by Gae Polisner
Dr. Alvarez nods, and I sit down next to her. Shoulders hunched, I stare at my feet.
The air echoes.
“I just wanted to stop feeling the pain,” I finally say.
“I get it,” she says. “Replace one pain with another, right?” I nod, grateful. “I understand. And now?”
“And now.” I look up. Around. We’re in a beautiful clearing. Sun streams down through the green lace of trees. “Now I just want to be okay.”
* * *
We don’t speak for a while, just sit, and when I do look around again and take in our surroundings, I notice things I hadn’t at first.
A matching white stone bench across from the one we sit on, its legs carved with ornate fruits and birds. A small shrine of sorts in the center of the clearing.
I get up and walk over. It’s a low, flat tree stump, upon which three stone Buddhas, a few assorted crystals and beach rocks, and several metal bowls filled with water and floating flower petals are perched. A few stems of silk flowers faded from the sun.
I give Dr. Alvarez a quizzical look and she says, “No, I didn’t put most of that here, if you’re wondering. Just one of the Buddhas, and some beach rocks. The others were already here when I found this spot.”
“Oh. Wow. Weird. I mean, cool, I guess. But weird.”
“Agree,” she says. “For what it’s worth, I’m not particularly religious. But I find it pretty and soothing. Years after I discovered it, I found that one Buddha, the small one in the center, at a garage sale. And, I love how the rainwater fills the bowls.”
Dr. Alvarez walks over and adjusts one of the bowls and picks an acorn from the ground and drops it in. I peer up through the canopy of branches, tracing the beams of sunlight down. They fall almost perfectly mid-altar.
“Comforting, right?” she asks. “I can’t tell you how often that happens. As if it’s all truly meant to be here. The woman who sold me the Buddha said her name is Green Tara. I looked her up once. She’s the Goddess of Universal Compassion. The story goes that she was born from the tears of a bodhisattva who saw the world suffering and wept. His tears formed a lake from which a lotus flower sprang. When the lotus flower opened, Green Tara was revealed.” I nod, reminded of the stories my father would tell. “Who knows if it’s true, but it’s a lovely thought, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” I say, scavenging a small bud of some sort from the ground and placing it in one of the bowls. I want to add something, leave some sort of contribution here.
I take a step closer and study Green Tara’s face. Something about how tranquil she appears fills me with a desire to paint. I could pull out my brushes and canvas, but I’m tired, too, so maybe tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow I’ll ask if we can come back so I can paint.
Dr. Alvarez sits on the opposite bench and stretches her legs. She’s taken off her shoes again and wiggles her red-polished toes. The soles of her feet are brown with dirt. I smile, thinking of the first day I sat with her, and how comfortable I am, how very much I like her now. I trust her completely. Has it really only been a week and a half?
“So,” she says, smiling at me, “the worst of it is out, yes? And here you are, in the sunshine, still standing.”
Day 10—Afternoon
When I get back to my room, Martin is waiting at my door.
I’m so not in the mood. It’s not that I mind the kid, but I don’t feel like talking. And seriously, he’s way too young to think he should be hanging out with me.
“What’s up, Martin?” I ask, still feeling the weight of the morning. I feel heavy and churned up, like my insides are the contents of a cement mixer. I want to lie down, take a nap, or find some mindless rerun on television.
“Want to hang in the game room? There’s a Ping-Pong table in the back.”
“There is?” I think of Sister Agnes Teresa, going in there and loading up her cart with board games from the past several decades, and find myself wondering if she’s good at Ping-Pong, too. Because, that I could beat her at, though the thought is unfair. She can probably barely reach above the table.
“Do you know Sister Agnes Teresa?” I ask.
“Who?”
“Sister Agnes Teresa. The nun who volunteers here.”
“The short one?” Martin asks, which makes me laugh a little, because it’s seriously the understatement of the year.
“Yeah, her.”
“Oh, yeah. I’ve seen her around. Why? What about her?”
“No. Nothing. I don’t know. I like her. She comes in and plays games with me sometimes.”
“She does?” Martin sounds hurt. So I guess she doesn’t do the same with him.
“Dumb games,” I say, not wanting him to feel bad. “Seriously. Like Checkers and Candy Land.” I laugh and Martin laughs, too. But the truth is, I do feel a little special now. Like Sister Agnes Teresa picked me, saw some reason to annoy and enlist me. “Anyway,” I tell him, “sure, why not? Ping-Pong it is.”
“Okay, but I’m going to whip your butt,” Martin warns.
“I’m used to that.” I follow him the few doors down the hall. “Hey, where’s Sabrina?”
“I don’t know,” he says, pushing the game room door open and switching on the lights. “We’re not really friends, or hadn’t you noticed?”
“I hadn’t,” I say. “And, I’m sure you are,” but the insightfulness of his statement kind of surprises me. The kid is smart, clearly, but he doesn’t always seem aware.
Martin shrugs and says, “No, we’re not. Why would we be? Anyway, none of us stick around long, if we’re lucky. So no one is actually friends inside here.”
“I get that,” I say. “But I also think we are. Maybe there are different kinds of friends. People who support you.” I want to rumple his hair, do something. I’m suddenly feeling pretty sorry for the kid.
“Maybe.” He shrugs again. “Then again, what do I know? It’s not like I’m some sort of an expert.”
“Really?” I want to say, “Aren’t you?” because he always acts like one. But he sounds so defeated, so instead I ask, “So, do you have many friends at home?”
“Not exactly. You?” Martin finds the rubber stop from behind the door and wedges it in the crack so the door won’t close. “House rules,” he says, walking to the shelves. He retrieves a clear plastic bin filled with white Ping-Pong balls and padded paddles. “Follow me.” He heads back to a second room. “So, do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Have a lot of friends.”
“Me, nah. Same as you. Not too many. But, I only came to Northhollow this year.”
I figure he’ll ask me why, and I’ll have to explain about my father and why my mother moved us up here my senior year. Explain about Cleto and Dan, and what good friends we were. But all he says is, “Yeah, figures. Most of us in here rarely have many good friends.”
I stop walking, my mind going to Cleto again. “Is that true?”
“Of course it’s true. We’re loners. We isolate from others. We mess up relationships. There are plenty of signs before we end up in here. You’re pretty new at this, aren’t you? This isn’t, like, step number one.”
Jesus. I think about Sarah and how adamant I was about not hanging out with her friends. Then again, Abbott and Dunn, well, can you blame me about them? But still. And Cleto and Dan, I never reached out to them …
“We’re all guilty of it,” Martin says, shaking his head. “I hear everyone’s stories. None of us ever think we play a part. But we do. We refuse to connect. We withdraw. Or at least we don’t reach out to anyone for help. We can do it alone, we think. We don’t need anyone else.”
He stops at the small green table, the kind that converts to a card table or bumper pool.
“I know, I know, not regulation size. Better than nothing. You serve,” he says, tossing a paddle and two balls at me.
We volley back and forth, my game off given the odd size of the table, until Martin slams the ball hard, making contact with the very edge of my s
ide of the table, before it whips past my head and into a window.
“Nice shot,” I say. “You didn’t tell me you were a prodigy at this, too.”
Martin shrugs. The last few days he’s lacked his original enthusiasm. “Dumb luck is all,” he says. “Besides, it’s a pointless thing to be good at. Anyway, I envy you. Being in college soon and all. I wish I were you.” He retrieves the ball and takes his serve.
“Hey, Martin, you’re a cool kid,” I say. “And smart, too. I know you know that. But not just smart. Not how you think, but in other ways too. You have a whole lot going for you.”
“You think?” Martin asks, giving me an eye, trying to figure out if I’m pulling his leg. But I’m not. I put my paddle down, walk over, and put an arm around him, give his hair a brotherly ruffle.
“Yeah, no kidding. I do.”
* * *
After Martin goes back to his room, I head to the nurses’ station. There’s something I need to do.
“Could I make a call, please?” I ask. “To an outside line. A friend, in the city.”
“Go ahead,” the nurse says. “Dial one first, to get out. You can sit over there.” She motions to an empty cluster of chairs across from the desk.
It’s weird to use a landline, been forever since I’ve had to, and suddenly, I’m not even sure I know his cell number. It takes me three false starts before I think I have the sequence right.
The minute it starts ringing, I panic. It’s a weekday. I didn’t even look at the time. He’s probably still in school. My eyes dart to the clock above the nurses’ station: 2:36 P.M. They just got out. But maybe he has some club and stayed after. Maybe he’s with Dan. Maybe he has a girlfriend.
It rings four times and I’m about to hang up, when I hear his familiar “Hey yo.” I don’t talk. I can’t get words out of my mouth. “Who is this?” Obviously he’s confused. I’m calling him from the fucking Ape Can. How might that come up on his caller ID?
I should hang up.
“Asshole,” he says.
“Cleto?” I say, fast.
“Klee? Hey! What up, man?”
Not much. I’m calling from the loony bin.
I had a bad day and went off the deep end.
“Klee? You there? Where you calling from, man?”
“Yeah, hey. I am. It’s been awhile. I just wanted to say hello.”
“Good to hear from you. Me and Dan, we were just talking about you this afternoon. No shit. Maybe your ears were burning, bro.”
I feel sick. I feel like I could actually throw up. I don’t know what made me think it was a good idea to call Cleto from in here.
“You all right, man? Whose number is this? You around this weekend? Want to come in? Melting Snow is playing at the Copper Penny, and Dan and I thought you might come in.”
Melting Snow is a band we follow. Used to follow. And, the Copper Penny is a dive bar down in the Village where Dan’s uncle works and lets us in. As long as we stay away from the bar.
“I wish,” I say. “Yeah. If I could, I would totally come in. But not this weekend. That’s what I’m calling you about, man.”
“Okay, sure.” I hear the disappointment in his voice, and it hits me again that he tried. He tried. Even after I moved up here to Northhollow. He and Dan would both call, and we’d make plans, but inevitably I’d find a way to blow them off. We’re loners. We isolate. We mess up relationships. There are plenty of signs before we end up in here. “But not because I don’t want to, Cleto. I do. I’m going to. I had a little accident…” I say.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Thanks. Well, not an accident, exactly. It’s been a little hairy around here.”
“Sorry to hear that. Can I help?”
“No. I’m okay. I mean, I think I am, now.”
“Do you want to talk?”
And, suddenly, I do. I really want to talk to Cleto. To my friend. Tell him everything. So I do. Whispered with my back turned so the nurse won’t hear. The whole ugly saga. About Sarah and my mom and her dumb letters—her affair—and how things got fucked-up long before that. “I didn’t deal with my dad when it happened, I don’t think,” I say, “and it all piled up, and I kind of went crazy, I guess.”
“Wow,” Cleto says. “I had no idea.”
“I know. I lost it, dude. I mean, seriously lost it. But I think I’m getting better in here.”
“Shit,” he says, after a few seconds of dead silence. “That’s fucked-up. I feel bad. I don’t know what to say.”
“It’s okay.”
“Yeah.” He’s quiet for a few seconds, then says, “So, you think you’re getting out soon?”
“Yeah. I mean, I hope so. I’ll have to stay in therapy and shit, stay on medication.”
“That makes sense,” Cleto says.
“Yeah. Anyway, I figured I should tell you. Reach out. You’re my best friend, Cleto. Always were. And I sure don’t have any friends up here. And I didn’t want you hearing through social media or some crazy shit like that.”
“Okay, man. I’m glad you did. Feel better, Klee. Holy shit. You’d better get better,” he says.
Day 11—Morning
Dr. Alvarez has her back to me, looks out her office window at the drizzle.
Yesterday, in the sunshine, talking to Dr. Alvarez, to Cleto, everything felt more hopeful, more doable. But today I’m back to worried again. What if I never feel well enough to get out of here?
When I walk in, she turns and smiles. Dr. Alvarez’s smile can almost make me believe what she believes. That I will get better. That I have. That soon I’ll be ready to go home.
“Klee,” she says, nodding at the couch, so I sit. “Have I told you how much I like your name?” I don’t say anything because I’m not sure what to say. “Clay,” she says, then, “Clay,” again. “Simple and solid, and appealing.”
I shift uncomfortably. I don’t give much thought to my name. I mean, I do, but not that way. It’s a burden at times. And I was never a fan of Paul Klee.
“My mother liked him,” I say. “My father and I preferred the Impressionists and Postimpressionists, obviously. Manet, Gauguin, Van Gogh. But my mother, she likes the Bauhaus painters, and abstracts, too, Kandinsky, Klee, and more modern ones.”
“I can imagine why you wouldn’t love it, then, but it’s a great strong name they chose for you. Though I imagine the mispronunciation drives you crazy.”
“I guess,” I say. “I’m used to it.” I twist and look out the window. The rain has intensified. A spring storm, thunder and all.
“Believe me, I get it. It’s strange, you probably don’t know this yet—or maybe you do?—but my first name is Ailîn, circumflex over the second i.”
She’s right, I didn’t know her first name. Never even thought about it. In fact, her having a first name never really occurred to me. I just think of her as Dr. Alvarez.
“So, see? I do get it, which is why I felt so bad when I realized I’d been mispronouncing your name. Although, no one really calls me Ailîn anymore. Not for a long time. My close friends and family all call me Lynnie or Lynn, and my mother passed away two years ago … She was the only one who called me by my proper name.” Her voice turns sad, and I realize we have more in common than I knew. She lost a parent recently, too. Though I’m guessing from something more normal than mine. “Anyway, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, my name means ‘transparent’ or ‘clear,’ which makes me like it better than I might. It’s a Mapudungun name, a language isolate spoken in south-central Chile. Don’t ask me what any of that means.”
She winks at me and moves around the coffee table to sit in her chair. “My mother was Chilean,” she says, “but I’ve seen Gaelic derivations, too. My father, now he…” She laughs at some funny thing I’m not privy to. “He was from San Salvador.”
“Oh, wow,” I say, twisting back to look out the window again. A low rumble of thunder is followed by a quick succession of lightning flashes.
“Boring, m
ore like it.” She laughs softly. “I guess my point is, I like names. I’m interested in them. I often wonder if and how they shape us. I’ve tried to do some research on what our names may have to do with who we are—who we become—if anything.” Another crack and rumble of thunder, this one louder and closer, and the rain opens up, stretching down in an almost deafening sheet.
“Anyway, I looked up your name, because I was curious. I mean, it sounds like Clay, but I was curious if I could find an exact reference. Besides Paul Klee in particular. I wondered if it had a distinct meaning.
“As you can imagine, you don’t find a lot of references for the version with your spelling, and most do, in fact, relate to the painter. There seems to be a Greek reference, too, to clover, or someone who lives near a field of clover. I like that a lot, because if you think of clover you might immediately think of good luck. But I wasn’t satisfied. That wasn’t the thing that I was looking for.
“So, I went with the English translation, Clay, which is how you pronounce it, after all. And, well, do you have any idea of the meaning?”
I try to focus over the din of the storm. I’m agitated; it conjures up Dunn’s house, and all I want to know at this point is how I get from here, to better, to home.
“Some kind of dirt or mineral or earth, I would think?” I ask halfheartedly.
“Aha, see? Right, you would think. And there is that version, short for Clayton, derived from Old English. But there’s another meaning altogether that I found in my search.”
She pulls out a folded piece of paper from her sweater pocket, and presses it onto her lap. “I couldn’t find the origin. But it’s the spelling with the k, and they say it means ‘He who is immortal.’” She pushes the piece of paper across the table to me. My eyes go to hers. “Not a bad choice, all things considered, right?” I nod, swallowing down the lump in my throat. “So, now that we’ve talked about all that other stuff, what happened with Sarah, what happened with your mom, perhaps it’s time we talk about your dad.”
So we do. With the rain and the thunder pounding in the background, and the paper with the word “immortal” squeezed in my hand.
We talk about him before, and we talk about after. And we talk about the afternoon I found him. And when we’re finished, Dr. Alvarez says, “That’s a lot to handle, a lot to take in, stuff that very few of us could process on our own. We should and will talk more about it. Talk about tools, ways you might handle it, and let go. Ways you can truly allow yourself to heal.
