by Ivy Jordan
“There you are! Dinner’s almost ready. It’s good to see you!”
I smiled at her warmth. It was difficult for me to live so far away from my parents; they’d moved a ways out to build their dream home, and I was happy for them. Still, I missed them. No matter how many times I cooked dinner for myself or made myself cookies, they didn’t have that same expert finesse that my mom’s meals did. Janet and Jesse provided that sort of relief in my life, the same way that I sort of played the role of ‘daughter’ while theirs was… elsewhere.
Jesse was sitting at the kitchen table. “Well, hello!” He smiled at me and I took a seat next to him.
“Hey, Jesse. It’s good to see you. What have you been up to today?”
“I went to the nursery and picked up a new flower pot,” he said. “Janet wants to start growing tomatoes in the backyard, so I’m moving the flowers into pots to make room in the ground.”
I smiled. “Tomatoes?”
“I just think they’d be so nice,” Janet said. She brought a dish to the table; the smell nearly made my knees weak. I forgot, sometimes, how wonderful it was to have someone cook something.
“It smells amazing,” I said.
“Thank you, sweetheart.”
“How was your day at work today?” Jesse asked.
I groaned. “It was… more stressful than usual. I had to file three neglect reports and an abuse report. A few of them were with the same person. I think I’m going to need to file a report with another for the police, too, about something else. I can’t tell you names or details, really, but it’s just such a pain.”
“Oh, goodness! Are you safe?” Janet set a glass of water at my place.
“Of course,” I assured her. I’d never had any kind of threats come to me, and the police were clear about the protections available to me when I filed reports with them. I hadn’t had to file many since I’d started working, but this had been a particularly eventful day. “It’s just some kind of stressful. I don’t like to file reports with the police when I don’t have to.”
“You must be dealing with a bunch of loons,” Jesse exclaimed.
I shook my head. “Oh, no, I wouldn’t say that.”
“You have to call the police on them!”
“Still, I wouldn’t say that. The neighbors called the police on my parents a few years back for playing music too loud at their barbecue, and they’re not loons,” I reasoned.
“But you only file for neglect and abuse, right?”
I sighed. “Yes. But, I don’t know, Jesse. I don’t think it’s healthy to look at people like that. Looking at them like they’re crazy means you’re not focusing on their problems. Only rarely is someone really just… You know, I’ve never had a patient that was out of their mind. Such a small part of the population is certifiably insane, you know. And out of those that are, some of them can be rehabilitated.”
Jesse raised his eyebrows. “You sure do have a lot of faith in people.”
“I have a lot of faith in mental health,” I corrected. “The brain’s just like anything else in the body. It gets sick, gets tired, needs fixing. That’s what I’m for.” I served myself some casserole and passed it to my aunt. I believed firmly in what I said. Calling people crazy or insane only took away from the larger point. People could have all sorts of problems that stemmed from all sorts of upbringings and situations. It wasn’t fair to dismiss them as crazy or loons when they weren’t. They were people who needed a little extra help.
Besides, it was the stigma surrounding mental health that kept people from seeking help in the first place. People thought that therapy was for crazy people when really, just about everyone could benefit from a therapy appointment every now and again. I didn’t believe in drugs for everyone; in fact, I believed in drugs for very few people. I thought of some of the statistics I’d seen about college students and depression, married couples and depression. People got themselves into fixes sometimes.
People that got themselves into fixes. I glanced across the table at the only empty spot remaining. I wondered where Stacy was, or whether my aunt or uncle had heard from her. I certainly hadn’t, but then, I wasn’t really someone that Stacy would come to if she needed help. She didn’t like or dislike me; she didn’t know me very well, and she tended to keep to her own social group. I tended to stay away from her social group. I thought about what my aunt had said about her and Sawyer dating in the past. I wondered if he’d been involved in what she got up to.
As though she could read my mind, my aunt spoke up about the topic I was thinking about. “We haven’t heard from Stacy in a little while,” she said.
An uncomfortable feeling settled over the table at the mention of her daughter’s name. My uncle cleared his throat and set his fork down, his mouth turned into an uncharacteristic frown. My aunt fidgeted, going quiet as though someone else had brought it up, not her.
That meant that the conversation fell to me. “How long is a while?”
“A few weeks,” Janet said.
That was a little longer than usual. Stacy was prone to going out for spells and not coming back for a few days at a time. The longest she’d been gone was about a week and a half. A few weeks was a record, and it didn’t bode well.
The uncomfortable feeling over the table didn’t shift. They didn’t know how to talk about Stacy, and so they tended not to. I wondered if they’d invited me over as a sort of psychological mediator. Sometimes friends would do that, using me for my skills. I usually got irritated by that, preferring them to schedule an appointment like everyone else, but I’d have done just about anything for Janet and Jesse. This situation with Stacy would require more than one twenty-seven-year-old with a psychology degree to crack.
“Do you think you should call the police?” I asked. “File a missing persons report?” A few weeks really was a long time to go without hearing from her.
Janet shook her head. “No, she’s updating her social media. I can’t see what she’s posting, but I can see she’s been on it.”
“I don’t want you going after her,” Jesse said. He looked serious behind the eyes. “Especially with the trouble she gets into, it’s dangerous running after her. Best to wait until she gets back.”
“Oh, I hate waiting,” Janet said. She folded her hands in her lap. “It’s dreadful not to know what she’s up to. Or, you know, where she is. I understand she’s an adult, but you know she gets involved in such dangerous things.”
“It’s the drugs,” Jesse muttered. “It’s the drugs that are the worst of it. If she’d listen to any of the rehab officers, maybe she’d be fine by now.”
I sighed. Stacy and her drugs were not something to be so easily divorced. She’d gone to rehab a few times and taken a chunk out of Janet and Jesse’s retirement doing so. It got to the point that the local church started throwing money at the issue. It seemed to be that her life was just going to be a series of cocaine binges and rehab cleansings until she decided to get her act together. I didn’t know where to start with that.
“You know, when she gets back, I might see if she’ll go talk to a psychiatrist,” Jesse said. “Quinn, maybe you could take a crack at her.”
I offered him a small smile. “I appreciate that, Jesse. But I don’t think I’m the person to deal with her. I know her too well. She needs someone on the outside who doesn’t know too much about her personal life.”
“Someone close to the family will make her defensive,” Janet piped up. “But we can see about it. It’s testy, getting her into a therapist. She’s always so jumpy about getting help.”
That was why I didn’t see the point in bringing her into my office. Someone who didn’t want help wouldn’t get help, no matter how much therapy they went to. Everything I might tell them would go out the other ear, and they wouldn’t be talking through their problems anyway.
I thought about the situation with Stacy all the way home. My paperwork waited for me in a pile by my bed, and when I curled up with a mug of tea, I
considered the implications of Stacy being gone so long. I tried to check her social media, but it seemed that I was blocked, too. It showed she’d updated it not too long ago.
It seemed we’d hear back from her either when she got arrested or when she got into some serious trouble and needed Janet and Jesse to bail her out. I resented that she used them like that, as sort of money pots for her partying. They were good, kind people. But she was an addict, and I had to remember that. Addicts looked at people as means to an end, not as multifaceted and important beings with needs and wants outside of their problems.
In any case, I wouldn’t be seeing her in my office. Even if Jesse insisted, even if Janet pleaded with Stacy, even if the whole world begged at her feet, Stacy wouldn’t be coming to me for help. She’d see someone else first. And that was for the best. An unbiased opinion was best, even if I did consider myself to be decent at my job. There would be too much at stake, knowing that she was Janet and Jesse’s daughter.
I started sorting through the papers I had for my clients the next day. A few people wouldn’t be coming in, and so I set them at the back of the stack. I had a couple coming in around noon for marriage counseling, which was always exciting. At first it had been terribly awkward to listen to a couple try and talk about their problems, but at this point, I found it incredibly fun. I didn’t specialize in it, but couples came to me, nonetheless.
When I finally reached the end of my stack, I found Sawyer’s paperwork. He’d marked his mother down as his emergency contact and put the house phone number as his phone number. I wondered if he still had a cell phone. I smiled at the scratchy writing, and at the reason he’d put for coming into therapy. ‘Sent by mother.’ It was the most honest anyone had been with me filling out a form.
I couldn’t help it. Despite everything, I was looking forward to seeing Sawyer the next day in my office.
Chapter Eleven
SAWYER
Wednesday morning was more of the same with my father running off, seemingly to avoid any conversation with me. I caught him leaving but said nothing, just watched while he took his newspaper and his mug of coffee to the back porch as though he’d ever done that ritual in his life before. For a moment I stood in the kitchen with one hand on the chair, considering running after him and confronting him about it. I knew he’d tell me some bullshit about liking to eat outside or always taking his breakfast in the morning outside, and how could I have forgotten?
He was full of shit. But he was my father, nonetheless. I sat down at the table and watched Mom, seemingly ignorant to the entire affair, sat down across from me. She acted as though she hadn’t a clue what had gone on.
“Do you think he’s ever going to get over this?” I asked her. That hadn’t been quite the right phrasing. I’d meant to make myself out to be more at fault. To some extent, though, I couldn’t do that anymore; I’d done nothing but blame myself and make penance for years. It was his turn now to offer some sort of forgiveness. At least, that’s what I felt.
“Oh, I don’t know what you mean, Sawyer,” Mom said. There was a careful tilt to her kind tone and I set my jaw, struggling not to grow frustrated with the wrong person.
“You know what I mean,” I said. “He’d avoided me since I got home. He’s… I don’t know whether it would be worse if he didn’t, but he’s avoiding me. Treats me like I’m not even here. Or, worse, like I’m here and he hates me.”
“He doesn’t hate you.”
“Then why does he leave?” I knew it wasn’t fair, in a way, to ask that when I had left myself years ago. But I’d left for much different reasons, many of which had to do with getting my father back on my good side, nonetheless.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” Mom said. “I really don’t, Sawyer, and you know I don’t like to talk to you about what we discuss, but I can tell you it hasn’t given me any leave to answer that question.”
I sighed and stared at the back of his head through the glass. I’d begun to get the feeling that I would never understand him, or maybe that he would never understand me.
“What I can tell you,” Mom said, carefully ladling herself a spoon of eggs, “is that he loves you. Whether or not you can tell it, he does.”
“That’s a lovely thought, Mom,” I returned, despite my better judgment. I should have known better than to snap like that, and she visibly stiffened, but there was no taking it back. And in truth, I meant it. She had no reason to defend the way he was treating me, at least, not unless she agreed with it in some part.
I had another appointment with Quinn that day. I’d thought of skipping it, but now I looked for the excuse to get out of the house. The appointment was only for an hour, but maybe she would take me up on my invitation for dinner. Well, my return to her invitation for dinner. I couldn’t help but be sorely disappointed that events had turned out the way they had.
Today, when I arrived in her office, the door was open. I didn’t sit down in the waiting room but rather proceeded directly to the door, and knocked against the side of it.
“Come in!”
So I did. It was hard not to marvel at her where she sat. She’d been lovely in jeans and a shirt at the party, but in slacks and these soft, ruffled blouses, she was nearly irresistible. For work, I noticed she wore glasses, perched on her nose and magnifying the deep blue in her eyes. They sat, round and all-knowing, above the peaks of her cheekbones and pointed slope of her nose. When she saw me, her mouth curled into a small smile.
“Sawyer, you’re just a little early,” she said.
I stood by the couch. “Do you need a few more minutes?”
“No, no. I just appreciate punctuality, and I’m glad that you do, too,” she said, and my own smile appeared despite any attempt to keep myself somber.
I hated that she’d turned out to be my therapist. In any other situation, I would ask her to dinner and at least attempt to date her. I didn’t know that I could stand sitting on this couch and not doing anything about this.
“I was rushing out of the house, really,” I said, as a sort of humble statement. I was punctual, but my punctuality today had been more circumstantial than behavioral.
“Oh? What had you in a hurry?”
“My dad.”
“Is he cross with you?”
I considered shutting the conversation down. I didn’t want to tell her all about my personal life and make her look at me as some broken person who needed help. But at this point, there was no point in trying not to talk to her. I had appointments with her, she didn’t want to go on dates with me, and the only thing I was achieving with shutting conversation down was making myself look ornery to her.
“Sort of,” I said. “He’s… he tends to ignore me.”
“Since you got back?”
“Yeah.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “I’ll walk into a room; he’ll leave. He avoided the party we had when I got back, and he’d avoided me since.”
“He didn’t come to meet you at the airport?” Quinn tilted her head slightly, and I couldn’t help but notice she had some sort of semblance of pity on her features. I adjusted myself slightly and tried to dissuade that.
“No, he didn’t, but it wasn’t a big deal,” I said. He wasn’t fighting with me, shouting at me, hitting me, any of that. Even despite all that we’d been through, he was at least being moderately civil. Part of me wanted to explain that, that everything could be much worse than it was.
“It’s just kind of hard, though, knowing that we used to get along,” I said. I looked down at the floor. “When I was a kid, you know, we would go everywhere together. “I remember being a little kid and going to get donuts with him on Saturday mornings. I was in Boy Scouts, too, and he used to go on all the campouts with me. We used to have a really good time.”
“What happened to change that?” Quinn asked.
So much had happened to change that, really. Almost everything that had happened was my fault, too, and not some change of heart by my father. I wanted to perp
etuate the narrative that my father was a villain. It might help me in Quinn’s eyes and make me look like some sort of unfairly treated kid. At least it would be better than the truth. I decided to evade from the truth as best I could.
“It’s just been different since I got back,” I said. That wasn’t a lie. Since I got back, he was more blatantly hateful towards me. The full truth would be that something happened before I left that made the situation change, and he’d been hateful before, too, just to a different extent.
Quinn looked like she suspected I was lying. It was in the arch of her eyebrow and slight twist of her mouth. I wondered what kind of date I might take her on, in a world where she would allow me to take her on a date. Probably dinner, somewhere nice but not too upscale. She didn’t seem like someone easily impressed by lavish meals or fancy decorations. She was well-educated—maybe she would want to go to an art museum, or see something interesting. She deserved better than a stereotypical movie date, that was for sure.
“When you were overseas, did you talk to him about something that had an effect on him?” She asked.
I shook my head. I hadn’t actually had any contact with him overseas. There had been one phone call from boot camp, one extremely terse phone call that hadn’t gone well. Neither of us had shouted, but he’d made it very clear that joining the military wasn’t going to solve my problems. Maybe turning to that phone call would help me understand why he still hated me.
“So he just randomly decided not to talk to you anymore? Do you think he feels guilty about your service, or doesn’t know how to talk to you about it?” Quinn asked.
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Sometimes when people come home from wartime, their families get a little distant because they don’t know how to talk to the veteran about their time overseas. They know that they must have seen horrible things and don’t know what to say about it. So they don’t say anything. Sometimes people get resentful of the attention veterans receive.”
