Chapter 7 Lorna Now #2
“Once, when I was a kid, I saw an old, beat-up dog at a gas station. He just sort of appeared while my dad was getting gas.” She pictured the golden dog, one ear half gone, scars on his body, a foot that didn’t land right.
“There were two kids who were trying to get him to come with them. ‘Come on,’ they said, ‘you can live with us.’ They were holding out a hot dog to entice him. The dog got closer and closer, and when he got close enough, one of the kids tried to grab him by his scruff,” she said, gesturing to the back of her neck.
“But the dog snatched the hot dog and broke free. He trotted back into the woods, his nose and tail high, like he was proud of himself.”
“That’s really sad,” Micah said.
Lorna blinked. “Sad? No, you don’t get it.
It was liberating. That dog didn’t need anyone.
He didn’t need two kids who were going to betray him like that.
He didn’t need a house or a family. He needed food, and once he got it, he was perfectly fine on his own.
Fewer entanglements. Fewer disappointments.
No one to mistreat him. That’s where I am. That’s how I stay safe.”
Micah said nothing for a moment. “But you do know that dogs are pack animals, and a lot of those that get rescued at gas stations may start out reluctant, but then find they really like having people around. That dog might have had a cushy life if the kids had caught him, instead of the hard life of a street dog, all alone with no one to lean on.”
Something roiled lightly in her chest. She shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe life with those kids would have been worse.” She shifted on her beanbag. This was getting too, too close to the door of her bomb shelter. “So anyway, you want to know how Lorna Lott got here. It started a long time ago.”
Micah leaned forward. “How long ago?”
“Thirty-five years? More? And my sister was...” She clamped her mouth shut. Why was Kristen the first thing, the first person, she mentioned?
“An addict,” Micah said.
Lorna eyed him warily.
“Your sister was an addict,” he said calmly. “That must have been very difficult for you and your family. Can you tell me how it affected you?”
“Why do you even want to know?” The heat or her ire was beginning to build.
“Anyway, I doubt you have the next year free,” she added flippantly.
But she recognized what she was doing and groaned.
She held up a hand. “I’m sorry,” she said wearily.
“I don’t know why I can’t seem to take a beat before I speak.
I get so angry out of nowhere. Honestly, Micah, I can’t even begin to list the many ways her addiction affected me without feeling the rage, you know?
If you read addiction literature, it will tell you that using drugs affects your relationships, your work, and every aspect of your life.
But it never tells you how your addiction casts a long shadow and wraps like a rope around the necks of everyone else in your life. ”
“That sounds suffocating,” Micah said.
“Suffocating, enraging. Kristen’s drug use made it impossible for me to have friends.
When they came over, she was high or just weird.
And try being the sister of the girl who got arrested on school grounds not once, but twice.
Just imagine all the fighting at home about the drug use and the arrests and her just disappearing, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for a few days.
Even when you move out as an adult, it doesn’t end.
You end up missing work because of some crisis or doctor’s appointment or some big worry.
” She paused, considering how often her mother had worried over Kristen’s whereabouts.
“I can’t imagine,” Micah said.
“You couldn’t possibly unless you lived it,” she said flatly.
“I hope you never do. I have never been free of Kristen. I could never just carry on with my life without waiting for loads of shoes to drop, because they always dropped, usually when I was least expecting it. I could never just accept who she was. I kept getting angrier.”
And then everyone was gone. Nana. Her mother. Her sister. Her dad, if he ever really counted. She shook her head. She’d said enough.
Micah didn’t seem surprised or disgusted by her confession. “An addict in the family takes up a lot of time and attention and emotional energy.”
“Yep,” Lorna said, and put aside her teacup. “It made me invisible in my family.”
“How young were you when the trouble began?”
She looked at the window, at the way the leaves on the tree just outside moved on the fall breeze. The same way the trees used to move outside the window of Nana’s house. “Six. That’s the first time I can remember her using something, anyway. It was during a trip to the beach. She was only ten.”
And just like that, the story of her life came tumbling out before she could stop herself.
She talked about how her family, who she thought had known happiness early on, became increasingly ruled by her sister’s addiction issues through the years.
How she had always loved Kristen, still did, or at least she thought she did, or maybe she told herself she did, and really, she wasn’t even sure if she did.
But she had once considered her the best of big sisters.
And now she didn’t want to be near her. She talked about how long she had begged and hoped for Kristen to change, and how she still had trouble accepting that this was Kristen’s life.
She told Micah that she believed Kristen’s struggles ruined her parents’ marriage and stole so many moments—moments that Lorna could never get back.
She told him about her grandmother’s house, where she and Kristen and her mother went to live after her parents’ divorce, that place of so much childhood happiness.
How she thought they would be so happy there, and how they were for a while, and how she loved that house.
But when her grandmother died, her mother sold it to pay for Kristen’s longest stint in treatment.
And when her mother got sick with cancer, Lorna had to care-take on top of a full-time job because Kristen couldn’t be trusted to follow through on doctor’s appointments, or not to steal her mother’s pain pills, or money from her purse.
She told Micah that two relationships she’d had with men had crumbled under the weight of caring for her mother and her sister.
And then she told him that her mother left her estate in trust for Lorna, but with untenable conditions, because her mother had decided Lorna was the one who needed to change.
Micah listened to all of it, his face conveying his empathy. He filled her teacup when she admitted to having the gut-wrenching regrets and suffocating guilt her mother had tried so hard to get her to acknowledge.
She told him she hated herself for believing all the lies Kristen told her and believing that she would change when she promised.
She hated herself for believing that Kristen would stop using drugs, that she would get a job, that she would be part of the family again.
She’d wanted so badly to believe her and was let down over and over.
“Addiction is a cruel master,” Micah said. “You love the person and hate the disease.”
“That’s too trite,” Lorna said. “I mean, sure, it’s true, obviously, but sometimes.
.. well, really, a lot of times... I hated Kristen.
I hated her,” she said again. “She was so impossible to love, no matter how hard I tried. Like, it’s not her fault she’s an addict, so you’re supposed to overlook that like you would if she had cancer, so they say, even while she is tearing you and your family apart.
” Lorna had never been good at articulating how she felt about Kristen’s disease.
Much less grasping her feelings fully—they were so damn complicated.
“I tried to save her,” she said quietly.
“But it was pointless. Kristen didn’t want to be saved. ”
“That is indeed a very personal decision,” Micah said. “To be sober or not. You said your sister is in Florida?”
“With my dad.”
“Do you see her or speak to her?”
She could feel the door of her bomb shelter swinging closed. She shook her head. “We’re on a break. It’s been almost two years.” Her eyes were beginning to fill with tears. Of fury? Of sadness? It was hard to know anymore.
Micah slid the box of tissues across the floor to her.
“I haven’t had any contact with her. I’ve hardly spoken to my dad either. My stepmother sends me a couple of letters every month. But I don’t read them.”
“Why not?” Micah asked.
Because she was afraid of what was in the letters. She couldn’t bear the blame or the guilt or the pleas for help. “They’ll just make me mad.” She took a tissue from the box. “All I know is that every time I get a pink envelope, I feel like crying. I know it will be about Kristen.”
“Ah,” Micah said.
Ah. Lorna heard that as Micah not understanding.
Could she blame him? How ridiculous was it that she wouldn’t open a letter and read it?
How could she explain she would rather just leave it like an unexploded mine in her apartment?
If she didn’t know what was in them, she didn’t know what there was to be upset about.
Avoidant , he’d called her. Maybe she was.
“I know this has been difficult, but thank you for sharing. I think it will help us set some goals for your wellness program. Let’s start with what you hope to achieve?”
What sort of question was that? She wanted to keep her job. She wanted to be liked. She wanted her grandmother’s house. “I want to go back to work and have a normal life. That’s it.”
“And what does a normal life look like to you?”
Use your context clues, Micah . “Just a normal life. Not having to talk about my sister. Not having to pretend I had a normal childhood. Just being happy in my grandmother’s house like I used to be.”
“For the record, normal is a myth. But it’s very interesting to me that you equate having a normal life with not talking about your sister. Clearly, your trust has been destroyed many times.”
Damn it, the tears would not stop welling.
She hated to be vulnerable. She’d said more today than she’d said in years, and she was already regretting it.
“It’s not just that I don’t trust people.
People don’t trust me either. Deb can’t trust me not to say the wrong thing.
And I’m not trying to say the wrong thing; it just happens.
My mother put conditions on her trust because she didn’t trust me to be the daughter she wanted.
” It all seemed perfectly obvious to her.
“But is that true, Lorna?” Micah asked kindly and handed her another tissue. “Seems to me the evidence would suggest otherwise. You were there for her. When your sister wasn’t, you were there. What’s upsetting you?”
“Oh, let’s see—that my mom had a list of things she wanted me to do to somehow forgive Kristen? Or understand her? Or accept her as she is? But her list is all about my regrets. So... not helpful, Mom. I was the good daughter. I did what I was supposed to do. And she wanted me to do more.”
“That must have been frustrating,” Micah agreed. “Let me offer a different perspective.”
“No,” Lorna said before he could say more.
“I’m just wondering if—”
“ No. I’ve already wondered enough. I’ve wondered so much my head hurts. I don’t need to wonder anymore. I’m not doing it.” She felt her feet encased in concrete when it came to that damn trust codicil. She resented it so much she could hardly think of it without wanting to scream.
“Isn’t it possible your mother understood that sometimes you must face your demons in order to move forward?
The past has a way of sucking us in and holding us there.
And if you can address those things that hold you back—the things that put you on this beanbag—don’t you want to at least try? Don’t you want to change, Lorna?”
A minute ago, she’d thought that kind of thinking was smart.
A minute ago, she was still all for trying.
But now she did not like the direction this conversation was going.
“Do you really think visiting past regrets—some of them from childhood, I might add—is going to show me the way to a better life? I don’t want to revisit them.
They are regrets, water under the bridge, which essentially means I don’t want to talk about them. ”
“Okay. But can you see any disadvantages to letting go of those things that make you feel so angry?”
Lorna felt a quake so deep she feared she would explode in his office. Those emotions, those thoughts around her so-called regrets, and her mother, and Kristen, were packed tightly away, and she didn’t think it was a good idea to get them out.
“Lorna?”
She frowned. “I have let go of the past, Micah. I never think about it.” That’s a lie , a little voice inside told her immediately.
She slammed her bomb-shelter door shut on her conscience.
“But I’ll consider exploring it.” She was not going to explore it.
Get out of here with that “opening herself up” crap.
Every time she did, something terrible happened.
Micah smiled. “I think we’ve made progress.”
“I’m not making any promises, so don’t get too excited.”
“I understand.” He looked almost smug, like he’d won something.
“I might not even come back to this stupid place,” she added.
“Not even for a sound bath?”
“Especially not for a sound bath.”
“I’ll schedule one for you after our next session. It should help you down the path of reframing all your negative thinking and self-talk,” he said with cheerful confidence.
“You seem awfully sure there is going to be a next session,” Lorna said, and rolled off the damn beanbag onto all fours. “And for your information, I feel like an idiot sitting on beanbags.”
“Thanks for the feedback.”
She made it to her feet, but her yoga pants felt twisted around her legs. She started for the door, pausing there to look back at him.
“See you tomorrow,” he said.
“Don’t be so sure,” she said, and went out the door, nearly colliding with Montreal in her haste to get out of there.