“Yeah. Well. I don’t.”
“As I’ve said before, you don’t want comfort.” Harriet wrote something on her notepad. “Why do you keep coming to me? You control your feelings so tightly we can hardly make progress.”
“I come to you for drugs. You know that.”
“How are you doing, really?”
“Tonight will be … bad. I’ll start remembering her, and I won’t be able to stop. I’ll think that Miles was wrong. That she could have gotten better, or that if I’d kissed her she could have woken up like a Disney princess. I’ll imagine that I should have tried mouth-to-mouth or pounded on her heart. Crazy things.” Jude looked up. Tears blurred Dr. Bloom’s sharp face, softened it. “I’ll take some sleeping pills, and then it will be tomorrow, and I’ll be okay until Thanksgiving, and then Christmas, and then … her birthday.”
“Zach’s birthday.”
She flinched at that. “Yeah. Not that he celebrates it anymore, either.”
“When was the last time your family celebrated anything?”
“You know the answer to that. We’re pod people like in that body-snatcher movie. We only pretend to be real. But why are we rehashing all of this? I just want you to tell me how to get through today.”
“You never ask me about tomorrow. Why is that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Most patients want to learn how to live. They want me to make a map that they can follow to get them to a healthy future. You simply just want to survive each day.”
“He-llo. I’m not bipolar or schizophrenic or borderline. I’m sad. My daughter died, and I’m devastated. There’s no getting better.”
“Is that what you want to believe?”
“It’s the way it is.” Jude crossed her arms. “Look, you’ve helped me, if that’s what this is about. Maybe you think I should be doing better by now, maybe you think six years is a long time. But it’s not, not when your child died. And I am doing better. I grocery shop. I cook dinner. I go out with girlfriends. I make love to my husband. I vote.”
“You didn’t mention either your son or your granddaughter.”
“It wasn’t meant to be an exhaustive list,” Jude said.
“Are you still stalking Grace?”
Jude pulled her scarf off. She was hot now, sweating, in fact, and the scarf was choking her. “I don’t stalk her.”
“You stand in the trees and watch her at that after-school program, but you won’t hold her or play with her. What would you call it?”
Jude started to unbutton her coat. “Man, it’s hot.”
“When was the last time you held Grace? Or kissed her?”
“Really. It’s an oven in here…”
“It’s not hot.”
“Damn menopause.”
“Jude,” Harriet said with an irritating patience. “You refuse to love your granddaughter.”
“No,” Jude said, finally looking up. “I can’t love her. There’s a difference. I’ve tried. Do you really think I haven’t tried? But when I look at her, I feel … nothing.”
“That’s not true, Jude.”
“Look,” Jude sighed. “I get what you’re doing. We’ve done this dance for years. I tell you I can’t feel, and you toss back that I don’t want to. My brain is the boss. I get it. I do. The old me would have been certain you were right.”
“And the new you?”
“The new me is living. That’s enough. I don’t burst into tears when I see pink anymore; I can start my car without crying; I can look at my son and not be angry at him. Sometimes I can look into his eyes without even thinking about Mia. I can pick my granddaughter up from school and give her a bath and read her a bedtime story, all without crying. You know how much progress this is. So can we just, for now, forget the next step and let me get through this day?”
“We could talk about Mia.”
“No,” Jude said sharply. She’d learned a long time ago that talking about Mia only sharpened the pain.
“You need to talk about her. You need to remember her and grieve.”