While Dan had seen her at her anxiety-ridden worst, she still felt the urge to hide the extent of her disorder. She felt so uncomfortable saying the words out loud, shackling them to another person. Branding herself as broken.
She could still remember sitting in the drab doctor’s office, the cold child psychiatrist rattling off descriptions straight from the DSM-IV while Aunt Rachel and Uncle Ben sent worried glances to each other over the top of Harper’s head.
Recurrent and unexpected panic attacks
Palpitations
Depersonalization
Paresthesia
Derealization
The words had sounded shameful. Complicated. They still did. At the time, Harper hadn’t known what most of them meant, but she knew the number of boxes she’d ticked in the doctor’s thick, scary book seemed never-ending.
And no matter how close she was to the people in her life, there was a constant survival instinct to shield them from how out of control her anxiety made her feel. It was hard to believe that anyone could witness the irrationality of her jumbled mind and not run away.
“They sent me to therapy, wanting me to get better,” she continued, her throat thick with pain and embarrassment. But something compelled her to keep being honest—for once in her life, to share with someone just how fucked up she was. “I hated it though. I hated talking about losing my mom and reliving it and having to process it. I started to refuse to go, and Aunt Rachel eventually gave up the fight. I fixated on every step that went wrong throughout that day. Everything that led to that moment. But it hurt so much to say it out loud. Share it with another person. A stranger. I couldn’t look at them and admit that if I hadn’t taken so long to find my boots, we could have driven through the intersection minutes earlier. If I hadn’t finished off the milk that morning, it wouldn’t have been so pressing we go to the grocery store. Even things as drastic as if I had only been born four years earlier, I could have been the one driving, not my mom…”
She squeezed her eyes shut. Dan ran his hands through her hair. He gave it the gentlest of tugs, mimicking what he must have seen her do a thousand times to center herself. The gesture nearly fractured her into a million pieces. His close watch on her, his careful observations. His relentless caring. It was terrifying to have someone know her like this, to flay herself open for another person. But Dan had her trust and her heart, and she didn’t want to hide anymore.
“My mom didn’t die on impact,” she said, her eyes flashing open. “They found her alive, rushed her to the hospital in a separate ambulance.” She paused, trying to steady her breathing.
“They took her into surgery. Her worst injuries were to her head and neck. She hit the steering wheel before the airbag deployed. Oral and maxillofacial surgeons are often called in for car accidents, restructuring jaw bones and eye sockets, operating on the cranial nerves and jugular arteries and veins.” She said the last part with a detached, clinical voice.
“She died on the table,” Harper said simply, turning to look into Dan’s eyes. “I was never told it was a surgical mistake, or anyone’s fault. But I always assumed it was. I always assumed it was the hands of someone else that took my mom from me. And I’ve always thought, maybe if I’d been that oral surgeon, I could have saved her.” Tears streamed down her cheeks, but she continued to hold his gaze. “Maybe it’s ridiculous. Maybe it’s true. I don’t think it really matters.”
Dan stared back at her, anchoring her. He brushed his fingers over her cheeks, wiping away the tears.
“All my life, I’ve been working toward this one thing I’m supposed to do. It’s almost like if I fail, she’ll have died for nothing.” Harper’s lips twitched and she lost the ability to form words. She started crying then. Truly crying.
Ugly, raw sobs ripped from her body, threatening to break her apart. Pain so intense it felt powerful enough to kill her.
And through it all, Dan held her. He pulled her close to his chest and didn’t let her go, placing soothing kisses to her hair, running his strong arms over her back.
When she’d finally cried herself to exhaustion, exposed herself to her messiest core, her body relaxed. She felt afraid of what he thought, ashamed at her weaknesses, her shortcomings. But she also felt nurtured. Protected.
Neither of them said anything. Harper doubted they would. She’d propelled all that tangled emotion into the world, onto someone else, and she didn’t want to unravel it.
So instead, she gently drifted off to sleep in the comforting nest of his arms.