“Think about this,” she’d said. “Knights wore suits of armor that weighed a hundred and ten pounds. It took two times as much energy for them to walk around, much less fight to the death. A modern soldier in Afghanistan hauls around sixty pounds on his back in brutal desert conditions. But he does it. Your new leg feels heavy, but it weighs, what? Five pounds? Much that shouldn’t be possible is, Odette. Most of the time, the difference between my patients who push against all the odds and the ones who do not comes down to something inside that cannot be defined. You define yourself.”

Get the fuck up. Don’t whine. That’s essentially what she was telling me in session two. You’d think my father would love her. Over the next month, she became relentless with EMDR—Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing—a technique being used aggressively on cops and combat veterans with PTSD.

My eyes tracked the blue pencil she moved from side to side. I closed them and listened to her fingernail tap-tap-tap against glass.

What happened next, what happened next, what happened next? How do you feel, how do you feel, how do you feel? Why, why, why? The more I processed my scary movie, she promised, the less of a rough cut it would be. The more it would feel like any old movie I’d seen a hundred times. I’d be able to recite it and not feel like I’d been hurled around in a dryer.

Except I always left her office red-eyed and limp, feeling every bit.

The day after session seven, I overheard my father on the phone: “You’re destroying her. What the hell are you trying to get her to say?”

He never took me back.

I always wondered: What if I’d watched the reel of my movie with her one more time? Two more times? Three more times? What else might I have seen through the crack of the door that Wyatt held open for seconds? Would I be able to recite the license plate of the sedan that sat in the dark by the barn? She had been adamant to me, to my father, that this wasn’t hypnosis.

Did she always think I knew something?

Did she believe I played a part in killing Trumanell?

That guilty little worm is always there. Every night, every day, I wonder if underneath the smiles and platitudes, everybody thinks I’m something more.

24

Johnnie Walker can cut through any crap. Dr. Greco has poured us two fingers. She’s going to sit back and wait, like always.

We’re seated on a back balcony that extends ten feet over a rocky drop-off. Dizzying. I can’t fight the sense that if I set my glass down just a little too hard, the back half of the house will crack off and us with it.

The whiskey bottle was in place, my chair adjusted and poised to look straight into the bitter lemon of the sun, before I even pulled in. Her own chair is a good five feet away, a sign of well-earned paranoia about the human race.

After, Hello, Odette, the first thing she asked was if I was still a cop. The second was if I had a gun on me. I had turned slowly on her porch, full circle, arms extended. Her eyes scoured my Lycra workout gear, where there were no secrets to hide. I nodded to the truck, the host of my small arsenal, and that seemed to settle her mind.

As she leans in now to pick up her glass, her thin cotton shirt clings to her hip, outlining the geometry of her own gun. The sun is bleaching out all her fine lines but hunting down every single thread of gray. She looks at least sixty. Ten years ago, in a cover story about the most eligible women in Dallas, a magazine pegged her at thirty-five.

She crosses her legs. Even all this time later, I remember her tell. It means she’s surprising me. She’s going to speak first after all.

“It’s not like I’ve forgotten you, Odette. Or haven’t felt regret that I couldn’t help you more. You made an interesting choice, becoming a cop. Returning to the town that almost ate you alive. I would not have predicted that. I’d love to discuss your choices.”

“I’m not here for me,” I say bluntly. “I’m here to ask …”

The voice in my head is saying stop.

Adjust your chair so you aren’t squinting.

Scoot it closer.

Ease in.

Don’t start with your father.

Angel’s face flashes in my brain and a picture of someone else, a little boy I haven’t thought of in years.

“There used to be a child in your waiting room who was mute,” I say slowly. “A boy. We talked. Or rather, we both didn’t talk. We played Hangman. And Tic-Tac-Toe. He liked … to see my leg. I want to ask about him.”

“Is he involved in one of your cases?” She holds up a hand. “Don’t answer that. I can’t talk about one of my patients, current or not. I’d think you’d know that.”

“This isn’t about him specifically,” I persist. “I want to understand what makes a child mute.”

She lets out a hoarse laugh. “Get in line. Like everything else, it’s often a mystery, specific to each child. Why come to me, Odette? There are books. Thousands of other psychologists, not retired. Something called ‘the Internet.’ I took on the occasional case, but I don’t pretend to be an expert in this field.”

I shrug. “You’re an expert in screwed-up children. I need a young girl to talk to me, and she won’t.”

“You’ll have to give me a little more than that.”

“OK, this is about a case,” I say cautiously. “An unidentified girl who has been almost perfectly silent since she was found. She’s been … physically traumatized. I need her to talk.”

“You need her to talk? Or you want her to?”

“I can’t protect her from what I can’t see coming.”

“You know the reality of that better than anyone. What’s coming is always unimaginable, and by that, I mean just that. It cannot be imagined. What’s coming never acts or behaves the way we think it will.” There is a bitter tinge to the last sentence. I don’t remember her this way.

“I’m not here for me,” I repeat.

“I don’t believe that. But, all right, Odette, I’ll play along. Is this girl expressionless? Nonreactive? Antisocial?”

“No. Very smart. Very aware. Things show in her face. I feel like she’s assessing everything around her all the time. She’s sweet … with little children.”

“You’ve known her how long?”

“Two days.”

“You said she was ‘almost perfectly silent.’ How much has she said?”

“One word.”

“Are you pressing her?”

“Yes.”

“Well, stop. In my experience, mute kids don’t choose to stop speaking. They desperately want to but can’t. Most people know what they know about mute kids through movies. Hannibal Lecter sees his sister killed and eaten when he’s a kid, so he stops speaking for a while as a way to control his world. The Fifty Shades guy, Christian Grey, gets stuck with his mother’s dead body at a young age. Poor little assholes, right? How could they have possibly turned out any different? This concept of mutism, of elective mutism, not speaking as an act of rebellion against life, is pretty much bullshit. With her, I’d say it’s too soon to tell. I’m curious, what word did she say?”

“Dandelion.”

“How did she look after she said it?”

“She looked scared. A little angry. A little like her voice hurt her ears.”

“Do you know why that word might be important to her?”

“No idea.”

“I suggest giving her a diary. Observe her body language and determine what topics, objects, words, and sounds make her emotional. Find out if there are certain people or things she is speaking to. You said she liked children, so maybe a child. A dog. That Amazon thingamajig, Alexa. There is no typical case. A kid might be able to talk to strangers or to a computer freely but not be able to say a word to the person she loves most.”

The sun is striking the whiskey bottle like a sword. She pours another gold stream into my glass even though it is still a quarter full.

“I remember one devastating case.” The liquor has stretched out her drawl. “It was a colleague’s, not mine. A child was told by her mother that she’d drown her in the bathtub if she ever revealed a family secret. So every time this little girl heard her own voice, it terrified her. She was afraid the secret was going to jump out like a frog from a pond. Every time she tried to speak, she began to choke. Couldn’t breathe. She felt like she was already underwater in that bathtub her mother promised to drown her in. So she shut up for good.”

I’m swimming a little underwater myself. The sun and alcohol have set off a reeling, nauseating light show.

“What happened to her?” I ask.

“She stabbed her parents in the throat. Killed them while they slept. It didn’t help her speak. She’s never told the secret. Never spoken at all. Got a bad jury and a bad judge. She’s serving life.”

Dr. Greco is jiggling the ice in her glass, a nervous rattle.

“What really brought you here, Odette?” This steel in her voice that slices out of nowhere—this is what I remember.

“I want to know why my father had your private phone number in a locked drawer,” I fire back impulsively. “I want to know what you talked about, and if it had anything to do with Trumanell.”

“Then this will be a very short conversation,” she replies. “Because your father never called.”

I’m wiping bits of my vomit off the checkers of the doctor’s black-and-white bathroom tile. How many times did the doctor’s hand wrap around the Johnnie Walker bottle and pour? Three times? Four?

She told me to call her Andy, not Andrea, not Dr. Greco, but that seems wrong, too familiar. At some point, the conversation had turned. I can’t remember how I let that happen. Broken pieces of it are floating by in my head.