Dr. Shin waits until the first of April to ask about Colin.
It’s our tenth appointment, the middle stage of a relationship that starts to feel like it needs to go somewhere. And Dr. Shin isn’t the type to stall out. So I start with a tidbit about my family (one of her favorite subjects), which I’m hoping is enough to sustain her until the appointment ends. Next week, I’ll think of something else to blabber on about.
“My brother offered me a job,” I say, picking at the tuft of gray threads under the armrest.
“Which brother?”
“Edward.”
“The professional baseball player who lives in LA? You’ve never mentioned him by name.”
“That’s Edward.”
“I thought you said he was moving back to Boston.”
“He is.” I return my hands to my lap. “The job is in Boston.”
A long pause.
“I see,” she muses. Dr. Shin doesn’t like to prompt me with too many questions. Sometimes we sit in silence for ten or twenty minutes while she waits for me to say something.
“Anyway, I said no.”
“May I ask what the job is?”
“He’s trying to rejuvenate athletic programs for inner-city schools.” I pick at the threads until three more of them give way. Maybe she stocks these couches because she knows the crappy fabric is therapeutic.
“You told me once you didn’t think he’d actually leave professional baseball.”
“Well,” I say, looking up, “I was wrong.”
Her intense stare makes me want to rush on, to say more than I probably should. This is part of her effectiveness as a psychiatrist, more a weapon than a tool of the trade.
“I can’t go back to Boston,” I say.
She doesn’t even bother to express the long mmm that usually follows such a statement. With no more threads to unravel, the only thing left to focus on is her eyes, reaching into me like a pair of hands.
“Why not?” she asks.
“Because my life is here. I’ve got the team, and Lee, and swimming . . .”
“But you’re not swimming,” she says. “The conditioning therapy hasn’t worked.”
She’s right, of course. I’m sure Lee has been hounding her with e-mails, begging for advice. After that first “lesson,” I wore my favorite suit for the second one, all decked out and ready to swim. I couldn’t get in past my knees.
“Did Lee tell you what happened?”
“A bit.” She folds her hands together as she gathers her thoughts. “He couldn’t speak to what it was like for you, though.”
“Well, I can’t really describe it. It’s like some other part of my brain takes over.”
“Similar to the episodes you’ve had before?”
“Yeah.”
“So you feel afraid when you’re in the water. Not around it, but in it.” She directs her gaze upward for a moment, thinking. “What else do you feel?”
“Helpless. Fragile.” My voice trails to a whisper. “Out of control.”
“Have you ever been able to regain control?”
I shake my head, conceding the obvious. “The feeling passes after a few minutes, and it takes a while for me to feel like myself again.”
“How so?”
“I just feel lost.”
She crosses her ankles and studies me for five, maybe ten seconds. It feels like an eternity, but in the scheme of our frequent drawn-out silences, it’s really not that much.
“How do you feel about spending the summer in Boston?” she asks.
“I’m indifferent.” I look up, registering that telltale frustration in her eyes, colored with disappointment. She always seems to know when I’m lying.
She waits patiently for me to revise my answer.
“I’m uneasy about it,” I admit.
“Why is that, do you think?”
“Well, they all live in the Boston area. The boys, I mean.”
“Have you seen them?” she asks.
The answer comes haltingly, guilt welling up as I say, “No.”
Their voices. The lilting sounds of their laughter. The details of who they were under those merciless gray skies have faded, but my mind still wanders. Sometimes it finds them sitting under the stars, begging for candy canes. I’ve dreamed about seeing them again, and each time, I wake with tears on my face and a lurch in my throat.
“And Colin?”
“What about him?” I choke out.
“Have you spoken with him at all?”
The sudden change in tack takes me by surprise; only in rare cases will Dr. Shin go straight for the jugular. It throws me off my game. Makes me less likely to bend the truth. At least this time, I manage to suppress the first thought that comes to mind.
“I don’t want to talk about him,” I say.
She leans back in her chair but doesn’t look away. Her hair is tied into a tight bun, which accentuates the tautness of her features, the depth of her eyes. The truth is, I never want to talk about Colin. Because if we don’t talk about him, maybe he won’t haunt me in ways that confuse my emotions and sabotage my attempts to move on. Maybe the truth will never come out.
I put my head down and inspect the tiny knots in the carpet, as if willing myself to sink through it. “I just want to forget about him.”
Her voice is gently inquisitive. “Why?”
“Because he reminds me of everything that happened out there.”
Shit. I walked right into it.
“I thought you said you got separated early on.”
“We were. We did.” The media refused to accept the “I don’t remember anything” excuse when they got wind of Colin’s floss sutures. I told them we’d been together five hours instead of five days—just enough time for me to stitch up a wound. “That’s what I meant.”
“You said ‘everything.’”
“‘Everything’ is a vague term. I meant Colorado. The plane. Whatever.”
“I’m not sure that’s what you meant.”
“Of course it’s what I meant.” I don’t realize I’m screaming until someone knocks on the door and asks if everything is all right.
“Yes, fine,” Dr. Shin says. She waits for me to go on, but I can’t. I won’t. The person at the door gasps as I wrench it open and burst into the waiting room.
As it turns out, my abrupt exodus from that office isn’t as freeing as I’d hoped.
It’s damning.
•
The media wanted a hero, but more than that, they wanted to know about Colin and those three little boys. They wanted to know how we’d ended up so far apart, a logistical anomaly given the fact that there were no other survivors. The only reasonable answer was to say nothing—and later, when the floss sutures called into question the whole “amnesia” story, I came up with an abbreviated version of the truth. I told the world we’d gotten separated early on, which made for a very bland story.
The boys were never interviewed; the media assumed they were too young or sick or traumatized to remember anything. And then, of course, there was the question of taste. No one wanted to torture little kids by dredging up bad memories. Avery Delacorte, though—she could handle it. Except I couldn’t. So I lied about what happened, and the interviews stopped.
By the time Colin recovered enough to speak to the media, he didn’t challenge the details I’d provided, sparse as they were. He did this for me, of course, just like he did everything else.
For some reason, the world was kinder to him. Headlines painted him as the quiet hero. The photos recycled by all the media outlets over and over again were actually flattering. Most were taken in and around Boston, after his discharge from the hospital. And then, of course, there was that parking lot footage. The tabloids had a field day with that one: Has Avery Delacorte been holding back about what really happened out there? For weeks, life felt like a reality show.
But I could cope with the media firestorm. I learned to navigate it in my own way, sheltered by the cocoon of a college campus. The public has a short memory. People forget. They move on. Other stories, other tragedies, steal their attention. And I let it happen because being normal meant more to me than being me.
Colin never said anything about the notebook in our brief hours together on New Year’s, though I sometimes wondered if he intended to. The recovery personnel never found it, not like I made any effort to track it down. I didn’t want to relive those harrowing five days, nor think about them at all.
The truth was, the boys deserved better.
“Aves?”
I look up to see Lee sitting on the steps of my dorm. He has flowers in one hand and a brand-new Nike suit in the other.
“Hey.”
“What’s wrong? Did something happen?”
The silence expands until it’s everywhere, all at once, torturing me in ways that words never could. I’ve exhausted my ability to lie. There is only the truth, embedded in memory. Haunting memories, beautiful memories.
This is who I am now.
“Yes,” I say, wishing the answer were different.