Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Logan
The bus to Fort Lauderdale leaves at five AM, which means I need to be at the stadium by four forty-five, which means I set my alarm last night for four fifteen.
And that can only mean one thing:
I’ve been lying in the dark since three fifty counting down the minutes, because that’s what a guy with anxiety does.
I blink at the alarm clock, the red letters bright against the dark room. It’s four oh two now. I yawn and rub my eyes, which are sandy with sleep.
The apartment is quiet except for the ceiling fan and air conditioning. Slowly I give up and get out of bed, leaving the light off because turning it on will be a signal that the day is starting, and if the day starts, that means today’s the day I leave Georgie for a week.
I’m not ready to turn the light on.
I make myself a protein shake and put the spoon I used for my peanut butter powder in the sink while I shake my blender bottle, the ice and coiled metal ball clacking loudly with every shake.
I stare at that spoon in the sink. Man, it drove me crazy how Lucas would leave the dishes in the sink instead of loading them.
It’s funny how you can miss something like dirty dishes.
No, you know what? I don’t miss the dirty dishes. I miss the guy who dirtied the dishes.
There’s a difference. No one actually misses dirty dishes.
As I keep shaking, I walk past box after box, looking at paperbacks and hard copies, special editions and used copies. I walk over to a box full of favorites, which I’ve left right on Lucas’s bed for no other reason than to spite his memory.
His dishes drove me crazy. My books drove him crazy.
It’s a brother thing.
This box has the complete Chronicles of Narnia and a couple of nonfiction books that are more pop psychology than deep psychology but I don’t care.
And it has my favorite nonfiction of all: Tuesdays with Morrie.
I pop the top off my blender bottle and take a drink while I hold the book in my hand. When I finish my shake, I’m still holding the book.
I put it on top of my wallet and then grab my things to leave. I double-check that I’ve remembered my toothbrush, charger, and underwear, and then, because I’m me, I check that my wallet has my ID in it … as well as the Meant to Bean patch Georgie was wearing at Spring Training.
I take it out of my wallet and run my fingers over it.
The brown patch is maybe half the size of my palm, with the stitching slightly raised around the Meant to Bean name and coffee cup logo.
The safety pin is still attached to the backing, bent slightly from when it ripped out of her shoe.
I turn it over and over in my hand, thinking about how it was a symbol for months, and now …
Now I have the real thing.
I hold it between two fingers while I grab Tuesdays with Morrie and open the book to the page I’ve read more times than I can count. In fact, the book opens to the page automatically, the spine having been trained by my constant rereading.
I love this book, but it’s a gut punch.
When the author found out his beloved mentor was dying, he visited him every Tuesday until he passed, wanting to glean all the wisdom he could from his old friend.
There’s a part about detachment that hit me hard when I read it several years ago. It’s not simply because the mentor was dying of ALS—the same disease that was slowly claiming my mother—but because I felt like the author could see through me.
The detachment he talked about wasn’t the cold, unfeeling kind where you shut down all emotion. It was the kind where you feel something all the way to your bones, let it seep into the fabric of who you are—and then you open your hand and release it.
You feel it and feel it and then somehow just let it go.
I’ve committed that passage to memory. Studied it, considered it endlessly.
I haven’t opened my hand yet.
But I want to.
I look back at the Meant to Bean patch and then put it back in the zipper coin pouch of my wallet for safekeeping.
***
The world is still asleep when I pull out of the parking lot, taking Sycamore over to Meant to Bean at four twenty in the morning.
The shop is dark, as is the apartment above.
The streetlamp on the corner throws light most of the way across the parking lot but not quite to the northwest corner, where the lending library sits in the long shadow of the live oaks.
I park and get out, and soon, I’m standing in front of the little library with its powder blue paint, brass hinge, and slightly uneven pitched roof. I open the door, return the Shel Silverstein collection, and slide Tuesdays with Morrie in next to it.
Then I close the door and stand there with my hand on the latch, and that’s when my anxiety, which has been unusually quiet all morning, decides it’s had enough of being ignored.
What are you doing?
It’s less a question than an accusation.
You’ve been going to her coffee shop since April hoping she’d appear, and she finally did.
But you think because you saw her at a game, tracked her down through questionably ethical video surveillance, and have been meeting her for a week that this—leaving a book that lays your soul on the line before you leave for a week long-road trip—is an emotionally healthy idea?
What are you doing?
I take my hand off the latch, listening to how loud my anxiety is screaming.
Have you considered that she’s not even a person to you yet?
You’ve made her into a symbol. You latched onto the idea of her when Lucas left, didn’t you?
You needed something to want so you didn’t have to look at the actual problem, which is that you don’t know who you are without your brother and you are terrified to find out.
I stand in the dark parking lot and let my brain go until it’s finished.
Because that’s the thing about anxiety—it’s not stupid, and it’s not make-believe. It reads the fine print, the actual historical evidence, and it builds a case. I have used things as symbols before. I have held on for the wrong reasons.
My anxiety keeps receipts. And it’s auditing me right now.
What would Dr. Chang want me to do?
I remember his voice, the cognitive behavioral therapy worksheets, all his talk about forcing a parasympathetic override. So I try it.
I plant my feet. Close my eyes. Inhale for four. Hold for four. Exhale for four. Hold for four. Basic box breathing to clear stress hormones, stabilize blood chemistry, and force neural reengagement, according to the worksheets.
I breathe again, keeping to that four-second pattern until my heart rate calms.
Better.
Next up: refuting the cognitive distortion with objective data.
I can hear Dr. Chang’s voice.
What does it feel like to grip when you should release?
I keep my eyes closed and think and feel.
Gripping too hard feels like my two-bedroom apartment that’s too big for me but that I haven’t moved out of yet.
It feels like standing on the mound with runners on base, beating myself up and being afraid I’m going to screw up.
It feels like everything being out of control and me grasping for it like I’m trying to catch running water in my fists.
Does this—thinking about Georgie, leaving a book for her, getting excited to see her—feel like that?
My mind runs through a hundred moments, everything from her dimples to the way she lingered against my chest when she bumped into me to her texting beg your pardon. Her dark, ringed brown eyes, sideways hearts, and sideways ice cream cones.
No.
It feels exciting, exhilarating, even. Like taking a deep breath on a crisp autumn day.
I’d be lying if I said she doesn’t represent something to me—like hope, connection, a future of my own—but she isn’t a symbol. Not only.
She’s so much more.
The rightness of that clicks into place in my chest, even as my anxiety peters out, at least for the moment.
Whoa.
I did it. I used the tools Dr. Chang has given me, and they worked.
Progress!
And maybe it’s the thrill of this progress that makes me take my cap off and look at it for a second. Powder blue and rust red, fitted perfectly in a way only people who wear a lot of baseball caps understand. I don’t want it to get grimy, so I never wear it during a game.
I only wear it to see Georgie.
I set it on top of the library.
She’ll see the hat before she sees the book. She’ll know someone left it on purpose—me. Hopefully she’ll even find Tuesdays with Morrie and read it and find the part I underlined so she can understand something about me without me having to lay my soul bare. Again.
I stand there for one final moment before turning back to my truck, my anxiety calming the rest of the way, probably because there’s nothing left for either of us to say.
As I drive out of the lot, I take one last glance in my rearview, at the hat sitting on top of the powder blue library in the predawn dark.
I turn at the light.
Fingertips. No palm.
Let it go.