by Ivy Jordan
“Oh, I don’t know what you mean, Sawyer,” Mom said. There was a careful tilt to her kind tone and I set my jaw, struggling not to grow frustrated with the wrong person.
“You know what I mean,” I said. “He’d avoided me since I got home. He’s… I don’t know whether it would be worse if he didn’t, but he’s avoiding me. Treats me like I’m not even here. Or, worse, like I’m here and he hates me.”
“He doesn’t hate you.”
“Then why does he leave?” I knew it wasn’t fair, in a way, to ask that when I had left myself years ago. But I’d left for much different reasons, many of which had to do with getting my father back on my good side, nonetheless.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” Mom said. “I really don’t, Sawyer, and you know I don’t like to talk to you about what we discuss, but I can tell you it hasn’t given me any leave to answer that question.”
I sighed and stared at the back of his head through the glass. I’d begun to get the feeling that I would never understand him, or maybe that he would never understand me.
“What I can tell you,” Mom said, carefully ladling herself a spoon of eggs, “is that he loves you. Whether or not you can tell it, he does.”
“That’s a lovely thought, Mom,” I returned, despite my better judgment. I should have known better than to snap like that, and she visibly stiffened, but there was no taking it back. And in truth, I meant it. She had no reason to defend the way he was treating me, at least, not unless she agreed with it in some part.
I had another appointment with Quinn that day. I’d thought of skipping it, but now I looked for the excuse to get out of the house. The appointment was only for an hour, but maybe she would take me up on my invitation for dinner. Well, my return to her invitation for dinner. I couldn’t help but be sorely disappointed that events had turned out the way they had.
Today, when I arrived in her office, the door was open. I didn’t sit down in the waiting room but rather proceeded directly to the door, and knocked against the side of it.
“Come in!”
So I did. It was hard not to marvel at her where she sat. She’d been lovely in jeans and a shirt at the party, but in slacks and these soft, ruffled blouses, she was nearly irresistible. For work, I noticed she wore glasses, perched on her nose and magnifying the deep blue in her eyes. They sat, round and all-knowing, above the peaks of her cheekbones and pointed slope of her nose. When she saw me, her mouth curled into a small smile.
“Sawyer, you’re just a little early,” she said.
I stood by the couch. “Do you need a few more minutes?”
“No, no. I just appreciate punctuality, and I’m glad that you do, too,” she said, and my own smile appeared despite any attempt to keep myself somber.
I hated that she’d turned out to be my therapist. In any other situation, I would ask her to dinner and at least attempt to date her. I didn’t know that I could stand sitting on this couch and not doing anything about this.
“I was rushing out of the house, really,” I said, as a sort of humble statement. I was punctual, but my punctuality today had been more circumstantial than behavioral.
“Oh? What had you in a hurry?”
“My dad.”
“Is he cross with you?”
I considered shutting the conversation down. I didn’t want to tell her all about my personal life and make her look at me as some broken person who needed help. But at this point, there was no point in trying not to talk to her. I had appointments with her, she didn’t want to go on dates with me, and the only thing I was achieving with shutting conversation down was making myself look ornery to her.
“Sort of,” I said. “He’s… he tends to ignore me.”
“Since you got back?”
“Yeah.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “I’ll walk into a room; he’ll leave. He avoided the party we had when I got back, and he’d avoided me since.”
“He didn’t come to meet you at the airport?” Quinn tilted her head slightly, and I couldn’t help but notice she had some sort of semblance of pity on her features. I adjusted myself slightly and tried to dissuade that.
“No, he didn’t, but it wasn’t a big deal,” I said. He wasn’t fighting with me, shouting at me, hitting me, any of that. Even despite all that we’d been through, he was at least being moderately civil. Part of me wanted to explain that, that everything could be much worse than it was.
“It’s just kind of hard, though, knowing that we used to get along,” I said. I looked down at the floor. “When I was a kid, you know, we would go everywhere together. “I remember being a little kid and going to get donuts with him on Saturday mornings. I was in Boy Scouts, too, and he used to go on all the campouts with me. We used to have a really good time.”
“What happened to change that?” Quinn asked.
So much had happened to change that, really. Almost everything that had happened was my fault, too, and not some change of heart by my father. I wanted to perpetuate the narrative that my father was a villain. It might help me in Quinn’s eyes and make me look like some sort of unfairly treated kid. At least it would be better than the truth. I decided to evade from the truth as best I could.
“It’s just been different since I got back,” I said. That wasn’t a lie. Since I got back, he was more blatantly hateful towards me. The full truth would be that something happened before I left that made the situation change, and he’d been hateful before, too, just to a different extent.
Quinn looked like she suspected I was lying. It was in the arch of her eyebrow and slight twist of her mouth. I wondered what kind of date I might take her on, in a world where she would allow me to take her on a date. Probably dinner, somewhere nice but not too upscale. She didn’t seem like someone easily impressed by lavish meals or fancy decorations. She was well-educated—maybe she would want to go to an art museum, or see something interesting. She deserved better than a stereotypical movie date, that was for sure.
“When you were overseas, did you talk to him about something that had an effect on him?” She asked.
I shook my head. I hadn’t actually had any contact with him overseas. There had been one phone call from boot camp, one extremely terse phone call that hadn’t gone well. Neither of us had shouted, but he’d made it very clear that joining the military wasn’t going to solve my problems. Maybe turning to that phone call would help me understand why he still hated me.
“So he just randomly decided not to talk to you anymore? Do you think he feels guilty about your service, or doesn’t know how to talk to you about it?” Quinn asked.
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Sometimes when people come home from wartime, their families get a little distant because they don’t know how to talk to the veteran about their time overseas. They know that they must have seen horrible things and don’t know what to say about it. So they don’t say anything. Sometimes people get resentful of the attention veterans receive.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Resentful of the attention?”
“I know, it’s a really shitty way to be,” Quinn agreed. “If someone serves any amount of time doing some of the stuff the SEALs do, they probably deserve a nod and a ‘thank you for your service’ every now and again. It’s probably the least they could do.”
I shrugged. “I don’t like to think I’m looking for thanks.”
“Well, the point is that it’s displacement,” Quinn said. “Someone feels inadequate in one part of their life, and they see someone else getting attention or merit, and they don’t connect the reason in their brain. They just get resentful of the other person because they don’t realize that they’re actually resentful of themselves.”
That made sense. I knew a lot of people got irritated with how much attention veterans got, and I knew that the US tended to give veterans more attention than other countries did. Some people called it ‘deification,’ and I didn’t know if that was true. I certainly didn’t consider myself a g
od. I considered myself a person who’d done a job he needed to do to get his life in order. I wasn’t really a hero.
But that was the label people put on me. While it wasn’t the reason why my father hated me—the reason was clear, Quinn just couldn’t know about it—I wondered if maybe that had something to do with it. Now that I was home, people were acting like I’d saved the world, and he knew full well who I really was. Who I couldn’t escape the legacy of.
“That might have something to do with it,” I said. “I mean, it would explain some of it, anyway.” That was really all I could disclose.
When the session ended, I’d managed to keep all of my secrets hidden. I still wanted Quinn to look at me as a person and not as a basket case, even if I was willing to open up a little about some of my personal stuff. I started to leave the office, and Quinn called after me.
“Sawyer, the same time Friday, right?”
I paused and turned around. I didn’t want to come back as a patient. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I bit the inside of my cheek and summoned a bit of courage. “Actually, I was thinking maybe eight o’clock on Friday. I could pick you up, if you wanted.” It came out a little more forward than I intended, and I nearly berated myself. She could probably file for harassment in the workplace, or refuse to stop seeing me, or whatever the measures were in situations like this.
She laughed, instead of wincing. “You flatter me, Sawyer. You really do. But I’m keeping it professional.”
I resisted the urge to curse. “I understand. I won’t bother you about it again, I promise.” I didn’t want to harass her into a date. That was the last thing I wanted to do, make her uncomfortable.
“I would appreciate that,” Quinn said. “Have a good afternoon.”
I closed the door behind me and stared at the door for a second, eyebrows furrowed. Before, it had been a matter of trying to see if she’d say yes. Now, her refusal felt like a challenge. And that was a challenge that I was more than willing to accept.
Chapter Twelve
QUINN
When my day was finally over, I felt like I was still reeling from the appointment with Sawyer. At this point, saying no felt like a gun to the foot. I wanted, so much, to say yes, and to be able to be with him. That would be amazing, to be able to at least go on a date with Sawyer. I hadn’t been on a date in ages, and I hadn’t thought that I wanted to date anyone. Now, though, it was all I could think about, and even hours after he’d left I considered running after him and changing my answer.
It would be hugely unprofessional, though. I didn’t want to throw my career away for a shot at a patient. Even if that patient was incredibly attractive, incredibly insightful, and seemed very interested in me. I wondered what he would be like on a date. He was from the military, and from a smaller town in Texas, so I imagined he would be a little old-fashioned. That was what I liked about men from the military, though. They tended to be polite, well-practiced, and organized.
It wasn’t right of me to sit around and keep thinking about this. I decided I needed to talk to someone before I went to the bar and made questionable decisions just for the sake of some release. I texted my best friend and made my way over to her house.
Brittney Hughes had been my best friend since high school. We were nowhere near the same socioeconomic class; her family owned Hughes Marketing, an advertising company that controlled just about every television ad and billboard in the Austin area. She’d never been in a position where she worried about what she was going to do. Interestingly, she’d become a hippie during high school, or at least started acting like one. She got disinterested in the gold-plated life offered to her and preferred drugs and unwashed hair and healing crystals.
She went to college, of course, because that was the best place to connect with other people who loved drugs. Thankfully she didn’t go to the same college I did, but rather a small private art institution. She still painted, only painting when she was high and doing so in the middle of the night.
All of that said, she remained my closest friend. She gave solid advice, and around me, anyway, she dropped some of the hippie nonsense because she knew I believed in science. I could talk to her about anything, and she could tell me the same.
I pulled up in front of her house and shook my head, as I tended to do when I saw her place of residency. She didn’t live in a huge mansion, but a nice house in a relatively secluded area in Austin was far from affordable. Not to mention that she didn’t work at all; she had no need to, being on excellent terms with her enormously wealthy parents.
I rang the doorbell and waited a few moments. Finally, I heard, “Come in!”
I opened the door, and the smell of pot hit my nose before anything else did. I wrinkled my nose a little and waved a little at the cat that wandered by. She had a few, and I tended to forget the names. Pots full of assorted herbs and flowers were in hanging arrangements, dangling from windows. I found her sitting in her living room with her bowl on the coffee table, legs crossed, wearing a tank top and exercise shorts with no bra.
“Hey, Dr. Rodgers!” She grinned at me. Her brown eyes could barely be made out to be brown for how dilated her pupils were. It didn’t bother me—she smoked all the time, and she’d passed the days that she’d be zoned out for hours on end.
“Hey, Babs.” I’d always called her Babs—calling her Brittney was too formal. It was what her parents called her. “Are you busy?”
“Nah,” she said. She ran a hand through her dirty hair and cleared off a space on the couch next to her. “You want a hit?”
The bowl was still smoking slightly. I shook my head. “I’m good.” I avoided drugs at all costs. I had no problem with them, but I preferred to stay away from them, and Babs didn’t judge me much.
“You sure? You know, it works wonders for stress. You just feel so much better when you smoke a little. And it’s non-addictive. It’s actually better for you than drinking,” Babs reminded me. She always had a whole speech prepared about weed in the back of her mind for whenever I refused a hit.
“I know,” I said. “I just don’t want to right now.”
“No sweat, no sweat. What brings you by? Are you alright?” Babs leaned back and set her head against the couch. One of the cats hopped up onto her lap, and she scratched it behind the ears.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. I wondered how to talk to her about this without breaking confidentiality, and decided to only talk to her about what had gone on outside of the appointments themselves. That was all fair game, after all. “Did you ever meet Sawyer? Sawyer Gains?”
“Ugh, he dated Stacy Black,” Babs said. “She was a bitch.”
I’d forgotten that Babs knew Stacy. Stacy had tried to join her social circle, looking for drugs, but Babs didn’t like to do hard drugs. At least, she didn’t like to do hard drugs very often—she considered crack, heroin, and meth to be unpure. If it couldn’t be grown naturally, she didn’t want to injest it. She’d done shrooms a few times, but didn’t consider those to be hard drugs.
“Didn’t she try to get you to do crack?” I tried to remember.
“She got pissed off when we all told her that crack was a bad gig,” Babs said. “She kept trying to get money from us and then she started stealing our pot to sell and buy more fuckin’ crack.”
That was right. I remembered that Babs had almost called the police to report theft, forgetting momentarily that in Texas, weed was very much illegal itself, and they would have all been arrested for it.
“But she dated a guy called Sawyer,” Babs said. “He hung around sometimes. He did whatever she did, but his heart was never really in it. I don’t remember him saying anything. Just kinda there, you know?”
I didn’t like to think of Sawyer doing cocaine. I figured that that wasn’t the case, though—around Babs, Stacy didn’t do cocaine, just weed, probably, and I didn’t care if Sawyer had smoked pot. Babs smoked pot, and she was my closest friend.
“Well, he’s been in the SEALs for six ye
ars now,” I said. “Really got his shit turned around if he used to hang around her all the time.”
“Goddamn. Good for him. Last time I heard Stacy was in rehab again,” Babs said. “She’s just bad news. She has such a negative energy. She literally siphons energy from other people. Some people are like that. There are so many things she could learn if she would stop doing crack and take a class on healing crystals or something.”
Babs probably didn’t know that there weren’t any classes about healing crystals, and I didn’t have the heart to correct her. Besides, I didn’t believe healing crystals were at all effective. Perhaps some of them carried a powerful placebo effect, but I strongly doubted it. Babs had given me a rock that was supposed to dispel bad energies and cure headaches, and all it did for me was offer a weak light for trying to read in the bathtub.
“I’m sorry to hear she’s in rehab again,” I said. “But yeah, Sawyer definitely has his shit together now. He got out of the military, and now he’s living back in his place.” I didn’t divulge any information about his relationship with his father. “I think he’s working on his friend’s farm. Something like that.”
“Good,” Babs said. She looked over at me and raised an eyebrow. “So why do you bring him up?”
“Well, I met him at the welcome home party that his mom threw,” I said. “My aunt and uncle invited me to go. I talked to him for a little while, and he was just really fucking cool, and I think he’d be interested to talk to, and I don’t know, I just liked him.” It didn’t hurt that he was unbearably attractive, but I didn’t want a lecture from Babs about appreciating the soul over the physical.
“So, did you ask him out?”
“Yeah, and then he showed up in my office. As my patient.” I began to realize now exactly how awful this situation probably looked to someone outside it. I wasn’t unprofessional and hadn’t ever had something like this happen. I didn’t want people to think of me as a horny lady who couldn’t keep it in her pants long enough to be professional. I’d worked hard to get to this point in my career, and I didn’t want things overshadowed by this one incident.