Chapter 32 Luca
"Luca. Come on in."
The office is the same office. Green chair, gray couch, the painting I still cannot name in warm colors above the desk. The plant on the windowsill is alive. The soil looks better than it did in February. She took my advice about the watering.
I take the chair. She takes the couch. Notebook on her knee, pen in her hand.
"How's your week been?"
My sixth visit to Gwen’s office and I keep thinking this will get easier but it hasn’t yet.
"Okay. Good, actually. Practice has been solid. We won Tuesday. I had an assist."
"How did that feel?"
"Like an assist. The pass was clean. Fontenot converted." I settle into the chair. The green fabric is familiar now in a way that February's chair was not. "I called my sister, Sina. I told her what’s been going on with me. That I'm seeing you and I'm working on it."
"How has that been sitting with you? Since the call."
I look at the plant. The brown-edged leaf from February is gone. A new one has taken its place, smaller, greener.
"She said I'm allowed to need things." I hear my own voice say the sentence and it sounds different in this room than it sounded in my kitchen. "She said she knows I've been calling and asking about her and how she is since we were kids, and that I'm allowed to need things too."
"What happened when she said that?"
"I felt it. Like she'd said the one sentence I didn't know I was waiting for."
"Had anyone said that to you before?"
"Wes has. In different words. But hearing it from Sina was..." I stop. The sentence is forming and I am letting it form instead of redirecting. "She doesn't know what that meant."
"What does that mean to you?"
"I've been her brother that calls and asks and organizes and shows up and never says what he actually needs because saying what I need is not…That's not the version of me everyone knows."
Gwen writes nothing. She adjusts her glasses. She waits.
"Tell me about that version," she says.
"That version is the one who works and is useful.
The helpful one, the easy one, the one who doesn't need anything because everyone else needs things and there isn't room.
" My hands are on the arms of the chair and I am gripping them and I didn't notice I was gripping them until now.
"I have been that person since I was nine years old. "
"What happened when you were nine?"
"Sina was sick. She had leukemia."
"Tell me about that."
The room is quiet. The afternoon light through the window is softer than February's light. Warmer.
"It was a normal house to grow up in," I say. "My parents loved us. They loved both of us. They were not bad parents. I need to say that first."
"I hear you."
"But when your six-year-old sister has leukemia the house reorganizes around that.
It has to. Every appointment, every treatment, every phone call from the hospital, every night my mother came home too tired to eat.
The house became about keeping Sina alive.
And that was right. That was what it should be about. "
"And you?"
"I figured it out." The words are coming slowly.
Not deflecting slowly. Thinking slowly. The fragments are the thinking, not the armor.
"I figured out the best thing I could do was not make things harder.
I made my own lunches. I did my homework without being asked.
I cleaned my room. I went to hockey practice on my own starting when I was ten because my father was at the hospital and my mother was at the hospital and I could ride my bike. "
"That's a lot for a ten-year-old."
"It didn't feel like a lot. It felt like the only option. My sister was fighting for her life and I was not going to be the reason anyone had to stop fighting for her."
Gwen nods. Her pen is on the notebook but it has not moved.
"So you learned how to not need anything."
"I learned how to be useful. If I was useful enough, if I was easy enough, if I was the one who organized and anticipated and showed up and never asked for anything, then it was easier for everyone."
"What happens if you're not useful?" she asks.
The question sits in the air between us.
I can feel it the way I can feel a play developing before the pass arrives.
The question is the pass. The answer is the play.
The play has been forming for six sessions and I have skated around it every time and today the pass is on my tape and I am standing still.
"Luca?"
"I heard you." My voice is quiet. "I'm trying to answer."
"Take your time."
The silence stretches. Ten seconds. Fifteen. The afternoon light moves on the windowsill. I can hear traffic on Juniper Street through the glass, the low hum of a city I have lived in for seven months and am only now beginning to hear.
"I don't think I know how to be a person who isn't useful."
Gwen does not move. "Tell me more," she says.
"When my sister was sick I figured out that the way I was supposed to be was the easy one.
The one who didn't need anything. And I think I have been being that person ever since.
In different forms. With my parents. With Wes.
With the team." I stare at the plant that still has the yellow leaf.
"I walk into places already on so nobody has to wonder if I'm okay.
I think that's how I prove I'm still useful.
And when I stop being useful I stop being a person. "
"You stop being a person?”
"I stop having a reason. To be here. To be anywhere.
" My eyes are wet and I don’t know when I started to cry.
"When I came to Atlanta and the function was gone, when I couldn't be the person who made Wes's life work from across the apartment, when I couldn't be the partner who showed up every day and did the thing that justified my being there, I just…
I had nothing. There was nobody underneath it. "
"There was nobody underneath the person being useful?"
"I didn't think there was. I thought the useful version was the real version and everything else was just…but then I didn't know who was there."
Gwen is quiet for a moment. Then she leans forward slightly.
"I want to stay with something you said. You said you couldn't be the partner who showed up every day. That the function was gone. But you also couldn't tell anyone here why you were falling apart."
"No."
"Because of hiding your relationship with Wes."
The words land. It is not the words I would have used in February. In February it was the arrangement, the situation, the way things were.
"Because of the hiding. Yeah."
"What did the hiding cost you, Luca? When you got to Atlanta and the function was gone and you were falling apart?"
I look at the ceiling. The tiles are the same tiles. The light fixture has a dead bug in it that has been there since my first session. I have never mentioned it. The dead bug is familiar now.
"It cost me things that could have helped.
" My voice is steady and I am speaking slowly because each word is hard to say.
"Thompson sat across from me at dinner and told me I looked like someone died.
And he was right but I couldn't tell him why.
Marchetti called me every week and I couldn't explain why I didn’t want to leave my place, why I wasn't eating. They would have been there for me. But that meant saying his name which wasn’t useful. "
"The useful thing."
"The useful thing was staying hidden. Making myself invisible so the relationship could function.
" I hear myself say it and it’s not the words are said that I see how true it is.
"The move and the distance broke me. But the hiding is what kept me going down.
The hiding meant I couldn't reach for anything. "
Gwen is still. Her pen has not moved.
"You see the pattern," she says. "You said you don't think you know how to be a person who isn't useful and when you stop being useful you stop being a person. The pattern that kept you from asking for help when you needed it most."
"Yeah."
"Is it true? That there's nobody underneath?"
"It's what I've believed."
"I know. I'm asking you a different question. Is it true?"
I am in the green chair and the light is on the plant and my face is wet and I am being asked whether the sentence that has organized my entire life is true.
"I don't know," I say. "I think it's what I learned. I don't know if it's true."
Her voice is warm and level when she says, "Can you sit with that for a minute?"
My hands are open on the arms of the chair and my face is wet and I am wrung out.
"Same time next Thursday?" she says.
"Same time next Thursday."
"You did real work today, Luca."
"It doesn't feel like work. It feels like I’m still falling."
"Sometimes we have to go through the uncomfortable and messy for progress to happen."
I stand. She stands. Her handshake is warm and unhurried the way it was in February, the way it has been every time, the greeting that asks nothing except that I showed up.
The hallway. The stairs. The parking lot.
I sit in my car and I don't turn it on. Through the windshield the sky is white going gold, the afternoon softening toward evening.
My phone is on the console. The wallpaper with the blue water and white railing.
I look at it for a long time. It looks like a photograph.
It has looked like a window into a life I lost, and today, it looks like a picture of a place I used to live.
I open the camera roll. I scroll until I find the one from last week: Mouse on the counter, her paw on a lime, her face severe. I took it to send to Wes and then forgot.
I set it as the wallpaper. Mouse's face fills the screen. Unimpressed. Supervisory. Present.
Mouse is waiting for me when I get back to the apartment twenty minutes later.
"Hey, Maus."
She yells at me once. I fill her bowl. She inspects the contents with the focus of a health inspector running a final evaluation and then eats with the urgency of a cat who has never been fed in her entire life.
I lean against the counter. The kitchen is organized. The cutting board is in its drawer. The rice is on its shelf. The apartment is the apartment I have been building for weeks now, one routine at a time, and the man standing in it said the truest sentence of his life twenty minutes ago.
I pull out my phone and open FaceTime and call Wes.
He picks up on the second ring. His face fills the screen, his apartment behind him, the low light of a Miami evening. He is on the couch. I can see the edge of the balcony through the sliding door, the sky going purple over the water.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey."
"How was the session?"
"Hard." I set the phone against the backsplash so I can see him and lean against the counter. Mouse finishes eating and jumps up beside the phone and puts her face directly into the camera. "Mouse. Move."
Wes laughs. "Let her stay. I haven't seen her in a week."
"She's blocking the entire screen."
"She's showing me her face. It's a gift. Accept it." Mouse yells at the phone. Wes says, "Hi, Mouse. You look angry."
"She's always angry. It's her brand." I move the phone slightly. Mouse gives me a look of deep professional offense and jumps down. "There. Now you can see me."
"I can see you." His voice shifts. Not much. Enough. "You've been crying."
"Yeah."
"Hard session?"
"The hardest one." I look at his face on the screen.
The hazel eyes, the steadiness, the way he is holding the phone like he is holding the conversation open without pushing on it.
"Gwen asked me what happens when I'm not useful.
I said I don't know how to be a person who isn't useful.
She asked if it's true. I said I don't know. "
"You said you don't know if that’s true?" His voice is rough.
"Not no. Not yes. I don't know. Which is different from believing it's true."
He puts his hand over his mouth for a second. Then he drops it. His eyes are bright on the screen.
"That's different," he says. "That's good."
"I know."
"How do you feel?"
"Tired. Emptied out. Like I ran a full sixty and someone took the boards away." I look at the ceiling and then back at the screen. "And lighter. Like the sentence was taking up space and now it's outside of me and it's not running things from inside anymore."
He nods. He doesn't say anything for a few seconds and the silence on the video call is different from the silence in Gwen's office. This silence holds the answer he is not going to give me because the answer is not his to give. He knows that.
"I wish I was there," he says.
"I know. But I think I needed to come home from this one alone. I needed to stand in my kitchen and feel it without anyone catching me."
"You're standing in your kitchen."
"I'm standing in my kitchen. Mouse is judging my posture."
"Mouse is correct. Your posture is terrible."
"My posture is fine."
"Your posture is a six-point-two on a good day."
"You don't get to rate my posture. You're a thousand miles away."
"I'm rating it from the screen. The data is clear."
I laugh. It comes out rough and tired and real and it surprises me and I let it happen because the laugh is mine.
"Wes, thank you for asking."
"I'll always ask."
"I know." I look at his face. The balcony behind him, the sky darkening. "Love you."
"Love you, Luca. Call me tomorrow?"
"I'll call you tomorrow."
His face goes dark. I stand in the kitchen with the phone in my hand and Mouse back on the counter and the last of the daylight through the window. The session is done. It is not resolved and it is not fixed. But it’s a start.
?