Everything After(4)

He didn’t wait for my response about Dire Straits before he started playing.

But it was a song I knew, about Romeo on the streets serenading Juliet.

“Indigo Girls,” I told him. “They cover this.”

He stopped playing and laughed. “Of course,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked him.

But he was playing again.

I watched his fingers. I heard the chords, felt the notes vibrating inside me. And before long, I was singing with him. Our voices wove into each other. The whole world fell away. The heat and the humidity were gone. It was just me and him and the music. I was awash in it. We finished the song staring into the blacks of each other’s eyes.

“Wow,” he said.

Soon he was behind me on the bed, his guitar on my lap, his legs on either side of mine, his fingers showing mine how to coax a chord out of the instrument, how to strum.

“You’re a natural.” He kissed my neck as he said it.

And maybe I was. Or maybe it was just that everything with him felt natural.





4



On Tuesdays, Emily, Priya, and another psychologist in their office, Reuben, had a consultation group. There they talked about how their patients affected them, worried about whether they were actually helping in the right way or saying the right thing, and sometimes asked for advice. They discussed their pasts, the way their own experiences and preconceptions might stop them from being as effective as they could be.

“I saw T today,” Emily told them. Calling their patients by their initials gave the patients enough anonymity while also making it easy for everyone to remember who they were talking about.

Emily had talked about Tessa a lot during the last school year. Emily worried to Priya and Reuben that she identified too closely with Tessa, that there were events in her own past that made her less objective than she might be otherwise, that made it hard for her to separate her personal feelings from Tessa’s story the way she tried to with all of her patients.

“How is she doing?” Reuben asked. They were sitting in his office, which he’d decorated with tapestries on the walls and a big ficus in the corner. He had a couch on one side of the room, where Priya and Emily were sitting, and an armchair opposite it, where he was sitting with his feet up on a coffee table. He’d just gotten a haircut, and his short twists were gone, replaced by a buzz cut. He clearly hadn’t gotten used to it yet, because he kept running his hand over the top of his head.

“She seemed good,” Emily said.

“I’m glad,” Priya answered, leaning forward on the couch, her elbows on her knees. “She had a rough go of it.”

Emily nodded. “I still worry about her.”

Priya smiled. “Of course you do. You worry about all of them.”

Emily laughed. “You know me well.”

“How was it for you?” Priya asked. “Seeing her again.”

Emily thought about it. “I was just relieved she was okay.”

“Because you weren’t,” Priya said, a fact more than a question. “When you were in college.”

“Right,” Emily answered. “I wasn’t.”

Then Reuben started talking about a patient he was worried about, J, who went silent when Reuben asked him about how it felt seeing his brother in rehab.

“I shouldn’t have asked it that way,” Reuben said. “Maybe if I’d phrased it differently, eased into it . . . I know he freezes people out, freezes me out, when things get too hard. I screwed up.”

“You’ve got him talking before,” Priya said. “He trusts you. You’ll have another chance.”

Reuben shook his head. “I’m always afraid that kids like J won’t come back. That this is the week they’ll decide I’m useless. That they’re wasting time sitting here with me when they could be playing video games or hanging out with their friends or whatever.”

The white noise machine hummed quietly in the background.

“I don’t think they come because they feel like time with us is useful or useless,” Emily said, turning to Reuben. “I think sometimes they just need to know there’s someone who cares. Someone who will wait for them to be ready. Someone who will listen when they finally do talk.” She was thinking about her patients, but she was also thinking about her husband. He wasn’t too different from some of these kids. From Reuben’s J. She wondered whether, if she actually was pregnant, her child would be the same way.

“Speaking of people who finally decide to talk,” Priya said, “I saw a new patient today. I asked her what brought her to the counseling center and she told me that she can’t stop thinking about the night this summer that she had too much to drink and passed out, and when she woke up, a guy she’d thought was her friend was standing over her, about to ejaculate on her stomach. I had the hardest time not jumping out of my chair in outrage. She told me she can’t sleep unless her bedroom door is locked and bolted, and she hasn’t touched alcohol since. When I hear stories like that, I just . . . I can feel the rage rising inside me. It’s like . . . it starts to boil until I become a vessel containing only that. I wanted to tell her to report it to the police, to make that asshole squirm. Even if he’s not charged in the end, it’s worth it to show him he’s not entitled to masturbate wherever he pleases, on whomever he pleases.” Priya’s voice was getting louder. “I was practically shaking with indignation when she finished her story.” Then she took a couple of deep breaths. “I have to figure out how to stay in the room.”