The Waiting Room

by Emily Bleeker

  “Will it ever stop hurting?” she asked, wanting to touch his face, feel his arms around her, and wishing more than anything that she could say sorry but feeling at a loss for those words.

  He blinked and a tear fell. “It’s not going to stop hurting, Ronnie. You eventually learn to live with the pain. That’s what grief is—living with pain. Time doesn’t heal all wounds; it just builds up your resistance.”

  “Fine,” she said, finding it harder and harder to say anything at all, “I’ll go.”

  “Good,” Nick responded, nearly patting her knee, but then retreating.

  The anger was gone; he could never stay mad long, it wasn’t in his makeup. She’d loved it and hated it about him when they were married. Sometimes you need a good, full-blown rager of an argument to work out all the kinks.

  “Why don’t you go pack a bag. They’re waiting for us,” he said, slipping his hands in his pockets and sliding past Veronica and moving toward the door. “Mark, could you go with her?”

  “Of course,” he replied, now by her side. Mark didn’t say a word as he escorted her to her bedroom, watching silently as she took out a bag and packed it as if she were heading for vacation rather than a mental institution. But somehow it didn’t feel like a judging gaze, or even a pitying one, which was perhaps worse, more like he understood or maybe even like he was impressed with her. As they walked down the stairs and out of the house together, Veronica robotically put in the code on the alarm system and carefully locked the door behind her, not sure when she’d cross that threshold again and who she would be when she did. Her mom was gone, presumably with Sophie . . . Chloe, heading back to Durham.

  Green Oaks would have medication. They might even sedate her; she could drift into an abyss of emptiness. It might not be as comfortable as the life she’d convinced herself of for the past seven months, but it would be better than being out in the real world, alone. Her body released all the fight she’d been holding on to, the effort it took to live her life every day; her joints loosened and her mind started to darken again.

  “Could you make sure my car makes it back in the garage? I left the keys on the counter in the kitchen.” It felt strange to be talking about such normal things.

  “Sure, I can do that.”

  “Can you check up on the house occasionally?” She hesitated slightly and continued. “Make sure my mom is okay? I forgot to ask.”

  Mark nodded, glancing at the side of her face more than once, probably thinking she wouldn’t notice. “I’d love to.”

  Her limbs were heavy, and she had to force every footfall. It was as though the house were holding on to her, as if she were stuck in its tractor beam. She just wanted it all to go away. Why the hell did she have to feel anything anymore?

  They were almost at Nick’s car, the same Jeep Cherokee he’d been driving for the past ten years. Well . . . twelve. It was already running, and Nick was on the phone inside. Mark reached across her to open the door, but she stopped him, touching his shoulder.

  “Will you take care of Gillian?” The question came out of nowhere, her mind as jumbled as a toddler’s toy box. “She’s going to be worried when I don’t show up. Can you think of something to tell her—not the truth, not yet—and make sure she’s safe? I’ll have Nick text you all the info.”

  She was too ashamed for Gillian to know how broken she was. Weak, pathetic Gillian had lost her son and her husband and, unlike Veronica, hadn’t lost her mind. In fact, she turned out to be one of the strongest people Veronica had ever met. God, she wished she could be more like her unexpected friend.

  The lines on Mark’s face were exaggerated by the yellow streetlights, and his irises nearly blended into the whites of his eyes, but Veronica could still read a deep sincerity there. He placed a hand on the space between her shoulder blades and spread his fingers wide like he was measuring it.

  “You focus on getting better, and I’ll take care of everything else out here, okay?”

  Veronica couldn’t find the muscles in her face that should make her smile, but if things were different, she would’ve tried to at least. She squinted up at him. “Why aren’t you running away? Most men would be sprinting for the exit right now, and I can’t say I’d blame them.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, looking up at the clear, moonless sky filled with a blanket of blinking stars. “I guess sometimes you run away from the flames, and other times”—he looked back down at Veronica and into her eyes, his hand leaving her back, making her shiver—“you stay and help put out the fire.”

  Without waiting for a response, he opened the car door and helped her inside, passing over the bag he’d been carrying on his shoulder. When the door closed, she settled in and clicked the seat belt like she had a million and one times, including the day Sophie had been strapped in the back seat in her infant seat as they headed home from the hospital and the day they drove away from her funeral, parents without a child. Those memories were nibbling at the edges of her consciousness, but she was holding them back, carefully at bay.

  She couldn’t take it all in today. It would overwhelm her. She needed to wait till she got to Greek Oaks, till she got the real help she needed. Until then, she could only let it in a bit at a time. She could only mourn in inches.

  The pain would never go away; Nick’s words echoed in her mind, feeling more like a warning than a comfort now. At Green Oaks she’d find out a lot of things, like the memories she’d tried to erase of Sophie and the grief she’d tried to bury, but she’d also find out if it was worth it, living with this pain. She’d learn if there really was any way she could ever “move on.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Four months later

  “I know it’s a lot to take in, and I’m not asking you to trust me or believe me, but if you’d give me another chance, I promise that I’m willing to work. Dr. Klein seems to think I’m not a total lost cause,” Veronica said, sitting on the edge of her seat, trying to lighten the tone of the room.

  “Well, looks like we have a lot to work on,” Lisa half laughed, half grimaced. The look of surprise she’d tried to hide behind her hand during Veronica’s monologue, divulging the whole truth of her life and lies, had almost disappeared.

  At first, Lisa was ecstatic to see her again. She’d gotten a brief message from Veronica’s mother four months earlier explaining that Veronica wouldn’t be attending sessions anymore, but that was it. When Veronica walked in, there were hugs and loud welcomes as she left the empty waiting room and followed Lisa to her office. But once she started in on confession time, Lisa became somber and, soon, silent. Veronica was expecting a lecture or maybe even rejection, though Dr. Klein at Green Oaks seemed to think that worry was unlikely. It had taken a long time for Veronica to be willing to sign the consent form so Dr. Klein could talk to Lisa. She’d thought about letting that therapeutic relationship die and starting a new one. But she’d felt connected to Lisa, and that was hard to find in a therapist, so she finally consented. And now she was back.

  “Clearly,” Veronica agreed, bouncing her foot over her crossed leg. Just like Lisa had predicted in their first session, Veronica was sitting in the same chair even after a four-month absence. Hopefully, though the chair was the same, the outcome would be different now that Veronica was on a healthier path. “So you’ll keep working with me even though I’m a total mess?”

  Lisa clutched her pen in the palm of her hand and put her notebook to the side on the small table to her left. Her dark hair fell around her face as she fixed her lips into a firm but kind line.

  “Veronica,” she said and then hesitated, “or Ronnie . . . which would you like to go by?”

  “I’m sticking with Veronica. New life, new name, new outlook, I guess.”

  “Okay, we can chat about that next time.” She fought against another smile. “Veronica, what kind of people do you think walk through those doors?” She pointed to the office door and figuratively to all the other doors Veronica had to go through to get into th
is office. “Do you think they are perfect people? ’Cause they aren’t. They are messes. We are all messes. You know that, right?”

  “I’m a bit messier than most, you have to admit.” She’d been angry at herself for being the kind of person who was the most screwed-up woman in a hospital of screwed-up women. “I bet none of the nice people sitting in your waiting room spent four months in a mental institution after committing a felony. Four months, Lisa. That is a long time. Most of the people were there for a week or maybe a month. I’m a special kind of screwed up.”

  “You know I don’t like that kind of self-talk, Veronica,” Lisa said, as close to scolding her as she’d ever come.

  “I know, I know. I’m working on it. Green Oaks was terrible and wonderful at the same time. Don’t get me wrong, I never want to go back there, but they helped me find myself again, and somehow I learned that I am still Sophie’s mom even if she’s not here with me. Doesn’t stop me from feeling like a crazy person sometimes,” Veronica added, trying to make a joke.

  Lisa shook her head and then cocked it to one side. She really wanted to get through to Veronica—she could see it in the way Lisa thought through what she was going to say next so carefully instead of spitting it out or following a script like some other counselors she’d met over the past months. It made her feel like she wasn’t a lost cause, like even if she told her whole story, someone could still find value in her.

  Besides grief, shame was the emotion Veronica had to wrestle with as the memories came back. Shame for how she’d treated Nick and for how she’d used her mother and how selfish she’d been in her grief. Shame made her want to hide more, afraid no one would ever be able to love her again because she wasn’t lovable. But then her mom visited her at Green Oaks, week after week, month after month.

  And eventually, Mark came too, at first to give updates on all the items she’d left in his care and, finally, to sit and talk until he hustled her out of her bubble-gum stash while playing gin rummy and was forced out by a well-meaning nurse. He asked her if Gillian could come, but that was a shame she wasn’t ready to face yet. Gillian had lost a child and gone through a divorce without crumbling, and to top it all off, Veronica used to look down on her. She’d pulled the poor woman into a kidnapping scheme and almost gotten her killed by her ex-husband. As far as Gillian knew, Veronica had moved as a part of her job and would be back soon. She wanted to tell her the rest face-to-face.

  “The fact that you are trying so hard to organize and work on your own chaos shows me you are one of the best to sit in my waiting room, cry into my tissues, and rest in your very own special chair. Pains and struggles are not comparable. I don’t have some measuring stick I take out when you leave to see who has the most heartbreaking story. You get to feel what you feel, Veronica. And then we work on what we can control. That’s it. You are an artist—when you look at a palette of paint blobs or a lump of clay or random shapes on a page, what do you see?”

  Veronica made a sincere effort to really think through the question and put herself into that moment of creation. She rarely looked at any raw materials and saw a helpless medium. One of her first art professors at NYU had assigned the use of only found items in their next project. When Sophie was little, they’d collect random items—leaves, candy wrappers, toilet paper rolls—and figure out how to make masterpieces out of them.

  “Potential,” she said honestly, almost forgetting that this “mess” analogy was about her until Lisa sat back in her seat, satisfied.

  “Exactly,” she said, grabbing her appointment book and putting it on her lap. “Potential. Now, does this time work for you next week, or do you want to meet sooner?”

  “I have a follow-up at Green Oaks later this week, so I’m fine for next Thursday,” Veronica said, allowing herself to feel like she had “potential” for at least a few minutes that day.

  Lisa wrote whatever she wrote in her magic appointment book, closed it up, and put it on the table beside her. “Welcome back, Veronica.”

  They headed to the front desk together, and after another round of goodbyes, Veronica went through the heavy wooden door that separated the offices from the waiting room. On the other side, Mark sat reading a magazine. She’d only been out a week, so he’d offered to drive her to her appointment, and Veronica had decided to let him. She was doing that a lot more often lately, letting Mark into her life. When she was at Green Oaks, it had been once a week, but now that she was home, she’d seen him every day.

  She cleared her throat and waited for Mark to look up, but he kept his head down, apparently engrossed in some Good Housekeeping article. He licked his finger slowly and turned the page. Veronica bit her lip, trying not to look too amused.

  “Ahem,” she said, clearer this time.

  Mark put up one finger, mouthing the words he was reading on the page in front of him, and then with some flourish, he closed the magazine with a slap. “Oh, I didn’t even see you there,” he said with mock surprise.

  “I know, you were far too interested in learning how to make lemon-and-lavender scones.” She glanced down at the cover of the magazine, wondering how long he’d been planning his little prank.

  “Strawberry and rosemary, get it right,” Mark corrected, jumping to his feet. “Ready to go?”

  “Um-hm,” she said with pressed lips. He wouldn’t ask what they talked about; he was good like that, and she probably wouldn’t tell him. Not everything. He wasn’t that kind of a friend. Not yet at least.

  “Well, I don’t know about you, but I need to go grocery shopping. First thing on my list—strawberries.” He held the door open to the hallway, and Veronica left without even one self-conscious glance over her shoulder to see if anyone had been watching.

  “As long as it’s not tampons, I’m fine,” she joked, remembering the first time he talked to her in Piggly Wiggly. She’d thought he was objectively handsome then, like you can think a celebrity on TV handsome. But now, she glanced at him as he held yet another door open to the stairwell and took in the little scar on his cheek that he said he’d gotten when he was a kid from a skateboarding accident and the arch in his eyebrow that she knew meant he was having fun playing around with her. Now she thought he might be one of the most attractive men she’d ever met. Not that she was going to tell him that anytime soon.

  Mark grimaced. “I’m the ultimate romantic, aren’t I? You were just so pretty, I didn’t know what to say once I got the chance.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, pretty, my ass. You were getting paid to talk to me about feminine hygiene products.” She allowed herself to be playful, enjoying his compliment more than she wanted to admit to herself. After remembering how she’d shut Nick out of her life and then the pain when he’d moved on, she thought she could never be loved again. Mark might not love her, but she couldn’t deny that he sure liked her, and that was a good enough start. “You know I’m telling Kayla that story one day, right?”

  “You’d better not!”

  They exited the building to the chill of the fall air. It was cool but not cold, and the trees were finally starting to turn colors. Before losing Sophie, fall had been Veronica’s favorite time of year. She was trying to rewire the fuses in her brain to remember why she loved fall and not the one reason she now hated it.

  “Yeah, it’s gonna be a fun pizza Friday.” She flapped her hand at him and then put it in her jeans pocket, glad she’d worn a sweatshirt over her cotton T. Lost in her laughter, Veronica jumped when she heard a familiar voice.

  “Veronica? Veronica Shelton, is that you?”

  Gillian. When she’d decided to put her off until she was a little stronger, a little healthier, Veronica didn’t think it would be today. There was so much to confess and explain. It couldn’t all be done on the lawn of her medical clinic, but she also couldn’t walk away. Her days of treating Gillian poorly were over. Gillian deserved a real friend.

  “Hey! You look great!” Veronica called out across the patch of grass behind the offices. Gi
llian’s hair was a little longer and a uniform color, and her waistline was a little trimmer, but something beyond style or numbers on a scale had changed, something that meant more than those outward things ever could.

  “You too, lady! God, I’ve missed you. Where have you been?” She dropped the large black handbag she’d been carrying and rushed across the lawn, her legs moving fast beneath her, and no worry of dignity lost. When she landed on the same sidewalk Veronica was standing on, Gillian wrapped her up into a warm and comforting embrace. Her homey smell, the way her arms just felt safe like she’d love Veronica no matter what, they made Veronica’s body go from stiff and frozen by surprise to a deep calm, like she would be safe forever with Gillian’s arms around her. Christopher must’ve loved his mom’s hugs.

  “Uh, it’s a long story. I’m sorry I’ve been MIA. I hope Mark explained what he could.”

  “Yeah, he said . . . some stuff.” She gave her nervous chuckle that Veronica missed. “I still have a million questions.”

  “Well, so do I. How is life?” Veronica asked, trying to steer the conversation away from herself. Gillian hesitated but then seemed to make an internal decision to let Veronica off the hook for now.

  “Pretty good. I got a real job now, actually at Mark’s agency. I do clerical work, but I also get to do research and stuff. Mark put in a good word after seeing us in action, right, bud?” Gillian wiggled her eyebrows and pointed at Mark. “But I’m sure Mark told you about all this if you two have been hanging out. Though he forgot to mention that little detail, you naughty young man. You said she was out of town and needed ‘space.’”