Confidential(41)

It wasn’t simple at all. I had decided: a) that the new me needed to have a baby, damn the torpedoes, and that b) I should try to have the baby of my therapist. This was insane. I couldn’t really be contemplating this.

Except I most definitely was.





CHAPTER 33





LUCINDA


My phone was ringing, and it returned me to my body and to my desk where I should have been proofreading someone else’s crappy novel, but I just wanted to write my own. Not a crappy novel—a good one. I was increasingly sure that I could.

Lately, I’d been catching fire, and all I wanted was to write and to see Dr. Baylor. I was growing more confident about the prose, and I’d even thought of bringing some pages to our next session, letting him see what I could do. I’d make him proud.

Or he might have to psychoanalyze them. After all, that was his job. I wasn’t ready for that. I wanted them to be art, like he said.

Oh shit. The call was from Adam.

I’d almost forgotten I left him a voice mail weeks ago. Honestly, I’d almost forgotten how worried I was about my mother. I’d decided to go with Dr. Baylor’s take, which was that my mother was an adult who was responsible for her own feelings and behavior, and that she was an adult who was being unfairly punitive with her own child. Besides, I had my writing, and she wasn’t going to steal that from me. It felt good to be a creative being, uninhibited, especially after so many years of being racked with guilt and shame.

But I saw Adam’s name, and I was sucked back down, down, down in an instant.

“Hello,” I said.

“You sound out of breath,” he said. “That’s my department.”

He was wheezing, though it wasn’t lung cancer. I never thought before of dying in that way: as the loss of breath. That it was just running away from him, running out.

Adam didn’t deserve air.

“Hold on,” I told him. I stepped outside. It was just about noon, which meant that there was the most pedestrian traffic the street would see all day. I watched people heading into the vegan diner, wishing I could join them. Wishing I could be doing anything other than talking to my dying stepfather and ex-lover.

Bile rushed up into my mouth. No vegan food today.

“I called you when I was trying to find my mother,” I said. Trying. Past tense. I didn’t want to hear about how she was nursing him back to health, and I wasn’t about to ask how he was. I didn’t care. There would be no pleasantries or small talk. He could drop dead tomorrow for all I cared. He had decided to take my relationship with my mother into the grave with him, and he had no right to do that.

Dr. Baylor would probably want me to express my anger to the source of it, but that had never been my style, and I wasn’t going to change now. It wasn’t because I had compassion for Adam; it was because I didn’t see the point. Dr. Baylor always seemed so sure that anger needed to be vented, that it would set me free, but for once, I thought he was wrong. I had my writing for that. I had him.

“Yeah,” he said, “no one’s heard from her.” Each word was a belabored exhalation. I’d like this conversation over as quickly as possible, but I wasn’t likely to get my wish.

“Because she’s spending all her time and energy on you.”

“I haven’t heard from her.” I . . . haven’t . . . heard . . . from . . . her. This was excruciating.

Wait, if she wasn’t with Adam, then where was she? I thought of how to ask the question so that the response would require as few words as possible. “Did she leave you?”

“Kicked . . . me . . . out.”

It was good to hear that. But it unleashed a whole different set of worries. Blythe said she’d taken a leave of absence from her job and that she hadn’t been in contact with anyone. It wasn’t just me. Even Adam said he hadn’t heard from her.

“Where are you?” I didn’t know why I asked; it wasn’t like I cared.

“In hospice.”

It was real. He was going to die. I closed my eyes and leaned against the building, blotting out all the lunch crowd, blotting out the sun as best I could. “What’s that like?” I whispered.

“It’s okay here. No treatments, just morphine. Going gentle into that good night.”

It took a long time for him to finish, and in the spaces between words, tears slipped down my face, one after the other. I knew he didn’t deserve them, but it didn’t matter.

I wasn’t crying only for him but for my missing mother. She was gone because of what I did. Because I didn’t just fuck her husband; I tried to steal him, and I failed.

Did she know everything? Even half would justify her silence.

Dr. Baylor disagreed, and it had been in my interest to believe him. To say that she had been the adult and I had been the child and therefore, it was unacceptable for her to behave so childishly now, to freeze me out. But I was an adult, too. She got to decide who she wanted in her life, same as I did. She didn’t want Adam anymore, and she didn’t want me.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I’d ask for what, but it would take too long for him to answer.

“I’m at peace. I want you to be, too.”

Then why did you tell my mother?

As if he had any right to find peace first. A minute ago, I was crying. Now I wanted him dead. I wanted to do it myself.