“Is he okay?” Mom says.
I glance sidelong at Jack, face impassive and eyes unfocused. “Physically,” I offer. “Yeah, he’s fine.”
Mom sighs, a mix of relief and blossoming concern. “Okay,” she says. “Okay, well, I can’t leave work right now, but Dad’s going to take off early. He’ll be right home.” Jack’s eyes flick to mine when he hears her words through the speaker, then away again miserably.
When I hang up, I stumble over an apology. “I’m sure they’ll understand if you tell them what happened.”
Jack says nothing, doesn’t look at me. As soon as we get home, he storms inside, and I follow him up to his room, but the door’s already shut, his and Coco’s whispers spilling through the cracks around it. I stand with an ear pressed to the door until I hear the soft squeak that escapes when you hold tears in. Jack, definitely. There’s nothing scarier than hearing someone you love cry, and the smaller the sound, the deeper it can burrow into you.
“. . . . just don’t want this sometimes,” Jack’s saying.
“Don’t want what?” Coco murmurs gently.
“Don’t want to be.”
I step back from the door and lean against the wall, mind spinning and dark splotches floating across my vision.
Three months to save him.
There’s nothing scarier than hearing someone you love cry, except imagining a world where that sound stops. Suddenly I can’t breathe. Can’t be here. There’s nothing scarier than loving someone.
Beau and I sneak out to the studio every night until my next appointment with Alice, and every night’s the same. We’re jittery and tense on the car ride over, every inch between us thick with our heartbeats. We talk and flirt while I stretch in the center of the studio floor. Then we turn off the lights, Beau closes his eyes, and I dance. Every song is beautiful, but none is mine. I wonder if I’ll ever hear that song again, or if telling Beau not to wait for me means he’ll never finish writing it. Toward the end of our time in the studio he always ends up watching me while playing, but by then I also feel comfortable and relaxed. Then, once we get into the truck, the tension falls again with a renewed fervor.
Every glance across the dark cab, every moment of eye contact, of almost touching, is overwhelming. Every early morning when he drops me off and we whisper goodbye, I run back to my house, push Gus off my pillows, and collapse into bed feeling wired.
But when I sleep it’s deep and dark and warm and dreamless. I only have a week and a half until we leave for our trip, and while our nights at the studio don’t seem to bring me any closer to Grandmother, I covet them. Every moment with Beau drowns my fear out, but when I wake up from my late-afternoon nap, and the buzz of spending the previous night with him has faded, dread fills me to the brim.
Someone is going to die.
Someone is going to die, and here I am worrying whether Beau and Rachel are back to Whatever They Were since I told him not to wait for me and we don’t see each other outside of the studio.
My Tuesday appointment with Alice goes horribly. I can’t think clearly, and Alice is irritated by my long pauses and short answers. When she asks me to talk about my relationship with Mom, and I respond after thirty seconds with “She’s nice,” Alice slams her notebook shut though we still have half an hour together.
“I can’t work with this, Natalie.”
“Work with what?” I say, at least as annoyed as she is.
“Every session, your emotions cyclone around you like tornadoes, and all you’ll give me is she’s nice. You have to really cut yourself open for counseling to work, and you won’t. You’re trying to kill your feelings to make life easier. You’ve given up. And don’t get me wrong, I appreciate all the new insight you’ve lent to this. But if you’re really so convinced Grandmother is a prophet, or deity, then you know someone’s going to die soon if we don’t crack this. This may be about science for me, but a girl with your already fragile psyche is going to fall to pieces when she lets someone she loves die.”
“I do not have a fragile psyche.”
Alice stands up and opens her office door for me. “You’re shutting me out. You’re too afraid.”
I don’t budge. “Afraid of what?”
“You want a counselor, Natalie? Is that what you need? Fine. I should’ve cut my schooling in half if all I was going to do was psychoanalyze teenagers, but if that’s what you need, I’ll be your child psychologist for sixty seconds. Here’s my diagnosis: You are suffering a typical, run-of-the-mill, naval-gazing, who-am-I existential crisis. You were separated from your biological family at a young age, and you’ve had abandonment issues ever since. Though your adoptive parents are incredibly supportive and loving, and yes, as you said, nice, you didn’t see yourself reflected in either of them as a small child. Thus you learned to look into yourself, overthink and imagine and fantasize, about your identity. Most likely you would have this natural disposition and these feelings of isolation regardless of whether you were raised by your birth parents or adoptive parents, but your obsession with self-knowledge is compacted by the assumption that your biological parents gave you up for the same reason that you don’t recognize yourself in your adoptive parents: because you are missing something. So while most children form their identities out of their likes and dislikes, their interests and relationships, you spent all your time trying to develop an identity from scratch. And what foundation do you build it on? Emotions. Now the problem for highly emotional people is that feelings are unstable and unreliable. They come and go. They change swiftly. Sometimes, in certain seasons of life, they seem to be absent entirely. Not much to build on, is it? Shall I go on?”
“Alice, I—”
“The more negative interactions with others you had as a child, the more you reinforced the belief that you were missing something, and thus the more isolated and alone you felt. The more you convinced yourself you weren’t like your peers. And in one essential way, you’re not like them. Most of your classmates never worried about who they were when they were ten years old. Don’t get me wrong, eventually they will—probably in six months when they’re on their own for the first time. But right now most of them are just living their lives. So why aren’t you? Because you have conditioned yourself to spend the vast majority of your time trying to know yourself. You are incapable of letting any feeling go unnamed. Your quest for self-awareness has resulted in crippling self-consciousness. You aren’t able to describe your mother to me in any word other than nice because you are at once desperate to be seen and afraid of being seen. You are afraid of unveiling any piece of yourself you don’t like or you find shameful. I can tell you, even if I had cut my schooling in half, I’d still be confident enough to bet money that that piece is made up of resentment and jealousy. You disdain yourself for feelings you believe to be unique to you, which only further encourages the thought pattern that whispers in your brain at night: I am not good enough. I am not good, period. Maybe even, I’m bad. There is something in me that cannot be fixed.”
Something’s searing though me, and it’s hard to breathe or even see straight. I want to tell Alice to stop, but my throat feels closed and my chest too heavy to get in the breath I need to make words. She goes on.
“No matter how many times your mother and father encourage you to feel comfortable asking questions about your origins, you still feel guilty for wanting to know, and thus refuse to search anywhere but within yourself. You seek out relationships with people you hope will reflect yourself back to you and validate the person you think you are, the person you don’t believe your parents accurately see. When you realize that no one can fully see your soul, you become disillusioned. You become hopeless and despairing and you retreat further into yourself, believing you cannot go on living until you have a firm picture of who you are.
“It doesn’t help that, for years, you had Grandmother, an entity that seemed to know everything
about you, only to have her abandon you when you most needed confidence in your identity. And the worst part, for me personally, as I watch this incredibly slow-moving train wreck, is that I—a scientist—am more aware of the quintessential and unnamable thing that makes Natalie Cleary Natalie Cleary than you are. What’s tragic is you’re self-destructing purely by inaction even though you are a smart, strong, emotionally resilient, competent, and capable young woman who should be out conquering the world and falling wildly in love and saying yes to every opportunity while, might I add, helping me dismantle the patriarchy controlling the world of scholarly scientific journals by uncovering the truth about Grandmother.”
I’m dizzy now and shaking, my eyes damp, but the pressure on my chest has lightened. I feel empty, like a flimsy outline. “I’m trying.”
“Listen to me.” Alice crosses the room and roughly takes my hand in hers. “I’m older than you and, no offense, way smarter. You’re not missing something. You’re not broken. Your grand identity will not be revealed to you like a bolt of lightning. It’s okay to be scared. Your big feelings are powerful. But it’s not okay to hide, especially when what you want more than anything is to be known. Don’t shut down. Stick this out. Woman up, tell your parents what you’re doing, and stay until we finish this.”
I drop my face into my hands. It’s hard to look at her right now. I feel transparent, horrifyingly naked and not in the comfortable way I do when I’m with Beau. It’s more like I’m in a room made of mirrors and stark light. “What if I can’t, Alice?” My voice comes out quivering, and I realize how afraid I really am. “What if I do everything I can and it’s still not enough, and I lose Matt or Beau or Dad or Jack? What then?”
I look up at Alice. Her face has softened; she almost looks like a different person. “I don’t know, kid,” she says. “But the only promise you ever get is this very second, and if you leave Union now, you may never see Grandmother again. You may never again see the parallel-universe-traversing boy who’s in love with you, and you may never again see whoever’s about to die. And even if you’re the one calling that shot, it’s going to hurt like hell.”
“My mom’s not going to go for it,” I tell Megan when she calls the next afternoon. I’ve just woken up after another long night at the studio and a break during which I drove Jack over to the football field in my pajamas before coming home and dropping back into bed. I’m in desperate need of a shower and sheet-washing, but I can find the energy for neither. “She’s not going to let me miss this trip. She lives for this trip. In her mind it’s a sacred family pilgrimage. The rest of the year is just filler.”
“Well, she’s got to come to terms with you doing your own thing eventually,” she says. “The Cleary family cannot always be one big, happy, five-limbed starfish that goes everywhere and does everything together. Case in point: College. Marriage. Jobs.”
“College, marriage, and jobs will come and go—in the end, only this trip will remain.”
“Trust me, your mom will drown in happy tears when she finds out you willingly went to see a counselor,” Megan insists. “Plus I’m coming home for a weekend before school starts, so if you stay, we’ll get to hang out. Please do it. When your mom gets home tonight, just ask. If for no other reason than we’ll have another weekend together. And you might save someone’s life. And Beau Wilkes.”
“Oh, is that all?”
“I’m trying to think of something better, but that’s all I’ve got. Hey, by the way, have you heard anything new about Matt?”
“No,” I say, stomach tightening. “Joyce told me she’d call when the doctors decide when to wake him up, and every time I ask how he’s doing she replies with an idiom not even Google has heard of. Like, when the clouds part, the patient cow yields the best milk, keep praying.” We’re both silent then, and I busy myself with the familiar stray threads on my quilt. “Is Alice right? Have I been hiding instead of living?”
Megan sighs softly. “I don’t know, Nat. But if you were, who could blame you?”
My throat tightens, and I nod as if she can see me.
“Let’s talk about something happy. Tell me about Beau or something. How are you feeling about him?”
“I’m bad at talking about my feelings. Clearly. I just got thrown out of a therapist’s office.”
“I’m not asking as your counselor,” she says. “I’m asking as your best friend. That’s basically like talking to yourself. If I were there, I’d know from looking at you, because I do see your soul. But we’re apart, and now I’m reduced to the communication methods of the rest of the world, so you have to tell me. Feelings, et cetera. Short response. Go.”
“Um, warm?”
She laughs. “I’m sorry. That’s a good answer.”
“And nothing is funnier than a good answer about your feelings!”
“No, it’s really good. I’m not trying to make you feel bad. It’s just—of course you’d go straight for temperature.”
“Ugh, this is hard.” I know what I feel, but saying it aloud feels risky, as if I’m daring the world to come at me. Like talking about a nightmare or wearing all white to a barbecue. Once you say something, it’s just out there, where the Universe can use it against you. “God, I am a slow train wreck of inaction, or whatever she said. Alice is right.”
“You’re going to counseling, aren’t you?” Megan says. “You’re getting hypnotized and you’re staying up all night dancing and you’re fielding text messages from Matt’s parents and you’re trying to be there for Jack and I wouldn’t put it past you to send a decoy on vacation so your mom can have her perfect trip while you stay home and kill yourself trying to save someone’s life. Sure you’re scared and you have trouble opening up, but you’re not a slug, Natalie. And you’re putting yourself out there with Beau. That has to count for something.”
“Beau and I literally come from different worlds,” I say, frustrated. “So why am I putting myself through this? I mean, on the one hand I can’t even tell my best friend how I feel about him, and on the other, I can’t make myself stop going there with him.”
“Nat,” Megan says, the pounding of her feet against the treadmill slowing. “We don’t have to talk about this.”
“He does make me feel warm,” I say. “And safe. He’s . . . even. I doubt I could ever shock him. And he knows about Grandmother and the two worlds, and that makes me feel understood. Like, less alone than I’ve ever been. Like we’re somehow two parts of the same thing.” That’s what I’ve been scared to say. That’s why I’m afraid to want him, and also why I can’t make myself stop. “I don’t know. He’s gentle. He’s so gentle that I feel like crying when I think about it, and I don’t really understand that but it’s the truth and I don’t want to lose him but I’m going to, and somehow, even with the guilt about Matt, it’s still worth it to me to spend every minute I can with him.”
Megan’s silent for a long moment before she murmurs, “I changed my mind.”
“About what?”
“Denial,” she says, “I don’t want to live there after all. I want to feel everything so much it hurts.”
I take a deep breath and fumble over my words. “Did you ever think you and Matt might . . . you know.”
“Might what?”
“Date.”
She snorts. “You mean throughout the years of him staring at you like a desperate-to-please Labrador puppy? Yes, naturally. The biggest turn-on in the world is someone who’s obsessed with your best friend.”
“I’m serious, Meg. You’ve really never thought you guys might work?”
“In a group project or flag-football scenario, yes. But in a romantic relationship, only if you died shortly after having Matt’s baby and, in my resulting psychotic break, I began to wear your old clothes and only eat your favorite foods and continue your life à la Stevie Nicks’s marriage to Kim Anderson, and even in that situation I don’
t think I’d make it as long as Stevie before returning to writing songs for mothers and wives rather than being a mother and wife. Hey, speaking of psychotic breaks, any reason why you’re trying to set me up with your ex-boyfriend who’s in a coma?”
Despite the way the word coma slices through me, I laugh in relief. “Sorry. I don’t want to live in Denial either. I want to live in a world where you get everything you’ve ever wanted. And cheese fries. I want cheese fries.”
“Always.”
Thursday’s hypnotherapy is a bust, and Alice won’t speak to me when it’s over. “I’m going to ask my parents tonight,” I tell her as I’m leaving. “About missing the family trip.”
“We’ll see,” she says sharply.
“I just need a little more time. It’s more complicated than it seems, but I’m going to ask.”
“Everything on this entire planet is complicated,” Alice says coolly, and with that, I nod and leave.
I hate to prove her right, but when dinner comes and we’re all peacefully sitting around the table, I start to feel like there are hands grasped around my trachea. It doesn’t help when the trip comes up in conversation naturally, and Mom starts giddily describing all the pre-trip research she’s done. I promised myself I was going to ask to stay home, right after dinner, but now the thought of actually doing it makes me visibly shake.
Then, halfway through the meal, Coco sets down her fork and clears her throat, immediately summoning all of our attention.
“I don’t want to transfer,” she announces. “I want to stay at Ryle.”
Mom sets her own fork down and stares at her, mouth agape, but Dad just half shrugs and keeps eating. “If that’s what you want, baby,” he says. It’s what he’s always called Coco, but now it elicits an eye roll. Mom shoots him a We have to talk about this before we say such things! look, and he clears his throat exactly like Coco just did. “Any particular reason?”