Page 101 of What Boys Learn

Don’t thank me, Curtis had said directly after the hypnosis. I didn’t want to thank him, it’s true. But if he was willing to keep my secrets, it meant he’d be willing to keep Benjamin’s, too. That mattered.

The most important thing any mother does for her child is to know when to let go. A better mother would have let go even sooner.

36

“So, let me see if I’m understanding,” Willa said on Monday evening, our normal check-in. “You have a new job, which might lead to an even better job. You got some unexpected money from your last employer. You have a clean apartment that will stay clean, because you’re the only person in it. And you don’t need to worry about your teenage son for the rest of the summer.”

“Two weeks,” I clarified.

It’s what we had agreed on when I brought Benjamin over for what would have been their last therapy session but now, since my about-face, represented the beginning of a new therapeutic phase.

Willa asked, “This isn’t the psychologist you gave your phone number to weeks ago, is it?”

“Yeah. Curtis.”

I’d kept most of the details of Benjamin’s therapy from her, as well as his diagnosis, something I didn’t plan to tell anyone, ever, if I could help it.

“Wasn’t Benjamin trying to get a job at a pool?”

“They told him that members’ kids got first dibs. They put him on a list but his only chance will be if another kid quits.”

“And does Benjamin think he’s going for vacation?”

“No, he knows it’s work camp,” I said with a weak laugh. “You should have seen Benjamin’s face when Dr. Campbell explained everything they’d be doing.”

“He’s ‘Doctor’ now. Didn’t you just call him Curtis a minute ago?”

“There’s some sort of shed to be assembled, aside from the yard work, and Dr. Campbell said he wasn’t going to help. He handed Benjamin a printout of the steps, just as a preview, and I could tell at that moment that Benj shares my phobia of assembly instructions.”

“He’ll figure it out.”

“Yes, I’m sure that’s the point. Make him sweat. Give him challenges. Plus, he has to take a tech break. No phone for the first week.”

“Sounds exactly what every teenager should be made to do. Now tell me about your new job.”

I told her about my first day at Grove, working with a group of six Chinese, two Japanese, two Arabic, and one Spanish student, all of them so fluent in English that we’d have no communication problems—or so I thought until the end of the day, when I realized that quiet Min and even quieter Basma had been nodding automatically to hide their complete lack of comprehension. We’d have six weeks to figure it out. Whether or not they picked up on “study skills and college-prep mental health strategies,” they’d get lots of English immersion.

“If they hire me in the fall, I won’t just be a counselor, I’ll also teach a high school level psychology class. And I’ll oversee a small team of student mental health advocates.”

I trailed off, voice flattening.

“It sounds great, hon. But for some reason, you don’t.”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve been alone,” I told Willa, finally—the truth, but not the whole truth.

After a phlegmy guffaw, Willa said, “For godsake, woman, count your blessings.”

The next day and the one after that were the same. Rewarding days with the international students, followed by too-quiet dinners, at home. Curtis and Benjamin had left Monday afternoon. Today was only Wednesday, and I didn’t feel used to Benjamin’s absence, I only noted it more with every passing hour. Something already felt wrong, and it was more than just a change in routines or an early preview of emptynest syndrome. I regretted the phone detox plan, though I’d believed at first it would be good for Benjamin. I wanted, at the very least, to know they’d made it to Fond du Lac okay. I’d simply have to wait—four more days, possibly, until Curtis had decided the one-week detox had worked and Benjamin could have his phone back.

In the dim, hot silence of my apartment each evening, I had plenty of time to think. I continued to ponder the details of Harper’s murder, and Veronica’s snatching and release, and Robert’s criminal files, which had managed to convert the landscape of my childhood—northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin—into a geography of bodies lost and found.

I thought about the hypnosis transcript, including all the parts I hadn’t remembered. From there my mind traveled further back, looking for proof of my dark side. But it didn’t add up. If I really had antisocial personality disorder, why did I feel so guilty and remorseful about what the transcript had revealed?

And then again, psychopathy was complicated. Now, with more free time, I sifted through some of the latest research online. I read papers that claimed there were different kinds of psychopaths—primary and secondaryvariants, with heterogeneity within each, and primary and secondarysubtypes, and continuums within each. And there were different personalities and different etiologies, or causes, and quite possibly, someday, we’d all be talking about psychopathy as a spectrum, our assumptions reorganized, as they had been already in terms of autism.

Spectrum. Like a rainbow. I tried to find the beauty in that word.

Perhaps Curtis had understood all this. Perhaps it’s what he’d meant when he said he wouldn’t give Benjamin a simplistic label—and wouldn’t have, even if Benjamin were eighteen, the age when the antisocial personality disorder label was sometimes applied. It was fortunate that I’d found a therapist who wouldn’t force Benjamin into a box. In time, the research seemed to be suggesting, the boxes and labels would all be changing anyway.