Like was not the right word. For the moment he still found therapy pretty random—not like in the league, when you talked to the team psychologist specifically to improve your mental game. This Joe thing, for instance. Why was it even on his mind? He’d come to Dr. Evans because he was grieving, because he was dealing with Tim and D. Now he was annoyed at her for letting him get off-track.
The next week, he went in with a mission.
“We talked about my dad last week,” he reminded Dr. Evans, feeling agitated the moment he sat down. “But that’s not what I’m here for. I want to talk about my friend D, who got his brains bashed in by a jet ski.”
He spoke to shock; he hadn’t mentioned before that it was a violent death. But she was smart, she must’ve read the news, and she was ready with her neutral smile.
“We played together four years, the last four of my career,” he said. “I was a mentor to him, showed him the ropes. And he was willful at first, but eventually we were friends. Then, a few weeks ago, he died.”
“And how did you feel about that?” Dr. Evans asked him.
“Sad,” he said. They’d covered that. “But also angry.”
“Who were you angry with?”
“Just—God. That this happened. But also the kid who caused it. His parents. And D. And everyone at the funeral who was like, ‘He was a hero.’”
She looked confused. “They said that?”
“Thank you!” Mitch cried, clapping his hands.
“Who said that?”
“The other guys, my teammates. Because he might’ve saved his son’s life.”
“Well, that is pretty heroic.”
Mitch shrugged.
“You don’t see it that way?”
“Absolutely not. If you listen to the witnesses, it’s pretty clear the jet ski was never hitting Donte. People are just saying that because they don’t want to believe it was meaningless.”
“But you do?”
He looked at the poster on her wall, from a museum show in 1998. The central image was of a yellow house. “You know who else you remind me of?” he told her. He heard the edge in his voice. “The reporters. Always asking questions.” Van Gogh, he thought proudly. He would’ve known it even without the label.
That smile again. “It’s my job.”
“I didn’t mind them so much by the end, but only because we understood each other. I didn’t like to talk much and they didn’t push me. When they did, they knew they’d get nothing.”
“You seem to like to talk.”
“I do like to talk. I don’t like answering questions.”
“That’s going to make this difficult. Questions are central to talk therapy.”
“And why is that, though? Who decided that’s the way it has to be?”
She shifted forward in her chair. “Who decided football has to have four downs? It’s a practice that’s evolved over time. No one is saying it’s the only way to proceed, only that it’s proven successful.”
He grinned. So she knew her football. “And what if one day it’s proven not successful?”
“Then I think we would adjust.”
A word he respected. Adjust.
“But,” she continued, “I don’t think today’s that day. Now, we were talking about D. Do you want to go back to that?” He shifted in his seat, a partial concession.
“How’s his family doing?”
“They’re holding up.” He wasn’t an idiot. He knew what she wanted. She wanted him to admit he’d driven all the way to Philadelphia to honor D and pay his respects but hadn’t managed to talk to the family at all. Just completely skipped the receiving line the way he used to skip class in high school. And why did he do it, she would ask if he told her this? Because he didn’t know what to say, because he was angry with them for letting D die, because he was ashamed he’d been so out of touch with a man he’d claimed to call a friend, because he was scared to look Shawna and Donte and D’s mother in the eye and tell them he was sorry for their loss. Because they might, in all their other-side wisdom, look back at him in a way that says you’re next. And how weak that would make him feel to admit. Wasn’t it enough that he was thinking it? What good would saying it do?
He had to give her something, though. He hadn’t been looking at her—most of the time he spent in her office he didn’t look at her—and now he looked at her aggressively. She was wearing loafers and plain tan slacks.
“I was just thinking about the other guys,” he decided, finally. “It was all Eagles at the service.”
“And where did you play before that?” she asked, even though he knew she knew.
“Before that, New England Patriots, before that Miami Hurricanes, before that Monacan Warriors. Before that Monacan Jets.” He rattled them off on his fingers.
“That’s a lot of teammates. Are you still in touch with any of them?”
He nodded as names and faces crowded his head. Hardy, Ricky, Caleb, Gaines. Though he hadn’t really talked to Gaines. But he’d hired Ricky to sell cars, and he golfed with Caleb, because they both still lived in the area. He’d thought of this as a safe topic, just football, just guys, but it was almost wiping him out to recall.
That whole thing in New England—aside from Hardy, what was there to say? The Philly guys, too. They were lost. He remembered what Tim had said about Vietnam: “You only know guys in the moment. When it’s over it’s over and you have to live your life.” Like high school, like college, the NFL was a moment. But it was a moment that had felt so permanent.
“It’s hard to hold on to people,” he confessed. “I’m doing the best I can.”
Thanksgiving was a sorry showing. Another year, another turkey tied by Julie. Alyssa and Cindy came down with Journey and the five of them stuffed themselves on a meal better suited to fifteen. He couldn’t remember the last time his crew had been so small. Without Tim, Tracy and the girls had decided to go to New York to shop and see some shows. They’d sent him a selfie from Times Square: three round Virginia faces nearly blocking out the lights. He used to have his other kids, too, but Kaylie and Tyler were both in college now, which made Lori more desperate to see them. She was taking back Thanksgiving this year, same as she’d done last year, and with Lori he always gave in. He’d get them for a couple days after Christmas, if he was lucky. They hadn’t even begun to work that out.
At least he had Alyssa and Journey. Normally, they behaved like a whole ecosystem, every role in nature accounted for between the two of them. But at dinner this time, her phone kept lighting up, and she kept reading it, more focused on the screen than on Journey, who sat singing to himself under his wavy blond hair, which Alyssa seemed determined not to cut.
“You seeing someone?” Mitch asked.
Alyssa looked up. “Maybe.”
“Uh-oh,” Mitch teased.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself.” She tucked the phone away. She’d grown secretive as an adult, every new development in her life a shock to his sense of the world. First she dressed rich and went to a rich-kid school. Then she switched colleges. Then her hair was purple and she had a massive tattoo of a seal on her back. Then she was accidentally pregnant, no father, then having the kid with a midwife at home. The trick was to expect an about-face every six months or so, and that was exactly the kind of thing Mitch never could learn to expect. This fall she was a first-year law student—Alyssa, who was too smart for school.
He looked at Cindy for a clue but she just shrugged and offered him more turkey, which he accepted, because why not. He’d have to remember to interrogate her later. He tried to expect nothing, yet even as he chewed, he allowed himself to hope. A guy for Alyssa, someone he could golf with, another warm body in the room. He needed all the bodies he could get.
The next week, Mitch walked into Dr. Evans’s office and collapsed on the couch.
“Can I just lie here?” he asked her.
“It’s your time.”
He closed his eyes and they were quiet, the sound
of cars pulling into the parking lot slowly eating away at his head.
“Don’t you even have one question?” he finally asked.
“What’s troubling you?”
He tapped his head.
“Migraine?” she asked.
“Good guess.”
“We haven’t talked about that. Or about your goggles. They’re pretty impressive.”
“I really just want to be quiet.”
“But you came in. That suggests you want to talk.”
“I want to be in this office and not talk.”
“It’s your time,” she said again, and for some reason he heard it as a warning.
“I know what you’re up to,” he said after they’d listened to a few more passing cars. “I’ve seen ‘The Sopranos.’”
She made a noise that was nearly a laugh. “It’s a good show,” she said. “Psychotherapists love it.”
He sat up. She was looking at him.
“So it’s all my mother’s fault, right? Or my dad who wasn’t around.”
“What do you think?”
“Always what I think! What do you think?”
“That’s not important. We’re working to understand what you think. And what you feel.”
“I think I do better when I don’t think about what I feel.” He grunted and flopped back down.
“You know I have to ask: Why do you think that is?”
He looked at her ceiling, which was tiled with panels the exact color and texture of athletic tape, and he felt her smiling in her purposeful way, thinking the answer into his head, the answer she wanted him to give. It was like school again with Mrs. Murray, or football with its endless coaches. It was even like his old talks with God. He wasn’t against those folks; they’d helped him along his entire life. But if there was anything to be gained from retirement, it ought to be freedom, the right to finally have a conversation that wasn’t controlled by someone else.
He closed his eyes and went silent. And in that silence, he thought his answer back at her, thought it up the drab legs of her trousers, along the little canyons of her wrinkled cheeks, and in between the teeth of that satisfied smile, where it dissolved and got washed back into her gut. If she was half as smart as he thought she was, she’d know he could take it from here.
A few days later, he ran into Mrs. Murray, of all people, at CVS. He’d been standing behind her in the pharmacy line, wondering if he was imagining things, and it wasn’t until she stepped forward to speak to the pharmacist that he was positive it was her. He’d know that voice anywhere. It still didn’t belong in the South.
“Mitch Wilkins!” she said, when he gave her his name. She hadn’t recognized him, but that was not her fault. “Those glasses!”
She cupped his fat elbow in her cool, thin hand, and pressed her cheek against his, which was not ever the way they’d greeted each other, not even that long-ago time when he found himself floating in her doorway, overdue paper in hand, halfway between one life and the next. They were both undeniably adults now. She still had that braided hippie hair, now fully gray, but remarkably, her face wasn’t wrinkled. If anything, it boasted a dry sheen, like certain sweat-wicking fabrics.
They stood chatting for several minutes, every now and then having to step out of a new customer’s way, and when it became clear that neither had anywhere to be, they went across the street to the gas station bar, where they ordered beers and fries, against their doctors’ advice.
He found himself talking to her, well lubricated, the words just slipping out one after the other, about his life since the last time he’d seen her, which was his entire life, a life full of people she didn’t know, but might as well have, since she’d known him when he was young. It was everything he’d told Dr. Evans, but sharper this time, more connected, as though that had only been practice for this. He didn’t need Dr. Evans. He needed Mrs. Murray, someone who knew him, and knew where he came from, to whom he didn’t have to explain about his parents, and who would let him talk the way he wished.
And then came her turn, and he found himself interested in a way that buzzed in his brain, earnestly wanting to know what her life had been like. “I actually retired this year,” she told him, smiling, as if over a private joke. “We’re moving to DC in January. So you’re catching me just in time.”
He felt gut-punched. “But that’s crazy, you can’t,” he blurted. “I’d been thinking about you, and then all of a sudden, you’re at CVS. You have to admit that’s a sign.”
She smiled again. “I’m flattered. Truly. But Gordon and I have always wanted a city life. And to be closer to our daughter.”
This was news. Mrs. Murray was a mother? “I never knew you had a kid.”
“We had her late. Well, late for here. Her name is Sarah. She lives in New York.” She held up her phone, where a young woman tilted her head: dirty blonde like her mom, bigger mouth, same unimpressed eyes.
“She a teacher, too?”
“She’s a researcher. Studies proteins in the brain. I don’t know where she gets it.”
“Obviously from you!”
Mrs. Murray gave one of her masculine laughs, and Mitch felt that old, rare pleasure of pleasing her with an observation. “I don’t know anything about what happens on a microscopic level,” she said. “I only know about things I can see, hear, and feel.”
“That makes two of us. And I’m not even that good at seeing anymore.”
As if to check his claim, she snuck a glance at the clock behind the bar, but he caught that move clear as day, and she must have seen his panic, smart woman that she was. She must’ve known he wanted more, as she’d known all those years ago in her classroom. Only this time, she had nothing to lose, no boundaries to protect.
“Another round?” she asked, almost flirtatiously.
“On me!” He ordered and they went deeper. She told him about teaching in the same small place for almost forty years, which basically meant teaching whole families, first the parents, then their kids, and even, in one case, a grandkid of one of those first kids, which was how she knew it was time to quit. She talked, too, about her daughter, whom she worried about because she was single and always in pursuit of very particular and exacting forms of excellence, in her diet, in her vacation plans, and maybe also in her boyfriends. She worried this quality would work against her daughter in the end, a thought she repeated again a short while later, unwittingly showing her age. Mitch said he felt the same way about Alyssa, and Mrs. Murray—he still couldn’t think of her as Laura—affirmed that it was natural to worry about their kids this way, but that if parents wanted to offer advice that might be taken, they had to wait until they were asked, excruciating though that might be. He was struck again at how much better this was than talking to Dr. Evans, precisely because it was not neutral, because Mrs. Murray was admitting that she was a parent, too. He found himself wanting her advice on other things, and in this way he allowed himself to venture a few uncertain words about his dad.
“Has Dr. Evans brought up medication at all?” Julie asked the next morning as he popped his breakfast pill.
“If she does,” he said, “I’m not interested.” He pointed at his weekly pillbox. “I take plenty of crap already.”
His current daily regimen was relatively Spartan: one extended-release oxycodone, morning and night, with food, which he knew he was lucky to get. Plus an ACE-inhibitor for his blood pressure. And turmeric supplements. And his self-directed weed. He’d taken all kinds of candy in the league, especially after surgery, but since then he’d been vigilant, preferring to live with the known pain of his own broken body rather than risk an addiction that might turn out worse. Once, at Julie’s suggestion, he’d tried sleeping pills, but they had messed him up bad. He’d had the tingling limbs, the shaking hands, the dizziness, you name it—virtually every nasty side effect the pharmacist could fit on the accompanying insert. Better to stay awake all his life. An implant was one thing. But he would not lose himself to pills.
>
“Honestly,” he said. “I think therapy has done its job.”
“Ha,” Julie said.
“Yep. I think I’m done. Haven’t felt dizzy in weeks.” A lie. But he hadn’t felt like he was dying. “That’s gotta be proof of something.”
“Proof you have to keep going.”
“You’ll see,” he said. “You’ll see.”
He waited until his morning oxy had kicked in before he picked up the phone. By the time it had, he felt fine. He felt Mrs. Murray was definitely right: he needed to make this call.
“Listen, Joe,” Mitch told his father when he answered, “I want you to come for Christmas.”
“Oh, well, now,” Joe deflected. He spouted his usual noise about the dogs, Tammy, the distance. Never the real issue, which was cash. Well, that was fine. Everyone had his limit. But Mitch would not let Joe’s limit stop him from getting his way.
“I’ll take care of it,” he said. “I’ll take care of everything. The fact is I’m in therapy now and I’m really trying to work through my issues. So just do me a favor and come.”
They weren’t magic words, but for a New Age hippie like Joe, they were close, so what if they were a few weeks out of date. When his dad called back, after talking it over with Tammy, he said yes. Tammy would stay with the dogs—someone had to—but he’d be glad to spend Christmas with his son.
At last, at last, a conversation he had controlled.
“You’ll meet your grandkids,” Mitch said, excitedly, not realizing until this moment that this was something he wanted to see.
The next few days he threw himself into organizing, calling Alyssa, Lori, Maddie, Kaylie, Tyler, Cindy, Tracy. Everyone sounded blindsided by his vigor; they weren’t used to him making any plans, and they weren’t used to plans being made so assertively. With little protest they all agreed. Kaylie, Tyler, Maddie, and Joe would fly in on the twenty-third. Alyssa, Journey, and Cindy would drive down on Christmas Eve. He got on the fare site and ordered everyone flights. He hauled out to Wal-Mart to pick up a tree, a beautiful evergreen thing, in every way different from all the other trees in the roped-off enclosure, and in every way the same.
A Short Move Page 26