He was also slightly alarmed at the cost of therapy. He was off his mother’s health insurance and flying solo. He wouldn’t be out on the street because of this, but still, he wanted the assurance he was getting his money’s worth.
It was unsatisfying. Touching a little on Daisy here, a bit on the shooting there, a dash of his mother, a drop of David, a shake of childhood. It all led to the first six weeks feeling like a bad technical run-through: a lot of disassociated parts but no show.
“What exactly is supposed to happen here?” He made the mistake of asking, back before he learned asking questions was pointless because Diane only parroted them back to him.
“You feel something is supposed to be happening.” Often she left off the upward, inquiring inflection at the end of a question, making it a statement.
“Shouldn’t this be… I don’t know, deeper?”
“This feels shallow.”
“Well, I mean, shouldn’t I be crying or something?”
“Do you feel sad, Erik?”
It was enough to make you crazy, if you weren’t already.
He tried going in cold, no preparation. Tried the approach of having nothing to prove and trusting Diane wasn’t grading his sessions. He realized he did trust her. He was getting used to her, getting used to this hour of self-centered introspection. Week after week, he made and kept his appointments. He never looked forward to a session. Sometimes he outright dreaded it, constantly on the verge of canceling. He didn’t like therapy, but, he admitted, he didn’t dislike Diane.
He went. And they dug.
Time was gentle. The weeks softly piled up into months. And he began to find things in the dirt.
For the first time ever, he took all his scattered memories and impressions and lined them up into a wobbly narrative of not just the shooting, but the events leading up to it. He began with James, how he had come to Lancaster and rearranged the elements. Margaret’s dog tags and the penny. Powaqqatsi. The stolen condoms and the affair with Will.
The telling was strange. Erik found he could narrate the events of the fall semester, but his memory seemed to cave in after December. He hopped from one isolated recollection to another, bobbing like buoys in a choppy ocean. January and February were murky and muddled. March was filled with alarming sinkholes. April disappeared entirely. He could pick up the thread again, shakily, when James stepped onto the stage. And he could go forward from there.
“Why did you even come out of the booth?” Diane asked. Her voice didn’t dip out of its professional neutrality but it seemed her eyes were pressing him hard. He wondered for a moment if she had children. A son of her own who was capable of such a reckless move. “Why didn’t you stay down and covered?”
“I can’t tell you what my thought process was that day, I don’t remember. All I know is he shot Daisy.” He held out his hands to indicate it was reason enough. “I had to get to her.”
“You could have been killed.” She turned her lips in as soon as the words were out. He guessed she had just crossed a line. She was here to listen, not judge. He decided to step across as well.
“Do you have a son?” he asked.
Diane nodded, and he smiled briefly at her. “I know,” he said. “It was an insanely stupid thing to do. My mother… Before she hugged me, she shook me. Like she didn’t know whether to kiss me or kill me. A thousand people have asked me what I was thinking. And I feel like anything I try to describe, any way I try to tell the story, I’m making half of it up. I don’t know what I was thinking in the moment, Diane. I don’t.”
“How about what you were feeling?”
“Feeling? I was scared shitless.”
“What else?”
His shoulders inched up to his ears, silently indicating he could not remember. The “I don’t know” was poised in his mouth, all made, not yet spoken. He kept it back. Closed his eyes. He let the words go unsaid, let his shoulders fall again. He relaxed into the silence, and followed his mind. Let it take him by the hand and go for a walk.