Chapter 11
Jackson
Inever envisioned I would ever speak to a therapist, but I hit rock bottom.
Last week involved a rebirth of sorts.
Checking out of the motel room where I’d crawled into a bottle of whiskey to lick my wounds was the first step in that.
It started with a dream after I’d passed out again.
Home from work, Ellie was in the kitchen holding a baby. She turned to grin at me as I walked into the room; the baby with my blue eyes gurgled happily.
“You’ve spilled something on your shirt,” Ellie said with a smile. When I looked down, I saw I was still wearing the same sour-smelling clothes from the motel, and I was holding an empty whiskey bottle.
I looked up, and Ellie was gone.
And then I woke up.
I was still drunk. When I sat up, the contents of my stomach sloshed, and I felt queasy and pathetic.
I was sick of it all. The mess I’d made of myself, my life, all of it.
The feeling chased me into the shower, and when I got out, I called Wade. He came to the motel after work, clutching a giant cup of black coffee. Thus began the process of being… better.
I found a downtown apartment that came fully furnished. A cold, sterile place, but it wasn’t expensive, and it had everything I needed to start over. There were things I’d wanted from the house, but it’s Ellie’s sanctuary now. I refuse to enter it without her express permission.
I went to my return-to-work interview with my boss and told him I wouldn’t make the same mistakes I had made before.
Dennis agreed to my office-switch request, moving my files and computer into a room further down the hall. I was leaving work one day with my boss when a man in blue jeans and a black T-shirt came out of nowhere and handed me a thick brown envelope.
“You’ve been served,” he said, snapping a picture of me holding the letter with his cell phone and walking away before I could ask what the letter contained.
I emptied the contents into my hand, saw the word ‘Divorce’, and my stomach dropped.
My boss took one look at my face and said, “Go see a therapist.”
He recommended a therapist he knew, and I made an appointment for the next day.
That was a few days ago, and I haven’t regretted the decision to see Lynn Wilkes, a dark-haired woman in her late forties with sharp gray eyes who dresses in black pantsuits and pastel button-down shirts.
In her office, there’s a green velvet couch.
She told me I could lie on it if it would make me more comfortable, but I refused.
Her office is beige with pops of green. Her desk is walnut brown, and there are two floral fabric armchairs facing each other opposite the couch, with a low coffee table where I usually set down my coffee beside the glass of water and box of tissues that Lynn has ready for me before our session starts.
I always sit in the blue-green armchair.
Lynn crosses her arms, her small notebook resting in her lap, as she listens to me recount my unexpected run-in with Ellary in the coffee shop.
“She looked sick, and I wanted to ask what was wrong, but she wouldn’t have told me even if I’d asked,” I say.
The conversations with my therapist are more two-sided than I thought they would be. In my head, maybe it’s the result of watching movies with patients lying on a couch with their hands folded over their stomachs, talking and talking while the therapist did nothing but listen and occasionally nod.
Maybe some therapists are like that, but my sessions with Lynn are like talking to a friend. Not a friend who knows everything about you, but one who never shies away from asking you tough questions that force you to confront the things you’re running from.
I hid a lot from her at our first meeting, when I wandered into her beige and green office with the thick double-glazed windows that muffle all the traffic sounds from the road just outside
“What do you think might be wrong with her?” Lynn asks.
I lift one shoulder. “A voice in my head thinks it’s bad. That she could be ill. Maybe it’s cancer. Maybe she’s dying.”
“But?”
“That’s the panic talking. The part of me that wants to help her but thinks this is one thing I can’t help her with, and she’s right to push me away because I hurt her so badly.”
“So instead you lied about her looking good,” she says.
I take a sip of my cold coffee.
I let it get cold on the walk to her office.
Not because I didn’t want to drink it. The latte I’d grabbed from the coffee shop I’d popped into before my last therapy session had been good, and there’d been no sign of my wife behind the counter.
When I went back for another latte today, I’d been so shocked that I froze when Ellie had turned, smiling at me from behind the counter.
“I didn’t want to say anything that would make her push me away,” I admit.
The truth is that Ellie looked tired and pale, wan, and thinner than the last time I saw her. Still beautiful, she could not be beautiful, but rundown.
Sick.
“And what do you think about that?”
I roll my eyes at her. “I’m an idiot for thinking lies will improve anything between Ellie and me. It’s the reason she’s divorcing me in the first place.”
Lynn had pulled out the details of my life imploding from me with a few careful, quiet, pointed questions.
I’d kept the truth of what I’d done tucked up inside. Ashamed, embarrassed, and angry with myself. I came here knowing she’d expect me to talk, yet desperate not to reveal a single painful thing. Like a ball of thread, she’d known exactly which loose thread to pull to cause me to unravel.
It had not felt good to reveal it all.
Some people say talking makes them feel better. It doesn’t at first. At first, all you’re left with is pain and anger and hurt. Shame. Sharing the awful thing you’ve done to a person you profess you love is not a good feeling.
Trying to understand why, how, and what led to a decision you can’t understand you would make is confusing, complicated, and frustrating, but sometimes it feels incredibly freeing.
As if you’ve put pieces of a puzzle together and you see a little more of what makes you tick.
Parts of yourself you had never looked at before.
“I’d never call you an idiot. I doubt you think you’re an idiot either. How did it feel to know that she wants to go through with the divorce?”
I look down at my paper coffee cup, not wanting to answer. But I’m here to be a better man than I have been. A better husband to Ellary if it’s not too late to convince her I’m deserving of a second chance at our marriage.
I’ve told her that I’ll give her a divorce. And I won’t fight her on it. Anything she wants: a house, a car, money, anything. It’s hers.
But I love her, and knowing I have six months to convince her to give our marriage another chance before it becomes final is what I’m clinging to right now.
I don’t want to lose her.
“It hurts. I wanted to tell her that I’m trying to be better.
That I’d like us to try marriage counseling, but it would feel too much like I’m showing off.
” Lifting my head, I focus on the window toward the coffee shop.
I can’t see it from here, but I imagine Ellie behind the counter, smiling, happy…
at least until she saw me. “I don’t want her to think that I’m only doing this to get her back. ”
“And why are you doing therapy?”
It’s not the first time she’s asked. We circle the questions that I struggle to answer. Lynn will nod when I stumble or hesitate too long, smile, and say we can come back to the question another time. No need to force an answer when I don’t have one.
“I never knew I had it in me to cheat.” The quiet words come from a place these therapy sessions are opening up.
“Because you’re too good to cheat?”
My head snaps toward her. I frown, angry until I remember what this is.
Not an attempt to provoke a response from me.
To get me to think.
To get me to confront aspects of myself that I don’t like and don’t want to see.
“Yes. I saw those TV shows and movies of guys who threw away good things they had, and I told myself I was lucky to have Ellie. That I would never hurt her like that. I thought I was better than those men. They were weak, and I was strong. But I was wrong. It’s not about strength or weakness.
It’s about appreciation. No, it’s about taking someone for granted.
Believing no matter what, that they’ll always be there. ”
“Explain what you mean by appreciation.”
“I took Ellie for granted. I took the ordinary life we had for granted.” She was there for all of it.
Going pro. When I crashed and burned as a rookie, she was with me when we came back home.
“I missed being a star. Ellie never stopped looking at me as if I were a pro NHL star. Her light and belief in me never faded. And I knew it never would. But it wasn’t enough. I wanted more.”
“More people to look at you like a star?”
I nod.
“And where does Rachel fit in with this?”
I can barely say her name, let alone hear it, without a sick churn in my gut. I swallow the bile, and we dig into the reasons I would cheat on my wife, whom I love.
Our session runs late, and I hurry from the building, glancing toward the coffee shop, not seeing Ellie’s car parked nearby.
But now that I know she works there, I’ll make a habit of stopping by.
I won’t linger too long or push her to talk.
I just want to check she’s okay, since something is wrong with her and she’s still deleting my text messages.
During my drive back to work, I think about the therapy session.
Today was a hard one. But necessary. I needed to say things out loud that I haven’t wanted to face.
Maybe I won’t always go twice a week, but during our introductory meeting, Lynn recommended twice weekly for the first month or so, and depending on how the sessions go, she’d like to reduce them to once a week and maybe even once a fortnight.
But my mind keeps pulling me back to Ellie looking so sick.
What is wrong with my beautiful wife?