by Ann Packer
“So,” he said.
He smiled at her, and she looked out the window: at the bare trees and at the rain streaming down the glass. She hated this—hated it. She had no idea what to say. They had even discussed it once, how it was so hard, but that had been really embarrassing in and of itself. Last Thursday, in the morning before she left for school, she had written down some things to talk about with him, but once she was sitting here, feeling his eyes on her, it turned out that the idea of taking the little piece of paper out of her pocket and referring to it in front of him was far worse than miserably racking her brain as usual, and so the piece of paper stayed where it was. Later, at home, she flushed it down the toilet, too embarrassed even to read it again.
“How are you feeling?” he said, shifting a little in his chair and crossing his legs. When he asked questions he always had this concerned you-can-tell-me-anything look on his face, and he had it now.
“OK.”
“Where would you like to start today?”
Behind him was a charcoal drawing of an old city street with some kids playing in front of an open fire hydrant. Sometimes, when she squinched her eyes, the arrangement of shapes looked a little like the face of a small, scared animal. Then she unsquinched and wondered how she’d seen anything but the street scene. She said, “Amanda has a new boyfriend. She was bragging about it all through lunch today.”
He waited. After a while he said, “Can you tell me more?”
She felt a giggle rising inside her, and she fought to keep it down. In the hospital, Abby had told her about a therapist she’d seen for a while who had a Magic 8 Ball in her waiting room, but instead of stuff like “It is very likely” or “I don’t think so,” it had responses like “How did that make you feel?” and “Can you tell me more?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “His name is Noah.”
Dr. Lewis made a steeple with his forefingers. “Two by two.”
“What?”
“Noah made me think of Noah’s ark.”
Lauren considered this. “It’s been raining a lot.”
“It has.”
She thought of Jeff coming into the cafeteria, dripping wet. Then, for some reason, of her dad at dinner last night, complaining about the rain like he was really angry, and how her mom acted like there was something wrong with him, minding the rain so much.
“He’s avoiding me,” she said.
“Jeff?”
She nodded. Dr. Lewis shifted again and recrossed his legs. He kept his eyes on her.
“His friends sat near me and Amanda at lunch today, and, you know, instead of sitting with them he went to this totally different part of the cafeteria.”
“And you felt that was because he saw you.”
“It was because he saw me! It was completely obvious!”
Dr. Lewis sat still for a while. At last he said, “It sounds like a hard moment for you,” and she didn’t like how she was starting to feel, kind of shaky. “It’s very painful for you,” he went on, “to think he might be avoiding you,” and to her fury she felt an approach of tears. In a moment she was weeping into her hands. He stayed silent. He always did this: made her cry and then just let her cry.
“I would bet,” he said once she’d calmed a little, “that Amanda talking about her new boyfriend made the feelings about Jeff harder to tolerate.”
“Duh,” she said. And then, confused, “Wait—Why?”
“Any ideas?”
She thought about it: Amanda talking about duder—Noah—and Jeff not coming anywhere near her. She pulled up her sleeve and looked at her scars. “They don’t hurt at all anymore.”
“How is that for you?”
“It’s just a fact.”
“It’s a fact, true, but you might have feelings about it.”
Actually, she did: she wished they still hurt. Sometimes she pressed on them to try to recover the way they’d felt as they were healing—so open, so raw. But she couldn’t tell him that—he’d say something weird about it. When she told him once that she was afraid of people seeing the scars, he said maybe that was also what she wanted, for people to see them. Maybe the cutting was a way of showing the world how much pain you’re in. A way of making it visible. Blech.
She reached for a Kleenex and folded it in half, then in half again.
“I have some ideas about why today might have been hard for you,” he said.
“What?”
“If Amanda has a boyfriend, then she has something you want and don’t have, so you might be having some pretty painful competitive feelings. In addition, you might worry that you won’t see her as much anymore now that she’s dating Noah.”
“She isn’t dating him.”
“Oh. What would you call it? I don’t know what you’d call it.”
“She isn’t anythinging him. She just likes him, and he likes her back. I—I lied earlier.”
“You lied.”
“I said she has a new boyfriend, but she doesn’t really. Not yet, anyway. I lied.”
“Imagining things can make them feel true.”
“No, I lied.”
“I see.”
She looked down at the Kleenex, and all at once she began pulling it apart, shredding it until her lap began to fill with bits of fluff. There had been times when she’d forgotten what a geek he was, but here it was again. She didn’t want to come here anymore. In the hospital she’d had this bizarre feeling that as long as she kept seeing him she’d be OK. Even this morning she had sort of wanted to see him. What was her problem? She was like some crazy person, always changing her mind. She had more than half an hour to go. Her mom would never let her quit coming, either. More than half an hour today, and hours and hours for however long it would take everyone to believe she wasn’t “at risk” anymore. She hated that: “at risk.” Like at any moment she’d do it again. She would never. Never. She hadn’t even really meant it! Dr. Lewis had said so: she knew her mom was coming home; she knew she’d be found in time.
“Where’d you go?” he said.
He was watching her. The Kleenex was all over the place, and her face warmed as she plucked bits of it from her pants and tried to gather them in her hand. He was always so calm—she didn’t think it was fair. She wondered if he’d ever had to do this. Maybe he was a therapist because he’d been “at risk” himself.
“I was wondering where you grew up.”
“You’re curious about me.”
Her face burned, but she kept looking at him.
“I grew up in Sacramento.”
“Oh.” She was surprised. “Were you depressed?”
He did the steeple thing again with his fingers. He sat there without responding, as if he were thinking about it. Don’t you remember? she wanted to say, but didn’t.
“What do you imagine?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s why I’m asking.”
“Sometimes,” he said, “when teenagers feel alone with painful feelings, they want to know how other people have dealt with the same thing.”
“So?”
“So maybe in asking if I was depressed, you were wondering if I’d gone through what you’re going through—if I felt as bad as you feel.”
She shook her head, but she was about to cry again, and then she was crying. Why had she done it—said I’m Lauren? Why, why, why? Everything was going along fine until then. Maybe that wasn’t entirely true, but with Jeff it was. And if it hadn’t been for her problems with Jeff, would she have been such a moper? Would she have been such a crier, such a loser? No. No, she wouldn’t. Dr. Lewis had it backward. He thought her crappy life, her “low self-esteem,” made it just seem like Jeff hated her. But she knew what she knew: Jeff hated her, and that made her life crappy.
30
All that lying in bed in December, all those tears—Sarabeth wondered where they’d gone. She’d had trouble getting herself out of bed then, but in an odd way she felt worse now—she couldn’t get the bed out of her.
Her legs, that had moved her through Tilden Park: they were full of sand, deadweights. Her head was full of sand, too, which made it hard to concentrate, hard to talk. She met Nina for coffee one evening and tried to explain what had happened, but she kept losing her train of thought or having trouble finding the right words.
“I’m worried about you,” Nina said, and Sarabeth knew she meant well, but it made her feel worse. “Will you make an appointment with a shrink?”
Sarabeth shook her head. She didn’t feel it was a bad idea, just that she couldn’t do it. Besides, she was too poor. Real estate was dead, and though she had lampshade orders to fill, she couldn’t make herself work.
Nina said, “Would you go if I made an appointment?”
“The lightbulb has to want to change,” Sarabeth joked, but her face felt weird, as if something were crawling on her cheeks, and she gave up and shrugged. “Anyway, it’s getting late—I should get going.”
At home she sat on her couch. She felt tired in one way but wide awake in another. There would come a moment when she would feel it was time to go to bed, and she would go, but meanwhile she waited. Time moved slowly. She thought of a freeway just past the point of a huge jam, how each emerging car would seem to have the road to itself, minutes passing, one by one.
In a while she realized that she needed to pee, and then that she needed to pee very badly: the pressure in her bladder surprised her. She got up and went into the bathroom, and it was the strangest thing—at the moment when she felt the urine against her skin, her eyes welled. It was like that trick kids played, putting someone’s hand in water to make him wet the bed.
Back in the living room it was very quiet—she could hear the tick of the clock in her workroom. She recalled a time when she almost always had music playing, but that was long ago. She hadn’t opened her stereo cabinet in months. What would it be like to have the kind of terrible, wasting disease where your mind was entirely intact but you couldn’t move or speak? She felt a little like that now, as if somewhere inside her there might be an urge to hear music, but that she lacked the means to bring that urge forward, to feel it.
She let Jim and Donald talk her into going to a cocktail party in Marin, at a stark hillside house in which just about everything was beige or white. The crowd was very upscale: she met a cardiologist, a landscape architect, a professor of sociology, a producer at KQED. She chirped her way through an explanation of her work, pretty sure they were all wondering how she supported herself. Not very well, she wanted to say.
At the hors d’oeuvres table she ate a handful of salty cashews, then a couple of mouth-puckering cornichons. She picked up a little plate and helped herself to a few sections of California roll, then added several leaves of pickled ginger and a knob of wasabi. She rolled a piece in the seasonings and put it in her mouth whole, and instantly the wasabi assaulted her sinuses, burning her nostrils and making her eyes water. She chewed quickly and immediately had another.
In the window over the table she saw her reflection, her pale face with its shadowed eyes, her mouth moving mechanically. Behind her, the party guests talked animatedly of art and Hawaii and feeling more grounded these days. She didn’t know them, but she knew she wasn’t them. Is this it? It was. She was where she’d been heading all along, though without knowing it. Liz hadn’t put her there; she’d just turned on the light. There was a fluttering in Sarabeth, like wings, and she thought her task was to quiet that feeling, to soothe the bird inside her, reassure it that all was OK. She looked at the window again, but this time she tried to look through it. She believed she was looking into the backyard, but it was too dark and rainy to tell if there were dense trees out there, or lawn, or a neighbor’s imposing house.
In the days after the party she began to think of her bedroom on Cowper Street, of how, because of an unfortunately placed streetlight, it had been very light at night, and of how when she couldn’t sleep she sometimes pretended that the illuminated shapes she saw were other than what she knew them to be. Her fan-backed chair was a peacock, her coat-rack was an antelope, and down the hall her mother’s voice was just the cry of a monkey, a shriek that should be, or the soft, rhythmic cawing of an exotic bird.
The bird in Sarabeth grew more and more still. Without the beating of its wings it began to seem like something quieter than a bird, a small warm roundish thing in the middle of her chest, like an auxiliary heart. This thought pleased her for a very short time and then repelled her with its reach toward poetry. If not a heart, then a stone? But that was poetic, too.
So there was nothing inside her—she said goodbye to the bird and missed it only briefly. She was shedding what she could, though the pile of stuff on her floor remained.
31
In the second half of January an acquisition deal of Brody’s did an eleventh-hour stall, and though he could have dealt with it by videoconference he booked a flight to Boston instead, telling Liz it was the only way.
Bruce Sellers came along. They took a cab from Logan, arriving at their hotel a little before 11:00 p.m. Once Brody’d dropped his bag in his room and phoned Liz, he went down to the empty business center and spent an hour on e-mail, calling room service to bring him a burger while he worked.
He’d taken a midday flight because of a morning meeting he couldn’t miss, so he’d been home at breakfast—unusual for a day when he had to travel. “Where are you going?” Joe said, and when Brody told him, Joe found the weather page of the newspaper and reported that snow was expected in the Northeast.
“Better take your galoshes,” Liz teased.
“Oh, no—I don’t have galoshes!”
“Maybe you could buy some at the airport.” Joe looked serious, pleased to have this idea for Brody. “You know those stores that have everything, like suitcases and toothbrushes and stuff? I’ll bet they’d have galoshes. Especially in January.”
Lauren was watching Joe. “They were kidding,” she said in a mean voice, and from across the table Liz met Brody’s eyes and then quickly looked away.
Finished with his burger, he opened a new e-mail and addressed it to Joe. It was a little after nine in California; he might be online. Brody typed:
It’s the middle of the night here and twenty-three degrees out. It was a real shock when I walked out of the terminal. What’s up there?
He went to the Times site and read an early edition of tomorrow’s paper, giving Joe five minutes, ten, fifteen. At last, when he was close to giving up, a reply came.
Not much—I have a ton of homework. Mom ordered Round Table for dinner.
Brody wrote back:
She’s slipping! I’ll have to talk to her about that. (Just kidding.) I’m alone in a sterile “business center” in my hotel—a weird place to be in the middle of the night.
And Joe wrote:
That would be a good opening scene for a movie. Businessman in the middle of the night in a strange hotel, no one else around.
Brody smiled.
Stop, you’re scaring me!
Tracking shot up the hotel corridor, scary music. Sorry, I’ve gotta get back to my math now.
No need to be sorry, Joejy. You don’t ever need to be sorry you’ve got other stuff to do, OK?
Brody thought for a moment, the cursor hovering over the SEND button. He moved it to the line he’d just written and backspaced until it was gone.
“Go get ’em, kiddo” he typed instead, and he sent it, though he knew Joe might not see it before tomorrow sometime. He did a few more work e-mails and then logged out and wandered around the mezzanine level of the hotel, passing an empty conference room and then the closed door to the fitness center. A sign said it was available twenty-four hours a day, and he opened the door: empty, though the lights were on, the machines lined up against a black window. There’d been so much rain at home lately, he and David hadn’t played tennis in weeks, and he’d all but stopped his nighttime trips to the high school. He imagined himself working out, and the pain this would bring to his shoulde
r was almost a draw—as if hurting it were a job he’d been neglecting.
Round Table. They delivered, was the main attraction. Their pizza wasn’t very good. Hound Table, the kids used to call it. Woof, woof.
An elevator took him to the main lobby, and he strolled past the concierge. At the registration desk the lone clerk said, “Anything we can help you with, Mr. Mackay?” and Brody did a double take, wondering if this was the same guy who’d checked him in two hours ago. He didn’t think so. Another ominous touch for a movie: everyone knowing your name.
In the bar there were several clusters of low, upholstered chairs, only one of which was occupied, by a couple sitting as close together as the furniture allowed. Brody took a stool and ordered a Scotch. The bartender was a young woman with long hair and a tastefully revealing blouse, and he imagined saying, I’ll bet you get a lot of lonely businessmen trying to talk to you, but then he’d be one.
The first taste of his drink gave his throat a satisfying burn. He went to bars only when he traveled, drank Scotch only when he went to bars. It tasted good, better than he remembered. He sometimes thought that the main difference between life now and life in his parents’ heyday was the decline of alcohol. He and Liz had talked about this: how, growing up, they’d lived with their parents’ drinking the way farmers lived with the seasons. Spring, summer, fall, winter. Sober, tipsy, drunk, hungover. And none of the four of them—Robert and Marguerite, his mother and father—had ever had anything like a drinking problem. It was just how people lived then.
Liz, at breakfast this morning. That mischievous look when she made the galoshes comment. An idea had flashed through his mind in that instant: Don’t go. Don’t go to Boston. Then Lauren made her nasty remark to Joe.
He thought of an evening at Tahoe, over Christmas, when Joe switched his vote from the DVD his cousins preferred to the one Lauren wanted. “That’s not fair,” Austin said, but Joe wouldn’t budge, and the only adult willing to intervene was Steve, who forced a coin toss and was thereby the agent of his boys’ defeat. “I changed my mind,” Brody overheard Joe saying later. “What’s the big deal?” He didn’t want to be caught protecting his sister’s interests.