THE LAST WITNESS
What Memory Knows
The mind protects itself. Sometimes the protection is the most dangerous thing about it.
Therapy || Dr. Ross || Memory || Psychology
Dr. Petra Ross had been Sara’s therapist for two years. They met on Thursday mornings at ten, in a small office in Lincoln Park that had the deliberate calm of a space designed to make difficult conversations slightly less difficult — good light, neutral colors, furniture arranged with the specific care of someone who understood that the physical environment of a therapeutic relationship mattered. Petra Ross was fifty-one, slight, with the particular quality of stillness that very good therapists developed, the ability to occupy a room without imposing on it, to be entirely present without being intrusive. Sara had started seeing her during a period of acute work-related stress in the second year of a major organized crime prosecution — a case that had involved eighteen months of case preparation, three attempts on witnesses, and the specific exhaustion of being responsible for something enormous — and she had continued seeing her through the case’s conclusion, through the pregnancy, through the long weeks of waiting that the third trimester was, because therapy had proven useful in the specific practical way that useful things kept your life organized when the alternative was disorganization.
She arrived on Thursday morning — the day after Webb’s visit — and sat in her usual chair and looked at Petra Ross across the small table with the tissue box and the good lamp and she told her about the alley. All of it. The sequence of events, the witness statement, the phone records, the Thomas Greer article. She told it in the precise, organized way she told most things — beginning, middle, facts in order, implications noted but separated from the facts themselves. Petra listened with her characteristic stillness, her hands folded in her lap, her face attentive in the way that good listeners’ faces were attentive — present but not reactive, receiving rather than responding before reception was complete. When Sara finished, Petra was quiet for a moment. Then: “How do you feel about the memory gap?” “Alarmed,” Sara said. “It’s not something that should happen. I don’t lose time. I don’t have episodes of dissociation. My memory is — it’s one of the things I rely on. It’s integral to how I work.” “You’ve described before the way your memory functions as a professional tool,” Petra said. “Yes,” Sara said. “What would it mean for it to fail?” “It would mean something is wrong,” Sara said. “Medically, or — I don’t know. It would mean something I’m not accounting for.” “Something neurological?” Petra said. “That’s one possibility,” Sara said. “I should rule that out. I’ll see a neurologist.” “Yes,” Petra said. “That’s a reasonable step.” She paused. “Can I ask you something?” “Of course.” “In the time period before the memory gap — before ten p.m. on Tuesday — do you remember where you were and what you were doing?” “Yes,” Sara said. “Completely. I was at the office until seven. I drove home. I made dinner for myself — James had a work dinner. I ate. I watched television for an hour, approximately. I called my mother. I called the office to check in with my paralegal about a filing. Then I went to bed to read, which I do most nights, and then—” She stopped. “And then?” Petra said. “And then I was in the parking garage on West Madison at eleven-fourteen p.m.,” Sara said. “I don’t know how I got there. The last thing I remember is getting into bed with a book at nine-thirty.” She said it flat. Without the performance of distress. The distress was real but she had had twelve hours to begin managing it. “That’s a gap of approximately an hour and forty-five minutes,” Petra said. “Yes,” Sara said. “Does that gap feel — empty? Or does it feel like something is there that you can’t access?” Sara thought about it seriously, the way she thought about everything. “It feels empty,” she said. “Like a section of wall where a window should be. Nothing there. Not even the sensation of something missing, until I know to look for it.” Petra nodded. “Has this happened before?” she said. “Never,” Sara said. “Not once in my life.” Petra made a note. Sara watched her write it and said nothing, because the writing was part of the process and she trusted the process even when she was finding it difficult. “Are you sleeping?” Petra said. “Poorly,” Sara said. “The pregnancy makes it hard. And now this.” “Are you eating?” “Adequately,” Sara said. “Have you told James?” Sara looked at the tissue box on the table. “No,” she said. “Why not?” Sara thought about this honestly, which was the deal she had with herself in this room — she answered honestly, even when the honest answer was one she would have preferred not to articulate. “Because I don’t know how to tell him in a way that doesn’t make me look — compromised,” she said. “He doesn’t know about the investigation. He doesn’t know I was in the alley. I’ve been telling him the pregnancy is making me anxious. Which is true. But not the whole truth.” “What are you afraid he’ll think?” Petra said. “I’m afraid he’ll think I did something I don’t remember doing,” Sara said. She said it very quietly. “Something involving Thomas Greer.” “And do you think that?” Petra said. Sara looked at her. “I think,” she said slowly, “that the evidence of my own behavior — three calls I don’t remember making, a gap of nearly two hours I don’t remember experiencing — is inconsistent with the person I believe myself to be.” “But?” “But I don’t know if the person I believe myself to be is who I actually am,” Sara said. “And I’m a lawyer. I know what it means when the evidence and the narrative don’t match.” Petra looked at her for a moment. Then she said: “Sara. I want to suggest something that you may find uncomfortable.” “Most useful things are,” Sara said. “I’d like to try hypnotic regression. Not as a therapeutic technique — as a memory access tool. In conjunction with whatever a neurologist recommends. There may be content in the gap that is accessible through a different approach.” Sara looked at her. “Would that be admissible?” she said immediately. “In an investigation?” “That depends on jurisdiction and circumstances,” Petra said. “But it might give you information. Which might give you the ability to understand what happened before someone else’s interpretation of it becomes the official record.” Sara thought about this. She thought about Webb’s grey eyes and the specific quality of his professional concern. She thought about Thomas Greer in a hospital bed with a subdural hematoma. She thought about the name Sara Cole in a 2009 murder prosecution that she had no memory of being part of because she had still been in law school in 2009. “When?” she said. “Next week,” Petra said. “We’ll schedule it separately. A longer session.” Sara nodded. She spent the rest of the hour talking about the baby, which was Petra’s way of ensuring that the session didn’t end in acute stress, the gentle redirect toward something immediate and present and unequivocal. The baby was real. The baby was hers. The baby was the anchor she was going to need, she suspected, as the waters around everything else continued to rise. She walked out into the Thursday morning of Lincoln Park and sat in her car for a moment and thought about the memory access technique and the gap in Tuesday evening and what might be in the gap and whether knowing was better than not knowing. She decided yes. It was always better to know. She had never made a mistake by knowing too much. She had, on occasion, made mistakes by knowing too little. She started the car. She drove to the office. She had a case to prosecute and a life to manage and a killer to identify and somewhere, in the gap between nine-thirty and eleven-fourteen on a Tuesday night, a version of herself she needed to find.
What Sara did not know — what she had no way of knowing, sitting in her car outside Petra Ross’s Lincoln Park office — was that Petra Ross had already called someone by the time Sara reached the elevator in the parking garage. Not a supervisor. Not a professional consultation. A private number that she dialed from a second phone she kept in her desk drawer, a phone whose number did not appear on her professional records. She said three words into it: “She’s getting close.” Then she ended the call and put the phone away and picked up her pen and made a note in Sara’s file: Memory gap persistent. Patient distressed but functional. Suggest neurological evaluation. Technically accurate. Professionally irreproachable. And the most dangerous thing she had done to the woman she was supposed to be helping since she had started doing it.