Therapy didn’t start well when Lee first brought me two counties away to Margaret. It wasn’t even that I was resisting; it was that I had no concept of how to tell the truth about anything, especially myself. I had all the tools of a liar and nothing else.
Margaret knows a lot, but she also knows nothing. I’m an optical illusion, where one person sees the old lady and the other sees the young woman. Margaret gets to see slivers of both, but never either of them fully. She has my truths, but she doesn’t have Raymond’s name. She knows about my mother, but thinks she’s dead. Little lies, not just to keep me safe, but Margaret, too.
Stumbling toward carefully picked-over truth into healing has taken longer than I’ve liked. I like being good at things. I’m not good at the truth or opening up or asking for help.
You’re good at applying the help is what Margaret says when I tell her that. Once you get over the obstacle of the asking.
Sometimes it’s so hard to ask.
“He wants to kiss me,” I say, because it’s been on my mind for weeks, ever since I noticed.
“Who does?”
“Wes.”
Margaret looks like she’s trying to suppress an indulgent smile that might come off as condescending. I’m not supposed to break her down like that; Lee told me that therapy was about listening to the therapist and puzzling out myself, not her.
“This is your friend?”
“My best friend.” And then, digging for that truth: “Kind of my only friend.”
She takes me in. “You’ve talked to me about other friends, too.”
“It’s not the same.”
“Why not?”
“Wes knows. I mean, no. He doesn’t know. He just . . .” I swallow. It’s like the first few times in here with her all of a sudden, and I hate it so much, it heats my face up. “He knows I got hurt. He . . . got hurt, too.” I’m betraying him, telling her. I’m betraying something else, by putting the abuse in the past instead of the present.
She can’t tell anyone, I remind myself. She wouldn’t.
“I’m impressed that you were able to share that with him,” Margaret says. “That shows a lot of progress.”
“He figured it out,” I tell her, unable to take credit that isn’t earned. “There are scars,” I continue. “He saw them when we were swimming.”
“And you didn’t spin a story for him?”
“He would’ve seen through it.”
She waits, in that maddening way of hers. She’s got a whole thing about drawing me out. It didn’t work for a long time, and then it did, and now we’re here: surrounded by that tricky trust thing. We built it, she and I. Bit by bit, over ninety painful sessions. She helped me lay brick on the tilting ground, weighing it down so I could walk steady.
But I don’t feel so steady anymore.
“I didn’t want to lie to him,” I finally say. “He’s got scars, too. To lie about it . . .” I just shake my head. It had felt so wrong. Like stepping away from something sacred and into something sticky-hot and putrid.
“So he knows more about you than most people,” Margaret says.
I nod.
“Do you want to kiss him?”
I can’t look at her or move. The answer’s not just yes or just no. It’s just . . .
“It’s okay to have a crush.”
“It’s not that simple,” I mutter before I can stop myself, because of that tricky trust thing. I’m used to speaking about stuff in here, but I don’t talk about some things out of choice rather than protection. And I’ve never talked about it because of that swirl of shame and the sour taste of bile that rises in my throat every time I think about it. Yet I find myself on the edge suddenly, like I’d planned to tell her today, even though I hadn’t. “I’m not good with that stuff,” I say, paddling desperately away from it like a kid who never learned how to swim but jumped into the deep end anyway.
“What stuff?”
“Kissing. Flirting. All that stuff.”
“Well, considering you’re just getting started with all that stuff, wouldn’t you say that’s acceptable?”
It lies there like a dead animal: assumption roadkill. And I don’t know how to ask her what I want to ask. The blood is pulsing in my face, and I am lost in the wanting to know and not knowing how to ask.
How to admit it.
“I don’t want to hurt him.”
She’s spent enough time with me—ninety sessions’ worth—to see the buried truths beneath those words.