I am not one of those eyes-only criers. What a gift that would be. No, my eyes are the last to get in on the action. My mouth wobbles and, basically, disintegrates. My face becomes red and contorted. The only thing to do is to hide it.
So, am I saying that vanity is what made me run away from Justin when I cried in the park yesterday?
Dr. Gilbert looks at me expectantly. When I don’t read any more, she says, “No more?”
“That’s everything I wrote down.”
“And that’s fine,” she says.
“I do hate the way I look when I cry,” I say. “So of course I wouldn’t want this guy I’m kind of interested in to see me crying, when my face falls apart.”
I sit for a few minutes without saying anything. She waits. Dr. Gilbert is a patient person.
“And maybe I didn’t want to cry about Humphrey—about Humphrey in particular—in front of him. In front of anyone, really.”
“Because you think it might seem strange that you felt so close to a five-year-old,” Dr. Gilbert prompts, “who doesn’t know enough to have conversations about family dynamics and immigration?”
Wow. I said that two weeks ago. “Do you memorize the things I say and write in here?”
“The memorable things, yes,” she says, with a hint of a smile.
“Well,” I say, “it felt okay for Justin to know how great I thought Humphrey was. How cute and smart.”
I am aware that I am not saying whether I did or didn’t want Justin to see how close I felt to Humphrey. I’m only saying that I was okay with Justin knowing how much I liked Humphrey. Two different things. And I know I’m the one who raised this issue with Dr. Gilbert in the first place, this matter of feeling too close to Humphrey—but I don’t want to talk about that with her anymore. I’m not sorry I said it when I said it, but I’m not going back to it, either.
“So then why do you think you didn’t want to cry in front of Justin about Humphrey?” she asks.
“It’s a little confusing,” I say. “Maybe I do feel some embarrassment about what—about what—”
This is hard to say. I’m stumbling.
Dr. Gilbert is sitting there, her usual patient self.
“Not embarrassed, exactly, but I am aware that it might seem, I’ll say, unusual, what Humphrey and I—what we … had.”
There, I said it. We had something. We weren’t siblings. We weren’t exactly friends. But we were something. I would say we were soul mates, but I don’t want to say that out loud.
“What I’m trying to say is that what Humphrey and I had—maybe I feel something like embarrassment about it. But mostly, I want to protect it. I feel protective of its … perfection. I don’t want to say and show everything out loud about it to people. Especially people who didn’t even know him.”
“Even Justin, a new friend whom you like and, presumably, trust.”
“Is that bad?” I ask. “Does that mean I don’t know how to be friends with someone my own age? I did share some with Justin. More than usual. A lot more. Just not everything.”
“No, Danielle,” Dr. Gilbert says. “It is not bad. We aren’t in the territory of good and bad here.”
No, we’re not, are we. After all the times I’ve gone over the accident, I’ve got north, south, east, and west down pat. But I sure could use a compass to navigate whatever territory it is that I’m moving into—with Justin, but also, if it’s not too strange to say this, with Humphrey. And with my ideas about what is and what is not too strange.