Page 61 of What Boys Learn

II

22

Ihad a friend in grad school—Marta, from Colombia—a single, middle-aged student who had a teenage daughter. At the end of our first semester, Marta’s daughter, Camila, was sent to an inpatient hospital program for anorexia, a condition Camila had suffered with since the age of eleven.

I remember asking Marta if she was doing all right, assuming that this latest turn was creating stress at the worst possible time, just as she was facing our first exams and term paper deadlines. But Marta surprised me. She said that the moment her daughter was checked in to the program, she felt better than she’d felt in years, even though Camila was at her lowest weight and Marta had urgent concerns about kidney and liver damage.

“I was just so grateful to have someone else in charge,” she told me. “I could finally trust someone else to be watching and weighing and asking all the questions Camila hated me asking. Her life and her future had been in my hands, every minute for months. A person can only take that for so long.”

I’d always thought I’d understood hypervigilance, but I understood it even better now. I couldn’t last an hour without thinking of Izzy and Sidney or googling for any news about the police investigations, and in between those moments I couldn’t stop listening for a knock at the door. The sound of a closing car door inevitably sent me racing to the window, sure I’d see several patrol cars had pulled up—lights off, stealthy, ready with a warrant and a reason for carting Benjamin away, perhaps permanently.

But things would get better. Finally, I had help. Finally,wehad a new routine. It started every day with a drive to Lake Forest.

“How’d it go?” I asked Benjamin after picking him up at Curtis’s office.

He shrugged.

It was the same reaction I’d gotten since day one, but now we’d made it through three and he was still attending afternoon therapy sessions without protest.

“Talk about anything interesting?”

“Not really.” He shifted in his seat, turning toward me, as if something had just come to mind. “Actually, we talked about how weird it is when people get fixated on things.”

“Like what?” He was smiling.

“Go on,” I said. “Tell me.”

“I told him about the time you came home barefoot, going on about some girl.”

I didn’t think Benjamin had noticed, especially given the larger drama happening that evening, when Robert had picked him up for breaking and entering.

Benjamin said, “I told him how you gave her your shoes.”

“Because she didn’t have any.”

“And how you took a photo of her and kept staring at it.”

I nodded. So this was how Benjamin was using up at least some of his time, evading more pertinent and personal issues.

“Can we go now?” he asked.

The car was running but I hadn’t backed out of my parking spot on Curtis’s long gravel driveway.

“In a minute. Did Dr. Campbell analyze my . . . what did you call it. My fixation?”

“That’s confidential.”

I laughed. “Confidentiality runs the other direction. He owes it to you. You don’t owe it to him.”

I had a feeling Benjamin knew that. He was just being a smart-ass.

I wasn’t going to overthink why Benjamin had brought up something so tangential, either to Dr. Campbell or to me. His new therapist would get wise to his deflection tactics.

I could deflect, too. I said, “Dr. Campbell’s got a nice place, doesn’t he? Three buildings.”

I looked past the spruce-green signboard with Curtis’s name etched in golden script next to the twin outbuildings. One of them was Curtis’s two-room office. The other was slightly larger, with clerestory windows up high near the roofline and a welcome mat at the side door. A mother-inlaw apartment, maybe. Farther back on the lot, the main house was bigger, but not too big—a historic property, built before the days of McMansions, with ivy-covered stone walls.

“Those smaller buildings are called carriage houses,” I told Benjamin as we pulled away. “From the days of horses and carriages. Pretty amazing, huh?”