Chapter 21 Now
Now
Dimple
Dimple’s enviously thick hair is straight again today. An attempt to tuck it behind her ears has been made, but as usual, it pushes forward of its own accord. Her probing style is similar; an attempt at reining in an irrepressible curiosity.
“How are you feeling today?”
I shrug. It’s knowingly petulant, but I resent how much she’s making me dredge up and I want her to know it.
“I’m uncomfortable. Apprehensive, I guess.
These sessions haven’t been easy for me; I’ve told you too much, and I’ve no idea which scab you’re going to want to pick at today.
But I know it’s important I’m here if I’m going to straighten myself out.
” After all, I love James. My love for him and his longevity are proof of my ability to get it right, my potential to be a good human being. The kind who’ll make a great mother.
“That’s an interesting expression.”
“What is?”
“Your framing of our sessions as picking at scabs. Why do you think of them that way?”
I sigh, knead the flesh of my thighs with the heels of my hands, then bring the movement to an end.
“I don’t like it when you do that, by the way.”
“What?” she asks.
“Ask questions you already know the answers to.”
She smiles, taps the back of her pen against her notepad. “It’s not my job to put words in your mouth or assume how you’re feeling. I wouldn’t be a very good therapist if I just made these sessions about what I think,” she says. “So, why do you describe our sessions as like picking at scabs?”
Inside, I’m twisting my mouth, stretching my fingers across her intent. I still think she’s on my side, that she wants to help me. But how do I know? At the very least, I know I can’t let the knot of paranoia that’s beginning to churn in my gut grow. I don’t need more problems.
“I describe it that way,” I say, “because it hurts to pick at it. I don’t think those old wounds ever properly healed.”
Dimple simply nods once—whether intentional encouragement or a betrayal of inner thoughts, I don’t know.
In the gap, I finally build up the courage to ask my next, most important question. “I need to know I can trust you if I continue. That being open with you isn’t going to land me in trouble.”
“Given what I already know, and what you’ve already disclosed, it would be difficult at this stage for you to shock me.
But please feel free to try.” She gives me a look that I imagine is meant to be encouraging.
“We ran out of time last week, but you were telling me about the day you found your father dead.”
I try to shift my brain into gear, to focus back on where we are in the room. The thought of my dad is still a complicated one. It’s difficult to disentangle the emotions knotted together around it. All I know is that it hurts.
“Yes, it’s—it’s a difficult memory.”
“I noticed your retelling was suggestive, but unspecific about how your father died.”
My eyes snap onto hers. “What do you mean?”
The quirk of her mouth tells me she’s holding back her own rebuttal about asking questions one knows the answer to.
“How do you believe your father died?” she asks.
My eyes look away and scan the fuzzy peach, forest green, and gold of the room.
It’s tempting to try to force her to revisit the present instead, to ask that we talk about James.
He’s why I’m here, after all. Because if these resurfaced feelings go unchecked, who knows what I’ll be capable of?
But Dimple doesn’t seem particularly interested in James today.
“Can I have some water, please?”
She pours me a glass from the jug on her table and then looks at me expectantly.
“Are you okay, Natalie?” Dimple asks.
I nod.
“Are you able to answer the question?” she presses on. “How do you believe your father died?”
The truth is unavoidable.
“My mother killed him.”
“And how do you feel about this?”
It’s easy to talk about how I feel about it.
Feelings, I have a lot of. Talking about it clearly, however, is another matter.
And so, in disordered fragments, I tell her about my Feelings.
I tell her how I felt relieved at the thought of not waiting for his tightly coiled anger to spring loose again.
I tell her how disgusted I was, how my stomach churned at the strange angle of his neck, limbs all wrong like a collapsed marionette.
I tell her how I felt scared of my immediate numbness, that I felt my feelings ought to be bigger somehow.
I tell her how frightened I was of finding out what my place in the world meant without my father in it, of finding out whether my mother might grow into a bigger monster than he was with her whims unchecked.
I tell Dimple many things, and through it all, she nods like she understands.
I don’t see how she can, but I don’t blame her for pretending.
“Those are a lot of feelings,” she says.
“It was a complicated time.”
She shuffles, shoulders shimmying as she sinks into the soft back of her seat. “If you were to pick the emotion you felt was strongest in the weeks after your father’s death, what would it be?”
I take a moment to Look at her, tongue running across the back of my teeth. Her hunt carries a scent of its own and it is strong. If there’s a point she wants to get to, then she should get to it directly.
“Listen, I know what you want me to say.”
Dimple’s eyebrows rise in question. It’s almost provocative, and perhaps she realizes this, as they soon drop. She squints and opens her mouth to speak. “A reminder that it’s not my job to put words in your mouth or explain your feelings.”
I want to huff and slouch and scowl. Instead, I give her a small smile.
“You’re right. Sorry…” A pause. “Relief was definitely the most powerful feeling…Yeah. I can’t remember being more terrified than when he’d hurt our mother and disappeared, leaving Claire and me to fend for ourselves.
Things were unmistakably better after he was gone.
We were all happier. We were all safer. We had a little bit more money, too, as it turned out Dad was drinking away more than he was contributing.
And before you try gently nudging there, I know what you’re getting at…
. My mother hurt my dad, and it felt good.
I saw and felt how good a decision that was for our family, and so now, when my partners fuck up, badly, my brain is wired to think my life would be better if I hurt them, too.
Don’t you think I already know this? That it’s obvious where it comes from?
But I’m not the only woman in the world with a dead deadbeat dad, so… ”
Now I do allow myself to huff and slouch and scowl. It’s petulant behavior, I know. But I want her to see my frustration. Perhaps revisiting these old childhood memories is encouraging a regression into childish behavior. Perhaps.
“Do you have any dead relatives?” I ask.
She looks somewhere between bemused and amused. Her face looks pretty when it’s contorted like that. It’s infuriating. “Dead relatives? Yes.”
She can’t be much older than me, if older at all. The power dynamic makes me think of her as more grown up, but when I look beyond the glasses and the sensible clothes, she could be even younger than me. “Glad any of them aren’t around anymore?”
The smile on her lips flattens into a thin line.
“I’m going to take that as a yes. Any murderous tendencies of your own? No? Well, you see my point.”
As usual, Dimple is unflustered. She simply takes a moment to adjust the glasses on her face. “I’m interested. How much remorse would you say you feel for the people you’ve hurt?”
In my own way, I do feel bad about it. It would be nice to say that hurting them keeps me up at night, but it’s not so much what I’ve done as what my actions say about me that plagues me.
After all, if they hadn’t hurt me first, I wouldn’t have had to hurt them worse.
I’m sure I’ve saved countless other people from being hurt by them over the years.
But I don’t want to become the kind of person for whom the ends justify the means.
That kind of person will inevitably hurt the people they love.
My mother was that kind of person. I’m sitting in this chair because I won’t be that kind of mother.
Dimple scrutinizes the expression I’m determined to keep placid as she waits for my response. Eventually, I have to accept that if I want to get better, I’m going to have to be honest.
I smooth a thumb across the slightly oily slick of an eyebrow. “If I’m being honest, Dimple, I’d say I feel worse for what I’ve done to me, than what I’ve done to them.”