by Sandra Block
He places the pen on his desk. “I’m sensing a conflict here. Are you?”
“What sort of conflict? An ‘I’m angry at you because I’m looking for my mother and you killed yours’ kind of conflict?”
A smile escapes from his lips. “Something like that.”
I tap my good foot on the floor. “It’s not that odd to be turned off by a matricidal maniac, is it?”
“Maybe not,” Sam says, “for most people. But then again, she is your patient.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t mean I have to like her,” I return.
“No, I suppose not,” he answers, looking down at his folded hands.
And I think we both know what he means by that one.
* * *
There are two messages blinking red on the answering machine when I get home, which uncharacteristically Scotty hasn’t already erased. I push the button, then go to hang up my coat.
“Scotty, it’s Shelley. Call me, please. We really just need to talk. You have my number.” The voice is desperate. I feel sorry for Shelley. This isn’t the first pleading “I’ve been wronged” phone message for Scotty, and no doubt it won’t be the last.
The next message is unexpected. “Zoe, it’s me. You won’t answer your texts, and your message box said it was full, so I thought I would try you at home. Please call me.” I don’t get many pleading messages, though Jean Luc can hardly claim to have been wronged.
I ignore my heart, which is leaping and panting like a puppy, and plop down on the couch, clicking on our gas fireplace. My foot is throbbing like a toothache so I pop two pills and turn on the TV. I flip through some true-crime shows, which are usually my favorite, but today just seem depressing, and finally turn off the TV and crack open the DSM V, fighting the urge to doze.
Headlights flicker as cars drive by, shooting off snow in their wake. It is snowing in earnest now. They say every snowflake is a one and only, but each flake mounds ceaselessly on top of the other, linking crystals and giving up a unique pattern for the greater good of covering the ground. Which mostly means I will have to clean off the car if I want to go anywhere tonight.
The words swim as the pills soothe my foot and my brain. I put the DSM V on the floor and lay the soft mohair blanket (which Mom knitted BD) over my legs. The heater kicks in with a contented hiss, and I fall into a drugged, dreamless sleep.
When the doorbell pierces me awake, I panic for a confused minute, thinking it’s morning and I’m late for work, but then glance outside at a darkening evening. On cue, the grandfather clock starts its stately chiming, one-two-three-four-five-six, seven pauses to take a breath, and then loud ticking resumes. The fireplace balloons in the reflection of the clock’s brass pendulum.
The doorbell blares again, an annoying buzz I keep meaning to change before realizing I have no concept of how one would do this. Are there doorbell stores, for instance? By the time I think to Google it, my brain has already moved on to the next bright, shiny object.
Buuuuuuuzzzzz.
I am positive this blaring pedestrian at my doorstep is either some girl for Scotty or a Jehovah’s Witness, which makes the noise all the more annoying, but I rouse myself and peel off my blanket, rubbing my arms in the dark apartment. My head feels groggy, my mouth furry, and finally my foot realizes it’s awake and starts throbbing. “I’m coming,” I call, or more accurately bray, out, gathering my crutches to get to the door. The door buzzes again on my way over, just to piss me off a little more. When I open the door, the snow blasts me right in the face.
My heart does the fox-trot.
Jean Luc is standing there shivering in a thin, light-blue spring jacket. “Zoe,” he says, in his peculiar, lovely French way. A dark green compact car is parked in the driveway. I stare at him in shock, stock-still in the doorway. The snow lines his hair, and his lips are puffy with the cold, like rosebuds.
“Je t’aime,” he says.
* * *
He asks about my foot, and I explain the whole idiotic story, then there is an awkward silence. Jean Luc stands by the fireplace, rubbing warmth into his hands, while I sit on the couch.
“So what happened with Melanie?” I ask, getting right to the heart of the matter.
He exhales, as if he’s just been through a trial. The flames from the fireplace throw shadows onto his face. “She went back to Robbie.”
“Oh.” I don’t know what else to say. I could be angry, maybe I should be. But I’m not. I’m buoyantly, stupidly happy.
“It’s for the best. She is too young”—he pauses—“too capricious.” This is probably not quite the right translation of the French word he was thinking of. “And the truth is, I missed you.”
I try to keep from smiling. “So it’s totally over then?”
“Totally over,” he says and walks over to me, the heat of the fireplace wafting off his clothes. He leans down over the couch to kiss me, his lips soft on mine. He lays his hand on my knee right above my cast. The patch of jeans lights up with warmth, and my heart thuds through my sweater, but I pull away, as if I’m pulling myself from a magnet.
“Jean Luc, I’m glad you’re here. I really am. But I can’t do this right now. I don’t know.” I shake my head, searching for words. “I don’t even know how I’m supposed to feel.”
His eyes stare into mine, deep and gray. He nods, as if he is mulling over a solution to a complex question. “I will just have to prove myself.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way,” I balk. “It’s not a test or anything. It’s just…I need some time to figure this out.”
“Yes. You are simply being logical.”
“I guess,” I say, though my heart is skipping illogically at the moment.
Jean Luc rubs his neck, which is lined with soft hair, like peach fuzz. “Let’s go out,” he says. “Are you okay to? With your leg?”
“Oh, that? Sure, no problem. You hungry for dinner?”
“Yes,” he says. “Something from Buffalo, I will experiment.” Then he crinkles up his nose. “Anything but sushi.”
* * *
Beer and wings are meant for each other.
So much so that I’m on my second, maybe third beer. Maybe not the ideal plan with Vicodin in the mix, but what the hell, you only live once. The snow swoops and swirls outside, a pleasant contrast to the festive warmth in the restaurant. Rusted license plates line the walls in every shade and color.
“It wasn’t a total failure,” Jean Luc says, almost shouting to be heard above the music. “You remembered some things. I would say this is an achievement.”
“I guess,” I say, dabbing some chicken-wing grease off my chin.
He takes a long sip of beer. “Even if you stopped the hypnosis, you started the process. Maybe more memories will come on their own.”
“Maybe,” I say, with some cheer. This is a line of reasoning I hadn’t considered.
The waitress wanders by. “Can I get you another, honey?”
“What the heck?” I say, handing her my glass, though my speech is already on the slurred side. Jean Luc signals for another, too.
“So,” I continue, “Sam thinks my obsession with my birth mother has something to do with my mom’s dementia.”
He licks sauce off his lips. “Makes sense.”
“You think?” I ask, chewing into another wing. “I don’t think it’s all that complex. I just want to know more about my birth mother. What’s so wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” Jean Luc answers. “We are all looking for our mothers, no?”
I laugh into my beer. Jean Luc makes everything seems so simple. “You would have made a good doctor,” I tell him.
“Ah no,” he says, with a mock-horrified face. “Talk, talk, talk to people all day long,” he says. “I prefer to be left alone in my lab.”
We both laugh. It is like his experiments, elegantly simple. The song pauses for a few seconds, then a new song starts up, a pounding drumbeat I can feel in my foot. “Do you think,” he asks, wiping red grease from his
hands on his napkin, “maybe I am too alone?”
I tap my palm to the music. “What do you mean?”
He shrugs. “Monica said I am too alone. Well, she said this in French, it translates a little differently. But basically, that I don’t need anyone else but myself, and this is a problem.”
Monica is his old girlfriend. They broke up a few months before he started dating me, after three long years with her in Paris and him at Yale. His debacle with Monica was an indictment against the concept of long-distance relationships, as far as Jean Luc was concerned. Which is why we broke up in the first place. Now it appears he’s decided to repeat the experiment. “You’re self-sufficient,” I point out. “That’s a good thing.”
“It was more than that, though. She called me ‘emotionally stupid.’”
“What?” I chew on a celery stalk from my basket. “Now that has to be a mistranslation.”
“Yes, I suppose you are right. She said I have no ‘emotional intelligence.’ Not the same as stupid, I guess. What do you think of this—emotional intelligence?”
I have to pause on this one. Jean Luc once admitted to me that his laboratory sometimes felt more real to him than the outside world, “the one with trees, buildings, and people,” he said. And the funny thing is that I understood him. After a lifetime of people waving their hands in front of my eyes, asking, “Hello? Anybody home?” and parents and teachers scolding, “Are you even listening to a word I’m saying?” Suffice it to say, I’m in my head a lot. But as a budding psychiatrist, I have emotional intelligence in spades. Jean Luc is masterful at solving problems, but he is hopeless at understanding people. So maybe his ex has a point.
“I don’t know,” I say. “It’s something you might want to work on.”
At this, Jean Luc drops his head in his hands and bursts into laughter, his hair falling into his eyes. This is not at all the response I expected, but then, he is getting a bit pink-faced and drunk. “I’ll be right back,” he says, standing up to walk to the bathroom. I turn my head to follow him and notice my vision swimming, which makes me regret ordering my last drink.
A group of men at the next table shout out laughing, their faces flushed from heat, beer, and wings. The waitress brings by our new frosty beer mugs just as Jean Luc returns to the table, drying his hands on his jeans. There is a hole at his knee, pale skin peeking through. “I like these. What do you call them, ‘wings’?” His bowl is a mess of chicken bones.
“You want to try one of mine?”
“Sure,” he says, reaching over.
“They’re hot, be careful.”
Jean Luc takes a bite and in seconds starts coughing, his eyes filling with tears. “What is wrong with this?” he asks, grabbing for his beer.
“I warned you they were hot.”
“That is not hot,” he argues, sticking out his tongue and fanning it, which doesn’t help. I know; I’ve tried. “This is more like unbearable.”
“Unbearable is their Armageddon sauce. I had that on my wings once. Almost needed CPR.”
“Zoe,” he says, hoarsely, grabbing my hand. His eyes are still watering.
“Don’t worry. I’ll get medium next time. You just have to get used to it.”
“No, no, it is not the sauce.” He looks down at the table, then back up at me. “Listen, I should never have gotten involved with Melanie. She was all wrong for me, and it was a bad thing to do to Robbie. And to you, obviously,” he adds, his emotional intelligence catching up with him. “You know me. I am not usually like that.”
I nod, finishing off my last wing. “I don’t disagree with you.”
“I wanted to say I’m sorry. But I’m also not sorry, because it helped me see something very important. Something I hadn’t seen clearly before, and perhaps I needed that variable to demonstrate it.”
“Okay?” I say. I’m not sure what he’s getting at, but I think he is comparing me to a chemistry experiment.
“It is this: I love you.”
There is a pause, the music blaring around us, as I realize he never has said this in English before, though I always assumed he meant the same thing in French. Maybe he didn’t, though.
“Je t’aime, too,” I answer, and he gives me a bleary smile.
We walk back to the apartment, which is harder than it sounds on crutches in the snow. The snow is postcard perfect. The streetlights shine through the snow in a winsome blur, his hand steady on my elbow, until we finally get to the sidewalk that Scotty must have shoveled. The heavy oak door opens to the quiet apartment, and we head up to my bedroom and sit on my bed. We stare at each other in the dark. The room is silent except for our breathing, and I grab the rough fabric of his shirt and kiss him hard, with something more than desire, something like desperation. As if I want to kiss every inch of skin on his body and mark him as mine.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The morning dawns gray and cloudy, with my head pounding and my stomach queasy. The bed is empty. “Jean Luc?”
“C’est moi,” he answers, and seconds later he walks in with two steaming mugs of coffee. I forgot he was a morning person.
“One sugar and one creamer. Am I right?”
“You are right,” I say. “And trés thoughtful.” I take a long draught of coffee, which Jean Luc has made ultrastrong as usual, but which calms the thrumming in my temples now beating in time with my foot. “How did you sleep?” I ask, my voice husky from last night’s beer and hot sauce.
“Not so good,” he answers with a shrug. “Too much to drink. You?”
“Same,” I answer.
He is sitting at my desk, drinking his coffee and reading through the Sunday Times. An image of him whispering into his cell phone in my desk chair from last night pops into my mind. The visual is grainy, like a hallucinatory dream, mixed with a night of alcohol-laced anxiety dreams.
“Were you on the phone last night or something?” I ask.
“No.” He shakes the newspaper straight. “Perhaps you dreamed it.”
“Maybe.”
“So what should we do today?” Jean Luc asks, flipping a page of the newspaper, the corner wilting over.
“I don’t know. You’re leaving tomorrow, right?”
“Yes, in the morning, to avoid the traffic.” He moves the paper so I see half of his face.
“Okay.” I mentally peruse things to do in Buffalo when a crazy idea strikes. “How about a trip to Cleveland?”
Jean Luc raises an eyebrow. “Cleveland? I don’t know,” he hedges. “It seems like a long drive for the rock-and-roll things.”
“No.” I laugh. “To see my birth mother. Well, I don’t know if she’s my birth mother. My maybe–birth mother.”
His eyebrows furrow with unease. “How does this follow again?”
“You remember the facial recognition I was telling you about?”
“Right,” he says slowly, dipping back into the conversation from last night’s debauchery.
“It’s the last one from the program. Sylvia Nealon.”
Jean Luc’s jaw clenches, and he flips another page.
“Or what the hell,” I say. “We don’t have to. It’s a stupid idea. We could go to Niagara Falls if you want.”
He lowers the paper, staring out the window. “No, let’s do it. Let’s go to Cleveland.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, Zoe. If I can help you, then I should help you. Let’s go find your mother.”
* * *
His face contorts with dismay. “She doesn’t know we are coming?” Jean Luc has always been an open book. A psychiatrist’s dream.
“Sort of,” I lie. “Well, I left quite a few messages, but she never exactly answered.”
“Oh,” he answers doubtfully, as Karin reminds him to turn left in three-quarters of a mile.
I wipe the powdered sugar off my lips from our Tim Hortons doughnut run. Jean Luc takes dainty bites of a croissant and leaves the other half in the bag. His car is pristine, unlike mine, which looks l
ike a mixture of my office and a locker, and somewhere a homeless person might live. I had wanted to pack some goodies and magazines but he said, “Why would we do this? There are stores on the way, no? If we are hungry?” Completely missing the point of a road trip, even a three-hour one.
We listen to NPR while I rearrange my cast in a million uncomfortable ways and try to ignore the burbling in my stomach, which may be a consequence of my hangover or a response to the impending reunion with my maybe–birth mother. When I see the sign for Cleveland, I want to puke. We pass by stately brick homes with stately brown trees, then by scaled-down suburban new builds for scaled-down American dreams, and finally to rows of cramped, beat-up houses with dirt-streaked vinyl siding, for those who have just about given up on the American dream.
Karin states that we have arrived, and the nerves squeeze in my chest. Jean Luc pulls to a stop on the opposite side of the street, and we both stare at the house as if we’re on a stakeout. I stretch my legs and take a deep breath.
“Do you want me to come in with you?” Jean Luc asks, though I can tell the thought makes him nervous.
“No, she probably won’t even be home. You stay. I’ll be right back.” I hobble out the door and across the slushy street. Another doorstop, another mother. I stare at the door a moment, at the peeling, pale lavender paint. The stoop is covered with fungus-ridden Astroturf, like all the other stoops in the row. Breathing in deeply, I am about to ring the bell when the door swings open and a woman steps out.
At first glance, I know this is my mother. I know it in my bones. She is the picture, aged twenty years, standing before me. Her frizzy hair is a head full of black curls now, veined with wiry grays. The sun is bright, shining behind her, framing her head like a halo. I stand there staring slack-jawed at my mother, who obviously did not die in a fire or otherwise, and incidentally does not recognize me.
“Hello?” she says. It is not a nice hello. It is an annoyed, “What are you doing on my doorstep staring at me?” hello.
“I’m Zoe Goldman.”
“Okay. I’m Sylvia Nealon. Can I help you with something?” She has a thick New York accent.