“I’m sorry you had to come all the way down here on a Sunday.”
She shrugs. “I was only cleaning the bathroom. Let’s go for a walk.” She gestures over to where there’s a concrete embankment a few yards from where we stand, a couple of hospital visitors and an orderly smoking cigarettes. “The smell is giving mean old jones.”
I look over my shoulder toward the doors, shuffle my feet uncomfortably. I don’t want to be so far from her.
Patricia rolls her eyes. “Listen, pal,” she says, lifting her left wrist and shaking her Fitbit in my face. “I need to get my steps in. There’s a track two blocks away. Your phone’ll work there.”
I type out a text to Kit, let her know where I’ll be, and follow Patricia.
On the way we’re mostly quiet. She asks me a couple of questions about what happened with Greer, and I answer them briefly, quietly, not even wanting to release the terror I’d felt into the air, more bad luck superstitions rubbing off. On the track, though, Patricia moves fast, her steps churning up the springy, orange-and-white surface, her face focused in the same way it is in her office. “So you said you remembered something.” Her breathing is deliberate, her eyesstraight ahead.
“Yeah.” I take a few seconds, match my breathing to hers. It’d been a relief to remember this, back there in the cafeteria; it’d felt like a breakthrough. But now I’m afraid of what Patricia will say when I tell her. I’m afraid she won’t see it as the answerI think it is.
She turns her head, cuts me a look. “I’m thinking of charging you double for this, soget a move on.”
“The first one was the day I dropped Kit off for college.”
In the quiet Patricia leaves there, I tell her what I remember. I’d been excited that day—really excited, and not just for Kit. I’d been searching classifieds for apartments in Cleveland, something that’d put me close to the paper. I’d been kicking around the idea of going to Columbus, where there was more political work. I’d made a plan: New York City by the next January, when I knew Kit’d be settled.
Kit had ridden next to me in that borrowed truck, a new backpack I’d bought her tucked between her feet for the entire forty-five-minute drive from the dingy suburb we’d been living in for her last couple of years of high school. I’d carried everything we’d brought with us up three flights of stairs to her dorm, trying to ignore how much less Kit had in comparison to her roommate, a girl named Megan who looked at me like I was a dessert that had arrived at her dinner table. I’d shaken the hands of other parents, and I’d thought of how far I’d come. I felt like a man there, dropping off my brilliant sister whom I’d raised. I’d taught her what she needed to know. I’d leave her there and she’d be fine, and I’d finally,finallybe free.
Then I tell Patricia about what happened when I got back in the truckto drive home.
“I thought I was just sad. A little choked up, you know? She’d cried when she’d hugged me goodbye, so—you know. I figured it was hard drivingaway from her.”
“Sure,” says Patricia, a matter-of-fact agreement that seems based in experience. “They ought to hand out benzos at collegedrop-off day.”
“Maybe.” For a second I’m back in that truck, thinking about the way I’d pressed my foot more firmly on the gas, turning up the radio. “I wasn’t choked up, though. I was—Ichoked. Couldn’t breathe right. Chest in a vise. It’d never happened before that. I know because I was so freaked out I pulledthe car over.”
I’d gotten out. I’d leaned over the guardrail at the edge of the highway and waited for a sickness that never came. I’d barely heard the cars speeding by, my heart beating so hard, so loud in my ears. I’d watched my hands tremble every time I’d try to lift them from the hot,sunbaked metal.
“Must’ve been scary,”says Patricia.
I nod. It had been scary. “I thought about driving to the hospital. I kept thinking I’d die. I thought—” I break off, allow myself a slow breath through my nose. “I thought maybe my sister had been the only thing keeping me alive.”
“Hmm,” Patricia says, her pace quickening.
“So that’s it, right? I don’t have panic attacks because I feel trapped or stuck. Maybe I have them because—because I don’t always know where to go.”
I’m a couple of steps ahead before I realize Patricia’s stopped on the track, so I turn to face her. She’s got a sheen of sweat on her forehead, the hair at her temples damp. I must’ve been talking for a while. “So you think you’ve solved it, huh?”
She’s said it in the way that you know means you have not, in fact, solved it. If we were in her office I’m sure the chair would’ve made itsfeelings known.
“I was scared to death for Greer. I’m still scared, all the way into the center of my bones. But I didn’t panic, not once, not the whole time I sat beside her in that hospital room. I don’t feel like panicking now, and I’ve got no intention of leaving her. I’mstaying, and that doesn’t bother me at all. I’m supposed to behere with her.”
“Greer’s not the answer to your problems. She’s not medicine for you, and she’s not a test you pass.” Greer’s words, from a month ago, echo back to me.It doesn’twork like that.
“I didn’t say—”
“Alex, I told you from the beginning. Anxiety is complicated.You’recomplicated. You want to make this about one thing.”
I shove my hands in my pockets, stare across an expanse of the track at her. “I want itfixed,” I say, throughgritted teeth.
“Okay, sure. One month and we’ve worked out the fact that your mother died before you could remember anything about her. We’ve worked out that you lived with an abusive, addict father who put you in the direct path of danger since you could walk. We’ve obviously solved the problem that you parented a sibling when you were a child yourself. And let’s not forget when we tackled the last decade of your life, where you pathologically sent yourself into the center of chaotic, devastating humanitarian crises all over the world. I should charge you triple.”
I feel the way my jaw has set in frustration. I don’t want to do this right now; I don’t want to go over it again. I want back in that room, where I left everything about me that matters.
“She thinks I only want to stay because I feel sorry for her. She thinks what I’ve wanted all along is to get back out there and now I won’t because”—I pull my hand from my pocket, gesture toward the hospital—“because ofthis.”
