Dad twisted across me, his bare skin pressing onto my shirt. Onto my arm.
“Oh it’s my fault again, is it? It’s always me!”
“Dad … you’re touching my arm.”
Dr. Rhodes leaned forward and squirmed in her chair. I watched the second hand on the clock pass the three.
“Mr. and Mrs. Corbin, it doesn’t work like that. In fact, OCD isn’t always about germs or cleanliness. If we could just—”
“Well, you’re not exactly a tidy man, are you, Brian? I mean, look at the state of the shed! You just open the door and fling everything in there—”
“Don’t you start on about my shed again—”
“—and then you go on and on about not being able to find anything—”
“No I don’t! I never moan about that …”
His arm brushed against mine again, and I moved away as much as I could without touching Mum.
“Dad …”
Dr. Rhodes took her glasses off and pinched the bridge of her nose.
“If you put things back where they belong, you wouldn’t make such hard work for yourself, would you?”
“Dad! Please move over a bit … You’re touching my arm!”
His attention turned to me, his face now as red as Dr. Rhodes’s hair. I’d pressed myself as far away as I could.
“Oh I’m touching your arm, am I? Am I not allowed to touch my own son?”
He twisted himself around and I leaned back as far as I could.
“What about a hug? Or a kiss on your birthday? When you get your exam results? When you pass your driving test? How about we shake hands on it, eh?”
He directed his hand toward me, his fingers tight together and his thumb pointing upward. His hand, which had felt so strong, so safe, when I’d held it as a young child, now filled me with terror. I hid my gloves under the clipboard, and Dad’s hand fell onto his lap. His face crumbled and he turned away and quietly began to cry. I thought I should say something, but my throat was shut tight. And besides, I’d looked at the clock on the wall, and the bad luck minute was here. I kept as still as I could and counted to seven repeatedly in my head. Fortunately Dr. Rhodes stepped in.
“Actually, Mr. and Mrs. Corbin, maybe this is a good time for you both to have some time-out and for me to have a little chat with Matthew on my own. Then we can decide together how we’re going to tackle this thing. Okay, Matthew?”
She looked directly at me and smiled, pretending that my dad wasn’t crying and everything was just fine. I lost track of my counting and started again.
“There’s a coffee shop next door. Go and get some fresh air and come back in about half an hour. That sound okay?”
Mum and Dad looked almost relieved to escape and they levered themselves out of the sofa, shuffling out with hunched shoulders and closing the door behind them.
“Okay. Now we can have a proper chat,” said Dr. Rhodes, smiling kindly.
She scribbled something on her pad, then looked up at me. I kept an eye on the clock. Twenty seconds to go.
“So, let’s start again. How are you, Matthew? How does it feel being here today?”
Silence.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven …
My eyes darted to the clock again and she followed my gaze.
“Is there a problem, Matthew?”
Silence.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven …
She tilted her head and waited. The second hand passed the twelve and I took a deep breath.
“No, no problem,” I said.
She frowned. I got a feeling she’d been able to look straight into my head and see all the numbers floating around as I counted. Adding seven onto the bad number made twenty and neutralized its power. She knew that. She knew exactly what I’d been doing.
“What do you want to get out of these sessions, Matthew?”
I shrugged.
“I don’t know really.”
I suddenly felt ridiculous sitting there with my stupid plastic gloves. She waited, her pencil poised as she put her head to one side. I opened my mouth but couldn’t seem to get any words out. The urge to escape from there, to get home and wash, was unbearable. My arm where Dad touched me was tingling with all of the germs that were now crawling under my sleeve.
“Can you remember when you first began to feel the urge to wash?”
I rubbed at the scar above my eyebrow. The mark that showed I was responsible for my own brother’s death.
“A few years ago, I guess.”
Dr. Rhodes smiled.
“And your parents said that things have gotten worse quite recently. Do you know why that is? Do you know what has made you feel more anxious?”
I looked at my knees, and in my mind I pictured Hannah Jenkins next door. Her heavily pregnant stomach with its tiny helpless life cocooned inside. I shivered.
Looking back up at Dr. Rhodes, I shrugged.
“No. No idea.”
The therapist leaned back in her chair.
“Okay, Matthew, let’s leave that for now and start with the form I’ve given you, shall we? Let’s see if we can see what area is bothering you the most.”
I finished the form and was pleased that I hadn’t ticked every box; in fact, I’d only ticked about a quarter of them. She was right, though; it did look like I had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
“Would you like me to explain what that means?” she asked, and I nodded.
“The ‘obsessive’ part refers to what is at the forefront of your mind for a lot of your day. For you, that’s germs and illness. With OCD, an obsession can cause a huge amount of distress and really have an impact on your daily life—stopping you from going to school, for example.”
She was certainly right about that bit.
“The ‘compulsion’ part means your urge to clean all the time and your need to do it over and over again until it feels right.”
She waited, letting me take it all in.
It also turned out that I did have “magical thinking” after all, but it had nothing to do with tricks. Apparently I believed that my actions and thoughts were able to “magically” prevent some catastrophic illness from hurting me or my family, even though I knew deep, deep, deep down that all of my actions were completely ridiculous and this way of thinking didn’t really have any power at all. All the cleaning was, well, just a waste of my time and energy.
So now that I know that, can I just go home and wash my hands? I wanted to say.
Dr. Rhodes asked if there was anything else I wanted to add, anything that wasn’t covered in the questions. I thought perhaps I should mention Callum, but I couldn’t bring myself to even say his name.
I shook my head, and she started talking about a technique that was going to help me called cognitive behavioral therapy. She said that together we were going to retrain my brain to stop thinking the way it does and that, after a while, I’d stop doing the things I kept doing. It wasn’t going to be easy, especially the exposure therapy, but I’d made the first step by being there and …
I stopped listening because my ears were buzzing and panic was bubbling in my stomach. I wanted to get the hell out of there. She was talking about some relaxation techniques and asked me to close my eyes and imagine my stomach was a deflated balloon that I needed to blow up. I glanced at the clock, closed my eyes, and began to write my mental list:
Tuesday, July 29th. 10:57 a.m. Dr. Rhodes’s office.
Facts about Dr. Rhodes:
She’s a big coffee drinker (the smell of coffee has been absorbed into the walls)
Likes antiques, gardening, American thrillers (bookcase observations)
One daughter. Single mother? (child’s drawing propped up on a bookcase shelf of two stick figures, one larger than the other; both are wearing triangular skirts and they are holding hands)
Daughter recently visited a doctor or hospital (on the sole of her shoe there is a round sticker of a smiling giraffe saying, “Star Patient”)
“… and now … slowly open your eyes and take one more deep breath …”
I opened my eyes and resisted looking straight at the clock. Time had to be up by now. I gave her a smile, trying to look relaxed, trying to look like a star patient who was feeling better and ready to go home now, thank you very much.