“Stand up, Max.”
Max obliged. She knew the routine. People look at you like you’re crazy. Larger people even seemed to get angry.
“You can sit now. Thank you. I hope that didn’t embarrass you. I’m pretty good at guessing weights. Actually, working with eating disorders is one of my specialties.” Prunella sighed, picked up a pencil and tapped it against the pad on her desk. “Normally I’d meet with you a couple of times, you’d get over your anxiety about seeing a new man, and you’d move on. Here’s what worries me. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that anorexia is like alcoholism. It’s not a disease that gets cured, it’s a disease that’s managed. It never truly goes away. If you’re having ‘bad body thoughts,’ or whatever else you’d like to call them, then I think it’s of the utmost importance that we take them seriously.”
“Exactly. I want to nip it in the bud.”
“I have a few questions, to keep me on track.” Dr. Shale wrote on her pad, underlined, then looked back at Max. “I realize that after the death of your husband, many things in your life have changed. At one time, though, would you have considered yourself promiscuous?”
Max shook her head, topped it off with a quick, “No,” but the lie made the hair at her nape rise. Her hands were suddenly cold.
“The reason I ask is that many sexual abuse survivors suffer from eating disorders and/or problems with promiscuity, as odd as that may sound. Is abuse a possibility we need to explore with you?”
“No. Absolutely not.” The words came out a little too strong and set off a live wire of tension buzzing through her. Prunella watched her like a hawk. Max took a deep breath. “What I mean is, I don’t remember anything like that happening. After my mother died when I was eight, I went to live with my uncle and aunt. They were quite ... pleasant people.” Her uncle was an asshole, but she really wasn’t here to be analyzed. She was here to get to Jada.
“Pleasant? What do you mean by that?” Psychiatrists. They could take a word and make it into a thesis.
“I mean that they were okay. I didn’t particularly love them and didn’t particularly hate them. They were just there.” Quite unintentionally, Max’s voice rose on the last sentence.
The doctor scribbled a note. Max was sure she’d revealed evidence of some lesion on her brain.
The questions went on. A tidbit about high school. Another about college. What did she do for a living? How had she met Cameron? Had she loved him? And finally, how had he died?
She answered everything. She didn’t lie unless she had to. All she wanted was to get assigned to Jada’s group.
“Why are you afraid of this new man in your life?”
“A million reasons,” burst out before she had a chance to stop it. Not the least of which being the way she wanted to feel Witt inside her again, his weight pinning her to the floor or the mattress or whatever other surface might be available.
“Tell me one.”
Max looked at Dr. Prunella Shale. She’d paid this woman $155 for forty-five minutes, thirty-five of which was up. She couldn’t talk to Cameron about Witt. She couldn’t talk to Witt about Witt. She didn’t have anyone else, unless she wanted to talk to herself.
“I don’t want to start depending on someone, then wake up one morning to find him gone.”
“So you’d rather be alone now, than risk being alone later.”
Sounded kind of dumb put that way, but, “Yeah.”
“Your mother died, your aunt died, your husband died. I’d say you have good reasons to be afraid, Max.”
She felt like a nail had been slammed right through her breastbone. “Yeah.”
“So what do you want to do about it?”
“It?”
“Being alone. Is that what you want?”
The woman’s questions robbed her of speech. They were so succinct, the answers so simple. So terrifying. If she said yes, she doomed herself to another fifty years in a one-room studio replacing her cats every ten to fifteen years when they died so she had something alive to cuddle up to at night. If she said no? Well, that meant Witt.
None of this was what she’d come here for.
“I’m sorry, Max, I can see you’re thinking I want an answer right now. I don’t.”
Thank God. Max breathed a sigh of relief.
The doctor went on. “I’m trying to get to the lowest common denominator here. Quite frankly, I don’t have a clue yet.”
“I didn’t expect you to.” Especially with the hodgepodge of crap Max had fed her.
“Why don’t you tell me what you think you want?”
Ah, so psychiatric. Patient, heal thyself. “I think I’d like to try a group again. It worked before.”
“Why?”