And then he’s back. Like it never happened, wearing his collar and trying to pull me up the street to where a decidedly terrifying standard poodle lives. I dig my feet in and try to yank him back toward the front door.
My mind is reeling. My stomach roils. I drag Gus across the yard and run up onto the porch, but I come up short. It feels like my heart just slammed into a wall. And now Gus is gone again. The door and the shutters are red, not green like they should be. I’m so freaked out that for some reason, I still try to jam my house key into the lock, but it won’t work. My insides are screaming, I can barely breathe, and I fumble with the key, panic filling me up like a flood of acid. “Gus,” I say again. Then, “Grandmother. Grandmother! Are you there? Please!”
The key finally slips into the lock as the door turns green again before my eyes, and Gus reappears in the same moment.
I run inside, hauling Gus in after me, and lock the door behind us. I slump against it and slide to the ground, wrap my arms around Gus’s neck as tears stream down my cheeks. I nuzzle into his fur and wait for the fit of trembling to pass.
11
My first session with Alice is eerily similar to every appointment I’ve had with real therapists, as long as you completely ignore the Hoarders-esque state of her office and the way she keeps snapping her gum and the fact that she occasionally rolls her eyes when I say something she disagrees with. I have this sense that she’s assuming the pose, role-playing the whole thing like we had to do in A.P. Psychology.
It’s like we’re playing doctor until we get to the bits that might actually be useful, when she sits forward abruptly, drums her lips, then jots something down haphazardly in her notebook.
“Are you sure there’s no faster way to do this?” I ask. “Maybe if you told me what you’re writing down.”
“There’s no faster way,” she says, scribbling furiously. “I’m following my gut. Some things may seem mundane to you, but they might hold the key. Other things may seem really big and have nothing to do with it. I just want you to keep talking.”
And I do. For ninety-five straight minutes, and I don’t leave a single second empty. And I feel productive, like I’m getting something done and need to keep plowing ahead.
I tell her about my tantrums and how dance seemed to get them out of me, and how Mom thought that meant maybe I’d had ADHD. I tell her the night terrors started out as dreams, then spread to the visitors at my bedside and I’d scream until they disappeared and Dad would come running in with the baseball bat he kept under the bed. I tell her things I’ve never said aloud, not even to the other counselors, because the words themselves make me feel weak, and when I feel weak, I cry, and when I cry, I feel out of control. I tell her how, when I was little, I thought Debra Messing and Isla Fisher and Amy Adams were the very definition of beauty and how, when the twins turned three and their baby-blond hair started darkening toward Mom’s reddish color, I was secretly heartbroken, as if I’d lost something, no matter how stupid or self-absorbed that sounds. They were going to look like our parents, and I was going to keep looking like a stranger.
But I tell Alice the truth, because for the first time, I want the counseling to work more than I want to hide the parts of me I’m scared of.
At some point we bounce toward the present. “The Wrong Things,” Alice says. “The changes or flickers. Tell me about those again.”
So I talk, telling her about the most recent events with Gus and the buffalo and the renovated church. But the more I talk, the more the piercing headache behind my eye swells. “I don’t understand what’s happening,” I gasp.
“You’ve come to the right place,” Alice says, without looking up from her notebook. She has the voice recorder I traded her this morning balanced on her lap. “I mean, maybe. Hopefully. In an ideal world, yes, this is the right place. Look, you may have been having these extended conversations with one of Them for your entire life, but what you’re experiencing now is much more common. I mean, typically they’d only be happening on your way in or out of a dream state, but the gist is the same.”
“Well, what are they?” I ask.
“Too soon to say. What I do know is that most people only experience very brief visitations, like the flashes you describe. You wake up and you’re not in your room, but as soon as you scream you’re back. You fall asleep on the bus and when your eyes open someone’s staring at you—you jump up and they’re gone. You hear someone talking downstairs, so you go see a couple having dinner at your table. When you flip on the light, they vanish. Usually, they don’t even see you. When they do, witnesses describe the Others as seeming just as surprised as they were. I don’t think they’re fully aware of us.”
“Grandmother is.”
“Grandmother, like you, my dear Natalie, is different. And that’s why this is so important.”