by P. J. Tracy
“But it’s a powerful one. You know that. And you know how hard it is to escape it.”
He did know, and now he was feeding that same demon again, feeling guilty about her feeling guilty, which was exactly what he wasn’t supposed to be doing at this juncture in his life. “Let’s just take this one day at a time, okay? Twelve-step it to success, just like Bill and his friends.”
“Who’s Bill?”
“He’s one of the guys who founded Alcoholics Anonymous.”
“Are you going?”
“I stopped drinking. I’m in spontaneous remission.” For a whole ten hours, give our brave veteran a Medal of Honor! “Did you know that seventy-five percent of people who recover from alcohol dependence do it without any help, including treatment or AA?”
“I take it that’s a no.”
“You can apply the philosophy to other things. One day at a time, Yuki. Keep telling yourself that.”
“Okay. But I suck at that.”
He smiled and squeezed her hand. “Yeah, you do.”
And she did suck at that. Aside from being a stringent pragmatist, Yuki was a highly regimented person, meticulously organized in every aspect of her life, and her mind was always a light-year beyond the present. On Sunday nights, she knew exactly what she would wear to work for the entire week, knew what meals she would prepare on what day. She kept a journal that outlined her six-month plan, her one-year plan, her five-year plan, her ten-year plan. She probably knew what date she would retire.
Unlike him, she knew exactly what her future would be, at least before a husband with PTSD had screwed it all up. He wondered if she knew whether he was in her future as she saw it now. He wanted to ask, but he didn’t want to hear the answer. Her unexpected visit was a bright spot of joy, but he could also sense a dark, implicit tenor to it, a dismantling of something important at the core of it. Her manner was suddenly strange and desperate and seemed cold to him instead of familiar. She said she missed him, but maybe she missed the idea of him, missed what he had been before. And maybe the separation had been more than just good for Yuki—maybe it had set her free and that’s why she was here—to tell him that.
It shouldn’t have surprised him that their impromptu lunch ended in the bedroom, but it did—a sweaty, apocalyptic nirvana, the greatest farewell fuck ever before Yuki told him she had accepted a once-in-a-lifetime job offer in Seattle. It wasn’t the end, she promised. Please think about moving to Seattle, she implored, as if changing locale would fix everything. But he hadn’t been a part of her decision, and that said it all.
She was crying when she left. Sam wanted to, wished he could, but the deadness inside him squelched any tears, any emotion he had left.
He went to the front window and watched her drive off in a blue Honda hearse that was carrying away their marriage. He looked down the street and saw that the black Jeep was back, parked a half a block away. His grief turned to groundless fury in a blinding flash. The next time he was cognizant of his surroundings, he was standing on the front porch with his Colt Anaconda in his hand. His second blackout of the day. Jesus Christ.
Shaking, he shoved the gun in the waistband of his jeans and looked down the street. The Jeep was gone, along with any recollection of what had happened between the time Yuki had driven off until now. Whenever now was. He was afraid to look at his watch.
Chapter Fifteen
MELODY WAS TRYING TO KEEP HERSELF busy, doing laundry, cleaning the apartment, making hummus and a fruit salad to have on hand. But no matter how much she moved or how fast, her nerves continued to fray, and every strange sound made her heart flail.
She kept checking her phone every few minutes, but Ryan hadn’t sent a text since What roses? and hadn’t responded to her answer: The roses you left in my bedroom. He hadn’t been on social media, hadn’t called either; so eventually she’d called him—several times—but his phone went straight to voicemail.
She wanted to nurture her anger, but fear had slithered into her mind like a dark, poisonous snake. Jealousy was Ryan’s trigger, and now he knew she had a secret admirer. He wasn’t responding because he was going to confront her in person, accuse her of having somebody on the side. He might be on his way over right now.
Sam had been right about him, but she hadn’t let herself see it because abuse had been so normal in her life since Netta’s death. The abused sought out abusers, it was right there in all of her psychology textbooks.
Even more frightening was the fact that someone other than Ryan had crawled through her window to leave her a special gift, and she had no idea who or why. But maybe Teddy was right and it had something to do with the black Jeep. And Sam knew something about that, although she couldn’t imagine how. She called him, but his phone went to voicemail, too, leaving that same empty hollowness of isolation she’d felt earlier. She wanted to seek out Teddy’s company, maybe even his advice, but he’d left to go surfing. It was just her, hummus, fruit salad, and a gun, which was on the kitchen counter next to her phone.
She didn’t drink during the day, never during the day, and never before a shift, but she found herself sitting on the sofa, clutching her phone and gun, gulping down a Sierra Nevada. Booze and firearms, a fantastic combination.
The soft, soothing buzz of the first beer sent her to the fridge for another, and when she’d finished that she ran to the bathroom to pee, thinking about all the mistakes she’d made in her life and how would she stop making them?
She suddenly hated herself for clinging desperately to the idea of Ryan as a knight in shining armor; to the kindness of Sam, who had much bigger things to worry about than a fucked up coworker; and to the consideration and protectiveness of Teddy. Any man who showed her compassion instead of horror became a crutch for her, which made her weak and pathetic, a revolting emotional vampire who was never going to entirely climb out of the darkness unless she learned to handle the past demons on her own. No time like the present to take charge. Kick ass. Take names. Call the cops.
She considered that option for a moment. It wasn’t a bad one—she could file a report, get her fears on the record in case Ryan or the black Jeep guy killed her or she ended up in a position to have to kill them in self-defense. But the idea quickly fizzled away when she imagined how the conversation might go.
A stranger broke into my apartment and left two dozen roses in my bedroom and I want him arrested. My boyfriend didn’t leave them, but now he knows I have a secret admirer and I’m afraid he might kill me because it turns out he’s jealous and violent. Oh yeah, and I think there’s a black Jeep following me. No, I’ve never seen it, but I heard about it from two people, a stoner surfer who thinks he can communicate with plants and waves and a really nice guy who’s suffering from serious PTSD and has hallucinations sometimes. Booze on my breath? I had a couple beers because I was so stressed out … yes, I do have a record because I used to be an addict, but I’m over all that now, a good and productive citizen, honest.
Good luck with that.
Chapter Sixteen
DR. FROLICH WAS HANDSOME IN THE way old movies and books characterized “women of a certain age,” as if there was a point in life when you were no longer worthy of feminine adjectives. She’d let her hair go gray and kept it wrapped in a messy bun at the nape of her neck. She wore a suit, but it was wildly colorful and deconstructed and nothing she’d bought off a rack anywhere.
She reminded Sam of his maternal grandmother, a long-time Berkeley resident who had been the very embodiment of that mien while she was still alive—a trust funder-turned-hippie bent on pissing off her parents in retaliation for their wealth, which she’d considered unethical or something to that effect. Everything she’d ever worn had been purchased at some art fair, and everything that had passed her lips or her guest’s lips was organic and green and often liquefied, which Sam blamed for his aversion to things like kale salad. The green hadn’t saved her from breast cancer, but he didn’t fault her for trying. DNA was cooked into you from concept
ion, and lucky cats, shamrocks, and vegetable smoothies were symbolic forces against the omnipotency of both genetics and fate. Dr. Frolich was busy at her computer when he walked into her office, probably entering notes on her previous patient’s chart, but Sam preferred to imagine she was surreptitiously shopping online for outré clothing between appointments. She looked up and seemed genuinely happy to see him. “Hi, Sam. I’m pleased to see you looking exceedingly healthy today.”
“Fresh air and exercise.”
“Where did you find fresh air in LA?”
Sam smiled at her joke in spite of the monumentally shitty day he was having.
“How are you?”
“Honestly? I’ve been a lot better.”
Her bright blue eyes disappeared in an elaborate mesh of crow’s feet that advertised her scorn for cosmetic surgical intervention. “Sit down.” She gestured to the cozy seating arrangement by a window that looked out on busy Wilshire Boulevard. There were a couple leather chairs, the requisite sofa, and a coffee table with a box of tissues, handy for mopping up the consequences of any crying jags.
A vase of white calla lilies adorned a credenza filled with psych textbooks, some that Dr. Frolich herself had written. He scanned the spines of her work, which bore grim titles like Deep into the Dark: Methodology in Treating Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and The Long Road to Trauma Healing.
She gathered a notebook and pen and sat across from him, her face very serious now. “Tell me what’s happening, Sam.”
This was the moment that always confounded him. Where did you start? At the beginning? At the end? Somewhere in the middle? “Yukiko stopped by today,” he finally said. “Unexpectedly.”
“How did that go?”
“It was good for a while. Except she brought kale salad.”
Dr. Frolich raised an unpruned eyebrow. “Classic passive-aggressive behavior. You’re clearly being punished.”
“That’s what I think. Even worse, she served everything out of the plastic deli containers. It was horrific.”
“You said it was good for a while. What changed?”
“She said she missed me but the separation has been good for her.”
Dr. Frolich scrawled a few notes but didn’t say anything. Psychiatrists were very much like cops, allowing lags in the conversation that would hopefully become so awkward, the subject would be compelled to babble on to fill the uncomfortable silence. Just like he’d done with Melody this morning while pressing her about Ryan. Maybe he was learning some unexpected life skills in therapy.
“Yuki’s feeling guilty. About the separation.”
“That was a very difficult decision for both of you. Do you think her absence has been helpful to you in any way?”
“I didn’t think so.”
“But?”
“But today I realized that with her gone, I wasn’t feeling guilty anymore about putting her through my hell. So we swapped—she left and took my guilt with her. But then I started to feel guilty again because she feels guilty. Funny how that works.”
“Do you remember when we talked about guilt being a kind of drug? A coping mechanism?”
“A destructive, negative coping mechanism. A way of life, if you succumb to it.”
“You’re a good patient with a good memory.”
“Only for psychiatric sessions and baseball trivia. I don’t remember where I got my Auto World coffee mug, and stuff like that drives me nuts.”
“Baseball? You’ve never talked about that.”
“I played in college. USC. My true skills were bench warming and random, odd facts about the game.”
She gave him a challenging smile. “No-hitter, Yanks versus Cleveland, 1993.”
“September fourth, Jim Abbott pitching. Born without a right hand, but he still had a ten-season career.”
“I am duly impressed.”
“You never talked about baseball either, Doc.”
“That’s because it’s my job to listen. But I guess my secret’s out now—baseball is a minor passion of mine. Sam, you’re dealing with things better than you know. I don’t often see a sense of irony or a sense of humor come through these doors. Certainly not self-effacement. And none of those things come without intelligence and strength. You’re going to get through this.”
“That’s my plan. Is Jim Abbott supposed to be an allegory? Overcoming hardship and all that?”
“I was actually just testing you on your baseball trivia. It’s a diagnostic tool. For instance, if I had a patient who tells me he’s a physicist and says e equals mc squared represents the dimensions of his living room, I have a baseline for treatment.”
“That’s pretty specific. You had a patient like that, didn’t you?”
She gave him a demure look. “It was a purely hypothetical example.”
“I’m not as crazy as your hypothetical example. That should make you happy.”
“It does. And you’re not crazy.”
She might change her opinion if he told her about his obsession with the black Jeep or the episode that had culminated with him standing on the front porch with his gun. They smacked of paranoia and impending psychosis, so he decided to add them to his growing list of secrets. Pretty soon he’d have to start writing it all down—who knew what, who didn’t.
“Is there anything else about Yukiko’s visit you’d like to talk about?”
He focused on the vase of lilies, and words tumbled out of his mouth before he could stop them. “Yuki took a job in Seattle. She leaves next month. We fucked like bunnies, then she told me. If you’re interested, I don’t feel anything. Just numb.”
Dr. Frolich leaned back in her chair. She was gifted in the fine art of the impassive expression, but this news seemed to take her by surprise. “You must be in shock.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
“Are you angry?”
“I don’t have the energy to be angry. And why should I be? I’m the reason she left. I’m the reason she’s moving to Seattle.”
She closed her notebook and placed it on her lap. “The things that have happened to you, the things happening now, none of it is your fault, Sam. It’s important to understand that.”
“Then who should I blame?”
“Nobody. There’s a difference between being a victim and having a victim mentality. Victims move on and improve their situation. People with a victim mentality never do. It’s the easy way out, blaming somebody or something else for your misfortune, nothing but mental gymnastics that exonerate you from taking personal responsibility and doing something to rectify your situation. Life isn’t fair, and it never has been. The expectation that it should be, without any effort, is the very definition of insanity in my opinion.”
Sam thought about Melody and the harsh words he’d said to her about being a victim. She used to be one, but she didn’t blame anybody, and she’d climbed out of her hole on her own. “That’s a good point.”
“You’ve had a lot of devastating losses in your life.”
“And now I have one more to add to the list.”
“Did Yuki say she wanted to end the marriage?”
“She didn’t have to.”
“If she didn’t specifically mention it, I’d like to encourage you not to get ahead of things. Just because she took a job in Seattle doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the end.”
“I think it is. I know it is.”
“Is that a husband’s intuition or fatalism?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes, because neither of those things is grounded in reality. They’re merely projections. Right now, you’re not seeing anything but a single path to a bad outcome.”
“I don’t see any other paths.”
“That’s because you’ve already finished the journey in your mind.” She folded her hands together and leaned forward. “This is a fresh wound. Give yourself some time to process everything. And keep an open mind to other possibilities, a new perspective.”
Sam s
hrugged, suddenly feeling exhausted. “So don’t jump straight to divorce court, is that what you’re saying?”
“Something like that. Let’s take a short break, I’ll get us something to drink. Coffee or water today?”
“Water, thanks.”
The break ended the first half hour of talk therapy and commenced the second, which was usually devoted to pharmacological discussion. It gave him time to regroup after walking the hot coals of psychotherapy, and he appreciated it.
* * *
“I’d like to ask you about the new drug, Sam. You’ve been on it long enough to be seeing some results if it’s something that will work for you.”
“I think I am. I didn’t have a dream for three nights in a row. That seems like progress.”
“It is progress. Have you noticed any side effects?”
If you read the two pages of disclaimer notes included in the pharmacy bag when you filled any given prescription, you would be tempted to throw the pills away and live out your natural life as God intended. If you actually started the medication, you would become fixated on the endless roster of potential discomforts and life-threatening maladies, anything from dizziness to nausea, headaches, blurred vision, and organ failure—and of course the worst, which was sudden death. Most everything he had was preexisting, so he couldn’t blame the new drug. But he did have something to say on the matter.
“Actually, I have. Just this morning, when I was jogging.” Sam told her about his incident on San Vicente, about the red, writhing word that had formed on Katy’s forehead while he was sitting beneath a coral tree. It took ten minutes to tell the story because Dr. Frolich kept interrupting with questions.
“You must have witnessed the accident and then blacked out, transposing the timeline in your mind.”
“No, it was all pretty clear … what accident?”
She took a deep breath and retrieved her laptop from the desk. She tapped on the keyboard for a few seconds, then turned the monitor to face him. “Is this her?”