The Man I Love (29 page)

“Janey?”

“Erik, honey, how are you? Goodness, we haven’t heard from you in months.”

“I know.”

“Miles is out for a run.”

“Actually,” Erik said, “I called to talk to you.”

“Did you now?”

“I promised you I would.”

As he’d hoped, Janey went into her professional voice. “Are you all right?”

Erik was sitting on the floor of his apartment, curled up, mouth on his knees. “I think I’m in trouble.”

“What’s the matter, Erik?”

He squeezed his lips in. He had been so afraid to call her. Now he was even more afraid to tell her the reason why.

“I’ll help you, Erik,” she said calmly. “Tell me what’s happening.”

“I think I’m losing my mind.”

“Do you feel like you’re going to hurt yourself?”

“I can’t stop hurting.”

“Talk to me. Tell me.”

“I can’t do this anymore.”

“Where are you?”

“Janey, I lied to you about so many things. I never got help in college. I never went to a support group or was on meds or anything. And I let you think my girlfriend was killed but she wasn’t, she’s alive. She’s with someone else now. She’s alive and I feel like I’m dying and—“

“Erik, slow down, I will—“

“I need to talk to someone. And I can’t find the card you gave me.”

“Erik. Where are you?”

“Home. And I can’t do this anymore.”

“Erik, listen to me, I’m going to make a call. Two calls. You sit tight right there, don’t move. Don’t move a muscle until I call you back, do you understand?”

“All right.”

“I will call you back. I promise. I’m going to get you help.”

“All right.”

“We’ll find you, Erik. We’ll get through it. I will call you back.”

Disconnected, he sat on the cold floor, dead center in a ring of wolves. Their eyes glowed green and malevolent as they watched him open the blade of his Swiss Army knife. He touched the tip to the inside of his left wrist, tracing the daisy petals.

I have set you in my presence forever.

He had done this to himself.

He had to cut her out of him or he would die.

Shaking his head hard, he took the blade off his wrist, closed the knife again. “You don’t have to do this,” he whispered. “You can stop.”

I am the alpha male.

I lead this pack.

And John lives with Daisy.

The wolves took a step closer, tightening the circle.

I am the omega. A stray out in the rain.

Like James.

The wolves nodded. Erik opened the blade again.

Janey sent a friend, a man Erik vaguely remembered from the Kellys’ house parties. He was kind. He didn’t ask questions or probe. He made gentle talk as he took the knife away, closed the blade and slipped it into his pocket. Then he drove Erik downtown, to the office of Dr. Diane Erskine, who was waiting for him.

So it started.

At first glance, when he was trembling and disoriented, Erik thought Diane Erskine was old, maybe in her sixties. More lucid at his next visit, he realized she was one of those women who go grey early, eventually becoming silver-haired while still in their prime. She wore her silver hair short, in a pixie cut. Her eyes were grey as well and she tended to dress in neutral tones. She exuded a sleek, expensive class, but she was oddly colorless.

Therapy perplexed Erik. He went into his first session assuming they’d talk about the shooting. He took up the entire hour talking about his job at the playhouse and the student theater program. He didn’t even touch the subject of college, let alone the shooting. He walked out with a confused dissatisfaction, certain he’d botched it out of the gate and accomplished nothing.

He started going in with an agenda, a comprehensive list of things to talk about, in order of importance. Yet half the time, the plan was forgotten, the list went untouched, and he would be babbling on a tangent of the most pointless, inconsequential crap.

It was nervous babble, partly because Diane would never direct the session. She responded to whatever he brought up, but if he had nothing to talk about, she didn’t help him by prompting a topic or line of discussion. Not a baited hook dropped. Not a bone thrown. She simply sat. And waited. The silence would stretch past awkward into agonizing, until Erik reached for anything and started rambling.

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.

“Where are you,” Diane said, after a minute.

“I had to get past him,” Erik said. “I had to get to the stage. If I snuck by James, he’d shoot me. But if I talked to him. If I asked him… I don’t know.”

“Let it spill out,” Diane murmured. “Don’t be articulate. We can explore it afterward.”

“I spoke to him,” Erik said, trying to let go. “I called him by name and said ‘you don’t have to do this.’ I thought I could calm him down. If anyone could, I could. I was the alpha male. Human valium.”

“Tell me more.”

“I calm everyone down. David said so. I started believing it was true. I could talk James down. He trusted me. He trusted me with the story about his sister. He gave me the penny. I had him in my pocket.”

He looked up at Diane, who stared unblinking back at him. “Were you angry with him?” she asked.

“Angry?” he said, startled. “Right there and then?”

“Or right now.”

“Sure. I mean, Jesus, he was fucked-up and depressed, maybe he was heartbroken over Will. But so what? A million people are fucked-up, depressed and heartbroken. Including yours truly. You don’t see me going into Geneseo playhouse with a gun. Who thinks like that? I don’t know why I bothered trying to sympathize. Fuck him. He blew the back of his head off and I got up and left him in the aisle. I didn’t even look back. It’s not the defining moment of the day. I got nothing for him.” He slumped back in the couch unclenched the fingers he had been holding in fists during the rant. “There you go, Doc, there’s anger. I got anger for him. What a breakthrough.”

Diane shifted in her chair, her fingers playing with her earring. “What was the defining moment of the day, I wonder?”

Erik hesitated, then reached in his pocket. He took the penny out and gave it to Diane. “Maybe that is,” he said, watching her examine it. “I’ve carried it with me every day since the shooting. I had it in my pocket when I was at the funerals of the people he killed. I hate his guts but I keep it with me all the time. I wish I knew why.”

Diane turned the flattened coin over and over in her fingers. “Often the victims of violence make their assailant into a monster. Something less than human. They refuse to call them by name. Acknowledge their pasts or their families.” She handed the pendant back to him. “You chose to keep this. And to keep his humanity.”

“He trusted me,” Erik said.

Diane nodded.

A long aching silence passed. Erik put the penny back in his pocket. “I just need to keep it.”

“It doesn’t mean you’re a horrible person,” Diane said. “It just means you’re a person.”

“I wish he’d never given it to me. I don’t want to define that day, Diane, and I don’t want that damn day defining me. It was an incident, not my life. If I could, I’d go back to the theater and throw the stupid penny on the floor. Leave it in the aisle. Leave it dead there with the rest of—”

They died, only you are left.

“Where were you going just then?” she asked.

Haltingly, he told her.

“You pictured them dead?”

“It made it so much easier. But then Will would call, or Daisy would write, or my heart would just laugh at me and the whole illusion would crumble. So I stopped killing them off but I still kept telling myself to feel nothing.”

He felt terrible after the session. Physically awful. Weak and anxious. His chest wide open and wailing. He felt perpetually on the verge of tears, his throat seized up.

“Therapy doesn’t seem to be good for my health.”

“How so?”

“I mean I don’t feel better. I just feel like shit. Shittier.”

“Because you’re feeling.”

He closed his eyes. “Meaning what?”

“Erik, you cannot selectively shut down. You can’t cherry-pick the feelings you want to suppress. The limbic system is not a sophisticated switchboard. It’s just one primitive switch. On or off. You mute one feeling, and you mute them all. And now, if you start digging into one feeling…”

“I wake up all of them and now I’m fucked,” he said, exhaling wearily.

Diane interlaced her fingers around a knee. “We’ve discussed before going on antidepressants.”

He dropped his head back, squirming against the notion. “I don’t really want to.”

“Why not?”

“It just makes me feel weak.”

“You’re in a weak place right now.”

He put his head in his hands, trying to dig for the words to articulate this fierce aversion. “I don’t want to be that kind of person. I don’t want to need a pharmaceutical crutch the rest of my life. It makes me feel… I don’t know. Weak.”

“Let me tell you what meds won’t do,” Diane said. “They won’t make it all go away. They won’t numb you, they won’t fix you. If you keep coming to see me, you are going to keep feeling, Erik, and feeling bad and feeling hard. But with the proper medication, we can slice off the extreme end of the spectrum, those horrible episodes of depression and anxiety keeping you from making progress with me. Meds can hold the floor under your feet while we rebuild some of your walls.”

He chewed on her metaphor, allowing himself to entertain the idea. “I guess so.”

“And the goal here, Erik, my goal, is to get you off the meds. I certainly don’t want you on them for the rest of your life if it’s not necessary. And honestly, I don’t think you will be.”

With her declaring she had a goal for him, his trust in her deepened. He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. “All right,” he whispered. “All right, I’ll try.”