by E. R. Frank
“Dad,” I say on his fifth tour.
He stops walking.
“Tuesday’s my last therapy session, if we’re still going by what you said when I started.” He stays quiet, which, truthfully, makes me nervous. “But I want to keep seeing Frances.” He touches his fingertips to his chin.
“Dad?”
“All right,” he says. And he goes back to the kitchen.
Frances’s freckled face looks windburned. I wonder if she went skiing over the holidays, but I don’t ask.
“Everybody’s had a pretty challenging time,” she says after I’m done telling her what’s been going on. It’s such a therapist thing to say. Then she asks, “Do you have any ideas why you have so many mixed feelings about going out with Seth?”
I shake my head a little and feel tired. I wonder why, of all the things I’ve told her, that’s the one she decides to ask me about. “It just seems hard.” I don’t even really know what I mean. “It’s another person you have to …”
“You have to what?” Frances goes.
“You have to … I don’t know. Take care of. Not piss off. Not disappoint.”
“That’s what a boyfriend is?” Frances asks.
“I guess that’s not how other people see it,” I go, feeling stupid.
“You like Seth, right?” Frances asks.
“A lot,” I admit. “He’s really funny and nice and sort of weird, but in a cool way.”
“You like the fooling around?” Frances asks.
“Frances!”
“Well?” She smiles. A wide smile. That fang. “Fooling around is a big part of romantic relationships.”
“Yes,” I tell her. “I like it.”
“You enjoy how you feel when you’re with him?”
I nod.
“But not enough to want to take responsibility for his happiness?”
“I guess,” I say
“What if you were to consider the possibility that in relationships you’re not responsible for the other person’s happiness?”
“Huh?”
“That maybe we’re responsible for our own,” Frances says. “Other people can help or hinder, or sometimes both. But in the end it’s up to each of us.”
“It’s hard for me to see it that way,” I tell her. “I mean, if you mess up with someone, they can’t handle it and they don’t like you, and you feel awful and it’s just not worth it.”
“Is that right?” Frances asks.
“Plus, people leave.”
“Leave?”
“You know. Break up with you or break your heart or …”
“Or?”
“I don’t know. They just leave you. They … they …”
“Die?”
“Why are you being so mean?”
“I’m not trying to be mean,” Frances says. “I just had a feeling that’s what you were thinking, and so I said it for you.”
“Well, what if I didn’t want you to say it for me? What if that’s not even what I was thinking?”
“Then, I made a mistake,” Frances says. “And I’m sorry.”
I stew on that for a while and stroke my suede pillow. Then I say out loud what’s in my head. “Why should I get to be happy with somebody as amazing as Seth when Jack will never be happy with someone again?”
She waits awhile, but I don’t say anything else, and she doesn’t speak for me this time.
“I think that question is one we should definitely talk about,” she finally says. I don’t say something back about it. I can’t go there right now. That whole topic just makes me tired.
“Aren’t we supposed to do EMDR today?”
“Nice dodge,” Frances goes. She looks at me without moving for just long enough to let me know she’s not going to forget to bring it up again. “But yes.” She pulls out the gray box and starts to untangle the wires. “Let’s start by checking what we did last session.”
“It’s hard to remember,” I say, getting myself situated with legs up and crossed under my pillow.
“That’s okay.” Frances hands me the buzzers. “Just tell me, when you do think of the work we did last time, what comes up?”
There was the key chain. I can see it dangling from the steering wheel made of light on that bright day by the windy road. Also there was the thing about screaming. But what I remember more is wet grass.
“Sprinklers,” I tell Frances. “Wet grass and little kids playing in the sprinklers.”
Frances nods and turns on the buzzers.
The sprinklers make that snickety, snickety sound over and over, and all that black, wiry hair on Ellen’s leg, with the razor going snick, snick over and over, repeating and repeating, and then the black hairs turn into green blades of grass strewn with brown leaves the size of barrettes, and I’m picking them up and saying, “In order to add fractions, you have to find a common numerator,” and my father is standing over me, glaring and vein-popping, screaming, “Why are you always repeating the same wrong thing?” And there’s dread and weight and blackness, and he’s looming, like a monster, screaming and screaming, and I try to pick up the leaves, but they crumble or blow away under his monster breath, and it’s my fault because I’m repeating the same wrong thing over and over, always wrong, always bad, and it’s better to be still and calm, but I can’t do it, it’s never right, I’m bad, always so bad.
“Take a deep breath,” Frances tells me as she turns off the buzzers. “And let it go.” It’s wild how you forget to breathe sometimes.
“It’s my father,” I tell her. “He’s mad. He’s yelling at me. I hate the way he always yells and makes up his stupid rules at the drop of a hat and won’t let you even say anything.”
“Go,” Frances says.
My father’s face bloats and then lengthens and gels into a brackish green wave, and my brother has his feet planted and his arms up and out, and he’s going, “I can stop the wave, Anna! I can stop the wave!” Only, he can’t, and the father face breaks hard on top of us, and Jack yells for me to help, only I’m no help, I’m no help at all, I can’t help Jack, and Jack can’t help me because it’s too much, too fast, and another one rears above us, and the vein in the temple ripples and froth foams at the mouth, and it crashes, and there’s nothing you can do because it’s so much bigger and smarter and stronger than you and it knows what you deserve anyway.
“I have a sour taste in my mouth,” I tell Frances, and she keeps the buzzers going. “Like I’m going to throw up, only I’m not, and it’s this feeling of desperation and despair and dread, and I hate it. I so hate it.”
“Just notice,” Frances tells me in her steady voice.
Another father face looming and rearing and screaming and crashing black noise over and through us, and another and another and another, and our feet are planted wide and our heads are ducked low, bracing ourselves for wave after wave after wave after wave.
“I hate him,” I tell Frances, clutching the buzzers. “I hate him. I hate how he can’t stop. He never stops. He never stops and you can’t breathe or move, there’s never any room, and I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it.”
He’s crashing down on us, down on me and Jack, and we struggle to stay standing, to breathe, we struggle under that wave and then another and another, and then suddenly there’s a pocket of air and we suck it in, gasping, just as another father face lifts and poises to strike, and Jack is clutching my hand, and the wave above is roaring, howling, only somehow it isn’t angry anymore, it’s afraid, it’s a wave afraid to hurt us and afraid of us getting hurt, and the mouth in the wave is a circle of fear and the eyes are wide, and it’s straining not to crash, shuddering and shaking with the effort because the gravity of the tides and of the moon and of everything is stronger than anything, and when it can’t stop itself anymore, the father face cascades down on us, screaming, “Hold on! Hold on!” And Jack and I wind our arms together, clasping each other’s wrists, like trapeze artists, gripping so hard we’re shaking and trembling, but we s
till hold on, we hold on, even though we can’t stop the waves, even though we can’t stop anything, we hold on together, and it helps.
Frances turns off the buzzers and hands me a tissue. I see those stupid certificates and some fresh tulips in a vase, and inside I notice that I’m wondering where she got tulips from in the middle of the winter and if she put aspirin in them, but what I say is, “I don’t know.” Frances waits, and I blow my nose. “I just see me and Jack and my father, and it’s just … I don’t know. Emotional.”
Jack and I are underneath rushing and blackness and weight and pressure, but we’re holding on to each other, side by side, feet planted, heads down, hands gripping wrists, and we hold on and hold on and hold on, and it helps, it helps a lot, and then the wave has passed, and there’s no more, there’s really no more, and we squint out at the horizon to make sure, but the ocean has morphed into a magical Caribbean sea of dazzling turquoise, and we’re standing next to each other in the warm, soft water. Calm and still and peaceful, with a barely moving ship on the horizon and a V of pelicans gliding above. We look behind us, and on the pink sand, by the red-striped umbrella and damp towels and low-slung chairs, my parents are lazing in the sun. The brim of my father’s white hat is tilted low over his eyes, and the strap of my mother’s straw one is tied firmly under her chin. We’re looking over our shoulders, back at them, and they see us and wave, and in my father’s hand is number 1,000 coconut sunblock, and Jack and I turn back to the ocean, side by side, palms cupping the surface of the beautiful, beautiful blue water.
“Look,” Jack says. “Minnows.”
27
“HERE,” I SAY, SHOVING MY SIXTH BOUQUET AT JASON. WE’RE IN Ellen’s room, upstairs. It’s June, and I’ve had to give all my roses away because as it turns out, my dad started sneezing and swelling immediately with the first one.
“Thanks,” Jason goes. But he doesn’t take them from me. His eyes are puffy.
“I’m really sorry,” I tell him. Sweatshirt cheated on him. With a girl.
Ellen takes the flowers and leaves the room, probably to find a vase. She barely has a limp anymore. At first when she got the short cast off, she walked sort of funny. Tippy-toed. She couldn’t get her heel flat on the ground. But now she’s moving pretty smoothly.
Jason flops onto Ellen’s bed. He’s half sitting on Whitey, but I don’t say anything. He leans back and stares at the upside-down dried roses hanging from Ellen’s ceiling fixture. I gave her bouquet number four. My mother got number three for her office, and Seth got number two, just for kicks.
“He was so mad about prom. I should have taken him.” Jason took Ellen to prom instead of Sweatshirt. As friends, obviously. None of us thought our school could handle two guys going together. Not yet, anyway. Maybe in a couple of years.
“For someone who wasn’t even out until he met you, that seems totally unfair,” I tell Jason.
The prom committee thing turned out to be not so bad. I ended up tagging along with Ellen and Jack to most of the meetings anyway, and nobody cared that I was an unofficial member. Jack wanted to DJ prom himself, but he got voted down because even though he’s pretty popular, nobody much likes his music, and we hired a band instead. But Jack did manage to convince the band and the committee to let him set up movie clips on a big screen on one side of the gym, and everybody thought that was completely cool.
Seth and I spent so much time fooling around outside on the football field that a bunch of people said they thought we hadn’t shown up at all. Lisa started liking Jack and wanted to go to prom with him, but he hasn’t liked anyone since Cameron, and especially not Lisa. So she went with some guy she met at the mall who Ellen and Jason reported was cute, but who didn’t say a word the whole time.
“Besides which,” Ellen goes, walking back into the room with a vase full of water, “what’s he fooling around with a girl for if he’s gay?” She sits at her desk and starts arranging the roses. “He’s confused, Jase.”
Jason starts to cry again. Well, not cry exactly. It’s more of a weep. Which makes me think about Seth. Which makes me think about sex. Which makes me internally slap myself so that I can focus on Jason, who needs his friends.
“You deserve better,” I tell Jason. “A lot better than that guy.”
“Yeah,” Ellen says. “You need someone like Keith.”
She’s sort of dating some guy she met in physical therapy who smashed his arm in another car wreck. He looks a little bit like Bono, but he’s not all that charismatic. I like him, though, and he likes Ellen, and that’s good enough for me. She still drinks too much at parties, but she’s stopped drinking during the day, and Keith is on my side about the whole thing, so that’s good.
“If Seth cheated on me, I think I’d die,” I tell Jason. He’s stopped weeping.
“Especially if he cheated on you with a guy,” he points out.
“Don’t,” I go. “Do you think he’s gay?” Panicked, I’m remembering all those rumors about Jason and Seth after the accident.
Ellen snorts. “No way.”
“You’d never fool around with him, would you?” I ask Jason. “That would be, like, insanely cruel.”
Now Jason snorts. “No offense, Anna,” he goes. “But no way.”
“So have you guys done it yet?” Ellen asks. She’s finished with the roses. She spins around on her desk stool to look at me. She means have we gone all the way, made it home, gotten busy, done the dirty. Had sex.
But she knows we haven’t. She’s just trying to distract Jason.
“Stop trying to distract me,” Jason goes.
“Fine,” Ellen goes. “You’re sitting on Whitey.” Jason lifts his butt, and Ellen gets off her stool to pull Whitey free. She starts rubbing him over her chin. “I know you know I made a pass at Jason,” Ellen goes to me out of the blue. Then she blushes.
“You told her?” I ask Jason.
“No.” Jason arches his left eyebrow and looks at Ellen. “How do you know?”
“Whitey told me.”
“How would Whitey know?” I go.
Ellen shrugs. “Whitey knows everything.”
When I get home, my parents are in the kitchen. The weird thing is, it’s my mom yelling instead of my dad.
“Responsibility!” my mom’s saying. My father’s sitting at the table in front of a Texas Hold ’Em online game.
“What’s happening?” I ask Jack, who’s in the family room on the L-shaped couch with his DVD paused. Somehow I get the feeling this fight has been going on for a while.
“Mom’s pissed,” Jack says.
“Mom’s pissed?” I can’t remember the last time my mother was the one who was pissed.
“Bullshit,” my father’s saying, only kind of weak.
“You can’t tell anything from two sessions!” my mom yells. “It takes time, Harvey. It takes time and effort!”
“The guy’s an idiot,” my dad says back. “I’m not going to sit in some room with an idiot for an hour a week and pay him for idiocy.”
“This is not a debate,” my mom goes. “This is an ultimatum!”
“Damn it,” my father says. “I had three aces.”
We hear a crash and then silence.
Jack and I look at each other and then race to the kitchen doorway. My father’s laptop is on the floor. Someone knocked it off the table. He and my mother are staring at it.
“You can’t really force someone into therapy,” Jack says into the quiet room. He should know.
“This is none of your business,” my mom answers.
“Bullshit,” Jack goes.
“Yeah,” I say. I feel strangely calm. “Bullshit.”
“Go to your rooms,” my father tells us, still staring at his laptop.
“You can’t make someone go to therapy,” I say. “But you can be really pissed at someone for a long time for not going.” I look hard at Jack when I say that.
“I said,” my dad repeats, “go to your rooms.”
We ign
ore him. We go back to the L-shaped couch instead. Jack unpauses his DVD. It’s footage of some god-awful band.
“What’s this one called?” I ask him after about three seconds.
“Mystic Circles of the Young Girls. It’s good, right?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Right.”
I hear him crying through the wall in the middle of the night. I kick off my sheet and pull on decent pajama bottoms and the TALK TO MY AGENT T-shirt and leave my room to go to his. In the hallway I stop short, surprised to see my mother, her ear an inch away from Jack’s closed door. She straightens up in her slippers and looks sheepish for a minute. We watch each other listening to Jack for a while, and then my mom motions for me to follow her. She leads me to the kitchen and makes us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
“Are you taking Jack and me to Paris if dad won’t go?” I ask her.
“We’ll see,” she says.
“Do you think Jack’s going to pick NYU or UCLA?”
She chews her sandwich for a while without answering.
“Mom?” I say.
“NYU,” she tells me. “Please pass the milk.”
Jack won’t do therapy.
“It really helps,” I try to tell him one Sunday afternoon after Seth has left.
“Leave me alone, Anna,” he goes.
“With EMDR, your brain makes these little movies in your head,” I tell him for the tenth time. “I mean, some people’s do. Mine does. Yours probably would. You’d like that.”
“I know,” he says. “You’ve told me about it ten times.”
“Even Dad’s in therapy,” I argue.
“Twice. To some guy he thinks is a moron,” Jack says. “That’s not exactly therapy. And you don’t see him going back, do you? Besides, it’s not a competition.”
“Ellen says it’s totally ironic that out of the whole family you’re the only one not even willing to give it a try.”
“Ellen is too smart for her own good,” Jack goes.
“I heard you crying a few nights ago,” I tell him.