In the hallway outside the closed office door, Amber squirmed and shifted on the unforgiving chair. It wasn't a chair, actually, but a segment of old church pew, sawed to a width of about four feet and held upright by the bench ends glued back in place. Her artistic mind relished the aesthetics of the piece: its intricate grain, the living luster of the oak, buffed to a rich, dark sheen by the oil of thousands of human hands that had touched it on thousands of Sunday mornings. Her lower parts, however, found less to appreciate; the hard wood had put her butt to sleep ten minutes ago, and now a tingle, like a mild electric shock, traveled up and down her sciatic nerve.
She rose, stretched, and walked over to the door, peering at the name-plate: Rev. Dr. Susan Quentin, Rector.
What did you call a woman priest, anyway? Most Episcopalians referred to their clergy as Father, but that felt like more of a gender shift than Amber was comfortable with. Mother, perhaps? No, that was a designation for the head of a convent. Sister indicated a Catholic nun. Reverend Doctor seemed just a bit stilted and overblown. Maybe something simpler, more to the point, like Your Excellency.
She shouldn't have come. This was getting far too complicated, and she hadn't even met the woman yet. If she didn't know how to address Susan Quentin on their first meeting, how on earth did Amber expect to be able to—
The door swung open, and Amber found herself nose to nose with Father Susan.
"You must be Amber Chaney," she said, extending a hand. "Come on in."
Amber didn't know quite what she had expected, but Susan Quentin definitely wasn't it. She was a tiny, slender woman, about Meg's size, with reddish-blonde hair layered back from her face and eyes an unusual mingling of gray and blue. She wore stonewashed jeans, white leather tennis shoes, and a black clerical shirt under a cable-knit rag wool cardigan. How old was this woman? She didn't look more than twenty. Amber entertained a fleeting image of some pimply faced clerk asking her to show ID before she could buy communion wine.
"Please, have a seat," she said, motioning toward a small sofa and a pair of cushy leather chairs that looked as if they'd been around as long as the parish itself. "Can I get you anything? Coffee, a soft drink?"
"Bottled water would be great, if you have it." Amber chose one of the chairs and settled her numb posterior gratefully into the soft padding.
The woman went to a small refrigerator in the corner and returned with two bottles of water. She handed one to Amber, then set the other on the coffee table and adjusted the second chair at an angle before she sat down. "You have questions, I assume?"
The primary questions on Amber's mind were Can I see your driver's license? and What the heck do I call you? The first question seemed rude, so she opted for the second, somewhat censored. "I'm not sure how to address you," she admitted. "Father? Doctor? Reverend?"
"Ah, the age-old question. One of the many dilemmas caused by the ordination of women." The priest threw back her head and laughed—a mellow, musical sound that instantly put Amber more at ease. "How do you feel about Susan?"
Amber let out a pent-up breath. "Fine by me. You're a psychologist, Meg tells me—as well as a minister?"
Susan nodded toward the wall above the sofa. "Licensed by the State of Washington, ordained by the Episcopal church."
Amber's eyes drifted to the collection of framed credentials: Certificate of Ordination, License for the Practice of Clinical Psychology, Diplomas from Columbia University, Notre Dame, Yale Divinity School, University of Washington. "You've been around, I see."
"My former husband was a university professor, first at Columbia, then at Notre Dame. I received my bachelor's and master's degrees from the colleges where he was teaching at the time."
Amber frowned, trying to assimilate this bit of information. "A professor? But Meg said—" She stopped, unsure how to proceed.
"Meg told you my ex-husband was an abuser." She raised her eyebrows and shrugged. "He was. He was also head of his department at Notre Dame, a Rhodes Scholar, Outstanding Professor two years in a row, and a very accomplished liar." She gazed at Amber and waved one hand thoughtfully. "Abuse—physical, sexual, emotional, whatever—is not limited to one ethnic or social sector. It crosses all boundaries of race and class and wealth and status."
Amber looked into Susan Quentin's eyes, and suddenly she didn't seem so young and inexperienced anymore. Penetrating eyes, whose color deepened in intensity with increased concentration. Old eyes, that looked as if they had witnessed every terrible thing the world had to offer, and still survived.
"Well, enough about me, let's talk about you." Susan paused for just a heartbeat. "What do you think of me?"
Her timing was perfect, and Amber laughed out loud at the familiar Bette Midler punch line. Maybe this wasn't going to be so bad. Maybe Susan Quentin did have something to offer her—something besidesthe pat answers and meaningless jargon she expected from religious people.
Susan set a small tape recorder on the coffee table. "Do you mind if we tape our sessions? It's easier for me to focus if I don't have to take notes."
This was nothing new. All her therapy sessions in Raleigh had been taped, and after the first few times Amber hadn't even noticed. "Sure, I'm used to it."
"You've been in counseling before."
"In North Carolina. I was committed for five years," Amber answered bluntly. "That's where—" She caught herself before she said, That's where I met Meg. Would it be a violation of confidentiality if she divulged that bit of information?
"Where you met Meg Elkhorn." Susan completed the sentence as if she'd read Amber's mind. "It's all right; I know about that."
"What else do you know about me?"
"Not much. Only that you're a friend of Meg and Twojoe's, and that you came here to start a new life after you were released." Susan smiled faintly. "Oh, and that Meg loves you like a sister."
Amber felt herself flinch, and she averted her eyes.
"Did I hit a nerve?"
"Well, yes, a little bit," Amber admitted.
"Do you want to tell me about it?"
Amber sighed. She might as well get into it, she supposed. That's why she came here, after all. It wouldn't do any good to postpone the inevitable. "Where do I start? My unhappy childhood?"
Susan chuckled. "Maybe something a bit less stereotypical. First I'd like to hear about your life now. You're an artist, is that right?"
"I do a little sculpture," Amber responded. "But I make my living as a potter. Vases, stoneware, that kind of thing."
"A potter. Then you already know a lot about the way God works in people's lives."
Amber felt herself recoil. Here we go, she thought. The God speech. She knew it would come to this eventually. This woman might be a psychologist, but she was also a priest. And a priest's job was to convert people, to bring them into the fold. "I'm afraid I don't respond very positively to the image of God as a potter, manhandling people, crushing them up and molding them into something other than what they are." She tried to keep her voice even, but the words came out curt and cynical.
Susan, however, didn't seem the least bit ruffled by her rudeness. "I was thinking more along the lines of God taking something that seems shapeless or common and creating a work of enduring beauty and usefulness."
For just a flicker of a moment, something in the image appealed to Amber. That was, after all, what she did every day of her life, and it was refreshing to think that a Divine Being might share that kind of creative passion. But she wasn't going to get sucked into that whirlpool again. She held her ground. "Do we have to talk about God?"
"Not if you don't want to."
"I don't believe in God." Amber let the words settle for a moment, then amended, "Actually, that's not technically correct. I do acknowledge the premise of a Higher Power. I can't help accepting that much, seeing the beauty of nature all around us. But I don't believe in a God who can be trusted."
"You don't accept God as a loving Father, for example?"
"A father?" Amber let out a derisive snort. "Not likely."
"Tell me about your father."
"My father was the one who had me committed."
Susan sat back and gazed placidly at Amber. "He betrayed you."
"My other choice was prison, seven to ten. The charge was kidnap-ping." Amber paused, taking a moment to assess the shock value of her words. The Reverend Doctor showed no sign of revulsion or outrage. "I tried to steal . . . my baby sister."
"To protect her from your father's betrayal?"
Amber braced herself against the rush of emotion that churned in her gut. "I believed in him. I thought he loved me. But he couldn't be trusted. He wasn't the man he seemed to be. He sent me away, and I never saw her again. I couldn't save her."
"So that's why you had the strong reaction when I said Meg loved you like a sister."
"A lot of things are causing strong reactions in me these days," Amber admitted.
"Like what?"
Amber swallowed down her apprehension and began to give Susan Quentin a thumbnail sketch of her life: her five years in Raleigh, the discovery of her artistic talents, the new life she had begun when she moved to Kitsap County, the disastrous relationship with Rick Knutson, and how she had begun to spiral into depression after he deserted her, and then this, the final straw—destroying her sculpture, the one she called the Two Sisters. "When I left Raleigh and came out here, I thought I had this licked," she finished. "The first few years, I did just fine. Then the dark place started to open up again. And when I cut up the sculpture I had worked so hard on, I realized I hadn't succeeded in getting well at all. I felt so much . . . I don't know. Pain. Rage. I couldn't seem to control it."
"Did mutilating the statue help?"
Amber shook her head. "I guess not. It was a stupid thing to do."
"Was it?"
Amber quit picking at a bit of clay lodged in her thumbnail and looked up at Susan. "What do you mean?"
"When I finally got away from my husband, it took a long time for me to understand my anger. I had healed—physically, anyway—and I had resigned myself to living with the scars." Susan gazed off into middle space. "But years later, when I thought I had finished with my recovery, suddenly I began to feel this irrational anger. Blind fury, like what you're describing. A depression so deep I felt as if I were drowning in it."
Amber nodded for her to continue. This was beginning to make sense.
"My own counselor helped me see that emotions can lie buried for a long time, especially powerful emotions like anger. And if we're accustomed to being powerless, we don't know how to deal with them in a constructive way, so we continue to suppress them until they explode inside us, like a psychological Mount Saint Helens."
"That's pretty much what happened to me."
"Emotional healing doesn't come all at once, Amber," Susan said quietly. "Sometimes it's like grief—we think we've gone through that long dark tunnel and come out on the other side, and then when we least expect it, the pain erupts again. It takes many forms—fear, depression, anger, denial. The important thing is not to shove it back down again. Let it come out. Face it. Work through it."
"How do I do that?"
"How have you done it in the past?"
"Through art, mostly. A lot of people use journaling, I know, but I'm just no good at writing. Instead I create images out of clay." She exhaled heavily. "Though I usually don't destroy them after I've made them."
A brief smile flitted over Susan's face. "It's okay to destroy them, if it will help. Let the images surface, and then deal with them as you need to. That's much more constructive than allowing the anger to fester, or taking it out on a human target."
"Makes sense." Amber glanced at her watch. "Looks like our time is up." She got to her feet. This hadn't been nearly as bad as she had expected. She actually liked the Reverend Doctor, even if she did talk about God now and then.
But this could get messy, an inner voice warned. If you go down this road again, it's likely to get worse—a whole lot worse—before it gets better