My Beautiful Failure by Janet Ruth Young Page B

both sound asleep. No one had broken into the house; no one had touched me. So, though it felt real, I figured it was just a nightmare.
    “That seems really upsetting. What was that feeling?”
    It started to happen more often—waking up at night with the distinct feeling that something was pressing around my neck. I came to expect it, that I would wake up every night in a panic and not be able to get back to sleep. I wasn’t sleeping all that well. Maybe three hours a night.
    “You must have been exhausted.”
    Yeah, I was. The tiredness didn’t hit me all at once, but after a week or so it started taking a toll on me. And I didn’t feel like staying out late anymore, and my friends stopped calling me. You assume that people like you for yourself, but then something changes and you see that they only liked you for some other reason. Like that you have a car and can drive them around. Or what you look like. Or who your parents are. You know?
    “Uh-huh.” No one had ever liked me for those reasons. But I could relate.
    I’m supposed to be in school right now, you know, a reallygood school. I already told you that last time, but you probably don’t remember.
    I remembered. That really good selective school in New Hampshire. “Do you want to be in school?”
    Yes and no. Anyway, I tried to drag myself along at that level, living day to day, but I had this weird feeling, like dread, that was building up inside me, and on one of the rare occasions when I discussed anything important with my mom she sent me to a counselor who specialized in anxiety disorders. That doctor, who I saw only once, said it looked like I needed to see someone who deals with repressed memories. And that was how I found Melinda.
    “Did she help you?”
    She changed my whole life. The first time I went into her office she asked if there was any possibility that I’d been abused as a kid and didn’t remember. I got really quiet—it was like time was standing still—and then I felt this huge sadness come up from somewhere inside me that I hadn’t even known was there, and I couldn’t talk for about ten minutes . . . and then Melinda said, not in an accusing way, but in a kind of gentle, all-accepting way, because she’s a very gentle person, she said, “Why are you protecting them, Jenney?”
    Margaret and Richie whispered about her last call, but I was barely aware of them. “‘Why are you protecting them?’” I asked Jenney. “Meaning who?”
    Meaning my parents.
    The parents were abusive. “She meant that your parents had hurt you in some way. Had abused you.”
    Exactly.
    Mirror. Reflect. “I’m so sorry, Jenney. It must have been really awful to find that out.”
    Believe me, it was. My parents were having a dinner that night for two couples they had known since college, and I almost didn’t want to go home. After I left Melinda’s I called my parents and made an excuse about needing to go to the library, and I didn’t go home until after nine when the library closed, and I shut myself in my room and shut out the laughter and the dishes clinking and the music and everything else from the dinner party, and I just emptied myself out and allowed myself to feel nothing, just the way I did at Melinda’s. Because it was easier to feel nothing than to feel the pain of what had really happened, the pain of the betrayal. And then something else happened.
    “What was that?”
    After the whole neck thing, I started getting another feeling that seemed real. On my face. The feeling of something cold and hard on my cheek. Like stone. And I worked really hard in my sessions with Melinda. She regressed me and took me back through all the years and all the pain—oh, God, I nearly turned myself inside out—and we figured out what it meant.
    “The feeling on your face? What was it?”
    Melinda kept saying, “Where are you, Jenney? Where are you when your face feels so cold?” It was the floor of the basement of our house. We figured