Chapter 6

OUR DAYS START at six in the morning. One of us puts the kettle on and we move forward from there. I usually get ready for a running session but since autumn and winter are becoming intertwined, I take a shower and have breakfast with Jo and Dad.

This morning, I don’t think so. This morning, I’m turning my room upside down.

“Shit…” I let out a whisper, searching for my necklace in the walk-in wardrobe for the third time. It shouldn’t be hard to find. I never misplace it.

The chain is delicate. It could blend in with the taupe carpet but the gold pendant is the size of a shirt button and is engraved with J, which stands for Josephine. She gifted it to me on our anniversary. Initially, it had a pendant with an E. I changed it later on because I felt as if I was wearing a dog tag.

Anxiety starts to grow in my chest. The idea of me losing that piece of jewellery messes with my head. It might seem insignificant but having it means a lot to me. Fidgeting with it has helped me to manage my anxiety.

But above all, even if it sounds juvenile, I love to think I always have her with me.

My phone vibrating on the bedside table cuts me off from unmaking the bed for a second time. I intend to brush it off but I catch my sister’s name at a glance. Sitting on the half-made bed, I take my phone with my heart in my throat.

Three texts from Sonia.

A rush of cold goes down my body. I haven’t talked to her in a long, long time. It’s not like Ben. We might not see each other that much but we do text. I even keep tabs on Sonia through him.

They text and call each other on the regular, so I don’t worry that much because he always says that she is fine, that she’s finishing her STEM course in the computer system and network in France. So the suddenness of this pulls me away from my searching for a moment. I open the texts, somehow waiting for the worst.

S: You guys had dinner with dad and didn’t even face-time me.

S: assholes.

S: jk, I hope everything is fine.

I ignore the fact she called me an asshole because what am I supposed to text back? I want to go back to what I was doing. I'm already running late for the day.

E: Well that’s new.

I regret my text as soon as I hit send. A thousand things rush through my head as I try to come up with ways to fix what I said. What could I say if she responds right now? I delete the message and send another, hoping she didn’t read it.

E: We didn’t want to make you crave Jo’s food.

E: Next time, I promise.

It reads even worse than the last one. The trace of awkwardness shows I’m trying to hide something. She types, stops, and types again. She’s probably writing a paragraph cussing me out and, to be honest, if it makes her feel better and gets me back to my business, it’ll be fine.

S: I saw that.

“Shit.” I would’ve preferred the paragraph. I should’ve known better. There is nothing worse than backhanded texts. Why is this the first thing I come up with when my sister finally gets in touch?

E: keep in touch, Sonny.

She doesn’t reply, and now I'm the one who’s typing and erasing messages.

Mum used to be like this. I hated it. It would shatter every will I had to keep in touch. Ben says that with Sonia, it was worse. Mum was so much harder on Sonia than the rest of us and now it feels as if I’m becoming her.

“Stop it,” I command my brain. Josephine finds me with my eyes closed and my phone against my forehead.

“Honey?” Jo’s hand slides along my shoulders as she sits next to me.

When I open my eyes, I’m lost for words so I show her the screen and what went down between my sister and me. After a few seconds of her reading the awful interaction, her face grimaces, those eyes telling me I could’ve handled the conversation way better.

“Oh, whoa…” Jo gives me back my phone, and I look away in embarrassment. I feel it in every inch of my body. “What did the deleted text say?”

“That her texting me was a first.”

“Oh no.”

“I know.”

“Well, I guess that her reaching out is a good sign, regardless of how this first encounter went.” Jo strokes my back while I keep overthinking. “Try to keep in touch. She’ll soften and will let this go.”

“That's a very objective way of looking at it,” I tease. She sounds like me talking to my patients.

She kisses me before grabbing my hands. “What are you doing? Your dad was a bit worried.”

I let a sigh go, rubbing my eyes. The necklace, Sonia, shouldn’t be stressing me out this much.

“Right, I’m looking for my necklace.” I get up from the bed and walk to the vanity. “I’m sure that I left it in my nightstand but after coming out of the shower, it wasn’t there.”

“The one with the J engraved on the pendant?”

“Yes, exactly that one.” I keep opening and closing the drawers. Jo clears her throat and I turn to her, a bit hysterical because I don’t have time for this. I’ll be late.

Tenderly, she looks at me. She lets out a giggle when she gets up from the bed and goes to pick up my necklace dangling from the bed’s post.

“You…” She stands in front of me. I don’t even have the will to move. I’m not easily embarrassed, but with Sonia’s text and me acting like a toddler, making a mess of the bed, and skipping breakfast, my face is about to melt off. “…Need to relax, or take a holiday.” She clasps it around my neck and gives me a soft tap on the chin when she’s done.

“I know…” I grab the pendant as though it’s second nature and feel the texture of the J between my fingers. “I like to keep you with me everywhere I go, that’s all.”

AFTER THE INSENSITIVE-text-and-missing-necklace fiasco, I don’t have time to pass for Silvia’s tea. I arrive rushing through the door with my messenger bag, some folders in hand and my trench coat dangling from my arm. My first patient and his quite indiscreet mother are already waiting for me. After I settle my things on my desk, Silvia rushes through the door to give me Edward Lynch’s files.

Seventeen-year-old Edward, or, as he wants me to call him, Edds—I’m certainly not calling him Edds, I try to stick to the pronoun you as much as possible—is, overall, a normal kid with GAD and is prone to suffering from bipolar depression. His parents were advised by the school’s psychologist to see me due to misbehaviour and poor performance with his grades.

His parents want me to ‘fix him.’ And after a few encounters with them, I know he’s not the one that needs to be ‘fixed.’

“Why did you decide to be a shrink?” he asks me as he walks into my office to the sofa in front of my armchair. When I look at him, I notice that he has a new piercing on his nose.

“Why did you decide to get a new piercing?” I ask back with a smirk when he sits on the sofa.

“You can’t do that. You can’t answer my question with another question. It’s against your practice.” He looks a little irritated but, at the same time, amused. “I just felt like it.”

“I see.” I write down a note. “And I actually can, but since it seems that you are interested in this topic and have researched it, let me answer. Because I think the human emotions and the human brain are fascinating.”

He snorts and lets his head fall back. “All of you doctors have the same template answer. You always find something about your degree fascinating. ‘Oh I think the heart is fascinating, the lungs are fascinating.’ What the hell do you study if you think that shit is fascinating?”

“Microbiology.” The questions are rhetoric but I throw that there so I can ease his increasing frustration. He looks at me for a moment, biting the inside of his cheek. I’m not sure if it’s anxiety or he doesn’t want to laugh. He finally let himself grin while looking away.

“I just wish someone would be honest with me, man.”

Something is upsetting him but he doesn’t want to be upfront about it. There are still pieces of his walls up so asking directly wouldn't work.

“I understand that. Who do you feel isn’t being honest with you?”

“Everyone. Teachers, my parents, you, Ophelia—” He cuts off.

My brows rise. This is the first time I’m hearing that name. That path could be the right one to follow, but his face changes from a cocky teen’s to a scared little boy’s. It's so fast but it’s there. His eyes go from me to the door back to me again until I get it. He doesn’t want me to talk about this person when his mother is listening close to the door. She’s done it before.

“I understand.” I put my pen down and cross my hands over my knee, giving him my whole attention. “Well, I can only change myself from your list, so…” I let out a deep breath. “I wanted to be a therapist because when I was in college, I made lots of bad decisions that almost ended my life. Most of those decisions were made because I had undiagnosed problems, just like you. I was suffering from an unbalanced mental illness and no one around me was able to tell. So I decided that I wanted to help people who felt like no one was being honest with them.”

I grin at him.

I shouldn’t be giving details about my life to patients because it could compromise the course of the therapy, but sometimes, you have to give them something. You have to bend the rules a little so they can hold on a bit more.

“So, you like to help people. I see. I get that.” He looks down at his shoes. While he’s there, I pass him a note that lets him know that we can talk about Ophelia another time. “Thank you for being honest.”

TODAY WASN’T PARTICULARLY heavy but still, when I say goodbye to Silvia, I might as well have wrapped a shackle around my neck instead of my scarf.

Edward’s words keep reverberating inside my head.

You like to help people. I get that.

I think I do. At least, it’s what I try to tell myself when days like today happen, when they are too much. But today’s session reminded me of things that I thought were obvious. Maybe they were too far back in my brain.

I made bad decisions. I don’t see myself as a saint or as a person who can do no wrong but I believe that it’s more complicated than that.

Images of my body resting in a bathtub with muddy water flash before my eyes when the elevator opens and I’m greeted with the fluorescent white light. I shake my head as another memory of my green hair falling to the floor leaves me breathless.

The bell indicating that I’m already on the main floor pulls me out of my head and, fixing myself, I step out of the elevator. I’m about to exit the building when I spot an olive parka sitting on the steps of the building.

“It’s not him…” I whisper to myself. “Is it?”

A dog the size of a toy climbs the steps and sits beside the figure. “Ah, shit.”

Theodore is sitting under the rain with his miniature dog by his side.

“Hello?” I want to be wrong and be mistaking someone else for him, but when he looks up, the frames of his glasses reflect the street lights.

“Hi.” His voice is energetic against the noise of the rain.

“What are you doing here?” This is the last thing I want to do today.

“We need a better greeting than that.” He gets up from the steps. I take a step back because sometimes I forget that he’s a head taller than me, which is a bit intimidating.

“What do you want me to say then?”

“Something like ‘how are you?’ for a change? I don’t know, maybe? Just a suggestion.”

I sigh and his whole demeanour changes from funny to concerned. He stops looking directly at me and his hands start fidgeting with his dog’s lead. I’m about to ask him what’s going on but I’m lacking the small percent of energy I need to give him.

“Look, I’m not in the mood. I had a rough day.”

“That’s great.” I look at him as if he had grown a second head. “We can be miserable together.”

“What happened?”

“It didn’t work out. With your friend. Not at all.” I think it’s the way he emphasises each sentence that sends me on the verge of losing it. This fucker cannot wait till we meet again to tell me all of his complaints about the therapist I got for him.

I should flip him off and say goodbye. “Teodoro.” I haven’t called him that in a long time.

“Oui, Aimé”

A bolt sends me one more step back. I wasn’t expecting to hear that again. Not the accent, not even in his voice. He knows exactly what he is doing. He has to; there’s no way he can throw that so carelessly at me. I hold on to the railing of the steps so the whole building doesn’t fall on me.

“I don’t have time for this.” I walk down the steps to my car but his hand grabs my arm as he says my name in a French accent.

His touch makes me turn to him in one motion. “Don’t touch me. You need to stop.” My chest puffs, trying to make myself look bigger and stronger, even though I feel tiny and hopeless. This is the only way I’m in control of the situation. “We found each other by accident years after things ended between us. So what?” I shrug. “Huh? I get it, it can happen. I even get the crazy coincidence of you living in Soho and that you are just ‘living your best life,’ making friends and acquaintances around the neighbourhood, but…” I'm breathless. I’m not even shouting, but my heart is hitting my ribcage like a war drum. “What I don’t get is why you keep looking for me. Why are you so invested in me seeing you, being around you, when you upset me?” Now my voice has risen a bit. He hasn’t let go of my arm. “Do you like to see me in distress? I would understand that, too. It’s very… you. Just like when we were in college.”

“No, listen.” Now both of his hands look for my shoulders but I snap myself away from him with my heart almost jumping out my mouth. I hate his closeness. “Listen, please. I’m not looking to upset you. I’m not, believe me.”

“Then what do you want from me?” The way my voice comes like a plea makes me hate everything even more. I hate the way his eyes gleam under the streetlights, the way our clothes are getting soaked in the rain, the way I can’t just walk away because what I want are answers, what I want is stronger than what I need.

“I have nothing!” he yells against the loud sound of thunder. I’m getting used to people looking at us as if we were in a domestic dispute. “I have no one, no friends, no family. I’m about to lose my daughter. Her mother wants to give me unmeasurable hell. I don’t talk to my parents or sisters anymore.” Chase has started barking at us. I’m sure he doesn’t appreciate being dragged into the rain, let alone this mess. “When I saw you at Whole Foods, I remembered you, alright? I remembered I was a piece of shit with you. But I also remembered your kindness, your friendship, and I thought maybe this time I could be a decent friend and person. I know I might not deserve a second chance, but please, Emma…” Why does he have to say my name like that? As if I’m an old friend, as if the letters were melting on his tongue the way they used to ten years ago. “Let me show you that I’ve changed and that I want to fight for something till the end, for my daughter. Please.”

I know I can refute what he said, but I have zero will to do it. It's pouring down, I know Josephine is texting me, waiting for me, and I want to go home.

We could stay here in the rain, get a fucking cold, and never see each other again. I can do that. I can turn around and just let everything be a bad moment.

So, you like to help people. I see. I get that.

Those words echo in my head. I sat in front of my patient and told him I wanted to be there for people who didn’t feel like the world was being honest with them. I don’t know if it’s the wet curls, my damp socks, or the dog nibbling the strap of my bag that makes me pinch the bridge of my nose in frustration. I’m going to regret this decision, I know.

“Shit...” I let out. “Get in the car.”

The silence that settles in the car is not fragile. Instead, it’s somewhat comfortable. I guess he understands how much he wears me down and that I’m still processing all the things he said to me, so condescending and contradictory.

He knows what he did. Maybe all the shit he put me through finally sunk in after all these years. Still, he thinks he deserves a second chance, it doesn’t matter how much he says. Deep down, he feels entitled to my forgiveness.

When we arrive at his place near my practice, a set of apartments just like my office, we sit in the car for a moment. Still immersed in the silence and the sound of the raindrops against the windows.

“I don’t even know what I said back there,” he sighs.

I snort at the randomness of his comment, and he starts to chuckle, too. Even when everything is already weird and random, it can get weirder. I’d never thought that I’d be in my car, in the middle of a storm, laughing with Theodore Eullie.

We lock eyes. I won’t be the one to look away. I want him to know this means nothing.

“I’m sorry I want your help even when I’m aware I don’t deserve it.” When he says it like that, a needle pierces through my chest.

I fucking look away.

“You can’t help yourself, huh?” I tease. What else can I do?

“I guess not.” He grabs my hand and all the alarms in my head go off. He taps it with his other hand. “Let me offer you a deal.” I must be a lunatic because I don’t say a word but I don’t retrieve my hand, either. “But don’t look that excited… You have a lot of unanswered questions. I do, too.” He stops but I can barely concentrate on what’s happening right now.

“Help me and I’ll answer your questions. Shit, if you want to call me out on all the shit I did and put an insult into the mix, I’m down for it.”

He’s not serious.

He can’t be.

His hand is still cupping mine and his hopeful face hasn’t changed, which means that he is serious. I shouldn’t. It’s not ethical. I’d be breaking so many codes. I’d lose my licence if somebody found out.

But still.

There’s a pinch in my stomach that pulls me to the possibility of having the answers that kept me up at night, to be able to have the closure that I deserve. I’ll have the chance to say all I wanted to say and I couldn’t.

And I’m undone.

“Fine.” I retrieve my hand and place it on the steering wheel to let him know I’m about to leave. “Two times a week, Two times a day, Tuesday and Thursday, two to three and five to six. And don’t be late.”

“Thank you.” This time, it feels like he means it.