A Room of Their Own by Rakefet Yarden (best summer reads of all time .TXT) 📕

with you until you can be there for yourself and digest everything that happened − until you no longer need to vomit in order to protect yourself from what the world puts into you.”

Snoopy approached us. Dani trusted his senses more than she did mine. It’s so much easier to believe animals than humans. They never lie or betray. It does help not to have any slippery words to trip over repeatedly.

When I was three, I went with my parents to buy shoes for someone’s wedding at Kiryat Shemona’s old shopping center, which was built like a maze. I wanted shiny black pumps with a bow, and they wanted me to buy a pair of white shoes. I didn’t give in.

“Let’s look in another store,” Dad suggested. We left and went into another one. The young saleswoman with dyed hair looked familiar and overly smiley, and she held up a pair of white shoes, just like the ones they’d previously picked out. “Great,” Dad said, “they have them here, too, because these shoes are really good. So let’s buy them, okay?”

I didn’t understand what that had to do with anything, and why the fact that the same shoes were in a different store meant that I had to get a pair that I didn’t want. And then I suddenly realized that they’d fooled me and just brought me into the same shop, but from a different entrance.

“This is the same store! The same store!” I screamed. A smile passed through the three of them, like a ball, as though saying, what a perceptive little girl. A cramp started to form in my stomach. “I wanna go home! Take me home!” I pleaded. To this day I don’t get their logic. Were the shoes really so important that they were worth making me think that I was crazy?

“If I were to do what they’re asking me to do, then what good would my license be? What, I’d just tell patients that they have an Oedipus complex? Convince them that they’re just imagining things?”

“But you didn’t even tell me to tell them,” Dani said.

“True. And I really can’t tell you that. It needs to be your choice. But let’s give them some time to digest it all. They may eventually come to their senses and listen. After all, this isn’t a simple bit of news.”

I thought to myself: Now you can also understand why you didn’t tell them yourself. If this is their reaction today, what do you think they’d do when you were still eight years old? What choice did you have but to forget?

I think that the question isn’t how one can forget, but rather how one can even remember such a thing.

Here to Help

It was already late when the door opened and Yulia walked in with Ofir. They knew not to knock for fear of waking up Yotam.

“We came as soon as the babysitter arrived. What’s happening, Rotem? What’s the story?” Yulia asked.

“Coffee first?” I asked.

“Yes, thanks. Just give me the letter first. I want to see what this is all about, and make mine regular − glass mug, no sugar,” Ofir said. He’s a criminologist and a police detective. He once helped me get a job at a prison, but I ran away from there after having read some of the indictments against the human scum that I was supposed to help rehabilitate. I decided they deserved someone who could work with them without constant nausea in her throat. We all need to acknowledge our limits.

I handed him the coffee along with the cookies that he likes, and gave Yulia a cup of herbal tea so that she’d be able to fall asleep later on, since she had to wake up early and get the kids ready, and then go teach. Ofir had an evening shift the next day, and in any case, coffee was like apple juice to him, what with the amounts that he’d gulp down during the course of a single shift.

“What’s this? Have you been at your Mom’s recently?” Yulia asked.

“Yeah, I visited my parents, so I restocked on the cookies as well as taking a hike in Nahal Zavitan.”

I shifted both their mugs so that the handles were in a straight line with the print at the bottom. Ofir and Yulia exchanged glances. “Okay, we know the story. This is what you’re always like when stress levels are high,” Yulia said.

“What are you so stressed about, Rotem? Let them try and sue. What can they possibly prove?” Ofir said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“There’s no case here. According to what you say, she recalled the incidents. She had serious anorexia for years that didn’t just start when she began seeing you. You didn’t use hypnotherapy, nor did you try to tell her any stories to fill in the gaps. So what does any of this have to do with your therapy?”

“You’re crazy, you’re imagining things − that’s what they always say, after all,” Yulia added. And who would know better than she, who had been hospitalized a few times back in Safed when she was an adolescent. It was always a week after Passover. It took her a few years to recognize the pattern, and talk about what it was that made her collapse every year during that holiday period.

“Rotem, are you okay? Can I get you anything?” Yulia put her hand on my back.

“I’m fine. Just give me a second.”

I saw her before me, clearly, without the usual cloud shrouding her, and I knew. I wasn’t crazy and I wasn’t imagining things. Emily was lying on the floor and I couldn’t save her. I stood at the other end, frightened, scared to move, scared to call someone. I saw her eyes rolling around in their sockets, but I remained frozen in my spot.

Emily didn’t know that I could see them, but he did. Shimon Chaim, the neighbors’ son, the local bully. He was lying on top of her, and then