The Ex (14 page)

“Sorry, it’s all fine. I just need to talk to you about a couple of things you’d probably like to leave in the past. We’ve never talked about it because—well, we never talked. But I know about the year you spent getting counseling.” I was trying hard to avoid any mention of our breakup, Owen’s death, or the “hospitalization” word. I started to reach a hand toward his knee, but stopped. “Charlotte finally told me after I called her nonstop for a month.”

“I don’t talk about that with anyone, Olivia. It’s over. I went through—it was a bad time.”

We went from being engaged to never speaking again, but all he wanted me to know was that it was a
bad time.
“Well, you need to talk about it with me. The prosecution will probably find out, if they haven’t already.”

He was staring at his hands, folded in his lap. “I don’t want to talk about that night. If I’d wanted you to be the person who helped me through all that, I would have come back home.”

He’d been so relieved to see me when I got to the precinct. Now we were having a version of the conversation we might have had if I’d ever bumped into him at a coffee shop over the years. “But we both know you did more than
not come home
. That’s the part I need to know about. Where were you?”

When he looked up, I saw a flash of resentment.

“The hospital, Jack. I need the name.”

He finally gave in, telling me he spent a year at the Silver Oaks
Psychiatric Center in Connecticut. I wrote the name down on my notepad. “I had what they call a psychotic break. It’s temporary psychosis—”

“I know what it is.” I had used it as the basis for an insanity claim in an aggravated assault case two years earlier. An acute onset of temporary psychosis could be triggered by extreme stress, like the death of a sibling. Or perhaps, the dismissal of a lawsuit against the man responsible for the murder of a spouse.

A psychotic break could be marked by behavior ranging from severe depression to violent outbursts, or swings between the two. I asked Jack what version his was.

“I was a basket case. I was nearly catatonic for the first month. I wouldn’t move or speak or eat or drink.”

“Violence?” I pictured Jack tearing up that agent’s rejection letter in the lobby of our apartment building.

He shook his head. “I basically ceased to exist for a year. Charlotte was the only one who knew where I was. I’m surprised she broke down and told you. Everyone else thought I was at a writer’s retreat in Wyoming, trying to get going on that novel I was always fiddling with. When I got out of the hospital, I basically started over again. Meeting Molly helped, and then Buckley changed everything.”

“Jack, I’ve never had the chance to tell you this, but I’m so sorry about . . . everything. I was being a coward. And being cruel. And that was bad enough. But Owen—” I let the sentence drop, because I wasn’t sure how to finish it.

“I never blamed you, Olivia. God, you were always convincing yourself that you were such a bad person, and that I was a saint. It took me a long time to realize it, but I get it now: I smothered you. I kept trying to make you be someone you weren’t ready to be. I made it impossible for you to leave me.”

“It doesn’t excuse what I did—”

“You want to know who I blame for Owen’s crash? Me. Saint Jack,
as you used to say. I’m the one who called Owen after I . . . well, after everything in the apartment.”

We were both being so damn careful about calling it what it was. I had cheated, and I had lied. I took something that was sweet and good and made it ugly. I was the bad one. I always had been. It’s okay. Go ahead and hate me.

But instead, Jack was taking the blame. “I’m the one who kept buying round after round. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine.”

He was falling into the same old pattern: I had done something destructive, and Jack was trying to look past it. This time I did reach for him, but Jack pulled away.

“I really don’t like talking about this. You said this was about the hospital, for my case.”

I placed my pen against my notepad perfunctorily. Back to business. “So you spent a year at the hospital. Who was your doctor?”

“There were a bunch.”

“The one who knew you best.”

“The primary one was Dr. Scheppard. Robin Scheppard.”

“Is he still there?”

“She. I have no idea, but if I had to guess, she wasn’t even forty at the time. I don’t know if she’d still be at Silver Oaks, but she’s probably still in practice at least.”

“Good, that’s helpful. I mean, if we need her—I doubt we will. Any continuing treatment?”

“Twice a week therapy at first, then once a week, but only for the next year and a half or so.”

“No psych treatment at all since then?” I asked.

“I went back to therapy for about six months after Molly first died, but it wasn’t like before. I didn’t shut down or anything like that. I think the coping skills I learned at Silver Oaks probably helped me get through it. Plus I had to take care of Buckley. The only time I’ve seen a shrink in the past two years was to go with Buckley when her counselor
thought a family session was in order. Is the prosecution really allowed to use this against me?”

I told Jack I wouldn’t put it past them, but the threat of the government discovering his hospitalization wasn’t actually why I was here. If anyone was going to use this evidence in court, it would be me, to try to make out an insanity defense. But for now, I wasn’t thinking about the trial. “I need you to sign these forms so I can access your treatment records.”

“That’s not necessary—”

My response was firm. “It would be malpractice for me not to pursue this. We can’t be caught off guard.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Olivia. It was so long ago, right after we broke up. I said some things—”

“This isn’t about us. I’ve got a million things to do for your defense other than scour twenty-year-old medical records for your comments about our relationship.”

I handed him my pen, but he didn’t take it.

“Jack, it’s no big deal. I just need to have this stuff ready to go if the prosecution happens to brings it up.”

He took the pen and signed the most expansive medical release I keep on file. I could get whatever information I wanted. I could find out exactly how sweet, sensitive, fragile Jack responded when things went really bad.

I MADE IT TO LISSA’S
in time for the post-lunch, predinner lull. An older couple read the
New York Times
together at a corner table. The only other customers were both regulars, perched at opposite ends of the bar. “Where’s the boss?” I asked.

“Ran downstairs,” one explained. “I’m minding the store, so feel free to whip up your own drink; I’ll add it to your tab.”

I was tempted, but Melissa’s martinis were better than mine despite years of attempted replication.

Melissa appeared hugging three bottles of Hendrick’s to her chest. Once the bottles were safe on the counter, she leaned over the bar for a quick kiss on the cheek. “Must be some kind of psychic connection that made me grab all that gin.”

“Just set aside one of those bottles and write my name on it. I’m about to get drunk.”

I gulped down half of a martini in three sips while she topped off the wineglasses of the two regulars. When she came back to me, she was carrying yesterday’s edition of the
Daily News.
“You probably already saw this, but I saved it for you. Maybe I should hire you as my marketing person.”

The
News
front page was the first since the shooting that had used one of Jack’s publicity head shots instead of his booking photo. With his green eyes staring straight into the camera and a half smile, he looked impossibly harmless.
HARRIS CRIES FOUL, COMES OUT SWINGING
. Although I had already skimmed all the local coverage of the case since the bail hearing, I opened to the full article to take another quick read while Melissa summarized. “The reporter even interviewed a John Jay professor who says the state’s in trouble if all they have is the gunshot residue.” Melissa tapped her finger on the third paragraph. “He says it won’t be hard for—quote—a legal team as sophisticated as Ellison and Randall—unquote—to create reasonable doubt. We’ll see just how sophisticated you are by the time I’m done with you,” she said, starting to shake another drink for me. “So does the fact that you’re here getting drunk mean that Jack got settled into his apartment okay?”

She knew I’d been nervous about something going wrong with his release at the last minute. “No problem.” Except he might actually be guilty and I just tricked him into waiving his privacy rights so I could get a look at the side of him he never wanted me to know.

“And his kid?” Melissa asked.

“Buckley? She’s fine. I thought she was sort of bratty when I first met her, but she’s basically a daddy’s girl.”

“That’s good. Didn’t seem like Jack to raise a brat.”

I thought about Ryan texting me the other night, saying it “wasn’t like me” to go to bed early. It was just a saying, but he didn’t know what I was like, and Melissa and I didn’t know what Jack was like. Not anymore.

I took a big sip from my second glass and finally got to the subject that had me drinking so eagerly. “He had pictures of me in his closet, Melissa. In an old box.”

“Well, is it really that surprising? You were engaged. He’s not going to throw away all evidence that you ever existed.”

“Then how come he never called?”

“Maybe he just didn’t see the point. It was too painful or something. And then he met Molly, so was he going to mess that up by suddenly healing old wounds with his ex-fiancée? He just moved on. It’s what people do.”

It’s what most people did. Not me, at least not romantically. Short version: I started out okay with Kevin, the Roseburg High quarterback who deflowered me in the back of his pickup my junior year in high school after a year of patient but heavy petting. He cried when I left for college, where I got by on late-night hookups before settling in with Jack the end of sophomore year.

Since Jack, there were a lot of variations on my current situation with Ryan, meaning nothing serious and more than a little dysfunctional. I did manage one other long-term relationship: four years with Jared (in-house counsel at an insurance company), who even floated the idea of marriage, but only on the condition that I set aside what he called my “all-consuming ambition.” Instead of leaving, I turned our relationship into a professional rivalry. Rather than accept my ring and commence with cake tasting, I hardened my efforts to kick ass at work, no matter the personal consequences, so I could make partner in big law, the way Jared never had. But then that hadn’t worked out, either. I lost the job and eventually Jared.

I only really tried one more time after that. Chuck was a good guy, much kinder than Jared. But I met him when I was just starting to work for Don. The learning curve was excruciating, and Melissa had personally vouched for me with her uncle. I was terrified of losing my job, so I kept choosing Don and our clients over me and Chuck. After too many canceled vacations and no-shows for dinner, Chuck made the mistake of saying he was tired of feeling “like the woman” in our relationship. In a wine-fueled rage, I decided to show him what emasculation by me actually felt like. I said things that couldn’t be taken back.

Maybe other people move on, but I hadn’t. I moved more in circles. Sometimes when I thought about the connections from one man to the next, I thought that being alone was predestined.

I’ve never been able to explain why I did what I did to Jack. The best I can do is to say it was because he was
too
nice—at least for me. Just like Jack said, his kindness made it impossible for me to leave him.

What did my mother say after Jack’s first trip to Oregon? “I don’t know how you got someone so nice to fall in love with you.”

“BUT HE MUST NOT HAVE
moved on completely,” I said now to Melissa. “Not if he had those pictures. Buckley even said something about Molly finding them once and flipping out. And he still kept them.”

“Olivia, I swear, if you of all people start crying, I’m cutting you off. And not to be rude, but ever since he got arrested, we haven’t had a single conversation that would pass the Bechdel test.”

We’d learned about the test in college, probably from Charlotte. A woman in a cartoon by Alison Bechdel said she’d only see a movie if it had two women in it who talked to each other about something besides a man. If either Melissa or I droned on too long about a guy, the other would invoke the rule and change the subject.

“I’m not talking about some man. I’m talking about
Jack
. Not even, but about my instincts about Jack.”

“What’s going on here? You can’t possibly be thinking about you two starting—”

“Oh, of course not. I’m actually wondering if he might have kept the pictures for a different reason. What if—what if I really
broke
him? He was always so fragile.” Jack saw rejection and humiliation in even the smallest slights. But on the night we broke up, the hardship wasn’t imagined. Me. Owen’s crash. The psych ward. His first book, written three years later, basically about what a bitch I am.

“How many times have we had this conversation? He had a breakdown. His brother died. But everything worked out—”

“You’re not hearing me. What if it didn’t all work out? What if Jack never got put back together again? I’m rethinking everything I thought I knew about him. Like that mix tape. It seemed sweet at the time, and now it seems a little obsessive. Maybe this side of him was always there, and I pushed him over the edge.”

“Okay, now that’s just stupid. Take anything that’s sweet for a twenty-year-old guy, and it’s like serial killer shit on a forty-year-old. Dungeons and Dragons. Pet lizards. The Doors. Making those stupid Monty Python voices. Collecting . . . anything. Need I go on?”

“Stop it, I’m serious.”

“Come on, that was funny.” I wasn’t budging. “Where’s this coming from, Olivia?”

I wanted to answer the question. I wanted to tell her that it was possible for GSR to linger on clothing for a month, but extremely rare. That Jack probably knew Malcolm Neeley would be at the football field that morning. That good people like Ross Connor and Scott Temple were telling me that maybe I didn’t know Jack as well as I thought I did.