The Picture of Matt

She still had his picture.  The battered black plastic frame was scratched and covered in six years of dust.  She never touched it and never used the thrift store end table that it was on.  The picture was there and that is what mattered.  The young man in the frame, healthy and smiling, had just gotten off of the tallest rollercoaster in the world.  There was a line of people snaking in and out of the frame as they waited for their turn.

In the picture it was three days before that young man would graduate from high school.  Outside of the frame it was exactly ten years since he protected a girl he barely knew from an abusive boyfriend and lost his life in the process.

The woman who owned the picture was not the girl he saved.  The girl he saved spent her weekends at the jail, joking and laughing through protective glass with her boyfriend who was now serving a life sentence without the possibility for parole.

Jennifer had taken the picture of Matt.  It wasn’t anything special, just a picture of the last hurrah before graduation, before adulthood.  She never dusted the frame and only saw the picture inside in passing.  In reality the layer of dust on the glass was getting so thick that she could barely make out his face.  But she didn’t need to see the picture in order to know it was there. The frame and its inhabitant were always with her.  When she had a problem she thought of that picture and everything worked itself out.

For the first year or two she spoke directly to the young man in the picture.

“Matt, I think I need to switch majors, biology just doesn’t feel right for me.”

“Oh Matt, I just don’t feel like going to that party, Lee Fara is going to be there and he’s been creeping me out lately.”

“Matt, Lee Fara did something to me last night.  I should have listened to you.  I shouldn’t have gone to that party.  I don’t really remember much.  Matt, I should have listened.  Matt, I think I was raped.”

Jennifer’s mother caught her speaking about Matt during a surprise visit.

“How are you dear?  Is everything alright here at school?  Your father and I haven’t heard from you in ages.”

“Everything is fine Mom.  You know how I am, I get into a groove of work and class and I just don’t think about anything else.”

“Oh but Dear that isn’t really healthy.  You need to take some time off and talk to people.  You don’t want to become a shut in.”

“Mom, I’m not going to become a shut in.  And anyway, I always talk to Matt.”

Her mother’s confused look clued Jennifer in to what she had just said.  She slumped down onto the couch and didn’t speak full sentences for the rest of her mother’s visit.  Her mother immediately scheduled therapy for her.  The psychiatrist told her that she was showing slight signs of schizophrenia, probably brought on by the shock of losing a close friend at the very end of High School.  The psychiatrist told her that because most high school teenagers expect a relief of tension and a general feeling of well being upon graduation, the introduction of a traumatic and deeply disturbing event can come as a shock that hits five or six times heavier than it would have under normal circumstances.  He was certain that with repeated sessions and therapy, Jennifer would regain her emotional balance and bloom into a well situated college student.

She improved quickly.  Her mother and the psychiatrist convinced her she was crazy but that it was alright because something horrible had happened to her best friend.  Once she finally broke down and decided that something really must have been wrong with her it was easy to ignore the need to look at the picture, the need to talk to Matt whose happy smile had been changing lately into the mournful, lonely smile of the forgotten.  Jennifer knew she was imagining it, knew it was just another symptom of her schizophrenia.  She told the psychiatrist about it.  In two days time she was taking medicine for her illness.

On a perfectly white sheet of paper taped next to the mirror in her bathroom were the instructions: Two Pills, Twice a Day, Do Not Forget.  It was her mantra for two weeks as her mind and body became accustomed to the medicine.  The dust on the picture frame lay eight years thick.

Why she never got rid of the picture, Jennifer didn’t really know.  Her mother suggested it quite a few times and each time Jennifer agreed that it would probably be better for her if she just got rid of it and moved on.  When her mother left, the thought flew from her mind like a bad dream slipping from her memory upon awakening.  She never looked at it like she used to.  She never spoke to it like she used to.  Yet every time there was a problem, a mishap, a big decision or a problem that she just could not solve, Jennifer would think about that battered black frame and the figure within.  There would be no exchange of words but Jennifer would immediately know what she needed to do to solve her problem.

There would be no exchange of words but Jennifer would immediately know what she needed to do to solve her problem.  She never expressed this to her mother or her psychiatrist.  Somewhere in her mind she knew that she needed the connection, no matter how small.  She needed it as badly as she needed to take pills.

Eight years after she started her twice a day regiment and Jennifer was a moderately successful caseworker for battered women.  She was, in other’s eyes, a successful and well adjusted adult.  A few women, including her mother, wondered why she never married or even showed an interest in dating, but other than that she was generally well accepted wherever she went.

Work was starting to run later.  The better she did her job, the more the work piled up on her.  Weariness began to overtake her as the number of nights without adequate sleep began to climb.