Off the Deep End (25)

I laugh. “Sheesh, one question at a time.” He doesn’t smile or laugh. He never does. At least not when I want him to. “Getting him on my visitor list was easy. My mom put everyone on it because she was always trying to get people to visit me. Some doctor had told her in one of the family groups that social support would be huge for my recovery, so she’d latched on to that and put almost our entire family tree on the list. I just tucked him on it, slipped him right between my cousin Shelby and my uncle Ray. Nobody noticed when I added him.”

“And nobody said anything about him visiting you?” He doesn’t try to hide his disapproval or his disappointment.

“Maybe.” I shrug. “If they did, nobody ever said anything to me about it.”

It’s weird. I know. It felt odd to me in the beginning, too, and I wouldn’t have wanted Gabe to be able to visit some old woman in the psych ward either. But Isaac wasn’t a regular fifteen-year-old, and I wasn’t a regular forty-one-year-old woman. Not anymore.

“What kinds of things did the two of you talk about?” He tries to keep the judgment out of his voice, but there’s no mistaking its presence.

“Nothing really at first. Like I said, he was angry. It took him a few visits to stop being so mad.” I’d been more surprised to see him the second time he showed up at my door than I had been the first.

“What are you doing here? How do you keep getting in?” I asked after he startled me with a tentative knock. The truth was he was the one who snuck himself in the first time. I never had anything to do with it.

“I told them I’m your cousin Carl.” He grinned and beamed, clearly proud of himself to have done his research on my family. He got lucky picking Carl and even luckier that my mom had put our entire family on there.

“Come in,” I said, straightening my gown and tucking my hair behind my ears. I must’ve looked a mess. I hadn’t showered since the weekend.

He scanned the room slowly, then took a few tentative steps inside. He shoved his hands in his baggy blue jeans and stared at his tennis shoes while he announced, “I’m not exactly sure why I’m back or what I’m doing here.”

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said, motioning him closer. In a weird way, it felt good to see him, like an old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time. I gave him a big smile so he could see that I was still okay: that I hadn’t done anything stupid again with the gift he’d given me. Being alive wasn’t a gift, but I couldn’t tell him that any more than I would’ve told my son the tooth fairy wasn’t real when he was little. It would’ve been too mean.

Isaac shuffled farther inside the room, taking in all the plants and flowers hanging in the window. You’d swear I was battling a terminal illness, as many as were up there. The cards that accompanied the balloons and flowers were taped on the wall behind my bed. My mom had insisted. She’d spent her first Saturday visit putting up two bulletin boards and tacking them on with stuff she used for scrapbooking. Each time she came, she made sure to add any new cards.

He spotted the beat-up leather chair in the corner and took a seat, perched awkwardly on the edge of it. He tapped his hands on his knees.

“You don’t have to be so scared,” I said gently. I wanted to reach out and hug him, but I intuitively knew that it’d push him away, and I didn’t want to do that.

He peeked out at me from underneath his long bangs. “But I am. It’s so weird. I’m always scared now. I haven’t stopped being scared.” His vibrant green eyes that used to sparkle were hollow and dull. His face an ashen white like he was the one sick and in desperate need of a hospital bed. He brushed his hair off his face. “Do you remember what it was like right after we almost hit the deer? That feeling? Do you ever think about it?” There was an earnestness to his voice and his question like if he didn’t get it out fast enough, he might lose his nerve.

“That second has played itself out a thousand times in my mind,” I responded, nodding. “I’ve gone over every single part of that night ten thousand times. Every tiny second. Every word. Every moment. It’s like a video I obsessively rewind and watch over and over again.”

“Me too.” He gave me a tiny half smile.

It was our beginning. The way out of the horrible place we’d found ourselves in.

I shift my gaze back on Dr. Stephens. Does he wonder where I go when I mentally travel out of here during our sessions? So far he hasn’t asked. Maybe he hasn’t noticed. He’s sizing me up, trying to decide if he should give me a few more seconds to speak or if he should direct the narrative with a specific question. I can almost see him spinning the two options in his head. I make the decision for him.

“I had a friend who was in AA, and she used to always tell me that the way their program worked was that whenever you were really in a bad spot, that you should go find someone worse off than you and help them. Take the attention off yourself and your own problems and help somebody else solve theirs. It was kind of like that with Isaac.” At least it was in the beginning. He gave me someone to mother at a time when I desperately needed someone to be a mom to. I just didn’t know that then. What’s that saying? Hindsight’s twenty-twenty? “He needed to talk about that night with someone who didn’t try to fix it, so I just listened to him a lot. It was almost like he was one of my old patients.” I don’t realize what I’ve said until after it’s out of my mouth, but I can’t take it back.