“Mum, I’m not seeing Rad anymore,” I lied. “Can you please just drop it?”
After we left the cemetery that night, Rad took me to an old lighthouse at Widow’s Cove. It stood at the end of a battered wharf and wasn’t much taller than a lamppost. We climbed up a rickety ladder and onto a balcony edged with thin metal railing. It was still dark, and the moon—large and glowing—threw a pale shimmer of light across the water. That night, we talked the way old friends do, with candor and ease. We were still deep in conversation when the sun announced its arrival with an astonishing flourish of orange and pink.
“Well, the damage has already been done.” My mother’s voice, always on the verge of hysteria, drove a wedge into my thoughts. “I was in the grocery store the other day, and I heard the Baker sisters gossiping about it in the next aisle.”
“That’s because they’re assholes, Mum. I can’t live my whole life worrying about every damn thing people are saying about me.”
“No, you can’t. But in the future, you can try to be a little more considerate. Imagine how Duck feels, you taking off with some guy.”
“We just talked; that’s all. And Duck knows that. Rad needed a friend that night, and I was there for him. You’re just trying to turn it into something that it’s not. Maybe you’re projecting your own guilt onto me,” I said, my words coming out in a rush before I could lose my nerve.
Her eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about. What you did to Dad.”
Her face turned an ugly shade of red. “How dare you,” she hissed. “That happened years ago. Your dad has gotten past it. You’re the only one who won’t let it go.”
“Well, what choice did he have?” I spat at her. “At least we kept your dirty little secret to ourselves.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I had gone too far.
“Get out!” she screamed. “You ungrateful brat. Get out now.”
I got out of the car as quickly as I could, slamming the door behind me.
As the bus pulled away from the stop, I sat in my seat pinching hard at the skin between my knuckles. I took a deep gulp of air through my mouth and exhaled slowly. Feeling self-conscious, I looked up to see whether anyone noticed how jittery I was. But the bus was crowded, and all the riders looked like they were in their own worlds.
My mother had a way of making everything seem ten times worse than it actually was. She watched me like a hawk, scrutinizing every move I made, looking for an opportunity to call me out. When I was thirteen, she came to pick me up at a birthday party. She caught sight of a cake stain on my new dress and yelled at me in front of all my friends. Though it was years ago, the humiliation I felt that day remains fresh in my mind.
As the bus continued, starting and stopping in the heavy morning traffic, I reached into the pocket of my jeans and fished out the crumpled piece of bright yellow paper my dad had given me the night before.
Ida Summers & Associates
24 Sentinel Street, Cremorne
Ida Summers was a name already familiar to me. I heard it dropped every so often in the school playground, like a status symbol. She had a reputation for treating damaged adolescent girls.
It was strange. The words “panic attack” were thrown around so often that I used to think nothing of it, applying the expression to the most trivial things. But now whenever I heard it, my stomach turned itself into knots. I used to be bulletproof, and I didn’t even know it.
Describing a panic attack to someone who has never experienced one is impossible. However, to one who has, no explanation is needed. You just have to say the word “anxiety,” and their eyes would light up with a knowing look. A mixture of “Welcome to the club” and “I know it sucks, but at least you’re not alone.”
The other night I was watching a movie when, midway through, it went out of sync. As the actors spoke, their words no longer matched up with the movement of their lips. I picked up the remote and tried the pause button. When that didn’t work, I tried to restart the movie, hoping it would fix the problem. In the end I gave up and just stopped watching it altogether. That was when the realization hit me; that out-of-sync feeling is exactly what anxiety is. Only, imagine it is not on a movie screen but in your brain. The worst thing is you have no control over it. There is no fix. You have to wait until things begin to feel normal again, but when you’re in that state of mind, you can’t tell if it ever will. And that’s what makes it so terrifying.
I arrived at the clinic twenty minutes before my appointment. I was still in a bad frame of mind from the argument with Mum earlier. I tried my best not to think about it.
The building was a two-story brick terrace house next to a row of boutiques, a mini shopping mart, and a secondhand book store. I pushed through the wrought iron gate and made my way up the concrete footpath to the bright red door. To my right was an intercom next to a rectangular plaque that read Ida Summers, along with two other names I didn’t recognize. I pushed the red button labeled Call.
I heard a burst of static, and a female voice, almost childlike, came on.
“Hello?”
“Hi, it’s Audrey for my eleven-o’clock appointment with Ida,” I said into the speaker.
“Wonderful, come in.”
There was a buzzing sound followed by a click as I pushed the door open. I walked into a small reception room and was greeted by a petite lady dressed in a gray pantsuit.
“Hello,” she said smiling at me from behind her desk. “Is this your first time with Ida?”
“Yes, it is.”
She stood up and began riffling through a filing cabinet before pulling out a piece of paper.
“Can you please fill this out?”
“Sure,” I replied, taking the form from her tiny hands.
“Audrey?” I heard as I was flicking through a magazine. When I looked up, I saw a lady in her early thirties standing by the doorframe. Her inky black hair was cut into a sharp bob, and a pair of tortoiseshell glasses framed her china-doll features.
“Yes.”
“I’m Ida,” she said with a smile. “Come with me.”
I followed her up a narrow flight of steps and through a wood paneled door. Ida’s office was small and stark, the furniture sparse. It was almost monochromatic, with eggshell walls and abstract art; geometric patterns flourished and faltered within frames of brushed aluminum. A neat row of certificates were displayed on an otherwise bare wall proclaiming to Ida’s numerous areas of expertise. A tall, narrow window positioned behind a solid oak desk cast little light into the dimly lit room. “Over here, darling,” she said, waving at a brown leather lounge chair in the center of the room. “You can sit here. Put that shawl over you if you get a bit chilly; I like to have the window open. You can smoke in here if you want.”