"I've scuttled my career," Mac announced upon sitting down in Audrey's office.
Audrey struggled to hide her surprise, not at the statement, but at the fact that the statement was made without prompting on her part. "How's that?" she asked, proud of the neutral tone to her voice.
"I won't be allowed to stay in the Marines," she clarified. "I'll either resign, if the Admiral kept this quiet, or I'll be discharged. It's unfair to make him pay for my mistake."
Audrey didn't understand the technicalities involved in Mac's discharge, wouldn't even if Mac explained in them in detail, so she switched to a topic that she could handle without problems. "How does that make you feel?"
"I don't know," Mac shrugged off the question. "I haven't really thought about it."
Liar, liar, screamed Audrey in her head. Aloud, she asked, "How long were you in the Marines?"
"Since I was 19."
Audrey calculated the years. "And during that time, you never thought about a different lifestyle?"
"Once," Sarah admitted on a sigh. "I joined a D.C. law firm. It wasn't for me though. I went back to JAG quickly."
"Why did you go back?"
Sarah shrugged and looked out the window. "I was a wild child before the Marines," she murmured in the direction of the window. Turning back to Audrey, she said, "I was headed nowhere and fast. Stuck in a marriage to a guy who was only slightly better than my dad."
"And?" Audrey prompted, gesturing with her hands for Sarah to continue.
"And the Marines took me away from that."
Audrey frowned at her notepad. "You said you were a wild child. Did you drink? Take drugs?"
"Drink, yes," she confirmed. "Drugs, at least I wasn't that stupid. I was a recovering alcoholic by nineteen."
"What made you quit?"
"A car accident. It killed my best friend and my uncle took care of me and helped me dry out."
"Were you driving?"
"No." She shook her head in denial. "But I was too young and too drunk to realize that he shouldn't have been driving either."
"So you quit?"
"With a lot of help from uncle," she added.
"And you turned your life around?" Audrey asked.
"Not over night, no. And I couldn't have done it without my uncle and the Marines." Sarah waved a hand as if she were brushing the memories the away.
"Sarah." Audrey leaned forward and pulled a leg beneath her. She tapped her pencil against her notepad, taking the time to make sure her wording was satisfactory. "I'm going to do something I don't do very often. I'm going to give you an opinion. Normally, I'd try to help you arrive at the insight, but I think you need a pick me up." She smiled at her.
"A pick me up?" Sarah repeated, a frown creasing her face.
"Do you know what my least favorite Greek myth is?" When Sarah shook her head, she continued, "It's Pandora's box." She held up a hand to forestall the questions. "Ignoring the misogynistic tendency to once again blame the woman, it's because when people retell it, they leave the most important part of the story out. When Pandora opened the box, after most of the demons and problems had fled from it, she slammed the box closed. What you don't hear very often, is that in that box, at the bottom, underneath all the bad things, there was hope. The gods gave the world hope too."
"This is your opinion?" Sarah questioned again.
"No," Audrey denied. "I'm going to tell you something to help you let hope out. You're stronger than you think you are and it's time you gave yourself some credit for it."
"I'm still a little," she paused, "lost."
"Sarah, you pulled yourself up. You saved your life." Audrey smiled gently and tried to keep her voice soft. In all her years of psychiatry, she would never understand why people grew upset when they heard good things about themselves. "Give yourself some credit."
"But," Sarah leaned forward a little and gestured to the space behind her, as if the ghost of the earlier conversation lingered behind them, "I just told you I did all that because of my uncle and the Marines."
"Asking for help doesn't make you weak or less of a person." She smiled again and said, "Forgive me for this, I swear after today you will never hear about another ancient Greek from me again, but Socrates, or maybe it was Plato, I can never remember, once said that it's a wise man who knows he is not wise." Audrey waited a minute to see if Sarah would follow and finish her analogy. When the other woman remained stubbornly silent, she continued, "It takes a smart, strong person to realize that they need help and to accept it when it's offered."
Sarah dropped her head to her knees and shuddered out a deep breath. Audrey could see her ribs shake under her sweater. "I've made such a mess of things," She pushed herself up and dashed a hand beneath her eyes. "Such a mess." She let out a small, humorless laugh. "When I did this, I really thought that I was ending the problems, not creating new ones."
"Well, then. Let's start figuring out how to fix them. We'll start with an easy one, your career."
"I really don't know how to be anything other than a Marine."
"You're a lawyer aren't you?"
"Yes, but - Yes," she finished.
"But what?"
"I think that's why I liked JAG so much. I felt like I was doing something."
Sarah leaned her head against the palm of her hand and shook it a little.
"So you think if you get a job as a civilian attorney, you won't be able to accomplish as much?" Audrey rephrased Sarah's sentence into a question that would force Sarah to expound.
Sarah nodded slightly. "I did it once." She sighed and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. "It was all about billable hours and generating paperwork."
"And the cases at JAG don't require that sort of thing?"
"Paperwork," she said. "We still have to do the menial things like motions and depositions and interrogatories, but we get the chance to argue really big cases, too. The firm work wasn't so, so," she trailed off, unable to find the right word.
"Heroic?" Audrey supplied with a small smile. "They have big cases outside the military too, you know." She tried to remember her U.S. history course to name the big cases. "What about Brown versus the Board of Education? Or Miranda?"
Sarah shrugged. "I guess."
"Sarah," Audrey said her name firmly and waited until she had her full attention before speaking. "Big things are possible. Even in the civilian world."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"Yeah," she said grudgingly. "I do. It's just going to take some getting used to."
"Life means readjusting. I read that someplace."
"Socrates again?" Sarah smiled her question.
Relieved at the joke, even it was just a little one, Audrey answered honestly. "No, I think it was Nora Roberts," she said with a guilty smile. It surprised her when Sarah giggled.
Later, when her last appointment left, Audrey sat down with her notes and reviewed her patients' progress. As she sifted through the pile, she spied Sarah's name. Pulling out the notes, she glanced over them to refresh her memory. She allowed herself to relax fractionally. Every patient was different and Sarah was a harder subject than some of the others. She held on to her defenses tightly and Audrey had begun to wonder if she would ever let them go long enough for anyone to help her. But today, she finally, finally, felt the walls begin to crack. The real problem, the problem that prompted the attempt, was still lurking behind the walls, but at least she was starting to gain access.
Mentally,
she tracked Sarah's progress. If she was to chart it on a graph, she'd
find that the line was finally starting to go up.