Confidential(18)

It underscored that I didn’t really know her anymore. It had been six years since I lived in the river house. I’d hightailed it out for college at eighteen with a broken heart, and she’d called every week, and I hadn’t wanted to talk to her. I didn’t want to hear news about Adam. She’d won, which wasn’t her fault; she hadn’t even known we were competing. I was unfairly angry with her, and guilty over that, and mourning Adam’s loss, though I’d never had him to begin with. In short, I was an utter mess. My classmates gave me a wide berth.

But she kept calling, never pushing, expressing concern tactfully, lovingly, letting me know that I could tell her anything and she’d always be there for me. It was unbearable. I answered every third call or returned them when I knew she couldn’t pick up, like during her Monday night Narcotics Anonymous meeting, or I rang her while I was on my way to class and then told her, “Gotta go!” after five minutes. They were all tricks to keep my distance, and she was a bright woman. She must have known that. She just couldn’t have known the reason. Now, though, she did.

Did she feel any relief at that, since we were all detectives at heart, wanting to solve the mysteries of our lives? Or was she now tortured by the knowledge of exactly what kind of child she had raised and what kind of man she’d married?

My heartbreak had worn off slowly; I can’t say it healed, exactly. The guilt and shame rushed into the void, no longer background but foreground. I was aware of what an awful person I was and that I deserved to be alone. That made me want to keep hiding from her, keep avoiding her. I hid from everyone, really, in that all the friendships I started to make were superficial. By my senior year, she’d stopped calling every week or even every other, she no longer asked me to come home for breaks from school, and after I graduated, we could go a few months without speaking. Our calls were an exchange of facts, proof of life.

For a while, since therapy with Dr. Baylor, I’d been feeling a little better about myself, like I did have redeeming qualities and that if anyone could redeem me, it would be him. But now it had once again become stark, what kind of person I really was. I was going to see him tonight, and no matter what I said, he’d see through me.

I’d thought a hundred times about canceling. The policy was that if I canceled with less than forty-eight hours’ notice, I was supposed to pay the full fee for the missed session. I wasn’t sure how that worked now that I’d gone pro bono.

Canceling at the last minute after he’d entrusted me with a prime-time slot for free . . . I couldn’t do it. It would be a slap in the face of the person to whom I felt closest. On shaking legs, I made it to his office.

Yet I couldn’t even look at him, though his concern was palpable in the room. I was tucked into one corner of his couch, my knees drawn up to my chest, trying to disappear. My face was bright red. Almost ten excruciating minutes had ticked by, and I still hadn’t formed words. I’d bumped into the client he had before me, the one who’d looked so put together last week, and her outfit was on point, but from her face, it was clear she was unraveling, too. Maybe it was contagious. Poor Dr. Michael, surrounded by disastrous women.

He told me to take my time—after all, he’d always stressed this was my time and I was in charge of it—but he probably hadn’t anticipated that we could sit here for the entire fifty minutes in silence. Agonizing as that would be, though, speech would be worse. Once I started talking, there would be nowhere to hide.

“Did you go to see your mother and Adam like we discussed in the last session?” he finally asked at the twenty-five-minute mark. I managed a nod. “You thought it might be painful, seeing Adam like that and seeing how it was impacting your mother. From how you look today, I’m guessing you were right.”

Another nod.

“Have you ever grieved before?”

I didn’t even know what that meant. I shook my head.

“It hits everyone differently. It’s not that unusual to become mute in the face of mortality, actually.”

So he couldn’t see through me. I was almost disappointed. I’d ascribed such inhuman powers of perception and insight to him that it was no wonder he couldn’t match it.

“But I don’t think that’s what’s going on here,” he said. “Did your mother abuse you, Lucinda? Is that why you went away to college and never came home?”

This time, I shook my head with a force that was nearly spasmodic. He couldn’t think something like that about Mom. I was the rotten one. She was innocent.

“Did Adam abuse you?”

“No.” People might say that I’d been too young to consent and that Adam had been like a father, but it had never been like that.

“Do you know what complicated grief is?” Dr. Baylor asked.

No, I didn’t.

“Simple grief is when we have simple feelings for the person we’ve lost or will lose soon. For example, a husband and wife are married fifty years. It’s a loving marriage. When he dies, you’d think she’d have the hardest time coping, but no. The wife who has it worst is the one who secretly hated her husband, who had wished for her freedom. Then once it happens, she’s full of guilt. She doesn’t recover for many years, if ever.”

“What if the guilt isn’t because of the person who died?” I said. “What if it’s about someone else who’s been left behind?”