by A. R. Rivera
“That’s precisely why we should talk, Miss Patel.” Her voice was all soft and soothing.
“We,” I shook my head. It happened every week. She’d tell me to talk about my mom and I’d tell her to suck it. Well, in my mind. Outwardly, I whined. “Do I have to?”
“We made a deal: one detail a week. That’s all. One memory.” She rested her folded knuckles over her lap. “We are learning to communicate our feelings, to change those harmful patterns of behavior. There can be no progress if there is no change.”
I rolled my eyes. She thought she was so deep.
I picked my brain for something meaningless, something she wouldn’t be able to read into. “Her name was Margaret Barry.”
But even that small fact made me wince, because if you think about it, it really was a telling detail. My mother never shared the identity of my father with me, just like she never shared her own last name. She so obviously didn’t want me and that bald-faced rejection of a simple commonality made me want to contract into a tiny ball. Like that old movie, Incredible Shrinking Woman, I wanted to become too small to see. Too small to feel.
Doctor Williams’ spectacles slid down the slender bridge of her nose the way they always did when she was serious. The sounds of crashing waves lingered while she responded, “You gave me that one last week.” Her tight curls seemed to stiffen as she sorted through her session notes. “Tell me the first thing that comes to mind when you think of that day.”
“Empty,” I blurted and wanted to kick myself. All the honesty with Jake made me too aware, too open.
What that doctor didn’t get was talking about my shit only made it worse. Like a flare gun to the chest, it seared me to think of those days: times when I assumed, as most kids do, that all people are good. I made a conscious choice not to think of her, not to go to that dark place, and still, her two words echoed—“that day”—and a memory flashed.
+++
The scene opened up like a blanket unfolding a backdrop that put me on a roadside. I was there, standing, empty, watching a far away part of my life play out in third-person. I stood at the end of a gravel driveway, looking on at a little blond girl, all pigtails and smiles. She was a sharp contrast to the woman beside her. The woman—the girls’ mother—was all dark hair, dead eyes, and a long frown. The day was young and cool, though the sun was bright. The woman lifted the girl by the waist, taking her upon her hip. Their mouths were moving, but I heard no sound. The girls’ tiny white dress seemed to sparkle in the stark sunlight as she was set in the front seat of a big brown car.
The overall feeling of the moment is one of . . . wholeness. But only because my five year-old mind couldn’t put a label on it. It was not a happy scene. It was a goodbye—my mothers’ last monologue, her big send-off—and my young heart couldn’t comprehend. I only recalled that moment with happiness because when my mother cuddled me and spoke, I didn’t know what she had planned.
It’s amazing how much harm a little ignorance can do.
+++
I pulled myself out of the memory. Looking at Doctor Williams’ calm face irritated me. I noted the ocean soundtrack seemed to be playing louder.
“I don’t get why we have to do this. When people are gone, they’re gone. And I barely remember her. It’s like she never existed.”
“But you remember that day.” Doctor Williams declared, and I felt the pull of that phrase.
The scene . . . her words . . . they sucked me back in. I wanted to run, to shrink away, but the sound of her voice cemented me in that faraway place I’d spent my life trying to forget.
+++
An old brown, boat of a car clipped the curb as it backed out of the gravel driveway onto what I assume was a suburban street and took off a little too fast down a long stretch of road. The little girl in the white dress was standing in the front seat, holding onto the headrest as she bounced up and down.
I couldn’t see the edges of the memory. There might not have been any other houses beside the one they left behind. It might have been surrounded by desert.
+++
“You remember her. Why do you feel like she never existed?” Doctor Williams’ glasses slipped again and she pressed them back in place with her thumb and index finger.
Her question triggered something and my mind switched back to her office. But then, I let it go again, refusing to focus. I didn’t want to be there, either.
When I was sitting in Doctor Williams office, I’d do it all the time—make myself be somewhere else. The images that used to spring up were so vivid, as if I could reach out and touch them. They were full and alive, they could block out anything. Everything.
So that’s what I did. I blocked out her office and my session. I didn’t curl up and float away I just let my lively imagination explore the first ridiculous scenario that popped into my head when I looked at Doctor Williams holding her pen up near her chin.
+++
I was sitting in a dim lounge at a small round table. Doc Williams was standing at the other end, in the center of a small stage, holding a microphone, staring out at the audience. There was a poster advertising an open-mic night on the wall behind her. The dark tables surrounding the low stage were filled with eager patrons and a two-drink minimum. She’d just told her best knock-knock joke and the punch line was met with silence. Crickets comically chirped.
+++
“Is something funny?” Doctor Williams looked at her watch and back to me. One of her eyebrows had gone crooked. “Miss Patel, I need you to focus.”
My mind teetered between three worlds. The world where my shrink’s stand-up comedienne act was bombing, the other was in her office—where I couldn’t stand to be—and the third was that damned roadside—the last place I wanted to be but could not manage to leave.
It was as if her words were a trigger that pulled the lever on a viewfinder, changing the backdrop on me.
“Tell me about that day, that one memory,” She urged, her voice sounding as serene as a song.
And just like that, I was back to that place where the driveway met the road. The injustice of that mournful moment returned. My throat swelled. I tasted bile. “No.”
“Alright. Let’s move on.” She casually shuffled some pages of my file. “How is your friend, Avery? Have you been seeing much of her lately?”
I froze. It was so like her to jump from one impossible thing to the next.
The topic of my friendship with Avery was expressly forbidden. Avery had made it very clear after I mentioned her in one of my sessions that I was never to do it again. “Grownups never like me,” Avery reasoned, and knowing her the way I did, I knew she was right. The Foster barely liked her, but she was still diplomatic about our friendship. If Doctor Williams ever met with her, that would change.
“Please, don’t make me ask. Avery won’t come.”
Actually, she might but I hadn’t asked her. And I couldn’t really see how having my best friend talk to my shrink could possibly help anything. But I was running out of excuses.
“What about a boyfriend?”
That last word caught my attention. “What?”
“You’re a pretty, seventeen year-old girl. Haven’t any boys approached and asked you out on a date?”
I couldn’t stop my answering smile. “Nope. No boys. No boyfriend.”
Doctor Williams clicked the pen she was holding and looked down at the notepad in her hand, flipping through pages. “Have you been attending your classes?”
“Yes.”
“What about anger management?”
“Just went to my last one, so . . . yes,” the‘s’ hissed a little too long, matching the recorded cry of a sea bird.
I’d been assigned, so I had to attend. Social workers and guidance counselors working in tandem with my psychiatrist were all very interested in my every move—being that I was a ward of the state and all. Any one of them would call The Foster if I missed a class.
No one ever called to report good news
, like progress. Just the bad. Or if they did, I never heard about it. It seemed that people only took time out of their busy lives to rag on me. So I tried my best not to make waves, keeping my proverbial nose clean so I could continue to do what I wanted, namely seeing Jake. My Foster, Deanna, was never comfortable with our age difference, but told me she recognized that she was not my mother and left the final decision up to me.
The only upside to anger management was that they were over.
“Good for you. Before I let you go, I would like an example of how your newly acquired anger management skills were put into practice this past week.” She raised her attentive pad and pen, waiting to jot down my every word.
I wanted to smile because, back then it was a joke. At that tender age of seventeen, I had never been legitimately pissed with anyone but my mother. And I figured I was doing pretty well because if I could cope with knowing my mom wanted me dead, then everything else was tolerable.
Even though there was a lot of everything else that kept me on edge, I was only ever sad or peeved. Righteously irritated from time to time, but never angry. Maybe because my first instinct was always to run and hide.
Avery—who knew me better than anyone—once said that she knew, deep inside, I wasn’t brave enough to let myself feel the rage. I wanted to roll my eyes when she said that. I mean, hot-headed Avery giving me advice about how to handle anger? The only reason I was assigned to the stupid classes in the first place was because of her.
She’d punched a senior, Shelley Bloom, who gave me a bloody nose for using her gym locker, even though they weren’t assigned. I guess Mrs. Ryan, Shelley’s softball coach, heard something, because the next thing I knew, I was being suspended. I didn’t care; three days vacation from the hell-hole they called school was cake. They sent me home with my assignments and some open-book tests and I was fine. Shelley’s eye was black for a week.
I never told anyone Avery was there because she’d been protecting me and the least I could do was keep her secret.
Since Doctor Williams was still waiting for my example—I swear, the woman was never satisfied unless I was filling silence—I decided, on the fly, that I would give her anger management skills something to stew about.
“It was last weekend.”
Doctor Williams’ eyes were all aglow as I dove into a story all about how it was mine and a made-up best friends’ birthday party. “Well, our actual birthdays are only a week apart so we always celebrate together—my foster ‘mom’, Chanel, was working, as usual.”
Yeah, it was the kind of blatant lie that deserved to be called-out. I paused, waiting for her to raise a brow, correct me or call me a liar, but all she did was click the top of the pen she was holding.
So, I kept going, making up more and more as I went. I pressed my fingernails deep into the creases of my elbows, connecting myself to the moment, willing myself to answer her inane questions, when she raised them. They were the type of questions that forced me to elaborate. She wasn’t going to make me stop, not while I was on a roll. All sevens.
The story evolved into one I had overheard in the girls bathroom—a typically moronic teenage drama about an ex-friend being confronted over her supposed kleptomania at a slumber party. I concocted a list of names and descriptions—it was good. Really detailed. And it would end with a confrontation, just like she wanted.
The lies poured out smooth, like warm syrup over a pancake. “I gave her a little shove—”
“You physically pushed her?” Doctor Williams was practically out of her chair, gripping the armrests.
“No!” I argued, thinking over all I’d said about a fabricated conflict. “Well, a little, but not because I was angry. I was just trying to keep her from leaving.”
Her crinkled brow smoothed out as she tossed her hand, clicking the pen-top again. “You were saying?”
I went on with the lie, paying more attention now, trying not to betray how much fun I was having. “Yvonne slipped, but she didn’t fall. I pretended like it was an accident, but then I told her: ‘My foster mom doesn’t allow thieves in her house,’ I said. She crossed her arms, sounding all snotty. ‘Don’t you mean trailer?’”
“‘Mobile home,’ I told her, trying to sound just as snotty. We argued a little, back and forth, but—”
“In what way did you two girls ‘argue’?”
I kept myself from smiling. “In a very adult fashion.”
She shook her head at the snark and made some notes in my file which was thicker than most people my age. But, I’d been through more than most, so there was a lot more to write in there. Much more to force me into talking about.
I’ve never understood why shrinks feel it’s necessary to hash out every little thing that happens. Therapy might have been mandatory, but it never felt like it was for my benefit. It seemed like it was for the doctor, to make her feel better about her own messed up life. And her life was a freaking soap opera. I’d heard her talking on the phone a couple times when she didn’t know I was in the waiting room and her office door was open. For someone whose profession required secrecy, she wasn’t very discreet about her personal life.
Her son was all depressed and her husband, from what I understood of the conversation, was being an asshole about it. I felt for her, but it wasn’t my job to distract her from her life. I had my own shit to deal with. And I found it tough to take advice from someone who so obviously did not have their own life together.
I was so over everyone telling me how to live and I didn’t need her therapy. The ocean soundtrack she used was way more therapeutic than her. Music, really, was all I needed. That was the only thing that ever made me feel better. I could lose myself in it. And Jake. He was the calm to my storm, the warm blanket on a cold night. He was my therapy, my panacea for any ailment—him and his music. I’d spend hours, days upon weeks, soaking it all up. It was all about Analog Controller. All the time. I was at almost every show, first row, center stage, right in front of my band and my leading man.
“So, how was this confrontation resolved?”
“I didn’t hit her when she called me trailer trash.” I shrugged.
Doctor Williams shook her head. “Come on, I’ll walk you to the lab.”
We walked shoulder to shoulder down the white corridor that reeked of rubbing alcohol, towards the buildings lab to get my blood drawn. She made me pee in a cup once a month. Drug testing to make sure I was on my meds and nothing else, because once I tried some crank at a party and totally freaked out. I also got my blood tested once a month—something having to do with chemical imbalances.
“Miss Patel?”
“What?”
“Have you experienced any more blank spaces?”
I shook my head, “Not for a long time,” and turned into the tiny glass-walled office that was the source of the sharp scent.
Blank spaces were an accepted part of my life, like my memory problems; a side effect of the accident. Doctor Williams was the dutiful physician who helped me pinpoint the lost time and got me started on trying to keep track of it. She was keenly interested, which made me want to hide it.
She instructed me, the second I noticed a lapse, to make notes—what time it is versus what time it was last time I checked, or if anything was different in my surroundings: if anything was moved or missing in my room, if I changed my clothes—and bring the notes to my sessions for her to look at and decide whether my meds needed adjusting.
That right there—her solution—created another problem for me.
I didn’t like when they messed with my meds. It always threw me for a loop when they changed-up the cocktail or made me stop one pill to replace it with something else that didn’t work, but with worse side-effects. Like standing on the edge of the sidewalk, trying to cross the street, and feeling like the four inch curb was a mile high. It’s a real shit situation not being the captain of your own mind.
Another issue: it wasn’t so easy to find the “blank spots” she mentioned. I mean,
how was I supposed to know I was missing time if the day didn’t disappear? How was I supposed to know I needed to look for something out of place when nothing appeared jumbled? It’s not like I ever woke up with a knife in my hand or anything. My brain would just check out from time to time. The only time I’d ever noticed anything was when I found myself somewhere I didn’t remember going—which hardly ever happened.
On my long walk home from my appointment that day, I figured that Doctor Williams was probably busying herself making phone calls. All the blatant lies involved in my elaborate story probably had her in a tailspin.
Of course there was no group of friends. No slumber party. No birthday shared with anyone.
I did mention my foster brother, Austen, but he was never a turd like I told Doctor Williams. When he took the time to talk with me, he was usually very nice. Austen’s mom, my Foster, her name was Deanna, not Chanel—Doctor knew that, too. I made it up because her real name was so tough to remember. It was unremarkable and never stuck with me the way her soft face or generosity did. She always smelled really good, though, so I called her a perfume.
The first day I came under the care of that particular foster parent, the child services worker assigned to drop me off introduced me to my ‘new family.’ She actually said, ‘meet your new family!’ and I was so blown by how she casually tossed the word around, that when The Foster introduced herself, I couldn’t retain. I just kept thinking: if she was my family, she wouldn’t be here.
At first, it made no difference whether I knew her name or not. I didn’t care. I was sure she was just like everybody else and would be done with me after a few months. But she turned out to be different. She was a little cooky—constantly locking away the kitchen knives and scissors since before I got there because her son, Austen, was a sleepwalker or some crazy shit like that—but she was genuinely nice to me. And I couldn’t bring myself to keep asking her name.
