Then he was gone.
We texted over the next few days, and Burke mentioned that his client in London was becoming increasingly demanding and had requested a daily Skype call every morning at five-thirty for the next several weeks. That’s why, after our next date the following week, I knew it was safe to let Burke sleep over again. And the date after that, and the date after that, and the date after that. It was our morning routine: Burke’s alarm went off before dawn and he left my apartment in the dark while I was still heavy with sleep. It was the first time I’d been able to sleep through the night with a guy since Max LaPointe.
After five sleepovers, Burke called me one Friday and suggested we meet up that evening and finally spend a “regular” morning together on Saturday. The night before we’d gone to eat at Le Bernardin, and Burke had, as usual, slipped out of my apartment at dawn for his client call. My gut twisted with nerves at his proposition, but I knew it was time to tell him the truth.
I braced myself for the worst as I headed to Greenwich Village to meet him that evening. It was the first week of October, and the city was just beginning to evoke that true nip of fall, summer like sand escaping through my fingers. I’ve never liked the start of autumn; most New Yorkers savor the drop in humidity and the crisp air, but it’s the time of year Mom died, so to me, fall is just death. Dying trees, dying light. Everything ending.
I felt particularly low as I walked into the Marlton Hotel and saw Burke sitting at a table near the front windows. He looked so handsome with his jet-black hair combed neat, shirtsleeves rolled halfway up his strong forearms, red tie loose around his collar. More than anything else I wanted this man to be mine, but I knew that he wouldn’t be. Not after the shadow I was about to cast over his perception of the girl he’d been seeing. If he was anything like the others, he’d stick around for one or two more dates, then run for the hills.
Burke stood to kiss my cheek, and we both sat. I ordered a negroni from the cocktail waitress. I waited for it to arrive, took a huge sip, then told him everything.
I was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder when I was twelve, three months after my mother died of liver cancer. It took Dr. Perry two whole months to make the diagnosis, which revealed itself through my symptoms of touching certain things in a specified way. If I was in a room and the door was closed, I had to touch the door a specific number of times in a specified order before I could open it. It didn’t matter if someone else opened the door first and held it for me—I still had to do my thing to exit the building or room. The same went for clocks; if I looked at the clock at 10:10 or 2:22 or 4:44—any time stamp composed of repeating numbers—I had to touch and kiss every clock in the area in a particular way.
Why? Because I had to. I couldn’t not. When I tried to resist these urges, there’d be a tightening in my chest and lungs, a giant fist squeezing my windpipe, cutting off my air supply. That would morph into a sharp, lucid panic that prickled every inch of my skin. None of it was in my control. When Dr. Perry finally diagnosed me with OCD, he explained that these random, irresistible urges were called compulsions.
I remembered being occasionally anxious and claustrophobic as a kid, but it was nothing like what I’d begun to experience immediately after my mother passed away.
My father was so clouded by his own grief that it took him a couple of weeks to notice the strange way I was touching doors and clocks.
“Skye, why do you keep doing that?” he asked one night when we were leaving the house for dinner at my grandmother’s. He’d gone out the back door before me, and I thought he was already waiting in the car when I did my door taps: one two three four five six seven eight; eight seven six five four three two one.
I was startled to see him watching me. “I don’t know. I can’t stop.”
My father peered at me through desolate gray eyes. The next day he made me an appointment with Dr. Perry, the psychiatrist he’d started seeing himself after Mom went into hospice.
When he finally diagnosed me, Dr. Perry put me on a low dosage of Luvox, an antidepressant used to treat OCD in children.
The Luvox made me feel slightly less anxious, but it didn’t stop my compulsions. I was back in school and kids were starting to notice my behavior. I tried to linger at the end of classes so that everyone else left the room before me, but that tactic wasn’t always possible. Andie and Iz and Lexy had my back, but that didn’t stop other kids from making fun of me, even when Lexy punched Sasha Bateman in the face when she called me a mental patient. Sasha had a black eye, and Lexy got detention for the rest of the year.
Dr. Perry became interested that only certain doors required the special knock. When I mentioned that my compulsion wasn’t triggered by the electronic sliding doors at the mall or doors that were already propped open by an object—such as the gym doors at school—Dr. Perry’s bushy gray eyebrows jumped.
“Well, that is certainly interesting,” he said, stroking his beard.
But he never dug much deeper than that; never seemed to want to look too hard for a cause. It’s surprising, in retrospect, that none of the many subsequent doctors I saw were all that interested in determining a potential cause. The onset of OCD often occurred during the beginning stages of puberty; I was twelve when my symptoms started. Doctors didn’t seem to need more of an explanation than that.
Until Dr. Salam.
That first day in her office, when I mentioned that my OCD began when I was in seventh grade, right after my mother died, I watched Dr. Salam’s large chocolate eyes bloom.
“Right after your mother died?” Concern was in her voice.
“Yes. As far as I can remember, my symptoms started that day.”
Dr. Salam made me walk her back to the very beginning, to that horrible black hole of a day, the worst day of my life. I didn’t see the point in going there—I certainly didn’t want to—but Dr. Salam said she had to know. Some instinctual part of me trusted her as she explained that recent research had been connecting the development of OCD to childhood trauma, including grief. My eyes watered as I shook the memory loose, my voice wobbly as Dr. Salam nodded, prompting me forward.
* * *
Mom had been sick for almost two years, and we’d known the end was coming, and that terrible summer had been one long, agonizing goodbye. When the Twin Towers fell that September, it felt as though the world were literally ending, as though the safe life I’d always taken for granted was going up in a cloud of smoke. In early October the doctors finally said Mom’s time had come. She only had a few hours.
Dad had my brother and me get dressed, and I watched the tears slide down his cheeks as we rode to the hospital in silence. He was so broken at that point—we all were. People who told us we were strong simply didn’t know what else to say.
In her hospital bed Mom was a sliver of herself, a speck of the beautiful, vibrant woman who’d raised me. Her thick hair was gone, replaced by a blue head scarf that I hated, that I was sure Mom hated, too. Her body was a tiny bundle of bones, her face hard and jagged in the places where it had once been the softest skin I knew. Mom squeezed my hand, her eyes barely open. Dad had warned us that she was going to be really, really out of it. I told her I would always love her more than anyone else in the world, and even though she didn’t say anything back, a smile struggled against the edges of her pale lips, and I knew she loved me, too.