Lee: Frustration

There was a brand-new minivan in front of the apartment when Lee got home. He chuckled as he walked around it; Amanda had once again gone with woodgrain-on-white. What was this, the fourth vehicle in a row now? He’d have to be sure and tease her about that over dinner.

Inside, the smell of meatloaf made his mouth water. After placing his keys on the entryway table — doing so really did make it easier to grab them on his way out — he went into the bedroom and changed out of his suit. Jamie had been on the floor behind the coffee table the whole time, papers spread out in front of him, and hadn’t said a word or even looked up.

Lee sat on the couch. “Hey, sport. Smells like your mom’s almost done with dinner.”

“She said a few more minutes, and then I’ll set the table.”

“Okay.” He paused. “What’re you working on?”

“Just stuff.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“No.”

Jamie had been silent and sullen more often than not lately, but it wasn’t like him to be openly rude. After a moment of thought, Lee decided it wasn’t worth the argument. “You, ah, you see your mom’s new car yet?”

“She used it to pick me up from the Carlisles’ after school.”

“What do you think about it?”

The child shrugged. “It’s all right.”

“You know, Jamie,” he observed, keeping his tone as conversational as he could, “it’s usually polite to look at someone when you’re having a conversation. And you’re usually done with your homework by now anyway.”

With an exaggerated sigh, Jamie finally looked up, and Lee did a double take. “What in the world happened to you?”

“Nothin’. Just messin’ around with Tad.”

“And that gave you a black eye? Yeah, right. Someone socked you but good. Has your mom seen that yet?”

“I told her the same thing. We were just messin’ around.”

“Messing around doing what?” He slid forward to take a closer look, wincing in sympathy when he saw just how deep the bruising went. And was that the shadow of another bruise on his left jaw? “What were you fighting about?”

Jamie looked down again. “We weren’t fighting. Just passin’ some licks.”

“Uh-huh. What’d your mom say?”

“Nothin’. She just told me to get in the car, and we came here.”

Pushing to his feet, Lee strode into the kitchen where Amanda was just taking the meatloaf out of the oven. “Hey,” he said as he kissed her cheek. “I saw the new car outside. But did you see Jamie’s face?”

“Yeah, and Tad looks about the same. Now that I have a car, I think I’ll pick him up from school directly, at least for next week. I want to talk to Lisa, that’s Mrs. Carlisle, before sending Jamie back over there after school.”

“They wouldn’t tell you what it was all about, either?”

“No, but they were getting along by the time I got there. Teasing his little sister about some friend of hers at school. So it couldn’t have been that awful.”

“Amanda,” he exclaimed, “didn’t you see how bad that black eye was? Or how many other bruises he has? There are probably more underneath his clothing. I’ve looked better than that after going a round with a KGB agent. They weren’t just ‘passing licks,’ no matter what Jamie says. They were fighting.”

“Jamie’s not a fighter.”

“Yeah? Then how else would he be looking like that?”

She shrugged. “Boys are going to be boys, Lee, and bruises happen. Jamie,” she called. “Time to set the table.”

His lips thinned, but Lee let it go. He wasn’t Jamie’s father, after all, which meant — as hard as it sometimes was for him to accept it — Amanda’s word was final. But he wasn’t imagining the pain in his stepson’s eyes, nor was he imagining the stiffness in Jamie’s movements or the fact that he was even more reticent than usual. By the end of the meal, he wasn’t offering any more than monosyllabic answers. When he asked to be excused, Amanda gave him a long look, but she didn’t actually say anything before releasing him.

“Hey,” called Lee as he left the room. “A hot shower will help the aches and pains. As hot as you can stand it.”

There was no response.

Amanda had already started clearing the table. He stood up, gathering plates and silverware for the dishwasher. They worked in silence, quickly and efficiently, but the air in the kitchen and dining room was almost vibrating with all the words left unsaid.

Finally Amanda sighed. “Thanks for suggesting the hot shower. I’ll make sure he takes some Tylenol tonight and maybe again in the morning.”

“I still think he got into a fight.”

“There weren’t any witnesses, and both he and Tad said it was just roughhousing. So unless they admit it, there’s no way to know for sure.”

Exasperation crept into his tone. “Come on, Amanda, you don’t look like that after a minor scuffle.”

“I know.” Now she turned to face him. “That’s why I’m going to talk to Lisa on Monday, to see if Tad says anything more to her. But unless one of them does, we have to take their word for it!”

“Why?” It came out harsher than he’d meant, but the question was valid enough.

She began to stammer, but then cut herself off and turned back to the sink, plunging her hands into the water where she’d been working on the pans. A healthy amount of it splashed backward onto her blouse. “Oh, blast it. I didn’t have time to change clothes after work and have dinner ready at any decent hour.”

Lee crossed over to wrap his arms around her shoulders. “It was ready in plenty of time. You did good, especially given that minivan outside.” It occurred to him that he’d meant to tease her about the color, but right now it didn’t seem like a good time. “They give you a decent deal?”

Amanda sighed, a long exhalation. “Decent enough. It could’ve been better, I suppose, but I got them to throw in a maintenance agreement for the duration of the warranty. I figure that’s worth at least a thousand dollars or so —”

“I’m sure you did fine,” he replied, inhaling the scent from her hair. “I can still smell your perfume from this morning.”

“Some of it’s probably on my blouse. Which I need to go change.”

“I could help with that,” he pointed out softly, putting a lilt into his voice.

She disentangled herself. “It’ll only take a minute, and then I need to finish these pans before the food dries. I want to check on Jamie, too. I don’t hear any water running.”

Standing alone in the kitchen, he let out a sigh that was as long as hers had been. If not longer.

---

“And how did the weekend go after that?”

Lee scrubbed his hands through his hair. “Downhill.”

“Hm.” Pfaff took a bite out of his latest ice cream bar. Lee wondered how he kept himself within the Agency’s physical standards eating like that. But he must be doing something right, since nobody at the Agency was exempt from them. “This is the first weekend Jamie had spent with you since the accident, wasn’t it?”

“Not the first. But yeah, he’s usually over at his father’s. Joe was prepping for a trial or something, or maybe out of town.” He shrugged. “I don’t keep track.”

“How did Amanda do with him?”

“I don’t know. We barely exchanged half a dozen sentences the whole weekend.”

“What was she doing?” asked the psychologist.

“Damned if I know. But they were in and out.”

“Did you ask?”

“Yeah, but he wasn’t going to answer, and Amanda just said they were taking care of some things.” He heard the irritation in his voice, meaning to check it, but then decided that it was better to let it stay. As long as he was stuck in these mandatory sessions, he might as well try and get something from them. “Tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife last night.”

“Maybe Amanda is trying to deal with whatever had happened when she picked him up on Friday.”

Lee rolled his eyes. “Look, if all you’re going to do is tell me to give people the benefit of the doubt —”

“I’m not, actually.” Pfaff sat up from where he’d been reclining on his couch. “But I’m also not going to focus on Amanda’s behaviors right now. We’re here to talk about how you’re feeling, and it sounds to me like you’re pretty frustrated.”

“I am!” He shook his head. “They’re not dealing with things.”

“How do you know?”

“Because nothing’s being done!” he finally exploded. “And nothing’s happening! Hell, Doc, we haven’t even made love since —” Lee cut himself off abruptly. Did he really want to get that personal with the Agency shrink, knowing that it might end up in his records? “She’s not dealing with this, and that means none of us can, either.”

“Why not?”

“We’re supposed to be doing this together, damn it! I can’t do it all by myself! It’s so blasted obvious that Jamie’s having trouble, and hell, doc, I would be too after six weeks of having to sleep on a couch when I could be in a bed. At least I assume that’s part of what’s wrong with him, since he won’t speak more than two words to me without being spoken to first. Amanda doesn’t even seem to notice half of what’s been going on around her or between us or even with Joe and Carrie and…” he realized he’d begun to rant and forced himself to take a breath. “It’s like she’s lost in her own little world, and I can’t break into it.”

“Maybe she’s just not ready yet, even though you are.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do about that?” he growled.

“Well,” began Pfaff, “you can begin by acknowledging your own anger and pain over what happened.”

At that, Lee dropped his gaze. “I’m not the one who lost half my family.”

“Aren’t you? You’re married, and that makes her family your family. Hadn’t you already been watching over them for years before you officially met them? Word gets around, Scarecrow. There was scuttlebutt about that toy you got one of them from overseas, and about the time you helped the other with his birthday.”

Lee looked at him, surprised.

The doctor smiled and took another bite of ice cream. “The grapevine finds its way down here as much as it does anywhere else. But that’s not really the point. Whether you’ve known them for as long as Amanda did or have been as involved in their lives as she was, they became your family too. Maybe it’s your way of trying to regain some part of what you lost as a child. Maybe it’s something else. The point is, you still cared about Phillip and Dotty. You’d been listening through the window for, what, three years before you finally officially met them?”

“Yeah,” he muttered. “But it’s not the same.”

“No,” said Pfaff. “It isn’t. But that doesn’t mean you’re not going through your own grieving process, and you are, Lee. You’ve got to acknowledge that before you can start dealing with it, and you’ll need to keep doing that if you want to be strong for Amanda and Jamie. Because I guarantee you, when things finally do start coming out with them, you’re going to need all your coping skills to handle that.”

“Come on, Doc, I’ve known Amanda for years. I can handle her.”

“You’ve never seen her like this. Like I said, we’re talking about you, anyway.” He leaned forward. “What have you been doing to work through your own feelings?”

He lurched to his feet and prowled around the room. “I haven’t had time to deal with any of that.”

“You’re going to need to make time, Lee, and right now’s a great time to get yourself level set before the next thing happens.”

“Which is?”

“It could be one of several different things,” he replied. “There’s no way to know for sure until it happens.”

“As if that isn’t adding to my frustration! I know grief, damn it. I lived it for too long. I can manage.”

“Can you? Because all I’ve heard you do in here so far is deny it.”

“Damn it, Doc!” It came out at something close to full volume.

“What?”

Lee opened his mouth to reply but found that he didn’t have the words. His hands were shaking, and his skin was crawling so badly he thought he might be flying apart. He could no more have kept still than he could have pulled out his service weapon and shot Amanda.

Bad example, Stetson, a part of his mind responded.

The shaking got worse, and some nausea was starting too. “I, ah, I…” he trailed off.

“All right,” said Pfaff. “We’re at our time limit for this session anyway. Go to the workout rooms.”

“What?”

“Go to the workout rooms, here at the Agency. Right now. No, don’t argue. You’re in no shape to go back up to the Q-Bureau anyway, especially if Amanda’s there. Change clothes and run through some drills or whatever you do in there. You need to calm down, and after that, I want you to think about the answer to my question: how are you handling your own anger, denial, resentment, and all those other things you’re feeling? Because you are feeling them, whether you want to admit it or not.”

He stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind him, but realized that Pfaff was right about at least one thing: he was in no shape to head back up to the Q, and yelling and screaming and hitting something sounded like it might actually be a good idea. Detouring to the locker room, he took his martial arts gear out of his locker and stripped down, letting his street clothes land haphazardly. Once he had changed, he stomped out and glared around until his eyes fell on the heavy bag.

That would be perfect.

Without bothering to wrap his knuckles, he charged it full tilt, attacking it with furious punches and kicks. At one point it swung back hard enough to clip him on the left ankle. He tumbled to the mat but was up again almost immediately, hitting it even harder than before despite the pain in his hands. He wasn’t even close to being ready to stop yet! Dimly, Lee realized he was also yelling wordlessly at the top of his lungs.

Despite all his anger and frustration, though, he could feel the adrenaline of unarmed combat beginning to take hold and lift his mood. He kept at it, pushing himself to the limit. He’d be sore afterward, but that would be a good kind of pain.

“Lee?”

A step back onto his left ankle resulted in a sharp pain, and he quickly switched to his right leg. Was that blood on his knuckles? No matter; he’d been hurt worse.

“Lee!” Amanda’s voice finally penetrated his awareness.

Gasping, he dropped to his elbows and knees, his body screaming in half a dozen places. After only a few minutes?

But it had been longer than that, he realized as his breathing began to slow. The clock on the workout room’s wall showed he’d been at it for nearly an hour.

His wife came up, took one look at him, and then turned toward the first aid kit. “You’re bleeding. Let me clean you up.”

“I’m fine.” His voice was hoarse and scratchy. “I will be, anyway.”

“You’re going to need help wrapping your hands. And I’ll bring you a towel. You probably should take a shower before you get back into your regular clothes.”

“Yeah,” he acknowledged, rolling his head around his neck. “Thank you.”

She paused and turned back to him for a long moment, and while she seemed to be nearly expressionless, there was something in her eyes. It was as though all the anger and frustration he’d been feeling was being reflected back at him, and he took a long, shaky breath in response. It wasn’t going to be very long before things started “coming out.” It wasn’t going to be very long at all.

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