just one of those and you are out the door and inside a squad car. Be discreet about what happens here. Be respectful. And most important is the last rule.

“You must try,” Olivia says very slowly. “I must see progress and acknowledgment of what you have done. Do you understand?”

The women nod their heads up and down, and in this quick pause Dr. Bayer takes a discerning look at each of them. Jane had the guts to wear heels to the meeting. She is, without question, the red dot. The chair arranger, Grace, is the blue dot. Olivia is glad that they all look a little nervous. That’s at least something.

She now hesitates. She hasn’t rehearsed everything. She often likes to wait and now, sitting in front of these women, she is not sure if she should go easy or hard. In the thirty-three years that she has been a practicing clinical psychologist, Dr. Bayer has never had a group like this, or three clients who, without knowing it, have already pushed her to the wall. And she has never done what she is about to do with these three women.

“It’s not just a sign of the times,” she told her supervisor when they first discussed the three cases. “These women have issues, obviously, or this wouldn’t have happened. I want to try something.”

“My gut tells me to throw them in jail, let them learn a lesson,” her supervisor fired back. “This is not a psychology lab, Livie. These women are in serious trouble.”

“I know that,” Olivia responded. “But look at the damn system we’ve floated in all these years. We treat every offender the exact same way. It doesn’t always work. Not by a long shot. I know who these women are. I know how hard this is going to be. I know the rules society has written for the ways women are supposed to handle anger. You have to let me try. After all this time, I deserve it.”

“I’ll make you a deal,” he finally said, leaning across his old metal desk. “I will let you have this if you promise you will seriously, and I mean seriously, consider the retirement offer. Unless you screw this up, you’ll be getting the top layer of benefits. It’s past time, Livie. You owe it to yourself and to you-know-who.”

That conversation had landed her in this room with the blue, red, and green dots, and a game plan that would startle every professor she had ever had. As she watches the dots sit with their arms crossed in the classic “I am not going to cooperate” mode, she decides to open up both barrels. It’s absolutely freeing to be totally in charge for the first time in her professional career.

“All right,” she starts, gaining confidence. “This is not a book club. It is not an after-work social meeting. This is serious business, and all three of you need help.”

Jane is biting her lip. Instead of acknowledging that she’s frightened, that her ribbon of fear is stretching yet again, she forces herself to keep from shouting “
Tell me something I don’t know
!” and she slips off her left shoe and dangles it on the end of her big toe.

Olivia, of course, catches the passive-aggressive move and knows that she has to work fast with Jane. If ever a woman was dressed in emotional camouflage, it’s this one.

“Jane, please tell us why you’re here.”

“I received a piece of paper in the mail saying I had to come,” Jane responds, still giving her shoe a ride and lying through her pure white teeth.

“Really, Jane? You came because of a piece of paper?”

“Yes, and I suppose what you want to hear is that I whacked a guy before the piece of paper came.”

“Whacked as in—?”

“Hit him.”

“What did you hit him with, Jane?”

“My shoe. A high heel.”

Grace and Kit look down at Jane’s shoes and wonder if it was with these shoes. Maybe there are still traces of blood on the heels. Grace wants to grin. She knew those shoes were a weapon.

“That’s all you want to say?” Olivia asks.

Jane shrugs, clearly embarrassed.

Olivia moves on to Kit. Kit has not taken off her jacket and is sitting with her hands in her pockets, her legs crossed, and her shoulders back.

“I hit my brother,” Kit readily admits. “He’s an asshole. Actually, all of my brothers are assholes.”

“What did you hit your brother with, Kit?”

“A wine bottle.”

“Was there anything special about the wine bottle?”

“It was broken.”

The other two women widen their eyes. A broken wine bottle? That’s something. They both wonder at the same time if the poor guy is still alive.

Grace wants to crawl under the table at the far end of the room. She’s so nervous that another hot flash has erupted, and she’s sweating so much that it looks as if she’s crying. She is praying to a God she feels has abandoned her that she will be able to speak.

“Grace?”

“I … I drove my car into the back end of my daughter’s boyfriend’s car.”

“How fast were you driving when you hit the car, Grace?”

Grace didn’t expect this. She thought this was going to be one of those group meetings where people just talked about life and maybe went out for coffee after the meeting was all over.

“If I remember correctly, I was going about twenty miles per hour.”

“Twenty?” Olivia knows she’s lying. She’s read the police report. She’s read all their police reports. She’s seen the graphic photograph—the smashed car, the staples, the jagged cuts.

Kit and Jane can’t stop staring at Grace. You would never know it to look at her. She looks like a frigging housewife who sells Mary Kay or something. Wow! She probably totaled both cars.

Olivia centers herself on her chair. There’s a very small hand waving inside her that wants to reach out and slap each one of these women. She remembers an old professor in one of her early psych classes telling her a story about a mother who smacked her son in the face and said, “Stop hitting your sister!” She needs to hold these women’s fingers to the fire, but she has to do it so none of them, herself included, get burned.

“That’s what you all want to say about why you’re here?” She asks this looking them in the eye, one at a time.

“What should we say?” Kit asks, leaning forward and resting her arms on her knees. “I’ve never been to anything like this before.”

“You mean this was your first wine-bottle incident?” Jane smirks.

Kit rolls her eyes.

Olivia interrupts before the tension escalates.

“Group therapy is give-and-take,” she explains, hoping they’re paying attention and not just checking her out. “People can talk whenever they want, as long as they follow the rules. Sometimes, if people are
honest
, they can actually learn something from each other. When other people talk, please think about how hard it must be for them to be opening up, which is something that I expect you all to do. Group discussions, sharing, therapy—whatever you want to call it—can be absolutely life-changing.”

She pauses. Olivia is a little surprised that no one is running off at the mouth, but then again, they look terrified. Sometimes group members bond immediately when they realize they’re not alone. These women appear so alone, so stranded, so terribly unhappy, that they make her heart ache. Olivia knows more than anyone that happiness isn’t always that simple to reach, to hold, to claim as the center of your life. But discovering who you really are in spite of the troubles that swirl around you, reaching up and grasping your true life, is a personal journey that is absolutely necessary. Will she be able to convince these women that life can be about so much more than anger?

“All right,” she says, moving her papers back inside her folder. “Let’s cut the nonsense. This is very serious business and all three of you are in trouble. Not just a little bit of trouble but a lot of trouble.”

Dr. Bayer’s tone has changed. There’s an edge to it now that makes all three of the women sit up.

“This is court-ordered anger management. Do you get that?”

“Yes,” all three of them say.

“Do you understand what
court-ordered
means?”

“Sure,” Grace responds quickly, surprising herself. “We have to be here. There is no choice.”

“Well, you’re wrong about that,” Olivia fires back. “You do have a choice.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes. You could go straight to jail instead. You could have felony charges on your records for the rest of your lives. Then you could be on probation for years. You would be on a list of potential offenders every time there’s a violent act within fifty miles of where you live. So, see? You do have a choice.”