Toxic parents.
At one point, Diego examined Greta’s throbbing foot. She was able to wiggle her toes slightly, and he said her foot was badly sprained but maybe not broken, and he encouraged her to submerge it in the cold water. He removed his shirt and dove into the lake in one motion, and she watched him sidestroke away from her, his powerful legs making that exaggerated scissor, and then he treaded water about twenty feet away, squinting at her. He must have recognized the look on her face—intense longing—because he took a breath, dove under, and swam straight up to her. Her legs were dangling off the boat, feet submerged, and he grabbed her feet and held them in his hands. She thought he might pull her into the water, but he didn’t. He floated on his back, looking directly at her face and blinking, and because his own face was wet it looked like he was blinking back tears, and Greta felt what she could only describe as hysterical rapture.
She’d fallen forward into the water and he was right there to catch her. He kept repeating her name, emphasizing the T each time, which made her feel like someone else but also somehow more like herself, and then he helped her back onto the boat and said she probably had altitude sickness.
A case of the vapors. Sanatorium. Helena Bonham Carter.
Then he held a towel around her while she removed her wet clothes, and, well, you can guess what happened next.
“What?” Om said, startled.
“I’m kidding,” Greta said. “Nothing happened. He caressed me, but only with his accent. He read aloud from field guides while my clothes dried, and then it was time for me to go back to horse camp. To stall for more time, I told him it was my birthday.”
It had felt greedy and fucked-up even then, but she’d wanted him to fuss over her a little more. On the way to the trailhead, they stopped by his cabin and he gave her a gift—a long rope necklace with a bunch of trinkets hanging off it, including an old horse tooth—and then he stuck a few candles in a brownie and told her to make a wish. She remembered feeling pressured to make the best wish possible, this was her one chance, but she couldn’t think of anything specific. She simply wished for a new life, and he sang to her as she blew out the candles.
“Anyway, I worked it out in my head later that it was probably the same moment my mother blew her brains out.”
Om grimaced. “Poor you. Were you the one to find her body?”
“No,” Greta said.
In fact, she hadn’t gotten home until three days later. Her mother’s siblings had swooped in by then and packed up the house. They waited for her to get home to tell her what happened.
“But honestly, I don’t remember much,” Greta said. “Which is odd because I’m known for my memory. I can recite some of your transcripts verbatim.”
“Jesus, don’t tell me that.”
“I only remember seeing everything in boxes, and noticing that they’d forgotten to take the stuff off the fridge. My mother loved decorating the outside of the fridge, and the last thing she’d put up was a New Yorker cartoon. We didn’t subscribe to the New Yorker, so I’m not sure where she’d gotten it, but the cartoon was two women in a store, shopping for lamps, and one of them says, ‘It’s very me, but I hate myself.’？”
“Did she leave a note?”
Greta nodded. “I don’t remember what it said.”
“I can help you with that, if you’re interested.”
“How?”
“I’m a licensed hypnotherapist,” Om said.
“Right. Of course you are. Anyway, my wish came true. My life was new, to say the least. I made sure to be very specific with my wishes after that. Now I take ten minutes to blow out candles.”
Om closed his notebook. “You realize there probably isn’t glass in your foot, right?”
“I’m not claiming to have Morgellons,” Greta said. “It’s glass, man. See for yourself.”
Om sighed and retrieved a pair of reading glasses and tweezers from his desk drawer. He told her to lie back and rest her foot on the arm of the sofa. He talked quietly as he examined the bottom of her foot. He claimed that she’d been living in a straitjacket for decades, a straitjacket that prevented her from fully participating in her own life, from experiencing a full range of emotions. The straitjacket explained her passivity, her inability to defend herself, to take action, to make plans, to dream—
Greta waved her arms. “Are you dreaming? What straitjacket?”
“Guilt,” Om said. “Your guilt is a straitjacket.”
“Then why do I feel so… unfettered? I’m flopping around all over the place.”
“You’re struggling to break free,” Om said. “It takes an enormous amount of energy—and courage—to free yourself, to follow the path of transformation without abandoning yourself, without fleeing from your pain and all the loss you’ve experienced. But you need to have more compassion for yourself. That’s what’s missing. It’s no accident that this is happening now, after you’ve transcribed so many sessions for me. In a sense, you’ve been in therapy with me for many months. Hold on, I see it, Greta, I got it.”
He raised his eyebrows and held out his hand. The glass glinted in the light. Sadly, it was only slightly bigger than a grain of sand.
“That’s not it,” Greta said, and rolled her eyes.
“The rest is in your head, honey. We’ll deal with it next time.”
Phantom glass, Greta thought. Kill me.
19
She didn’t realize how miniature they were until they showed up in a minivan. They bounded out the side door, tails swinging, and began munching grass in the yard. The jack was tan with white spots; the jennet, a moody gray. They were only three feet tall and a little over two hundred pounds, less than half the size of regular donkeys, but their ears were a good five inches long, nearly as long as their faces, and stood straight up. Unlike horses, they had short, spiky manes and no bangs. Their asses were boxy, their knees knobby, and they both had crosses on their backs—a dark stripe running the length of their spines crossed with another over their shoulders—and so it was hard not to think of Jesus when you saw them, Thy cross I’ll carry and so on, and to remember that they were beasts of burden, though these two didn’t look like they could carry more than a bag of groceries.
If she were a different sort of person, she would have said they seemed magical. Like unicorns. But whereas unicorns were symbols of purity and grace and could only be tamed by virgins, these guys devoured gingersnaps straight out of Greta’s impure hand while leaning against her bare legs.
She watched them chase each other around a tree, bucking their back legs and farting at the same time. Their farts were loud and endearing, as was the sound of their slow, thoughtful chewing, which made Greta’s spine and scalp tingle.
Their ears were extremely mobile. They rotated almost 180 degrees and were moving constantly. It seemed obvious they used them to communicate, though Greta didn’t know what they were saying yet. All she knew was that their presence had obvious physiological and psychological benefits, like forest bathing in Japan. When their ears rotated in Greta’s direction, she felt a sense of deep well-being, along with the urge to reproduce them in some way. She could render them in pencil, perhaps. Or pastry dough? Donkey Ears: éclair-like pastries filled with chocolate custard and topped with a crunchy croustillant made from pistachios, pralines, and… holy shit, was she stoned? Why was she thinking like this?