There was a time when Mitch’s touch reached every part of me. When it put my mind to rest. Set my body on fire. Filled my heart with contentment. I would take any of those. I would take something new, even something painful. I feel his skin on my skin, but it is nothing more than a physical sensation. I am a million miles away, running after the answer to my question about the tall man.
And it terrifies me.
Chapter Four
I was right to be worried.
Twelve days after the shooting, I’m in Dr. Landyn’s office for the last of my mandated sessions. I’m careful with my words when I meet with him. Everything I say will be a factor in his decision to clear me for work tomorrow. And I need to work. I need distractions. I need to not be at home.
I haven’t been myself. The woman who was content. Happy at times. Who felt moments of joy and love and irritation and amusement and tension and release—countless feelings every day. She was gone. The woman I have become in these two weeks feels nothing.
Thirty-twominutes are left on the clock.
“Tell me more about the gifts and flowers,” he says. “And the commendation from the mayor yesterday. I saw it on the news. You looked—apprehensive.”
Dr. Landyn is sharply focused. His notepad sits on his lap, the pen gripped in his hand, the hand that dangles off his knee, the leg that’s crossed on top of the other. And he stares at me with concern. I have not been hiding well enough.
“No,” I lie. “I wasn’t apprehensive.”
“And the gifts—are you still giving them away unopened? Not reading the notes on the flowers?”
Did I tell him that?Stupid.Small wrapped gifts and flowers had been arriving every single day since the shooting. I opened the note on the first bouquet. It read simply,With gratitude to a truehero.
I couldn’t see those words again. I was not worthy of gratitude. This was not a cause for hanging a piece of metal around my neck at the town hall.
I drove the flowers to the hospital and the gifts to a local thrift store. I wanted to put the award in the basement, but Mitch had already set it on the mantel and given a speech to the girls about how their mother was a hero. I didn’t have the heart to take it down and make them wonder why.
I think of something to tell Landyn.
“I was worried after what you told me in our first session,” I say. “About being careful with the others from the shooting.”
A spark of recognition lights up his face. “How so?”
“You said that sometimes people who come close to death transfer their feelings onto rescue workers. That they need a way of understanding why they survived.”
He nods, so I continue, “You said they can sometimes believe the rescuer was destined to save them and that they were meant to be there.”
Dr. Landyn draws a long breath and taps his pen on the notepad. “Okay,” he says. “But opening athank-younote is not the kind of interaction I was concerned about. I’m more interested in the possibility that you still have doubts about what you did and whether it had to be done, and if your ambivalence is what has made these gestures difficult to accept.”
Yes, of course. This is his job—both to heal and study me. If I have doubts, I might hesitate next time. And that could be detrimental to others. Rowan, for one. What if he’d been in Nichols, standing beside me? What if I’d had the shot and hesitated? And the tall man? What about him? He might be dead.
The question still lingers and now, it seems, is destined to remain unanswered. There was no reason for this man to be the subject of an ongoing investigation. Many witnesses left the scene amid the chaos from media trucks, responders, and relatives who’d flooded the parking lot to search for their loved ones. I had pleaded with Rowan to look for the tall man for my own sanity, and despite his efforts, all he could find was one glimpse from the camera surveillance outside the store that showed him getting into a blue pickup truck and driving off. The plates were not visible.
“Elise?” Dr. Landyn waits for my response. He wants me to tell him that I’ve come to terms with my decision to kill a man.
“He was going to keep shooting,” Dr. Landyn says. It’s not the first time he’s said this, and I imagine he’s watching my expression and my movements to gauge my reaction. I remain perfectly still. “Every forensic report. Every psychological report. Every image captured on the security cameras. It all points to that conclusion. Clay Lucas was not going to stop shooting, and eventually he was going to hurt someone. The rounds they recovered were in the walls, not the ceiling. Witness accounts all say he was shooting to kill. It doesn’t matter that he missed his targets before you shot him. And it doesn’t matter where this other man was or what he was doing.”
I manage a nod and nothing more because I can feel the heat build inside my head. It has become a separate entity—an unruly toddler that demands an answer and won’t stop screaming until it gets one. It is unbearable to live with.
“I’m afraid you will never have what you want, Elise. And not just in this more significant life event. Uncertainty is inherent in the human experience.”
Dr. Landyn is frustrated with me. I can hear it in his voice. Most of his patients can accept this degree of closure. Most of them live with this “inherent uncertainty” as they muddle through their “human experience.”
Dr. Landyn and I have discussed my need for certainty. It has impacted my life for as long as I can remember. My marriage. My parenting. My career. I downplay just how much because they don’t let people with these types of conditions on the force. He pries and probes to see what’s there but finds nothing. There is no childhood trauma to indicate pathology, which disappoints him. That’s an easy line to draw. Early childhood trauma, especially in the years before we have memories, can hardwire our brains for all kinds of emotional damage. The question had come the second after he detected the anxious brain that makes it hard for me to buy towels at Nichols, decide what to order at restaurants, and believe my husband when he tells me he’s working late.
But my childhood was fine. Normal. My parents stayed together until they passed, two years apart. My mother first, and my father just after Amy was born. My brother lives in Boston, and we speak once a week. He’s married with three children. There was nothing to see here. I was born this way. Genetics. Nature over nurture.
In our first session, Dr. Landyn homed in on my teaching. “I understand you created your own textbook for your class. That’s unusual, isn’t it?”
