What did that even mean?
Everybody kept telling me to wait, let the edema resolve, get some rest, see what happened. But I didn’t have that kind of time. I had to get my portrait painted for the show. I couldn’t just watch my whole life fall apart and not try to do something about it.
Then she glanced at her watch, so I glanced at my phone. We had two minutes left in the session. Time to wrap it up. “The point is,” Dr. Nicole said, “you’re still adjusting. You have to allow for confirmation bias.”
“What’s confirmation bias?”
Dr. Nicole paused for a good definition. “It means that we tend to think what we think we’re going to think.”
I added all those words up. “So … if you expect to think a thing is true, you’re more likely to think it’s true?”
“Exactly,” she said, looking pleased. “Basically we tend to decide on what the world is and who people are and how things are—and then we look for evidence that supports what we’ve already decided. And we ignore everything that doesn’t fit.”
“That doesn’t sound like me,” I said.
“Everybody does it,” Dr. Nicole said with a shrug. “It’s a normal human foible. But you’re doing it a little extra right now.”
“I am?”
She nodded. “Because your senses are off. It’s harder for you to collect solid information about the world around you. And because you’ve experienced trauma, you’re on high alert for danger.”
No argument there.
“So,” I said. “If I think everything is terrible, then everything will be terrible?”
She nodded, like, Bingo.
“But I do think everything is terrible.”
“In the wake of a difficult time,” Dr. Nicole said then, sounding more than ever like the calm voice of reason, “as you try to readjust to a new normal—”
“I don’t want a new normal!” I interrupted. “I want the old normal.”
“The trick,” Dr. Nicole continued, not letting me throw her off, “is to look for the good stuff.”
“Fine,” I said, thinking about it. “I’ll try.” Then I added, “And I won’t call the cops on the Weasel. Yet.”
“And maybe stop calling him the Weasel.”
“But he is a weasel.”
“You’ll definitely keep thinking that if you keep thinking that.”
I sighed. Another gotcha moment. “Confirmation bias?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“That’s my girl,” she said.
Twelve
DID THE GREAT Dr. Oliver Addison, veterinarian sex god, work a miracle and restore my geriatric bestie to perfect canine health?
Kind of. Mostly.
Though he did warn me that Peanut would be “a little tired” for a week or two.
Sure enough, on the day Peanut came home from the clinic, all he wanted was to curl up under the bed and nap.
But I wanted to hang out. I’d missed him.
I’d missed him so much, apparently, that all I wanted to do was lie on my tummy, half under the bed myself, watching him sleep and reassuring myself he was okay.
Look for good things, Dr. Nicole had said.
Peanut being home is definitely a good thing, I thought as I watched him.
But there was another good thing under that bed—one I’d forgotten about until I pushed it aside to get a better view of Peanut.
A box I’d kept for years, with my mother’s roller skates inside.
I hadn’t seen them in ages, but I decided to pull the box out and open it up.
My mom loved to roller-skate. The two of us used to skate up and down our block, listening to Top 40 on her little portable radio, and singing along, and waving to the neighbors. My mom could skate backward, do the moonwalk, spin around on one foot, and do the grapevine. Plus a million other things. She used to pull me with a rope behind her and call it water skiing. It was our favorite thing to do on weekends.
She had her own skates—white leather with pink pom-poms on the toes. And she’d bought me a matching pair when I was little. This was the nineties, and most of the world had shifted to Rollerblades. But not my mom.
After she died, I inherited them.
By inherited, I mean, I took them out of her closet before Lucinda donated everything to Goodwill.
I never wore them. After I lost her, I never roller-skated again. And my kid-sized skates got lost somewhere along the way, like things do.
Wherever I went, though, I kept my mom’s skates close—in that box under my bed. Not to wear. Just to have. Just because holding on to them felt like holding on to a piece of her. Just because, even though I never even looked at them, if I could save one thing in a fire—besides Peanut, of course—I wouldn’t even think about it.