The Mother's Promise

by Sally Hepworth

  Why wasn’t Paul doing that?

  Alice stared at him. “What are you doing here, Paul?”

  “I just … I couldn’t stop thinking about what you told me,” he said. “About Zoe’s father.”

  Alice turned and headed back into the apartment. “Come in,” she called over her shoulder. She fell onto the couch with another violent shiver.

  Paul shut the door and joined her in the living room. “I just wish I had known. Did Mom or Dad know?”

  Alice pulled the blanket tightly around her. “No, not the details. I just told them what I told you.”

  “That he wasn’t father material?”

  “Yes.” Alice was stunned. That was exactly what Alice had said. She hadn’t realized Paul had been paying attention.

  “Alice. I’m your big brother. I could have … done something. I could have tracked him down and punched his lights out.”

  A lump, big and fat and gnarly, grew in Alice’s throat.

  “I’ve been a shit brother,” he continued. “But I’m going to step up. I promise.”

  It was so little, so late. And no help to her at all. But hearing him say it brought Alice dangerously close to tears. As for stepping up, she believed that, at least in this moment, he meant it.

  “Thanks, Paul.” She gave another involuntary, violent shiver. “Is it … is it cold in here?”

  “Actually, I was about to take off my sweater.” Paul put a hand to her forehead. “Jesus, you’re roasting!”

  She pushed his hand away. “Hot? I’m freezing.”

  “You’re on fire, Alice.”

  She shivered again, as if to prove him wrong. Then she realized that fever and chills were not an either/or. And according to the forum, a temperature was something you did call your doctor for. “Let me find my thermometer,” she said. “If it’s over a hundred point five, I’ll need to go to the hospital.”

  “Forget the thermometer,” he said.

  “No, really. The forum said—”

  “Fuck the forum,” he said. “We’re going to the hospital.”

  Alice felt unexpected tears well in her eyes. “All right,” she said. “Just let me get my coat.”

  The truth was, she probably did need to go to the hospital. And there was something about someone else taking control of the situation that was simply too hard to resist.

  48

  Zoe was going back to school. At least, she was walking in that direction. Who knew what would happen when she got closer. But she was doing as Kate taught her and not thinking about it. It had been a week since the debate. It would be hard to go back … but people did hard things every day. Lord knew, her mom had it tough this last week, after chemo. She’d been pretty sick, but she was managing.

  As she got closer to the school, the street swelled with students, hoofing their way toward the school gates. Zoe’s heart began to race. A few people glanced in her direction but she focused on her feet. She didn’t want to see the exchanged glances, or hear the whispers. That’s her. That’s the girl. High school had been bad enough before she became the girl who peed her pants.

  Was she actually going to do this? She needed to make a decision, and fast. The gates were approaching. She could keep walking, or she could go in. She took a breath, steeled herself. Then she headed in.

  There was a collective gasp as she approached the front steps. She looked up long enough to map a course around the kids who sat there (several who’d been part of the debate) and then, with her head down, took the steps two at a time. She’d just reached the double doors into the building when she heard an explosion of giggles followed by a shriek from someone else and a Shhh! from a third party.

  You can do this, Zoe told herself. Just don’t think about it.

  In the hallway, conversations hushed as she passed. Zoe scanned the halls for Harry, but when she couldn’t find him, stared straight ahead. She slowed as she approached another group, waiting for someone to let her past. She noticed Seth in the circle, along with a few others including Cameron Freeman in the center. Cameron noticed Zoe and a faint smile appeared.

  “Ooh no, I forgot what I was supposed to say…,” he said in a squeaky, girly voice. “Um … oh…”

  There was a sound of plastic hitting the ground, then the slosh of water against the linoleum floors. The crowd jumped back. Cameron had dropped his water bottle. “Oops!” he cried. “I couldn’t hold it.”

  Cameron laughed hysterically. Seth gave him a shove. “It’s not funny, man,” he said. Zoe stepped over the water and kept walking.

  At her locker, she noticed Jessie Lee smiling at her. Jessie Lee had dyed the front of her hair purple now. The rest was black and cut so she looked like a shaggy rock star. She wore a black tank with a giant red tongue on the front and two strands of long, fake pearls.

  “Zoe,” she said. “You’re back.”

  Zoe nodded.

  “I’m glad.”

  “Thanks.”

  Jessie Lee raked her hair back out of her eyes, but it immediately returned to its original position. “You know, once, in junior high, I stepped in dog shit and then walked it into the classroom. By the time I’d realized, Mr. Schmidt had noticed and was making everyone check their feet. Someone saw it was me and announced it to the whole class. Everyone called me shit-shoes for months.”

  Zoe remembered Jessie Lee being called shit-shoes. She hadn’t known why. Jessie Lee had acted as if it hadn’t bothered her.

  “No one says it anymore,” Jessie Lee continued. “Eventually people move on. Find someone else to torture. We all have to take our turn. Share around the suffering. It’s pretty funny, really. Shit-shoes.”

  “I wonder what they’ll call me,” Zoe said.

  “Dunno. Pee-stage doesn’t have quite the same ring.”

  Unbelievably, Zoe laughed. Just a little.

  “Zoe?”

  Zoe turned to see Emily bustling up behind her. And just like that, wham! the panic was back in the center of her chest. “Hey. What’s up?”

  Emily’s neck was craned and her gaze was fixed on the puddle on the floor. “Who did that?”

  “Oh … you know…”

  “It was Cameron,” Jessie Lee said.

  “Fucker,” Emily muttered.

  Zoe basked in that for a moment. It might have been the loveliest thing Emily had ever said to her.

  After a moment, Em looked back at Zoe and sighed. “Zo, I feel terrible. About our stupid fight … about everything. I tried calling you, like, a gazillion times, but you wouldn’t pick up.”

  “I didn’t want to know what everyone was saying about me,” Zoe said.

  “Ha! As if anyone would say anything with your resident bodyguard hanging around.”

  “My … what?”

  A twinkle appeared in Emily’s eye. “Harry?”

  “Harry is my bodyguard?”

  “He’s been telling everyone that if they said anything about the debate when you come back today, they’d have to deal with him.” She grinned. “Clearly Cameron didn’t get the memo.”

  Zoe couldn’t help it, a huge grin spread across her face.

  “Does this mean things are happening between you two?” Emily asked coyly.

  Zoe felt the heat on her face. But this time, she didn’t care. “He’s a good guy,” she said finally. “Even if he is not very punctual.”

  The playfulness drained out of Emily’s face. “So, I guess I’m asking … will you have me back?”

  “Of course I will,” Zoe said. But before they could even hug, a commotion erupted down the corridor. Zoe turned in time to see Harry shove Cameron hard enough to make him skid through the puddle of water and land on his ass.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Harry said, striding down the hall toward her.

  * * *

  “Why don’t you tell me what happened? From the start.”

  The school-therapist guy sat with his legs crossed, one ankle at the opposite knee, a notepad and pen in his lap. A coffee table
sat between them. After what had happened at the debate, Mrs. Hunt had insisted that she see him and, as Zoe wasn’t especially keen to go to first period, English, she decided to go along with it.

  “I peed myself,” she said.

  The humiliation at the retelling was nearly as bad as the event. Worse, maybe, out of context. She imagined his thoughts. How revolting, a fifteen-year-old who couldn’t control her bladder! But he just nodded, as if that humiliating, horrific incident were irrelevant.

  “Yes,” he said, “but … I’m more interested in what was going on to cause that to happen?”

  Talk about getting straight down to it.

  Zoe balked at telling him about mother’s cancer. She wasn’t ready for that. But she thought she could, maybe, tell him some other things. Her fight with Emily. The debate.

  “Can I close my eyes?” she asked.

  He looked surprised, but then he said, “By all means.”

  She did, and immediately she felt more comfortable. This guy had a way of looking at her that was a little unsettling, but perhaps that was true of all therapists? When she’d knocked on his door a few minutes ago, he’d seemed busy, but then he’d immediately closed his laptop and said, “Please, come on in.” Now, she suspected, he was regretting his enthusiasm.

  “So tell me a little about your anxiety issues,” he said.

  He said it just like that, a statement. Zoe supposed she should be impressed that he’d figured her out at a glance, but instead she just felt exposed.

  “Well … I have social anxiety disorder. With panic attacks.”

  “And yet you were part of a debate,” he said quietly, almost to himself.

  “I know it seems weird—”

  “Unexpected,” he corrected, like a good therapist.

  “The thing is … I’ve always kind of liked the idea of being good at public speaking. Which is crazy, because obviously I’m not even good at, you know, private speaking. But the day I volunteered for the debate it was kind of like … my body took over. My mind told me that if I didn’t put my hand up, something bad would happen. Like a—”

  “Compulsion?”

  “Yes,” she said. “A compulsion.”

  There was something about the way he just said it, without inflection or judgment. Or pity. It was simply a fact. It gave her the courage to continue. “I get these compulsions sometimes. And I can be a bit … OCD. Sometimes I think I’m saying something on the inside but I say it out loud. And regular things freak me out, like eating in public or talking in class.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “Sounds like you’ve got a lot going on inside that head of yours. Must be exhausting.”

  Zoe nodded. It was strangely validating to hear him say it.

  “Can you tell me what strategies you’ve tried to help with these things?” he asked after a few moments.

  She told him about her short stint with a therapist and how she’d convinced her mom to let her stop. She told him about the affirmations and the not-thinking-about-it trick that she’d picked up from Kate. If he had feelings about this, he kept them out of his voice.

  “Medication?”

  “I was prescribed Klonopin,” Zoe said, “but I don’t really take it. I’m scared of getting addicted.”

  “And … closing your eyes? That’s one of your strategies?”

  “Yes. A friend of mine suggested it. It helps. I don’t worry as much about what people are thinking.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Is it a bad strategy?” Zoe asked, after a moment.

  “There are worse ones. Self-harm, for example. But there are better ones too. And we’re going to talk about them in just a minute.”

  Zoe wasn’t sure why, but she felt a burst of optimism. If it was possible that there was something he could do—something that would make her life better—she wanted to know what it was.

  “Can you open your eyes now, Zoe?” he said.

  She did. He put his notepad and pen on the coffee table. “Okay. Firstly, can I just say what a remarkable job you’ve done holding it together. Social anxiety disorder can be an incredibly difficult condition to live with. Many people with the disorder fall into a serious depressive state. And by depressive, I mean unable to go to school, do homework, perform basic household chores. And you are not only keeping up with your regular routine, but you are actively trying to challenge and improve yourself by taking risks and employing strategies that help you. Honestly, I’m a little flabbergasted. I’ve never heard of anyone with social phobia volunteering to be part of something as public as a debate, at least not without a lot of support and medication. You should be applauded.”

  Zoe felt her eyes unexpectedly fill with tears. “I shouldn’t be applauded. I’m terrified all the time. I’m terrified of what people think of me. I’m terrified of my mom dying. Mostly I’m terrified of feeling like this for the rest of my life.”

  “What if I told you that you don’t have to feel like this the rest of your life?” he said. “Zoe, have you heard of a treatment called exposure therapy?”

  “Uh … is that … like electric shock therapy?”

  “Not at all. Exposure therapy is when you actively challenge your fears, one at a time, until you are not afraid of them anymore.”

  “Like the debate?”

  “Well, yes, but we would start on a much smaller scale. The idea of exposure therapy is that you start by tackling something that is scary, but not so scary that you can’t be successful. Most important, you tackle each thing in a controlled way, with support.”

  Zoe wasn’t sure she liked the sound of exposure therapy. “But … the debate—”

  He held up a palm, silencing her. “When you did the debate, you didn’t have me on your team.” He smiled a little.

  His arrogance was, in a weird way, reassuring. As was the prospect of having a “team.” Zoe felt fear and hope sparring inside her.

  “I would say that the debate scenario might be something we could build up to, say, after a year of incremental exposure therapy,” he said, “but for now, we’ll do much smaller things. The good news is that we know you have guts. That will serve us well in exposure therapy.”

  Zoe swallowed. “So … what would I have to do? In this exposure therapy?”

  “It’s up to you. You clearly have a fear of speaking in public, maybe we can try something related to that, like asking a question in class? Or you could try to challenge another fear, like eating in public? Even one French fry. Would that be doable?”

  Zoe stared at him. “But how would eating a fry help me?”

  “It might not help you much,” he admitted. “But if the next week you ate two fries, and the week after you ate a chicken nugget and two fries, and the week after you ate two nuggets and two fries … you get the idea. In six months you might be able to eat an entire meal in public, and that would make a difference to your life, wouldn’t it?”

  He raised his eyebrows and Zoe had no choice but to nod. She suddenly realized why this guy was so good. You had to improve under his guidance. Even your feelings were too scared to disagree with him.

  “So,” he said. “Shall we make a deal? By the next time we meet, which I think should be in a week, you will have either eaten in public or asked a question in class. Can we agree to that?”

  “Yes,” she said, “we can.”

  They both stood.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Dr. Sanders,” she said, reaching out to take his outstretched hand. She shook it, cringing at her clammy palms. His hands, she noticed, were dry and surprisingly cold.

  49

  At lunchtime, in the cafeteria, Zoe was looking for Harry. Instead, she found Emily.

  “Hey,” Zoe said, approaching her table. Emily was sitting with Lucy Barker and Jessie Lee. “Saved you a seat,” she said.

  Zoe hesitated. With one eye, she continued to look for Harry. She stood in a thoroughfare and she had to squish up against the table to let people past.

 
“If you’re looking for your boyfriend,” Emily said, knowingly, “he’s gone.”

  “Harry’s gone?”

  “Aha, so he is your boyfriend!” She snapped her fingers in delight. “Man, I’m so jealous.”

  “Where is he?” Zoe asked.

  “He was suspended,” Lucy Barker said, clearly delighted to impart this particular piece of information. “For hitting Cameron this morning.”

  “Hitting Cameron?” Zoe exclaimed. “He pushed him.”

  “Whatever it was, Harry’s been sent home.”

  Zoe ignored a loud whisper of “That’s her!” as someone passed her. She was too busy thinking about Harry. She’d been looking forward to—and anxious as hell about—the possibility of sitting beside him in the cafeteria.

  “Are you going to sit down or what?” Emily said. “We have so much to catch up on!”

  Zoe remained standing. It was hard to describe how it felt to have someone in her corner. Harry had stood up for her. He’d gotten into trouble for it. She thought of what Dr. Sanders said. And she had a feeling she’d just gotten another new member on her team.

  “Can we catch up later?” she said to Emily. “I have somewhere else to be.”

  * * *

  Zoe was skipping school, something she’d never done. She felt a knot of anxiety at the idea of getting caught, but she tried to block it out. What’s the worst that could happen? she muttered to herself. Just don’t think about it.

  “So you’re my bodyguard?” Zoe said when Harry answered his door.

  Harry grinned. “Apparently I am. You’d better be impressed because my parents grounded me for two weeks.”

  “I’m impressed,” she said, blushing.

  He widened the door. “In that case, won’t you come in?” he said, in a fake-formal voice.

  She ducked under his arm, into the house. He followed her into the lounge room and fell backward onto the sofa. Zoe hovered awkwardly.