Beach Memories: A Special Excerpt from Forgiveness Road

I promised to post a special excerpt from my upcoming novel, Forgiveness Road, if more than 500 people added it to their to-be-read lists on Goodreads. So here goes! Let me set the scene. It’s 1970s Mississippi. Sixteen-year-old Cissy Pickering has killed her father to stop him from abusing her little sisters. She’s remanded to a psychiatric hospital. Part of her treatment are sessions with the hospital psychiatrist, Dr. Guttman. Here’s one of their conversations I call Beach Memories.

“I’d like us to agree not to use the word ‘murder’ during our visits, because it’s also a banned word. I usually just say I shot my daddy.” Cissy didn’t like to use the word kill either, but there was no getting around that. Killing was killing even if done for the right reasons.

“If you wish, Cissy,” he said. “But you’ve got to trust that you can talk about anything in our sessions. You’re safe here.”

When Cissy didn’t want to pay attention to Dr. Guttman, she thought about how many things in the room begged to be touched—the sheet of thick glass that covered his cherry desk, the rough pile of the carpet beneath her slippers, the sleek coolness of the black leather couch. Although smell was her favorite sense, touch was a close second because the surfaces of things sometimes spoke louder than words. A porcupine’s quills said, “Back off!” while rabbit fur said, “Squeeze me carefully.”

Her favorite part of the office was the wall behind his desk, which was covered from top to bottom with books—even more books than the library in the recreation room. She hadn’t asked him if he’d read them all, but she suspected someone so smart had read at least most of them. Some must have been very old because old books put off a special odor, a cross between cigar smoke and tree bark. While she’d always had an especially keen sense of smell, the summer humidity likely coaxed the scent out into the open.

“Cissy? Are you paying attention?”

“Of course,” she said, looking into his face. “I can talk about anything in our sessions because I am safe here.”

He stared at her for so long that she thought they might be having a contest.

“You have an awful lot of books.” She began counting, starting with the very top row, and going right to left, just to mix things up.

“Cissy, you’re welcome to count my books another time,” he said. “But I’d like you to be brave and share something that’s been on your mind. Would you do that?”

She thought about the thing that kept entering her mind over and over recently. “I’ve been missing the beach. Something fierce.”

Growing up in Biloxi meant Cissy could smell salt in the air all the time, and it became a part of every other scent. She smelled lots of things at the hospital. The strongest odor was of people who’d messed their pants on days the nurses were too busy to clean them up right away. When the hallways were freshly mopped, they smelled of stale water and pine cleaner. When the sheets were washed, they smelled of hot water and bleach. Nothing compared to the smell of the ocean, though.

“Tell me about the beach, then,” Dr. Guttman said.

“A few times each summer, Mama takes us to the beach even though she doesn’t like what she calls the hordes of vacationers who should keep driving until they hit Pensacola.”

Dr. Guttman chuckled, which put Cissy at ease. She told him how she and her sisters were made to wear wide-brimmed straw hats while they played in the sand and water because all three were freckled and fair-skinned. She told him she was often embarrassed that her mama made Bess carry their picnic basket and set up their beach umbrella when other families didn’t have their housekeepers along. Some of her classmates’ families didn’t even keep house help at all anymore.

“Did your father ever join you?”

“Not once,” she said. “He was always working. Mama didn’t work, so she had plenty of time to take us to the shore, even though she never seemed to enjoy it as much as us kids did.”

Cissy was grateful her daddy wasn’t part of her beach memories. Too many other memories—like birthday parties and Christmas mornings—had him attached to them. On those days, she wore her happiness on the outside. She did like looking at old photographs, though, because she could sometimes trick her mind into believing other parts of her childhood were happy.

“Are you okay, Cissy? You look very sad,” Dr. Guttman said.

“I was just thinking it’s hard to enjoy anything when you think you’re at least partly to blame for the bad things that happened in your life.”