Confidential(8)

What should I be feeling? What was I feeling?

“How are you?” That was a better question. Safer.

“I’m scared.” Then she was crying, hard, and I’d never heard that before. She loved him so much. I’d always known that. I used to wonder if she loved him more than me.

But this wasn’t about that. It was about how I could help her right then. My mother’s a good person; the strain in our relationship wasn’t her fault. “You’re going to get through this,” I told her.

“It’s advanced, so there aren’t many options. They can try chemo, but he doesn’t want to do it. His mother did chemo, and he said that it took everything out of her and she died anyway.” More sobs. “He’s just going to let himself die.”

“Oh, Mom. Mommy.” I was crying, too, not because of him—at least, I was pretty sure it wasn’t—but because she was in so much pain.

“Come home and talk to him,” she said. “You know how he feels about you.”

I wanted to help her, but I never wanted to go back. “If he’s not listening to you, he’s not going to listen to me.”

“He thinks you’re smarter than me. You’re the one who went to Berkeley.”

“I’ll call him.”

“Something like this, it has to be in person.”

My first visit in . . . how long had it been? A year, or more like two? “Does he look sick?”

“No. He just looks like Adam.” I heard her stifling her tears, and the effort at containment was just as heart-wrenching as the weeping. “Please, Lucy. Come home. I need you. Not just to talk to him.”

She needed me to be there for her. She was falling apart. The man she loved was dying.

It sounded like he was ready to die. Maybe our job was just to let him go.

Was it evil to feel the teeniest bit of anticipatory relief, to think that my secret would die with him?

I was torn. I didn’t like to say no to anyone, especially not to Mom, and especially not right then, because that would be monstrous, but I didn’t see how I could handle this. How I could be her confidante. Or his. The image made me shudder.

It was like I was shrinking, losing a year a second, and I was a kid again. I wanted my mommy.

But my mommy was asking me to be a grown-up. I couldn’t let her down, yet I couldn’t come through, either.

“I’ve never known anyone who’s died,” I said. All four of my grandparents were still alive; my father was, too, as I knew from Christmas cards and nothing else. He’d been on the East Coast and entirely uninvolved, not even aware of what was happening during Mom’s drug years. Aunts, uncles, cousins—everyone was okay. Except Adam.

“Adam is not going to die!” she said fiercely. “He needs treatment, that’s all. If he fights, he wins. We have to make sure he fights.”

We. I was in this with her, whether I wanted to be or not. I couldn’t tell her why I was hesitating. She’d never even asked why I didn’t come home all through college. Like she hadn’t wanted to know. Like she hadn’t cared.

Suddenly, I was feeling the most unfamiliar emotion: anger.

Dr. Baylor would be pleased. He said I needed to get mad more often, that it was the building block of assertiveness, and that I should be standing up for myself.

It was a blessing and a curse that I was seeing Dr. Baylor that night. A blessing because I was in a horrible tumult, and because he’s Dr. Baylor and I always wanted to see him, every day, and I thought of him more often than was comfortable in one sense, but in another, he was the ultimate solace. I liked knowing that he was out there, looking forward to our time together, maybe not the same as I did, but he must have had some anticipation. Otherwise, why would he do it for free?

But it was a curse because I was going to walk in there a total mess, and I hadn’t told him much about Adam, or even about my mother. For a therapist, he asked remarkably few questions about childhood. I thought all therapists would insist we go there, but not Dr. Baylor.

Maybe there were things he didn’t want to know, either.

“I’ll come home this weekend,” I said. It was the only way out of this call.

“Thank you, Lucy.”

She sounded relieved; I was feeling the opposite. I was having trouble breathing, wondering if it was cardiac arrest or a panic attack. Best to assume it’s a panic attack and to focus on my breathing. I told myself to think calming thoughts and visualize a serene place. Picture Dr. Baylor’s face.

I didn’t go back inside. I texted Christine and told her that I had to leave just a little bit early, I must have eaten bad shrimp. No one wanted to make further inquiries into other people’s GI tracts.

Then I spent five minutes beating myself up: Bad shrimp? Who says that?

But those were five minutes not spent beating myself up for the far greater offense that lingered in the back of my subconscious, just waiting for an opportune moment to rise to prominence. Sometimes it was like I really did have a parasite living inside me, only it wasn’t in my GI tract at all.

I tried to kill time in a café, but I was so antsy, so full of awful swirling thoughts, that I decided to go straight to Dr. Baylor’s. Just being near him, even in the waiting room, could have a positive effect. I had to hope.

The intimacy of knowing the code to his building settled me a little. Seeing his name on the subscription label for all those issues of Psychology Today settled me more. I wasn’t alone. He’d get me through this.