Free She's Gone: A Novel by Joye Emmens Page A

encounter session? Did she and Will have to go? She didn’t know these people. She didn’t know what an encounter session was, and she certainly wasn’t going to share her innermost feelings with them.
    As if on cue, Bill looked at Will and then Jolie. “This will be a good experience. You’ll learn more about us, and we’ll learn more about you and your relationship.”
    Kerrie and Peter brought in two large baking pans of hot apple crisp. Deidre brought in bowls, and Michael followed with a gallon of vanilla ice cream. The aroma of cinnamon and baked apples filled the room. Peter and Kerrie stood at one end of the table and dished out bowls of the dessert and passed them down the table. Jolie savored the pure pleasure of the cold ice cream on hot apples and the crunchy brown sugar oatmeal crust. Aside from the upcoming encounter session, life here seemed good.
    After dinner some of the group went into the parlor. Jolie and Will joined them. They were a lively bunch, and the conversation ranged from the upcoming apple harvest to Marxism. Jolie browsed the book shelves near the stairs. She pulled out Silent Spring by Rachael Carson and read the back cover. “A woman scientist exposes human carelessness, greed and irresponsibility by the reckless use of pesticides and their devastating effect on animals and humans.”
    She scanned the first chapter, A Fable for Tomorrow, and glanced back at the group. Will and others talked about the history of class struggle between the working class and the bourgeois. She slipped upstairs to their room with the book. Laying on the bed, she reveled in the comfort of a real house with electricity, no holes in the roof, and a smooth hardwood floor. She opened the book and read. The tragedy of man’s destruction of nature drew her in. She thought of the oil spill and how it had blackened miles of beautiful shoreline and killed countless birds and sea creatures. She thought of home. Once they were settled she would get a message to her parents.
    Will came up much later. “I signed us up for cooking and chores,” he said.
    “You did?”
    “Well, actually, I don’t think they would have let me go without an assignment.”
    “What’s an encounter session?” Jolie asked.
    “It’s an intense analysis of your flaws. They break you down to build you up.”
    She clutched the moonstone pouch around her neck. “I don’t like the sound of it.”
    “It’ll be fine. There’ll just be a lot of crying.”
    “Crying?”
    He nodded.
    She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. What if she cracked under pressure and the truth about them came out?

8
    The Gestalt of Self

    That week Jolie and Will settled into the routine at the Big Yellow House. All of the action was either in the dining room, the parlor, or the front porch. The Beatles The White Album , the favorite of the month, played constantly on an old phonograph.
    “Will you teach me to make soap?” Jolie asked Deidre.
    “Sure, but not until next month when all of the fruit and nut harvests are done,” Deidre said. “That’s a good rainy day project and trust me, we get a lot of rain.”
    Most of the members volunteered at the Food Cooperative four hours a week, which gave them a discount. They also bartered skills for food and services. Some picked apples and fruit throughout the season.
    They talked endlessly about Carl Rogers, a respected psychologist, and his theory of individuals based on nineteen propositions, the gestalt of self. One evening after dinner they moved the discussion to the parlor.
    “We need to change our perceptual field of reality to live in a communal society,” Bill said.
    Jolie frowned; what was he saying? Michael saw her expression and explained. “The perceptual field is the self that has been formed through our interaction with our traditional environments from birth.”
    “So the concept of self must change in a communal family,” Anthony said.
    “Why do we have to change?” Dawn said. “I