🎧 Chapter Forty-Three | The Final Testimony
Where One Story Ends, Another Begins
What you need to know:
Jennifer begins therapy with Elenore, a dream analyst who helps her explore the inner landscape. During their first session, Jennifer reveals details of her ongoing divorce from Rick and firing of her attorney. Through dream analysis, Elenore helps her understand how her past relationship with Steve, particularly a traumatic childbirth experience, connects to her present struggles. Elenore also offers to work with Jennifer at a rate she can afford, introducing her to the concept of engaging with her "inner child."
Chapter Forty-Three
The Final Testimony
I sit in the outer lobby of the Oregon Medical Board offices and from speakers embedded in the ceiling, Morning Edition is sidelined by a local fund-raising campaign.
“Call right now…” a woman announcer says in a smooth, low-key voice. “Help us help you enjoy commercial-free music and news.”
“That’s right, folks!” a man announcer says, voice a jolt of electricity. Strident and metallic.
The soft and hard sell, I think, sitting there with legs crossed, foot bobbing up and down like I’m amped up on too much caffeine.
I’ve been told that the members of the medical board now settle into the hearing room located deeper in this building and I can hear them rustle about within an inner hall way, can smell the coffee they must be making, can pick up snippets of their conversations.
It is early. Eight A.M. And the reception staff isn’t here yet, so it’s just me looking around while the two announcers chatter, “Call now.” And, “We need you!”
The lobby is square with side tables and ceramic lamps that funnel buttery light into circles on the plasterboard ceiling and down over tidy stacks of Time, Newsweek, and National Geographic.
“Look folks, you need to call,” the man bellows.
“Please! We need you to make a pledge,” the woman says, gentle but sincere.
I have been seeing Elenore for four months now which adds up to fifty dreams because I bring two, even three, per session. I’m a dreaming machine, it turns out. After each session, when I write her a paltry check for fifty bucks, and then sixty, and now seventy, I apologize profusely and promise to keep paying more as I can, but Elenore only waves me off.
“I’ve never seen anyone work as hard as you do,” she says. “That’s payment enough.”
I don’t want to be here today, don’t want to tell my story—again—but Elenore and Abrams both say I’ll be publicly breaking a long-standing habit: Compliant silence nested inside a seemingly endless supply of justifications.
This habit apparently started in childhood (where all our worse habits begin). It seems my father was a lot like Rick. Tall. Geeky. Crazy intelligent. And sadistic.
In one of the dreams, picked apart carefully by Elenore, I uncovered a repressed memory of being forced to stand in a cold shower as punishment. The memory of screaming to be let out from under the icy flow. Of my father—who I loved—sitting on the toilet lid, head bowed, and hands held together. Unmoved.
This has been a brutal revelation, one that drops a major piece of the puzzle into place because I’ve long suspected there was something like this in my past—some baffling inconsistency, some betrayal that short circuited my understanding of love, men, myself.
“Just do it, as our friends over at Nike headquarters like to say,” the man on the radio says now, his voice like a hammer to an anvil. “And speaking of Nike, we’ve got a challenge, folks.”
I sweep a copy of Time from the top of the nearby stack and flip through. It is the first anniversary of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. Seventy people have been killed in a fight between fans and rival teams during a soccer match in Port Said. A rogue US soldier kills seventeen civilians in Afghanistan, including nine children. This is not helping calm me down, I tell myself and toss the magazine back on the pile, order the edges to be as perfect as they were before. Hugging my arms around myself, I rest the back of my head against the wall.
Be calm, I tell the frightened child inside, which is something Elenore says I need to keep doing because this so called “inner child” keeps showing up in my dreams. Sometimes she’s there as Josephine—“A projection of your best inner sense of self,” Elenore says. Other times it’s as my younger self which is rare because,“You have a negative perception of the child you once were.” Of course I do, I often think. How does one shape a positive perception when their father tosses them into cold showers as young as three years old?
They are up to ten grand on the radio. The two announcers are so excited they sound like they are about to burst through the speakers.
“This is great. Wonderful,” the woman says, giddy.
“Let’s keep it going,” the man says, insistent.
I have a new divorce attorney now, a man recommended by The Cowboy Poet of all people, the one who hired me to teach at The Tin Pot Collective. My new lawyer is a cowboy-type, too, and as languid as a hot afternoon. I call him Tom Friendly (not his real name) because it sums him up. In the manner of a Southern gentleman, Tom Friendly calls me “Ma’am” and “Ms. Jennifer” and when we meet, calls the case between Rick and me a load of “horse shit.”
It takes Tom Friendly a total of three telephone calls to wrap things up.
In the first, which I sat in on, Tom Friendly batted away Cal’s demand that I drop the complaint against Rick and not testify before the board.
“Your guy did a bad thing, Cal,” Tom Friendly said. “We both know it. You gotta let this little gal tell her truth, otherwise, we’re talking coercion. Am I right?” and that was that.
The two additional calls, made without me present, involved negotiating a new deal where I was given two years to refinance the house in my own name or sell. If I did have to sell, I would keep the profits. “That’ll give the market time to bounce, Ma’am,” Tom Friendly told me confidentially.
I didn’t have to pay Rick a settlement, or cover his attorney fees, and I didn’t have to pay him back for the cost of my wedding ring. When it was done, Tom Friendly charged five hundred bucks. Case closed.
Elenore had not been kidding about the power of this work. Face yourself and everything changes for the better. Don’t, and the mess of your life gets more and more tangled.
“Ms. Lauck?” a man says.
I startle.
The door to the inner offices stands wide, held in place by one of the state investigators. Tall, in a crisp well tailored suit, he’s a fit looking guy with a shock of white hair. Former cop, I sense. He’s the point man for the state and I’ve spoken to him a couple times as part of my prep for appearing today. He’s let me know that Rick also testified a couple days earlier with a lawyer at his side, and that after my testimony, the board will go into deliberations that could go as long as a month to six months.
“You move like a ninja,” I say, hand to my chest.
“Apologies,” he says. “We’re ready for you.”
Gathering my bag and coat, I stand and cross to where he waits.
On the radio, the pledges have swelled to twelve thousand in the form of fifty, one hundred and five hundred dollar promises made all over the state.
“We’re not done yet,” the man says in his loud, bossy voice.
“Call us,” the woman says. “Call now.”
The state medical board is comprised of four men and one woman. Two are lawyers. Three are medical doctors.