The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(92)

“Why did you even come out of the booth?” Diane asked. Her voice didn’t dip out of its professional neutrality but it seemed her eyes were pressing him hard. He wondered for a moment if she had children. A son of her own who was capable of such a reckless move. “Why didn’t you stay down and covered?”

“I can’t tell you what my thought process was that day, I don’t remember. All I know is he shot Daisy.” He held out his hands to indicate it was reason enough. “I had to get to her.”

“You could have been killed.” She turned her lips in as soon as the words were out. He guessed she had just crossed a line. She was here to listen, not judge. He decided to step across as well.

“Do you have a son?” he asked.

Diane nodded, and he smiled briefly at her. “I know,” he said. “It was an insanely stupid thing to do. My mother… Before she hugged me, she shook me. Like she didn’t know whether to kiss me or kill me. A thousand people have asked me what I was thinking. And I feel like anything I try to describe, any way I try to tell the story, I’m making half of it up. I don’t know what I was thinking in the moment, Diane. I don’t.”

“How about what you were feeling?”

“Feeling? I was scared shitless.”

“What else?”

His shoulders inched up to his ears, silently indicating he could not remember. The “I don’t know” was poised in his mouth, all made, not yet spoken. He kept it back. Closed his eyes. He let the words go unsaid, let his shoulders fall again. He relaxed into the silence, and followed his mind. Let it take him by the hand and go for a walk.

“Where are you,” Diane said, after a minute.

“I had to get past him,” Erik said. “I had to get to the stage. If I snuck by James, he’d shoot me. But if I talked to him. If I asked him… I don’t know.”

“Let it spill out,” Diane murmured. “Don’t be articulate. We can explore it afterward.”

“I spoke to him,” Erik said, trying to let go. “I called him by name and said ‘you don’t have to do this.’ I thought I could calm him down. If anyone could, I could. I was the alpha male. Human valium.”

“Tell me more.”

“I calm everyone down. David said so. I started believing it was true. I could talk James down. He trusted me. He trusted me with the story about his sister. He gave me the penny. I had him in my pocket.”

He looked up at Diane, who stared unblinking back at him. “Were you angry with him?” she asked.

“Angry?” he said, startled. “Right there and then?”

“Or right now.”

“Sure. I mean, Jesus, he was f*cked-up and depressed, maybe he was heartbroken over Will. But so what? A million people are f*cked-up, depressed and heartbroken. Including yours truly. You don’t see me going into Geneseo playhouse with a gun. Who thinks like that? I don’t know why I bothered trying to sympathize. Fuck him. He blew the back of his head off and I got up and left him in the aisle. I didn’t even look back. It’s not the defining moment of the day. I got nothing for him.” He slumped back in the couch unclenched the fingers he had been holding in fists during the rant. “There you go, Doc, there’s anger. I got anger for him. What a breakthrough.”

Diane shifted in her chair, her fingers playing with her earring. “What was the defining moment of the day, I wonder?”

Erik hesitated, then reached in his pocket. He took the penny out and gave it to Diane. “Maybe that is,” he said, watching her examine it. “I’ve carried it with me every day since the shooting. I had it in my pocket when I was at the funerals of the people he killed. I hate his guts but I keep it with me all the time. I wish I knew why.”

Diane turned the flattened coin over and over in her fingers. “Often the victims of violence make their assailant into a monster. Something less than human. They refuse to call them by name. Acknowledge their pasts or their families.” She handed the pendant back to him. “You chose to keep this. And to keep his humanity.”

“He trusted me,” Erik said.

Diane nodded.

A long aching silence passed. Erik put the penny back in his pocket. “I just need to keep it.”

“It doesn’t mean you’re a horrible person,” Diane said. “It just means you’re a person.”

“I wish he’d never given it to me. I don’t want to define that day, Diane, and I don’t want that damn day defining me. It was an incident, not my life. If I could, I’d go back to the theater and throw the stupid penny on the floor. Leave it in the aisle. Leave it dead there with the rest of—”

They died, only you are left.

“Where were you going just then?” she asked.

Haltingly, he told her.

“You pictured them dead?”

“It made it so much easier. But then Will would call, or Daisy would write, or my heart would just laugh at me and the whole illusion would crumble. So I stopped killing them off but I still kept telling myself to feel nothing.”

He felt terrible after the session. Physically awful. Weak and anxious. His chest wide open and wailing. He felt perpetually on the verge of tears, his throat seized up.

“Therapy doesn’t seem to be good for my health.”