Love is a mystery ... an indecipherable MYSTERY
#Love #Betrayal #Vengeance
A compelling backward journey through a broken mind.
Blurb:
Paige Lyman, an accomplished psychiatrist, is on the verge of madness but she
doesn’t know it yet. The madness begins when she gets it into her head to write
her memoirs. As her brilliant mind assembles bits and pieces of her life for
the book, ugly skeletons, long forgotten in the closet, rear their heads.
It had all begun with a simple act of
love. And love, for her, was a blond-haired Irish boy named Bill, so when Bill
abandoned her for priesthood, the world around her collapsed. Seized by a
different passion—vengeance—she seeks her proverbial pound of flesh in the beds
of various priests.
But that was before she met Stern W,
a medical researcher who swept into her life like a hurricane and married her. And
they lived happily after until he died in a helicopter crash and she discovered
the startling truth about who he really was. Now, transformed from a psychiatrist
to a patient, Paige is saddled with a damning
memory that she must decipher to be free.
Take Back the Memory is the saga of her compelling backward journey through her own life on a
psychotherapist’s couch.
The Hook - {Book Excerpt}
The door of the consulting studio swung
open at 9.00 a.m. and Dr. Wilson, a slender, pipe-smoking clinical psychologist
stuck his hoary head in the doorway. His face lit up at the sight of Paige
sitting cross-legged in the cozy waiting room.
“Hello Dr. Lyman,” he smiled courteously,
“I had no idea you were here already.”
Paige glanced up, her face a frozen scowl, and gazed at him. She had expected
them to be on a first-name basis this
morning; the unexpected formality fazed her quite a bit.
“Good morning, Dr. Wilson,” she said
wryly. “Sorry I’m early, a habit, I guess.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he said quickly,
the smile on his lips waning. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”
She nodded and looked away as he
disappeared back into the consulting room. Left alone, she gazed across the
lounge. The psychotherapist’s studio was illuminated by the sun’s rays through
an opened Venetian blind, and the balmy sunlit ambiance fascinated her.
“Like the cheery whisper of an admirer
after a heartbreak,” she said wistfully and rose.
As she did so, echoes of distant traffic
momentarily brought her to a state of mental alertness. Palms sweaty, Paige
walked to the window and opened it. She gazed, mesmerized, at the sun-drenched
avenue on the breezy late September morning and noted the peak time for fall
foliage in New York was weeks away yet. She closed the window.
Shrugging, she walked back to her seat and
plopped down. Her hand trembled slightly on the black zebra-print clutch bag in
her lap.
“Darn,” she mumbled, her thoughts turning
to her daughter who had convinced her to come.
“I shouldn’t be here, Diane,” she
whispered savagely. “I just shouldn’t.”
Anxious to gain control of herself, she
heaved a sigh and leaned back on the comfortable davenport, puckering her lips.
She was wearing a rose-tinted shirt with a
low-cut neckline that revealed abundant cleavage.
A cherry, handcrafted silk scarf encircled her neck. Her knee-high black boots
matched the color of her fringed skirt, accentuating its beauty. Angry with
herself for letting Diane convince her to come, she started at the sound of a
latch unfastening as the door of the consulting room swung open again.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Dr. Wilson
said from the doorway and then walked to where she was sitting.
Paige rose slowly. Her eyes on his face,
she smoothed her skirt and noticed his courteous smile had not waned
completely. Without altering his gait, Dr. Wilson thrust his hand in front of
her. Paige took the outstretched hand and shook it gently.
“Can I come in now?”
“Yes, please do,” he said, gesturing with
his hand.
Clean-shaven, he wore no tie. His
fawn-striped shirt, unlike hers, was buttoned up. Expensive clothing testified
to a successful practice. He wore black semi-brogues and walked with a slight
shuffle. Paige followed him into his office, full of expectation.
“Please sit down,” he indicated a black,
buckskin couch. “Would you like some coffee?”
“No, thank you.”
Paige sat on the familiar couch, and as
she gazed at him from the corner of her eyes on the chair that should be hers,
the magnitude of the moment escaped her.
In the magnifying silence of the room, Dr.
Wilson sat composed on his standard, comfortable chair, the tip of his pen held
against his lip the way men who smoked would usually hold a pipe. His eyes
remained on her, and hers were on his. For several seconds their eyes locked;
at first warily, like two professionals trying to find a meeting ground, a
starting point.
“Diane made me come,” she said, frowning.
“Frankly, I don’t know why I’m here.”
“You’re here to talk to me,” he said,
crossing one leg over the other. “I guess both as a colleague and as a patient,
and I’ll love to listen to you as much as I’ve loved reading your work.”
She uncrossed her legs and quickly
re-crossed them, and then she leaned back on the couch, her fringed skirt
shifting upwards. She noticed his eyes, unlike those of most men, remained on
her face and not on her legs.
“Don’t patronize me. Even my daughter
thinks I’m going mad. Don’t lie to me. You think so, too, but I can still sit
on that chair and listen to patients.”
“You certainly can,” he responded
indulgently. “You were one of the best. However, we both know things aren’t the
way they used to be. If you were on this
chair, the first thing you would tell the patient would be to admit their
situation and talk to you about it.” He paused a moment. “I think you have
admitted that much within you,” he said without looking at her. “That’s why you
allowed Diane to convince you to come. So, let’s talk, my friend. Let’s talk
about the situation.”
Paige regarded him suspiciously. Let’s
talk about the situation. Talk about the situation? Dr. Wilson’s
words jangled in her head like the howl of a campanile. What was there to talk
about?
Irritation rose inside her like the
beginning of a toothache. Yet, she knew he was right. Things were not the way
they used to be. In the course of her checkered life and career, especially in
recent years, nothing was the same. It hurt her quite a bit the way everyone
seemed to think she had gone mad, the way she had been transformed from
psychiatrist to patient.
“Be frank with me,” she said. “Do you
think I’m crazy?”
“Aren’t we all?” he laughed mirthlessly.
“Come on, this is not about you being crazy.”
“What is it about?”
“It’s about you and me having a nice
little talk so we can understand how things are.”
She was silent for a while. She wished he
could give her a reason to scream. She wanted desperately to scream at someone
this morning, so why not this psychotherapist with calm, upper-class manners?
After what seemed like a long time, she realized, not without some
satisfaction, that he was determined to be courteous
with her this morning.
“I’m at a loss,” she whined and turned on
the couch to face away from him. “I don’t know where to begin. I don’t even
know what to talk about. I mean, there are so many things to explore.”
“Let’s start with the endearing subject of
your book. Are you convinced you want to tell it as it is?”
“Yes.”
“Everything?”
“Every little detail.”
He watched her calmly. “I know you’ve
never been afraid to bare your mind, but between me and you, is there any
aspect of this memoir that disturbs you a bit?”
“Yes,” she turned and smiled at him. “But
an autobiography has to be frank. What’s the point of writing it if you are
going to shy away from the ugly part? I can’t keep it all inside. I want to let
it out.”
“Very well,” he said, his eyes agreeing
with her. “Maybe we should talk about some of the traumatizing aspects of the
experiences you have recalled and want to write about.”
She gazed at him without a word. Her mind
began to tumble backward slowly, very slowly.
“I think it all began with a simple act of
love,” she said at length, her voice surprisingly nostalgic. “A simple act of
love,” she emphasized, “between me and Bill when we were kids.”
“I’m listening.”
She sat upright on the couch. “My life is
like a soap opera,” she muttered, grimacing. “A distressing mélange spiced with
love, heartbreak, and vengeance. It will silence your thoughts.”
“I take it you loved this Bill.”
“Don’t interrupt me,” she snapped at him
and the psychotherapist pursed his lips but did not smile. “What Bill and I
shared wasn’t a sensual scream, okay? We were kids.”
“Okay,” he mumbled, nodding.
“We grew up together in Kenya,” she told
him. “We were on an unending safari. Bill was a handsome Irish boy. You must
understand, there weren’t many white boys around to connect to, so I fell
desperately in love with him and thought I would marry him someday.” She paused
and stared at the rug on the floor of the consulting room, her thoughts a riot.
She hated to remember that back then while
she was nursing her infantile dreams of matrimony, Bill’s father was
formulating a different program for his son. “Into the service of God you’ll
go,” he had told the boy. “A priest, that’s what you are going to be.” Paige
glanced up sharply and thoughts jangled in her head. It might have been
different, she mused, if Bill had been a Protestant Irish and not Catholic.
She gazed at Dr. Wilson’s shoes as
memories flooded her mind. She tried to speak
“Did you eventually recover from this
heartbreak?” Dr. Wilson said.
“Maybe I did, in my way.”
“What happened when you recovered?” His
voice was wary.
Her eyes didn’t meet his, “A different
passion engulfed me then.”
“What kind of passion?”
“Maybe you’ll call it vengeance.”
“Was it vengeance?” Dr. Wilson, like her,
uncrossed and re-crossed his legs.
“Yes. A strange kind though.”
Their eyes locked. “A strange kind of
vengeance, you say?”
Paige nodded and looked away. “It was priesthood that caused Bill to jilt me,” she
said in a defensive voice. “So, I figured a settling of scores might heal me.”
She paused, sighed, and then spoke. “I decided to wage a very personal war
against priests.”
Dr. Wilson narrowed his eyes. “You mean,
like secretly assassinating priests?”
“No,” she frowned, staring at her skirt.
“But a personal war...”
“A personal war that made nonsense of
their vow, if you know what I mean.”
“Not really.”
She gritted her teeth. “I seduced them,
damn it, and then I made them suffer.”
Wilson gaped at her, “You seduced priests
to get back at Bill for abandoning you for priesthood?”
“Yes.” She looked up at him now. “But that is only a small part of the story.”
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