“But I’m not even sure if there is a something else. I was just trying to explain that.”
“What if there is, though? Imagine there’s something else there, and just tell me your best guess as to what it might be.”
Oddly, Stewie spoke without so much as a hint of hesitation. It just burst out.
“I didn’t get to say goodbye to her.”
“I can understand why that would trouble you. But I don’t think anyone knew she was about to pass away. Did they?”
“No, not Marilyn,” he said. “Well, that too. Her too. But, like you say, nobody knew, so how could they tell me? I was talking about my gam.”
Stewie sat very still for a moment, waiting to hear how the doctor would respond. But no words came back to him. Doctor Briggs just scribbled a quick note on his pad and left space open for Stewie to say more.
As he opened his mouth to speak it struck him that he was no longer shivering.
“They took her to the hospital and I wanted to go visit her but they said I couldn’t. The hospital people. They said I was too young to come in and that you have to be fourteen to visit. And then she died and that would have been the last time I ever got to see her and they didn’t let me have it. And that makes me really mad.”
He waited, in case it was wrong to be mad and he was about to be taken to task for it, but then he remembered that Dr. Briggs seemed to have a different opinion than most people about such things.
“You don’t sound mad,” the doctor said, leveling Stewie with an almost alarmingly direct gaze. Under normal circumstances it would have made him squirm, but these were not normal circumstances. “You just sound down and sad.”
“If I tell you I’m mad, I think you ought to believe me.”
“I’m not saying you’re not. I’m just noting that the last time you told me you were mad, you looked and acted mad. I just think it’s interesting that you’re expressing it in such a different way today.”
“I wish,” Stewie said, “that when I’m having a hard time with something, you wouldn’t keep saying it’s interesting.”
“Maybe I haven’t been clear about what I mean when I say that. I don’t mean that you’re a curiosity to me, like a butterfly pinned to a card.”
“That’s a terrible picture to have in my head,” Stewie said, shaking his head as if to dislodge it. “What a horrible way to treat a butterfly. Why would anybody pin a butterfly to a card?”
“That’s the way they used to study them. Or maybe they still do, I don’t know.”
“Alive?”
“No, I think they probably kill them first.”
“And that’s supposed to make me feel better? Can we please talk about something else?”
“Sorry. What I was trying to say is that I don’t find you interesting like a curiosity. When I say I find something interesting about you, I mean it’s something that helps me know you a little better. And the reason it’s of interest to me is because the more I know you, the more I feel I can help you.”
“Oh,” Stewie said. “Well . . . I guess that’s maybe okay, then.”
He shrugged out of his jacket. It was harder and more awkward than he would have wanted it to be, especially with the doctor staring at him.
“Here’s the thing about being mad,” Stewie said. “Stacey always says it doesn’t do any good to get mad.”
“It may or may not do anything to help your situation, depending on the case. But I do want to note that anger is not without its purpose.”
“It’s not?”
“Not at all.”
“What does it do?”
“It protects you. When somebody treats you in a way you don’t wish to be treated, you get angry with them, and that’s a clear sign that you don’t want them to do it again.”
“But you can’t use that with a person dying.”
“No.”
“So in this case Stacey was right. What good does it do?”
“But the problem with a statement like that—‘It doesn’t do any good to get angry’—is that by the time a person says it, you already are angry. Good or bad, helpful or unhelpful, when you’re angry, you just are. You really only have two choices at that point: keep it in or let it out.”
“Safer to keep it in.”
“I’m not so sure I agree. A lot of trouble in this world comes from people who hold their anger in too long, and then it comes out on its own and there’s no controlling it, and it’s destructive. I honestly think the world would be a much safer place if people knew how to express their anger appropriately.”
Stewie scratched his mosquito-bitten legs through his irritating wool trousers, which he now realized had been a mistake to wear.
“How do I do that?”
“Maybe start by telling me what makes you angry.”
“I just did. They wouldn’t let me in the hospital to say goodbye to Gam.”
“Anything else?”
“Sure. Lots of things. Everything. Why does everybody have so many people but me? Just about every kid I know has two parents and four grandparents, and most of them have aunts and uncles and cousins, and some even have great-grandparents, and even those that don’t have all of that have most of it. All I had was my gam and then she died and then I had Marilyn and then she died and I don’t think it’s fair. Every time I have somebody, they die. I mean, I have Stacey and Theo, and I’m not saying that’s not a good thing to have, but I’m talking about the older people. Older relatives. You know? There’s Louise at Eastbridge. She always says I can adopt her, but I don’t know. Now I’m just sort of thinking . . . if I adopt her, I’ll probably get to liking her real well and then she’ll die. Why even start liking people if they’re just going to die?”
“This is another situation,” the doctor said, setting down his pad, “where you really only have two choices. Have no one at all in your life or have people in your life at the risk of losing them. You never had parents, in a very real sense, as most people do. You did, of course, but you were so young that you couldn’t even experience what it meant to lose them. It’s almost as though they were never there. Do you really think that’s better than loving someone and then losing them?”
“No, it’s worse. Because I didn’t even get to have them. I didn’t even get to know them. Everybody knows their parents but me. I got totally robbed.”
“So we agree. ‘’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.’”
“Isn’t that that Tennyson guy? The one with ‘Lord’ in his name?”
The doctor seemed shocked.
“I’m a little surprised that you recognized that.”
“Our teacher taught it to us in English class last year.”
“I see.”
“So you think I should adopt Louise.”
“I absolutely do.”
Stewie sat for a long time, feeling around in something. Some vague feeling of dissatisfaction. Or maybe it was a sense of incompleteness.
He heard a tapping sound, and looked to the window to see a little brown bird, probably a sparrow of some sort, beating its wings against the glass. The doctor didn’t seem to notice, but Stewie couldn’t take his eyes off it. He couldn’t figure out why a bird would try to beat its way into a room. It just seemed to need to be someplace other than where it was, which Stewie found almost painfully familiar.
A few seconds later it was gone in a flash of wings—it had given up and soared in a new direction.
“Here’s the thing,” Stewie said. “You tell me these things, and I believe you. And I sort of get it. But another part of me . . . I just don’t see what it changes. I come in here and I’m all upset because Marilyn died. And we talk about it. We talk about all these things, and then we’re done talking, but I’m still upset because Marilyn died. I’m just not sure I see the point of the whole thing.”
He waited for Dr. Briggs’s reaction with a slight inward wince. After all, he had just maligned his life’s work.