Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

by Lori Gottlieb

  The night before the trip to Legoland, Margo asked John if he would please stay off the phone during their vacation. It was family time away, and it was just three days.

  “Unless someone’s dying,” Margo had pleaded—which John took to mean Unless there’s an emergency—“please don’t pick up the phone on this trip.”

  To avoid another fight, John agreed.

  The kids couldn’t wait to go to Legoland—they’d been talking about it for weeks. On the drive down, they wriggled in their seats, asking every few minutes, “How much longer?” and “Are we almost there?”

  The family had decided to take the scenic route along the beach instead of the freeway, and John and Margo distracted the kids by having them count the boats in the ocean and play a game in which they’d make up silly songs together, each person adding a lyric more hilarious than the last until they were all cracking up.

  John’s phone was quiet. The night before, he’d warned the show’s crew not to call.

  “Unless someone’s dying,” he’d told them, quoting Margo, “find a way to handle it yourselves.” They weren’t complete idiots, he assured himself. The show was doing well. They could manage whatever came up. It was three fucking days.

  Now, making up silly songs in the car, John glanced over at Margo. She was laughing the way she’d laughed with him at the party where they’d met. He hadn’t seen her laugh like that in—well, he couldn’t remember how long. She placed her hand on his neck, and he melted into it, responding in a way he hadn’t in—again, he couldn’t remember how long. The kids were jabbering away in the back. He felt a sense of peace, and an image popped into his mind. He imagined that his mom was looking down from heaven or wherever the hell she was, smiling at how well things had turned out for her youngest son, the one he’d always believed was her favorite. Here John was, with his wife and kids, now a successful television writer, heading to Legoland in a car full of laughter and love.

  He remembered sitting in the back seat himself as a young boy, squeezed in the middle between his two older brothers, his parents in the front, his dad driving, his mom riding shotgun and navigating, all of them making up song lyrics and laughing their heads off. He remembered trying to keep up with his older brothers when it was his turn to add a line, and how his mom delighted in his wordplay.

  “So precocious!” she’d exclaim each time.

  John didn’t know what precocious meant. He assumed it was a fancy way of saying “precious”—and he knew that, to his mom, he was the most precious of the boys, not the “mistake” his brothers teasingly called him because he was so much younger than they were but instead, as his mom said, a “special surprise.” He remembered seeing his mom put her hand on the back of his father’s neck, and now Margo was doing this for him. He felt optimistic; he and Margo would find their way back to each other.

  Then John’s phone rang.

  The ringing phone was sitting on the console between him and Margo. John glanced at it. Margo gave him the death stare. John remembered his instructions to his staff to call only in case of emergency—unless someone’s dying. He knew that today’s shoot was on location. Had something gone wrong?

  “Don’t,” Margo said.

  “I just need to check who it is,” John replied.

  “God damn it,” Margo hissed, the first time she’d sworn in front of the kids.

  “Don’t ‘God damn it’ me,” John hissed back.

  “We’ve been away only two hours,” Margo said, her voice rising, “and you promised you wouldn’t do this!”

  The kids went silent, and so did the phone. The call had gone to voicemail.

  John sighed. He asked Margo to look at the caller ID and tell him who had called, but she shook her head and turned away. John reached for the phone with his right hand. Then they collided with a black SUV coming straight at them.

  Strapped in their booster seats were five-year-old Gracie and six-year-old Gabe. Irish twins, born just a year apart and inseparable. The loves of John’s life. Gracie survived along with John and Margo. Gabe, seated directly behind John and at exactly the point of impact, died at the scene.

  Later, the police would try to piece together what had caused the tragedy. The two witnesses from nearby cars weren’t much help. One said that the SUV veered across the lane, taking the curve too quickly. The other said that John’s car didn’t adjust to the position of the SUV coming around the curve. The police determined that the driver of the SUV had a blood-alcohol level above the legal limit, and he was put in jail. Manslaughter. But John didn’t feel absolved. He knew that at the very moment the SUV had rounded the curve, he’d looked away for a millisecond—or he possibly had, though he thought his eyes had stayed on the road as he felt for the phone with his hand. Margo didn’t see the SUV coming either. She was looking out the passenger window, toward the ocean, fuming at John while refusing to check his phone.

  Gracie couldn’t remember a thing, and the only person who saw what was about to happen seemed to be Gabe. The last time John heard his son’s voice, it was a piercing scream with one long word: “Daddyyyyyyy!”

  The phone call, by the way, was a wrong number.

  As I listen, I’m overwhelmed with heartbreak—not just for John but for his entire family. I’m holding back tears, but John, on the couch, has turned to face me now, and I see that his eyes are dry. He seems removed, distant, just as he had when he told me about his mother’s death.

  “Oh, John,” I say, “that’s—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he interrupts, his tone a taunt, “it’s so sad. I know. It’s so fucking sad. That’s all everyone said when it happened. My mom dies. It’s so sad. My kid dies. It’s so sad. Obviously. But that doesn’t change anything. They’re still dead. Which is why I don’t tell people. And why I didn’t tell you. I don’t need to hear how fucking sad it is. I don’t need to see people’s faces get that sad, stupid look of pity. The only reason I’m telling you is that I had a dream the other night—you shrinks like dreams, right? And I haven’t been able to get it out of my head and I thought—”

  John stops, sits up.

  “Margo heard me scream last night. I woke up screaming at four in the fucking morning. And I can’t be doing shit like that.”

  I want to say that what John sees in me isn’t pity at all—that it’s compassion and empathy and even a kind of love. But John doesn’t let anyone touch or be touched by him, which leaves him alone in already isolating circumstances. Losing somebody you love is such a profoundly lonely experience, something only you endure in your own particular way. I think about how gutted and alone John must have felt as a six-year-old when his mom died and then again as a dad when his own six-year-old died. But I don’t say that right now. I can tell that John’s feeling what therapists call flooded, meaning that his nervous system is in overdrive, and when people feel flooded, it’s best to wait a beat. We do this with couples when one person is so overwhelmed by anger or hurt that all he can do is lash out or shut down. The person needs a few minutes for his nervous system to reset before he can take anything in.

  “Tell me about the dream,” I say.

  Miraculously, he doesn’t balk. I notice that John isn’t fighting me right now, and he hasn’t once looked over at his phone today. He hasn’t even taken it out of his pocket. He simply sits up, folds his legs under him, takes a breath, and begins.

  “So, Gabe is sixteen. I mean, he was, in the dream—”

  I nod.

  “Okay, so he’s sixteen and he’s taking his driving test. He’s been waiting for this day and now it’s here. We’re standing outside by the car in the parking lot at the DMV and Gabe looks so confident. He’s started to shave, and I see some stubble, and I notice how grown up he’s become.” John’s voice breaks.

  “What was that like, seeing him so grown up?”

  John smiles. “I felt proud. So proud of who he was. But also, I don’t know, sad. Like he was going to leave for college soon. Did I spend enough time
with him? Had I been a good father? I was trying not to cry—in the dream, I mean—and I didn’t know if these were tears of pride or regret or . . . who the fuck knows. Anyway—”

  John looks away, like he’s trying not to cry now.

  “So we’re talking about what he’s going to do after the test—he says he’s going out with some friends—and I’m telling him to make sure never to get in the car if he’s been drinking or if his friends have. And he says, ‘I know, Dad. I’m not an idiot.’ The way teenagers do, you know? And then I go on to tell him never to text and drive.”

  John laughs, a dark laugh. “How on the nose is this dream, Sherlock?”

  I don’t smile. I bring him back by waiting.

  “Anyway,” he continues, “the examiner walks over, and Gabe and I give each other a thumbs-up—like the day I dropped him off at kindergarten right before he walked into his classroom. A quick You’ll do great. But something about the examiner makes me nervous.”

  “How so?” I ask.

  “I just have a bad feeling about her. Unsettling. I don’t trust her. Like she’s got it in for Gabe and he won’t pass the test. Anyway, I watch them pull away. I see Gabe make his first right turn out of the driveway and it goes well. So I start to relax, but then Margo calls. She says that my mom keeps calling and Margo wants to know if she should pick up the phone. In the dream my mom is still alive, and I don’t know why Margo’s asking me this, why she doesn’t just answer the goddamned phone. Why the hell wouldn’t she pick up? So she says, ‘Remember, we agreed, don’t pick up the phone unless somebody’s dying?’ And all of a sudden I think that if Margo picks up the phone, it means my mom is dying. That she’ll die. But if Margo doesn’t pick up, nobody’s dying—my mom’s not dying.

  “So I say, ‘You’re right. Whatever you do, don’t pick up the phone. Let it ring.’

  “So we hang up and I’m still waiting for Gabe at the DMV. I look at my watch. Where are they? They said they’d be back in twenty minutes. Thirty minutes go by. Forty. Then the examiner returns but Gabe isn’t there. She walks toward me, and I know.

  “‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘There’s been an accident. A man on his cell phone.’ And that’s when I see that the examiner is my mom. She’s the one telling me that Gabe is dead. And that’s why she was calling Margo over and over, because somebody was dying—it was Gabe. Some idiot on a cell phone killed him while he was taking his driving test!

  “So I say, ‘Who is this man? Have you called the police? I’ll murder him!’ And my mom just looks at me. And I realize that the man is me. I killed Gabe.”

  John takes a breath, then continues his story. After Gabe died, he says, he and Margo bitterly blamed each other. In the emergency room, Margo growled at John, “A gift? You said the phone was a gift? Gabe was the gift, you fucking moron.” Later, after the toxicology report indicated that the driver was drunk, Margo apologized to John, but he knew that deep down, Margo still blamed him. He knew because, deep down, John blamed her. Part of him felt that she was responsible, that if she hadn’t been so stubborn and had just looked at the caller ID, John would have had his hand on the wheel and reacted more quickly to the swerving drunk driver, getting them out of harm’s way.

  The terrible thing, he says, is that nobody will ever know who was responsible. The driver might have hit them anyway, or they might have avoided him if they hadn’t been distracted by their argument.

  It’s the not knowing that torments John.

  I think about how it’s the not knowing that torments all of us. Not knowing why your boyfriend left. Not knowing what’s wrong with your body. Not knowing if you could have saved your son. At a certain point, we all have to come to terms with the unknown and the unknowable. Sometimes we’ll never know why.

  “Anyway,” John says, returning to the dream, “at that point I wake up screaming. And you know what I say? I yell, ‘Daddyyyyyyy! ’ Gabe’s last word. And Margo hears this and freaks out. She runs into the bathroom and cries.”

  “Did you?” I say.

  “What?”

  “Cry.”

  John shakes his head.

  “Why not?”

  John sighs, as if the answer’s obvious. “Because Margo’s in the bathroom having a breakdown. What am I gonna do, have a breakdown too?”

  “I don’t know. If I had that kind of dream and woke up screaming, I might be pretty shaken by it. I might feel all kinds of things—rage, guilt, sadness, despair. And I might need to let some of it out, open the pressure valve a bit. I don’t know what I’d do. Maybe I’d do what you did, which is also a reasonable reaction to an intolerable situation—numb out, try to ignore what I felt, hold it together. But I think at some point I’d just explode.”

  John shakes his head. “Let me tell you something,” he says, locking his eyes on mine. There’s an intensity in his voice. “I’m a parent. I have two girls. I won’t let them down. I will not be a basket case and ruin their childhoods. I will not leave them with two parents who are haunted by the ghost of their son. They deserve better than that. What happened isn’t their fault. It’s ours. And it’s our responsibility to be there for them, to have our shit together for them.”

  I think about his idea of having his shit together for his kids. How he feels that he failed Gabe and doesn’t want to fail the others. How he feels that keeping the pain locked up will protect them. And I decide to tell him about my father’s brother, Jack.

  Until he was six years old, the age that John was when his mother died and the age Gabe was when he died, my father believed that he and his sister were their parents’ only kids. Then one day, my father was rummaging around in the attic and came across a box of photos of a little boy, from birth all the way to about school age.

  “Who’s that?” he asked his dad. The boy was my father’s brother, Jack, who had died at age five from pneumonia. Jack had never been mentioned before. My father was born a few years after his death. His parents believed that not talking about Jack was a way of keeping their shit together for their kids. But their six-year-old was shocked and confused. He wanted to talk about Jack—Why didn’t they tell him? What happened to Jack’s clothes? His toys? Were they in the attic with the photos? Why didn’t they ever talk about Jack? If he—the little boy who would one day be my father—died, would they forget all about him too?

  “You’re so focused on being a good dad,” I say to John, “but maybe part of being a good dad is allowing yourself the full range of human emotions, of really living, even if living fully can sometimes be harder than not. You can feel your feelings privately, or with Margo, or here with me—you can let them out in the adult sphere—and doing that might allow you to be more alive with your kids. It might be a different way of keeping your shit together for them. It might even be confusing for them if Gabe is never mentioned. And allowing yourself to rage or cry or sit with the despair at times might be more manageable if Gabe were given some air in your household and not tucked away in a box in the proverbial attic.”

  John shakes his head. “I don’t want to be like Margo,” he says. “She cries at the slightest things. Sometimes it seems like she’ll never stop crying, and I can’t live that way. It seems like nothing has changed for her and at some point, you have to make a decision to move on. I’ve chosen to move on. Margo hasn’t.”

  I picture Margo sitting on the couch near Wendell, hugging my favorite pillow and telling him how alone she feels in her pain, how she’s bearing it all herself while her husband is in his closed-off world. And then I think about how alone John must feel, watching his wife’s pain and not being able to bear the sight of it.

  “I know it looks that way,” I say finally. “But I wonder if part of why Margo is like this is that she’s been doing double duty. Maybe all of this time, she’s been crying for both of you.”

  John’s forehead furrows, then he looks down at his lap. A few tears land on his black designer jeans, slowly at first, then quickly, like a waterfall, faster than he ca
n wipe them, and finally he stops trying. These are the tears he’s been holding in for the past six years.

  Or maybe more than thirty.

  While he’s crying, it occurs to me that what I’d seen as a theme with John—the argument with Margo about letting their daughter have a cell phone, the back-and-forth with me about using it in my office—had far deeper meaning than I’d realized. I remember holding hands at the Lakers game with my son—Enjoy it while it lasts—and John’s comment when he arrived today. “You win . . . the pleasure of my company.” But perhaps he won the pleasure of mine. After all, he chose to come here today and tell me all of this.

  I think, too, about how there are many ways to defend oneself from the unspeakable. Here’s one: you split off unwanted parts of yourself, hide behind a false self, and develop narcissistic traits. You say, Yeah, this catastrophic thing has happened, but I’m A-Okay. Nothing can touch me because I’m special. A special surprise. When John was a boy, wrapping himself in the memory of his mother’s delight was a way to shield himself from the horror of life’s utter unpredictability. He may have comforted himself this way as an adult too, clinging to how special he was after Gabe died. Because the one certainty that John can count on in this world is that he is a special person surrounded by idiots.

  Through his tears, John says that this is exactly what he didn’t want to happen, that he didn’t come here to have a breakdown.

  But I assure him that he’s not breaking down; he’s breaking open.

  39

  How Humans Change

  Theories involving stages abound in psychology, no doubt because their order, clarity, and predictability are appealing. Anyone who has taken an introductory psychology course has likely encountered the developmental-stage models posited by Freud, Jung, Erikson, Piaget, and Maslow.

  But there’s one stage model I keep in mind nearly every minute of every session—the stages of change. If therapy is about guiding people from where they are now to where they’d like to be, we must always consider: How do humans actually change?