A Danger to Herself and Others(34)



“You can’t exactly be upset with your parents for taking you to the nicest places on Earth,” I say.

“Hannah,” Dr. Lightfoot says gently. “It doesn’t matter how nice the trips were. You are allowed to be angry at your parents.”

I shake my head. “I knew I was lucky, even then. I knew that traveling would influence the person I’d turn out to be.” My father’s voice this time, all that emphasis on broadening my horizons.

That restaurant in Paris was where I first tasted truffles and époisses cheese. (I pretended to love both because my parents did. Secretly, I thought they were stinky and gross.) I tasted sweetbreads that night too. No one bothered to tell me that they tasted a whole lot different than the name implied. (Sweetbreads are actually made from animals’ pancreas and thymus glands.) When the waiter put a plate of sweetbreads in front of me, my parents laughed at the surprised look on my face.

By the time I got to school, most of the girls in my class had already made their best friends.

I didn’t know then what I know now: kindergarten best-friendships are usually pretty fickle. Most girls have at least three best friends before winter break.

I only knew that I needed a best friend ASAP.

I had to pick from the girls no one liked: the smelly, strange, leftover girls. But I discovered I could make them less smelly, less strange. Soon my cast-off girls became the cool, pretty girls, and everyone else wanted to be friends with me and my projects.

“It sounds like your parents expected you to act like an adult even though you were still a little kid.”

Agnes said, I’ve been taking care of my little sisters for as long as I can remember. I never got to join clubs and teams at school because I had to be home to babysit.

I guess that’s something Agnes and I had in common. Both of us had parents who expected us to act like grown-ups from the very start.

I learned the word precocious when I was four years old.

We’re so lucky to have such a precocious little girl.

Since I didn’t go to day care or preschool, kindergarten was the first place I really interacted with kids my own age. I was already good at getting along with adults. I’d listen to their conversations and come up with clever rejoinders to my parents’ friends’ comments. And when I got tired of doing that, I’d pretend to sleep in the booths of five-star restaurants so the adults could talk. It got so I knew exactly when they’d had enough of oohing and ahhing over me and wanted to talk business, or gossip about who was sleeping with whom, that sort of thing. I knew exactly when to yawn and let my eyes flutter shut. But getting along with kids was new to me.

“I was born mature,” I say with a smile. Of course, Lightfoot isn’t in on the joke.

She shakes her head. “No one is born mature.”

That night at the Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris, after my parents laughed, I ate every last bite of the sweetbreads. I ate the époisses and the truffles even though I couldn’t stand the smell. My parents were proud of me.

From his place in the doorway, Stephen clears his throat. Dr. Lightfoot doesn’t wear a watch or carry a phone into our sessions. (Patient may pose a danger to herself and others.) She counts on Stephen to keep track of the time, so she never stays a minute longer than our allotted session. Not even when I’m having a breakthrough, like maybe she thinks I am today. In medical school, they probably taught her that it was important to maintain proper boundaries in a therapeutic relationship.

Lightfoot stands. “Our time is up.” She smiles at me. She looks so pleased with all my sharing that I’m not sure she even remembers she found me sitting outside my room at the beginning of this session.

I smile back. A real smile.





twenty-five


Here’s something this place has in common with the world’s nicest hotels: Windows in hotel rooms usually don’t open either. Of course, I was never locked in a hotel room like I am here, but when I was little, I wasn’t allowed to leave by myself and I never broke the rules. I would wait for my parents to return from the places they said little girls—even precocious little girls like me—couldn’t go: casinos, nightclubs, bars. They usually only left me at night, when they thought I’d sleep through their absence. And most of the time, I did. But some nights I stayed up waiting for the sound of the door opening in their adjoining room or for Mom to check on me, bringing with her the scent of perfume and alcohol and cigarette smoke. Sometimes she didn’t come until the next morning, waking me to say it was time to get up, get dressed, we had so much more to explore.

Tonight, I’m waiting for Lucy.

At hotel after hotel, I never doubted that my parents were coming back. Some little kids panic when their parents leave them, like they believe there’s a chance they might never see them again. And I read once that puppies can’t tell the difference between being left alone for five minutes and being left alone for five hours. I wasn’t like that. Part of being born mature was being born practical. When my parents said I’d see them again in the morning, that meant I would see them in the morning. It would have been impractical to believe otherwise.

Then again, there was always the possibility that something might have prevented them from getting back to me: a car accident or a run-in with a murderous cab driver or some other tragedy. But when I was little, I didn’t know about dangers like that. At least, I didn’t think about them.

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