The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(91)

“I need to talk to someone. And I can’t find the card you gave me.”

“Erik. Where are you?”

“Home. And I can’t do this anymore.”

“Erik, listen to me, I’m going to make a call. Two calls. You sit tight right there, don’t move. Don’t move a muscle until I call you back, do you understand?”

“All right.”

“I will call you back. I promise. I’m going to get you help.”

“All right.”

“We’ll find you, Erik. We’ll get through it. I will call you back.”

Disconnected, he sat on the cold floor, dead center in a ring of wolves. Their eyes glowed green and malevolent as they watched him open the blade of his Swiss Army knife. He touched the tip to the inside of his left wrist, tracing the daisy petals.

I have set you in my presence forever.

He had done this to himself.

He had to cut her out of him or he would die.

Shaking his head hard, he took the blade off his wrist, closed the knife again. “You don’t have to do this,” he whispered. “You can stop.”

I am the alpha male.

I lead this pack.

And John lives with Daisy.

The wolves took a step closer, tightening the circle.

I am the omega. A stray out in the rain.

Like James.

The wolves nodded. Erik opened the blade again.

Janey sent a friend, a man Erik vaguely remembered from the Kellys’ house parties. He was kind. He didn’t ask questions or probe. He made gentle talk as he took the knife away, closed the blade and slipped it into his pocket. Then he drove Erik downtown, to the office of Dr. Diane Erskine, who was waiting for him.

So it started.





The Defining Moment


At first glance, when he was trembling and disoriented, Erik thought Diane Erskine was old, maybe in her sixties. More lucid at his next visit, he realized she was one of those women who go grey early, eventually becoming silver-haired while still in their prime. She wore her silver hair short, in a pixie cut. Her eyes were grey as well and she tended to dress in neutral tones. She exuded a sleek, expensive class, but she was oddly colorless.

Therapy perplexed Erik. He went into his first session assuming they’d talk about the shooting. He took up the entire hour talking about his job at the playhouse and the student theater program. He didn’t even touch the subject of college, let alone the shooting. He walked out with a confused dissatisfaction, certain he’d botched it out of the gate and accomplished nothing.

He started going in with an agenda, a comprehensive list of things to talk about, in order of importance. Yet half the time, the plan was forgotten, the list went untouched, and he would be babbling on a tangent of the most pointless, inconsequential crap.

It was nervous babble, partly because Diane would never direct the session. She responded to whatever he brought up, but if he had nothing to talk about, she didn’t help him by prompting a topic or line of discussion. Not a baited hook dropped. Not a bone thrown. She simply sat. And waited. The silence would stretch past awkward into agonizing, until Erik reached for anything and started rambling.

He was also slightly alarmed at the cost of therapy. He was off his mother’s health insurance and flying solo. He wouldn’t be out on the street because of this, but still, he wanted the assurance he was getting his money’s worth.

It was unsatisfying. Touching a little on Daisy here, a bit on the shooting there, a dash of his mother, a drop of David, a shake of childhood. It all led to the first six weeks feeling like a bad technical run-through: a lot of disassociated parts but no show.

“What exactly is supposed to happen here?” He made the mistake of asking, back before he learned asking questions was pointless because Diane only parroted them back to him.

“You feel something is supposed to be happening.” Often she left off the upward, inquiring inflection at the end of a question, making it a statement.

“Shouldn’t this be… I don’t know, deeper?”

“This feels shallow.”

“Well, I mean, shouldn’t I be crying or something?”

“Do you feel sad, Erik?”

It was enough to make you crazy, if you weren’t already.

He tried going in cold, no preparation. Tried the approach of having nothing to prove and trusting Diane wasn’t grading his sessions. He realized he did trust her. He was getting used to her, getting used to this hour of self-centered introspection. Week after week, he made and kept his appointments. He never looked forward to a session. Sometimes he outright dreaded it, constantly on the verge of canceling. He didn’t like therapy, but, he admitted, he didn’t dislike Diane.

He went. And they dug.

Time was gentle. The weeks softly piled up into months. And he began to find things in the dirt.

For the first time ever, he took all his scattered memories and impressions and lined them up into a wobbly narrative of not just the shooting, but the events leading up to it. He began with James, how he had come to Lancaster and rearranged the elements. Margaret’s dog tags and the penny. Powaqqatsi. The stolen condoms and the affair with Will.

The telling was strange. Erik found he could narrate the events of the fall semester, but his memory seemed to cave in after December. He hopped from one isolated recollection to another, bobbing like buoys in a choppy ocean. January and February were murky and muddled. March was filled with alarming sinkholes. April disappeared entirely. He could pick up the thread again, shakily, when James stepped onto the stage. And he could go forward from there.