Inside

by Alix Ohlin

  She turned off the engine and got out. He was hopping angrily up and down, trying to reach a crutch that had landed upside down in a snowbank. She picked it up, dusted off the snow, and held it under his right arm. He was balancing, just barely, on the other crutch. He took a step toward the front door, then fell down again.

  “Look, I think you’re going to have to let me help you.”

  He said nothing. She put her arm around his waist and braced her hip against his, forcing him to lean on her, then stepped carefully up the walk with his arm across her shoulders. He used a crutch on the other side to help them both up the stairs. It took them five minutes to reach the front door, and another two for him to fish the keys out of his pocket.

  Once the door was open, without looking at her, he muttered, “Thanks.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Why?”

  “You need help. I don’t think there’s anybody in there except a dog that can’t help you with the crutches.”

  “You don’t know that. He’s a pretty smart dog.”

  “Well, he’d also have to be a tall and dexterous dog,” Grace said, “which is rarer.”

  He shrugged. Resignation was all he had to offer. Inside, the place was nicer than she had expected: wood floors, Persian rugs, bookshelves, artwork. There were stairs off to the right; she was sure the bedroom was upstairs, which wouldn’t be easy for him.

  He crutched awkwardly toward the back of the apartment, and the dog came out to greet him, a tiny Dachshund that pranced around his shins and whined. Worried that Tug might lose his balance, Grace sat down on the couch and called the dog over, and he jumped up into her lap and settled down like a cat.

  “Aren’t you friendly?” Grace said. She heard water running in the kitchen, then it stopped.

  Tug stumbled back into view. “Look, I appreciate your help and everything, but I’ll be fine now.”

  “Do you have some friends or family we could call? You shouldn’t be alone.”

  “In our hearts none of us are ever alone,” Tug said. “The therapist told me that, too.”

  She decided to try a different tack. “What floor is the bathroom on?”

  “There’s one on each.”

  “And your bedroom?”

  He sighed. “Upstairs. Why are you so pushy?”

  “I’m not pushy. I’m efficient. I’ll get you settled in and then I’ll go. I think it makes the most sense for you to sleep down here. I can go upstairs and get some sheets and things. I’ll just take them off the bed, okay? I won’t snoop around or touch anything. I’ll be right back.”

  He shrugged, as best he could with the crutches under his arms, and sat down in an armchair. The dog deserted her for him.

  Though she tried to keep her pledge, she couldn’t help but notice that the furnishings upstairs were equally tasteful. It didn’t seem like him at all. It wasn’t that she thought he wouldn’t be tasteful, just that he would be neglectful of things like that. It must be the influence of the ex-wife. She stripped the bed of its duvet and sheets, carried them bundled in her arms downstairs, and made up the couch.

  “What do you have in here to eat?” she said.

  Now he looked not annoyed but amused, the barest quiver of a smile hovering around his lips. “Nothing.”

  “Let’s order a pizza,” she said.

  “Are you serious? Come on. Who are you?”

  “I found you in the snow,” she said, “and I don’t want you to kill yourself.”

  “So you think you control me now. You own my life.”

  “No, I think we should order a pizza.”

  And she did. The dog went outside through a pet door into the triplex’s small backyard, where he tiptoed around anxiously before running back inside. Grace set plates, napkins, and glasses out on the coffee table. When the pizza came, she paid for it. It was ten o’clock already and she had patients the next morning, but she didn’t care. She could tell Tug thought she was a busybody or some deeply lonely person with nothing to go home to. These things were possibly a little bit true. What was mostly true, though, was that she didn’t like to fail at things, as she would if she left him and he killed himself, because it was within her power—merely with her presence—to stop it.

  They ate pizza and watched a movie from the seventies starring Jane Fonda. After it ended she said, “Why don’t you try to get some sleep? Do you want me to bring you some painkillers?” Thus far, she hadn’t seen him take any of the prescribed drugs.

  “Nightingale,” he said.

  “You mean Florence? Look, I just want you to be comfortable.”

  “I’d be more comfortable if you left,” he said. “Didn’t you say you’d get me settled and then leave?”

  “I can’t do that,” Grace said. “At least not tonight.”

  “Why?” he said, his voice flattened to a tone of pure exasperation.

  “Because if I left and you killed yourself, it would be my fault.”

  Prone on the couch, his head against a cushion, his bandaged ankle raised on another, he frowned at her. The color had returned to his lips, and she noticed that they were quite pink, not feminine but sensual, the lower lip full, even when straightened, as it was right now, in an angry line. “You want this to be all about you, is that it? You have a complex or something.”

  “Maybe,” she said lightly.

  “You want me to owe you.”

  “You don’t owe me anything. I don’t want anything except for you not to kill yourself.”

  “Why?” he said again.

  “If you saw someone about to commit a murder,” Grace said, “wouldn’t you feel obligated to stop it?”

  He shook his head. “This is different.”

  “Not to me.”

  “Maybe you’re on some kind of sexual kick. You’re attracted to damaged men you think you can save and therefore control.”

  Grace laughed. “Who’s the therapist now?”

  Though she would have denied this last charge to her dying breath, she did have to fight the urge to go over, sit down next to him, and hold his hand. She felt that a physical touch might ground him somehow. She wanted to put her palm on his shoulder or cheek, to communicate through her skin that he wasn’t alone, that his particular self was worthy of recognition, held value and weight. She moved a little closer, though still in the armchair, not wanting to alarm him.

  “My ex-wife would be very unhappy if she found you here,” Tug said.

  “Why is that?”

  “She’s very jealous.”

  “There’s nothing here to be jealous of.”

  “You don’t think? She comes back and finds a strange woman in my house giving me an extracurricular therapy session? Is that what they’re calling it these days? That’s what she’d say.”

  “You’re getting divorced because you were unfaithful,” Grace said.

  “No,” Tug said. “No.” For the first time she saw his face lose its impassive hold, now twisting in the grip of emotion, with tears welling in his eyes.

  She waited for him to go on, but when he didn’t, she decided to change the subject. “What do you do for a living?”

  Tug looked at her evenly, his eyes gone suddenly dry. “I work at a stationery store.”

  “Stationery as in paper.”

  “Wedding invitations, office letterhead, thank-you notes. Whereas you’re a commando therapist, running around offering counsel to people in pain wherever you find them.”

  “I don’t know how you feel about your work,” Grace said slowly. “But for me, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to pick and choose your moments. It seems inconsistent to be a therapist all day and then act completely different at night. Do you see what I mean?”

  She saw him finally see her, really take her in, not as an irritant or an obstacle but as a person. She saw herself register on his mind. He was staring at her, and without knowing exactly why, she felt herself flush.

  “I guess I don’t feel that way about my w
ork with paper,” he said, and smiled.

  “Does your ankle hurt?”

  “Not so you’d notice,” he said.

  It was midnight, the dog sleeping in Tug’s lap. There was no sign of the ex-wife. Grace watched him for a little while, in the dark of the strange living room. By half past twelve they were both asleep, she in the armchair, he on the couch, and when she woke up in the morning he was still alive.

  Having quickly showered and changed, Grace was in her office before nine. Her back ached from dozing off and on in the armchair all night. She’d left Tug glowering on the couch, no happier than he’d been the night before, nor any more willing to discuss what had happened on the mountain. She was reluctant to leave him alone, but she couldn’t stay and witness his life indefinitely, much as she’d been tempted. The morning passed quickly, though Tug was always there in the back of her mind, his voice coming back like a song’s refrain. She kept thinking about his blank face as he lay in the snow, the angry redness on his neck, and how his eyes had suddenly, startlingly come to life when he concocted that ridiculous story in the hospital. What kind of person was he?

  Again and again she pushed her curiosity away and tried to focus on the individuals in her office, the bustle and din of an ordinary day. Frank Lavallée, the fifty-five-year-old, mid-divorce recovering alcoholic. Mike and Denise Morgenstern, a married couple from Rosemount who couldn’t talk to each other without arguing. Annie Hardwick, who was sixteen years old and cut herself. As they spoke, Grace narrowed her gaze on their faces. Their mouths moved constantly, their lips pressed flat in concentration, wet with spittle or foam when agitated, injury or emotion written there first. Annie’s mouth showed a twinkle of braces that came and went, flashing in the soft light of the office lamp like signals from a faraway ship.

  When Annie felt the urge to cut herself, Grace told her, she should visualize herself as a movie star—the girl’s fantasy of a successful life—and convert the energy into a different behavior, something a star might do, like exercise or studying her lines (for which homework could stand in). This was what they were working on. Annie had a journal in which she wrote down her thoughts, and she reluctantly showed it to Grace, her neat handwriting chronicling all her dismal urges, the thirst for pain, the hunger to see her own blood. Cutting, she wrote, was the only thing she could really feel. She craved it, enjoying the building anticipation and then the secret, controlled fulfillment, the private pain she lavished upon herself like a gift. On the journal’s cover was a photo of an all-boy band she’d scissored out of a magazine, and next to that was a shot of the beach house where she spent summers with her family and a strip of pictures taken with a friend in a booth at the mall. All these images were safe and sweet and innocent, while the notes inside were unhappy and violent and tortured. I am rotten, she wrote. I am diseased.

  Grace had given her an assignment: to write a letter to herself from the future, a happy future in which she’d gotten everything she wanted, about what she’d been through as a teenager and how she’d survived it. Annie complained—she had enough homework to deal with already!—but Grace knew she liked the satisfaction of being given tasks she could complete, unlike the larger task she set herself every day, which was to be beautiful, smart, unassailable, and perfect.

  Grace felt for Annie the particular pity that a person who had a happy childhood feels for one who didn’t. An only child, she herself had grown up in a world dense with her own imagination. For three years she’d had a make-believe friend named Rollo Hartin. Her indulgent parents had set a place for Rollo at the dinner table and plumped an extra pillow for him in her bed. Grace was the kind of child who brought home injured birds and tried to nurse them back to health. When she saw cats wandering around the neighborhood, she took them home for bowls of milk. Hours or days later, their confused, angry owners would stop by to reclaim them.

  This was in a leafy suburb of Toronto. Her parents were happily married. Doctors themselves, they had found in each other the ideal mate. Every evening at five o’clock they’d come home, open a bottle of white wine, and talk to each other about their day for half an hour; just the two of them, wrapped up in their own company. They believed that the foundation of a family was a strong marriage—which Grace, as an adult, also believed—and yet somehow the very strength of their marriage, the unity of the front, sometimes gave her the impression that she was an intruder in it. As soon as she went off to the University of Toronto her parents retired, sold the house, and moved to an island off the coast of British Columbia, where her father worked on a novel, her mother made ceramics, and they still observed the white-wine ritual at five o’clock every day.

  Grace had spent her life attempting to recreate in her own space the perfection of her parents’ lives. It hadn’t helped that they always made it look so easy. There was an inherent mystery to the simplicity of it, to how well things worked out for them. They must have been the luckiest people alive.

  When she was at university, she met Mitch Mitchell. His actual first name, which he considered unusable, was Francis. A graduate student in clinical psychology, he was the teaching assistant in a lab her second year. She had originally intended to study literature, because she liked analyzing the motivations of people in stories, but it turned out that the truer draw was psychology itself. Getting to the roots of human behavior, the mind laid bare in all its frailties and contradictions, fascinated her. She fell in love with the subject and Mitch at the same time, and later on she wasn’t always certain that she had kept the two things separate in her mind. After they married, she followed him to Montreal, where he had a residency, and enrolled in graduate school herself.

  The first few years passed quickly. They both kept very busy. On the weekends they went hiking in the Laurentians or out to eat downtown, Grace marveling, as they drove past, at the crowds lined up outside Schwartz’s all day and night. Mitch taught her to love Fairmount bagels, which they ate straight from the bag and still hot from the oven, unable to wait until they got home. Sometimes they visited his mother, who was frail and lived alone in Lachine. Grace took French classes and worked at a clinic, counseling people who were addicts, or getting divorced, or failing at school or their jobs, who couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. Every day she and Mitch came home and drank wine and talked about everything except their jobs, the dull weight of all those intense and brutal conversations. They talked about politics, the weather, houses they were thinking of buying. They never talked about sex, which they were having less and less of. They never talked about unhappiness, their own or other people’s. In other words, they did everything they had been taught professionally was wrong.

  One Saturday morning she came home from the store to find Mitch emerging, oddly red-faced, from the bedroom. At first she didn’t want to say anything. She put away the groceries, and Mitch got into the shower. Then she walked into the bedroom and started looking around his side of the bed. Stuffed hastily below the mattress, its shiny spine extruding like a scab, was a porn magazine. The girls were young, with enormous fake breasts. That was the most disturbing part, she thought at first, their lack of resemblance to any real woman. But this wasn’t true; the most disturbing part was that her husband was jerking off to a porn magazine while she was at the grocery store. She tried speaking to herself as if she were a client: This kind of behavior is not uncommon, nor does it signal an automatic betrayal. But it was bullshit. All the counsel she had ever given burned to ashes in the face of lived experience.

  Mitch walked in, wearing a towel, and stopped. Seeming to read her mind, which he could still do, he said, “No. The most disturbing part is that I feel more emotionally connected to the girls in those pictures than I do to you.”

  Grace began to cry, tears not of anger or sadness but of sheer, straight pain. Mitch comforted her, because he was good at that. And they slept together with a kind of pathetic, slippery lust she hated even to remember, the porn magazine askew on the floor beside the bed. They didn’t s
eparate until a year later, but looking back she knew this was the day their marriage ended.

  She lived alone now, in a two-bedroom apartment in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. She’d been on some dates since the divorce, but nothing had taken. She was thirty-five and thought that maybe she just wasn’t the marrying kind—a statement she would have dismissed, or at least raised an eyebrow at, if it came from a client. The therapist’s prerogative was sometimes to put the blinders back on.

  Most of the day’s appointments were routine, until it came to Annie Hardwick. During an earlier visit, Grace had seen the shiny pink scars that inched up the girl’s pale stomach to her rib cage; she had lifted her shirt with a feigned reluctance that failed to conceal her pride in the harm she’d done herself. As common as cutting was, Grace still winced to see the evidence of it on Annie’s skin. The girl wasn’t beautiful yet, but she was going to be. She hadn’t grown into herself or into her body. Her features loomed too large on her face, and blue veins showed through her translucent skin at her temples and chin. Her dirty-blond hair hung thin and lank to her shoulders, and her forehead was covered with small red pimples. In a few years, Grace could imagine, when Annie was taller and learned to sit up straight, when her body grew curves to match her face, she would look like the movie star she so desperately wanted to be.

  But Annie didn’t know this. All she saw was the infinite distance between herself as she was and the perfection to which she aspired. Her father was an orthodontist and her mother a lawyer, and they had raised her to hold herself to a high standard. She got good grades, participated in extracurricular activities, had friends and family who cared for her. All this was invisible to her, or at least immaterial. Her lack of perspective was gigantic. When she looked at herself she saw an ugly, mean, ungainly girl, constantly failing, deservedly ignored. She believed wholeheartedly in her own shortcomings, and nothing Grace had told her had unsettled this conviction.