I wake before my alarm goes off, my thoughts hazy, my brain still swimming in a dream about Andy. It’s so vivid that I try to convince myself that it wasn’t a dream at all but a memory. I try to convince myself that it really happened, that it really is happening. I close my eyes and repeat it like a mantra, It’s real, it’s real, it’s real. I tell myself that Andy is next to me in this bed, tell myself that his body is synced with mine. I focus on my lungs expanding and contracting until I swear I can hear him breathing too. I focus until I feel his mouth on mine, until I feel his fingers running along my skin.
I don’t need to look at his picture to conjure him. He’s etched in my mind, my heart, maybe even my soul, although I’m not sure if I believe in souls. I’m not sure what I believe in anymore.
A knock on my bedroom door interrupts me, forcing me to give up the dream and open my eyes. I hear my mother’s voice from the other side. “Can I come in?”
“Sure,” I say. She sits on the edge of my bed. She’s wearing black linen shorts and a gray tank top, her hair pulled back in a low ponytail.
“Get dressed! I thought we’d go to the Sea Horse for breakfast before your appointment with Greg.”
I pull my comforter over my head. “I’m not in the mood for tourists today, Mom.”
“Come on, Ev, please. It’ll be fun. We haven’t been there in forever. Pecan pancakes. Grits with extra butter.” She peels the comforter from my face and flashes a hopeful smile. “Please,” she says again, her palms pressed together as if in prayer. “Pretty please.”
“Well, okay,” I say. “But only because you said pretty please.”
My mother orders her favorite dish at the Sea Horse—biscuits smothered in sausage gravy and topped with two eggs—“the hangover cure,” it’s called on the menu. I drown my pecan pancakes in real maple syrup before I devour them. I salt my buttered grits generously before they disappear.
We get our coffee refills to go and drive to Tampa for my session with Greg. My mother drops me off at Blake High School, telling me she’ll pick me up in about an hour. She’ll go check out nearby Riverwalk while she waits for me, a palm-lined scenic trail that snakes along the Hillsborough River.
Inside the school, I walk down an empty blue hallway. There’s something eerie about a school during summer vacation, all the energy drained from it, abandoned by the students and teachers. Although it’s quiet now, there are signs of previous life. A banner hangs in the stairwell, wishing students a safe and happy summer. Trophies and plaques shine from within their cases, symbols of achievement, artifacts of the past.
I enter the main office and sign in at the reception area, where a secretary clicks her fingertips on a computer keyboard. She directs me to a door labeled GUIDANCE, and after I pass through it, I walk down a short corridor of speckled floor. I find his office door, a plastic nameplate attached to the glass: GREGORY COTTOM, LCSW-C. I sit down on a worn blue office chair and wait, wiping the sweat from my palms on my jeans.
Greg will help me. He will find something in his therapist’s binder that will fix me. He will reach into his messenger bag of tricks, pull out something to seal my dark center, and fashion a tourniquet, twisting and twisting until the center stops leaking, until the darkness is flushed from my bloodstream. Greg will have a hundred ways to fix me, I’m sure of it. I fill my brain with possibilities but wring them out like water.
Greg opens his office door. “Hi, Evelyn. Come on in,” he says, smiling. I walk in and sit down on a dark red office chair with hard plastic armrests.
The room is decorated like a kindergarten classroom instead of a high school social worker’s office. There’s a bulletin board behind him edged with a bright yellow scalloped border. There are brilliant blue cut-out letters on the board spelling out the word FEELINGS. There are small clouds cut out of construction paper, each cloud wearing the name of a different emotion. Fear floats next to anger, which floats next to disappointment. I want to make every cloud of emotion disappear, forcing them back into vapor.
“How is summer treating you so far, Evelyn?” Greg asks. He straightens the row of knickknacks on his desk: an owl made of green glass, a cat figurine, and three monkeys fashioned out of shells, typical touristy trinkets you can find at any of the shops along the beaches. The monkeys are striking the poses of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
“Pretty good so far,” I say.
“Oh yeah? Just pretty good? What have you been up to?”
“Well, I’m going to take an acting class at Suncoast.”
The AC rumbles on, sending a hiss of refrigerated air out through the ceiling vent, rustling the clouds of emotions on the wall. The edge of anger lifts slightly as though it’s trying to rise up and escape into the atmosphere.
“Wow, that’s wonderful, Evelyn. I’m glad you’re having new experiences. Good for the brain, you know—all those neurons firing.”
“Yeah, it’s nice to have something else to focus on for once.”
“What do you mean? What are you usually focused on?” Greg’s voice hangs in the air. He raises his eyebrows slightly, waiting for me to answer. I breathe in, wondering how to say it. I breathe out, realizing there’s only one way to say it.
“Death.” There’s no turning back now. “I’m usually focused on death. I mean, well, I think about death a lot. And I’m afraid I think about it too much.”
Greg makes a quick note on a yellow legal pad in front of him.
“Well, it’s completely natural to think about death, Evelyn. We all do it from time to time. That’s a part of what makes us human—our awareness of death and our own mortality.” He sounds relaxed, nonchalant, as if he’s not worried about me at all. As if he thinks he knows how to deal with someone like me.
“Yeah, well, is it normal to think about death even when you don’t want to? Even when you’re trying to think of other things? It’s like it’s stuck in my subconscious or something.” Behind Greg is a small, square window that overlooks the courtyard. I can see the sky is turning, shades of light blue getting darker, the signs of a thunderstorm brewing. They happen so regularly in the summer afternoons here that you can set your watch by them.
“It’s not a good idea to get caught up in what’s normal or not normal. In fact, I avoid using those words at all. There is no such thing as normal when it comes to the human psyche. Nothing is black or white. There are so many shades of gray, Evelyn. There are so many ways of being, so many ways of reacting to experience.” He makes another note on his legal pad before taking a sip from a stainless steel water bottle on his desk.
“But shouldn’t there be a limit to how much someone thinks about death? I mean, at what point does it become unhealthy? At what point is it bad for you?”
“Well, Evelyn, there is no clinical answer for that. I want you to consider that maybe you’re being a little hard on yourself. Certainly, under your circumstances, I think it’s understandable that you might think about death a little more than the average person.” He makes another note on his legal pad. His pen sounds sharp against the paper.
I grab a tissue from the box on the corner of his desk and twist it around my index finger, something to keep my hands busy. “My circumstances,” I say. “So it’s always going to be about my father, isn’t it?”
“Well, facts are facts, Evelyn. We can’t change your situation. We can’t change what happened, can’t change the fact that your father did what he did. But I wouldn’t say it’s always about him. You can’t trace every problem you have back to just one source. It’s more complex than that.”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s pretty simple, really. I just need to get rid of these thoughts.”
“I don’t think it’s a matter of getting rid of the thoughts about death, Evelyn. I think instead we should be exploring the meaning behind the thoughts together. Can you give me an example? When you say you can’t stop thinking about death, that’s rather abstract. Tell me in a more concrete way.”
“I don’t know if I can,” I say.
“Why?”
“I’m afraid you won’t understand. You’ll think I’m crazy or something.”
Greg laughs softly through his nose. “Evelyn,” he says, “we don’t use that C word in my line of work. Okay?” He looks me squarely in the eyes. “I’m not going to pass any judgment. I’m not going to think any less of you. Just tell me about the thoughts. I can help you if I know what we’re dealing with here.”
I hear a hissing sound in my brain like static, a TV tuned to a channel with no signal. “I just want it all to stop,” I say. I put my head in my hands. “I want it to be over.” I’m sobbing, losing control. Greg stands up and walks around his desk toward me. He lowers himself to my eye level, crouching next to my chair.
“Evelyn, it’s okay,” Greg says. “You are processing a lot of emotions. Talking about it will help. I’m here to listen and to guide you. Maybe you’d like to start seeing me for more one-on-one sessions. Together, we will come up with a plan to help you work through these thoughts and feelings. You aren’t alone in this, Evelyn.”
Greg looks at me with such kindness in his eyes. He means well, but he is wrong. I am alone in this, and that’s how it has to be because who wants to stand with the girl at the edge, staring down into the nothingness below? Who wants to be there to see the moment she lets go? Clarisse was the only one, and I fucked up, and I lost her. Greg doesn’t know how to fix things. I don’t know why I let myself believe he did. There’s only one person who can help me. He’s the one I need to see.
“Thank you, Greg.”
“No thanks needed, Evelyn. It’s what I do. I’m really happy you’ve taken this step. I have a good feeling about your future.”
“Me too,” I say.
Outside, the thunderstorm begins. Rain pelts the window. I stare at the three monkeys on Greg’s desk.
It seems possible to speak no evil. You have a choice in that matter. You control what you say, mostly, unless you count strange phenomena like automatic speech or speaking in tongues or talking in your sleep. But even then, you could argue that the subconscious is in control in those cases, and the subconscious is still you after all—your brain in distilled form, boiled down to its essence.
It seems possible to hear no evil, mostly. You can plug your ears as soon as you hear evil announce itself. But see no evil, that’s the tricky one. Sure, you can cover your eyes once evil approaches, but evil doesn’t always looks like evil until it’s too late so how are you to know when you see it? There’s rarely a warning until evil is already pressed so close to your face that you have to look.