Mouthful of Birds(41)

He went to see her, and after that he returned once a week. The relief after each session helped him define his distress: his nervousness disappeared, and so did the anxiety that pulled his throat toward his stomach. The effect lasted all that day—a fullness that, according to him, was comparable to walking on air—and there was a residual peace that lasted for a few days after that. But in the end, the stiffness always came back.

In the fifth session he described the dream, and Mrs. Linn applied lavender essential oils and opened the window all the way. He sunk his head into the massage table’s generous opening and let Mrs. Linn work. Her hands, elbows, and knees were that woman’s true strength, and he let himself be influenced by them.

In the sixth session he talked about his father, about that first time his father had left home, and about the police officer, a woman, who called to let them know. He’d been found walking alone on the highway median; a driver had called 911 right away. He remembers his mother on the phone and the officer’s voice scolding her: “Do you realize he was putting everyone in danger, wandering alone along the highway like that?” Someone had to go pick him up from the station.

His mother put on her jacket over her pajamas, and he and his sister sat on the living room sofa and waited. “If you move your butts from that sofa,” their mother told them, “no more Dad for anyone.”

When the session ended, Mrs. Linn would say, “Open your eyes slowly.” It was pleasant to find the light a little more tenuous, and he wasn’t disturbed at not knowing when exactly she’d closed the curtains. In the eighth session he told about the next time his father had tried to leave them: his mother was making the shopping list, and his father was looking attentively at the tiles in the kitchen, the yellow ones.

“I know it’s strange,” he clarified for Mrs. Linn, “but I’m sure he was only looking at the yellow ones. Yellow like in my dream.”

He was afraid that among so many patients Mrs. Linn would forget the smallest details, and maybe it was there, in the yellow, where the important point lay. But Mrs. Linn’s fingers moved quickly up his back, and he understood how familiar she was with this kind of story, and he trusted that he had to go ahead with his own, without so many explanations.

“My father got up and left the kitchen,” he went on, “and it was the way he did it, a little stiffer than usual, that put me on alert. ‘Where are you going?’ my mother asked him. ‘You’re leaving without the shopping list.’ It was fairly violent, the way she stuffed the paper into his fist, like cramming an oversize letter into the mouth of a too-soft mailbox. But my mother knew what she was doing: with an order in his hands, my father would have to return.”

“Inhale and exhale deeply,” Mrs. Linn reminded him. “If you like, you can close your eyes.”

Sometimes he raised his head from the opening in the massage table to add a detail or size up Mrs. Linn’s eyes. But she dug her elbow into some strategic point of his body and put him right back in his place. Her elbows, her fists and knees approached, always shining and moist, avid. She shook the tubes of lotion before opening and squeezing them. She said it was good for the lotion to feel cold on first contact with the body, because it stimulated the epidermis and activated the muscles.

“I’m afraid,” he said in the ninth session, “afraid of a lot of things.”

He was immediately ashamed. He’d spoken without thinking; maybe the contact with the massage table put him too much at ease.

“Relax your arms,” said Mrs. Linn.

Maybe something had softened more than it should, and now there were things he could no longer control.

“Open your fists.”

Mrs. Linn poured more oil on her hands and extended her fingers several times, as if doing some sort of stretching exercise.

He felt more docile than usual; he was on the verge of tears, and it was a very embarrassing thing. But he took a deep breath and steeled himself to go on.

His father came back at midnight, almost twelve hours later and in the pouring rain, carrying the purchases in two large, drenched bags. In his last years of grade school, the father’s looming disappearances tormented him more and more, and not only because of the pain of feeling abandoned. It was resentment. Resentment that inflated in his chest and was caused by his father, so clumsy and weak and unable to leave for good. It was a painful ball of air that he carried with him, always with his mouth closed. Because if the father ever did manage to leave, that ball of air would be all that remained of him, and he wasn’t willing to let go of it so easily.

In the tenth session, Mrs. Linn asked about the dream again. He still had it, although the treatment was relieving the symptoms. He and his father were still a yellow animal, a single animal looking at itself in the mirror.

In the twelfth session he again felt the need to make some clarifications. His parents didn’t get along badly, that didn’t seem to be the problem, and neither were there financial problems. Sometimes these explanations were for himself, but he still made them out loud in order to include Mrs. Linn. Whatever it was that happened there on the massage table, it was a joint task. He said what he had to say, and, in exchange, Mrs. Linn’s elbows sank in on either side of his shoulder blades, they stabbed inward and outward, they acknowledged and permeated. There were only one or two occasions when, out of pure exhaustion, he didn’t say anything about his father in the whole session. And Mrs. Linn kneaded him more gently, pinching him in the lumbar zones a few times, emotionless.