Page 53

Therese

It is Thursday, and in this one-on-one session, Kyle will be making an appearance.

I am dreading this. I haven’t seen him since Margot escorted me from our home.

We’ve talked on the phone, which is always awkward and makes me feel like an inmate calling from prison.

It’s clear he doesn’t know what to say to me, and I don’t know what to say to him.

I am ashamed, and he is terrified of me. His wife, the nutcase.

Usually, I sit on the middle cushion of the couch in Crystal’s office, but today I sit on the far-right cushion in anticipation of Kyle’s presence.

“Remember, he’s probably nervous too. I’m here to help the two of you, okay?” Crystal says.

Before I can respond, there’s a knock at the door, and when Crystal opens it, Kyle is there with ever-smiling Phoebe.

He is a deer in headlights. His hair is longer than usual, borderline disheveled, and he still has the facial hair he had when I was in the hospital.

He puts a hand to his beard. I give him a meek smile, a cautious peace offering. He returns the same.

“You must be Kyle,” Crystal says to him.

His eyes are on me when he says, “Yeah.”

“Have a great session!” Phoebe says with too much enthusiasm before going on her way.

Crystal leads Kyle to the couch, and he sits on the far-left cushion, as I thought he would. Crystal watches this initial interaction, likely noting that we have not made any physical contact. Hands are not reaching for each other; bodies are not colliding into one another.

“So,” Crystal says with a long exhale. “I know we have a lot to get into, and it’s my hope that both of you will leave here a bit less uneasy after our hour together.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Kyle nod as he presses his palms to his thighs.

“Let’s jump right in and talk about the elephant in the room,” Crystal says. “The Delusion.”

That’s what we’ve been calling the Elijah situation—the Delusion. She has been careful not to call me delusional, though I was and may always be.

“Kyle, I’m sure this was a big shock to you, and I’m curious what your thoughts are now that you’ve had some time to process this.”

He groans. Audibly.

“My thoughts?” he says, seemingly bewildered by what’s being asked of him.

“Yes. How did you feel when you understood that your wife was having this imagined affair?”

He lets out a long sigh. “Well, confused at first. Then angry. I mean, I know the affair wasn’t real , but this whole ... delusion, as you call it ... was still a betrayal.”

Crystal squints at him—her inquisitive therapist stare.

“How so?”

“She was obsessed with this guy. I’ve read the texts.”

Apparently, the whole time I thought I was texting Elijah, I was just texting myself, texts Kyle has since perused. I have never been so humiliated.

“And beyond that, there’s just this disbelief. Like, how did her mind do this? She was staying at the freaking Hilton and thought she was in this guy’s apartment?”

Yes, that’s what I did, which explains Liv finding that hotel key card in my purse.

The charges were all there on our credit card: the nights spent at the Hilton, meals out—the breakfast spot I thought I went to with Elijah, the Chinese takeout, the Pier 39 fish house.

The amount of money spent suggests I purchased enough for two people. Again, humiliated.

“Okay, let’s take the two things separately. First, her obsession—as you said—with Elijah.”

Crystal glances at me, as if to check if I am okay with where this is going. I am. She and I have already gone here in our sessions.

“Do you want to share with Kyle some of the things we’ve discussed?” Crystal asks me.

I nod, reluctantly, and dare to turn my head to look at Kyle. He turns to me. His eyes are both sad and infuriated. I have never seen him like this.

“I think Elijah represented something to me,” I say, my voice soft and cautious.

Kyle just stares.

“Like, he was this ideal man. He was this escape from reality.”

“And this imagined ideal speaks to a lot of what she felt was missing in her life,” Crystal says. She nods at me, signals to me to continue.

“I wasn’t feeling seen. I wasn’t feeling tended to or cared for. I hated losing my job. I felt put in this position at home with the girls, and you didn’t seem to get it. You didn’t seem curious about what was going on with me. You just seemed ... annoyed.”

“I was annoyed,” he says. Honest, at least.

“Why were you annoyed?” Crystal asks.

He turns away from me to Crystal.

“Nobody said she had to stay home forever. This was a temporary thing. I thought she liked doing the mom stuff. She’s not the only one who didn’t feel ... tended to .”

“He’s talking about sex,” I say to Crystal, crossing my arms over my chest.

“It’s not just sex,” Kyle says. “It’s connection. That’s how we connect.”

“That’s how you connect.”

Crystal puts up both hands, telling us to pause.

“Ultimately, what I’m seeing here is a communication breakdown,” she says. “There wasn’t an open and honest discussion of needs, for both of you. You were both expecting a lot of mind reading.”

“Shouldn’t your partner be able to read your mind?” I ask. “We’ve been together since college, for god’s sake.”

“I wish our partners could do that. Alas, they are human.”

She smiles, but I do not find this amusing.

“We’ll come back to this—the communication breakdown,” she says. “But I also want to talk about the other half of what you said, Kyle, which is you questioning how your wife’s mind could do this.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like this,” he says. “This can’t be common.”

Crystal squints at him again.

“Common? Maybe not. We would classify this as a dissociative disorder. From a psychological perspective, considering all the factors, it’s understandable.”

“ Understandable? ” He nearly spits the word.

“Hear me out,” Crystal says, showing him her palms again. “Grief is an incredibly powerful force. Your wife was grieving the impending loss of her father—we call that anticipatory grief. She was grieving a loss of self in her role as mother and wife.”

I glance at him to confirm that, yes, he is rolling his eyes.

“I think she was grieving the marriage, the ideals she harbored about how two people should support and be with each other.”

I don’t have to look at him to know that his eyes are still rolling.

“Then there’s the grief related to her mother. I see that as directly contributing to the accident,” Crystal says. “It’s a lot of grief, Kyle. And the human mind is amazingly self-protective. It will do fascinating things to protect us, to shield us from pain.”

“Okay,” Kyle says. He presses fingertips into his temples. “I get that she was going through a lot. I’m not really sure what to say.”

Crystal turns to me, begging me with her eyes to chime in: “I know you’ve talked to me about the shame you feel from this.”

“Shame, yeah,” I say. “I mean, I’m basically reaffirming the stereotype of the batshit-crazy woman. That’s how he sees me now.”

I glance at Kyle, and his face says Pretty much .

“I think it’s important for us to push through this stereotype,” Crystal says.

“In my opinion, society doesn’t exactly support maternal mental health or maternal .

.. anything. Women, particularly mothers, have the deck stacked against them.

And we can get into all the reasons for that another time, but I just want to reiterate that your wife’s experience is, like I said, understandable.

The way things have ... manifested ..

. is unique, but your wife is not crazy.

If we are going to make any progress, we need to start there. ”

I expect Kyle to scoff, but he is silent.

“For what it’s worth, I think both of you see this as this terrible thing that’s happened, but I don’t,” Crystal says.

“I think this has broken open your lives in a very necessary way. If it hadn’t been this, specifically, it would have been something else.

Things wouldn’t have continued as they were, not with all that was going on. ”

When Kyle is silent, Crystal says, “Does any of that resonate with you?”

He sighs, again. “I guess. But I still maintain that I’ve never heard of anything like this. People go through all kinds of stress and this doesn’t happen.”

“Okay, what’s beneath that disbelief?”

“Beneath?” he says. He does not know therapy-speak.

“Meaning we can’t just stay stuck in disbelief. There’s something beneath that, something deeper that’s gnawing at you. For example, do these events make you worry that this will happen again? Are you fearful? Angry?”

“Yes,” Kyle says. “All of that.”

Crystal nods and turns to me. “You’re fearful, too, right?”

I clear my throat. “Yes. I don’t trust myself. I’m just as perplexed as he is at how this happened. It’s not like I’ve ever had something like this happen before.”

“So you’re both afraid. You’re both having a hard time trusting the future.”

I nod, and Kyle nods too.

“Good, that’s an honest admission. You don’t have to know the future right now. Trust of self and others can take time to rebuild. What I trust is that you two will figure it out.”

I look at Kyle just as he looks at me. His eyes look doubtful, and I do not blame him.

At the end of the session, we hug awkwardly, his hand patting my back twice, as if I’m a buddy on his softball team. Crystal says we will schedule another joint session soon. I walk him to the reception area and ask him how the girls are doing. He says they are doing fine but they miss me.

“They do?” I ask.

“Are you serious?” he asks. He really does think I’m batshit crazy. “Of course they miss you.”

I go back to my room to find Marie moving clothes from her drawers to a suitcase that’s open on the bed.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“I’m leaving. Patrick said he’s had enough of this, doesn’t think it’s helping.”

Patrick is her husband. They’ve just started having joint sessions like the one Kyle and I just had.

“So you’re just going back home?”

“No,” she says, not looking up at me. “I’m going to rent an apartment nearby. Patrick will have custody of the boys. I’ll visit sometimes.”

I try to hide my shock.

“Okay,” I say. It’s all I can manage.

She looks up. “I know it’s awful of me.”

I don’t know what to say. I do think it’s awful—not that she’s awful, but that it’s awful it has to be this way.

She sits on the edge of her bed.

“It occurred to me that I’m basically your mother,” she says.

I’ve told Marie my whole story—all the ugly little bits.

“No,” I say on impulse. Though as I think about it, she is right. She is resigning from motherhood, not as completely as my mother did, but a resignation just the same.

Crystal and I have talked some about my mother.

I’m sure we’ll discuss her more in coming sessions.

Crystal has given me space to admit my anger at my dad (and Merry) for keeping the truth from me.

She’s enabled me to come around to see my dad’s deception as an attempt to protect me from pain.

He was a papa bear that way. He wouldn’t have ever wanted me to feel abandoned.

“Deception of self or others can have the sweetest intentions,” Crystal said. “Not that the intention makes it less painful ... but it’s important to hold both feelings—the pain of being lied to and the gratitude for his desire to care for you.”

My eyes welled up when she said that. Hers did too.

I have this fear that I am my mother. The whole thing with Elijah was an escape, just a different kind than hers. Crystal asked me if I envied what she’d done in running away. And I don’t. I pity her. She missed out—on me.

“You attempted to escape without ever really leaving,” Crystal said. “It’s much different from what she did.”

“Maybe.”

“But for forgiveness to be possible—and it’s totally up to you if you want to seek that within yourself—you may need to have compassion for what she did.”

I scoffed. “I don’t think I’ll ever get there.”

But now, looking at Marie, at the anguish in her face, I think maybe I will get there. Or close to there.

“You’re not awful,” I tell Marie. “Life is just ... hard.”

She smiles. “Well, that’s true.”

“I’d like to keep in touch, if you want,” I say.

“Really?” She looks surprised. Perhaps she was expecting me to shun her.

“Of course.”

She goes to her nightstand, scribbles something on a piece of paper—a phone number and a name: Amber.

“So that’s your name,” I say, finding it funny that neither of us has cared to inquire about the other’s real name until now. We’ve been content pretending all this time.

“Amber Marie,” she says.

“Nice to meet you, Amber,” I say. “I’m Nicole.”