Читать книгу The Fragile World - Paula DeBoard Treick - Страница 16

olivia

At the beginning of spring, when Daniel had been dead for six months, Mom announced that we were going to see a family therapist. She looked desperately tired, as if she hadn’t slept in weeks—which maybe she hadn’t. It must have been exhausting, doing nice things for Dad and me and then having to point out that she’d done them, since we never noticed on our own. I made that Alfredo sauce you love.... I replaced the button on that shirt cuff. We thanked her, and five minutes later we had forgotten all about it and were back to our ungrateful selves.

We let her drag us into the meeting with the family therapist, Dr. Fisher, although we attended only once as an actual family—what was left of it, anyway, now that we were down to only three. Dr. Fisher had a sunny office that overlooked a small courtyard, and although the furniture was basically industrial gray, there were little pops of color everywhere—yellow throw pillows, a vase practically choked with pink and purple hydrangeas, an orange sunset on one wall.

It went just about how I figured it would go: Dr. Fisher asked some questions, and Mom answered them. Dad looked at his hands, and I looked out the window at the courtyard, trying to assess the level of danger present in two gingko trees and a shallow fountain. Dr. Fisher could have been anyone’s grandma; she was pleasantly white-haired, wore a floaty skirt and long cardigan, and had the patience of the world’s best kindergarten teacher.

Mom had commandeered the session, rambling on and on about communication and how she feared we would turn out if we simply couldn’t start talking again.

“And, Curtis? What would you like to say?” Dr. Fisher asked when Mom paused for a breath.

“Well, I—I would have to say that I agree,” Dad blurted, caught off guard. I noticed that his shirttail had come untucked, that there was a small streak of mustard on his pants.

I glanced at Mom and caught her at the end of an eye roll. She gave a forced laugh. “You see, this is what I’m—”

“Yes, but why do you feel there’s a lack of communication, Curtis?” Dr. Fisher probed, and Mom sat back.

It took Dad a very long time to respond. “I couldn’t say, exactly.”

“Olivia,” Dr. Fisher said, turning to me after a beat. “Let’s hear from you.”

I know what I should have said—about my panic attacks, and how much I missed Daniel every time I passed the closed door to his bedroom. I should have said that I was miserable and I was afraid of making my parents miserable—but these were very real things, and too awful to say with my parents staring at me. Mom kept nodding her encouragement, looking so hopeful that I knew whatever I said would absolutely crush her. Dad seemed surprised to realize that I was in the room, too.

“I don’t know,” I whispered.

Mom’s laugh this time was painful and sharp, like glass breaking into jagged pieces. “I mean, you read stories about families that break up when a single bad thing happens to them, and you think, that will never be my family. But it’s getting to the point.... Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know.” She leaned forward, head in her hands.

Dad and I looked at Dr. Fisher, waiting.

“Well,” she said, smiling at us kindly. I wondered if she ever came right out and said to someone, There’s really no helping you. “This is a very normal reaction for families who have experienced a sudden loss. It can be terribly difficult to express feelings openly. What I’m going to suggest are some one-on-one appointments for the time being, so that I can help each of you articulate your feelings. And then we’ll meet again as a group. In the meantime, I’d like to suggest a few activities that you can do together.”

Mom looked up, brightening. This was just her thing—a to-do list. Give her a thousand tasks, and she would tackle them all.

For the rest of the summer, I visited Dr. Fisher every week, not having any other choice. Mom went to her sessions and reported on them over dinner, determined to model “good communication” for us. As far as I could tell, Dad went only twice on his own; whatever was said in his sessions stayed there. Or maybe he said nothing at all and only stared alternately at his shoes or his car in the parking lot. Mom worked her way through a family togetherness checklist, insisting that we plan meals, visit the Youth Symphony Orchestra to make a donation in Daniel’s memory and spend at least one weekend night together doing something new—even if it was just wandering through a Pier 1, where we immediately branched off on our own and gathered again at the cash register. The week before school began, we took a vacation to Coronado, which involved a long drive from Sacramento to San Diego, nights in hotels with dubious cleanliness, a tour of the island on rented bikes and a long drive home. Somehow when Mom coaxed me into the trip, she’d neglected to mention the word “island,” and I had a full-on panic attack on the bridge, with Mom holding on to my head while I breathed into a Subway bag that had contained, ten minutes earlier, Dad’s pastrami sandwich.

The morning we left the island, Mom crushed a pill and slipped it into my yogurt, so Dad basically had to carry me to the car, wedge me into my seat and wrangle with my seat belt. I hardly remembered anything about the trip, but the photographic evidence was stored on Mom’s camera—a dozen or so pictures where none of us was exactly smiling, even though Coronado was beautiful. Despite my worrying—or maybe because of it?—nothing horrible had happened, after all. The bridge didn’t collapse, the island didn’t suddenly sink into the Pacific and, although I’d seen a shocking special news report about how rarely hotel bedding was washed, we didn’t take home a single bedbug.

When we finally arrived home, Mom dumped the contents of our suitcases into the washing machine and announced that she was going to bed for the night and didn’t want to be disturbed. It was four-thirty in the afternoon.

After that, she stopped seeing Dr. Fisher herself, but kept dropping me off for my appointments. And Dr. Fisher was helping me—it was her idea for me to find a new “coping mechanism” since I’d been more or less refusing to take my anxiety pills since the Coronado debacle. “Why don’t we do this?” she suggested, although I was pretty sure there would be no we involved. “Why don’t we keep a record of these things you’re afraid of? If you write them down during the week, we can discuss each fear at our next session.”

This turned out to be a fabulous suggestion. In a week, I filled ten pages, single-spaced. Dr. Fisher’s eyes widened in surprise at first, but as she kept reading, I had the distinct feeling that she was trying very hard not to laugh.

“Hair dryers?” she asked, looking up.

“Because hair could get caught in the little vents,” I explained.

“Right. That could happen. Has it happened to you, with a hair dryer in your home?”

“Not yet.”

“Okay. What about this one—open-toed shoes?”

“Because toes can get caught in escalators.” Anticipating her next question, I added, “It didn’t happen to me, but I heard about it happening to someone else, a cousin of a girl who was in my homeroom last year.”

“Fairly rare, though, I would think,” Dr. Fisher said, closing my notebook. “And I notice you have escalators on the list, as well.”

I nodded.

“It would seem to me that the escalator is relatively benign, though—provided one is wearing close-toed shoes, of course,” Dr. Fisher qualified quickly. “But I would think, compared to elevators—”

I shuddered. “Elevators are in a class unto themselves. The sudden plummeting, the claustrophobia...”

“Whereas with an escalator, if it stops working, you simply walk the rest of the way.”

“In that case, you might as well just take the stairs,” I pointed out. “Or, better yet, just stay on the ground floor.”

Dr. Fisher smiled, the skin around her eyes crinkling. “Well! Okay. That’s definitely a good start, then, Olivia. I think the next step might be for us to begin sorting through these fears, putting them into categories.” I must have looked puzzled, because she explained, “You know—like things that have happened to you before, or are likely to happen, versus things that are not at all likely to happen—that kind of thing.”

I agreed to think about it, although I didn’t see the value in this. It didn’t particularly matter what category things were in—I was equally scared of everything. But I kept writing fears down, filling one notebook and starting another. During the day I carried it in my backpack, sealed in a jumbo-sized Ziploc bag so it wouldn’t fall victim to a leaking pen or a spilled water bottle. At night, I kept the notebook on the floor next to my bed, in case something new came to me while I should have been sleeping.

Dad began referring to the notebook as my Fear Journal.

Mom called it my security blanket.

And it did give me security—enough, at least, that I had stopped taking medication completely by the time I entered eighth grade. I kept a single pill with me, wrapped in a ball of cellophane at the bottom of my backpack for an emergency situation, like a shooter on campus or an unannounced field trip. The busier I was with my classes and the more obsessed I grew with writing things down, the less I saw Dr. Fisher, until one day it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen her in months.

It had been a good idea—family therapy. But my family had approached it like a ride on a merry-go-round in the world’s saddest theme park, until one by one, we’d all simply flung ourselves off.