🎧 Chapter Forty-Four | Between Then and Now
A Rescue Taking Place Across Limitless Time
What you need to know:
When Abrams encouraged her to file a complaint against Rick, and then testify on her own behalf, he knew that breaking the silence about one abuse of power might unlock an even deeper truth. Now, as a seemingly simple dream about a helicopter and a lost black stone emerges, Jennifer finds herself caught between then and now, where time itself bends to allow what was impossible before: the chance to rescue a child across forty years of silence.
Content Warning: This chapter contains a respectfully handled but emotionally intense scene of a recovered childhood trauma. Written with sensitivity and care, it may still be challenging for some readers, especially those with their own trauma histories. Please be gentle with yourself when deciding if now is the right time to read this material.
Chapter Forty-Four
Between Then and Now
Crossing the street from where I park to Elenore’s office, the light is extraordinary and I have to shade my eyes against the glare of the sun but also against the green intensity of the new leaves on the trees.
It is April 13, 2015.
I’ve seen Elenore every week for three years. That’s four hundred dreams.
“I cannot believe how long I’ve been coming here,” I say to Elenore, shrugging my jacket off and hanging it on the stand myself. My arm is fully healed and I’m back to knitting again. I’ve finished that crazy alpaca shawl with all the cables and have moved on to hats and fingerless gloves. I even made Elenore a jaunty purple scarf in thanks for investing in me.
I tug a fresh pile of dreams out of my bag and pass them into Elenore’s waiting hand.
“This is nothing,” Elenore says, slides the pages onto her clipboard and lowers to sit in her chair. “I was in therapy for seven years.”
I drop into my own chair, give her look like Man! You must be totally screwed up, which isn’t kind, or true, but more a revelation of how little I understand the time it takes to do substantive work. I still have so much to learn. “Okay, then I have a few more to go,” I say.
“Maybe,” she says. “You’re making excellent progress. Who knows?”
I trust her, implicitly and feel safe in this Jungian Library space and every year my life gets a little better. After selling the house for the same amount I lost in those years with Rick, I moved us into a high-rise condo with a view of Mt. Hood.
Josephine, in seventh grade now, finally asks questions in class and is great at math and…well…everything else. Straight A student. Lots of friends. She will, I am sure, become an artist one day.
Spencer, a senior in high school, works part-time for his dad and another job at a grocery store. He’s six-foot-four and possesses a unique, engaging quality of genuine friendliness that has people stop me on the street to say, “What a great kid you’ve got there.” I joke with him all the time, say I’m going to start a Spencer-Fan-Club with me as president.
Despite leaving their dad, and my digression with Rick, the kids are okay.
As for me, I’m about to launch my own writing school teaching classic literary technique. I’m naming it after my first memoir, Blackbird, which started this whole healing journey I’ve been on since the late nineties.
Within, I have also managed to cultivate a somewhat solid relationship with the little girl inside, keep stickers and colorful pens at the ready, as if she is Jo. When the younger Jennifer speaks, I write her child-like words down, try to accept that she is a force of her own with stories to tell and sorrows to share. I have to admit I feel squeamish about the ghost of my former self. Deep down, I wish she would just go away. I feel burdened by her. By her pain. She’s too intense. Too real. Too honest.
“I’m not sure what dream to look at today,” I say to Elenore.
“Let’s do this one,” Elenore says, rotates a back page forward, clips it into place and slides her readers on. “With the helicopter thing.”
I adjust in my chair, settle back, pull up the one she means which is a harmless, simple dream. Short.
Smoothing the page on my lap, I read in a clear, confident voice: “I’m in a helicopter made from this tent-like material, very light and flimsy.”
Already, I’m thinking, Okay, this is my ego in a complex which is a man-made construct, as if I have this whole psyche-thing figured out.
“I’m higher in the sky than I want to be. Actually, I’m uncomfortable with the height. Then, a power line in the poles breaks free and snaps so high into the air that it glances toward a bank of thunderheads. The helicopter I’m in is unstable and I don’t know how to operate it. I just know I want to get away from the live power line. At one point, I drift too close to the surface of a pond, and something falls from my tailbone. It’s a black smooth stone. It plops into the water and disappears. What have I lost? I don’t know. I want to steer the helicopter down and reach into the water for it but the stone is gone. This makes me sad.”
I lower the page to my lap and take up my pencil. Ho hum. Big deal.
Elenore re-reads, lips pursed like she does when thinking.
White light slats through the shades on the French doors behind her, ladders across the carpet. In the quiet, I fix on this stacked light and an unfamiliar restlessness rises.
“What is that small thing lost?” Elenore asks at last. “What is that rock?”
My stomach grumbles. Was it the coffee I drank earlier? The biscuit I ate?
Looking toward the ceiling, which she does sometimes, Elenore continues. “A rock is, at the most basic level, inert matter. It’s slow moving and yet it is also energy.”
Sweat sheens the backs of my hands and I feel like I might be sick.
“The helicopter, the complex, tries to navigate within the unharnessed energy of the flinging power lines as well as between heaven and earth,” she says. “Up, up, down, down, but I keep returning to that rock. Primeval, old, of the earth. And...at the tailbone. Symbolically speaking, this is the sacrum, the one bone that remains long after the others have disintegrated. A tough bone. It’s where we sit. Where we find our stabilization. It’s also close to our reproductive organs.”
Pain reverberates low at my back and around into my pelvis. “I don’t feel so good,” I finally manage to say.
She levels her gaze over the clipboard. “What is it?” Elenore asks.
“It hurts,” I say but it’s not my voice. It’s her voice. The child I don’t like.
Elenore eases off her glasses and rests them on the clipboard, setting both aside on the low table next to her chair.
I’m still fixed on the sunlight stripes on the carpet past her chair and then…like a curtain rising on a theatrical production, the veil lifts.