I’ve never hated the sound of my own name until this moment.
I slide further down in my chair and pretend I didn’t hear him. I’m staring at the floor, but even without looking, I know that there are dozens of pairs of eyes on me. My face burns.
“Lexi,” Mr. Martin says again. “Don’t be scared. Gabe, Austin, and Chris got through it, didn’t they?”
Barely.
“Please come up here, Lexi.”
Matthew places a hand on mine and gives it a quick squeeze. “Just get it over with,” he whispers. “He’s not going to back down.”
I take a deep breath.
I walk to the stage.
I sit in the chair.
I close my eyes.
Mr. Martin begins the same way as always: “Tell us about your childhood.”
“It was good,” I say. “Normal.”
“You were raised by a mother and a father?”
I nod.
“Any siblings?”
I shake my head.
“Why not?”
I shrug. “They tried, but it never happened.”
“What was it like growing up as an only child?” Mr. Martin says.
“I don’t know. Fine, I guess. My parents were always nice to me.”
“What about your other family members? Grandparents, aunts and uncles…”
“My mom’s parents were normal and boring too when they were alive. I don’t have any aunts or uncles, and my dad’s parents died before I was born.”
“Do any unpleasant memories stand out? Maybe something that happened at school, with a friend or a teacher?” Mr. Martin presses.
I hate this.
“No,” I say. “My childhood was fine. I don’t have a Father Wound.”
“Of course you do. We just need to uncover it.”
I press my lips together. I’m not going to be bullied into making up some lie about how awful my parents were to me just so Mr. Martin can feel better.
But then he surprises me.
“You know,” he says, and from the way his voice carries, I can tell he’s pacing around behind me, “when I met your mother yesterday, I couldn’t help but notice the way she was dressed.”
I open my eyes and turn to face him. “What’s wrong with how she was dressed?”
He points a finger at me and rotates it in a circular motion, indicating I should turn back around. I do, but I don’t close my eyes this time. “Her clothing wasn’t very feminine, was it? Jeans, hiking boots, hair almost as short as a man’s.”
“So what? Lots of moms dress that way.”
“Does your mother work, Lexi?” he says. But I know he already knows the answer.
“Yeah,” I say. I don’t know where this is going, but I don’t like Mr. Martin’s tone. “She’s a teacher. Why?”
“I’m just putting the pieces together,” Mr. Martin says.
“What pieces? What are you saying?”
“I’m thinking about your story yesterday during our first session. I recall you saying you became interested in fashion because you liked watching women in pretty clothes on television. And then you started to become more interested in the women than the clothes. Is that correct?”
“Yeah…”
“It seems to me that your unfeminine, working mother wasn’t setting an appropriate gender example for you, and therefore you were left to seek that example elsewhere.” His voice is cutting, accusatory. “Your mother’s demonstration of improper womanhood completely warped your understanding of gender roles, Lexi.”
The impulse I’ve been feeling all day to fight is suddenly unlocked. “Why are you attacking my mother like this?” I say, my voice betraying the emotion bubbling up inside me. “You don’t even know her!” He really thinks that because my mother has short hair and works as a schoolteacher that’s what made me gay? It just doesn’t make any sense. Plus, for someone who loves stereotypes, it seems like he’s going with the wrong one here—he’s conveniently ignoring the fact that traditionally, most teachers are not only female but nurturing as well. His argument holds absolutely no water.
“I’m not attacking anyone, Lexi,” Mr. Martin says calmly. “I’m just trying to help you. Let me help you.”
I open my mouth, about to tell Mr. Martin exactly what I think about his whole Father Wound exercise, when I catch Kaylee’s eye. She’s standing off to the side of the audience area, looking directly at me. She holds up one palm in a tiny, calm-down gesture, and I remember what she said earlier: Just stick with it. I promise it will get easier.
I take a few deep breaths and give her a little nod.
I look at the other faces in the crowd—they’re riveted. With a few exceptions, everyone is focused more on Mr. Martin than me, and they all have that same expression of reverence that I saw on Carolyn yesterday as she listened to him speak. Already, my fellow campers have so much faith in this man.
I need to too. It’s like Kaylee said yesterday—they’re doing a job. They have to be harsh and direct in order to get their message across, to cut into fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years of our making the wrong choices. Mr. Martin is a good person—he understands us; he wants to help us; he was us. He was so kind to Daniel and let Gabe call home and has been nothing but welcoming.
But then he catches me off guard again.
“Where’s your father, Lexi?”
I look at him, and the innocent smile on his face confirms that he knows exactly where my father is. Even if he didn’t speak with my mother before I came here, he heard her talking about the life insurance payment yesterday.
But he’s got me in his stronghold and isn’t going to let me go.
“He’s dead,” I say, as emotionless as I can, but it still comes out sharp. Even through the pain and anger swimming around in my head, I don’t miss the gasps. I guess, in this crowd, a dead parent is a lot rarer than an abusive one. “You already knew that.”
“But we’re not here for me, Lexi. We’re here for you. And we’re here for them.” He sweeps a hand out toward the fifteen other campers. “Saying the words out loud is a very important part of this process. It makes it a lot harder to deny the truth.”
“I’m not denying anything,” I say. “Believe me, I know all too well that my father is dead. I think about it all the time.”
“How did your father pass away?” Mr. Martin asks.
I hate talking about this. I hate even thinking about it. And I really don’t understand what it has to do with anything.
But I look at Carolyn out there in the crowd and I know that she’s listening, waiting, and suddenly I want her to know my story.
I sigh and lower my voice. “He had pancreatic cancer.”
“Tell us about it.”
“I guess he’d had it for a long time before they actually knew what it was,” I say. “He’d been losing weight and was always complaining of stomach and back pain, but the doctors told him it was stress and to take a vacation. He took me to the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas.” It’s a complicated memory for me—we had so much fun, but knowing now that the cancer was eating at him the whole time we were there, making him sicker, taints the whole thing. I hate that doctor who told him to go on vacation instead of believing my dad that there was something wrong and doing more tests.
“But then he started getting jaundice—his eyes and skin had this weird yellowish tint—and the doctors finally figured out what was causing it. But it was too late. They pumped all this chemo into him, and he lost his hair and he got really weak and had to leave his job…” I break off for a moment. My eyes are filling with tears and my throat is threatening to close up. I blink, and the moisture overflows, spilling down my face. “And then he died anyway. Seven months after he was diagnosed.”
Mr. Martin hands me a tissue, and I blow my nose.
“You must miss him,” Mr. Martin says tenderly.
“He was my best friend,” I say.
Mr. Martin nods. “I’m assuming that during your father’s illness, your mother had to take over his role as the head of the household?”
I shrug. “It wasn’t like that. He was never really the ‘head of the household,’ even when he was healthy. He and my mom made decisions together.”
“I see. But as his illness progressed, he wasn’t able to make those decisions anymore?”
I sniffle. “Yeah, I guess.” I don’t think it’s worth adding that it wasn’t my mom who took over as the head of the household; it was me. Mr. Martin, I’m sure, would have a field day with that nugget of information, and I don’t see any reason to give him anything else to work with.
Mr. Martin hands me another tissue and squats down in front of me. “Think about it, Lexi. Your whole life, your parents gave you mixed signals about the roles of men and women. Your mother worked out of the home. She dressed like a man. She shared the head of household duties with your father, thereby reducing his masculine identity. He became more of a friend to you than a disciplinarian.” He places a hand on my arm. I have to force myself not to shrug it off. “It’s clear that your parents loved you very much; I’m not disputing that. But they taught you wrong.”
I twist the unused tissue around and around in my hands so it becomes ropelike and cuts into the soft patch of flesh where my thumb and index finger meet.
“You were right,” Mr. Martin says. “You don’t have an individual incident for a Father Wound. Rather, the overall dynamic between your parents serves as the Father Wound in this instance. Now, the question is, how do we heal it?”