“Then imagine it. What do you think Therese is thinking here?”
She tells me to do that a lot. Imagine what she’s thinking. Just pretend. Put yourself in her shoes. In her book she calls this “reclaiming.” She makes up a lot of her own terms, then defines them however she wants, without research to back her up. Compared to the neurology texts Dr. S lent me, Dr. Mehldau’s little book is an Archie comic with footnotes.
“You know what, Therese was a good Christian girl, so she probably loved it.”
“Are you sure?”
The wise men come on stage, three younger boys. They plop down their gifts and their lines, and the look on Therese’s face is wary. Her line is coming up.
Therese was petrified of screwing up. Everybody would be staring at her. I can almost see the congregation in the dark behind the lights. Alice and Mitch are out there, and they’re waiting for every line. My chest tightens, and I realize I’m holding my breath.
Dr. Mehldau’s eyes on mine are studiously neutral.
“You know what?” I have no idea what I’m going to say next. I’m stalling for time. I shift my weight in the big beige chair and move a leg underneath me. “The thing I like about Buddhism is Buddhists understand that they’ve been screwed by a whole string of previous selves. I had nothing to do with the decisions Therese made, the good or bad karma she’d acquired.”
This is a riff I’ve been thinking about in Therese’s big girly bedroom. “See, Therese was a Christian, so she probably thought by overdosing that she’d be born again, all her sins forgiven. It’s the perfect drug for her: suicide without the corpse.”
“Was she thinking about suicide that night?”
“I don’t know. I could spend a couple weeks mining through Therese’s memories, but frankly, I’m not interested. Whatever she was thinking, she wasn’t born again. I’m here, and I’m still saddled with her baggage. I am Therese’s donkey. I’m a karma donkey.”
Dr. Mehldau nods. “Dr. Subramaniam is Buddhist, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, but what’s. . . ?” It clicks. I roll my eyes. Dr. S and I talked about transference, and I know that my crush on him was par for the course. And it’s true that I spend a lot of time-still-thinking about fucking the man. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. “This is not about that,” I say. “I’ve been thinking about this on my own.”
She doesn’t fight me on that. “Wouldn’t a Buddhist say that you and Therese share the same soul? Self’s an illusion. So there’s no rider in charge, no donkey. There’s just you.”
“Just forget it,” I say.
“Let’s follow this, Terry. Don’t you feel you have a responsibility to your old self ? Your old self’s parents, your old friends? Maybe there’s karma you owe.”
“And who are you responsible to, Doctor? Who’s your patient? Therese, or me?”
She says nothing for a moment, then: “I’m responsible to you.”
You.
You swallow, surprised that the pills taste like cinnamon. The effect of the drug is intermittent at first. You realize that you’re in the back seat of a car, the cellphone in your hand, your friends laughing around you. You’re talking to your mother. If you concentrate, you can remember answering the phone, and telling her which friend’s house you’re staying at tonight. Before you can say goodbye, you’re stepping out of the car. The car is parked, your phone is away-and you remember saying goodnight to your mother and riding for a half hour before finding this parking garage. Joelly tosses her red curls and tugs you toward the stairwell: Come on, Miss T!
Then you look up and realize that you’re on the sidewalk outside an all-ages club, and you’re holding a ten dollar bill, ready to hand it to the bouncer. The music thunders every time the door swings open. You turn to Joelly and-
You’re in someone else’s car. On the Interstate. The driver is a boy you met hours ago, his name is Rush but you haven’t asked if that’s his first name or his last. In the club you leaned into each other and talked loud over the music about parents and food and the difference between the taste of a fresh cigarette in your mouth and the smell of stale smoke. But then you realize that there’s a cigarette in your mouth, you took it from Rush’s pack yourself, and you don’t like cigarettes. Do you like it now? You don’t know. Should you take it out, or keep smoking? You scour your memories, but can discover no reason why you decided to light the cigarette, no reason why you got into the car with this boy. You start to tell yourself a story: he must be a trustworthy person, or you wouldn’t have gotten into the car. You took that one cigarette because the boy’s feelings would have been hurt.
You’re not feeling like yourself tonight. And you like it. You take another drag off the cigarette. You think back over the past few hours, and marvel at everything you’ve done, all without that constant weight of self-reflection: worry, anticipation, instant regret. Without the inner voice constantly critiquing you.
Now the boy is wearing nothing but boxer shorts, and he’s reaching up to a shelf to get a box of cereal, and his back is beautiful. There is hazy light outside the small kitchen window. He pours Froot Loops into a bowl for you, and he laughs, though quietly because his mother is asleep in the next room. He looks at your face and frowns. He asks you what’s the matter. You look down, and you’re fully dressed. You think back, and realize that you’ve been in this boy’s apartment for hours. You made out in his bedroom, and the boy took off his clothes, and you kissed his chest and ran your hands along his legs. You let him put his hand under your shirt and cup your breasts, but you didn’t go any further. Why didn’t you have sex? Did he not interest you? No-you were wet. You were excited. Did you feel guilty? Did you feel ashamed?
What were you thinking?
When you get home there will be hell to pay. Your parents will be furious, and worse, they will pray for you. The entire church will pray for you. Everyone will know. And no one will ever look at you the same again.
Now there’s a cinnamon taste in your mouth, and you’re sitting in the boy’s car again, outside a convenience store. It’s afternoon. Your cell phone is ringing. You turn off the cell phone and put it back in your purse. You swallow, and your throat is dry. That boy-Rush-is buying you another bottle of water. What was it you swallowed? Oh, yes. You think back, and remember putting all those little pills in your mouth. Why did you take so many? Why did you take another one at all? Oh, yes.
Voices drift up from the kitchen. It’s before 6 AM, and I just want to pee and get back to sleep, but then I realize they’re talking about me.
“She doesn’t even walk the same. The way she holds herself, the way she talks . . .”
“It’s all those books Dr. Subramaniam gave her. She’s up past one every night. Therese never read like that, not science.”
“No, it’s not just the words, it’s how she sounds. That low voice . . .” She sobs. “Oh hon, I didn’t know it would be this way. It’s like she’s right, it’s like it isn’t her at all.”
He doesn’t say anything. Alice’s crying grows louder, subsides. The clink of dishes in the sink. I step back, and Mitch speaks again.
“Maybe we should try the camp,” he says.
“No, no, no! Not yet. Dr. Mehldau says she’s making progress. We’ve got to-”
“Of course she’s going to say that.”
“You said you’d try this, you said you’d give this a chance.” The anger cuts through the weeping, and Mitch mumbles something apologetic. I creep back to my bedroom, but I still have to pee, so I make a lot of noise going back out. Alice comes to the bottom of the stairs. “Are you all right, honey?”
I keep my face sleepy and walk into the bathroom. I shut the door and sit down on the toilet in the dark.
What fucking camp?
* * *
“Let’s try again,” Dr. Mehldau said. “Something pleasant and vivid.”
I’m having trouble concentrating. The brochure is like a bomb in my pocket. It wasn’t hard to find, once I decided to look for it. I want to ask Dr. Mehldau about the camp, but I know that once I bring it into the open, I’ll trigger a showdown between the doctor and the Klasses, with me in the middle.
“Keep your eyes closed,” she says. “Think about Therese’s tenth birthday. In her diary, she wrote that was the best birthday she’d ever had. Do you remember Sea World?”
“Vaguely.” I could see dolphins jumping-two at a time, three at a time. It had been sunny and hot. With every session it was getting easier for me to pop into Therese’s memories. Her life was on DVD, and I had the remote.
“Do you remember getting wet at the Namu and Shamu show?”
I laughed. “I think so.” I could see the metal benches, the glass wall just in front of me, the huge shapes in the blue-green water. “They had the whales flip their big tail fins. We got drenched.”
“Can you picture who was there with you? Where are your parents?”
There was a girl, my age, I can’t remember her name. The sheets of water were coming down on us and we were screaming and laughing. Afterward my parents toweled us off. They must have been sitting up high, out of the splash zone. Alice looked much younger: happier, and a little heavier. She was wider at the hips. This was before she started dieting and exercising, when she was Mom-sized.
My eyes pop open. “Oh God.”
“Are you okay?”