Chapter 21 In Session #2
"My last performance ended with a generalized tonic-clonic seizure in front of just over five thousand people.
Some people filmed it, and by the next morning, it was everywhere.
I was in the hospital, and people were making gifs out of it, memes, the whole machinery of public humiliation moving very efficiently while I was on a drip.
" She kept her voice level, the way she always did with this part.
"I decided I didn't want to be seen that way again.
So I chose to stop before it could happen a second time. "
There. She’d said it. Clean and contained. She waited for Florence to nod, say something about resilience or bravery, and move on.
Instead, she said, "That sounds like an incredibly difficult thing to navigate while you're coming to terms with a diagnosis."
Nobody had said that before. Not like that. Catherine felt the heat rise up her neck, and then, unexpectedly, the stupid threat of tears. She blinked until it passed.
Florence waited, "We can slow down if you need to."
Catherine shook her head.
"Okay. Take your time."
Catherine inhaled once, deeply, then met Florence's gaze. There. Composed.
"You've described how the public responded," Florence continued. "How the internet responded." She paused. "But what about the people closer to you? Your most recent seizure, five months ago, was it? Was the response different that time?"
Catherine looked at the bookshelf.
"In some respects," she said finally. "Thankfully, it hadn't made it to social media this time.
And there was someone I'd become—" she chose the word carefully, "—close to.
Romantically. She didn't know about the epilepsy.
She happened to be working a shift in the emergency department when I was brought in.
She was the doctor who stabilized me." She paused, deciding how much to say.
"She sat beside my bed for hours while I was unconscious.
And then I ended things with her the moment I woke up. "
"What did she say when you ended things?" Florence asked.
"She said she could respect my decision even if she didn't agree with it." Catherine's throat tightened slightly at the memory. "Which was so characteristically Theodora."
Florence nodded slowly. "So you ended the relationship because she'd witnessed you being unwell?"
"I ended it because I couldn't look at her without knowing she had that image of me.
And I couldn't bear the thought of her looking at me and seeing it too.
" She paused. "It made me feel less than.
" Less than what, she couldn't quite say.
Or rather, there were too many answers. Less than worthy of Theodora.
Less than worthy of being hers. Less than whole.
"I assume you would have told her about the epilepsy at some point?”
Catherine nodded.
“What would that have looked like? What would you have said?"
Catherine opened her mouth and found she didn't have an answer. She'd never actually thought that far ahead. She'd imagined the conversation in the abstract, the right moment, the right framing, but she'd never imagined the actual words.
"I don't know," she said slowly. "When I woke up, she asked why I hadn't told her. She was hurt." Catherine looked down briefly. "She said she hadn't thought she was just anyone to me. And she was right. She wasn't."
"But you still didn't tell her?”
"No."
"Why not?"
Catherine was quiet for a moment. "Because with her I could still be who I was before." The words came out more honestly than she'd intended. "The version of myself I actually liked." A brief, flat laugh that didn't quite land. "I'm aware of how that sounds."
"Which is?"
"Selfish. Manipulative." She said it without inflection, the way you say something you've turned over so many times it's lost its edges.
"Do you think that's what you are?"
Catherine considered it properly, maybe for the first time. "I can be."
"So can everyone else," Florence said.
Catherine looked at her. That wasn't the response she'd been expecting, but she suspected that was exactly the point.
"At the time, it felt like self-preservation," Catherine said, and was mildly surprised to find she meant it.
“I think I spent months building something with her very deliberately while simultaneously maintaining a perfectly good exit.
I kept my epilepsy to myself. I kept certain things at arm's length.
I made sure there was always just enough distance that if something happened, I could frame it as not having been that serious.
" She paused. "But then, it turned out it was serious, and I didn't have anywhere to put that. So I ended it instead."
Florence nodded gently, "You said the seizure created an imbalance. Is equality something you require in order to feel safe with someone?”
Catherine opened her mouth and closed it again.
"I think," she said, "that I've spent most of my adult life being very good at things.
Professionally. Socially. I know how to be composed, I know how to be impressive, I know how to walk into a room and command it.
" She paused. "And I had worked very hard for Theodora to see me that way.
Not falsely. I wasn't performing something I wasn't with her.
But I was…curating, perhaps. Showing her the version of myself I felt most confident in. "
"And the seizure took that away?"
"Yes." She heard something shift in her own voice, something she hadn't intended.
"I have never, ever, wanted anyone's pity.
And I woke up in that hospital bed knowing she'd seen me entirely—" She stopped.
"Undignified is the word I keep coming back to.
I know it's not the right word for a medical event.
I know that intellectually. But it's the only word that fits. "
"Who taught you that illness was undignified?" Florence asked.
Catherine felt her response arrive before she'd had time to prepare for it, before she could arrange her face into something neutral.
Her mother's voice. Beauty fades, Catherine, but prestige remains.
"That's a longer conversation," she said.
"We have time."
Catherine looked at her hands in her lap. The hands that had been shaking twenty minutes ago and were steadier now, though not entirely still.
"My mother," she said, and left a small gap after it, the way you leave a gap after a word that contains a lot of other words.
"She had very firm ideas about what it meant to be a Matthews.
What it meant to be a woman in the profession I was in.
Weakness was not something she had much patience for.
Vulnerability, least of all." She paused.
"She started screening my calls after the Royal Albert Hall, to create distance from the coverage…
I've never said that out loud before," Catherine said, more to herself than to Florence.
"I've told people closest to me about the skit SNL did.
About the memes. Those things I can say with a kind of dark humor that makes them easier to carry.
" She paused. "But I've never actually said that my mother decided I was a liability.
Even when Theodora asked about her, I just said we weren't close.
" She looked at the window. "Which is technically accurate.
But really, I couldn't be honest, because who would want to be involved with a woman whose own mother couldn't be bothered. "
Catherine blinked twice, and this time didn't entirely manage to stop the tears, just managed to keep them to one, which tracked silently down one cheek before she pressed her fingertips against it.
"I'm sorry," she said automatically.
"Don't be," Florence said as she handed a tissue box to her.
Catherine sat with that for a moment. "I think I have quite a lot of work to do," she said finally.
She'd expected to feel worse for saying it out loud. Instead, there was just exhaustion. The kind that comes from holding something tightly for a very long time and finally, in a room she hadn't been in before today, in front of a woman she'd met less than an hour ago, setting it down.
She was still here. Catherine Matthews, sitting in a mid-century armchair with her hands in her lap and tears she hadn't entirely managed to stop. The world had not, as it turned out, ended.
Who knew.
Florence reached for her diary. "I have Mondays at midday free for the foreseeable future."
Catherine thought of the bench outside, of the seven minutes she'd spent considering leaving. She thought of Theodora's chair still warm when she'd woken up in the hospital. The note dissolving in the sink.
“Monday at midday works," she said.