Eddie had been in Wings for a month, and he’d probably be released in a couple of weeks. He was miserable at first. And by miserable, I mean he escaped the first week and went on a joyride with two of our cousins.
But he was better now. He said the food was decent, and he liked his roommate—a thirty-year-old chef from one of the restaurants on the Strip. They got along. They both worshipped their doctor. She was the person who roped us into family therapy,so I didn’t like her all that much. But if she was helping Eddie, then great. I was a fan.
“I’ll just be waiting out here to take you to the next appointment, sir,” the driver told us as my father and I got out of the backseat.
“Fine, Beck,” my dad answered. “We’ll be back in forty-five minutes.”
After the heart attack, my mother hired Beck, the uncle of one of the women in her church, as a family driver. They were converting space in the villa’s garage to make an apartment for him, so he could live on the property. Mama believed road rage was just one more thing that could trigger my dad’s stress, so she basically took his car keys away.
Oops.
“Let’s get this over with,” he murmured, rubbing his face as we headed inside the treatment center’s auto-opening door.
The scent of lavender potpourri greeted us along with the chipper assistant behind the desk, who checked us in and gave us visitor badges. The lobby of the center was swanky—very white and calm, clearly tons of money floating around here. And mildly busy for a Saturday morning.
Always strange to make eye contact with people here, because it’s a mixed bag of Scared, Desperate, Strung Out, and Hopeful. Pretty sure my father hated it because people recognized him, and everyone knew his kid was in rehab. At first, that was the ultimate defeat for Serj Sarafian. He could have fist-fought everyone in the lobby of this place, just out of sheer rage.
Now? He just wanted to get back to the therapy room as fast as possible. In and out, let’s get ’er done.
You know, baby steps.
Today’s baby steps included a double dose of intimate chatting, because as soon as we were done here, we were headed straight over to Dr. Sanders’s for group anger management. Mama and the twins would be there for that one. Just a relaxing, soul-revealing Saturday morning all round.
A smiling staff nurse led us through winding corridors to an empty room, where morning sun streamed over a small group of couches and chairs. “You’re a few minutes early,” she told us. “Have a seat, and I’ll get Eddie and the therapist. Okey dokey?”
“Okey fucking dokey,” I said when she closed the door. “Who’s excited to get in touch with their feelings, raise their hand.”
“That nurse always touches my arm. Is that a therapeutic method?” my father asked.
“Um… human contact?” I said, amused. “Pretty sure that’s just her way of being friendly.”
“Well, I don’t like it,” he grumbled.
“You should bring it up in session.”
His eyes flicked to mine. “Why do you always have to do that?”
“Do what?”
“That.Smart-ass little digs.” He stabbed the air with an invisible knife several times. “Tiny cuts, over and over. Everything I say, you respond with a smart remark.”
I shrugged and crossed my arms over my chest. “You give me good material to riff off of?”
“Hmph.” My father shook his head. “You’re too sharp, Fennec. If you rerouted some of that jackassery toward something important, it could be a skill for you.”
That right there? That was bait, and I wasn’t taking it. He was trying to goad me into a fight, which was something I never was able to recognize until recently. But now that I was spending more time in the villa again, I could see it.
I wasn’t living back at home full-time—don’t think I ever could again. And that was fine by me. Family dinners every weekend and hanging out with the twins was enough. The apartment in the barn did what it had been doing: kept the peace between me and my father. There were a couple things that were different now, though.
All the therapy. That did help. A little.
And my music. That helped a lot.
I was trying to put everything I had into writing new pieces and practicing. I’d even started recording myself and posting videos online. I had a meeting with a dean of a college music department next week: she was going to talk to me and listen to me perform.
I’d promised Jane I would work on my music. That’s exactly what I was doing.
If I didn’t have music, I would be deep in a pit of despair without her. Right now, I was only clinging to the edge of the pit and trying not to fall inside.
