“Feel better?” Reece asked. It wasn’t snarky. He sounded hopeful.
I shook my head. “I have to clean it up.” And then I burst into tears, sinking to the floor in my despair. Poppy trotted over and licked my face, then lay down beside me as I poured out my grief on the checkered wood. Reece followed after, and we all three lay huddled in a mass of tears, muscles, and fur. My family. My family.
I checked the time: 7:57 A.M. Reece never left the car, but I hadn’t noticed, consumed in my thoughts, consumed with myself.
“So what do you think?” Reece asked.
I sighed. “I guess it’s time to go in.”
***
“How was your first day back?” Dr. Gordon asked. He leaned against his leather club chair, every now and then stroking his white beard. It was stained around his mouth. He smoked a pipe sometimes during our sessions after I told him I loved the smell and wouldn’t mind the second-hand smoke.
“Terrible.”
“Why?”
I slipped off my ballet flats and pulled my legs up on the couch.
“Because everyone was acting too hard. It would have been better had they just left me alone,” I said.
“But isn’t it right that your friends are concerned for you? They care about you, and they want to express that.”
“They’re not my friends,” I mumbled.
“Christopher is,” Dr. Gordon pointed out.
I shrugged.
“Bailey, perhaps you’re angry because you feel like these people don’t really understand what you’re going through?”
“They don’t.”
“You told me Christopher lost his dad several years ago.”
“That was different. He wasn’t close to his father,” I said.
“Does that mean he can’t understand the grief of losing someone?”
I shrugged again.
“And what about your fiancé, who’s never had a real family of his own? Not until you came along, anyway. Can he not understand on some level the pain you’re experiencing? Can he not be allowed to grieve with you? To help you work through all this?”
Squeeze on the heart. I was a terrible person. I knew it all along. I knew it at six years old when I was told I’d have to go to therapy to “fix my issue.” I was terrible for not wanting to go. I was terrible for having OCD in the first place. I was terrible for driving men away because my OCD was more important than they were.
Just. Plain. Terrible.
“Bailey?”
“Reece said I’m falling back into my old urges because I’m trying to honor my father’s memory,” I said suddenly.
“Well, let’s talk about that,” Dr. Gordon replied.
“I don’t think I’m trying to honor him that way,” I said.
“Then what is it you think you’re doing?”
I thought for a moment, staring at the bookshelf running the length of the wall from floor to ceiling.
“Dr. Gordon, you’re so cliché,” I observed, giggling. “That bookshelf. Your chair . . .”
“I know. It’s a game I play with my patients to see if they’ll take me seriously,” he replied.
I laughed—a strange sound I’d not made in weeks. Not since I sat at my mother’s kitchen table, drinking coffee and clearing the air.
“But back to your old habits,” Dr. Gordon said. He paused and waited.
“I think they’re safe. I think that’s why I went back to them,” I said.
“And Reece isn’t safe?”
I crinkled my brow.
“I see two options here, Bailey. I see the false safety in your rituals and the real safety in the man you love. You have a choice to make because I’m quite certain that you can’t have both. You see, you’re leaning toward the ‘safety’ of your rituals because they’ve been a part of your life since you were six. You know them very well, and they reflect your father, too. Reece, on the other hand, is still rather new. So while he’s the real, true safety you seek, you’re mistrusting because you don’t know him like you do your compulsions.”
“So what the hell am I supposed to do?” I asked.
“You tell me.”
“You’re the expert over here,” I griped.
“Bailey, tell me what you know in your heart you should do,” Dr. Gordon said gently.
“My heart? My heart is telling me I need more time to grieve. My heart is telling me that no one understands what I’m dealing with. My heart tells me to push people away!”
Dr. Gordon took a deep breath. “All right then. Tell me what you know in your head you oughta do.”
“Trust Reece and not my urges,” I said quietly.
“And how do you feel about that?”
“It makes me angry.”
“Why?”
“Because I have been trusting him!” I cried. “And I have been letting go of my urges and living a better life! And then my dad died, and it’s my fault!”
“What do you mean?”
“I stopped my rituals! I killed my dad because I stopped my rituals!” I burst into tears.
“Bailey, we’ve talked about this,” Dr. Gordon said above the noise of my wailing. “You did not invite disaster into your life because you started managing your condition.”
I nodded, unconvinced.
“Remember the day you finally discovered how illogical it was to connect bad events to the management of your OCD?”
I nodded again.
“You know you didn’t kill your father,” Dr. Gordon said. “I want you to tell me that.”
I breathed deeply.
“Go on,” Dr. Gordon gently urged.
“I didn’t kill my father,” I whispered.
“Believe it.”
“I didn’t kill my father,” I repeated.
“Tell me how you know that.”
“I didn’t kill my father because managing my OCD had nothing to do with his heart attack,” I said. I wanted to believe it.
Dr. Gordon waited.
“So I didn’t kill my dad,” I said, defeated. “Still, everything’s changed. All the goodness that was my life is gone.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that it stopped working,” I whispered.
“What stopped working?”
“Whatever magic Reece was using to make me feel for the first time in my life that I didn’t have to be controlled by my illness . . . it just stopped working.”
Dr. Gordon whipped out his pipe. “You mind?”