Dr. Ellen Jacoby's office was on the garden level of a brownstone in the North Slope, uncomfortably close to school. As Quinn and her mother waited out front to be buzzed in, Quinn kept her head down, long hair falling forward, and tapped a spiral notebook against her thigh.
The buzzer sounded. "Dr. Jacoby's supposed to be excellent," Katherine said, reaching for the door. "We were lucky to get an appointment."
"Dad told me."
A tall woman with close-cropped, grayish-blond hair and rectangular tortoiseshell glasses met them in the entryway. "Please, call me Ellen," she said. "Or Dr. Jacoby. Whichever you're more comfortable with." After a few words with Katherine about logistics, she led Quinn down a narrow hall to her office. She wore a slim gray skirt and silky orange blouse, all tailored and professional.
Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled two walls of the room; the back wall was mostly glass and had a door leading to a small, densely planted garden. The room itself was refined and precise. The only other type of therapy Quinn had ever been in was speech therapy when she was little, to help with a lisp, and now she remembered how chaotic that office had been—toys and dolls and bright colors everywhere. So different from this office, which was right out of one of her mother's design magazines. Ellen—no, Dr. Jacoby—sat in one of two modern armchairs and smiled. "Sit wherever you like," she said. Quinn picked the other chair instead of the sofa, because it let her look outside. She tried to calm herself by identifying the different plants in the garden: azalea, coleus, hosta ...
Dr. Jacoby started out by telling Quinn that everything she said in the office was completely private.
"This is a safe space," she said. "If you decide you want to keep working together, I'm not even going to tell your parents what we talk about, unless I'm worried you might harm yourself. I'll be here for you, and no one else."
She had a steady, calm voice and seemed warmer than Quinn would have imagined from her appearance. Quinn almost wished she were more businesslike, more doctorly and authoritative. She didn't need a friend or confidant; she needed answers.
Dr. Jacoby asked what had brought Quinn to see her. "Your mother's told me a bit," she said, adjusting her glasses. "But I'd like to hear it in your words. Tell me what's going on and what you're hoping to get out of our time together, if you decide you'd like to continue."
"You know I'm pregnant?"
"I do. But assume I know nothing. Start at the beginning."
Quinn told the story of the doctors' appointments, and how she hadn't even believed she was pregnant at all. "Now, of course, I know that I must have had sex, even though I don't remember it, which is really impossibly weird. So I guess that I was probably raped and don't remember, because I was drugged and blacked out, or because I have post-traumatic stress disorder." After her bath, she'd spent a couple of hours researching online and making notes. She kept telling herself her father was right—there had to be a rational explanation. And those were the two rational options she'd come up with: raped while drugged or PTSD. With PTSD, your brain could apparently repress something that was too upsetting to know. "And I'm in therapy because I need you to help me remember. I'm not sure if we'll be able to find the man and press charges, but just so we all know, me and my parents. For peace of mind." She paused, and when Dr. Jacoby didn't immediately respond, she added, "Is that enough?" Saying all of this out loud—the very idea of having been raped—made her stomach crawl up her throat.
"If you're finished."
"I guess."
"So, what I'm hearing is that you've found yourself in this seemingly impossible situation and you want to find out how it happened. That you feel you need to know both for yourself, and for your parents."
"Right," Quinn said. "And I've already started doing some stuff." She opened up her notebook. She'd gone through everything she could think of—old emails and texts and posts online and notebooks from school—and had filled out a chart of her activity those two weeks, as well as possible. "It happened during this time frame," she explained. "So, if you hypnotize me and ask about those events, maybe I'll remember."
Quinn had circled a few things on the chart, like her art teacher's gallery opening and a music festival in Prospect Park that she'd been at with Jesse and their friends. She pointed at the entries. "Like, these two nights I don't remember how I got home. So if I was walking alone, at night ..."
Dr. Jacoby spent a minute reading the pages. Quinn bounced her knee up and down, nervous, as if she was expecting her to immediately deduce what had happened.
Instead, Dr. Jacoby handed the notebook back, saying, "Let's put that aside for now. Okay?"
"Uh, okay. I know that there are a lot of empty time slots, but I did the best I could."
"You remembered a lot, Quinn. And although we'll definitely talk about what was going on in your life, and the work you've done will help, I'm not going to hypnotize you. I'm not sure if you know, but that's something only certain therapists do, and I'm not one of them."
"But ... isn't that the way, you know, to get memories back? That's what I read online."
"Memory is a slippery fish, Quinn. Very complex. If you really are forgetting what happened, we can try to help you remember in healthier ways."
"What do you mean, 'if' I'm forgetting what happened?" Quinn asked, her chest twisting.
"Let's talk about that. You say you have no memory of what happened, yet you sound pretty certain you were raped. I'm wondering how you came to such a firm conclusion?"
Quinn thought of the ridiculous ideas she'd had. Alien abduction—please! "It's the only logical thing." She rubbed her pendant. "Right? What else would explain it?"
"Well, the most obvious possibility is that something happened with your boyfriend."
"We've never had sex, I swear. Or even come close." She was so sick of having to say that. "So since that really, really can't be it, what other option is there, aside from rape?"
"Does anything come to your mind?"
"I don't know. I ..." This wasn't what Quinn was here for! She needed answers, not more questions. "When my mom told you what was going on, what did you think? How did you think it might have happened?"
Dr. Jacoby seemed to consider this for a second. "My first thought in a situation like this—about any girl in your position, not you specifically—would be that something accidental happened while she was being intimate with her boyfriend, as I already said. Or that she might not be ready to talk about something that happened with her boyfriend or with someone else."
"Lying?" Quinn said. "Why does everyone keep thinking I'm lying? I'm not. I swear."
"There are lots of reasons we all hold back the truth sometimes," Dr. Jacoby said. "Good, valid reasons. It wouldn't be any sort of reflection on you as a person, Quinn."
"But I'm not lying. I don't know how it happened! How am I supposed to figure it out if I'm telling the truth and none of you want to hear it?"
As Dr. Jacoby assured her that she wanted to hear whatever Quinn wanted to tell her, Quinn couldn't get enough air. She pressed a hand on her collarbone. "I really need this to not be more complicated," she said in a choked voice. "I just need us to figure out when I was raped, or whatever. Okay?"
Dr. Jacoby offered her a glass of water Quinn hadn't even seen her get. "Breathe a deep breath through your nose," she said.
Quinn did.
"And another."
She kept breathing and drinking. Her face was so hot she had to resist an urge to pour the cold water over her head.
"Quinn," Dr. Jacoby said, more softly, "I can't imagine how overwhelming this must be."
Quinn nodded, fighting back tears.
"By no means am I saying that you might not have been raped. I just want to keep our discussions as open as possible. And I don't want our sessions to only be about solving this mystery. You're going through some major emotional and physical stresses. I want to help you develop coping strategies for all of that."
"So, if you won't hypnotize me, what are we going to do?"
"Talk. Follow trains of thought. See what comes up for you, both emotionally and as far as memories go. Not just from those two weeks, but from anytime."
"Wait," Quinn said, agitated again. "Are you one of those therapists who's going to spend the whole time asking about my childhood? Because that has nothing to do with this. I need to talk about those two weeks, not about being a kid!"
"We'll talk about whatever you want," Dr. Jacoby said. "But our childhoods do affect how we react to later events, so we might find it useful to explore it."
"And you really think just talking will help? Because I need to know. Soon. Like, as soon as possible."
"I can't make you any specific promises. All I can promise is that I'm going to do my best to give you a place where you'll feel comfortable talking in ways you might not anywhere else. And I'm confident that will lead us somewhere." She paused. "I don't want you to get frustrated if it seems like things aren't moving quickly. With repressed memory situations, if that's what this is, there's really no way of predicting when it will come back. It will happen when you're good and ready."
"But I'm ready," Quinn said. "I'm ready now."
