She tries not to worry, tries to focus on the fact that at least there are times she is okay, that at least she has a friend. She tries not to mess it up. Amy hugged her so hard when she gave her the perfume. For her birthday, Amy bought Johanna a silver ring with a heart of turquoise. The color of the ocean they were going to see one day, together. “You can come with me, on our next family trip to Naples,” Amy said. She meant Florida, where Amy’s mother was from, they went every year and all Johanna had to do was pay for her flight, but there was no money for that. And by the time the next spring break rolled around, even though Johanna had saved and saved and almost had it and Amy was going to secretly loan her the rest, it was too late. She wasn’t invited anymore.
“Morrissey is so hot,” Amy would say, and Johanna would say, “Totally hot,” but she felt broken inside, hollowed out by her own lie. “I wonder if Morrissey’s gay?” Amy said once, and all Johanna said was, “Ew. No way.” And she had wished for her father’s wisdom then, and her mom’s easy understanding.
Johanna writes letters and throws them away. She drops hints, to no avail. She wants what all teenage girls want, just to fit in, but she doesn’t; that’s just the way it is. She decides she will be brave, because if Amy is deserving of her love—and she is, she knows it—she will understand. Maybe even feel the same. And then, Ivan, her mother’s new boyfriend, their relationship a symptom of her mother’s brokenness, invites them to move in with him. He was bad when he was always around, but it’s worse now that it’s officially his house. “Your mom couldn’t have picked someone more different than your dad was,” Amy has observed. Johanna can’t talk about it. She just rolls her eyes and feels her heart break a little more.
When he walks in one afternoon, the girls are curled up on the couch together like kittens watching a movie. Johanna hates it, the way he looks at Amy, the way he looks at her.
“What are you, some kind of fuckin’ dykes or something?” he says and she longs for her trailer, for her real home. His place is bigger, but there’s nowhere to hide.
He makes it sound so ugly, what he calls them. He dismantles all the work Johanna has done inside herself, convincing herself that it’s going to be all right and that someday, people will accept her for who she is. After that, they don’t sit in the living room anymore. After that, Johanna says they should stay in her room when they’re at her place. He takes to banging on the door. “What the fuck are you doing in there? You two dyking it out again?”
“Fuck you, asshole!” Johanna screams one day. Silence. And then he breaks down the door and tells Amy to get the hell out. Later, her mother doesn’t defend her. She says she shouldn’t have spoken to Ivan that way in the home he was kind enough to let them live in, after they lost the trailer. Everything changes because of him. He ruins everything. Johanna fantasizes about killing him, but it’s idle; how could she? She even goes so far as to research poisons at the library, but in the end, she doesn’t have the courage for that or anything else. It scares her how much she hates this man. And it scares her even more, that her mother doesn’t seem to notice, no matter what he does, no matter how many times he hurts her. Her mother doesn’t hate him at all. She’s grateful to him.
A good summer, endless days spent at Amy’s and away from Ivan, and then—
* * *
“Johanna?”
“Yes?” She blinked a few times and there was Grace Markell, who had probably never had a moment of such uncertainty and self-revulsion in her life. Grace Markell, who swam naked in cenotes with her lover. Grace Markell, who was free, even though she didn’t always appear to be. But Johanna knew.
“You’ve been silent for a while. What happened next?”
A sigh. “I told her I was in love with her.”
“And she...”
“Told me to go home. I was lying on the floor beside her bed at the time, where I always slept when I slept over at her house, on an air mattress we would blow up. She told me to leave and I did, went home in the middle of the night and told my mom I felt sick and when I went to school on Monday everyone was whispering about me because Amy told Marybeth.” She pressed her lips together, but then forced herself to keep talking. “That was when I decided it wasn’t who I was going to be. I just—decided. By the following year, I had a boyfriend.” Johanna wiped her eyes, then put down the tissue and carefully watched Grace’s face for signs of surprise or revulsion, but Grace appeared neutral, and when she caught Johanna’s exploratory gaze, she nodded encouragingly.
“You’re being very brave,” she said. The lava rock in Johanna’s hand was burning hot. “I know this is hard for you to talk about.”
Johanna put the rock down. “It was probably just a phase,” she said, because it felt better to say that. It had always felt better to say that. She was such a coward. Other people weren’t such cowards, and Johanna had never been one of them. She always heard Ivan’s voice in her head, calling her ugly names. She had never been able to chase that voice away. She opened her mouth to say something like this but then, the timer. The damn timer.
“I’ll see you tomorrow morning. We’ll continue this then,” Grace said to Johanna. Johanna stood. Her legs were wobbly. She needed something to hold on to; she thought for a moment that she would keel back onto the couch. But she managed it. She stayed upright.
“It’s going to be okay, Johanna,” Grace said, standing, too. “I promise it is. You’ll get it all out and then we can pick up the pieces.” She took a step closer and looked down. “Wait, though. Just one minute before you go. That rash on your ankle looks bad. You should go see the nurse about it, okay? And let me know what she says.”
Chapter 18
Shell and Miles were sitting beside one another on the couch in Miles’s office. Shell felt jittery and expectant. She badly wanted to sound the right note. She could hardly focus on what he was saying, so intent was she on choosing her next words, on explaining it all to him in a way that would be clear, in a way that would not cause her to fall apart in front of him. My mother came to visit. I was tired, but I shouldn’t have been. For years, we tried to have a child, and that’s the way I acted—ungrateful? And Colin, too. How could one night in the house alone together be so important to us? We should have been the ones going out to dinner, but I said I just wanted a quiet evening in. We sent my mother out on roads she didn’t know. We could hardly wait to get them out the door; we mustn’t have even given her proper directions into town. And those rural roads, when it gets dark—We should have known better.
“Did you know,” Miles said, “that of the five senses, sight is the strongest one?”
“Um. No,” she said.
“It’s very interesting when you think about it. In order to perceive touch and taste, we need to be in direct contact with an object. The same with smell or sound—we need to be close to hear, to smell. But our eyes can see for miles and miles. And our eyes can see inside things, the tiniest of details. Like, for example, I am noticing right now that your eyes are amber, ringed with dark brown. I thought they were brown. They’re beautiful. A very unusual eye color.”
She blinked. He kept staring into her eyes. “And I see sadness. Such sadness. And I think I know why you’re so sad, why you’re so lonely, just by looking at you.” She opened her mouth to speak. “What do you see?” he asked. “When you look into my eyes?” He took off his glasses and held them in his lap.
She hesitated. “Your eyes are dark blue,” she said. “Navy. You look...you seem...confident.”
“Anything else?”
She shook her head. “Not right now.”
“Do you remember yesterday, during our session? We were trying something new. It’s a technique I’ve wanted to try for some time but hadn’t had the courage. You gave me the courage. You say you see confidence in my eyes but I’m actually quite nervous right now.”
He seemed nervous, it was true. It was disconcer
ting, but also made her feel she possessed a power she hadn’t realized. It was calming, to be focusing on something other than her own pain.
“I suppose this could be called a consciousness experiment. I’ve been feeling a little disillusioned with myself and my practice.”
“But you’re so successful. You and Grace. How could you feel disillusioned?”
His eyes moved away from hers at the exact moment she said the name Grace and then back again. “It’s the human condition, I suppose, to chafe against what we have, to seek more. And I’ll be honest with you: the moment I saw you, the moment I looked into your eyes, I felt a connection. Did you feel it, too?”
She thought about that moment in the lobby when she first met him. She had felt a connection, but to his voice, not his eyes. She nodded. She felt like a student seeking approval from a teacher. Something didn’t feel right, but she never felt right, so she ignored the sensation. As she continued to stare into his eyes, she found she was losing touch with the physical symptoms she’d been experiencing that morning, the ones she didn’t want to talk about. Maybe this was a sign of improvement? That she no longer felt a searing urge to kill herself? That was another thing to talk about. That was something to tell Miles. When he asked.
“So, are you ready?” Miles said.
“Ready for what?” she asked.
“The experiment. It’s called EMDR—eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. Studies have shown it’s very effective for treating trauma. And yesterday, during those moments we tried it without even knowing it, it felt so right, didn’t it?”
Trauma. So he knew, and this was his way of leading. She felt herself relax then. Why was she so suspicious all the time? Just relax and go with the flow, she thought to herself. It will all come out in its time. Her eyes filled with tears in anticipation.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Yes. I’ll try it.”
He stood and walked over to his desk. “I think it might be best to have a little help at first,” he said. He had a glass of water in one hand and his other hand was held out, palm up.
A pill.
He put it in her hand. A current ran through her body. Alarm was drowned out by her own need. At the sight of it, her hands started to shake—whatever it was, that pill, she needed that. If she couldn’t have vodka, she needed it. She swallowed it, dry.
“It’s a mild relaxant,” he said.
She tried not to be embarrassed by grabbing for it, and then it didn’t matter. The sedative wasn’t so mild. She felt her senses dull and then heighten. “Colin,” she said. It was almost involuntary.
“Don’t think about anything right now. Not your husband, not the past. Just us, right now. Focus on this.”
She stared into his eyes. Time passed, and then more time. She stared so long his face distorted. He didn’t move. It was almost like being asleep. Then she heard a sound. Tibetan chimes, from his phone in the corner. Was he supposed to have a phone? Was he supposed to—
The chimes were still ringing, she was still staring into his eyes while inside her a torrent of unanswered questions begged for answers. It took her a moment to realize his lips were on hers, but then he was kissing her so forcefully she had to pull away and gasp for air.
“Oh, forgive me,” he moaned, putting his head in his hands. “Look what you’ve done to me—I’m powerless. Oh, Shell, I’m so sorry, but our connection was so intense. It felt like an out of body experience.”
She was stunned and heavy, as though she was underwater. “This is what you think I need?” Her tongue felt thick as she said the words. The pill was too strong. But she had taken it. She had grabbed it out of his hand. Hadn’t she? Now she didn’t remember.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he kept on saying.
“It’s okay,” she found herself saying, more to herself.
“Did you feel it? The connection.”
She thought about all the things she had wanted to say before, but came up empty. She felt vaguely nauseated.
“This is what I know you need. To be seen. To see. Don’t you feel it, too? Don’t you feel this?”
“You keep asking me that.” Her voice was dim.
“Because I want you to say yes.”
She touched her lips. Wait. What? Had he just kissed her, a minute ago, or had she imagined it?
“You wanted that,” he said, his gaze on her hand, her hand still at her lips. “That was what you needed. You didn’t say it aloud, and I didn’t hear it said, but in our moment of connection, your body sent mine the message. You asked for that, and more. This is what you want.”
She opened her mouth, tried to say no, but he said, “Say yes. Because your mind and your body have already said it. This is what you want. Say yes,” and so she stayed silent.
Too much. What was she supposed to say? “Yes,” wasn’t that it? Except she couldn’t remember why she was saying yes and then he was kissing her again—and it couldn’t have been to that; he was her therapist. What is happening?
She wished she had said no. It seemed to be too late.
Johanna dove down, pushed the crown of her head forward and up, stretched her body, first curving upward and then into downward dog, a position she had never liked the name of particularly, not even when a Buddhist friend of hers from home had once explained it had just as much to do with letting go of pride than anything else. She knew enough about letting go of her pride; she didn’t need to call herself a dog in order to do so.
She rose and twisted, dove down again, repeated the sequence. She turned her attention to her mat, and then to the front of the room and the yoga instructor, who said, “Remember to breathe.”
Dyke bitch. That voice was everywhere and she couldn’t tell whose voice it was anymore. Talking to Grace had helped but only when Grace had been there with her. Now she felt scared. Grace hadn’t said anything. Grace had just listened. What was Johanna going to say to her when she saw her next? What would Grace do if Johanna kept going, if she finished the story? Because that had just been the beginning, the very beginning of a long story. There was still Cleo. There was still the real truth, darker and worse. She had vowed not to tell—and now she wasn’t sure she was going to be able to stop herself.
The teacher instructed them to move into warrior two. Johanna liked the warrior poses best of all; they were the chief reason she did yoga, to feel that momentary strength and forward-moving purpose. But she didn’t feel it this time.
At the end of class, the instructor said, “There isn’t another class after this so if you would all like to stay in savasana for a while, please feel free.” But Johanna never did savasana at all, so she got up and left the room because she knew that in the silence, the voices would come, first one, then the other, telling her the truth about herself.
She entered the changing room to pick up her sweatshirt and yoga mat bag. She stopped. A woman crouched in the corner startled her. The woman had a haunted look in her eyes. At first, with her hair pulled back and up, as if she, too, had been about to do a yoga class, Johanna didn’t recognize her. Then she realized it was the shiny-haired woman from the first night, Shell Williams.
Johanna approached. Shell stared ahead, unseeing. She was trembling and there were tears on her cheeks. Instinctively Johanna looked her over for marks and for bruises. She crouched down and looked into her eyes. Small pupils, a bit glossy.
“Shell?” The woman didn’t move. “Are you all right?”
Shell’s eyes came into focus. “Oh,” she said, looking around the dim changing room. “I’m fine,” she said, touching her cheeks, as if surprised to find them wet.
“You’re not,” Johanna said. “Can I help you to the bench?”
Shell let Johanna guide her to sit. She sat with her shoulders slumped. She didn’t speak.
“What’s going on?” Johanna asked.
Silence. T
hen Shell’s brittle voice. “You don’t want to know.”
“I asked. I do want to know.” Johanna was reminded of the way she had felt some days at work, like she was involved in an elaborate dance with a person who had so much to say, so much buried inside, so much help they needed to ask for but couldn’t. Grace probably felt that way every day. And she did such a good job of getting people to talk. Every moment, she realized, Grace was in her head. But this was not the time to be thinking about that.
Shell said, “You’re the social worker.”
“That’s me,” Johanna said. “Was a social worker.”
“Really? You let that maniac ruin your career, too?” That stung. Johanna tried not to show it. She recalled those moments in the anger management group when she had spilled out her story.
“It’s complicated. I shouldn’t have unloaded on all of you like that.”
“No. It was very brave. And you have enough problems. You don’t need to hear about mine.”
Johanna leaned against the wall behind them. She tilted her head up and looked at the ceiling. There was a water stain. “What if I said hearing about someone else’s problems would distract me from mine and I might even like it?” She laughed softly. “Sorry, is that mean? I’ve been called jaded before.”
Shell laughed for a fraction of a moment, too. “I’m supposed to be in that stupid anger management group right now,” she said. “I had no intention of going to yoga at all. I put on the clothes and found a mat, but I was never going to go. My plan was to hide in a changing room. It seemed like such a good plan—”
“Can I ask you a question? Did you take something?”
No answer. But Johanna knew there was a larger picture she wasn’t seeing. The silence continued until she decided it was more important to let it go and keep Shell talking to her. “I don’t blame you for not going to anger management,” she said. “Anger management group is terrible. And that Ruth...”
The Last Resort Page 14