Free Coming Home by David Lewis

care to divulge personal details of her life with her mother, which would have been a betrayal. What they had together was so sacred, so wonderful, that she refused to submit her memories to their impersonal dissection.
    On paper she must have appeared to be a conundrum. Even the therapists contradicted one another, some declaring her of sound mind, albeit a little rattled, others pronouncing her scarred and damaged for life. By the time Jessie was sixteen and pursuing legal emancipation, her grandmother was still calling the shots from afar. Eventually she summoned the big guns as a last-ditch effort.
    … Michael Roeske, a Harvard-educated Freudian, was a large man with a full gray-flecked beard, slicked-back brown hair, and the obligatory gold-rimmed spectacles. He had reminded her of Orson Welles as she’d once seen him on a movie poster advertising the old classic Citizen Kane, and she’d told him so. He seemed delighted with the comparison.
    His office was lavishly furnished with dark wood, and the carpet reminded her of a giant argyle sock. The walls were covered with something resembling crushed straw, as if made flat by extensive ironing. The windows were semiopaque with a lacy winter frost, and the trees just outside, where people walked freely in the parking lot, were glazed with melting ice, the sun reflecting off a sparkling world of post-Christmas white.
    In spite of his austere appearance, he was a kind man. Friendly and engaging. She actually enjoyed the visits, which seemed more like conspiratorial meetings against her grandmother than counseling sessions. In later years, she realized the brilliance of his technique.
    “I’m impressed with your unique sense of self-equilibrium,” he’d once told her. “Your relationship with your mother was simply marvelous; I wish I could have met her.”
    True to his Freudian roots, he was particularly interested in her dreams.
    “They’re not bad dreams,” Jessie told him.
    “But your mother comes to you. No?”
    “She tucks me in at night, takes me to the park, that sort of thing.”
    “Very natural,” he stated. “They’ll fade in time.”
    I hope not, she thought.
    “Do you hate your grandmother?”
    “Have you met my grandmother?”
    “Yes,” he replied. “And she does seem … a difficult woman.”
    Jessie was surprised he would admit this.
    “She wants to have a relationship with you,” he said somewhat tentatively.
    “I can’t.”
    “Perhaps one day?”
    Jessie only shrugged.
    “She may not have had bad motives for what she did,” Dr. Roeske said, referring to the lawsuit that had led to the unexpected court order consigning her mother to a mental institution, instead of a care center, as her grandmother had insisted. Essentially, Olivia became a ward of the state.
    “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “As far as I’m concerned she stole my mother.”
    Roeske set down his ever-present dark blue and gold-scripted coffee cup. “But hating your grandmother won’t bring your mother back.”
    “I don’t hate her,” she said. “I just can’t stand to be around her.”
    “Your memories are like a festering wound,” he told her. “Inflamed and infected. You can’t just put on a Band-Aid and expect it to heal. Now that you’re older, you can deal with all this… .”
    She wasn’t interested. Fortunately, a few months after her seventeenth birthday, her emancipation was complete and she was free to conduct her life as she wished. In spite of mixed feelings, she canceled her therapy sessions, got a part-time job, made arrangements to rent a room in a school friend’s house, and finished high school. Things settled down after that and her grandmother finally let go.
    It was during her junior year in college that Jessie read of Roeske’s death. He’d died of a heart attack on a Sunday morning in the middle of winter while retrieving his Sunday paper. Jessie had wept for him. Until that moment she hadn’t realized her affection for