by Emilia Finn
“Nora.” Sonia closes the door and comes to stand between me and her client. “This is Allyson Moore. She’s a psychology student in her final year at college. She’s almost ready to graduate, but as always, students need practical hours in a live setting. It becomes part of their final grade.”
“And…” The woman’s eyes study mine. She’s a little aggressive, and perhaps, if I’m not mistaken, a little possessive of her therapist. “These are those hours? I’m your guinea pig?”
“Well,” Sonia smothers a quiet chuckle. “Only if you agree. I will ask each of my clients, each time they walk in, if they give permission for Allyson to observe. If you’re not comfortable, that’s completely fine. She will leave, and you and I can continue on as normal. If you agree, then as always, anything you say remains confidential. Allyson is here to learn, Nora. Not to replace me, and not to make you uncomfortable. The ball is always in your court.”
“Am I her first client?” She looks to me and raises a brow. “Am I your first?”
“Yeah. I just arrived in town yesterday, I got to the office about twenty minutes ago. You would be my first.”
“Well, hell.” Nora scoffs and drops down in the seat I was just using. “Let’s go straight to whacked-out craziness. Nice to meet you, Allyson. Now let me catch you up on what’s in my head.”
And so that’s how my first day goes.
Evidently, Nora is one of Sonia’s clients who has met the devil. Murder, drugs, sex crimes, arson, thugs, undercover cops, dead sister, daredevil boyfriend, guard dog, and cyber security as a day job; she’s seen it all. But the worst part is, her education in the underbelly of Hell began when she was only sixteen years old.
Once she left, Sonia let me pore over her history notes. Nora spent years closed away in a shell of self-deprecation and pain. She was hiding away to cope with her sister’s murder, and only in the last couple years has there been a breakthrough. And though Nora’s tough-as-nails intimidation game kind of spooked me, it left Sonia feeling a little giddy.
“That was growth!” she said. “She was ready to throw down when she thought you were trouble for me.”
Awesome.
Sonia has clients who are willing to beat up people like me.
As the day wore on, I met a wide cast of town’s people – none of whom met my stereotype of Wild West gunslingers, or toothless hicks from the backcountry.
I know. I know! I shouldn’t have pre-judged. I was having a moment this morning, and once I got started, I struggled to pull on the brakes.
But I know better now. I’m a better person now than I was before work this morning.
Sonia took me out to lunch, we ate at a local diner that felt a little too dressed-down, considering the skirt suit Sonia was wearing, but the service was nice, and the food was delicious. Then back to the office, where I was thrust back into people’s nightmares.
They’ve met the devil indeed.
Of six clients, only one asked that I not sit in. Of the remaining five, only one was nervous the whole way through. Of the four who settled in quickly, two of them cried. And of the remaining two non-criers, both seemed more interested in the new girl in town than in the topics they’d come to discuss.
Which, I guess, probably means they have the messiest stories of them all.
Those two have experience deflecting and pushing their troubles down, down, down, and screwing the cap on nice and tight. Those are the clients who need the most help, because they’re fragile beneath the strength. They’re the fixers, the ones who will always answer, when asked, that they’re fine, that they’ll get it done, that everything will be okay.
They’re the strength, and often, they don’t have the luxury of slowing down or falling apart.
Such an emotion is a privilege not all are afforded.
At five o’clock, when the final client walks out and Calla flips the open sign to closed on the front door, I drop back into Sonia’s desk chair and groan. “I absorbed! It’s like bee stings all over.”
Hearing the sarcasm in my voice – all ten percent of it – Sonia only grabs a bottle of water from a mini fridge hidden inside a cabinet, and passes it over. “You did really well, Allyson. Today was a big day, a lot of heavy topics were discussed.” She sits in her wing-back chair and studies my eyes. “How do you feel after all that?”
“Exhausted.” I bring the water bottle to my lips and chug a third of the contents in one go. “I feel heavy, lethargic, and really, really sad.”
“I understand.” She sits back and folds one ankle around the other. “You’re heavy because you’re exhausted. And you’re exhausted because you wanted to fix everything for each person who walked through that door.”
“But don’t you? Don’t you want to fix it all?”
She sits back, seemingly relaxed, and plays with the hem of her skirt. “Not necessarily. Of course it hurts me that they’re in pain. In some ways, I consider my clients my children. I want them to be happy. But…” she frowns for a moment of thought. “You know the old adage of giving someone a fish, versus teaching someone how to fish?”
“Well…” I press my lips together and scowl. “Yeah.”
“So, I could get caught up in trying to fix things for each of my clients, which would only be a Band-Aid solution that will eventually burn us both out. Or I could try to teach them how to fish.” She smiles and exhales a soothing breath. “I teach them how to process their emotions. I teach them how to feel their emotions, acknowledge them, rather than push them down and ignore them. As their therapist, it is my job to give them the tools for life, because are they going to come to me every single week, or every single month for the rest of their lives?” She shakes her head. “Ideally not. Rather, I will give them the tools to help themselves, then it’s a bit like graduation. They’ve learned, and now I’m sending them off into the real world.”
I bring the icy cold bottle of water to my brow and roll it across to alleviate the headache I’m not sure I have. I think my head hurts, but it’s so full of thoughts and emotions and the stories I heard today that it’s pure chaos up there.
“You don’t want to see your clients for a prolonged period of time?”
She gives a dainty little shrug. “I don’t want them to disappear from my life. But I do want them to be healthier and happier. The beauty of living in a small town is that, even when these people stop coming to me, I still get to see them around. The supermarket, the DMV, at functions. And every single person I’ve ever seen in this office has happily acknowledged me in public. They give me an update on how they’re doing, I meet their families, we smile and remember back to the time we spent together in the trenches.”
She pauses and studies me. “I know today was hard for you. And I know you’re wondering how you could possibly hold on to so much weight, day in, day out. But I promise you, for me, this career gives me so much more than I could have ever expected. Seeing my ‘children’,” she does the finger quotes, “in the wild, smiling and silly. That’s when it hits the best. You’ve chosen a very rewarding vocation, if only you give it a chance. Now.” She straightens the hem of her skirt and sits forward. “It’s time to go home. Dinner?”
“Oh, no, I can just—”
“I insist.” She smiles and stands from her chair. She’s pushy, but she’s old, so she makes it look innocent. “Your great grandfather and I insist. He’s been waiting a long time to meet you.” She moves to her desk and grabs her purse and a set of jangling keys. “He told me he was roasting lamb shanks in a special red wine sauce for dinner, and that my primary goal today was to convince you to come to the house.”
“He… uh…” I nervously play with the silver rings on my right hand. “Lamb?”
“And red wine sauce,” she repeats. “I bet he makes his famous mashed potatoes too, and I know for a fact we have a nice bottle of red just waiting to be cracked open.” She smiles, coercive and convincing. “Doesn’t that sound lovely?”
“Um…”
Luke
Sleight of Hand
“You need to get your eyes back over here, dumbass.” Rob tosses an old, rusted screw at my leg and snorts when the pointed end scratches my skin and draws blood. “Luke! Head in the game. This is your community service, so why the fuck am I the one doing the work?”
“It’s a whole group of ‘em.” I don’t turn away from the spectacle playing out ahead of us. I don’t need to look at Rob – we’re identical! I already know what he looks like. Rather, I study the gathering of girls tanning on the edge of the grass jut eight or so feet from the lake’s edge. Frilly bikinis, booty bikinis, polka-dot bikinis. “I’m so sad summer is ending,” I lament. “Now we have to wait till next year to see a little skin and side boob.”
“Sure is a hard life.” I know he’s rolling his eyes between grunts of exertion as he pulls screws from the rotting pier.
Under court orders, and with engineering approval, we’ve taped off the entire pier, added warning signs so no one sues us when they come here and fall through a rotting plank of wood, and for the last few hours, we’ve been removing screws and trying our damnedest not to drop the rusted steel into the lake. One is fine. Two or three are acceptable. But any more than that is laziness, and another mess the courts are going to demand I clean up.
So we’re being careful. We have our bucket to toss the decaying bits in to keep them all together. Which means, including the one Rob just tossed, we only have, roughly, eleven hundred others to fish from the bottom of the lake before the judge finds out and tosses me in jail.
“Luke! I’m not coming out here anymore if you’re gonna be a lazy prick. I have better things to do with my life than do the work you were ordered to do.”
“Ugh.” I shake my head and turn away from the girls who are slathering sunblock onto each other’s backs and are seconds away from turning into college-girl porn. “What’s got your panties in a twist, huh?” I kneel down and go back to work getting the screws out. “You’re grumpy today.”
“I’m not grumpy,” he rolls his eyes. “I’m just tired of your big mouth getting us both in trouble all the time.”
“No one is making you be here, ya know? I could be doing this on my own, and you could be at the house with Mom and Dad in the air conditioning.”
“I don’t wanna be at the house in the cold. I wanna be here, with my stupid fucking brother, bonding over the pier we’re gonna build. We can show it off for the next fifty years.” He stops working, rises to his knees and stares off into the distance the way I had to in eighth grade drama club when I was playing the killer in Sweeney Todd.
Totally inappropriate subject matter for kids our age, by the way.
“Look, son.” Rob’s voice is dreamy and faraway. “Uncle Luke and I built that pier back when we were twenty-one and young.”
“We were fighting champions,” I pick up the baton and keep going, “tanned as fuck, and hot as hell.” I lift my shirt and peek over at the crowd of girls. “We had eight-packs, and biceps that could break skulls. Oh, to be young again.”
“You’re so fucking annoying,” Rob huffs and goes back to work. “You’re the reason we’re known as the Devil Twins, you know that, right? There are two of us, and there are only a handful of people on this planet who can tell us apart, so whatever the fuck you’re doing on any given day, the town blames both of us. And because I’m loyal to you, motherfucker, I take your punishments on the chin and go on with my life.”
“And I love ya for it.” I stop work for a moment, and flash a toothy grin. “I appreciate the shit outta you.”
“You’re gonna die someday.”
“Most of us do.”
“Right, except you’ll be twenty-one, and cause of death will be the axe I threw at your skull.”
“Aggressive,” I murmur and go back to work. “A little bit dramatic, considering you could have gone with a knife, or the claw hammer over there by the bucket.”
He looks to the bucket, to the hammer, then back to me. “I have options.”
“You have anger issues,” I grumble and work on a crumbling screw. I’m here to get them out and toss them into the trash, but each time I touch this one, it turns to powder and dissolves. “You never used to be this pissy, man. Especially not toward me.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t—”
“Oh! I met this chick this week.”
Rob stops wrestling with his own problem screw, scowls, and shakes his head. “You meet chicks every day of the week. I can’t say I’m all that interested in this newest one.”
“She’s got red hair.”
His eyes whip up to mine and narrow. “What?”
I nod and continue working. “Uh huh. It’s not, like, bright red. And it’s not the strawberry blonde kind like Abby at the flower shop. It’s a little darker than that. It’s like, the poisoned apple type of red, and I bet, when she’s swimming and it’s all wet, it’ll be close to black.”
“You’ve put a lot of thought into this.”
I snort and toss my broken screw into the bucket. “I saw her at the bakery a couple mornings ago. She’s not local, and she does this thing with her lips.” I press the tip of my finger to my chin, and wrinkle my lips like I taste lemon on my tongue. “She’s snooty. Fancy heels, fancy clothes, fancy handbag with the fancy brand on the side. She ordered a fancy drink, and when I stood with her for a bit, she looked at me with her fancy eyes.”
“Fancy eyes?” He rolls his. “You can’t have fancy eyes, idiot. They’re genetics, not a marker of economic value.”
“They’re green like gemstones in a princess tiara,” I counter. “Trust me, they’re fancy as fuck. She told me she was starting a new job.”
“What job?” I’ve got his interest now.
“Dunno. She wouldn’t give me a straight answer, but she was looking all fancy about it. I doubt her new job is stacking shelves at Jonah’s store. Maybe she’s working at the eye doctor’s a couple streets over.”
“Optometrist’s.”
“Yeah, or maybe she works with the pediatrician. An assistant, or hell, even a doctor. She looks kinda fancy enough to have an Ivy League education with a fast track to graduation.”
“She’s our age?”
I nod and toss another screw into the bucket. “She looked it.”
“I don’t think doctoring is fast-tracked, no matter how rich or fancy a chick is. You gotta put in the years at school, and then the years on the job. Twenty-one ain’t enough time.”
“Doogie Howser.”
Rob stops, scowls, and tries to filter through my words. “Huh?”
“He was a teenaged doctor. Smart as a whip, graduated high school at, like, ten, right? Princeton at fourteen. Fully qualified doctor at eighteen.”
“You realize that was a TV show, right? Fiction. It was not inspired by real events.”
“I bet I’m onto something. Mmm.” I start on the next screw. The next plank of wood. “She’s a genius.”
“You’re literally projecting and making shit up. She could be bagging groceries at Jonah’s, but you’re already writing your own medical emergencies just to see if she’ll save your life.”
I grin and toss the next piece of rusted metal toward the bucket. It bounces off the rim, spins into the air for a long second, then plops into the lake and adds another I have to clean up later. “Mouth to mouth resuscitation.”
“You’re a freak.”
“Do you think I could convince her I’m having a heart attack, just so she would touch my chest?”
“No.”
“She could be doing the compressions. I just need one, maybe two. Then she’ll feel my pecs and decide she wants to lay on them for a bit.”
“You have a serious mental deficiency.”
“Is it against HIPPA law for her to lick my chest while on the job?”
“For one, I think you’re so fucking stupid it makes my teeth ache. And two, HIPPA is privacy,
not licking. Stupid ass.”
Giggles break out in the huddle of girls at the edge of the water. The sound is like a beacon for men, a lighthouse for wearied sailors. Not even Rob can resist glancing up as the group of women frolic at the edge of the lake. They kick water up so droplets sparkle in the sunlight and rain down on their friends. More squeals. And then those who got wet retaliate.
“It’s practically porn,” I murmur for my brother. “See that one in the dots? Her top ain’t staying on. You watch.”
“You’re a creep.” And yet, his eyes remain glued to the polka-dot bikini. “They didn’t give you permission to ogle like a total pervert.”
“Fuck they didn’t. They came here for us, little brother. They want our attention.” I look to him for just a moment, and smile. “It would be rude of us to ignore them.”
“I thought you were planning your Doogie moment? That’s done now?”
“Mmm. She was pretty. She likes iced coffee, by the way. With cream on top, and coconut body cream. I could smell it.”
“You’re going to prison someday.” Rob stops staring at the girls, and instead, goes back to work. “The only reason you’re not already there is because you’re not overweight and ugly. The creepin’ bullshit you do is cute for now, but put on weight, and move into Mom’s basement, and you’ll see what happens to your life then.”
“Mom doesn’t have a basement, dummy. And exactly my point, hence the eight-pack and lickable pecs.”
“I’m done.” He drops his tools and pushes to his feet with a groan.
Rob wears board shorts and sneakers, but he tossed his shirt hours ago when the sun was too damn hot, and the glare coming off the water was making us sweat. My little brother – by, like, seventeen minutes – might be the shier of our paring, and maybe he doesn’t openly ogle women. But he’s a Hart through and through, and he also has the abs and chest thing working for him.
The moment he straightens out and stretches his back and chest, the frolicking girls stop mid-squeal, and watch him the way I watch them.