TellMeNoLies

by Delphine Dryden

  She shrugged but didn’t deny it. She was having trouble attending to his words.

  “On top of that, your sister and your cousin have turned out to be normal, functional human beings who are capable of living their lives quite well without any supervision from their stand-in mom. Another thing you’d worked on for years that’s done now. So in under a year, all this stuff you’ve built your life around—”

  “That’s enough.” She pushed off his lap and backed halfway across the room.

  “It’s all changing, and you aren’t in control of any of it.”

  “No, stop!”

  Her heart had started pounding halfway through Jake’s speech and her head was swimming. Now her lips were buzzing as if she’d chased a beer with three shots of whiskey. Her stomach felt like a swarm of butterflies, a nightmarish quantity. It had come on so fast, and she knew what came next, the sweat and nausea, the suffocating sensation. She had no idea if Jake’s words had done it or if it was bad luck, this timing that couldn’t get any worse.

  “Honey? Tess, are you okay?”

  His voice sounded hollow, distant.

  Tess shook her head, trying to clear it. Waved her hands as if she could flick away the growing pressure. “Need a paper bag,” she managed, stumbling back to the couch and letting her head fall between her knees.

  “Shit!”

  “Language.”

  He laughed quick and harsh in disbelief. He was already headed toward the kitchen, presumably to find her something to breathe into. She concentrated on breathing out, resisting the urge to gasp for air.

  It’s all in my head, she reminded herself, and pressed her lips together to see if they were any less numb. Nope.

  “Here you go.”

  He pressed a brown lunch bag into her hands, its edges neatly folded down and already slightly compressed so all she had to do was put it up to her nose and lips. She breathed in, sucking hard, collapsing the bag. Then out, inflating it until it stopped crinkling.

  “Your fingers are like popsicles again. Keep the breathing up. Be right back.”

  I’ll be dead by then. Gonna keel right over. Thank god, about time.

  She reprimanded herself for the thought, which she knew was a product of whatever horrible mental misfire was causing her to freak out in the first place. Life was good, life was peachy, she had no complaints. There was no good, objective reason for her not to be happy.

  In and out, in and out, the crumpling noise soothing in its regularity. After a few more breaths she imagined the buzzing in her face was subsiding, her pulse rate returning to something like a safe range.

  “Okay, put this on.”

  Jake was back, slipping a big sweatshirt over her head. Tess had to scramble to find the armholes and settle the shirt into place while still keeping the bag pressed to her face. The fabric was old and soft, comforting. She sat back, leaning into the couch cushions, tucking her knees up into the voluminous shirt. Jake spread a crocheted throw over her then vanished into the kitchen again, only to return with a glass full of white wine and a large water bottle.

  She took the wine gratefully, trading it for the bag and swallowing an indelicately large gulp. Then she put the bag back over her face, more as a shield than anything else. Buying herself a few more minutes before Jake demanded more answers than she was ready to give.

  “So this isn’t your first one of these, I take it?”

  Startled, she looked up and shook her head. Jake looked sympathetic but not especially thrown by her odd fit. And now that she thought about it, how had he known exactly what to do, what she needed?

  “How do you…?”

  “I know somebody who gets them.”

  “Who?”

  He bit his lip, obviously debating whether to tell. “Well…Mom.”

  “Your mom?”

  “Yeah, my mom, whose mom did you think? She used to have panic attacks maybe a couple times a year when I was a teenager and I guess after I left for college too. She didn’t call them that at the time, of course. One glass of wine, a hot bath and quiet for the rest of the day, that was always her thing when it happened. She finally went to a psychiatrist about it and got some kind of medication for them; she puts it under her tongue. But I think they’re also not as frequent, now that’s she’s gone through, um. Menopause. Apparently whatever hormones she was taking helped too. Wow, she’s going to kill me if she ever finds out I told you all this stuff.”

  He was talking to distract her, she thought. He really seemed worried. It was endearing as hell.

  Tess tried to imagine Jake’s elegant, self-possessed mother having anything so crass as a “panic attack”. The closest she could come was “a fit of the vapors”.

  “I don’t know if that’s even what I’m having,” she lied. “I was probably just a little—”

  “Don’t even try. Do not even try that with me, Teresa Abigail Moore.”

  Slumping back into the cushions again, Tess closed her eyes, inexpressibly weary now that the worst moments were past. Her breathing was steadier but the weight was still there, a leaden cloak between her and any possible good in the world. This too was familiar. The novelty and excitement of the past day or so had lifted it, but now it was settling back into place around her, on top of her, making it an effort to get up and do the simplest things, make the simplest decisions.

  “But you’ve got other stuff going on too, don’t you? Tess, have you been seeing anyone?”

  In her muddled state it took her several seconds to realize he didn’t mean dating, but doctors.

  “No. I mean, I was for a while. After the first time this happened. And for the other stuff. Talk therapy, you know, not a psychiatrist. But I stopped.”

  “Not because of the insurance?”

  “No, no, I was still at the paper. It was months ago. And I have a COBRA, anyway. I could go if I wanted to. I stopped because…”

  How to explain it in a way that didn’t confirm her as crazy?

  She’d stopped going because she’d learned she could say whatever she wanted, with nobody to counter her version of events. She couldn’t resist the temptation. Tess, the budding fiction writer, had wanted to draw her listener in as she would a reader. When her own narrative seemed dull, she began to embellish, to see what she could get away with and what would pique the therapist’s interest. When she realized she was paying to play mind games with a stranger, she cancelled her next appointment and never returned.

  “I think in technical terms I was what they call an ‘unreliable reporter’. Which is super-ironic.”

  “You lied to your shrink?”

  Here, of course, she could get away with nothing. She couldn’t put anything past Jake.

  “Only for a few sessions. At a hundred-fifty bucks an hour it had limited appeal, even if I was getting reimbursed for a lot of it.” She contemplated her wineglass, the thicker-than-water way the pale liquid clung to the sides. It went down her throat cleanly, however.

  Jake sat on the coffee table, his knees brushing her toes. “I can see where that might get to be a costly hobby. But I guess what really matters is how it’s affecting your life. And why it’s happening to begin with. Do your attacks come out of nowhere, or does something bring them on?”

  Being herself brought them on. That in itself was enough of a struggle to give anyone anxiety. Right now her mood was a heavy weight, but usually she thought of it as a dark well, and lately she spent most of her time at the bottom wondering how to get out. The walls were slick stone, not impossible to climb most days but never easy. And yes, sometimes she couldn’t scale them at all. Worst of all were the days she didn’t even want to try. Because it was dark and secret down there, a familiar and fundamentally private misery that she couldn’t help but wallow in on those bad days.

  Things got poisoned in the well, or lost in translation on their way up and out into the world of light and laughter, of people who could enjoy things. Tess’ finer sentiments couldn’t survive being filte
red through so many gallons of self-loathing, second-guessing and resentment. What emerged was almost invariably not what she’d originally intended. Sometimes she wished she could explain this so people would understand.

  But it was her dark well. Her secret. She guarded it ferociously because it was all she had. Her whole life was in there. “Deeply invested” didn’t begin to cover it. So it didn’t surprise Tess that her ability to manage it all was sorely taxed sometimes. Who wouldn’t freak out from time to time? And nobody could help, because nobody else could possibly understand what it was like, living at the bottom of a well.

  Depression, her short-term therapist had called it. But she didn’t feel sad. She felt numb, or anxious, or obsessed, or plain nuts.

  Jake was still waiting for an answer. Tess wondered how long she’d spaced out, but it didn’t really matter now that he knew she was crazy on top of being a bitch. It didn’t get much less appealing than that combo. She wrapped the blanket tighter. Nothing mattered. Because of serotonin, or the lack thereof, or so she’d read somewhere. At least she could feel her face and breathe again.

  “Probably I think they’re coming from nowhere, but I’m actually ignoring some buried psychological response to my circumstances as an avoidance mechanism so I don’t have to take ownership of all my first-world problems.”

  “Great analysis. Did you get that from the therapist or is it more of Allison’s stuff?”

  “No, the internet. And thank you, it took me a while to come up with just the right summary of my crazy times.”

  He placed his elbows on his knees and pressed his palms together, resting his chin on his fingertips and contemplating her from that prayer-like pose. “I can’t help but notice that this came on when I wanted to talk about—”

  “It’s not like that. Not a reaction to stuff that’s going on right then. More like everything is bad all the time, and sometimes the lid kinda pops off from the pressure and all that stuff escapes in one big bubble of extra-gloopy badness. Like…like emotional flatulence.”

  Jake bit his lip, then gave in and chuckled. “Tess, your metaphors. So sophisticated. You want to write all that down so you can use it in a book sometime?”

  “Jerk.” She hauled a throw pillow out from behind her and whacked him with it, then let him wrest it from her hand and return it to its spot. “For what it’s worth, I’m sure you’re right, all the stuff you said earlier. About everything changing, and me freaking out because I can’t control it.”

  “Maybe you need time to adjust. You’re back here because you’re cocooning.”

  “Maybe.” She knocked back the rest of the wine in one go.

  “Sometimes the most stressful thing is getting exactly what you want,” Jake pointed out.

  “Because then what do you do? I know. In theory, I know that. But…did I even want that? Didn’t I want my old job at first too? So how long is this even going to last?”

  “For the answer to these and other important questions, tune in tomorrow.”

  She chuckled. Weakly, but not completely for show. He had lightened her mood, not only now but all week long, and she wondered how that could be possible when on the surface so much of what he’d done was either unremarkable or stuff that most people would consider abusive. And that stuff had been what made such a difference. Not the talking, not the dinners or fixing her water heater, but everything since yesterday. Maybe Jake was right, and it had triggered something, opened up some deeply buried cache of stuff. She certainly had plenty of those.

  “Or maybe it’s just some chemical thing, like my mom’s. The wrong hormones or something.”

  “Serotonin. Maybe. But whatever it is, for now I think the worst is over. And we don’t have time for this anyway. You need to get to work,” she reminded him regretfully. “I need to get some clothes on and go get ready to receive all my junk.”

  “You have clothes on. Not one but two of my shirts.”

  They felt great too. Especially the one that he’d been wearing yesterday, which also smelled like him. “I think to greet the movers I should also opt for pants. And, at a minimum, underwear. No bra though. I’m not going that far.”

  He smiled, slow and sexy. “Pants I’ll allow. You can skip the bra. And no underwear. I stole those and I’m not giving them back. I like the idea of you running around commando.”

  “I like the idea of you.” Yikes. Too much? Her filter had evidently gone down in the attack.

  “Only the idea of me? Or the actuality?”

  She ignored the question but returned his smile. “I’m keeping your shirts. Collateral for my underwear.”

  “You have yourself a deal.”

  Chapter Ten

  Everything seemed too real and bright in the light of day. The moving guys, laughing and joking as they hauled her furniture into place, had been a shade too loud. She’d wanted to be back at Jake’s house, cocooned as he’d said, silent, not having to decide where dressers and tables should go. She could stay there forever and he could be her contact with the outside world. Not very practical.

  The cottage was charming though, she had to admit. Not a bad place to regroup and lick some wounds. It was even cozier and cuter when all the furniture was in place, despite the unpacked boxes stacked in every corner.

  It stopped feeling cozy and just felt too small, Tess noticed, when it was full of annoyed teenage brother.

  “Do you have any idea how worried Dad has been? When he found out you’d been here for weeks, didn’t even bother to tell anyone your new address—”

  “It wasn’t weeks, it’s been a week. And it wasn’t that I didn’t bother,” she snapped, wishing Mikey would stop pacing around the tiny living room. He’d shown up unannounced a few minutes after the moving van had left. He had been pacing across her cottage, furious, ever since. “I wanted some time to myself. A vacation. Sometimes grownups need a break.”

  He stopped in his tracks and glared at her, reminding her of their father all of a sudden. At eighteen, Mikey topped six feet and had the kind of looks that high school girls penned odes to in their binders. But he was more forceful than she’d ever seen her dad act. More confident. Good for him. “You have to act like a grownup before you get a grownup break, Tess.”

  “That sounds like something you heard somebody else say, Michael. Who, I wonder?”

  His jaw tightened and he turned away, picking at the tape on the closest box. Forceful but still only a teenager. Confidence only took you so far, and Tess should know. She’d had it in spades once. If she’d acknowledged her own doubts, her own limitations, she never would have managed all she had.

  Raise a little girl and a baby boy, with next to no training and a father whose emotions seemed shut off at the source after his wife’s funeral? No problem, if you told yourself often enough that it was no problem. Two or three years later, when Dad had checked back in, he’d met a stony wall of resentment from his older daughter that lasted another several years. Tess could do all the parenting, thank you very much. She had been doing it since the age of thirteen, after all.

  Paying for college by herself, when it was clear Dad’s hardware store wouldn’t be able to cover tuition and expenses? Mind over matter. She’d brought her GPA up for the last two years of high school, remained on the cheerleading squad and applied for every local and state scholarship she could find, staying up all night to finish essays and applications on more than one occasion. When she’d hit the university campus, she hadn’t even unpacked before she was on the search for a job. It would be the first of many, and she subsidized her sister’s education as well when the time came.

  Journalism wasn’t a practical major, the field too competitive? So what? Tess was competitive, she was talented, and she knew what she wanted. When she’d interviewed for jobs fresh from college, she walked into the door every time as though she had already been hired and the interview was a formality. It worked. Later, when she’d decided to try to publish her book, she gave herself three months to f
ind an agent. She signed with one in six weeks.

  She’d gotten what she’d wanted, achieved what she’d set out to do, because she refused to let herself think about what would have happened if she hadn’t. Or what would’ve happened if she’d decided later that she wanted something else.

  Now her mind seemed to be offering up all those alternatives and what-ifs after the fact, making her pay a lump-sum price for barreling her way through so many years.

  “Dad’s just worried about you. So is Lindy.” Mikey was still contemplating the box. He’d peeled the tape all the way off the top and started rolling it down one side. At least he’d stopped pacing.

  “It’s a little late for that. I’m sorry,” she said, interrupting him when he tried to respond. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to feel that way, but I do. Okay? The time for him to worry about me was right around the time he turned into a goddamned zombie because his grief for his dead wife took precedence over anything that was going on with his live kids. After a couple years of waiting, I figured that ship had sailed. I learned to do without either parent, and I can’t unlearn that.

  “And you? You don’t get to judge me. Because while I was waiting for him to notice he wasn’t the only one hurting, I was busy changing your diapers and potty-training you and trying to teach you how to eat with utensils instead of your hands. Not to mention rocking Lindy to sleep every night while she cried her heart out. I was thirteen, Mikey. Thirteen. Five years younger than you are now. What were you doing when you were in the eighth grade, huh? Perving on Keisha Jackson and spending your allowance on comic books and computer games.”

  She’d gotten to her feet as she spoke, her gestures expanding to accommodate her rising emotions. Mikey, on the other hand, had turned with his mouth open then froze in obvious shock.

  Tess had never spoken to him that way, not in eighteen years. She’d scolded, teased, cajoled, lectured and generally made his business hers, but she’d never spoken any of those deeper things aloud to Mikey or to anyone.