I PULLED INTO THE DRIVEWAY after the less than ten-minute drive from Kim’s office. Mando was washing dishes at the kitchen sink after feeding the boys an early dinner. He dried his hands as I put down my keys and purse.
“How’d it go?”
After my appointment finished, I felt as if I couldn’t manage a full, deep breath. I assumed it was an aftereffect of the crying, akin to a toddler’s posttantrum hitching breath. I took one of these jagged breaths before answering. “It went fine. I think it’ll be good. I’m going back next week.”
“Okay,” he responded, waiting for more. We’d both been counting the moments until the appointment, anticipating it would be a hopeful turn. But Mando’s hope was contingent on mine, so he waited in vain for what I couldn’t give: assurances that I would soon be back to some semblance of the person he knew.
I shrugged. I saw his efforts to remain patient, to pose a productive question that wouldn’t be discouraging for both of us, but he didn’t have the vocabulary to inquire about what I was experiencing, just as I didn’t have the words to describe it. We were lost in translation. So instead of saying I felt separated from everything around me as if a thin glass wall surrounded me on all sides, instead of saying that the glass muffled the sound and love and warmth I needed from my life, instead of saying that a solution for this felt so far away that it was nearly invisible to me, I said, “Yeah. She seems good.”
And he said, “I’m glad you went to see her.”