Chapter 21
SHAY
During the first session, Shay did not cry.
Most people do, Simon had told her.
The stone building on Riverside was stately and imposing, but within, there wasn’t a hint of pretension.
The air smelled of burnt popcorn, and the front room was overcrowded, people tightly packed on plaid couches, people carrying in metal folding chairs.
Some had the wan, agitated faces of addicts she’d come to recognize after more than two years in New York, and others seemed like they could have been nurses or teachers, in bright white turtlenecks and suede loafers.
They hugged one another, obnoxiously sincere, smiling at her as if she were already one of them.
Everyone but Simon was a stranger. Come to one session, he’d told her after their walk through the park.
I think it’ll help you feel like yourself again.
The camaraderie was cloying, one woman even squeezing Shay’s arm as she passed. Within a few minutes of arriving, she wanted to leave, and she might have if she hadn’t been the first to play.
When she sat on the metal chair, it shifted so much she thought it would buckle beneath her. She’d washed her hair that morning, and she pulled at a strand as everyone watched her, too patient, too attentive, waiting for her to open her mouth.
Simon had to prompt her with questions. It was difficult to talk so much about herself.
Since she was a teenager, men had seemed to like her reticence when it came to personal details (how many times had she heard You’re not like other girls, and how awful it was, that this was a compliment?)—except for Joel.
He always wanted to know more in the same way she always wanted more of him, desperate for stories of him as a little boy, desperate to know what book he was reading, right at that moment, on the subway.
This was why it was so hard to stay away from him, why she could never seem to, even when she told herself it was best for both of them.
But this was not like being with Joel. Her voice was unsteady, tinny and small.
Two children clomped down the hallway, chanting a nursery rhyme: “She asked her mother, mother, mother, for five cents more, more, more.” The night before, she’d barely slept again, studying Andrew’s profile as he softly snored.
She talked about Columbia. It seemed like the easiest place to begin.
When she was growing up, school had become a refuge from her cramped apartment with its strained silences and drafty windows.
Sometimes she felt like she knew more than her teachers, more than her mother.
“My father, though . . .” she began, and then changed her mind, sensing that fracture that always threatened to spider into countless cracks.
Her intelligence was her escape, her way out, but there was something about her law classes that felt insurmountable, like she was climbing up a sheer rock face, unable to find purchase.
She had studied literature in college and could recite entire sonnets from memory, but details from her law textbooks never stayed with her.
It was all so dry, so impenetrable, and her professors seemed to be waiting for her to drop out, her male classmates—once they realized she wouldn’t sleep with them—irritated by her presence.
And should she drop out? She’d stubbornly persisted, barely passing, and now it was her third year.
She hadn’t told anyone how much she was struggling.
She was loved for her strength, how little she asked from others, and she’d been lying for too long.
And even if she was honest, what would she do afterward?
Become what Andrew secretly wanted—even if he said he loved how ambitious she was—a housewife?
A woman who was completely dependent on her husband? Then what would it all have been for?
When she stopped speaking, she was shaking. She looked around the room, but everyone was painfully silent. She could no longer even hear the children in the hall. What had she expected? Why had she come here?
And then a wiry woman in a denim shirt opened her mouth.
“You’re an uptight bitch.”
“Excuse me?” Shay said, indignant. Given how they’d all acted when she arrived, like idealistic hippies, she had not expected this.
“You think you’re smart, but I don’t think you know anything.
Reading books doesn’t make you smart. Like out in the world, none of that matters, and you just fooled everyone before because you could, what, bullshit about Shakespeare?
You thought that made you smarter than your teachers, than your own mom? People who actually lived and worked?”
“What the fuck do you know?” Shay radiated with anger.
She liked to pretend comments and insults didn’t affect her, though of course they did.
They lingered for years. A wild lynx, Aunt Eleanor once said when she thought Shay couldn’t hear her, and the shame she had felt, the hot, furious tears she’d cried in the closet.
“There’s nothing wrong with law school and there’s nothing wrong with being a housewife,” the woman continued.
“I didn’t—” Shay began.
“There’s just something wrong with you.”
Shay was too stunned to respond. Her cheeks burned, but it was no longer anger—it was embarrassment.
The woman was saying what she feared was true, whispers that had followed her to and from class, that had woken her with a hiss in the night.
That maybe what was different about her was not a source of strength, but a source of weakness.
An instability, a fragility, a mirror of her father’s faults in the same way she was once a mirror of his light.
And what had it meant, that this woman had seen this so instantly?
Who were these people, gathered together in this house?
The next person began to speak, an older man with wide-set eyes, his comments just as brutal and pointed. Another followed. And another.
As they spoke, she began to nod, and this seemed to change something in the room, everyone leaning in closer, mimicking the exact motions of her head. A syncopation to their heartbeats. They had all been there before.
William came to her then—a memory of him being handed to her as a newborn, this raw, celestial being that was not quite human but not quite anything else, wrapped in rough cotton.
She was only four years old, but she felt as if her parents were giving him to her.
If you don’t hold him close, he’ll fall, they said, and so she did, crying out when they tried to take him back, nearly snarling.
He was hers, and she was his. Certain things had come easily to her: the ability to ruthlessly assess a situation, to take care of herself.
William never had this. He toddled toward busy streets, fell in love with stray dogs, napped when Shay tried to read him books, sweet and unfocused, porous and trusting.
No one knew where he came from, how he came to be William.
All Shay knew was that she had to use her powers to protect him.
There was an echo of that first memory in this house, inverted. Somehow, she knew these strangers would protect her. If only she could give herself to them.
“You’re right,” she said. “You’re all right.”
When Simon told her to stand, she felt buoyant.
The young woman—Cleo, she’d learn later—came forward to hug her, wrapping her arms around her back like they had known each other for years, and there was a new lightness in Shay’s bones, a tingling at her palms that felt like a weight had been taken from her, that it was now being shared by everyone in that room.