“Hey.” My voice is scratchy, thick. “Class was good?”
“Alex. What happened?” She’s already come around to the couch, and when she sits, it’s right up against me, her leg pressed to mine. She’s wearing another pair of those tight, cropped jeans, these a pale pink color, soft and pretty in the light from Kit’s chandelier in the dining room. I set my hand on her knee, my eyes down, and think about lying to her.
Nothing happened,I’d say.I have a headache, is all.
Instead I ask her if she’s hungry. “I could make something. I meant to picksomething up.”
“No, I’m not hungry. What happened?” She’s focused, undeterred. I’ve got a feeling that if I lie to her now, after everything she and I have told each other—after everything she’s told me about something that’s awful and painful for her—we won’t make it much further than next week, whether I’ve got a plan in place or not. The fact that I’d even consider insulting her by suggesting I have a headache, of all things, makes me feel guilty,uncomfortable.
I press my palms to my eyes, feel the weight of her hand settle in the center of my back, right between my shoulder blades. She strokes up and down slowly, waiting.
“Patricia wanted to talk about my father today. About whether I’ve got some of the same problems as my father does.”
“Yikes,” Greer says, and I don’t know why, but that littleyikes—it strikes me so funny, goofy and sweet and disarming. I look over my shoulder at her, and my mouth somehow—it’s unbelievable, really, given the way I feel—tips into a smile. “I mean, notyikes, like there’s a spider in your cupboard. I don’t know why I said that.”
I squeeze her knee gently, shrug my shoulders. I’m used to this too, now, about Greer. She’s got an imagination like nothing I’ve ever heard of in my life. Sometimes she tells me about the elaborate, saga-like dreams she has, but only after breakfast, because talking about dreams before breakfast, she’s told me authoritatively, is bad luck.
“It’s okay. Is that the noise you make when youfind a spider?”
“I do it shriek-ier. Not for nothing am I the daughter and sister of actresses.” She rubs my back again. “You want totalk about it?”
“Maybe.” But as I lean back, settling myself into a more comfortable upright position—Greer moving her hand and turning sideways so she faces me—I realize that yeah, I do want to talk about it, or at least I want to talk about it with her.
It takes me a good while, almost as though I need to work up to it. At first we simply sit in the quiet, only old-house noises surrounding us, and I imagine us back on that beach at Turner’s Point, the shoreline empty except for us, the clouded night sky a blanket above us. Somewhere along the way I realize this is what my panic attack book would callvisualization, and damn if it doesn’t work in terms of calming me down enough to get the words out. I start small—first I tell her about the meeting with Bart and Henry and she laughs; she tells me I did a good thing, and she shifts to lean against me, tucking into the spot underneath my arm that I’ve come to think of as hers. She rests her hand over my heart while I talk.
I tell her everything Patricia said, everything I said. I tell her about how frustrated I am, that I go in there for panic attacks and we talk about those, but then also it’s all this other—shit, shit I don’t want to think of or look at or talk about. I tell her I know what Patricia says is right, that it’s complicated, but that—even though it makes me sound like a petty, whiny baby—I don’twantit to be complicated. I tell her I want it to be fixed. I tell her I chewed three pieces of gum in Patricia’s office, that I had to do some of those breathing exercises right there in front of her while sitting in that fucking annoying chair, and the damned thing didn’t even have the courtesy to stay quiet during my struggle.
What I don’t tell her is about the plan, or the lack of a plan, the plan I wanted to start figuring out before the subject of my father came up. But for some reason, as we’ve talked here, I feel like—I don’t know. I feel like maybethisis the plan, or at least part of it, maybe this is what I’m working on so I can be in a relationship. Maybe that moment, where I set my hand on Greer’s knee anddidn’tlie to her, is part of what it means to let go of feeling trapped, feeling obligated.
“I can’t believe she still has that chair,” Greer says, and both of us laugh in something like relief at having gotten through it.
I don’t know how long it is that we sit there, my head tipped back against the cushions, my eyes closing easily now. I think about reaching for the remote, wherever it is, turning on some Ina Garten. That ought to put us both in the mood to eat. It’s late, but maybe we’ll still light those candles. Maybe we’ll talk about the plan. I’ve got a dim idea forming about finding a hotel for the next week, up until the showcase, but I decide the idea will keep until tomorrow. Maybe we’ll simply fall asleep here, a different night than what I’d imagined, but all right in its own way. Necessaryin its own way.
It must be that we doze off. It must be that I’m more tired than I thought. It must be that I really wore myself out today.
Because the next thing I hear is mysister’s voice.
“Well, well, well,” she says, and I can hear her big smile even before I open my eyes.Oh, fuck. “Isn’t this just the best thing I’ve ever seen?”
Chapter 15
Greer
I wouldn’t say, in general, that there are a lot of advantages to having a chronic illness as a teenager. Or at all, really, but the point is, as a teenager, there’s something specific about the way information regarding your health gets communicated to you, two filters that color every single one of the exchanges. The first filter has to do with the nature of being a minor—when the doctors come in, they’re as likely to talk to your parents as they are to you, and sometimes, when you wake up from a deadened, surgical sleep, you might find that it’s your parents who are the ones communicating the information about your procedure. They’ve already heard a whole host of information from surgeons and nurses while you were trapped in a dreamless void, and they’re going to filter it in the way they see fit.
And the way they see fit is almost always through the second filter, which I long ago named the “Everything’s Fine Face.” The Everything’s Fine Face is often accompanied by the Reassuring Hand Pat or the Bedtime Story Voice of Placation, but even without these accoutrements, the Everything’s Fine Face is designed to inform you that circumstances are absolutely questionable but that you should absolutely not worry about it. You might use the Everything’s Fine Face, for example, when you say, “The scan turned up something unexpected,” or “Our procedure simply wasn’t as effectiveas we’d hoped.”
The important thing about the Everything’s Fine Face is that there are degrees of difficulty and capability. My mom’s Everything’s Fine Face is the worst; even when she tells you your surgical staples look a little inflamed, she delivers the news like you’ve got five minutes until the atomic bomb in your head explodes. My dad’s is pretty good, but he has trouble with maintenance—you might catch him, only a few minutes later, blinking glumly out into the middle distance, his shoulders slumped in defeat. Out of everyone in my family, Cary’s Everything’s Fine Face is the best, the most natural. He’s got a smile that looks authentic, sympathetic, and conspiratorial all at the same time.This sucks,that smile says,but no way will we let it be a problem.
Of course as I got older I realized that the Everything’s Fine Face translates to many situations outside of hospital rooms and doctors’ offices, such as when your mechanic finds out what that distressing rattle is, or when your friendly neighborhood computer tech tells you the hard drive has failed, or when a member of your group project realizes, two hours before a deadline, that she in fact did not “understand the assignment.”
Or, as I’m realizing now, when your best friend walks in on you sleeping with her brother. With her brother,onher brother, whatever.
All four of us are doing it now, with varying levels of success. Ben is definitely the winner here, since he pretty much always looks like Everything’s Fine, and coming off three weeks of a European honeymoon, he looks like Everything Is Literally the Best. Now that the initial shock has worn off—now that Alex and I have leapt up and apart—Kit is also turning in a commendable performance, pretending this isn’t that unusual after all. “I guess I should’ve called! We got rebooked on an earlier connection, so—”
“Of course you didn’t need to call,” Alex says, and jeez. His Everything’s Fine Face is not good right now. Not as bad as my mom’s, but you definitely wouldn’t want him telling you about your hard drive. “Let me help you with your things.” He looks quickly around him, gestures vaguely at the coffee table, where he’s got a newspaper and his FG, his laptop with the lid closed. “Obviously I’ll clean up. I’msorry for my—”
“You don’t have to apologize,” says Kit, and this is it, the moment her Everything’s Fine Face cracks, seeing how uncomfortable her brother is now in her house. She looks at me, her dark eyes wide behind her glasses, and I’m guessing my face isn’t cooperating either.
