“DO you remember your first time?” Shrink asks.
Just like that. We’re crossing the lawn behind the villa while she looks for the perfect setting for a therapy session. She carries a limp yellow picnic blanket under one arm. I hold the plastic cup of supplement I refuse to drink. Some of the other patients are sprawled out on the grass on their stomachs, writing in their journals. Everything about me is taut: my breath, my shoulders, my gut. I am bound tight with hate—for this place, for Eden, for my father.
Shrink stops at the edge of the lawn, beneath the stiff yellow talons of a palm tree. Then she spreads the picnic blanket carefully over the grass and settles down.
“My first time.” I repeat her words. I place the cup of calories in the grass and draw my knees to my chest.
“My guess is, you never forget the first time you use a behavior.”
“You always remember.”
“You mean . . . you always remember.”
“That’s what I said.” Just as well that she doesn’t get it. This way she won’t be able to talk about how she’s been there, and trust her, recovery has so much more to offer.
“No . . .” She scrunches up her nose and glances up at a palm tree. She looks young. “I mean, you always remember. As in, you, Stevie, think about the first time a lot. Can’t turn it off.”
My eyelids drop, and, unbidden, the memory of the first time comes back in smoky shards. The first image is always the same. Me, slumped in the driver’s seat of Dad’s old Buick. Engine idling, headlights off. The stench of sticky sweet gone rancid. My boozy breath, the supplies, the shame.
“Stevie?” There it is. Shrink’s soft, dangerous knock. “Can you describe what’s going on for you right now?”
I will never let her near the actual memory. The weight of it is mine alone to bear. I keep my eyes closed, but I shift the scene.
“Show me what you’re seeing, Stevie.”
“I’m . . . in my bedroom.” The lie sounds so realistic, I’m almost proud. “In the apartment.”
“Your bedroom. Are you alone, or is someone there with you?”
I know what she’s asking before she knows it. She wants to know if someone, maybe a “Very Bad Man,” touched me. That’s the only possible explanation. Something unspeakable must have happened for me to turn out this way.
“He’s there,” I say, because nothing else comes. No one ever touched me. No man, anyway. But maybe she’s right; maybe I do need a reason. Some glittering thing I can unveil for the crowd—see, look!—so they can make sense of this insanity. Ahhh, they will say, now we understand.
“He . . .” Shrink is whispering, afraid she’ll scare the revelation away if a single branch snaps beneath her cautious step.
“Joshua.”
It’s out before I can pull it back in. My eyes snap open. The sun beats down on the back of my neck, and the thin cotton of my henley seals itself to my slick skin.
Fuck. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. My fingers curl into claws, gathering clumps of rough, dry grass. Why did I say that? It’s not enough that I killed him? Now I have to lie about him, too? Fuck.
“Your brother. The one who . . . passed away?” She’s probably too afraid to say the one you killed.
“Josh is my dead brother, yeah.” I’m sorry, I tell him silently. I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I did that. But she can’t tell anybody; it’s against the law or something. God, I’m such a worthless little shit. Nobody would believe me anyway. Everybody knows I’m a liar, Josh. Everybody.
“Okay. And the two of you are in your room.” Her voice has this way of lilting at the end of her sentences, like she’s asking a question even when she’s not.
“Yeah. In my room.” Why can’t I stop? Why can’t I tell her the truth, that yes, fine, Josh was in my room thousands of times for thousands of reasons, but never in the way she’s thinking?
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” I tell Shrink.
“Okay. So let’s talk about what you want to talk about.”
I blink. “I don’t want to talk about anything.”
“It seems like maybe there’s something on your mind.”
“Nope.”
I place my palm on the picnic blanket. Dad used to have one like it, an old quilt his grandma made before he was born. I remember one August morning when Mom was out of town, Dad took us to the lake for a picnic. Josh sat on the blanket, bent over some paperback, while I made angels in the sand of the bank.
Shrink goes silent, but I can feel her watching me. So intently that for a second I wonder if she’s slipped inside me and can hear the crunch of grass under my little-kid bare feet and see the faded yellow pages of that stupid paperback.
“Stevie, flashbacks are nothing more than memories. They can’t hurt you. Josh can’t hurt you. Not anymore.”
I want to pinch myself until I bleed. Josh never hurt me. He was the only one who never hurt me! And here I am, letting her talk about him like he was some sort of monster. My insides seize, and the sun beats down, and I can almost see the cover, but it’s just outside the reach of memory.
“Have you ever spoken about what Josh—”
Enough. “He never—I wasn’t thinking about that.” My voice is sharp. “I was thinking about this paperback book he was reading and I can’t remember which one, so don’t ask.” My chest rises and falls in jagged rhythm. I press my fingers into the scar on my thigh. Rub it desperately, like a child clutching a blanket after a nightmare.
She is silent for a while. Finally she asks, “When was this?”
“At this picnic. Dad used to take Josh and me on picnics at the lake when our mom was out of town for a case or something.”
“That sounds like fun.”
I wiggle out of my flip-flops. The grass is rough, nothing like it was that day. “Dad said if we couldn’t go where Mom was going, we’d bring the country to us. He said we could be just as fancy as she was. The first time we did it, she was in Rome.”
“So you made Italian food?”
“Yeah. I was eight and Josh was nine. And Dad took us to this lake just outside of town and we had spaghetti. And those little plastic champagne flutes with grape juice for wine. You know those plastic champagne flutes you screw together?”
“Yup. Those are fun. Festive.”
I close my eyes and let the heat from the sun knead my skin. “It’s just that I can’t remember what book he was reading that day.”
“And that detail feels particularly important?”
“Yeah. It’s like, if I can’t remember all the details, then . . . I don’t know.” I realize that my arms and legs are moving slightly, like I’m making another sand angel. I freeze.
“Then what? He’s slipping away?”
“Are we done yet?”
“We have a few minutes left. Up to you how you want to use them.”
I sit up, turn away from Shrink, and survey the lawn. Curly Blonde is sitting at a wrought-iron table outside the patio doors, talking with an old Indian man in a white coat. The psychiatrist, I think.
“I need a new roommate,” I say.
“You’re not happy with your roommate.” One thing I’ve learned so far: Shrinks do a lot of repeating. Buying a parrot would be cheaper. “Can you tell me what’s bothering you, specifically?”
“Nope,” I murmur, still watching. CB is gesturing at the psychiatrist with humiliating enthusiasm.
“Stevie, if you don’t tell me what the issue is, it’s going to be difficult for me to help you resolve it.” I can hear the strain tugging at Shrink’s voice. “I am a therapist, but for better or worse, I’m not a mind reader.”
CB catches sight of me out of the corner of her eye, and breaks away from her conversation to wave excitedly.
“Fine,” I sigh, turning back to Shrink. “It’s her . . . attitude.”
“It’sherattitude! It’sherattitude!” squawks Parrot Shrink. “What is it about her attitude that’s frustrating to you?”
I stare at her, willing her to understand. How can I be expected to make progress with a Yellow Girl sleeping in my room? How can I live with a bulimic for a roommate? Everything about her is too much: the bubbly personality, the wild appetite for human contact. And the flesh—all the excess flesh. She is nothing like me. I am contained, self-sustaining. I don’t need contact; don’t need food. I do not need.
“It’s just that she’s not going to be helpful to me,” I tell her. “To what I’m . . . trying to accomplish in my time here.” Already I’m learning recovery-speak; it will be helpful in getting my way. When in Rome.
Her toes curl. “And what are you trying to accomplish in your time here?”
I stare, wondering if I heard correctly. The one and only time I wish she’d repeat herself, and she just stares back.
What am I trying to accomplish? Can’t she read my intentions in my jutted angles, see the end goal in my glassy, dead eyes? Doesn’t she get it every time I refuse meals and supplement? Or am I not trying hard enough, not achieving enough to make her see my choice, the one I’ve sworn to with skin and bone?
I choose power. I choose death.
“Stevie? Your goals for treatment?”
I have just one. I’ve known the truth since last night; it coalesced as I stared through the dark, listening to CB’s even snores. I understand now: Eden isn’t coming. Dad isn’t coming.
The reality of it threatens to rush in, and I try my hardest to block out all the thoughts that come: I won’t get to say good-bye to Dad in person, or tell Eden I blame her for everything, that I’ve always blamed her. I try to focus on the only thing that matters.
Josh. I extinguish any spark of regret with the syllable of his name. My plan will be harder to execute here, but I’ll do it. I’ll do it for him.
I imagine myself dead. Cold. Perfect and unbreathing with a still, stone heart. The weight of my useless body rotting in the ground. My soul lighter than paper and drifting far from its fleshy prison.
I allow myself a small smile. Death won’t desert me. It’s waiting for me, beckoning. And I’m ready, taking sure steps toward my final act. An intricately choreographed scene that will amaze. I will face the audience: my mother. Eden. My father. Shrink. And with a glimmering cloud of smoke—poof!
I will disappear.