Patricia gives me a long, steady look. “It’s not like putting a new transmission in your car, you know. There’s not one thing that’s broken in there. Dealing with panic, with anxiety—it can be complicated. Medical and behavioral. If anything, it’s like learning how to drive again.”
“I taught myself how to drive,” I say, ridiculously. I did, too. I drove my dad’s car illegally until I was eighteen, when I could take the driver’s test without having to go through the classes that cost, to my teenaged mind, a stupid, offensive amount of money.
She smiles, lifts her hands from where they rest to give a brief, palms-up gesture ofquestion. “So?”
I take a deep breath, think about Greer’s eyes on mine. I think about the promise I made her. And I think about my camera—my hands steady, my eyes focused, my head empty of everything except what’s in the shot. I’d felt that yesterday. I want tofeel it again.
“Complicated is fine.”
“Complicated is my favorite,” she says, and retrieves her stylus. “Let’s get started.”
* * * *
I’m only home from Patricia’s office for an hour, staring blankly at a newspaper I’d picked up on the walk back, when Greer’s soft knock sounds at the door. I’m immediately grateful she didn’t ring the doorbell. It’s quaint, the old-fashioned-crank style of it, one of the many things Kit’s proud of here, but I have to believe that even a person with a particularly calm temperament would find the shrillring alarming.
I stand, my legs and back feeling creaky and stiff, my mind sluggish and tired. That was—that was fuckinghard, that’s the thing. It was hard to talk to Patricia, to tell her even the short version of my past. At first I’d tried to keep my responses brief, neutral:I raised my sister after her mother left. My father has problems with addiction. I have spent most of the last ten years outside of the country.But her follow-ups were somehow both gentle and pointed, questions that mixed up feelings in my mind, made me conceive of myself and everyone in my life differently. “Did you ever feel anger toward your father and sister?” she’d asked, sometime around the thirty-five-minute mark—and I’d answered snappishly, too quickly. “Why would I ever feel anger toward my sister?”
But then I’d thought about how I’d behaved here two years ago, how I’d so coldly and forcefully rejected her offer of money, of a home base to come back to between trips. I’d felt my face heat in shame, and I’d felt Patricia’s eyes on me, not quite triumphant—butknowing.
So I can’t decide, as I walk to the door, whether it’s a good thing Greer and I are set to work on her first assignment now. On the surface of it, Greer and Patricia have about as much in common as a bicycle and a semi truck, but damn if Greer doesn’t have that knowing look about her too, and I don’t want her seeing everything messy and complicated about me while I’m teaching her about what I’m supposed to know best.
When I open the door, though, see Greer standing there with a shoebox tucked under her arm and her new bag slung across her body, her blue eyes wide and hopeful, her cheeks pink with summer heat, I think:I don’t care what she sees, so long as she comes in.
“Hey. Let me take those things for you.”
“Oh, that’s okay.” She holds the box a little more stiffly as she crosses the threshold. She’s like this, I’ve noticed—tentative, a bit defensive at offers of help, protective of herself and what’s hers.
I take a step back and reach an arm out, my attempt to welcome her to a home that isn’t mine. It feels awkward, like putting on clothesthat don’t fit.
“It was that bad?” she asks, staying where she is. The shoebox deforms slightly under the press of her arm, and her forehead crinkles. In her face I can see the weight of this, the responsibility she feels. She’d wantedit to go well.
“It was—exhausting.” Oddly so, not unlike the comedown after the adrenaline-packed panic attacks. I look at her, willing her not to ask me anything else about it, not now. I don’t think I could get into it, evenif I wanted to.
She nods once, as though I’ve made that request aloud. “Okay.” She takes another step forward, sets the shoebox and her bag down on the trunk that sits inside the foyer. I look down at them both, feeling a small release of breath I must’ve been holding. The shoebox must have to do with the assignment, and I feel a spark of curiosity. “If you want,” she says, “we could—loaf around for a while, start on thelesson later.”
Loaf around?“I’m all right. We can get started—”
But she’s already walked past me into the living room, her flats silent on the hardwoods as she passes into the dining room and then into the kitchen. When I get in there, she’s already got Kit’s pantry open. “Wow,” she says quietly.
“What?” From my spot leaning in the doorway, I watch her stare inside the space. When she looks over at me, her eyes are brightwith amusement.
“She must’ve cleaned for you. One time I was here making cookies and I found a stack of metallurgy journals and a pair of tweezers onthe top shelf.”
I snort a laugh of recognition. “There’s a real mess in the upstairs closet. I refolded all the towels last night and it looked like maybe she’d shoved a bunch of junk in there in a rush before she took off. Probably the journals and tweezersare there now.”
“You refolded all the towels?”
I shrug. “I taught Kit better than this. She’s messy.” She’d always tended to it, even when we were kids. Books and papers left out, detritus of half-done experiments she’d come up with on her own. After she’d go to bed at night I’d spend at least a half hour putting it all away.
Greer smiles at me, and I sense the laugh that lives inside her, the one she’s trying to suppress for my benefit. She looks back into the pantry, rummages around, and when she emerges she’s holding a plastic sleeve of microwave popcorn. “A-ha.” She holds it up, victorious, and then like she’s remembered I’m here, she lowers it again, her face resetting into something more neutral as she walks to the microwave over the stove. “Kit never has enough crunchy stuff. She likes candy for snacks. I thought we were going to have to settle for dry cereal.”
I blink, a tiny effort at catching up to this—snacks with Greer in my sister’s kitchen, some vague plan toloaf around. I cross to the refrigerator, pull out a couple of the fancy fruit sodas in glass bottles that I haven’t tried yet. When the kernels start to pop, Greer turns to me again. “We could watch a bunch of Ina Garten. That always relaxes me.”
“What’s Ina Garten?”
For a long moment, there’s only the hum of the microwave, the rising tide of tiny explosions inside it. Greer stares at me, her brow furrowed and her lips pursed. I feel like I’ve just asked her what a menstrual period is.
“You meanwho,” she finally says.“You mean who?”
