Fear of heights was a pretty common phobia. Camila had worked with plenty of patients dealing with it, and she felt like a goddamn hypocrite now in this red tin death trap, ascending what felt like Everest.
“This is going way too fast,” she said.
“It only goes like five miles per hour,” Zach said.
“Six,” she retorted, “six miles per hour.”
“You’re doing great. People commute on this every day. It’s not going to take any time at all to get up there. And once we’re up there, there are restaurants. We could get some lunch.”
“I am so not hungry.”
“I have never heard those words come out of your mouth,” Zach said.
She felt the vibrations of the tracks underneath her and wanted to hurl. “Bitch, you met me yesterday, basically. And, well, you’ve never made me face my mortality.”
Zach’s voice took on a quite yummy stern tone. “You’re fine. Haven’t you ever driven up here to watch the fireworks?” His reaction to her resulting look was better than a mirror. “OK, so no fireworks for you.”
“Why would I come up here with all the crowds to watch the fireworks I could just watch on TV? Or not. You see one firework show, you’ve seen them all.”
He wrapped an arm around her lower back and tugged her near. “I never expected you to be so cynical.”
“I’m not cynical,” she said, inhaling him now that he was closer. What tree did he smell like? She wasn’t sure. In the books she read, men always smelled like trees, but she avoided trees because they made her sneeze and bugs lived in them. Was his scent something peppery? Like vanilla, but not super sweet? Whatever, he smelled good and she wanted a big whiff. “I just don’t want to be up here.”
“It’s almost over,” Zach said, stroking the small of her back.
“Oh god. It’s shaking. Can’t you feel that?”
“That’s because we’re stopping,” Zach said, patting her on the shoulder now like she’d just done a good sports thing.
“Fuck, this is going to be even scarier on the way down, isn’t it?” Camila asked.
The car came to a stop and Zach pulled her by the hand. “A problem for later.”
Rushing out as quickly as she possibly could, Camila sat her butt on the ground, so incredibly grateful to no longer be in what had felt like a coffin ascending a cliff. “Oh thank god. Sweet Earth. Sweet ground. Madre tierra.”
She was drawing some stares but she didn’t give a shit. It seemed Zach didn’t either, because he let her stage her scene for a bit before pulling her back up. “OK, all right. Come look at this view. That’s the reward.”
Trying to keep her wits about her, Camila followed Zach to the railing that overlooked a swath of the city.
It all looked so pretty from up here — the cheery yellow of the bridges, the mirrored steel mingling with brown brick. The way that old industry merged with new felt just right. Her eyes were filled with buildings and rocky hills and water on all sides. She’d lived in this city her whole life and knew that she could never squeeze into all its crevices and pry out its secrets.
Maybe it wasn’t New York or L.A., but from here it felt enormous. This city had history, good and bad, progress and inequity. It made more sense here, looking at it from above, that it could hold so many of her best and worst memories.
“It’s a nice view,” she said, using the practiced neutral voice she used in session. “But I’m sure it’s nothing like the views that you’re used to in your travels.”
Zach was thoughtful for a moment.
“I don’t think you get used to things like that. I think if you do, you’ve lost the plot of what travel is for.” He looked out at the view as if he could see past it, through it. “And you know,” he said, “this is one of the things that I love about Pittsburgh. The landscape reminds you that you’re on Earth. It’s not just all hunks of steel. You see nature woven in even up here, and it feels like we just stacked a bunch of LEGO temporarily on top of a landscape that’s going to overtake and outlive us.”
“Yeah,” Camila said, letting that thought marinate. “That makes sense to me.”
“Really?” he asked. “Doesn’t sound too pretentious?”
“It’s just the right level of pretentious,” she said. “OK, I’ve got about two more minutes of enjoying the view and pondering my existence before I want to get back on that hell trolley so we can get something to eat.”
“There she is,” he said.
Thankfully the ride back down wasn’t as bad, and Zach held her hand the whole time and distracted her with stories of fights he’d seen break out during Steelers games his dad would take him to during his rare visits.
They stopped for sandwiches at a sports bar by the river, and Zach ordered one of the local craft beers, asking if Camila minded him having a drink before the server came around. Camila sipped on a non-alcoholic ginger beer, enjoying how spicy the bubbles felt with each sip.
“So why the bumblebee?” he asked, holding the underside of her wrist to look at the fresh art.
“Honeybee. Crucial difference for purposes of the metaphor.”
“Because you’re so sweet?” he teased. “Can a tattoo ever just be a pretty thing and not have some meaning behind it?”
“Sure, it can, but I’m a self-indulgent, navel-gazing overthinker so, it’s gonna have a metaphor behind it.”
“You and I have that in common. So what’s special about the honeybee, to you?”
“Honeybees are the ones that die if they sting someone. Most bees can sting you and go on to live full, happy lives after ruining your day, but not honeybees. They basically have to disembowel themselves to remove the stinger. It’s gruesome.”
Flinching at her over his beer, Zach said, “So is it like … you only get one shot? Is it an 8 Mile thing?”
“No. It’s more that … OK, so I used to be a real hothead. Really difficult to shake off the ‘spicy Latina’ stereotype when I was, in fact, a chaos entity in my own life. And honeybees make me think of how, when I lash out, I’m the one who gets hurt. Not a perfect metaphor since the bees are usually provoked, and they only lash out once versus it being a pattern. But it’s close enough. And it’s cute. Maybe that’s enough reason to put something on your body permanently. Maybe it isn’t.”
“I can’t imagine you as a hotheaded chaos entity.”
“You can’t?”
“Not at all. You might be the most level-headed, shit-together person I’ve ever met. I mean, you’re a therapist, for one.”
“Oh god. It’s laughable how not together I am. Just because I’m a therapist doesn’t mean I’m not a messy person. Pretty much every therapist I know is mentally ill, myself included.”
“That kind of surprises me.”
“It shouldn’t. I get why it does, though. We’ve been indoctrinated into the idea of therapist as cipher, as a blank slate. But I find that letting clients see glimpses of me as a full person makes therapy way more effective. It makes people more willing to open up. It lessens the shame of whatever they’re dealing with. I know that for me, I had a completely different experience in therapy before and after my therapist disclosed relevant stuff about her life to me. I went from thinking she was this flawless arbiter of morality and sanity who was certainly casting judgment on me, to someone who I felt was actually there for me. It made me check my own assumptions about people, too. Changed everything for me.”
“Interesting,” he said, and the way he said it, she believed it. He wasn’t scoffing at her. He wasn’t just throwing one word out there to stop her from expounding further despite not understanding her.
He sounded like he was genuinely interested in her reasoning, like he was mulling it over, like he would think about it days from now. He’d remember. He’d think about the way that she looked and sounded when she told him about it.
She realized that she was projecting an awful lot onto one word, onto one man, and she thought about ordering herself a beer.
Followed by several more beers, followed by a gin and tonic, followed by shot after shot of bourbon.
“So,” she said, “tell me something else that you’ve never done.”
“I was ready for this,” Zach said. “Never have I ever managed to keep a plant alive.”
She laughed. “Neither have I! They hate me.”
“Should we go and get some plants? Try not to kill them?”
“I'm down,” she said. “I hear having plants around is really good for your mental health. Unfortunately, the plants my clients benefit from in my office are just some really good fake plants. Well, some decent fake plants. Some passable fake plants.”
“Well then,” Zach said, “we’re going to have to get something for your office and something for your apartment.”
“I am up for the challenge, as soon as I figure out where one acquires plants.”
After some Googling, they found a local nursery and headed there next. Drawn in by a tall, luscious fiddle leaf fig that looked right out of a fitness YouTuber’s home, Camila headed for the row of them, while Zach looked at hanging baskets of pretty purple flowers and long, vining philodendrons.
After looking at the price tags, Camila caught up with Zach and tugged him close enough to whisper. “These are so expensive,” she giggled.
“We should probably start with something smaller and cheaper anyway,” he said.
A woman in a green apron approached them. “You folks doing OK?”
Camila was about to give her standard “Just browsing” dismissal, but Zach cut in. “Yes, hi. Can you point us to the plants that are hard to kill?”
“Not cacti, though,” Camila said. “They clash with my decor aesthetic.”
Zach nodded in agreement. “Plus I’m clumsy.”
“I don’t think cacti are as easy as people think they are, anyway,” said the saleswoman, whose name tag read “Linda.” “What I would recommend is something like a monstera. Or a ZZ plant. You could throw it in a closet for six months and it would survive.”
“That sounds perfect,” Camila said.
“Does your house have a window in the bathroom? Because these over here,” Linda said, guiding them to a table of voluminous ferns, “are some of my favorites. They love humidity, don’t need a lot of light, and they’re safe if you’ve got pets or little ones.”
Camila realized with growing horror that this plant lady thought they were a couple. A married couple even, with “little ones.” She was about to correct her, which in her panic would have been not tactful at all, when Zach pulled her in for a side hug and said, “No kids yet. We’re newlyweds.”
Linda beamed at them. “I knew it! You have that newlywed lovestruck look about you. Congratulations! I don’t see rings, though, but I know some young kids don’t like ’em. My daughter and her husband don’t wear them,” she said.
“Oh we have them,” Camila said, deciding to play along because why the hell not. “They’re just being resized.”
“Yeah, when you honeymoon by the ocean, you figure out real quick if your ring is too loose after all,” Zach said.
“And she would have just killed you if you lost it, I’m sure,” Linda teased.
“Oh, not at all,” Camila said. “If anything, I’m the one always misplacing things.” She couldn’t deny to herself that she was getting a thrill from this.
Once they’d loaded a cart with unkillable plants, they browsed the ceramic pots.
“How do you know how big to get them?” Camila asked.
Zach shrugged. “No idea. Same size as the ones they’re in now?”
“I think bigger. And what kind of dirt do we need? We need to find Linda again.”
After Googling, Zach held up his phone up. “Yeah, you’re right it should be bigger ones, but this says we don’t need to repot them right away, we can just set them in the new pots. And that dirt says all purpose, so I’d say that one.”
Camila heard someone call Zach’s name just then, and she turned toward the voice, but not before catching the way Zach paled.
“It is you,” the deep voice said. It was attached to a giant of a man built like Henry Cavill, pushing a cart with a toddler.
“Chase,” Zach said, in the flimsiest version of his voice.
“Daddy, who?” the little girl asked, pointing at Zach.
The man, Chase, pinched the toddler’s cheek and they smiled at each other. “This is Zach,” Chase said. “We went to high school together.”
Finding his tongue, Zach said, “Chase, this is Camila. Camila, Chase. We, um, we went to high school together.”
Camila raised an eyebrow at him. “I heard. Hi Chase! Nice to meet you,” she said, extending a hand. She watched how the men stood, the chasm between them larger than the six feet of space.
“Emily told me about your mom,” Chase said. “I’m sorry, man. Are you … are you staying here now?”
Zach nodded. “At least until Irene graduates. She’s going to be a senior in the fall.”
Chase whistled. “Time, man. Anyway, uh, good seeing you. Nice to meet you, Camila. See you around.”
“Bye,” Camila said with a cheery wave. She turned her attention to Zach, curious but not inquiring yet.
“Let’s go check out. This is going to be pricey.”
* * *
By the time they’d loaded up Zach’s backseat with plants and she saw he’d finally stopped shaking, it was evening. They got drive-thru coffee and drove around aimlessly.
“Should we just call it a day?” Camila asked.
It took Zach a while to answer. “There’s one more place we can go to, if you have time.”
“I mean, I’m having coffee after 6. I never do that. So I don’t plan on getting sleepy any time soon. So where are we going?” Camila asked.
“There’s this park near my old school that I used to go to a lot. There’s a story there. But I’ve never been back as an adult, and you’ve never been.”
“That counts,” Camila said. “How far?”
“We’re almost there,” he said.
A couple of minutes later, they pulled into a small park. It had a swing set and slides and monkey bars, but mostly it was just grass and benches. Deciding between the bench and the swings, Camila headed for the swings, and Zach took the seat next to her.
“Story time?” Camila asked.
There was that frenetic energy to his movements again, but they were stilted as if he was aware of them. He was trying to contain himself.
“Not yet. I realize there’s a lot I don’t know about you.”
Camila pushed off her feet and answered him mid-swing. “Like what?”
“Like, what’s your favorite color?”
He kicked off and joined her, and they were pendulums moving in opposite directions. Swings passing in the night, in perfect time.
“Purple,” Camila said. “Yours?”
“Teal,” he answered. “What kind of music do you like?”
“Oh, I’m a metalhead,” Camila said. She was swinging fast enough that the sound was distorted to her own ears.
“Really? I would have thought you were more into hip hop.”
She skidded to a stop. “Why? Because I’m brown?”
Zach stopped too and looked at her in a panic. “No, that’s not what I mean. I mean … maybe? I’m sorry.”
Camila couldn’t keep her stank face and burst into a belly laugh. “I’m messing with you. I do like hip hop, too. But in that regard, I’m more into whatever is trending on social media. And I like some weird shit, too. Like, I found this playlist the other day of orchestral EDM, and I’m in love.”
“Orchestral EDM? How does that work?”
“You know, like EDM covers of Mozart, or a mix of orchestral instruments and electronic ones. It’s cool. I’ll make you a playlist. Now, story time?”
Zach started swinging again. “OK. So, I don’t talk about my mom much.”
“I’ve noticed.”
He laughed, miserable. “Of course you have. I probably have ‘mommy issues’ written all over me.”
“That’s reductive,” Camila said. “People are more complicated than that.”
“Fine. But I do have mommy issues. My mother was a vicious drunk. She didn’t hit us or anything. She just yelled and said awful things, got sloppy, almost set the house on fire once because she started cooking something then passed out.”
“Christ. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, it was bad. And she took most of her anger out on me. I think it was partly because I was the oldest and Irene was just a toddler, but also because she saw me as more of an extension of my dad than she did Irene.”
They slowed to a stop. Quieter now, Zach continued. “I used to come here sometimes to wait out her tantrums. My best friend, Chase — yeah, the guy we ran into — he would pick me and Irene up and we’d come here. Irene would play or fall asleep in my lap, and we’d shoot the shit until we thought the coast was clear. It wasn’t every time my mother got drunk, just when she was exceptionally trashed and mean. I did try to be out of the house or in the basement as much as I could.”
“That sounds awful. You should have been able to feel safe and comfortable in your own home, in all of your home,” Camila said.
“I know,” Zach said. “Thank you. But, because I didn’t, I couldn’t wait to get out and go to college. And then I got a job at a museum in Philadelphia, and I almost never came home. Just around the holidays, for as few days as I could justify. And then I started traveling, and I didn’t come back at all. Not until her funeral. Which was also the first time I’d seen my dad in a few years.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. I know people go no-contact. I don’t feel like I was obligated to try to have a relationship with her. But I abandoned Irene. Who knows what she had to put up with while I was gone, with no one to be a buffer?”
“Zach, you didn’t abandon her.”
“I did,” Zach said, and he was forceful, angry. “I was supposed to protect her and I just fucked off to live my own life. ‘I did my time, kid, it’s your turn.’ I might as well have left her to be raised by wolves. Irene was the one who found her. She’d stopped breathing after mixing her booze with too many painkillers. It was an accident — apparently she’d been doing that for a while, and the dose wasn’t even that high according to the medical examiner. It seems the booze really did get her in the end.”
Camila said nothing for long moments. She stroked his back.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s terrible that your sister had to go through any of that, especially at the end. But at the same time, you both had a father who should have intervened, regardless of how bad things were between them. You were a child and then you were an adult who deserved to live his own life. You can feel guilty because whatever emotions come up for you are valid, but intellectually, you know you did nothing wrong, right?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Right?”
“But I could have called more. I could have texted. I could have flown her out to spend holidays with me instead of with her. I could have done more and I failed her. I feel like I’m failing her now, too.”
She wanted to keep pushing back, but didn’t. Instead she rubbed his back and felt him lean into her touch, his eyes softening. “You’re doing the best you can,” she whispered.
“Thanks,” he said, and when he looked back at her he looked calmer. “There’s another bit of the story.”
“Yeah?”
“Chase was my best friend, but, sometimes he was more.”
“Oh that makes sense,” Camila said. “I did catch that old-flame vibe. I mean, that sounds really sweet and romantic based on how he’d rescue you and Irene. Was it? Will you tell me about him?”
“I will, but some other time,” Zach said. Smirking, he added, “I’ll tell you about his sister, too. I dated her first.”
Camila gaped at him. “Are you fucking serious?”
“Unfortunately, yeah.”
“Oh, so that’s definitely a story for another day.”
“It is. I’ll tell you how it ends, though. Chase still lives in Pittsburgh, obviously, with his husband and their daughter. Emily was the surrogate, actually, so you know, no animosity between them over their shared ex. He teaches AP English and he and his husband are in a Ghostbusters cosplay group that goes to fundraisers for different causes. And Emily became an architect and moved to Los Angeles. She designs modernist homes that are one big window for celebrities and assorted corporate VPs, I’m sure. I only know all this from Emily’s social media. Chase and I didn’t keep in touch.”
“Well, at least it sounds like they survived you unscathed,” Camila joked, shoulder checking him.
“I think I got some scratches in,” he said. “Your turn. Something dark and sad, preferably. Want to tell me about your divorce?”
“Absolutely not,” she said. “That’s a long story.” She thought, well, this is as good a time as any, so she was going to do it. She was going to talk about her diagnosis and not be a little bitch about it. “But I’ll tell you something else that’s personal. So, you know about my career, but you don’t know that part of why I was so drawn to this field is because I’ve benefited from it. Remember what I said earlier?”
“About being a hotheaded chaos entity?” he quipped.
“Yeah, that, and how a lot of therapists including me are mentally ill?”
“Uh huh. So, depression? Anxiety?”
“Of course. And almost certainly undiagnosed ADHD, if social media algorithms have me pegged better than my psychiatrist. But the main thing I have is borderline personality disorder. Have you ever heard of it? I’ve definitely mentioned it in at least one video.”
He shook his head. “It sounds kind of familiar, probably because of your videos, yeah, but not really, no.”
This was the hard part. She knew how to connect behavior to a diagnosis. What she didn’t know was how to explain feeling so empty, feeling like such a bottomless void needing to be filled, yet popping like an overinflated balloon in response to every emotion.
“So there’s a lot more to it, but if you Google it, trust me, you’re gonna have a bad time. Basically, I feel things a lot more intensely than other people. Sometimes I feel like my emotions are going to kill me. And I react to the world accordingly. So I’ve had to learn how to deal with distress and with tough emotions, how to be better with other people, and how to take care of myself when I do get triggered. I’m in a good place now, but I wasn’t, before.”
“Is that why you don’t drink?” Zach asked.
“Partly, yeah. I didn’t feel my feelings as much when I drank, and that helped until it didn’t. Because, OK. Picture this giant box full of LEGO. Whenever I felt like I had a big feeling, I had to dump out that whole box trying to find the appropriate piece, the right reaction, and I never could. I just had a mess to deal with on top of whatever minor inconvenience or insult had sent me spiraling. So when I drank, I didn’t feel like I had to wade through the box. But the mess would spill out eventually.”
He reached over and squeezed her hand. “I understand the box metaphor. But I don’t think I relate to it. I feel like my emotional response is a 3D printer. I know in my head how I should react, and I just sort of make that piece.”
“That’s really interesting. And completely unrelatable to me.” They both laughed. “But it makes sense with what I’ve seen about you. You’ve got this stoic thing going on. But as far as the drinking, I’ve since learned other ways to cope.”
“Like what?”
She thought about her daily routines and how she got from her darkest place to now. “Lots and lots of therapy, including a type that’s specifically for teaching people with BPD skills to deal with it, like mindfulness. So, meditation plays into that. I do that every day. I knit. I exercise like I’m training for the Olympics. I get enough sleep. And I try to avoid drama.” She tried to think if there was anything else. “Oh! And I take medication. It helps make all the other stuff I do to manage my BPD doable. So on a related note, you really don’t have to worry about drinking around me. I’m good.”
“Are you sure?” Zach asked. “Because I’ve seen how bad it can get. I don’t want to tempt you, or upset you.”
Camila patted his shoulder. “I promise, I’m good. I don’t like when people are sloppy drunk around me, but mostly it’s because I don’t want to babysit them. But I’ve got everything under control.”
“So I was right,” Zach said.
Puzzled, she waited for him to elaborate.
“You do have your shit together. Because that sounds like a hard disorder to deal with, and you do so much to get a handle on it.”
She smiled and squeezed his hand. “Yeah, I guess I do. I’m doing the best I can.” Another squeeze. “Just like you are.”
Zach reached across the swings to touch her face and pull her into a kiss. There was heat and desire in that kiss, but just like she’d noticed Zach trying to contain his jitters earlier, this kiss felt methodical. Deliberate. He took his time exploring her tongue with his, digging his hands up into her hair slowly. When she was almost panting, almost ready to beg, he pulled her away by her curls and gently tilted her head back to taste her neck, tormenting her with licks and nibbles.
He descended to her collarbone, the hollow between them. His kisses across the top of her breasts burned through her. She was molten and he was forging her, working her like the metal he spent his days crafting. Her need was as sharp as a steel blade made in the fires of his touch.
That was when she knew she wouldn’t invite Zach home tonight. This magical, unpredictable day could not end predictably, with him satisfying the needy ache in her and leaving his teeth marks all over her skin. She felt so much closer to him as it was. She felt, so much. It was too fast. It was stronger than she was.
It was chaos.
She would pull away from him as gently as she could, because her system might not survive the shock of it otherwise. She would catch her breath, return to her own body alone in her own bed, and hope she didn’t wake up in a pile of lonely ashes.