“Say yes,” he growls.
“Yes.”
And then he’s smiling, too, this man who one day, I might come to love, if I figure out how to do that for real.
It’s possible.
After all, this man loves me, even if he doesn’t quite understand the concept. He feels it, though, or something like it. I can see it burning in his eyes.
19
ADRIAN
Cora really doesn’t wantto be here. She stares up at the Upper East Side brownstone, squeezing her Chanel clutch in a death grip. She dressed up. I didn’t even know she owned a suit, but she looks like a woman from the office. I don’t care for it.
“What’s the lady’s name again?” she asks. She’s stalling for time, probably figuring if we’re late enough, we’ll have to reschedule.
“Dr. Hoffman.” And we’re not going to have to reschedule. I told the doctor to block out her entire afternoon. I had a feeling Cora was going to drag her feet.
“Where’d you find her?”
I already told her this, too. “Dr. Farhadi recommended her.”
She cuts her eyes toward me and brings out the big guns. The blue grows shiny with impending tears, and her lip quivers. She looks just like Pearl.
“Don’t make me do this,” she says. Her voice trembles, and my gut ties into a knot.
“You said you would.”
“That was before.”
“Before what?”
“Before we werehere.”
I’m going to have to peel her out of the car seat. Johnson is double parked, and we’ve already gotten several irritated honks. The street is narrow. If a truck comes by, we’re going to have to circle the block.
“We discussed this. It’s just talk therapy. This is not going to be like it was for you before. I’m not letting anyone send you away.”
“You won’t have a choice. If they put a psych hold on you, you go.”
“No one is putting a psych hold on you.” I never imagined I’d say this phrase as many times as I have in the past few days.
Since I burnt off a layer of skin sticking my hand into a fire like a maniac, life during the day has been calm, maybe because I don’t let Cora out of my sight. At night, though, she’s been having nightmares. She wakes up drenched in sweat, practically hyperventilating.
Of course, as soon as the girls get up, she’s supermom again, doing Christmas things, wrapping presents and baking cookies. She fakes normalcy very well, but I had a long, theoretical talk with Farhadi, and he says that CPTSD, which a person who went through what Cora did most certainly has, at a minimum, doesn’t just go away. He says she’s probably decompensating and that the time for intensive treatment is now.
Cora disagrees.
There’s no real argument—she’s getting help. I wish I didn’t have to destroy our truce for it to happen, but her unhappiness is killing me. I can’t sleep when she’s so unsettled, and I can’t relax when she looks so damn scared all the time.
“I’ll be there, right in the other room. No one is taking you anywhere.”
“They can do whatever they want.” Her eyes are distant, her pupils pinpricks.
She hasn’t told me much about her life as Cara Perkins yet, but what she has said made my blood run cold. Apparently, when she was at the residential facility, she thought she was never getting out. A disgruntled staff member told her as long as the state’s check cleared, she wasn’t going anywhere, and she believed them.
I understand how that feels, to be locked away with no idea when or if you’ll get out. It’s an odd thing to have in common with a person, especially one’s wife, but there it is.
