"I know." I said "I appreciate what you are going through. Believe me, we want only the best for the both of you, for all of you."
"Well, let's see how she is." she told me. and I brought her to visit with Grace, who was sitting on a bench in the garden and reading.
Grace knew her mother was coming, of course. She and I had discussed it. I had not dared tell her my fears, but she knew from speaking with her mother that Jackie Lee anticipated taking her home, if not now, very soon. When Grace told me about the conversations. .I said nothing more than a "We'll see." I was afraid of what I would say if I added any more. Apparently, she understood.
"You look wonderful." Jackie Lee declared the moment Grace lifted her eves from the pages of the book she was reading. "What a difference between the girl I brought here and the girl I'm now looking at, wouldn't you agree. Dr. De Beers?" she asked.
Grace and I looked at each other.
"There's been some marked improvement, yes." I said. Stressing the word some,
"Um," Jackie Lee grunted.
"I'll leave you two for a while," I said, backing away, "I have to attend to some matters."
"Go on. Doctor. Thank you." Jackie Lee said, smiling at Grace. "I can see we don't need you hovering over us."
She sat beside Grace, who looked at me with some desperation in her eyes. I nodded, smiled at her, and left them, my heart pounding with anxiety. My feelings were mixed, of course. and I was at myself again, chastising myself for being so selfish as to want to keep a patient longer than she might need to be kept. I made up my mind that I would have Ralston treat her for a while so he could make an evaluation.
I am writing all this as if it is only my story. In the beginning of all this. I did not fully consider Grace's feelings, Willow. She was just as troubled by mixed emotions and desires as I was. On the one hand. I was sure she very much wanted to be considered well enough to go home. She certainly wanted either me or Dr. Price to confirm that she was capable of raising her child.
On the other hand, she was truly in love with me, and she never felt safer than she did with me at the clinic. In our own little world, no demon could enter and spoil anything. The curse she had come to believe was on her and followed her through most of her young life was stopped outside the door. I was too powerful for it. It dared not show its dark face.
"I can love you and not be afraid for you or far myself." she told me once.
There was that contradiction in me again. Willow. The doctor part of me insisted that was not valid. She would be just as safe anywhere and I had no special powers, certainly no powers to overcome some curse, and if there was one thing I didn't want to do as a psychotherapist, it was to provide her with another crutch. However. I would be lying if I didn't confess that the other part of me, the man. the lover, wanted to encourage such thoughts because I knew they would keep her close to me.
What would end such a grand struggle for my and her destinies? Apparently, at the end of that first visit, I knew it wasn't going to be Jackie Lee, Grace either pretended or really believed she was not quite ready to be released and return. She convinced her mother that she was still too fragile. I believed that, too. but I needed to have it validated, and so I told her I was going to have her see Dr. Price for the next few weeks. There was a danger in that, of course. Ralston was a talented man, a very perceptive man. He might very well discover the true relationship between Grace and me. and I wasn't ready for him to know that, nor was she.
The fact is she fell into a bad depression when she began her sessions with him. Not only didn't she make any new progress, she began to regress and to the point where he confronted me.
"Why did you want me to take this patient new. Claude?" he asked me. "You were doing so well with her. Now she's practically the way she was the day she arrived."
I referred to my original intention, talking about Jackie Lee and how she was pressuring me to release Grace. I wanted to be sure I was doing the right thing by resisting. He was too clever to buy into that completely. I could see it in the way he tilted his head and gave me his famous. "Umm."
"Well, I'm afraid I'm not doing well with h
er. Claude. She has a better rapport with you. I would advise you to continue her therapy. She's built a trust with you, a bridge that I'm only blocking.
"As for the mother, you're handling her correctly," he concluded, and Grace returned to me.
After that I spent more and more time at the clinic, taking advantage of Alberta's new and heavier involvement in her social activities since being elected president of her favorite club. She was out planning fundraisers, socials, networking with other women and other organizations, especially charities. She was almost weekly in the social pages of our newspapers and featured twice on our local television stations.
One afternoon Grace and I took one of our now famous walks, only we didn't stop at the crest nor did we stop at the river's edge. We continued on until we found a beautiful area shaded by trees. I knew we had gone too far from the clinic, and it would take us too long to return, but it was a magnificent, beautiful day with the sort of sky artists envision, the blue deep and rich, the few clouds puffy and milk white.
We sat on a soft patch of grass and watched a flock of birds do amazing gymnastic-like turns and circles. It was as though they were performing for us.
"When we first moved to our estate on the beach," Grace said, "I used to go out at night and lay on the sand and look up at the starry sky. Soon I would feel like I was falling into it, like I was above the stars."
She lay back and put her hands behind her head and looked up at the clouds.
"Try it," she told me. and I lay beside her.
"Yes," I said. laughing. It works."
We were both very still, hardly breathing for fear of shattering the moment.
"What will become of us. Claude?" she finally asked me. "You will get stronger and you will return to your boy." I said.