I saw the kitchen curtains flutter furtively as Tina reversed out of the driveway. My mother had been opening and shutting drawers with deep, woeful sighs when I’d told her I was leaving, like finding anything she needed was impossible now that I’d organized the kitchen for her. It was as good a goodbye as I was going to get. My fifty-two-year-old mother turned into a sullen teenager when she didn’t get her way, giving her oppressor flat, monosyllabic answers when a shrug or nod wouldn’t do. Normally, when she iced me out like this, I spiraled into a state of unparalleled terror. I’d become convinced that not only did everyone hate me but I had cancer and I was going to die. But on the day Tina and I left for Aspen, I was too in love with my face to care. In the bathroom mirror, I tilted my chin down and up, turned my head left and right. The only bump on my face was my nose, and I had always liked my nose.
Aspen. I felt so worldly saying it: I’m headed to Ah-spin for the weekend. Tina was wearing not an outfit but an ensemble—knit hat with a cute pom-pom on top, a fuzzy white jacket, suede and fur snow boots that made her legs look miles long. I wouldn’t have been able to stand looking at her if I didn’t feel so beautiful myself. People could finally see my bright eyes, my pale skin, and my pitch-black hair. Earlier that week, a little girl in the grocery store had tugged her mother’s sleeve and asked her what Snow White was doing in the cereal aisle.
“Have you ever been?” Tina asked once we were at the airport, waiting to board the flight.
“Just drove through once when I was a kid,” I said.
“It’s totally plush. There’s this place on the mountain. It’s all glass, and it feels like you’re drinking champagne outside.” Tina smiled longingly. “I always wanted to go back and actually enjoy myself.”
“You didn’t have a good time before?”
Tina’s smile faded. “Oh. I came with Ed. We spent most of our time in the room.”
I giggled. “Ooh la la.”
Crossly, Tina said, “Because he was eighty-three years old and not feeling well.”
The hotel was swankier than the place CJ had taken me on our honeymoon. In the lobby, a fire danced on the hearth’s stage, green apples gleamed in bowls, and uniformed staff milled about, refusing to let you touch your bags or press the button to the elevator. Tina tipped every last bellhop, even the one who did nothing but hold the door for us. Alone in the hotel room, which was smaller than I think we’d both anticipated, I awkwardly asked how much I owed her for the weekend. I didn’t have a ton of money to throw around, but I had a small amount saved from the time I worked as a cashier at the pharmacy during the last few months of my dying marriage, enough to pick up dinner one night.
“The conference is paying for the hotel room,” Tina said. “Let me get the rest. It’s the least I can do. I would be miserable if I were here alone. You’re really helping me out, Ruth. You have no idea.” I might have thought she was laying it on a little thick, doing that thing rich people do where they act like they owe you so as not to make you feel like some pitiful charity case. But Tina was wringing her hands, suddenly seeming very young and unsure of herself. “Let’s go down and get some dinner,” she said before I could refuse her offer. “I could use about ten drinks.”
We ordered steak and split a bottle of red wine and a slice of cheesecake for dessert. I ate my half, but Tina only scored the custardy surface with the tines of her fork, distractedly, while she nursed a nightcap of whiskey. Up until dessert, she’d been in a great mood. She was loud and pally with the waitress, cracking jokes about the biceps the girl must have developed while ferrying the huge silver trays from the other side of the hotel, where, stupidly, the kitchen operated.
“Let’s go upstairs and get a good night’s sleep,” I told Tina after she signed the check. When the waitress collected the billfold and saw her tip, her eyebrows shot way up.
In the room, Tina tried on different outfits for me. She’d packed five options, everything brand-new, tags dangling from the care labels. I wanted to be annoyed—she must know she looked spectacular in everything, did she really need me to say it?—but objectively, the woman was a wreck.
“Do you think we can practice?” she asked me after we decided on a slim-fitted black wool sweater and tweed pencil skirt with a thick belt that made her waist look slimmer than it already was. “I’m too worked up to go to bed.”
“What do you need me to do?”
Tina went over to the desk area and dragged out the chair so that it was facing the foot of the bed. “You sit here,” she said. She perched on the edge of the bed and crossed her legs, hooking her hands around her knee. She was barefoot, wearing the tweed skirt and a lacy silk camisole. She’d packed the third floor of Frederick & Nelson but no bra. “So I’m the therapist and you’re the patient,” she explained. “And this is just pretend. I mean, you can say real stuff if you want, but you can also make it up.”
“Got it.”
“But also, just go along with what I say.”
I nodded, trying to keep a straight face. Tina was blushing, and it was very sweet.
“It’s stupid, but I have to introduce myself.”
I laughed. “Just go already!”
Tina seemed to hear herself at last, and she laughed a little too. She closed her eyes, inhaled deep, and dropped her shoulders on her long exhale. Her eyes opened, revealing a composed and capable woman. “Hi, Ruth. I’m Dr. Cannon. It’s nice to meet you.”
Dr. Cannon. How thrilling for her. I smiled widely. “It’s nice to meet you too, Dr. Cannon.”
“I understand you have been referred to me by your physician because you’ve been feeling depressed recently.”
“I have been feeling a bit down, yes.”
Tina nodded approvingly, as if to say, Good job playing along. “And how long have you been feeling like that?”
“Oh.” I worried my face with a hand, thinking. “Do you mean this time or last?”
“So you’ve had spells before?”
“I guess you could call them that.”
“Let’s talk about the first time.”
The room seemed to darken as I thought about the first time. “I was in high school.”
“Did anything happen to trigger it?”
I saw my sister-in-law’s face—her real face, features slack and helpless—and then I saw my father’s, his heartbroken horror. “I got in some trouble.”
“What sort of trouble?”
Tina had positioned the chair too close to the bed. I scooted back before our knees grazed. “It was on school grounds. My dad was a teacher there, and he tried to stick up for me, but, well… in the end it was best for everyone if I left.”
“That must have been devastating for you.”
“I guess,” I said disagreeably. I didn’t care for the word devastating. It implied a sort of wartime destruction, a razing to the ground, and I was made of stronger stuff than that. “I had a problem, and it was better for me to be someplace where I could get help, anyway.”
Tina didn’t bat an eye at that. “So you received professional care after that first spell?”
I realized I was sitting on my hands and that they were going numb. Here is where I should probably make something up, I thought, but my mind went blank with everything except the truth about the nine months I’d spent at Eastern State. I sat, tolerating the pins and needles in my fingertips and saying nothing for a long stretch of time.
“It’s okay to stop here for now,” Tina said. “Sometimes the only way to talk about a difficult event is to give ourselves permission to stop when it gets to be too much. Each time you go into it, the hope is that you push yourself a little further.”
I nodded, my eyes downcast, feeling exposed and a little resentful. Tina stretched her arms over her head with an extravagant yawn. “I’m finally tired now. Thanks, Ruth. You’ve saved me again.”
* * *
In the middle of the night, I awoke to the sound of Tina crying. She was on her side, facing away from me and trying to be quiet about it, but the sound was unmissable. I’d gone to bed regretting having shared so much with Tina, but a balance had been restored once again, both of us unmasked in our misery. Feeling something like kinship, I was lulled back to sleep.