Read Retribution: A Lew Fonesca Novel (Lew Fonesca Novels) for Free Online

to say it to Ann. Saying her name aloud had brought back images, memories, pain, the empty feeling in my stomach, the sound of my heart madly pulsing blood through my veins, my neck, my head.
    “Feel better?” Ann asked when I had said my wife’s name.
    “No,” I answered. “Worse. Much worse.”
    “Of course,” she said. “This is therapy, not magic.”
    I had gone through this opening session ritual four times since then with Ann asking me to speak the name aloud. I had managed it only that one session.
    “Can you do it?” Ann asked, biscotti in hand.
    I took a deep breath, felt the beat of my heart, closed my eyes, and softly uttered, “Catherine.”
    “And you feel how?” Ann asked, redipping her biscotti.
    “Sorry I said it,” I said, reaching for my own coffee, which unlike my therapist’s was strongly fortified with half and half and two packets of Equal.
    “Of course you are. You are still in love with your depression and self-pity. You’ve held it around you like a child’s comfort blanket since your wife died. If you give it up, what are you left with?”
    “We’ve been through this,” I said.
    “And each week we become different people,” she said. “Sometimes different people with different answers. This time you said her name.”
    “Without my depression,” I said. “The few times anxiety takes over. I shake. I can’t do anything. I walk till I’m exhausted. Even
Mildred Pierce
doesn’t help. I think… you know all this.”
    “You would rather be depressed than anxious,” she said, continuing to work on my burnt offering.
    “Is that a question or an observation?”
    “Your choice.”
    “Yes, I would rather be depressed,” I said.
    “You owe it to Catherine to live depressed and guilty. You want to hide, not feel and slowly die, a hermit, a saint who does not deserve life.”
    “I know.”
    “I’m just recapitulating,” she said. “Do they have flavors other than chocolate?”
    “Yes.”
    “Next time if you remember, bring almond or something,” she said.
    “I’ll do that.”
    “Change is good, small stimulation from small changes. I just segued from my own taste to a metaphoric reference to your state of mind.”
    “I noticed,” I said.
    “You were meant to. You wouldn’t be one of my favorite clients if you couldn’t follow what I say.”
    “I thought I was your favorite,” I said.
    “You are part of an elite group.”
    “Am I making progress?” I asked.
    “Do you want to make progress?” she asked in return.
    Good question.
    “I don’t know.”
    “You still seeing Sally?”
    “Yes, tonight. Why?”
    “You can turn in your blanket of depression for something else,” she said. “Like coming back to life with a real person.”
    “I’m not giving up my wife,” I said.
    “You said her name,” Ann said with a smile, pointing her finger at me. “Progress. I’m not asking you to give her up. I’m asking you to place her gently inside you where she belongs and go on with your life.”
    I shook my head and said, “We keep saying the same things.”
    “But in different ways and… tell me, Lewis, are you starting to feel different?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “And it makes you anxious?”
    “Angry.”
    “At who? Who are you angry with?”
    “You.”
    “Say something about her,” Ann said, leaning back.
    “What?”
    “Your wife. Did she do anything that annoyed you?”
    I closed my eyes, and shook my head “no.”
    “She was perfect,” Ann said. “Nobody’s perfect. Remember the last line of
Some Like It Hot
? When Joe B. Brown finds out Jack Lemmon isn’t a woman? ‘Nobody’s perfect,’ he says.”
    “She left doors and drawers open,” I said. “Medicine cabinet, kitchen cabinets, dresser drawers. All the time.”
    “And what did you do?” Ann prompted.
    “I closed them.”
    “Never got irritated?”
    “For a while. Then …”
    “You liked her having little faults?”
    “I guess,” I said. “I think I can remember