“When you say that you can’t remember your mother, do you mean just her face?”
Owen Minor shook his head, annoyed because this was the fifth or sixth different way the therapist asked the same question. The woman simply could not get the idea straight.
“No,” he said with the kind of false patience foster kids learn for all such sessions. The key was always to walk the line between calm self-assurance and acceptable emotionality. Never too cold, never too enthusiastic. Not too much grief, or love, or anger, or anything. The key was to be, or at least appear to be, balanced. In control. Safe. “No, it’s just that I don’t remember much about her at all.”
The therapist, Mrs. Green, was a goat-faced forty-something with too much nose, not enough chin, and ears that stuck out like open car doors. Her face might have been comical if she had a shred of personality. Mrs. Green glanced at his file.
“She passed away three years ago?”
“Yeah,” he said and then corrected it. “Yes, ma’am.”
“And you were nine?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mrs. Greene nodded. “Do you have photos of her?”
“Sure,” said Owen. “I have a bunch of them.”
“Then how can you not remember what she looked like?”
Owen clenched his fists in his lap, careful that his crossed leg hid them. He wanted to punch her, to slap her. Instead he took a breath, adjusted his tone, and said, “I know what she looked like. But I can’t remember her.”
“What about her can’t you—?”
“Everything,” said Owen. “I know I had a mother. I know I lived with her until she died. I know there was a funeral and all. I know what I should know, but I don’t remember her. I remember where I grew up—the house, my bedroom, the living room furniture, the color of the kitchen walls. I can remember going to school. I remember my teachers. I can remember the lady who lived next door—Gracie Thompson. But I don’t remember my mother being any part of all that.” He paused, fishing for what he thought she would want to hear. “I want to remember her. Why can’t I?”
Owen was happy with the amount of emotion he put into his voice. He watched her eyes and saw when her professional detachment turned to compassion. That would influence her report for the foster agency.
He was twelve but he understood how the whole thing worked.
He was not particularly upset at the loss of all memories associated with his mother. They had been fading since she died, and from what he read in his diary, she’d been a slut, a drunk, and a shit. It was better not to have to lug around any memories that related to the stuff in that journal. The beatings. The nights he had to spend in the closet because of something he did that she didn’t like. Or when she made him sit in the cold parked car while she had a guy over. Sometimes she gave him a blanket and a box of Trix to munch on, mostly she forgot to even bother. He remembered sitting in the car, but he didn’t remember her. Not even a moment of her. Nothing.
Owen sat and listened as the therapist explained traumatic memory loss, and variations on the stages of grief, and all of the other stuff she’d been trained to say. He’d read up on what to expect from people like her. He was prepared and had rehearsed what to say and how to inflect it.
She talked.
He sat.
She tried to reach him.
And he let her think she had.
The only hard part was trying not to smile.