The Love That Split the World (12 page)

13

Alice closes her notebook thirty minutes early, while I’m mid-sentence. “You’re not stressed, Natalie. You’re sad. I can’t do anything for you if you’re sad.”

“It’s a little bit hard to control that,” I reply edgily. It’s been a week since Megan left. The Wrong Things have all but vanished. It probably doesn’t help that I’ve barely left my house in the past three days.

“It shouldn’t be. Stress starts to overshadow,
transform
sadness when you’re overcommitting your time, keeping yourself awake all night, spending time with people when you need to rest and be alone.”

“You’re the worst therapist in the world.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m a research psychologist, not a therapist. Look, I’m starting to see some threads forming in your
history, and I agree with what your last doctor said—there’s some other trauma there, something you haven’t worked through. All of your behaviors, your decisions and habits suggest so.”

“
What
behaviors—?”

“The fact that you can’t pinpoint a new aspect of the memory,” she cuts me off, “or recall any other event indicates that either you’ve suppressed the memory or it’s something that seemed really mundane to you at the time. I once read a case about a girl who was abandoned by her father, who went through EMDR and recovered a memory of opening the mailbox on her birthday. It wasn’t her parents’ fights or the memory of the day he walked out. It was the absence of a stupid birthday card. We’ve got to find
your
missing birthday card.”

“What if I don’t have one?”

“You do,” she says. “I feel it. I’m going to start bringing in
a colleague to do hypnotherapy on Thursdays. We’ll keep having our normal one-on-one Tuesday sessions. Meanwhile, you need to push yourself. Do things that make you uncomfortable; overextend yourself. In the long run it’ll be good for you, and in the short run it will overrun you.”

Mom gets back from a run looking like a Nike advertisement, dressed in her sleek pink and gray workout clothes and only dewy and bright with sweat. “Hey, honey,” she says, ruffling my hair from behind the couch. She takes a long swig from her matching pink water bottle then comes to sit beside me. “Everything okay?”

The tone of her voice tells me she knows it’s not. “Yep,” I lie.

She nods, her eyes intense on mine. “It must feel really weird around here with Megan gone, huh?”

“Yeah.” I want to be in my room, waiting for Megan to get done with practice so I can call, but thanks to Alice, I’m down here instead.

Mom puts her arm around me and squeezes me. “College goes by so fast,” she says. “I honestly felt like I blinked, and it was over. These are going to be some of the best years of your life, and when they’re done, you can go anywhere, you know?”

“I know.”

“Hey, I have an idea. Why don’t we go see a movie tonight?”

The thought of going somewhere I’d likely run into classmates makes me feel sick and anxious. I don’t know who knows about Matt and Rachel, but I’d bet money the answer is everyone, which of course makes me feel embarrassed. And angry. It makes it look like
he
rejected
me
, completely hides the fact that he practically forced himself on me then ran off to hook up with Rachel for revenge.

“A movie sounds fun,” I tell Mom.

“Really? You don’t
have
to,” she says hesitantly. “If you already have plans. I would just love to spend some time with my girl.”

“No, no plans,” I say, as if she didn’t already know.

“Great! I’ll just take a quick shower and then we can go.” She kisses the side of my head and walks off.

An hour later, we’re heading over to the theater. Following Alice’s orders, I chose the movie that looks the most disturbing: a drama about a girl who was kidnapped and forced into the sex trade for ten years, until she manages to escape.

“Are you sure about this one?” Mom says, trying and
failing to not look horrified. “This kind of thing usually upsets you, doesn’t it?”

“It has a happy ending, I think,” I say.

Mom pays for the tickets and we go into the theater. “Let’s use the bathroom first,” she says. She’ll have to go again in the middle of the movie regardless. It’s the Davidson family curse, apparently, which she inherited from her father. I wouldn’t know what that’s like since I don’t have any Davidson blood. I could probably hold my bladder if a tornado picked me up.

I pee anyway and wash my hands, waiting a minute in the bathroom for Mom to come out. “I’ll meet you in the lobby, okay?” I say finally. When she doesn’t answer, I bend over to look under the stall but her feet aren’t in there. “Mom?” I’m alone in the bathroom. She must’ve already slipped out.

I turn and push through the door, immediately colliding with someone in the lobby. I stumble backward, apologizing, until I see who it is. All the blood drains from my face. “Matt.”

He looks confused, glancing almost impatiently between me and the ticket-taker. “I’m so sorry,” he says, clasping his hands in front of his chest. “We’ve met before, haven’t we? I’m horrible with names.”

“Are you serious?” I say, fuming.

His gaze cuts across the lobby again. “I’m really sorry. My girlfriend’s waiting for me inside. It was great to run into you.”

Girlfriend
.

He jogs toward the bright red podium and stretch of velvet ropes leading to the theaters, and I’m left staring at his back, my whole body on fire yet tingling with chills. On the one hand, I can’t believe I ever loved him, someone capable of
convincingly
pretending I’m a complete stranger to him. On the other, I’m legitimately freaked out. Matt’s familiar blue eyes looked blank—no recognition behind them at all—as if really and truly his brain had erased me from its archives. This has “bad dream” written so vehemently all over it that I open and close my eyes hard a few times, hoping I’ll wake up in my bed.

“Ready?”

I turn to find Mom emerging from the bathroom, and more chills rush down my arms.

“Where’d you go?” I ask, biting back the remnants of angry tears.

“I was in the bathroom,” she says. She grabs my chin. “Honey, what happened? Are you okay?”

“Nothing,” I say. “I just ran into Matt. He has a new girlfriend.” It’s an easier explanation than the whole truth.

“Oh, baby.” She pulls me into her arms, and we stand there until a woman approaches the bathroom and we realize we’re blocking the way. We step aside and head into the concessions line. “We don’t have to stay,” Mom says. “If you want to go home, that’s fine.”

I shake my head. “I need a distraction.”

She nods. “Okay. But if you change your mind, just say the word.”

We pay for our popcorn and head into our movie. Within five minutes, I know I’ve made a horrible mistake. This movie’s the most upsetting thing I’ve ever seen, and there’s no escaping it. My insides are in alarming turmoil, and I’m fairly sure I’m going to have diarrhea for days. I close my eyes and shut out the sounds.

But when I steer my mind away from the awful plot
unfolding in front of me, another gruesome image resurfaces with a vengeance. I think of the boy I fell in love with as we sat on a hillside, swarmed in fireflies, and of how, on the night I broke his heart years later, he promised he could never hate me. Then I think of the guy who just treated me like a stranger. I think of the two different Matts my mind can’t reconcile, and then I think of a story Grandmother told me.

“This is the story of Brother Black and Brother Red,” Grandmother said. “There once was a brother and sister who lived in a lodge deep in a forest. They rarely saw any visitors. The brother was different from other people, in that one half of him was red and one half of him was black.

“One day, he went away to hunt, but no sooner had he left than his sister saw him coming back down the path toward their lodge. ‘I thought you went to hunt,’ she said, following him inside.

“‘I changed my mind,’ he told her and went to sit by her on the bed. He seemed different to her, and when he tried to embrace her, she became afraid and fought him off.

“‘Why do you act as my husband when you are my brother?’ she said angrily, but again he tried to hold her as a lover, and she fought him off again, and this time he left.

“The next day the brother returned home, but his sister would not speak to him, though usually they spent many hours talking. ‘My sister,’ the brother said, ‘Why do you treat me as one hated? What have I done to deserve such a change in your love toward me?’

“‘You know what you’ve done,’ the sister answered. ‘You harmed me and broke our bond.’ But the brother insisted he didn’t know what she was talking about, so the sister told him plainly, ‘Yesterday you embraced me as a lover, and today I can’t look at you.’

“‘My precious sister,’ the brother said, ‘I was not here yesterday. I was hunting. You must have met my friend, who looks like me in every way.’ The sister was angry that her brother had given such an outlandish excuse. ‘Do not treat me in that way again,’ she said, and for many days he seemed to be his old self.

“Finally the brother went away to hunt again, and as before, the sister saw someone who looked just like her brother and wore his clothes, hiding in the brush near their home. He followed her back inside, and this time when he tried to hold her, she tore at his face with her nails until he fled.

“Three days passed and her brother returned again with a deer he had hunted. Again she refused to speak to him, and again he spoke gently to her, saying, ‘Sister, you’re very angry with me. Has my friend been here again?’

“She did not answer him, but he repeated the question, and she broke down and wept. ‘How could you attack me again, when I had come to trust you? I see my nail marks on your face. I know it was you, brother.’

“But the brother denied it. ‘My face was scratched by thorns as I hunted,’ he told her, ‘but if you scratched my friend, that is why my face is scratched—whatever happens to one of us then happens to the other.’ But she didn’t believe him. She avoided him as much as possible until he left again to hunt, and this time when he returned and attacked her, she tore his
hunting shirt from his throat to his belly button and threw hot grease on his stomach, burning him and causing him to flee.

“As before, her brother returned, and as before he denied having been there though his shirt was torn and his stomach was burned just as his sister remembered it. ‘I tore my shirt while climbing a tree, and I burned myself while cooking the meat I hunted,’ he tried to tell her, but she would not believe him, and he saw what had to be done. ‘Sister, I will find my double and bring him here to prove to you it was not me who hurt you, and for what he’s done to you, I’ll kill him, though it may kill me too. That is how important it is to me that you know my heart and my brotherly love for you.’

“The sister did not believe him, and the brother left to find his double. He wasn’t gone long in the woods before he returned, dragging with him a man who looked exactly like him and whose clothes were torn in just the same way. ‘You’ve betrayed me by hurting my sister,’ the brother said to his double, ‘and now you must die.’ He lifted his bow and arrow and shot his double through the heart. The sister looked on as blood poured from the identical man’s chest and he slumped to his knees. Then she heard a second noise behind her—a battle cry—and when she turned, she saw her brother fall, an identical wound over his heart, blood spreading out through his shirt.

“The sister knew then she was safe, but her heart was broken.”