Emily nodded. “I still worry about her.”
Priya smiled. “Of course you do. You worry about all of them.”
Emily laughed. “You know me well.”
“How was it for you?” Priya asked. “Seeing her again.”
Emily thought about it. “I was just relieved she was okay.”
“Because you weren’t,” Priya said, a fact more than a question. “When you were in college.”
“Right,” Emily answered. “I wasn’t.”
Then Reuben started talking about a patient he was worried about, J, who went silent when Reuben asked him about how it felt seeing his brother in rehab.
“I shouldn’t have asked it that way,” Reuben said. “Maybe if I’d phrased it differently, eased into it . . . I know he freezes people out, freezes me out, when things get too hard. I screwed up.”
“You’ve got him talking before,” Priya said. “He trusts you. You’ll have another chance.”
Reuben shook his head. “I’m always afraid that kids like J won’t come back. That this is the week they’ll decide I’m useless. That they’re wasting time sitting here with me when they could be playing video games or hanging out with their friends or whatever.”
The white noise machine hummed quietly in the background.
“I don’t think they come because they feel like time with us is useful or useless,” Emily said, turning to Reuben. “I think sometimes they just need to know there’s someone who cares. Someone who will wait for them to be ready. Someone who will listen when they finally do talk.” She was thinking about her patients, but she was also thinking about her husband. He wasn’t too different from some of these kids. From Reuben’s J. She wondered whether, if she actually was pregnant, her child would be the same way.
“Speaking of people who finally decide to talk,” Priya said, “I saw a new patient today. I asked her what brought her to the counseling center and she told me that she can’t stop thinking about the night this summer that she had too much to drink and passed out, and when she woke up, a guy she’d thought was her friend was standing over her, about to ejaculate on her stomach. I had the hardest time not jumping out of my chair in outrage. She told me she can’t sleep unless her bedroom door is locked and bolted, and she hasn’t touched alcohol since. When I hear stories like that, I just . . . I can feel the rage rising inside me. It’s like . . . it starts to boil until I become a vessel containing only that. I wanted to tell her to report it to the police, to make that asshole squirm. Even if he’s not charged in the end, it’s worth it to show him he’s not entitled to masturbate wherever he pleases, on whomever he pleases.” Priya’s voice was getting louder. “I was practically shaking with indignation when she finished her story.” Then she took a couple of deep breaths. “I have to figure out how to stay in the room.”
“Sometimes I feel like we’re sin eaters,” Emily said, quietly. It was something she’d been thinking for a while.
“We’re what?” Reuben asked.
“Sin eaters,” she repeated. “When my mother died, I learned everything I could about death. And back in the Middle Ages there were these people whose job it was, after someone died, to eat their sins. Not literally, but they’d have to eat a meal that was believed to have absorbed the sins of the dead person. It made it so that the person who died was pure enough to go to heaven. Their soul had been cleansed by the sin eater. Sometimes I feel like we’re sin eaters, consuming stories instead of food.”
Reuben and Priya were quiet for a moment. Then Priya spoke. “I want to be a sin transformer,” she said. “I want to take the shit that happens to people and help them use it to become someone stronger.”
Emily sighed. “Sometimes that happens,” she said. “But sometimes shit doesn’t make you stronger. Sometimes it’s just shit.”
“Fact,” Reuben agreed.
Emily wondered, as she had been more and more often lately, if this was a job she could do forever. She happened to be good at it, or so people said, but she wondered how long she could eat people’s sins, help people sort through shit, before it would overwhelm her. She was worried it already was.
5
Emily was packing up at the end of the day, opening and closing her hand to see if she could stop it from aching, when her cell phone vibrated. It was Ezra: Not sure when I’ll be able to leave. You okay hanging out with me for a little? I told Malcolm’s dad I’d stay until he got back.