‘How are you feeling, Nick?’ Tessa sat forward in her seat and opened her notepad.
‘Better,’ he said. ‘At least with the cravings.’
‘Good. That’s great.’ She scribbled something on the pad. ‘Last time you took alcohol?’
Nick thought for a moment. ‘Eleven days ago.’ He thought it best not to mention his little slip-up.
‘And are you using the techniques, are they helping?’
Nick nodded. ‘Yes. I’d say so. I’m back working.’
‘That’s wonderful, Nick. And how about sleep? Are you sleeping okay? Any nightmares?’
‘Not so bad.’ He wondered if she noticed his evasiveness.
She didn’t say anything, put down her pen and came around to his side of the desk. She smiled. ‘You’re doing really well, Nick. Now, whenever you’re ready, you can take a seat.’
Nick sat back into the recliner. His feelings about being regressed, since he’d met Caitlin, were contradictory. He wanted to go back there, to find out more about his wife, Rachel, and his little girl. At the same time, he was afraid of what the sessions might uncover. He wasn’t sure if he could deal with what he might find.
‘Relax your limbs, Nick. Let that calm feeling wash over you, taking with it all the tension, all the anxiety …’ Tessa’s voice, soothing, lulled him backwards in time.
His body grew slack as he followed Tessa into the past.
‘Okay, I’m going to bring you back slowly, Nick. Bit by bit, we’re going to revisit those moments when you felt good – when you didn’t rely on alcohol to bring about a false sense of fulfilment.’
His life begins to unravel – moments glimpsed and then swept away again as his memory is set to rewind.
He’s back in the house in Dalkey again, sitting outside on the terrace that looks over the sea. It’s one of those rare warm days when there isn’t a gale blowing across the bay. He’s relaxing, earbuds in, listening to music, the sun warm on his face. He doesn’t hear Susan come in, jumps when she lays a hand on his arm, and then laughs at his reaction.
‘Hey you,’ she says.
‘Jesus, you gave me a fright,’ he says.
‘Clearly.’ She grins, pulls out the other chair, sits next to him. ‘It’s not a bad life, is it?’ she says.
He smiles. ‘Could be worse.’
‘Or better,’ she says.
He looks at her. She seems in an oddly happy mood. ‘Come on,’ he says, ‘I know you have something to tell me?’
‘Well …’ She leans in towards him. ‘We’re going to be parents.’
He sits up, at first, he doesn’t know how he feels, then the realization hits him. ‘Seriously? My God … when did …?’
‘I’ve suspected for a few weeks, but I didn’t want to say anything. I’ve just been to Doctor Breen and she confirmed it. Roughly eight weeks, she said.’
Susan is looking at him, clearly delighted. She’s had more time to get over the shock, of course. He’s happy too, at least he thinks he is, but he also feels an overwhelming sense of responsibility.
‘You are happy?’ she says, frowning.
‘Yeah, of course, I mean … wow.’ He starts to laugh; his feelings are still ambivalent, but he doesn’t want to spoil it for Susan. It’s not like they hadn’t intended to have a family, they just hadn’t intended to start it this soon. They’d always been careful.
‘I’ve got a scan next Thursday. They won’t be able to tell the sex yet … not for another month or two, but … would you like to know?’
He nods. ‘Why not? That way it’s easier to prepare, isn’t it?’ He doesn’t know why, but he already feels that it’s a girl. With that instinct comes worry, a sense of guilt, and he has no idea why. He would love a girl, would probably be one of those overprotective fathers that wouldn’t let any boy so much as look at her. He tries to shake his inexplicable feeling of guilt, of burden. He’s going to be a father. This is the glue they need, him and Susan, to really make a life.
‘Where are you, Nick?’ Tessa’s voice intrudes on the scene.
‘At home. Susan’s come in. She’s told me we’re going to have a baby.’
‘Does that make you happy?’
‘Yes.’ He’s aware even as he says it that it’s not entirely true, but it’s what people expect him to say. He can’t say that he doesn’t know. That he needs time to figure out if he’s truly happy. And he can’t explain this feeling; this sense of foreboding. He tries to reason with himself, thinks that maybe every new parent feels this … He’s still trying to work it out when the scene flashes forward …
He gets the call at work. It’s Susan’s friend, Anna, telling him to get to the hospital – that something’s happened. He asks her if Susan’s okay. ‘Just get here,’ she says. He checks his mobile: five missed calls from Susan over an hour ago; two more from a number he doesn’t recognize. He gets a text from Anna on the way to the hospital giving him the name of the ward and the number of the room Susan is in.
Susan looks terrible. She’s not crying when he gets there, but it’s clear that she has been. Her face is swollen and red.
‘What happened?’ he says.
Susan looks at him, stonily. ‘This is your fault,’ she says.
He is shocked by the venom with which she spews the words. ‘What … the baby?’
‘Dead,’ she says. ‘The baby’s dead.’
He collapses into the chair that Anna has vacated. She’s standing, awkwardly. ‘I’ll leave you …’ she says.
‘Don’t.’ The word is an order.
‘What happened?’ he tries again. Susan turns on her side away from him. Anna puts a hand on his arm, mouths something sympathetic, but he shakes her off. ‘Where’s the doctor?’ he says.
He accosts a young Filipino nurse who comes into the ward. ‘I want to speak to a doctor.’
‘I’m afraid they’re on the wards,’ she tells him.
‘Well, this is a ward, isn’t it?’ he barks. ‘I want to know what happened here.’
‘I’ll try and call a doctor now,’ the nurse tells him, and is immediately called away by another woman buzzing for assistance. He storms out to the nurse’s station looking for answers since his wife refuses to even look at him.
‘Nick? Are you okay?’ Tessa’s voice again. He reached towards it, wanted her to take him from that place, from that memory. She hadn’t taken him back far enough. She needed to take him back further, to before the bad stuff, before his marriage caved in. Before the blame began.
‘Nick …’ Tessa was calling his name, bringing him out of it.
He began to surface as she counted from one to five, her voice soothing. When he opened his eyes, they stung, and he realized that he’d been crying. Embarrassed, he rubbed at his eyes with the sleeve of his sweater. Tessa told him to take his time, asked him if he’d like a glass of water, but he shook his head and told her he was all right.
At the desk, she sat back and looked at him. ‘Unfortunately, we can’t avoid the bad things, Nick. We need to access them to get to the core of the problem, find out what it is that’s making you want to escape through alcohol.’
‘She blamed me. The baby died, and Susan blamed me. She said I didn’t want it and that the baby knew.’
Tessa nodded. ‘I’m sorry, Nick.’
‘It seemed irrational, but the doctors said it was normal, that she was taking the trauma out on me. But I knew it was more than that, that she was right. It wasn’t that I didn’t want the baby, I wanted it more than anything. But I couldn’t be that baby’s father and I couldn’t figure why … now I think I do. It’s to do with the past. I must have known, in my subconscious, what had happened … what I’d done to Rachel and Caitlin.’
Tessa leaned her elbows on the desk, looked at him from over the steeple of her fingers. She didn’t say anything, forced him to go on.
‘I didn’t know,’ he said again. ‘But what happened before, it’s part of what tore my marriage apart. I was afraid that if I had another child …’
She waited until he had trailed off. ‘What happened after the miscarriage, Nick?’
‘Susan came home from the hospital. She barely spoke to me for weeks. We skirted round one another. Then she said that we should try again, that she wanted a baby. I didn’t know if it was a good idea – I thought she was trying to replace the dead child. I told her maybe we ought to wait, give it time. She accused me again of not wanting a child, and I gave in, thought it might be the only thing that would fix us. I needn’t have worried. Nothing happened after that. We tried for months, and nothing.’
‘Did either of you talk to anyone at the time – a counsellor?’
‘No.’
‘And Susan … do you talk now? Did your marriage end amicably?’
Nick looked at his hands. ‘Not exactly. Things got worse. I started staying out, avoided going home. We don’t really keep in touch. She texts sometimes, sends a card at Christmas. I think she’s met someone. I hope she has.’
Tessa tapped the pen on the pad. She hadn’t written anything while he was talking. ‘You could be right, Nick,’ she said.
He looked at her. ‘What about?’
‘The past – what happened before affecting your decisions in this life.’
‘You do believe that it’s true then – that it’s not just confabulation?’
‘It’s a possibility, Nick. And if that’s the case, we must let the memories come. I checked the dates, the circumstances. It’s not something I’m comfortable with … not something that should have happened, but it has and there doesn’t seem to be another explanation for it. I don’t want you to repress it – or to try to keep it from me if something further happens in these sessions. I’m not encouraging you to actively pursue it either, I want you to understand that. But hypnosis is about uncovering the suppressed, and if the problems in your previous life are the underlying cause of your alcoholism, then they need to be acknowledged – and I’m willing to do that.’
Tessa sat back after this long speech, asking Nick if he understood.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Don’t think I’m comfortable with it either, but I need to find out everything.’
‘What’s your schedule like next week?’ she asked. ‘Does Monday work for you?’
‘Monday? Sure,’ he said. That was only three days away. Clearly, Tessa thought the quicker they dealt with the past, the sooner he could be healed.