• “For a minute there, I lost myself.” - Radiohead, “Karma Police”

    She hates commercial holidays, saying that they “depress” her. What the therapist wants to ask but doesn’t is, “What doesn’t depress you?”

    He watches as she squirms up into a ball in her chair, hugging her knees. She’s wilting in her post-adolescent bloom, and he wonders what sort of mental hell she’s in right now. She looks angry and sad, but mostly, he thinks, she just looks lost. As he doodles in the margins of her file, the girl in front of him silently self-destructs.

    Three…two…one. He’s counting down the seconds until the fireworks with the click of his pen, gaze shifting between her slender, silent form and the wooden box of Kleenex to her right. His mind is like a Remington, plagued by internal repetitions of “It won’t be long; it won’t be long; it won’t be long.”

    However, it is long, much longer than he expected. He feels a perverse sense of joy when she finally cracks and lifts a tear-streaked face to him. He wonders if that makes him some sort of Nazi. Instead of voicing his guilt, he tilts his head coyly to one side and waits. She’ll start talking soon, rambling on and on in that dark voice made thick with angst and soaked with ennui.

    He’s got pages upon pages upon endless pages of notes about this guy she’d been seeing since before he met her, none of them good. All this paper, and no understanding. In all his Rogerian glory, he tries to build her up during each session. She’s away from that mess now, which is good. He feels something like fatherly (or perhaps grandfatherly, considering that he’s now almost twenty years past conventional retirement) protectiveness, and hopes that the kid turns out all right in the end.

    He listens carefully as she talks, in agitated, cynical tones, about how her ex called her for the first time in over a week and a half last Valentine’s Day, just before her last class of the day. He said he didn’t trust her anymore. She thinks it’s all quite funny, considering she stopped talking to guys altogether when she started dating him, but her face sobers when she mentions the Ambien-suicide-that-wasn’t and the Hyacinth (for he can hear the capitals in her voice), and everything else that transpired on February 14, 2008. He listens, raising an eyebrow inwardly, as she talks about how The Boy, who is clearly not a man, left her house at seven in the evening, claiming that he “didn’t want his mother to sit home alone and feel bad.” Flipping through his notes, he notices with some dark amusement that The Boy’s mother once quoted, in warped Hitchcockian style, that “a boy’s best friend is his mother.”

    Well. That, and his mother hated her. He smiles sympathetically as he flips back to a session in mid-July of the previous year, looking for the quote. Aha. There it is, in black and white. Mrs. Bates.

    The therapist hears the girl sniffle and lifts his head. He tells her he’s glad she didn’t kill herself, then asks her if this was the only time his trust “issues” surfaced. He knows well, damn well, that it’s happened before, and even if he forgot, it’s all right there on his charts.

    The night before my thyroid surgery, at three a.m., she says, he called me up to yell at me. He said he’d tried calling several times before, and a guy finally answered the phone.

    It’s impossible, she says, because the only other people in the house with me were a few aunts and my grandmother. But he didn’t care.

    Her ex told her he wouldn’t show up at the hospital for her the next morning, and she cried and begged him not to “do this” to her (It’s sort of like Stockholm Syndrome, isn’t it? she quips). He finally relented, speaking in the soothing, controlled tones of an abuser. What the therapist knows, what even she knows deep down, is that she wishes he hadn’t shown up at all.

    That little b*****d, she says through clenched, expensive teeth, made me cry inconsolably on every major holiday since I met him, whether we were together or not.

    Of course. The therapist remembers her mention the harassment after The Boy had dumped her yet again; he’d caught wind of a guy she was interested in, and killed Thanksgiving night by calling her up to scream into the phone.

    She threw her paintbrush at the wall after that “conversation.”

    It left a dent.


    And here she is, a classic case study in muted tones of black Irish and ivory. She sighs, takes a deep breath. For a moment, the therapist thinks that perhaps she has gone catatonic, because she’s just sitting there and staring at the lamp across the room. He’d brought it from home to make his office feel, well, homey, but right now, he’s more worried about potential damage to her already poor eyesight.

    When she finally speaks again, her voice is an arid whisper, a far cry from earlier in the session. She says, The first time he hit me was Christmas. Our second one together, actually. Apparently, The Boy didn’t want her to come to a get-together with his entire family, claiming that his cousins would “get drunk and hit on” her. When he was driving her home, sulking and shell-shocked and silent in the passenger seat, they passed an ambulance heading the opposite direction.

    She pushes hair out of her eyes and laughs. He looked at me and he yelled, “What about that guy, Jessica? Do you think he’s having a good Christmas?”

    What they both know, what he should’ve known after a year, is that she hates more than anything to be called by her full first name.

    The good doctor asks her, Is there anything else? She nods and hesitates, her eyes darting surreptitiously around the room as if checking to see if he’s listening, then continues.

    On New Year’s Eve, she says, we were going to go out with a few of our friends. He showed up an hour and a half late, then moped around my room like a little girl for the next five hours, claiming that I “wasn’t the same” as before he dumped me for about the third time.

    By now, the therapist doesn’t even need to ask to know how hard she cried, how she begged him to forgive her until her voice went raw and her aunt asked “just what the hell is going on in there.”

    She gives a wry smile before quipping, I rang in 2008 sitting on my bedroom floor with the remnants of a box of Kleenex and a serious sinus headache.

    He reminds her, once again, that none of it was her fault. The incessant trumpeting from his computer tells him that the hour is nearly up, but he’s not quite ready to let this go yet.

    He asks, Is this a problem for you and your fiance?

    And she says, Yes, yes, it is. But at least he listens. He gets it. He says I apologize too much; that’s the only thing I do that really makes him angry, and even then he’s more annoyed than anything. He hates what happened to me, but at least he understands.

    The therapist cuffs her on the shoulder gently before sending her back to the waiting room and out the door, hoping that when the cast and splint fall away, there will still be someone there to watch over her. And, he thinks with a smile as he sees her long shadow disappear, there will.