Keeper of Secrets |
by Anjuelle Floyd View Comments
Genre: Drama | Rating: PG-13
The letter Lahni received that morning read:
“… As executor of his estate, this letter is
to inform you that Dr. Karl Schreiber, psychoanalyst,
has died. All records of his work with clients, former
and present, have been destroyed. Should you have
further questions, please call 212-557-92…”
Eight years had passed since Lahni had seen Karl Schreiber---the length of her marriage to Nwoye’. A newly licensed analyst, she’d been thirty, Schreiber, seventy-one. Lahni folded the letter and considered her last session with the last person in America who held her secret.
"Are you sure you want to marry him?” The white-haired Schreiber had asked of Nwoye’.
"He loves me.”
"Amos loved you too,” Schreiber had said.
Childhood friends, Lahni and Amos Morgan, had trained at an analytic institute in upstate New York during the early eighties. When Lahni refused his proposal for marriage, he’d left for Africa, where during a trek through Ghana he’d met, and then married Nicole, a native of Paris.
At the time of Lahni’s session, Amos was living with Nicole in Berkeley, California, and they had a child on the way. Yet he’d called Lahni each day back in New York, sometimes twice, the two of them discussing various clients.
"I feel safe when I’m with Nwoye’,” Lahni had then said to Schreiber.
"And you didn’t feel so with Amos?” Schreiber leaned back. “That’s interesting in light of the fact that Nwoye’s blind and Amos is not.”
Certain that Schreiber’s question had been connected to the death of her father weeks earlier, Lahni resented her answer.
"Are you saying I shouldn’t marry Nwoye’ because he can’t see me?”
The sound of her words had reverberated, and then settled, Lahni meeting the soft blue gaze of her analyst’s eyes and realizing how he had come to understand her so well. Karl Schreiber had listened to Lahni’s thoughts twice and often three times weekly for over six years.