Return to You (Letters to Nowhere #3)(8)
Nina folds her arms across her chest and stares me down. Needless to say, everyone is staring me down. Breaks are dictated by coaches, not gymnasts. After what feels like an eternity, she sighs and gestures toward the door, indicating that I can go. My body is numb while I grab my small gym bag and head out.
What am I doing? Where am I going?
I need to talk this through with someone who gets it, but Jordan is resting and he needs to be resting. I remove my cell phone from my bag and roll it around in my palm. If I call Bentley, he’ll probably be on the next flight here. Blair’s at practice right now so she won’t answer her phone and calling the gym to ask for her would tip off Bentley.
My finger is already scrolling down the contact list in my phone, pausing on one number. I glance back at the gym to make sure no one is coming outside before hitting the call button.
“Doctor Carson’s office,” a familiar voice says after only one ring.
“Hi… um…” I check the door again. “I need to speak with Jack—I mean Doctor Carson. If she’s available.”
“Are you a current patient or prospective patient?”
“Current,” I say lowering my voice when a small group of campers passes in front of me on their way to Gym II.
“One moment, please,” the secretary says.
Before I can even tell her who’s calling and mention that I’m not having a mental crisis or anything too severe (even though I kind of am) she’s transferred the call and Jackie’s picking up.
“It’s Karen Campbell,” I say quickly. “I’m sorry to call you, especially if you have an appointment right now—”
“Hi Karen, how are you? Is everything okay?” Her tone is warm and free of any sense of urgency or that careful code-voice people sometimes use when carrying on a conversion with someone else in the room who isn’t supposed to hear said conversation.
“I’m okay.” I walk around the building, hunting out a shady spot where I can sit down. “It’s just that… this morning…”
“What happened this morning?” she prompts. “I’ve got time.”
I give a nervous laugh and then proceed to explain the drama of my first fall and how I ran from the gym crying with over a hundred campers watching. By the time I finish the story, my voice is shaky and I’m on the verge of tears again.
“First of all,” Jackie says after I finish, “you need to separate your fear of hurting yourself on the uneven bars from that feeling of emptiness you experienced when the one boy…”
“TJ,” I fill in, finally locating a spot of shade in the grass where I can lean against the building.
“When TJ mentioned your parents.”
Now that I know about Jackie’s past, about her own parents’ deaths, the door seems to be open for me to ask a whole new set of questions that I’d assumed she couldn’t answer before. “Does it ever go away? That feeling like someone just punched you in the gut when you realize that you’d forgotten they’re gone and then suddenly remember?” The hollowness, the carved-out insides—please say that it will stop someday.
She was silent for several long moments before saying, “It gets better.”
My gut twists again. “Just better? Not gone?”
“Right now, you need them so much and their role in your life hasn’t been replaced with anyone else, or even with yourself. So of course it’s not only incredibly painful, but also really scary—all these decisions to make on your own…”
“Like whether I should get my own apartment,” I mumble, another wave of anxiety rushing over me as I’m reminded of yet another current problem.
“What was that?” Jackie asks.
I take a few minutes to explain the situation of Grandma suggesting it would be “more appropriate for a young lady of my age to live on her own rather than with her forty-something-year-old coach.” When I finally finish explaining all this to Jackie, I notice a pair of dark feet on the sidewalk beside me. I glance up and Stevie is standing there looking as if she can’t decide if she should turn back.
“I think my break might be over,” I say to Jackie. Before hanging up, we quickly agree on a time to have regular phone sessions over the next three weeks. I tuck my phone away in my gym bag, feeling about ten percent better even though we didn’t really create a plan of action or accomplish anything. But it’s not the first time that merely speaking truths out loud has lifted some weight off my shoulders.
“Nina sent me,” Stevie blurts out when I stand and brush grass off my butt.
“I figured.”
I glance sideways at her a couple times on the way back to the gym. She looks like she wants to say something, which makes me wonder how much of my phone conversation she’d overheard. I clamp my mouth shut because I really don’t want to talk to Stevie about my therapist at the moment. Blair, Coach Bentley, and Jordan were the only ones who knew about Jackie. Okay, and Tony knows.
Maybe it’s not that tight of a secret after all.
I figure Nina’s waiting around to lecture me the second I walk back into the gym, but instead it’s TJ who’s standing by the door, fidgeting with his pocketknife.
Stevie lets out a dramatic sigh at the sight of him. “What are you doing in here? Don’t you have work to do? Kids to coach?”