The Other Chair

Dr. Conor Brennan had been practicing as a clinical psychologist in Dublin for nineteen years, and in that time he had learned to read a new client's first thirty seconds the way other men read a weather forecast. The way they sat. Whether they took off their coat. Whether they looked at the box of tissues on the low table as an invitation or an insult. So when Kevin Moran walked into his consulting room in Ranelagh on a wet Tuesday in October, Brennan noticed the coat, kept on, and the tissues, ignored, before he noticed anything else. It was only when Kevin sat down and looked at him directly that the floor seemed to tilt.

He had not seen that face in thirty years, but he would have known it anywhere. At fourteen, Kevin Moran had been small for his age, with a stammer and a schoolbag his mother had clearly bought too big so that he could grow into it. At fourteen, Conor Brennan had been the boy who made sure everyone in second year knew about the stammer. He had imitated it in the hallways. He had once, and the memory arrived now with appalling clarity, emptied that oversized bag into a puddle in the yard while a dozen boys laughed.

Kevin gave no sign of recognition. He said he had been referred by his GP for insomnia and what he called "a general heaviness". He was forty-four, an accountant, married, with two daughters. He spoke fluently; the stammer was gone, or very well hidden. Brennan took notes in a hand he hoped looked steady, asked the usual questions, and spent the entire fifty minutes wishing he had canceled his appointments and gone home with a cold.

That night he barely slept himself. He knew what the professional guidelines would say: a prior relationship of this kind, if it compromised his objectivity, meant he should refer the client to a colleague. But Kevin had not said anything. Perhaps he truly did not remember. Perhaps, Brennan thought, with a cowardice he recognized and disliked, it would be crueler to raise it than to let it lie. If only he could be sure which of those thoughts was judgment and which was self-protection.

The second session was harder. Kevin talked about his father, a man who had never once said he was proud of him, and about a feeling he had carried since his teens that he was always about to be found out. "I wish I could stop rehearsing conversations," he said. "I lie awake going over things people said to me thirty years ago. Things they've probably forgotten." He looked up. "Do people forget, do you think? The ones who said them?" Brennan replied that memory was selective, which was true and was also, he knew, an evasion.

In the third session, Kevin stopped pretending. He arrived early, took off his coat for the first time, and said, before Brennan had even opened his notebook, "You know who I am. I knew who you were before I booked. I saw your name on the clinic's website and I sat looking at it for an hour." He spoke quite calmly. "I wanted to see whether you'd turned into someone else. And I'd rather you didn't analyze that. Not yet."

Brennan put down his pen. For a long moment the only sound was the rain against the sash window. Then he said, "I remember the yard. The bag. I've remembered it for thirty years, though not as often as I should have." It was not what any textbook would have advised, and it was the most honest thing he had said in a consulting room in a long time. Kevin nodded slowly, like a man watching a column of figures he had been checking for years finally balance.

Afterwards, Brennan called his clinical supervisor, a dry, kindly woman called Nuala Kearney, who had heard most things in her career and said so. She listened without interrupting, then told him what he had known since the first Tuesday. "You can't be his therapist, Conor. Not because of what you did at fourteen, but because of what you feel now. You'll be working for your own forgiveness in every session, and he deserves someone who's working for him." She paused. "End it properly, though. Don't just hand him a phone number. He's had enough people walk away from him."

So the fourth and fifth sessions became something unusual: a careful, structured ending. Brennan explained why he had to refer Kevin on and gave him the names of two colleagues he trusted. Kevin was angry at first. "So I finally say it out loud, and you're the one who gets to leave?" he said, and Brennan, who had a hundred well-trained responses for moments like this, found that none of them would do. "You're right," he said. "I wish there were a way to do this that didn't feel like that. There isn't one I can see."

In the sixth and final session, there was no agenda. Kevin talked about his daughters, the elder of whom, he had recently discovered, was being picked on at school. He had found himself lying awake, rehearsing what he would say to the other child's parents, and it had frightened him how much of the old anger was still in him. "For years I used to wish something bad would happen to you," he said. "Nothing dramatic. Just that you'd be unhappy. And now I've sat in this room, and you're a decent enough man with gray hair and a bad back, and I don't know what to do with all that wishing."

Brennan did not try to tell him. Near the end, he said the thing he had been carrying since the first Tuesday, plainly and without any of the softening phrases his profession had taught him. "I'm sorry, Kevin. Not because it would make me feel better, though it might. Because it was true then and it's true now. You didn't deserve any of it." Kevin was quiet. Then he stood, put on his coat, and stopped at the door. "If only you'd said that when we were fourteen," he said. "Though I suppose you weren't capable of it then." "No," Brennan said. "I wasn't. I'd like to think I am now." Kevin almost smiled. "So would I," he said, and closed the door behind him.