GW:?So, everyone.
OM:?This may surprise you, but a lot of people feel at home in their bodies.
GW:?Name one.
OM:?In any case, they don’t limp around, convinced there’s glass in their feet. How do you feel right now?
GW:?Strange.
OM:?Are you relaxed? Do you feel calm?
GW:?I saw Flavia this morning. At a farm stand. I watched her buy a bunch of corn. I didn’t recognize her at first because she cut off all her hair. It really rattled me. Not her hair, but seeing her. Without speaking. Without touching. I cried in my car afterward.
OM:?What do you miss about her?
GW:?Her intensity. Her smell. Her bizarre insights and condiments.
OM:?Did she see you?
GW:?She pretended not to.
OM:?You’ll move past it eventually. If you stick around Hudson, you won’t be able to enter a room without having weird, sometimes horrifying history with at least four different people.
GW: ?I may have ruined her life, Om. Her husband’s life. They’d be in Ecuador right now, making a baby, if it weren’t for me.
OM:?I’m all for accepting responsibility for your actions, but blaming yourself for Luke’s injuries won’t help you get better. Your actions may have hurt him emotionally, but you didn’t put him in the hospital—Keith did that. Of course, I’m not suggesting you’re blameless. You stalked my client and lied your way into an affair with her. That’s yours to carry.
GW:?I wouldn’t say I stalked her—
OM:?What would you call it?
GW:?[INDISCERNIBLE]
OM:?You’re not being emotionally honest, Greta. You were stealthy, you were secretive, and I’m pretty sure it’s all connected to your mother’s death. [PAUSE] What do you think you’re doing?
GW:?Can you pass the ashtray?
OM:?I don’t have one.
GW:?That thing next to your pencil holder will work.
OM:?This? This holds my business cards.
GW:?How about that dish with the keys in it?
OM:?No. [PAUSE] You can’t smoke in here.
GW:?Two puffs.
OM:?Can we access some of these buried memories?
GW:?Be my guest.
OM:?First, can you be here more fully? Can you put out the cigarette, close your eyes, and take a deep breath through your nose?
GW:?Are we accessing my memories or yours?
OM:?Yours.
GW:?Then I don’t need to breathe, Om. I remember everything. Not to be indelicate, or overly direct, but, well, I killed my mother. That’s my big dark secret.
OM:?[PAUSE] You murdered your own mother. And made it look like suicide. At age thirteen.
GW:?I wanted her out of my life, and I knew one of us would have to die. So, when she threatened suicide for the nine thousandth time, I told her that ending her life was not only a viable option, it was the only sane choice for someone like her, and if it was me who was holding her back, she had my blessing. I’d be better off without her.
OM:?Where was your father?
GW:?Out of the picture.
OM:?So you planned to raise yourself?
GW:?We talked about that. How and where she would do it, who would find her, what would happen to me, who I might live with. She assured me that one of her siblings would take me in.
OM:?Her siblings were on board with this?
GW:?Not in advance, but they were aware of her illness.
OM:?Cancer?
GW:?Bipolar. She was deeply paranoid at that point. Her only concern was being criticized, disparaged, gossiped about, and so I promised never to bad-mouth her, to always defend her in her absence. Neither of which I’ve done.
OM:?How did this conversation make you feel?
GW:?Wild with relief. It was like crawling out of a rain forest and standing in the sunlight for the first time. I could finally stop fake-begging her to live. And she felt better, too. She referenced our heart-to-heart often in her notes to me, how a weight had been lifted, how her brain felt different—
OM:?What notes?
GW:?We carried on a correspondence for years while living under the same roof, passing notes to each other in tiny, hard-to-read handwriting.
OM:?Like prisoners.
GW:?Or the Bront? sisters. She had a supreme talent for describing feelings as if they were objects. I loved her on the page, but I always dreaded spending an evening with her—the notes were often so lengthy and detailed, they left little to talk about in person.
OM:?What did your notes to her say?
GW:?They were mostly dialogue. Snatches of overheard conversations.
OM:?Interesting.
GW:?Anyway, after our conversation, she cleaned, cooked, and took care of me for once. She stopped coming into my room at night and sleeping next to me like a child. She became less clingy, though I still hated to be touched or looked at by her.
OM:?How did she look at you?
GW: ?Appraisingly. But it was edged with something unsettling. Longing, I guess. Although I hated the sight of her, she couldn’t seem to take her eyes off me. It made me want to wear a fat suit around her. I had to barricade myself in my bedroom.
OM:?How long did she wait?
GW:?Six months. I’d nearly forgotten about it. Then I went to horse camp for two weeks. She was happy to see me go, which should have told me something. Maybe I knew what she was about to do and was in denial. Maybe I signed up for the camp on purpose. I did, after all, want her to die—genuinely, with all my heart—and two weeks was a long time, the longest we’d ever spent apart. I rarely stayed away overnight because I hated coming home. She was great at goodbyes but horrible at hellos, or reunions of any kind. Returning home, even after a day, was extremely fraught. At first she’d seem shocked to see me, like I was returning from the grave, and then she would act all confused and uncomprehending. It was this whole charade. “You had fun? You rode a roller coaster? With friends? What friends? I didn’t know you had friends!” Then she would sulk. But I could always sense a lot going on under the surface, and it was all envy related.
Anyway, I never knew what I was coming home to. But this time felt different. I wasn’t dreading seeing her, because I had someone else to think about.
OM:?Who?
GW:?Diego. The angelic Italian guy with the boat and blond hair. On the long bus ride home, I must have fantasized about him for a solid twelve hours. I kept replaying the scene in the lake—my bare feet in his hands, the way he looked at me—and I felt the same hysterical rapture over and over.
OM:?Might that remind you of a certain other blond European?
GW:?Good point.
Anyway, I remember trying to write a note, just to ground myself, and being startled when I saw my handwriting. It was chicken scratch. I was delirious, evidently, and dehydrated, and my foot was broken. I don’t remember who drove me home after I got off the bus, but I let myself into the house with my key. Her siblings were scattered around the living room, waiting for me, just like we’d discussed months before. They sat me down, told me how sorry they were. She was gone, they said. Everything was in boxes or had been burned in the yard. For a second, I thought she’d simply disappeared. She’d somehow fallen in love, just like me, and had vanished to another country. When her twin sister passed me an envelope, I figured it was just another letter from her. I limped around the house, holding it in my hands. It wasn’t until I entered her bedroom that I realized she’d actually gone through with it. I went back to the living room and tried to make myself cry, for appearances. But I just sat there, dry-eyed, and listened to her siblings tell stories about her.