Four days after you’ve returned home from the most devastating family experience of your life.
But the convenient thing about Dr. Hobbs is that she hasn’t been a therapist all that long, which means she’s still building her practice up, and I happened to call when her book was still fairly open. I knew the exact number of days I had before I needed to take Tegan for dorm move-in and first-year orientation, and I figured, after all this time of leaving her without professional help, I ought to lean in. Take her for as many sessions as I could before then.
I admit, I didn’t expect to do much in therapy. Like most of the stuff I did in those first days after we got home, I booked Dr. Hobbs with the same mechanical, force-of-will concentration I’d relied on ever since the houseboat.
The hotel hallway.
Get home, unpack. Sort through the mail. Call Dad; call the salon. Keep checking on Tegan. Sit with her in a therapist’s office, and make sure all the focus stays on her.
Don’t think about what happened. Don’t dare think about Adam, and what I did to him.
What I feel for him.
But the thing about Dr. Hobbs—who I’m pretty sure is my exact age, though I try not to fixate on that—is that she is pretty good at her job, such as it is. And such as it is, is making Tegan and me talk about—and think about—hard things. Really hard things.
When we clear the door and make it out into the hot sunshine of the August day, Tegan and I both breathe in a lungful of fresh air, not looking at each other quite yet. I’m almost used to it now, the way both of us walk out of there every time a little sheepish, each of us needing a few seconds to shake off the session. I hear Tegan sniffle once, a remnant of the tears she shed inside, but I don’t react or intrude.
I learned in a session last week that it bothers Tegan when I go into “fix-it” mode about her feelings.
In the car, though, she buckles her seat belt and leans her head back on the headrest. I feel, rather than see, her tip her head my way.
“Wow, thatsucked, right?”
I snort a laugh, a fizz of relief in my middle that it didn’t take her too long to bring some levity to the moment. Today was a tough one. We talked about the time right after Mom left, including the bed-wetting. I didn’t know, but Tegan still feels so ashamed about it. Sometimes she still worries about it happening again, especially when she goes to college. She’s embarrassed about how long she did it, but also about how many times it happened. How many times I had to clean up after her. How I’d never let her help me start the laundry or change the sheets.
It made me think of Adam. Him in that hallway, offering to help.
“Yeah,” I say, meaning it. I snap my own seat belt. “Want to get fries?”
“Uh, obviously.”
So, we do what we’ve done after the last five sessions. I start the car and Tegan pulls up a delivery app and we get two gigantic orders of fries and four different sauces from our favorite place. We never used to eat out much, before the road trip, but now we’ve got a taste for it.
Do something difficult; eat food you didn’t prepare yourself.
By the time we get home—Dr. Hobbs’s office is almost a full half hour away, far out in a northwest suburb of Columbus—our fries are on our doorstep, and Tegan hops out to get them. If she notices that I avoid that doorstep like the plague, only ever coming through the garage now, she hasn’t said.
It looks empty to me, is the thing. All the time, it looks empty.
We’re quiet as we eat. A couple months ago, I know I would’ve tried to fill the silence. I would’ve pressed Tegan on how her day was, asking her too many questions. Now I let her be alone with her thoughts, and I try to be alone with mine.
Adam, I think, the way I always do these days, and on Dr. Hobbs’s annoying, excruciating, probably very good advice, I don’t shove it away. I don’t stand up to get more napkins or to start cleaning up even though I’m not done eating yet. I don’t suddenly remember I need to check whether I paid the gas bill this month.
I just think about Adam, and how much I miss him.
How lonely I am without him. His warm, wrap-you-up body and his carved-from-stone face. His curiosity and his calm, his weird cracking bones and the quiet smiles he used to send myway.
I strain to imagine the life he is leading back in Boston, a place I’ve never been to, but that I’ve looked up on the internet more than a few times since we’ve been home. I try to cobble together a picture of his apartment based on the scattered, small details he shared over the time we spent together. I puzzle through a picture of the office he works in, based only on the scraps I picked up from listening to him and Salem talk about work. I remember that at dinner on the farm one night, he told his nieces about his downstairs neighbor who lets their cat wander all through the hallways and stairwells, and sometimes Adam comes home to gigantic, disgusting hairballs on his doormat. The girls had laughed and laughed.
I am a shell collector. I’m trying so hard to coat all these precious, fragile facts about Adam in something hard and firm and inflexible.
I’m trying to make a souvenir.
Tell me you don’t remember
Tell me you don’t remember how it’s always felt between you and me
“Hellooooooooooooo,” Tegan says, snapping two fingers in front of my face in dramatic, lighthearted interruption.
