by James Smythe
She brings Laurence a sandwich as he sits on the sofa.
‘I’m not hungry,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just not.’
‘You should try,’ she says. He nods and sits up, and she puts the tray on his lap. He eats the whole thing in only four or five mouthfuls. ‘You can tell me what happened in Texas,’ Deanna says to him. ‘And in the shop.’
‘It was nothing,’ he says. ‘Really. I will be fine.’
‘I’ve booked us in to see Dr Diaz in an hour. I thought it would be good.’ He doesn’t argue. He nods, slowly, as if it makes sense to him as well.
Diaz’s waiting room is an oasis: a feature wall turned into a waterfall, green-tinted water that smells like a theme park running down orange-veneer wood paneling into a trough filled with curious hand-carved stones of slightly off geometric shapes. It’s an intentionally artificial replica of something more intrinsically real. Deanna has always focused on the metaphor of it: that such a thing should be here, while people try to find a plateau of normality through such false means. The other walls are the same wooden panels, making this feel like a sauna – another likeness that, Deanna is sure, isn’t accidental – and the furniture is either highly functional or nearly decadent, nowhere between the two. There are never other clients waiting, which, again, Deanna is sure is part of the therapy. You sit and talk to each other, or you’re silent. Either way, it’s a prelude to taking part in the session itself.
Their initial visits with Dr Diaz were preventative. Amit’s research told them that the things most likely to destroy a candidate’s potential were familial collapse or crisis. This was before Sean died and he told them to think about making sure they kept the lines of communication open. Maybe, he told them, therapy would be a good start. They laughed, because they had always been perfectly happy. They argued, but they saw theirs as healthy arguments, because what couple didn’t argue? They aired their grievances, got them out in the open. From there, you move on. Still, they listened to him. He was insistent.
Now, they sit next to each other on a sofa that’s so low to the ground and so curved they’re almost lying down. The receptionist brings them both a small glass containing some variant of green tea and then goes to her desk which is in another room entirely. There’s no choice of drink: it’s always tea, and it’s always pungent, and it’s always intended to be calming. The first few times they hated it, then after a while it just became something that they drank when they came here. They grew to like the taste. (Laurence looked it up: if you try something five times, he read, you can persuade your body to like it. Don’t reject it, embrace it, and your body changes its mind. Like, he reasoned, Stockholm Syndrome, but with herbal tea.) Laurence drinks his straight down, as hot as it is, and the receptionist brings him another immediately. She must be watching them, Deanna thinks. There must be a hidden camera in here.
‘Won’t be long now,’ she says. Another part of the process: the waiting. This way, you feel relief when you finally get into the room. Such a wait – never too long to make you angry, never too short to not become troublesome – engenders the desire to talk. Appointments are an hour, but you’re paying for ninety minutes of therapy, when you factor everything in. Then the door opens – it’s hidden, almost, in one of the walls, defined only by where the lines in the wood panels are – and Dr Diaz beckons them in, shaking their hands as they pass her, smiling at them over her glasses.
‘It’s been a while,’ she says.
‘Yes,’ Deanna replies. They take their usual seats: two utterly functional chairs in her wooden-chalet office. Laurence looks around at the décor and he’s reminded of the video, for some reason. Something so false that feels so very real. ‘I felt it important that we came now. Laurence has been … It’s been a hard few days.’ He looks up when he hears his name, suddenly in the moment. It’s a reaction that he can’t help.
‘Laurence? Do you want to tell me what happened?’ Diaz asks, looking at Deanna still, but directing the question to Laurence.
‘I had a lapse,’ Laurence says, abruptly and truthfully. It comes out of nowhere, surprising Deanna. She hadn’t really expected him to speak much. ‘A fugue, almost. I passed out.’
‘Did anything happen to spark that?’
‘I panicked. I had a panic attack, I think.’
‘It felt the same as the ones you’ve had before? Brought about by the same thoughts?’ They’ve spoken about Laurence’s time at war in the past, who he was then, and what happened to him when he was in the army.
‘Yes. Not the same thoughts, but the same feeling.’ He looks at Deanna. ‘I blacked out a bit and I had trouble breathing. So, maybe some of the same thoughts, yes. But not the rest of it, that was different. I wasn’t there.’
‘Okay. So do you maybe think this is because of how hard you’re working?’ Diaz asks. ‘I’ve seen you on the Internet. You’re very good with your audience, at putting your case across. You’re very convincing.’
‘I have to be,’ he says.
‘Amit – his advisor – he sent him home. He’s given him a break from the schedule,’ Deanna says. She nods at Diaz, confirming her question.
‘So you’re tired,’ Diaz says to Laurence. She has a smile that works, tells them to trust her.
‘I am.’ He looks it, in that moment. So tired, more than Deanna’s ever seen him before.
‘Do you think about Sean a lot?’ Diaz asks.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Every moment.’
‘Which is natural.’
He nods his head. ‘I know. I can’t shake him.’
‘Nor should you. So you had a blip. What do you think caused it?’
‘Probably the stress,’ he says.
‘More than that,’ Deanna says. He’s lying, she knows. They agreed, when they started coming to see Diaz, that they wouldn’t lie in these sessions. They were useless if they did; they only worked with honesty on the table. Now, Deanna wants to be a part of the conversation. She wants to say what she knows, and talk about the ClearVista report. He still hasn’t told her, and she desperately wants him to. Lying like this, she knows, is simply bottling it up.
‘It wasn’t,’ he says. ‘This is just all too much for me, maybe. I need a rest.’
‘Please, Laurence,’ she says. He looks at her. He stares at her, and she meets it, and he can tell.
‘Amit told you,’ he says. ‘Amit fucking told you, didn’t he.’ Deanna doesn’t reply. Dr Diaz sits back and lets them do this. This is what she’s best at: starting something and then letting it play out. ‘What do you know?’
‘He told me about ClearVista,’ she says, ‘and what they said.’ Laurence looks at the door. Everything said in the room is private and confidential, but that doesn’t make him feel better about it. These are secrets; these are potentially ruinous to him.
‘I don’t want to do this,’ he says.
‘We have to,’ Deanna tells him.
‘Maybe this is important to Deanna, Laurence?’ Diaz asks.
‘No,’ he says. ‘It was a mistake, and nobody’s business. I am not like that.’ He stands up and walks to the door, pressing it so that it swings wide. He rushes through the waterfall-room and out into the parking lot which is surrounded by single-storey pale-brick buildings, nail salons and sandwich shops and coffee shops. Suddenly America as it is all over, these little oases of commercialism. It feels safer here, somehow. He puts his hands on his thighs and bends forward, feeling as if he is going to be sick, as if all of his fears have manifested themselves inside him and now they’re forcing their way out. He shudders, and as he does so he feels a hand on his shoulder. It’s Deanna, her touch warm, even through his sweater.
‘Come on,’ she says. He’s reticent but complies, walking slowly – shuffling, almost – but letting her take his hand. She leads him back inside, past the waterfall – she hears the sound and thinks how familiar it is to her, that rustle of water, the noise that it makes when droplets of it collide with each other, like a tide draw
ing back from a shoreline – and to the chair in Diaz’s office. Diaz asks him to explain about the report, if he wants to. Deanna begins to do it for him, but Diaz indicates that she should be quiet. This is Laurence’s information to share. He holds his breath inside him. He thinks that, if he doesn’t, there’s a chance he won’t be able to find it again, each breath, each inhalation suddenly so precious. He stays silent, and they wait for him.
When the hour is up, Diaz asks them to make another appointment. She tells Laurence that it will be helpful.
‘There’s no downside,’ she says. He nods. He tells Deanna that he’ll drive, but he sits behind the wheel and puts his hands at ten and two and doesn’t start the engine. He stares forward across the car park at the bookstore and the giant discount store that are across the road.
‘Let me take over,’ Deanna says. He nods and silently gets out of the car. They swap seats – she holds him as they cross at the front of the hood, just for a second, and he lets her – and then she starts the engine.
‘I don’t want to go home yet,’ he tells her, as they’re pulling out of the lot. ‘I need to have some peace for a second.’
She knows where to take him.
They get out at the front of cemetery. They never come at this time: the middle of the day, mid-week. A different sort of people comes here at this time of day. They’re older, in general. They’re single, older men and women coming to visit their loved ones, ambling between the rows of headstones as if they’re aisles at a supermarket. They’re almost browsing, they walk so slowly, their heads reading the names of other people’s dead relatives as they pass.
Sean’s lot is in a far corner. They paid more for the privacy. There were different tiered packages and they spoke about it almost endlessly in the days after they first met with the undertaker and the lot manager; a way of taking their minds off what had happened and trying to do the best by their son. The conversations where they discussed the money made them feel worse, because they were doing this for themselves, not Sean. The privacy was so that they couldn’t be seen when they cried over the stone that marked him. They imagined that their mourning would be eternal, that they would never recover from how broken they felt in those first few terrible weeks. The plot that they finally chose is near some trees, behind a wall. It was in the second highest tier. There are five others here in this nook, but they’re always alone when they come to visit. It’s like a subliminal schedule created by the mutual experience of the families. The other headstones are all for children as well, all between the ages of four and sixteen. Deanna and Laurence have never spoken about that, but Deanna’s thought it: that the parents of those children must have felt the same way as they did. That losing a child is one of the few incontrovertible shared emotional truths.
Now, they don’t cry as they once did. They don’t change the flowers. Deanna looks for the shape of the toys through the soil, as she always does. They’re eternal, or nearly, and that’s how he will be. Sean will never get old now and the toys will always be appropriate for him. He’ll never grow out of them. Laurence stands at the foot of their son’s plot and looks at the headstone. He reads it every time they come here. They always wonder if maybe they couldn’t have said more with it. Deanna reads it now and thinks of the dedication in her book. The same resonance – and yet, somehow, there aren’t words enough.
She holds Laurence’s hand. ‘It’s okay,’ she says.
‘I know,’ he tells her. ‘I mean, it’s not.’ She pulls him close. She thinks of the cover art of his favorite album, a Bob Dylan record from the 1960s. They have the sleeve framed in their kitchen: the singer and his girlfriend, huddled together in each other’s presence, walking along a street. So close that you can feel the love between them, and there’s no mystery of what it means.
‘I love you,’ she says. He’s silent. ‘Amit said that there was a video.’ She doesn’t know if this is the right time to bring this up. She doesn’t know that there will ever be a right time. He nods, and he kisses her.
‘I only want to protect you all, you know. It’s all that I’ve ever wanted.’ He says it while he looks at the grave, as if he can see through it, right down, past the topsoil, the toys, into the thin wood of the coffin itself. The fact that he admitted it to her has to be enough, for now. She kisses her hand and rests it briefly on the headstone, and she whispers to her son that she loves him.
‘Do you want to go?’ she asks. Laurence shakes his head.
‘Let’s stay here for a while,’ he says. They sit down on the ground, leaning back against the wall, and they stare out. Across the way, behind the cemetery, there’s a hill, and behind the hill the sun begins to descend, and then its light comes around them, golden orange. It frames them as they look at all the stones.
‘I can’t believe how long it’s been,’ Deanna says as it becomes dark.
She opens the front door. There are no lights downstairs. Some light comes down from upstairs, and from the moon, through the windows – the girls didn’t darken the glass – but the house is otherwise dark.
‘I feel a little better,’ Laurence says. ‘I’m sorry to have given you a scare.’ He stretches as he takes off his coat and Deanna flicks all the lights on. ‘I’m so tired,’ he says. He walks to the kitchen, which is chaos: the unwashed bowls of some dinner or other that might have been attempted – a dessert, Deanna sees, sugar and flour both out of the cupboards, their dust on the surfaces – and then a pizza box on the table, the slices half-eaten, the topping peeled from them. ‘Pigs,’ Laurence says. He smiles, half-there but honest, and he takes one of the untouched slices and bites from it. ‘Where are they?’
‘Bed, I guess,’ Deanna says. ‘It’s quiet. I’ll go check.’ She leans in and kisses him on the lips. Their faces fit together the way that they have for years and years now, knowing instinctively how to find each other. That never changes.
Upstairs, there’s a light left on in the bathroom that the girls share. Deanna looks in, and there’s hair in the sink, Lane’s clippers plugged in at the wall still. Deanna pulls them out and puts them in a plastic tray on the side with her other accouterments. She scoops handfuls of the damp hair out, balling it up and throwing it into the small trashcan under the sink.
‘Gross,’ she says. ‘Lane,’ slightly raising her voice, hoping that her daughter hears her, knowing that she won’t be asleep, ‘this is gross.’ She puts the light out and walks into Alyx’s room. Her youngest is already in bed, the covers pulled up tight around her head. Deanna backs out, pulling the door to. She knocks on Lane’s door, and her daughter answers.
‘What?’ she asks. Deanna tries the handle, but it’s locked.
‘Listen,’ she says, close to the wood so that she’ll be heard, ‘you left the house in a hell of a state. Your hair will clog the drains, I’ve told you.’ She thinks, as she says it: that Lane’s been keeping her hair short now for months, but the hair that she pulled out of the sink was much longer. It must have grown more than she realized.
‘I’m sorry,’ Lane says. There’s something in her voice: an actual contrition. She’s not apologizing for the mess. Deanna rushes to Alyx’s room and throws back the duvet, and her daughter is still awake: lying there, terrified, her hair taken back so close to her head that it’s almost non-existent. Deanna wants to think it’s a joke, a wig, a trick that’s being played on her, but she sees the uneven lengths, the section where they worked out that they had gone too far and obviously turned chicken – a mullet, almost, a longer rat-tail of hair at the back – and Alyx starts to cry. Deanna doesn’t know what to say: she just stands there and looks at her daughter, now writhing on the sheets.
She looks like Sean, she keeps thinking. She looks like Sean.
The crying escalates, and Deanna bends down and holds her, and tells her that it’ll be okay. Alyx tries to form words, but they’re distorted by her tears and the huffs of air that she drags in. She starts to hyperventilate; she’s done this a few times before, especiall
y in the wake of Sean’s death. Heaving breaths that she can’t quite fully form.
‘Okay,’ Deanna says. She goes to her daughter and sits on the bed and she cradles her. ‘Okay, calm down.’ She leans back, towards the door, so that she’ll be heard. ‘Lane,’ she says, ‘get in here.’ She hears the click of Lane’s door lock, and the creak.
‘Alyx asked me to do it,’ Lane says, before she’s even in the room.
‘She’s eight years old! She doesn’t know what she wants!’
‘I thought it might look cute,’ Lane says. She’s swaying, and she smells of something.
‘You’re drunk,’ she says. ‘What the hell did you think you were doing, drinking when you were looking after her?’ Lane half-smirks and tries to hide it. ‘For god’s sake, Lane!’
‘I asked her to do it,’ Alyx says. ‘I wanted to look like Lane does.’ She says it with such innocence, with almost a sense of protecting her sister. It wasn’t malicious – neither of them thought. Lane should have known better, but she didn’t. That’s an argument for another time, Deanna thinks.
‘I’m sorry,’ Alyx says. She sobs harder, into her mother’s shoulder. Deanna wraps herself around her daughter, almost entirely cradling her.
‘What’s going on up there?’ Laurence asks. His voice comes up through the stairwell and they all turn.
‘Daddy?’ Alyx asks.
‘Hey Pumpkin,’ he says. He seems to almost skip up the stairs, taking them so lightly, and then he’s in the hallway. Fragments of the old Laurence; where the day they’ve had has, in some way, been cathartic for him.
