The morning after group therapy, in my kitchen, I hung up the phone with the insurance agent and looked at the figure I’d written on a pad of paper. I was finally dealing with the financial implications of my car wreck. The number on the paper was huge. I sighed. I’d just received an education in the finer points of car insurance. It seemed Kevin didn’t have the proper kind of insurance on his leased Mazdaspeed3, and fixing it would be costly.
I dropped the pencil onto my kitchen table and sulked. Why didn’t he know to put gap insurance on the car? Sure, I’d never heard of it until moments ago when the insurance agent told me about it, but it was Kevin’s job to know these things. He had been fastidious about details such as insurance, investment, and squeezing every last dollar out of a contract. For some reason he’d messed up on the Mazda.
I got up to put on the teakettle. I noticed a slight tremor in my right hand. The kettle trembled in my grip, and I couldn’t steady it no matter how hard I tried. I set the kettle down with a plunk and pulled a long breath in through my nose just like Laura-Lea taught us. Dr. Alexander—who I still saw once a week—had told me to take note of physical signs of stress because they can be gateways to what he called “cathartic breakthroughs.” I didn’t know if a cathartic breakthrough was something I particularly wanted, but he said they were important.
A sudden tremor I couldn’t control could be a sign that my body was attempting to relieve stress—in other words, it was trying to tell me something. I let my breath out in a slow, thin line between my lips. I took another slow breath in and closed my eyes. Dr. Alexander had said I could mentally journey through my body in order to locate what he called the “seat of emotion.”
“We feel different emotions in different parts of our bodies,” he had told me.
Eyes closed, I imagined traveling through my body, looking for the part that was feeling stress.
First I checked out my heart and lungs, and then moved on to my stomach. Everything seemed normal. I moved down to my legs and feet, then back up to my arms and hands. Nothing. The kettle boiled. I opened my eyes and reached for a cup. My hand trembled as I placed the cup on the counter.
“I don’t know,” I said to the kettle. “Maybe this is just malarkey.” I closed my eyes and repeated the exercise. This time it occurred to me that I should examine my back, spine, and neck. My eyes opened wide as I reached around and touched the base of my neck. Something was rolling around in there, like a tiny ball, in my spine. Now what? I thought back to Dr. Alexander’s instructions.
I could hear his instruction, “Picture the stress, Kate. Give it a form, give it substance.”
I pictured the ball as a marble lodged between my vertebrae. I mentally reached out and touched it with a soft, exploring finger. It was hard, but instead of feeling cold as I for some reason expected, the marble was hot, like fire. The moment my finger made contact, it howled and then let out a growling yell and began to spin faster and faster. Startled, I pulled my eyes open, gasping for air. “That’s enough,” I said. I sucked on my fingertip as if cooling a burn.
An hour later I took a sip of cold Earl Grey and spat it back into the cup. I had been thinking about the marble of anger, but I was still staring at the enormous sum the insurance company quoted to fix Kevin’s car.
I dragged my hands over my face and stared at the number again. My Ford was getting old, but was fixing the Mazda the best solution? I reached back and rubbed my shoulder. With one finger I touched the spot on the back of my neck where I had “seen” and touched that spinning, burning hot marble of anger.
I was angry. I had told Blair as much, but after the marble experience, I realized that I had probably been angry for a long time, even before Kevin’s death. But my Swiss-cheese memory hadn’t told me the whole story. Bits and pieces continued to come, but never enough for me to see the whole picture. I supposed that hearing Kevin’s voice wasn’t my only mental health issue.
I sat and contemplated my mental health. No doubt I was doing better than the Kate who sat unbathed and rumpled on the living room floor day after day after Kevin died. In fact I was the opposite of her. I was barely ever home. Sure, I was still sleeping in my living room, but I’d made remarkable progress. Hadn’t I? I was improved from the Kate who snapped harsh words at her sister without warning or warrant, ordering her out of my house. My conversations with Heather were quieter now, calm, sparse dialogues centered on our mutual desire to lead normal lives, to be normal people. For me to be cured.
But cured of what, exactly? Dr. Alexander had no hesitation in labeling my condition as mental illness. He had handed me a prescription (still sitting, unfilled, on my counter) with the assurance of a man who knew crazy when he saw it. But I flinched at the label. I didn’t feel mentally ill. Fractured maybe—a temporary fissure that would, in time, heal. But ill? Mental diabetes? Cancer of the thinking? No, I couldn’t accept that. Besides, I was improving every day.
A picture of a burning, spinning marble formed in my mind.
I pushed the teacup away, frustrated. “Am I fixed or not?” I muttered.
“It’s not worth fixing,” Kevin said.
I shot out of my chair, slopping Earl Grey onto the table. My heart expanded and fell in huge, pulsing thuds. “No. Stop. Don’t do this. I don’t want to do this.”
Kevin’s voice came calm and easy. “I don’t think you should.”
I shook my head, trying to clear it. Fear roared in my ears, drowning out his words. “Should what? This makes no sense.”
“I agree.”
Even as my skin rose up in goose pimples and my heart began to pound, some part of my mind yelled out. Don’t listen. Make it stop. I crushed my fists into my eye sockets. “I’m not going to do this.”
Kevin’s voice was conversational. “Don’t do it.”
Tears flowed down my cheeks. “What do you mean, ‘don’t’? You’re doing it, not me.” I thought about running out the back door. Would his voice follow me? I remembered the afternoon in the playground with Blair. Kevin’s voice had followed me there. There was no reason to think it wouldn’t now. Desperation flooded my body. “I can’t do this anymore.”
Kevin said, “It’s not worth it.”
Worth? He thinks I’m not worth fixing? That I can’t get better? I raised my face toward the ceiling and roared, “I’m worth it. My sanity is worth it.”
“The car isn’t worth fixing,” came the unfazed response.
Slow realization, like a sunrise on a rainy day, dawned and pulled the tension out of my body. I felt like a deflated balloon. “You’re talking about the car.”
“It sounds like waves in the ocean.”
Ocean? We were miles from any ocean. “I don’t understand.”
The kitchen clock ticked in the silence.
“Why is this happening?” I said to the air.
I could hear my own breathing, the rapid little breaths that were flooding my brain with too much oxygen, making me feel dizzy. “This has to stop, Kevin. I need you to stop doing this. Do you hear me?”
Nothing.
Inspiration struck; a benevolent poke in the eye. I knew what to do.
I grabbed the phone and dialed. “No more arguing with a dead guy,” I mumbled.
Dr. Alexander’s receptionist, efficient as ever, answered in one ring.
“Hi, Sally,” I said, “Listen, Dr. Alexander told me to call him if I heard Kevin’s voice again.”
Sally’s smooth tones slid over the phone lines. “Hold the line, Kate.” The sound of rushing water filled my ear. Dr. Alexander didn’t believe in playing music when a patient was put on hold. Instead I was treated to the sounds of nature, in this case, water. It irritated me. I had to pee. The soundtrack was approaching what sounded like Niagara Falls and I was crossing my legs hard, when Dr. Alexander’s voice came on the line.
“Yes, Kate, I’m here.” That was his line. No What’s the problem? or even What is the nature of this call? Just, I’m here.
I clutched the phone hard. “Kevin. He spoke.”
“When?”
“Just now. Minutes ago. I called you right away.”
He mumbled something that sounded like excellent. “What did he say?”
My bladder poked at me. I bit my lower lip. “He said I shouldn’t bother to get the car fixed.”
There was a long pause. “Anything else?”
“He hears the ocean.”
Another pause. “I see.”
I gave my head a quick shake. “But, listen, the reason I’m calling is because I’ve figured out how to make him stop talking.”
I heard rustling paper. “You’re taking the medication as I prescribed?”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s not the point, Dr. Alexander. Listen to me. I know how to make Kevin’s voice stop. There are rules he follows. I’ve been trying to figure them out for weeks. But I was always trying to figure out how to get Kevin to talk more. You see? I wasn’t trying to get him to stop. I was trying to get him to talk. I’ve always known how to get him to stop talking. It’s simple. Whenever he speaks, I mention something personal—like how much I miss him. Or I ask him a question. He can’t seem to answer direct questions. That’s one of the rules. You see? I can control it. So I don’t need to be afraid anymore. “
“I’d like you to come in this afternoon.”
I shook my head. “Don’t you see? I have the control. All this time I thought I had no control. But I do. I have all the control. I can make his voice stop.”
Dr. Alexander cleared his throat. “Can you be here by 2:30?”