“She became a psychologist?”
“Psychiatrist. She was at the top of her field almost from the get-go thanks to her passion. She knew her symptoms right away.”
I stopped and faced Georgia. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” The thought of a daughter dedicating her life to her father’s illness, only to be stricken with the same thing was enough to almost double me over.
“Yeah. God saves his bad days for her.”
“W-what?”
She forced a smile. “Keep walking. It’s easier to process when you feel like you can walk away from it.”
I took a deep breath and tried to remember the woman I’d met in my apartment building hours before. She seemed normal, no signs of a lifetime of holy treachery staining her eyes.
“My mom wanted to make sure I wasn’t in the dark about what was going on with her. She knew that days of erratic and unexplainable behavior were ahead, and, I guess, she wanted to prepare me the best she could.”
“How do you prepare such a little kid for something like that?”
A cynical smile appeared on her velvety lips. “A different reality.”
“Ah.” I nodded, recalling the moment she fled our seated position and led me on this walk. “Explain?”
“My mom sat me down and,” Georgia cleared her throat, doing a hell of a job retaining composure, “told me that sometimes she might say or do things that didn’t make any sense, and it would feel like a fairytale.”
“Uh, not like any fairytale I know.” I twisted my lips in confusion.
“Wonderland,” she sighed.
“W—oooooh. Alice in Wonderland...” As she nodded in the corner of my vision, my first memories of Georgia flashed through my brain. Strange tattoos, riddled speech. I looked at her again and she made sense for the very first time.
“Stop staring at me.”
“I can’t.”
“What?”
“Tell me why your mother chose Alice in Wonderland.” It seemed obvious, but I doubted that I knew it all.
Georgia stopped and sat, digging her toes into the cakey wet sand. “It was my favorite movie and book when I got old enough to read. But, she just used the movie when she explained her condition. She told me that when Alice fell down the rabbit hole and landed with a thump in Wonderland, she sometimes saw things that were pretty, and sometimes things that were scary or confusing, but always at the end she woke up from her dream in the field of flowers in which she started.”
“So,” she continued, “my mom assured me that if I felt confused or scared, it was no different than Alice, and when it was all over, everything would be normal and comfortable again.”
I’d been standing as she was talking, but I sank on my heels next to her, wrapping my arm around her shoulder. She never settled into the embrace, but didn’t flinch away, either.
“So, your tattoos, the bakery, the random things you say sometimes...”
She smiled. “All a part of my life. Who I am.”
“Isn’t that kind of more who she is?” I questioned, pulling my arm away and leaning back on it.
Her face went grey. “Same thing.”
“I don’t...” I wanted to say understand, but she didn’t let me.
“That’s enough, okay? I’ll tell you more, just not right now.” Two tears rolled down her right cheek, and she just let them. They bumped into each other at the edge of her jaw and fell as one onto her shoulder.
My chest ached for her. I didn’t have all of the answers to her behavior I’d witnessed over the last several weeks, but it seemed they all lay in this story. This empty hole of a story that messed with her face and made it look older than her twenty-four years. The hostility I thought I’d observed in her eyes looked like pain in the light of personal tragedy. Maybe hostility lingered, though.
I had to touch her. To hug her. Never in my life had I seen a person who needed to be hugged as much as Georgia did. As she sat, her knees pulled to her chest, that half-assed excuse for a self-hug didn’t seem to be taking hold in her soul.
“I’ll shut up about it,” I said as I slid closer to her until our sides were touching, “if you let me hug you.”
She scrunched her eyebrows and looked at me like I’d just said the most absurd thing she’d ever heard. As ironic of a look as I’d ever seen.
“Please.” I nudged her shoulder with mine. “Just let me hug you. I can tell you need it.”
“I’ll let you hug me,” she straightened her face as she sat forward, “if you open that letter. Then maybe we’ll both need one.”
Feeling like I’d been tossed down my own rabbit hole, I shook my head. “I can’t.”
“That makes no sense. You have every body part necessary for the task.”
“You know what I mean. I ... physically can’t.”
“Why not?”
“What if it’s bad?” I’d been tossing possibilities around in my head for a week straight.
“I’d say the worst is over, isn’t it? The absolute worst thing has already happened. What the hell else could be worse?” Now her hand was on my leg, but I didn’t move. Human contact was at a premium for me these days, and I needed it.