“Very wise decision to change schools,” she said.
I really didn’t want to talk about myself. I had done enough of that with my own therapist and my father. I also was afraid I had become one of those special cases for psychiatrists, one that would be cited in textbooks or something.
“Does anyone you treat ever really get better?” I asked aggressively, to make it clear that I wasn’t here for myself.
I could see that her training enabled her to deflect the slings and arrows in my tone and question.
She shrugged. “I think it’s a matter of degree rather than stamping someone with approval and saying he or she has been completely cured. Some are like cancer patients and go into remission. We hope it will last, but there is a high percentage of regression, too.”
“And where does my sister fit into that analysis?”
She smiled. I was forcing her to get right down to it. No dilly-dallying here.
“There are, and I suspect always have been, significant differences between the two of you, no matter how you were raised and what you were told. Your sister is nowhere near as direct, for one,” she said, and leaned forward. “She subtle, she’s conniving, and she’s very clever. She has an excellent eye for reading the situation and adjusting it to her benefit. But,” she said, sitting back again, “I suspect you knew all this.”
“It doesn’t sound like you think she’s improved.”
“Honestly, I’m not completely sold one way or the other, which is why I think you’re important in this now. I can observe and confront her in therapy forever and not have the insight you have when it comes to her and, I imagine, she has when it comes to you. That much about the two of you I will grant your mother.”
“You’re going to blame her, too?”
“I don’t think it’s of any real value to us now to assign blame. I always found guilt to be a tricky thing. Nothing is really black-and-white when it comes to that.” She smiled. “It doesn’t help to say ‘the devil made me do it,’ either. I think the thing about our relationships is how much we share in creating them and the results that follow. When they’re negative, the relief we experience comes only from being honest with ourselves, first and foremost. If Eve wasn’t vain, she never would have listened to the snake.”
“But who made her vain?”
“So we continue to spread the guilt around, look for ways to escape the truth about ourselves. To get to the point, I think your sister has cut back on that. I’m not saying completely, but maybe enough to face and accept responsibility. With that could come regret, and with regret comes a desperate need for forgiveness.”
“Forgiveness?”
“Which brings us to you.”
“And what you want to know from this visit is if I am capable of forgiving her?”
“Something like that. You have to want to, of course. You’re in control, Kaylee. What you want and what you do will determine how this eventually goes for yourself but also for Haylee and your parents.”
“So no matter what I suffered, the pressure shifts to me? I’ll receive either compliments or blame?”
“Isn’t that always true? In the end, the victim either decides to go on hating, seeking revenge, or he or she lets go. The victim has to accept that society has dealt justice, but to continue wanting more only keeps the violence and abuse done to him or her alive. Don’t you want to bury it, too?”
I looked down. I was determined to be hard and reluctant, no matter what, but the reasonableness of what she was saying was too overpowering.
“She has to be sorry,” I said. “To be really sorry.”
“Oh, I agree with that. And no matter what tests I put her through and what the opinions of my associates, to my way of thinking, especially in this case, only you can decide if she is. What I will tell you is that she has suffered, too. The catatonic condition you witnessed was triggered by her inability to face the truth, the responsibility.”
“I thought she was angry that I didn’t look as devastated as she’d hoped,” I said.
“That, too, but whatever the main cause, it was a form of escape. We had
to treat it, and it didn’t last. All the self-deprecating things she has done while in the institution only reinforced my diagnosis,” she said.
She paused. I looked away. Strangely, I wanted and didn’t want to hear all this at the same time.
“Sure you don’t want something to drink?” she asked.
“Maybe just some water.”
She went to the kitchen. I looked around the living room more closely and saw a picture of people who had to be her parents. I didn’t see pictures of any brother or sister.