by Megan Hart
The conversation didn’t even pause when I got up and went into the empty steam room. Here, at least, I could be alone without feeling like a social misfit. The tiles were warm and the air thick with steam that writhed around me like the embrace of a phantom. I settled onto the bench and breathed deeply, letting the heat and moisture embrace me. Unlike the locker room and hot tub, the steam room cosseted me with its silence. Somnolent. Lugubrious. Stygian.
I made myself laugh a little, thinking of the very best and most flowery words to describe this small room. Thus, I was cheered a bit by the time they called me for my appointment.
My masseuse introduced herself as Marta, and she stepped out of the room while I got comfortable under the sheet. Comfortable wasn’t exactly what I felt. The staff recommended nudity for massage, and when was the last time I’d been naked in front of a stranger?
She rapped quietly on the door and came in at my murmured assent that I was, indeed ready. She asked me a few questions and dimmed the lights. Soft music burbled from hidden speakers. She positioned herself behind my head.
“You tell me if you need more or less.”
I promised I would and tensed with the waiting for her touch. The music shifted and changed. Marta’s strong, nimble fingers cupped the back of my neck and worked tension spots at the base of my skull. I wanted to ask her how she knew what I needed, how she know how and where to touch me, to ease aches I hadn’t even noticed, but fortunately for my dignity, such silly questions were rendered impossible by my mouth’s refusal to form words. I floated in that dim room, with music and the scents of lavender and rosemary to cradle me while she worked.
After a few moments she left my neck and moved to my side, exposing my arm but tucking the sheet around my body to maintain my modesty. Her hands moved along my bicep, then my forearm, working muscles I abused with daily typing and writing of my notes, but to which I rarely paid notice. I let out a small groan when she hit a particularly tender spot on the underside of my wrist. Her fingers pressed and kneaded and worked their way down toward my hand where she tugged each of my fingers. My hand in hers, my fingers closed and opened involuntarily as she massaged my palm and the back of my hand. She closed both hands over mine, holding it between them for a second or two before massaging between each of my fingers.
Emotion rushed into my throat with the force and bitterness of acid. When was the last time someone had held my hand this way, with such tenderness and care? When was the last time anyone had held my hand at all?
I forced myself to swallow against the knot lodged in my throat, but could do nothing about the sting of tears behind my closed eyelids. Marta moved to my other arm and worked it with the same tender force she’d used on the first. By the time she got to my right hand, her palm against mine as she manipulated my fingers, I couldn’t even pretend not to be weeping. Tears made silent, burning trails down my cheeks, puddled in my ears and leaked down the side of my neck.
“I’m going to ask you to roll over now.” She squeezed my hand between both of hers, then patted my shoulder.
Grateful for the chance to hide my face and gain control, I rolled quickly onto my stomach and nestled my face into the doughnut-shaped cushion at the head of the table. The smooth, crinkling paper covering pressed coolness to my heated face, against my eyes, so I didn’t even have to close them in order to blind myself. It blocked out everything, cocooning me.
Nobody touched me anymore. A handshake or the kind of casual hug that kept inches between upper bodies and didn’t even come close to lower body contact were not enough for me. I missed Adam’s all encompassing hugs, his legs and thighs and pelvis pressed against me. I missed being engulfed by him.
Dealing with someone else’s tears is never a comfortable business, not even when you’re expecting them. I tried to keep them silent, to keep my shoulders from tensing with sobs I couldn’t bear to release. Marta had to know I was crying, but said nothing, only kept up her work.
I wept in silence, without sobs, without effort. I heard the snap of the cap opening, the liquid slush of oil poured into her hands, and felt them once more my skin. My knotted muscles unraveled, and so did I.
Marta placed her palm flat on my back, between my shoulder blades. “I’m finished. I’ll get you a cup of water. I’ll be back in a minute.”
She discreetly left a bunch of tissues next to me. I waited for the door to close before I sat, clutching the sheet around my breasts with hands still slick from oil. I wiped my face and pulled on the spa’s robe, recovering a bit by the time she returned with a paper cup of tepid water I didn’t really want to drink.
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling like a puppy who’d piddled on the rug.
“You don’t have to be sorry. Massage releases endorphins and can be an intensely emotional experience.” She squeezed my shoulder kindly. “Have a good rest of your day, okay?”
I nodded, feeling less of a fool than I thought I would.
I stepped into my quiet house without announcing my presence. I moved with muscles still loose and soft, feeling something like a dancer in the way I set each foot heel to toe along the hardwood floor and the sweep of my hands as I unbuttoned my coat and hung it up, as I settled my briefcase onto the hook. I paused, listening to the noises of a house not expecting my presence.
The soft tick of the grandfather clock in the living room melded with the low mutter of daytime television from the kitchen, and the steady sound of a knife on a cutting board. I put my hand to the newel post, my foot to the stair and drank in the peace of my home with eyes closed and slow, deep breaths.
“Dr. Danning?”
I opened my eyes at once. “Hi, Mrs. Lapp.”
“You’re home early.” She looked concerned. “Are you sick?”
“No. I had an outside appointment today and decided to come home early, that’s all.”
She still looked concerned. I figured the evidence of my afternoon’s distress was stamped all over my face. Wiping her hands on a dishtowel, she nodded, looking unconvinced but perhaps not certain of what wasn’t convincing her.
“All right,” she said. “Do you want me to go, then?”
“If you’d like to, that would be fine.”
She nodded. “I’ll call Samuel. We’ve got the grandkids for a few days while Emma and her husband are on a trip.”
“Then of course you should go home,” I told her. “Go spend time with them!”
She beamed, her gaze still sweeping me up and down. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”
She bustled away and I went upstairs. The quiet up here was more pervasive. Dennis would be sleeping, most likely, since he usually didn’t get up until around 5:00 p.m. Adam was probably working.
I moved on quiet feet to his door and pushed it open a little. “Adam?”
He wasn’t working. He was in bed, his computer on but open to a blank document. He’d turned his face toward the window, where early afternoon sunshine moved in shadows cast by the tree outside.
I’d seen him thousands of times this way, his long, lean body covered with sheets and blankets to keep him warm because he could no longer regulate his temperature effectively on his own.
“Hey,” I said quietly, little more than a whisper.
He turned to look at me. Once, his eyes or the curve of his mouth would have told me what he was thinking. He’d have reached for me, murmuring my name, and taken me to bed where he might have undressed me slowly or barely bothered at all, and we’d have made love for hours.
“What are you doing home?” he said, instead, his voice hoarse with a touch of a cold.
“I used the gift certificate Katie gave me today.” I moved toward the bed to sit beside him. I reached to smooth his hair off his forehead. It was getting too long again. “You need a trim, Cap’n.”
“How was it?” His eyes moved over me, and I wondered what he saw.
“Very relaxing.” I stroked my fingers through his hair. It felt different, now. He’d always worn it long,
like silk against my fingers. They’d had to shave his head in the hospital to put him into traction, and it had grown back thicker, but coarse. “Let me cut this for you.”
“It’s fine, Sadie.”
I pushed my fingers through his hair again, letting it caress the back of my hand. “It’s too long. It’s getting in your eyes.”
He gave a long-suffering sigh. “All right.”
I leaned to kiss his cheek, pausing to breathe him in, my husband. “I’ll get the scissors.”
In the bathroom, my reflection confronted me. My hair had come loose from its clip and feathered around my cheeks in tousled waves. My eyes were red and my cheeks flushed, my clothes in disarray. I’d ignored the complimentary showers and lotions at the spa, unable to face being there any longer than necessary, and left without doing more than dressing and grabbing my jacket. I looked like I’d just rolled out of bed. No wonder Mrs. Lapp had looked at me with such consternation. Now I knew what Adam had seen when he looked at me. I wondered what he thought, or if he believed me.
I grabbed the comb and the barber scissors and went back to him. I adjusted the bed to full sitting position and fastened a towel around his neck. I finger-combed his hair so it fell over his eyes the way it used to, making him a rogue.
“Cut it short,” he said suddenly. “Really short.”
I hesitated. “How short is really short?”
Adam smiled. “Just short of shaved.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Are you sure? I thought you liked your hair.”
“Each man kills the thing he loves, Sadie.”
His tone gave no hint as to his mood, teasing or serious, and I again ran my fingers through his hair. I knew the reference to Oscar Wilde’s poem, but I didn’t know what it meant for him to say it now.
“Are you sure?”
I’d often been in envy of Adam’s eloquence. His use of language to express emotion in a way many people never managed. Now, I waited for his answer, my gaze on his, wishing just once for words to not escape me.
“Cut my hair.”
“Adam—”
He gave a minute shake of his head, his mouth thinning. I stopped. I picked up the comb and the scissors, but couldn’t force myself to begin.
Adam was not a beautiful man. His features were too bold and asymmetrical for beauty, his eyes deep-set and nose crooked from an old break. But his hair was beautiful, the color of autumn, all deep browns and bits of red, and rare, gleaming strands of gold.
“Cut it,” he said.
And so I did.
There was no point in trimming it snip by snip. Like ripping off a bandage, the only way to do this was to do it all at once. The first chunk fell onto the towel on his front, bright against the plain white cloth. Another cut and another, his hair uneven and butchered but getting shorter as he’d wanted.
It was difficult to manage the back with his head resting on the pillow, but I managed. Cut by cut, my scissors flashed, revealing to me the shape of his head and sweetness of his ears, the uneven pattern of his hairline, the vulnerability of the nape of his neck.
It took far too few minutes to finish. I ran my hand over the remaining bristles. The cut made him look younger. Bared. I brushed the stray hairs away and tidied the towel, setting it aside to clean later.
“Do I look like a prisoner?”
I leaned in to take his face in my hands. “You look gorgeous.”
He closed his eyes, his mouth going tight and thin again. I kissed his mouth, a brush of lip on lip. “You look beautiful to me, Adam. Like you always do.”
His lips parted and the kiss got deeper. He breathed out, and I drew him inside my body. I needed to make him a part of me.
He opened his eyes. Still holding his face, I stroked his cheeks with my thumbs. “I love you, Adam.”
“A thousand poets could write for a thousand years,” he whispered, “and none of them would ever be able to describe how I feel about you.”
I toed off my shoes and pulled down the blankets and got into bed beside him. There wasn’t much room for me there, in his bed, but I made it work. I tucked myself up against him and pulled the blankets up around us. I put my hand on his chest and felt the steady thump of his heart, the rise and fall of his breath.
“I hate letting you down,” he whispered and broke my heart.
“You’ve never let me down.” I held him closer, but there was no comfort in my embrace for him. “Not ever, Adam.”
I waited for his words, but he lay silent. “Talk to me.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Whatever you have to,” I said. “Whatever you want to. Just…talk to me, Adam. The way you used to.”
His eyes were still closed. “I’m tired, Sadie.”
I held him closer for a moment, and then, though I wasn’t even close to being ready to let him go, I did. I got up and rearranged the blankets, tucking them around him firmly. I brushed a few more stray hairs away from his face and neck, adjusted the bed, arranged his computer for him. I gathered the towel covered with his hair.
“I’ll let you take a nap.” I didn’t have words like Adam did but nor did I have the talent of keeping my emotions out of my voice. At least not with him. “Do you need anything before I go?”
“I need everything.”
I had to lean in to hear what he’d said, and even then I couldn’t be certain I’d heard him right. “Adam?”
Eyes still closed, he was hidden from me. He gave another small shake of his head. I waited, hoping, but he didn’t open his eyes or say more. I reached to touch him, but in the end, only smoothed the blankets over his leg, a caress he didn’t even know.
His voice caught me at the door.
“Thank you for cutting my hair.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, and waited, hoping for more but getting nothing.
It took me an hour to capture from the towel every strand of hair I’d cut. I put them in a small cardboard box and tucked it away in the bottom of my drawer where I didn’t have to see it to know it was there.
From my office window, I could see the Susquehanna River. The ice had melted months ago, but the water kept its gray-green winter shade. Across the wide, flat expanse I saw City Island, its colors also muted. It was starting to bustle with summertime activity on the batting range, the baseball field, the small train that circled the island.
It wasn’t the view that captivated me and kept me from hearing the knock on my door. I was making lists. Things to plan and do, errands I needed to run in preparation for my upcoming houseguests, groceries I needed to buy, bills I needed to pay. I should have been writing them down, these details of my life, but for the moment I was content to sit and stare out the window, watching the bustle of downtown Harrisburg’s lunch hour. The weather had brought out the suits and dog-walkers in droves. I envied them.
“Dr. Danning?”
Embarrassed, I spun in my chair to face the doorway. “Elle! Oh, goodness, is it time already? I’m so sorry, come in.”
“I knocked,” she said hesitantly. “I guess you didn’t hear me.”
“I was wool-gathering.” I shook my head. “Spring fever, I guess.”
Nodding, she sat. I offered a couch for those patients who felt they could speak better on their backs, but Elle had never used it until today. She perched on the edge like she was expecting to sit upon a whoopee cushion, or a pin. Like she expected to up and fly away at any second.
“Iced tea? I have some lemonade, or soda,” I offered. “The weather’s too warm for something hot.”
She shook her head again, sharply, her dark braid swinging. Her fingers twisted and turned in her lap like restless kittens. I said nothing, watching. She looked up at me, and I’d never seen such a look from her before.
“Elle?” I asked gently. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” she said. “I mean, wrong implies something bad, or incorrect.”
“True.”
She squirmed a bi
t, cutting her gaze from me. Her cheeks had flushed. She crossed and recrossed her legs. When she looked at me again, her smile was tentatively exuberant.
“Do you have something to tell me?” I asked, smiling myself.
She nodded. “Yes, Dr. Danning. I do.”
Slowly, she held up her hand. A diamond sparkled on her finger, its beauty not from its brightness or the simplicity of its cut, but in what it meant for her to be wearing it.
“He asked me to marry him,” she whispered, as if she was afraid to speak out loud. “And…I said…yes.”
There’s a time for doctorly distance and a time for genuine congratulations, and this was definitely time for that. I let out a small whoop and came around the desk to shake her hand.
“Congratulations! That’s marvelous news!”
Smiling, her hand clutching mine, she burst into tears. I had the tissues ready and sat next to her, patting her shoulder while she had a small fit of hysterics I found utterly reassuring in their sincerity.
“I’m sorry,” she said when the tears had tapered away. “I’m sorry, I just…I should be happy…I am happy! But I can’t seem to stop crying!”
She blew her nose loudly, took a few deep, shuddering breaths and burst into more tears. I handed her tissue after tissue and held her hand, saying nothing. There wasn’t much to say I hadn’t said dozens of times already.
I didn’t have a brutal childhood. Not even an unhappy one. I had a good relationship with my parents and sister, I’d been popular in school, had met and married the man of my dreams. I didn’t have “issues” with my life. I’d been blessed. I’d had self-esteem to spare.
I’d become a psychologist to help people not as fortunate as myself. It had been inconceivable to me that people could destroy each other, over and over again. I had thought back then I could make a difference with my advice, that I could offer comfort. That I could erase damage.
Watching someone I’d come to respect a great deal suffer this way, I felt helpless and futile and worthless. Elle had worked hard with me, never resisting anything I suggested, even when facing her demons was more difficult than running away. She had made great changes in her life, and I wasn’t too modest not to take credit for helping her do it. She’d wept and wailed before. She’d screamed and raged, and sat in stoic silence. Until today, I’d never seen her break down so utterly and completely lose the sense of self-composure that had been a point of pride for her as long as I’d known her.