My thumb taps the home button on my phone, closing out my calendar, and I force myself to focus and do a mental scan through my job performance over the course of the semester. Aside from what happened this morning with Justin—and the meeting can’t be about that, since David scheduled our appointment earlier in the week—I’ve been having one of the best semesters of my career: engaged students, well-prepped and delivered lectures. Before all this mess with Justin, I’d felt I was finally coming into my own as a professor.
I start composing a text to Justin, something along the lines of, “I’m so sorry, I know I have issues, please forgive me, I love you too.” All one big run-on purge of remorse, but when I read it over I just can’t quite stomach the desperation of it. Annie’s words bubble up like indigestion. We’re not broken.
I delete the message.
I answer a few e-mails (all of the “Will this be on the final exam?” or “I just decided to go to graduate school and need a letter of recommendation in seventy-two hours” variety). I empty my recycling bin on my desktop. The basket icon is now pleasantly empty.
I do a Google image search for no-knead bread recipes.
When I take out my phone again, I don’t delete Twitter and Facebook (Sorry Annie), but I do finally send a text to Justin. Then I call Dr. Koftura’s office and set an appointment with her for this afternoon. Before I leave for my appointment, I hold the button to power off my phone. As the screen turns dim, the imprint of my message stares back at me.
I’m sorry.
I figure it’s harder to sound crazy when you limit yourself to two words.
My department head’s office is hidden behind an imposing desk occupied by Sheila, his staff assistant. Sheila is the kind of woman who wears holiday-themed sweatshirts, and somehow manages to make them look good on her. She brings in cookies on a regular basis and walks them around to the faculty offices, each tasty morsel proffered from a perfectly nestled place inside her Danish butter cookie tin. Everyone, including me, thinks she’s fantastic.
My boss, David Sothern, doesn’t have quite the same effect.
Sheila spots me as I venture down the faculty hallways towards the main offices in the psychology department, and her hand instinctively reaches for a tin of what I’m assuming is something delicious.
Blueberry muffins, it turns out.
Before I can snag one, my mouth watering despite my earlier cruciferous snack, David emerges from the oak-paneled door of his office and sees me standing over Sheila’s desk.
“Kalson!” he exclaims. For some indeterminate reason, he calls all the faculty members by their last names. Never a “Professor” or a “Doctor” preceding it. It’s as though we’re all members of some lacrosse team where he got last pick for his teammates.
I follow him into his office and find him already sitting at his desk, his computer screen off, and a stack of papers neatly laid out on the shining wood. I catch a glimpse of his family photos as I walk in, with his wife and three almost-grown kids smiling back at him every day while he works.
David waves me to a seat opposite his desk. I start to sit down, but he adds, “Close the door, would you.”
It’s not a request.
I do as I’m told and settle myself in the indicated chair, which is 1960s style leather and oak, with a few cracks in the seat. The old leather catches greedily on the fabric of my pants as I settle in.
I wait for David—Professor Sothern—to begin.
“Do you know what we need to discuss today?” David asks.
Like I said, he’s no Sheila.
I pull a thoughtful face and consider the question for a few moments to stop myself from saying something else. “No, I can honestly say I do not.” I punch the “t” with my tongue.
“Hmm . . .” David leans forward. “I wanted to congratulate you once again on the op-ed you wrote for the Plain Dealer in June. You’ve garnered some great press for the department. And you were absolutely right in what you wrote—child protection is failing our children and, as you point out, it failed you too. I’d thought that could become an avenue of research for you as you work towards tenure. Your interest in child welfare could not only lead to groundbreaking science, but also hefty grants to help fund your work within our department. Maria’s recently had some luck in this same area, and I see a lot of potential in you. . .”
A bead of sweat drips from my underarm into the band of my bra. I shift in my seat, trying to take in the compliment, and feel my pants snag on one of the leather faults. The scratch of a tiny rip sounds across the quiet space between David and me.
David interrupts himself. “Is everything okay? You look pale.”
It takes me a moment to get the words out of my mouth. My ears are buzzing.
“I think I’m just hungry.” I give a nod towards Sheila’s desk behind the wall of his office. “Sheila’s muffins. . .” I trail off.
I fold my hands in my lap and focus on the crease between wall and ceiling behind the withering ficus in the corner. I shape my mouth into a smile, and hope it doesn’t resemble rictus.
David pats his stomach and smiles back. “They are delicious, although I may have overindulged a little.” I force a chuckle, and somehow laughing with my boss about his midriff helps me feel better.
“Yes, well,” David reaches up and straightens his tie. “Keep up the great work and you might be looking at preparing your promotion/tenure package in the next couple of months. I wanted to give you a heads up.”
I have to wait a few extra moments, more than is polite, for the riot in my body to subside. I pause another couple of seconds, until the expected whorl of satisfaction at my boss’s approval rises in my chest. “Thank you. That’s great news,” I say.
David turns his head back to the papers on his desk and I make a line for the door. He calls out a “Goodbye” to me, which I hear from Sheila’s desk, where she’s waiting with the muffin tin ready for me to tuck into as I pass by on my way back to my office. Even though I’m no longer hungry, I grab a muffin and take a massive bite before heading back to my office. Blueberries burst in my mouth.
Sheila smiles and holds the tin out again. “One for the road?”
12
St. Elizabeth’s hospital sits right around the corner from Youngstown State’s campus, and Dr. Koftura’s office can be found in one of the extension buildings built a while ago onto the original hospital’s structure. It’s more than a little convenient that I can walk over for my appointment directly from my office. On my way out, I pass by Maria’s office and catch a glimpse of her dark head bent over her desk, highlighter in hand. I rush past, too embarrassed to hash over what happened this morning.
It’s bitter out today, and the wind chafes at my body as I walk over the freeway overpass and past the antediluvian street sign reading, “No cell phone use in this area.” The burst of pleasure from my successful meeting with David—Sothern!—has leaked out of me and I have to arm-wrestle my mind into submission so it will stop replaying my weird spaz out in his office. By the time I enter through the staggered mechanical doors designed to keep the winter air out of the reception area, I am shivering from the cold and clammy from nerves.
I’m worried about what Dr. Koftura will say.
The receptionist is a young man in his mid-twenties. I hand over my university insurance card and take in his dimples and wavy blond hair. I offer him a smile, trying to get out of my head for a minute, but he ignores me almost entirely, aside from mechanically asking for my date of birth and name of the doctor I’m seeing. He looks over my shoulder as he hands back my insurance card and tells me to take a seat in Waiting Room B.
Still got it.
Before I can warm my hands up on a well-thumbed People magazine (I just look at the pictures, I swear), a dark-haired nurse with huge hoop earrings calls my name. I follow her through the magical door that leads to the warren of exam rooms, and sit obligingly as she takes my blood pressure, weight, and height. The nurses do this ever
y time, and every time I think what a waste it is to measure my height, seeing as I haven’t grown since I was fourteen and I’ve been coming here for biannual exams for the past umpteen years.
As the nurse leads me further into the tributaries of exam rooms, we pass by Dr. Koftura’s office, emblazoned with the embossed nameplate of Jana Koftura, M.D., and Dr. Koftura herself. She’s on her knees, wiggling the lock on the door to her personal office. I have a few seconds to gaze inside as the nurse and I walk towards her, where I glimpse a pristine desk with papers in neat stacks and a computer screen sitting on one side. There are two chairs in soft brown with leather seats across from the desk—new additions from the last time I was brought into Dr. Koftura’s inner sanctum. After all these years of care, I’ve only been inside her office twice. Once when we first began treatment, right after the accident, and then a few years later, when Patty and Dave decided I couldn’t stay with them any longer and I needed to go to another foster family.
I hadn’t taken the news well.
“Do you need some help?” I offer by way of introduction.
As she turns her head towards me, her dark hair is so lustrous that it catches light from the industrial fluorescents and creates a corona around her face.
Dr. Koftura’s gaze fixes on me for a moment, scanning for something—Does she not recognize me? I think for a split second—and then offers me a smile.
“Morgan, it’s so good to see you.” She gestures to her office, still crouched on the floor. “This door won’t stay shut. I keep closing it, locking it even, and then when I walk by again it’s open.”
“I can call maintenance,” the nurse offers, with an edge to her voice that makes me wonder what Dr. Koftura is like to work for.
Dr. Koftura turns her gaze back to the door and its lock. “That’s not necessary. I’ve already called several times, and they have yet to send anyone to fix it.” She mutters something under her breath as the screwdriver in her hand slips.
“Do you have other tools here?” I ask. In foster care, making myself useful made it more likely for me to stick around a home. Usually. I can plunge a toilet like nobody’s business. Or pick a lock.
“I brought my entire toolbox in.” Dr. Koftura stands up and lets out a sigh. “But it’s no use. It really is quite ridiculous. I have private files in there—the lock should work.”
“I can try and fix it,” I offer, and I reach my hand out to grab the screwdriver from her, ready to impress her.
More than once in grad school I had professors compare the human brain to one big electrical circuit, and each time I heard that, all I could think was, “I wish.” If that were the case, we’d all be easy to fix.
Dr. Koftura gives me a complicated look, and then shakes her head. “This can wait.”
She asks the nurse to take me over to the exam room.
“I’ll see you in a minute,” she says, and heads back into her office.
It’s only a few minutes when I hear Dr. Koftura’s gentle knock on the door before she enters. Her long, silky hair is tied in its usual braid at the nape of her neck. Over the years, streaks of gray have been added to her plaits. One dark wisp falls in front of her eye as she swings the door open, and she tucks it behind her ear as she greets me once again. I feel like a five-year-old, fidgeting on the exam table with my sweaty palms.
“Morgan, how are you?” She does the full double-hand hold that few people can achieve genuinely, but Dr. Koftura is certainly one of them. There’s a comfort in seeing the same doctor for most of your life.
“I’m okay.” I give a watery smile before asking after her two kids, who are almost as old as me now. I can remember when they were younger, and I was younger, too, and how Dr. Koftura’s skin would look ashen, her eyes sunk from the fatigue of raising her children on her own—her husband died when they were young—but even then she’d still be glowing in that way she has.
Sometimes, when I was younger, I’d pretend Dr. Koftura was my mother.
“Oh, you know—these millennials have their own unique formula for navigating the world, don’t they? And parents aren’t usually a big part of it.” She smiles again and sits down, clipboard turned over on top of her knee, and looks at me intently.
“What’s going on? I have a few notes from the intake nurse, but I’d rather hear from you directly.”
I’d been rehearsing what to say to her on the walk over, but now my mind seems to have gone blank. I take a deep breath and try to remember how I wanted to explain my shitstorm of a morning.
“My boyfriend and I got into a fight today. After I couldn’t find him online—not even on Facebook, and I mean everyone and their grandmother is on Facebook—” I glance up from my hands, where I’ve fixed my eyes while I’ve talked, but Dr. Koftura doesn’t shift her expression at my lame joke. She stares at me intently. “So I searched for Justin—that’s his name, Justin—and when I didn’t find anything I started getting suspicious, thinking that maybe he’d been lying to me. I ended up trying to follow him on campus, and things just spiraled from there.”
I blush because all my “prepwork” has resulted in an incoherent babbling fit.
She’s going to take my shoelaces, I think.
I raise my eyes expectantly. Dr. Koftura frowns at me, but not in an unkind way. Finally, after a few more moments of consideration, she speaks.
“I see. What do you mean by ‘spiraled from there’?”
I sigh. I might as well finish the job.
I tell her about my fight with Justin. I tell her everything.
Dr. Koftura listens calmly, nodding intermittently as I talk. Active listening. Normalizing.
I know what she’s doing, but from her it reads as genuine.
When I’m finished, she says, “Morgan, these are patterns that you and I both recognize.”
I shrug my shoulders, eight-years-old again, and waiting for my Band-Aid and lollipop. “I know,” I say. “That’s why I’m here.”
She nods again.
“You had several episodes during your graduate training, and we discussed how that was possibly due to the stress of your program. I’ve been worried about your transition to your full-time position at the university, especially now that you’ll be coming up for promotion soon. Do you see any connection between your behavior this morning and potential stressors at work?”
She doesn’t glance at her clipboard once, and I try to remember if I mentioned four months ago at my regular check-up about the possibility of promotion, but can’t recall. Dr. Koftura adds, brushing the same dark strand of hair behind her ear again, “You’ve been at the university for two years now, correct? When Jawinder had just begun working, his first tenure assessment also came at two years.”
Her eyes scan the ground for a breath or two. She doesn’t usually talk about her husband.
Jawinder was a medical doctor—an internist, according to one of the nurses who clued me in a few years back during an extra long wait in the pre-screening room—who went down the academic route and became a faculty member in YSU’s biology department.
I think back to my earlier meeting with my department head, push away the weird hot flash that sent me rushing out of his office, and focus instead on what he said. That jolt of satisfaction I felt at his compliment barrels through me again. It only lasts for a moment, though, because I know what I need to tell Dr. Koftura.
“It’s not work.” I swallow. Hard. This is so embarrassing. “Justin said he loves me.”
Surprise flashes across Dr. Koftura’s face, followed by relief.
“Well, that’s wonderful,” she says.
“Is it?” I steel myself to go through with this rehashing. “The same thing happened with Richard.” I point out the obvious. “I don’t do well with vulnerability.”
“You know that’s not entirely true,” Dr. Koftura says, her voice gentle. “We’ve been monitoring your health for a long time, because when you were a child—”
I cut her off, parroting th
e words I’ve heard so many times before, here in this office. “I sustained a massive head trauma after being struck by a moving vehicle, which resulted in episodic amnesia and perceptual distortions.”
“That’s correct,” my doctor chimes in. “And because the brain can sometimes not show the effects of injuries until years and years after the trauma occurred, we check in with you at least twice a year. You know I’d prefer,” and here she touches her hand to her chest, just above her heart, in a gesture I’d dismiss as cheesy if it were anyone else. “I’d prefer to see you at least four times a year, but you’ve never agreed to that since you were old enough to decide this on your own. But I’m glad you’re here today talking to me about your concerns.”
“I don’t know.” It’s the best I can offer.
She nods thoughtfully but doesn’t say anything. We know the same tricks: silence is really just opportunity.
“I’ve been feeling fine, otherwise,” I add. “No blips in my memory. No weird déjà vus.”
“No re-emergence of memories?” Dr. Koftura asks. “I know in the past this has been difficult for you.”
I decide not to mention hearing my mother’s voice the other day in my classroom. I’m convinced it was a fluke—a remnant of stress given the lecture topic. And besides, my mother has nothing to do with love.
“Just the normal background noise,” I say.
Dr. Koftura’s brow furrows slightly. “No changes there?” she asks.
“No,” I reply.
Dr. Koftura raises one eyebrow slightly, but I hold firm.
She continues, “Tell me more about why you think Justin saying he loves you caused your behavior today.”
“Because, like you said earlier, it seems to be a pattern with me. And that’s what scares me, I guess. I know about the effects of trauma on the brain.” She and I share a measured look at each other. We both know the data is not in my favor. “What if I’m destined to always get paranoid whenever somebody starts to care about me?” I want Dr. Koftura to tell me it’s going to be okay. That I’m okay. Because, unlike Annie, she knows how trauma changes a person, down to the cellular level.
It Was Always You Page 6