by Devan Sipher
“And what about before that?”
“There was no before that. It was an accident.”
“I don’t think so.”
The stress of dealing with Mandy must have gotten to Austin. Penelope couldn’t believe he had forgotten what happened to his father. “It was a surfing accident, Austin.”
“I don’t see how it was an accident,” Austin said with a cold voice. “He wasn’t accidentally surfing.”
“Austin—”
“He chose to go surfing.”
“He didn’t choose to be hit in the head with a—”
“He gambled and he lost. He gambled with his life. And he gambled with our lives. He was a man with two small children, and he chose surfing over us.”
“You can’t believe that.” But she could tell by the look on Austin’s face that he did. “Your father didn’t even know how to surf.”
“That part’s pretty obvious.”
“He didn’t grow up by the beach, like you did. He worked in his father’s appliance shop from the time he was twelve.” Austin didn’t understand. She needed to make him understand. “You were already ten years old—”
“I know exactly how old I was.”
“Your friends were starting to take surfing lessons. And you were afraid to. He didn’t want you to be afraid of . . . He didn’t want you to be afraid of anything. He was taking lessons so he could teach you.”
“Bullshit!”
“It’s the truth.” But how could she expect it to make sense to Austin, after all these years, when it barely made sense to her at the time?
“I didn’t need to surf.”
“That’s what I told him—”
“I needed a father.”
“But he was a stubborn man—”
“You should have stopped him.”
“And he would have done anything for you.”
“YOU COULD HAVE STOPPED HIM!”
“I couldn’t even stop Mandy from going to the Congo! How do you think I could stop your father?”
That seemed to register. But only for a moment.
“It’s your fault,” he said. “Everything that’s happened to Mandy and me our entire lives is your fault. And I wish it was you in that hospital bed instead of her!”
It was no longer her son’s pained voice that Penelope heard, but the one that raged in the middle of the night, shredding her dreams.
“So do I.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Austin was uncomfortable sitting in a patient’s chair.
It didn’t help that the chair wasn’t particularly comfortable. It was a big, heavily stuffed chair, but there was no give to it. When he sat back in it, he felt encased by it. But when he sat forward, he felt it made him seem nervous. He didn’t want to seem nervous.
He had thought therapists still used couches, where patients lay down. Maybe some did. Actually, in his mind, he was picturing a tufted divan. He must have seen that in a film. Someone lying with one arm flung across his face, shielding his eyes from the glare of the doctor’s truth. Or something like that. Lying down would definitely be more comfortable. But probably also more vulnerable.
Hope Cassidy had recommended the therapist, saying it was some- one she had worked with at St. Vincent’s. Austin and Hope had met for coffee a couple of times since he’d moved to New York. She said he reminded her of a good friend of hers. He took that as a bad sign for any romantic future. But he wasn’t looking for romance at the moment, just a friend. A shoulder. Hope was actually pretty good in the shoulder department. But she had suggested he also try a professional. So he was trying. Or was about to start trying. He was still waiting for Dr. Obatola to arrive. The receptionist in the hospital waiting room said he was running a little late, and she deeply apologized. She had invited him into Dr. Obatola’s office because she said it was more comfortable than the antiseptic waiting room. She didn’t know Austin had been in far worse waiting rooms. And “comfort” was a subjective kind of thing.
What wasn’t comforting were the well-intended sympathy cards and phone calls. It was exhausting having the conversations. And it was a weird circular logic that people felt obligated to call to make him feel better, and he felt obligated to talk to them to make them feel better. But the awkward and pause-ridden conversations didn’t really make anyone feel better. And he felt the people who designed sympathy cards should be shot.
Why do they think that someone in mourning would enjoy looking at gloomy pictures of wilting flowers and barren trees? There was only one card he’d received that he liked. It was a picture of a footpath on a sandy dune, leading past a ramshackle wooden fence to a patch of shoreline. Austin liked the idea of Mandy being on a path to finally getting over her fear of the water. He kind of hoped that heaven was a tranquil sea in which Mandy was splashing lazily in serene circles. Austin didn’t really believe in heaven as a place. But he did when he looked at that one card.
“I’m so sorry I’m late,” Dr. Obatola said, coming in and shaking Austin’s hand. He was a dark-skinned man in a white lab coat. He looked somewhat familiar, but Austin found everyone in New York looked more familiar than they should, given that he had just moved there. His brain had been so overloaded the last month, it was hard to know what was real and what was imaginary.
“I promise it won’t happen again,” Dr. Obatola said. He had a soft British accent that Austin hadn’t picked up on at first. Austin didn’t know what he felt about a therapist with a British accent. He kind of bought into the stereotype of Brits being stuffy. But Dr. Obatola seemed friendly, and he obviously wasn’t tracing his lineage back to the Magna Carta. “I understand you know Dr. Cassidy,” Dr. Obatola said.
“Yes,” Austin replied.
“We worked together,” Dr. Obatola said.
“She told me.” Austin wondered if perhaps they had done more than work together. Dr. Obatola was a handsome guy, and Austin didn’t see a wedding ring on his hand. Even though Austin wasn’t dating Hope, he wasn’t sure he felt comfortable seeing a therapist who had. Or maybe still was. Maybe Austin still wasn’t comfortable with this whole therapy thing.
“You are also a doctor?” Dr. Obatola asked.
“Ophthalmologist.”
“Then you know just how crazy things are getting. I’ve only been at St. Luke’s a year. I worked at two hospitals that went bankrupt.” Austin was under the impression that therapy was supposed to be about him. He wondered if he was going to be charged for this part of the conversation. “I don’t know if Obamacare will make it better or worse. But a lot of doctors in New York are no longer taking insurance. Concierge service, they call it. Like a private club.”
“A private health club,” Austin said.
“Yes.” Dr. Obatola smiled in a way that suggested they were having a “bonding” moment. But Austin didn’t feel “bonded.” He felt completely adrift. “In your message, you spoke about your sister. Do you want to talk about her?”
Austin realized that he didn’t. He didn’t want to tell this stranger about Mandy’s life. About her death. This man couldn’t understand who Mandy was. It made a mockery of what had happened to her. And what had happened to him.
“I’m not sure about this,” Penelope said.
Austin and Penelope were standing along the narrow stretch of beach on Belle Isle. There were children near them running back and forth into the gently lapping water.
“Do you want to wait in the car?” Austin asked.
Penelope shook her head. “I made it this far,” she said, burrowing a foot in the sand. “Did you ever bring Mandy here?”
There was a squeal of laughter as the children started splashing one another. “Are you seriously asking me that?”
She shook her head again and softly laughed. “No.” She took a Kleenex out of her purse and dabbed at her eye.
Aus
tin gazed out across the Detroit River at the downtown skyline. Towering Oz-like over the city were the gleaming cylindrical skyscrapers of the General Motors headquarters. Well, the new headquarters, since the old landmarked building now housed government offices, which was vaguely appropriate given the city’s history.
He unzipped his backpack and took out the tin container. Penelope looked away. Inside the tin were the fluorescent red strands of hair.
“Mandy hated her hair,” Austin said to Dr. Obatola, surprising himself by the disclosure.
“Why did she hate her hair?”
“I don’t know,” Austin said. “Yes, I guess I do. It wasn’t the color she wanted. It wasn’t as straight as she wanted. On rainy days, she looked like a redheaded Roseanne Roseannadanna, the Gilda Radner character on Saturday Night Live. She had this idea of who she wanted to be, of what she wanted to be, and she fell short of it. And she couldn’t get past it. Except that’s not true. I think she was getting past it. I think she was finally letting go of having this preconceived idea of what her life was supposed to be like. Because it never was going to be a picture-book life. I mean, it never was for us. There were no picture-book parents watching out for us. There was barely a mother. And mostly we watched out for her. I don’t know what my mother would have done without my dad’s life insurance policy. If she had to earn enough money to fully support us. Or maybe that’s not true. Maybe if she had to earn more money, she would have gotten a better job and she would have been happier. Maybe Mandy would have been happier. She wanted to be happier. But at some point, I think she gave up trying.”
“Until recently,” Dr. Obatola said.
“Until recently,” Austin confirmed.
“You seem to have been very close with your sister,” Dr. Obatola said. Austin wondered if there was some mp3 file or DVD with prerecorded comments for therapists to make.
“Well, yeah,” he said. “It was pretty much her and me against the world.”
“Against your mother?”
“No.”
“You said against the world.”
“The outside world.”
“So your mother was on the inside?”
“Yes. No.” Now Austin was getting confused. He thought he was a step ahead of the therapist until a question or two back. Now he was trying to catch up.
“So was the outside world where bad things happened?”
“I’m not sure if that’s exactly how Mandy viewed it.”
“How did you view it?” Dr. Obatola asked. He had gone from being nearly silent to asking way too many questions. Austin was tripping over himself, and he was losing his train of thought.
“I’m not agoraphobic or something. I don’t view the outside world as a bad place, if that’s what you’re asking. And that’s not really what I’m here for.”
“You’re here for your sister.”
“Yes,” Austin said. “No. I’m here for me. To help me deal with my sister.” That was implicit. Wasn’t it? “You know, you’re making this seem like I’m doing something bizarre.”
“Am I?” Dr. Obatola sounded coy.
“Yes.” Austin thought the whole point of therapy was to be supported. To have someone wrap you in the psychological equivalent of a warm towel and tell you everything you were feeling was normal. Unless what you were feeling wasn’t normal. “You’re making it seem like no one’s ever sought therapy to deal with the loss of a loved one. As if I’ve landed from some spaceship from another planet where people get messed up when a family member dies.” Austin was getting pissed off and was planning on telling Hope what a complete jerk this guy was. And he didn’t really care if she was dating him.
“I’m so sorry,” Dr. Obatola said. But something about having a British accent made his apology sound insincere.
“Are you sorry about making me feel bad or sorry that you can’t help me?”
“You don’t think that I can help you?”
“No.” Austin felt he should leave. He was wasting time and money. And now that he was working at a public clinic, he didn’t really have much of either. Not that he was complaining. He enjoyed working at the clinic. He was once again an employee, but he wasn’t paid well enough for anyone to gripe about how much time he spent with patients. And Stu kept threatening to move in with him to help them both cut costs, but Austin wasn’t clear how having a roommate was going to help if the roommate didn’t have a job. Stu had been living off his savings for almost four years, hoping to come up with the next great app, which never quite happened. The savings were pretty much gone, and he needed a job. It seemed that there was one obvious dot-com CEO to ask for help. But Stu refused. Some people insisted on making things difficult for themselves.
“Maybe I’m not the right therapist for you,” Dr. Obatola said. Austin was surprised he didn’t put up more of a fight. “But maybe I can help you find the right person. Can you tell me what you’re looking for?”
Austin was looking for someone with empathy for a start. He was looking for someone who understood what he was going through. “I’d like someone who had a close family member die.”
“Someone who lost a sibling?”
“Or a parent. Or both parents.”
“So I should recommend orphan therapists?”
Austin knew he sounded ridiculous. But better to sound ridiculous by his own doing than to sound ridiculous because of someone else twisting his words. “You asked what I want.”
“I did.”
“And that’s what I want. I know it’s irrational. But isn’t everyone allowed to be irrational occasionally?”
“You think it’s irrational?”
“Of course it’s irrational. I’m a doctor. I know you don’t need to have a patient’s symptoms to treat them. But I also know what I feel.”
“What do you feel?”
It was such a simple question, but the answer felt tangled like old fishing wires with the hooks still attached waiting to prick him if he wasn’t careful. “When Mandy was born, my parents didn’t say they had a daughter; they told people I had a sister. They said she was my responsibility. And she was. Pretty much from that day forward. I took care of her. Or I always tried to take care of her. But now I can’t take care of her anymore. She was this sweet kid with freckles and weird hair and big brown eyes and a great laugh. And she’s gone.” His eyes were watering.
“And you want me to help you get her back?” Dr. Obatola asked gently.
Austin sniffed as he shook his head. Maybe this guy wasn’t so bad at his job after all.
Austin pulled several strands of hair out of the open tin box, then held the box toward his mother so she could do the same.
“I’m not sure if Jews are supposed to do this kind of thing,” Penelope said.
“It’s not her ashes, Mom.”
“I know,” she said, but she seemed doubtful.
Austin wasn’t doubtful. It was only a gesture, and one of which he was sure Mandy would have approved. He watched two kayakers paddling along the shoreline as they made slow and steady headway toward Lake St. Clair. It wasn’t the Pacific, but it would do. Austin released the strands from his fingers, letting the bright red filaments twirl and tumble in the breeze as they sailed over the river below. Penelope let go of her strands as well, and somewhere off in the distance, beyond where Austin’s eyes could see, they touched water.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Penelope.
They were both still looking out toward the liquid horizon. “If I didn’t think it was a good idea to do this, I wouldn’t have gone along with it,” she said.
That wasn’t what he was apologizing for. “I’m sorry about what I said to you at the hospital.” It had been weighing on him ever since, but with the funeral and the shiva, there never seemed to be the right moment to say something.
Penelope blotted the corners of her eye
s with her Kleenex. “If we start apologizing to each other for things like that, I’ll be apologizing to you till the day I die.”
“So you forgive me?” He could feel his throat tightening.
“Oh, Austin . . .” She opened her arms, and he stumbled into them, allowing her to hold him to her the way she did when he was six or seven. She seemed so much smaller than he remembered, and it made him sad. He wanted to go back to when he was six. He wanted to go back and start everything over. But all he could do was cry, sobbing onto his mother’s shoulder as she rocked him back and forth and told him everything was going to be okay.
“People keep saying ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’” Austin said, wiping at his eyes. “But I didn’t lose my sister. I didn’t misplace her at the mall. She was taken from me. So much has been taken from me.”
“What do you feel has been taken from you?” Dr. Obatola asked in a kind voice.
“Everything,” Austin said, knowing it sounded grandiose and not caring. “My father. My sister. My career.”
He was about to say “my love.” But Dallas wasn’t really his love, much as he cared for her and much as he adored Coal. It was Naomi he ached for. And Naomi wouldn’t even answer his texts anymore. Not that he could blame her. Love hadn’t been taken from him.
It had been lost.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Naomi had lost her GPS signal.
She was looking for Sherlock Court. And she thought she had found it, but it turned out she was on Sherlock Road, not Sherlock Court, and since every road around seemed to be a one-way street, the next thing she knew she was on Moody Road. For the third time. And she was definitely getting “moody.”
For some reason the GPS on her Prius had ceased functioning. Assuming she was pressing the right buttons, which was doubtful. Driving a Prius was like driving a computer, and she had never been very good with electronic equipment, which was ironic for someone who now owned a tech company. But the digital display said she was getting seventy-five miles to the gallon, so she was emitting minimal greenhouse gases while driving in circles. She otherwise liked the Prius. Well, she liked what it looked like and that she was saving the planet. But she hadn’t driven regularly since she’d lived in Miami, and she had come to prefer letting a public transit worker navigate where she was going. Or a taxi driver when she was running late and felt like a “splurge.”