The Backwoods

(I)

Patricia, of course, had forgotten. It had been five years, hadn’t it?

Five years since her return to Agan’s Point.

The Cadillac cruised silently, comfortingly, but as the city had faded behind her, and the interstate highways had eventually given over to long, winding, and very rural county roads, the words began to haunt her:

Oh, my God, girl. How could you let something like that happen?

They were her father’s words, less than a week after her sixteenth birthday. . . .

The look in his eye, and the words he’d chosen. Like I let it happen, she thought now in an overwhelming mental darkness. Like I wanted it to happen . . .

She’d never been more hurt in her life.

She’d felt good, hadn’t she? Her wonderful, if selfish, love session with Byron last night might have had something to do with it, but when she pulled away from the condo, knowing full well where she was going, she felt good, and that was something she didn’t expect. Watching the sun bloom as she drove, opening the Cadillac up on Interstate 95, and moving forward . . . It seemed to clear her head of all the city’s stresses and the endless intricacies of work. Indeed, Patricia felt clean, new; she felt purged. Until . . .

Her mood began to wilt in increments. She knew what she was doing. Putting it off. But I can’t put it off. All I can do is dawdle, procrastinate. She wound up driving through the historic district in Richmond, and blowing an hour looking for a place to have breakfast. Same thing through Norfolk, for lunch. She was turning the three-hour drive into an all-day journey, as if getting to Agan′s Point later would ease some of her distress. But she knew it wouldn’t. I’m torturing myself, she thought.

Hours later familiar road signs began to pop up, signals that she wasn′t so much driving away from her exhausting lifestyle in Washington, but instead driving to something much more stressful. The far less traveled Route 10 seemed to throw the signs in her face as she raced past, towns with names like Benn’s Church, Rescue, and Chuckatuck. More and more of her frame of mind began to melt. Then a sign flashed by:

DISMAL SWAMP—10 MILES.

And more signs, with stranger names:

LUNTVILLE—6 MILES.

CRICK CITY—11 MILES.

MOYOCK—30 MILES.

Oh, God, Patricia thought.

She was beginning to feel sick, and with the sickness came a resurfacing. She hadn’t thought of the psychologist in a long time, a keen, incisive bald man named Dr. Sallee. And she’d seen him only once, just after her return from her last trip to Agan’s Point five years ago, when her despair seemed insurmountable.

“We bury traumas,” he’d told her. “In a variety of different ways, but the effect remains the same. Some people deal with their traumas by confronting them immediately, and then forgetting about them, while others deal best by forgetting about them first and then never confronting them because there’s no apparent need. That’s what you’re doing, Patricia, and there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s no apparent need because you relocated yourself from the premises of the trauma.”

The premises of the trauma. She thought over the odd choice of words. But he’d been right. I moved away as fast as I could. . . .

“What happened to you will always be there,” he continued, fingering a paperweight shaped like a blue pill that read STELAZINE. “I’m a behavioralist psychologist; I’m not so liberal in my manner of interpreting human psychology. Other professionals would tell you that it’s unhealthy to leave your traumas because they remain in your psyche whether you know it or not. That’s not true with regard to how we must function in our lives, in our society, and in the world. If not living in Agan’s Point restores you to that kind of functionality, then you’ve done the right thing. Your trauma becomes neutered, ineffectual—it becomes a thing that can’t affect you anymore. It no longer has any bearing on your life, and never will . . . unless you let it. You don’t need a regimen of antidepressant drugs and costly psychotherapy to deal with your trauma; all you need is to be away from the area of the occurrence. Your life right now is validation. You’re a fabulously successful attorney enjoying a fulfilling career and a wonderful marriage. Am I right?”

Patricia splayed her hands on the couch. “Yes.”

“You aren’t traumatized by what happened to you when you were sixteen, are you? You aren’t a psychological basket case; this event in your past hasn’t ruined you. You can’t tell me that this twenty-five-year-old tragedy still rears its head and exerts a negative force in your existence, can you? Can you tell me that?”

Patricia almost laughed. What he was forcing her to admit to herself was now replacing a creeping despair with a frivolous joy. “No, Doctor, I can’t tell you that at all.”

He looked at her with a blank expression. “So your problem is . . . ?”

She conceded to him. “You’re right. I don’t have a problem anymore.”

He raised a finger. “Proximity to the scene of the trauma is your only problem. Whenever you return to Agan’s Point, your despair recommences. When you’re away from Agan’s Point, your mind functions as though the trauma never occurred. We know I’m correct about this because every aspect of your life verifies it. Let me put it in the most sophisticated, clinical terminology I can, Patricia. Fuck Agan’s Point. Shit on Agan’s Point. To hell with Agan’s Point. How’s that?”

Now Patricia was laughing outright.

And he finished, “Your despair is activated only when you return to Agan’s Point, so my professional advice is never to go back there. You don’t have to. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want. If you want to see your relatives, then they can come to you. You don’t have to go to them. Agan’s Point is a bowel movement that you flushed down the toilet years ago. Solution? Don’t go back to the sewer.”

And that was that. Not only had Patricia gotten a great laugh from Dr. Sallee’s acumen, she’d needed to see him only that one time for all to be set back to rights. When she’d gone home from her sister’s wedding, it all returned to her—indeed, like a toilet backing up. Now that I’m away from that hellhole . . . I feel great. . . .

And she continued to feel great . . . until she’d received the call from Judy reporting her husband’s murder.

I’m going back to the sewer, she recalled the doctor’s metaphor as the Caddy brought her closer and closer. I don’t know what else to do. She’s my sister. . . .

This was all she could do, and she knew it. “And I’ll just have to make the best of it,” she said to herself. “It was so long ago anyway. I’m acting like a baby.″ Admitting that to herself was easier than admitting her optimism was forced.

She let more of the road take her, the Cadillac almost too quiet and smooth as more roads turned rural, and more turnoffs took her farther away from her metropolitan world. The wilds of southern Virginia were an opposite world—farms instead of skyscrapers, old pickup trucks and tractors lumbering along quiet, tree-lined roads, quite unlike the manic traffic streams of the city. She knew that home grew ever closer by still more telltale signs: AGAN′S POINT CRAB CAKES, boasted a roadside restaurant. Then a market: WE SELL AGAN′S POINT CRABMEAT. Her sister’s crabmeat was locally renowned. Eventually the scenery began to calm Patricia’s nerves, and she actually smiled. Would she really be able to forget about her trauma of decades ago? Maybe it’s all just worn off, she hoped.

Then another sign swept by:

AGAN’S POINT—3 MILES.

She steeled herself behind the wheel. It’s no big deal, no big deal. I’m over it!

And then the awful words came back to haunt her just as effectively as she was being haunted by her past:

Yes, her own father’s words . . .

How could you let something like that happen?

Patricia’s eyes suddenly flooded with tears. She couldn’t control herself; she couldn’t even remember what she was doing, her sensibilities jerking away from her like something being stolen. Without even realizing it, she pulled the Cadillac to the shoulder and got out, her heart hammering, sweat pasting her red bangs to her forehead. A passerby would’ve dismissed her as a crazy woman about to run amok into the woods. Tears blurred her vision. Her feet took her in a blind run away from the car. When she fell to her knees several minutes later, she looked up, choking through sobs, and then saw a smaller sign just before the turn onto a narrow country road. She had to squint through her tears to focus until she could finally read the sign, a right-turn arrow and the words:

BOWEN’S FIELD.

Patricia shrieked, vomited into the grass, and passed out.