“If you were to make a pie chart of all the things that make you anxious, how big of a chunk is this?”
My pulse sped and throbbed in my neck at the reminder. There was a huge stressor I was avoiding in therapy, by far the largest slice of the pie: Paolo’s flesh rotting under a few inches of dirt. Bloodstains smeared across the floor and shower curtain. Potential witnesses at the bar, the hotel, the long road back in the dusky predawn.
But we’re focusing on my relationships here.
“Well, it’s a bigger chunk now that Aaron and I are officially together.” I futzed with my necklace. “It’s weird, part of me feels like getting close with Aaron means abandoning Kristen. Even though there’s no reason I can’t have a best friend and a boyfriend.”
“Why does it feel like abandoning her?”
“She’s…I told you, she’s like a sister to me. She’s all I’ve needed for so long.”
“All you’ve needed,” she repeated. “Do you see why that’s a lot to put on any one person?”
“You think I’m too dependent on her?”
“I’m not making judgments about you. Or about Kristen.” She leaned back. “But I want you to think about what a healthy support system looks like. One that’s…diversified. The way you talk about Aaron, it sounds like he’s a really positive person in your life.”
I gave a fervent nod.
“That’s great, that there’s another person you can count on. And of course your new relationship is going to shake up your and Kristen’s dynamic. It’s normal and healthy for friendships to change, but there’s often some pushback.”
I pressed my lips together. “I think you’re right.” I could feel my face contorting, crumpling around the ugly fear: I’d be a bad girlfriend to Aaron and a bad friend to Kristen. I’d wind up sad and alone, with guilt bloodying my insides and nightmarish memories staining my days.
“I don’t want to screw things up,” I said. “I hate screwing up.” Jesus, of all people to be running around with two homicides in their past…
“Would you call yourself a perfectionist?”
“Oh, one thousand percent. Even as a kid, I was such a goody two-shoes. All my report cards said, ‘a pleasure to have in class.’？”
“So not much of a rebel? Even as a teenager?”
I winced—today, I was still a model citizen, except for the two enormous stains on my record. “I got in trouble with my parents sometimes,” I admitted. “Especially my dad. He could be…unpredictable.”
As a child, I seemed to attract their attention only when I did something wrong, often without realizing it. One of my earliest memories was of singing “This Is the Song That Doesn’t End” at the top of my lungs as I ran up and down the stairs, a three-year-old whirling dervish. I can still remember the bright, sharp confusion as my father stopped me in my tracks and spanked my tiny buttocks. The memory filled me with steamy shame, too tender-hot to tell Adrienne.
“And your mom?”
I scraped at my fingernails. “We got along okay. When they split up, I thought maybe she and I would become close. But over time I started to see how she…she wasn’t really in my corner either. When I moved out, I kind of realized I didn’t need them. Like, I was forming my own family. With people who actually cared about me. Like Kristen.”
Closer than a sister, the only one who loved me unconditionally. Who’d risk her life for me, who’d sacrifice her own sleep and well-being to nurse me through my pain.
My insides contracted: I should’ve kept on driving west last night, I should’ve continued on to Brookfield just to give her a hug. How selfish of me, turning around to try to get Aaron back in my bed.
Adrienne set her pen down. “Do you believe you need to be perfect to deserve Kristen’s friendship?”
Guilt streamed through me. “I mean, she’s a pretty perfect friend. We’re already…kinda mismatched with how good she is to me.”
She pursed her brow. “I don’t know Kristen, so I’m not saying this is going on.” She flipped over her notebook. “But in some relationships, Person A seems like they’re doing more work than Person B, but Person A wants it that way. They like being the caretaker, so it serves them to keep Person B in that needy role. Does that resonate for you?”
No way. The thought filled my belly with discomfort: Kristen keeping me down, finding pleasure in my helplessness. “I really don’t think Kristen and I are like that,” I said loudly. “We both want the other person to feel strong. And, like, there are times when I’ve had to prop her up too.” Like those lonely hours in the Elqui Valley, the night when I’d champed up and taken charge as death hovered in the air around us.
“Okay.” Another serene nod. “Perfectionism keeps coming up when you talk about your relationships. Do you agree?”
“Totally. It’s so destructive. Kristen has pointed out how self-sabotaging my perfectionism can be.”
She peered at me for a moment, then glanced at her notebook. “It’s common among children of parents like yours. But it’s dangerous, tying your worth to never making a mistake. Can we try a visualization exercise?”
I nodded, unease brewing in my chest.
“I want you to close your eyes and picture the worst thing you’ve ever done. A time you were anything but perfect. Really picture your past self going through the motions. Take a minute to…”
Her voice faded as the scene cued up around me: Sebastian yanking his hand away from my mouth, shock in his eyes as blood dripped from his palm where I’d bitten it. The relentlessness, the fury in Kristen’s gaze as she took Sebastian down. Stop. Stop. Stop. Blood, so much blood, surging all over the floor, more than a single skull should hold, like his head was a jug of sloshing wine.
It’s happening. My lungs were collapsing, deflating, balloons with the air leaking out. My heart beat wildly, my fingers clawed at my purse—lungs on fire, a single thought blaring like an emergency alert system: AIR, AIR, AIR.
I shoved my inhaler into my mouth and pressed hard. Ahhh. With the second dose, I noticed Adrienne had stood and was looming over me, her face twisted in concern.
“I’m fine,” I told her, snapping the cap back onto the mouthpiece.
But did either of us believe it?
CHAPTER 18
I woke up on my birthday with butterflies in my stomach—excitement, yes, but anxiety too. Not because I was thirty （still young, whatever） but because I had a feeling Kristen had planned something unexpected. The apprehension was like orange-red coals, threatening to ignite. What had she said about women’s intuition? We see things men miss?
I flopped onto my side and unplugged my phone. A deluge of birthday greetings on Facebook; texts from both parents as well as some friends. A video from a high school pal, still up in Minneapolis—her twin toddlers shouting, “Happy buff-day, Emiry!”
Nothing from Aaron, oddly. Or Kristen. Yet.
I padded into the kitchen and started up the coffee maker. As it brewed, I turned on NPR: A Missouri man had thrown acid on a congregant outside a Sikh temple. Horrible. A nut job, my mom would say with a shake of her head. And, okay—not healthy, I’d give her that, not emotionally controlled nor self-actualized. But what if monsters walk among us and they aren’t nut jobs? Sebastian was a seemingly normal guy who grew angry, so angry, he could have killed me. Anger isn’t a mental illness. Maybe regular people do terrible things all the damn time.