Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Logan
Dr. Chang’s office doesn’t look like a therapist’s office.
There’s no couch or box of tissues, no abstract art or fish tank.
Instead, there’s a desk, two chairs facing each other, a window that looks out at the practice fields, and the pen he uses for brainspotting.
He’s holding it before I’ve even sat down.
He works for the Firebirds organization and primarily works with guys in the Majors, but he also travels to the different farm teams, giving the best prospects the mental help they need to move up.
He’s probably in his early sixties and peers at me over his reading glasses. “I understand you leave tomorrow?”
“Thursday,” I say. “Flight’s at six.”
“AM or PM?” he asks.
“PM. Does that matter?”
“Only if you like sleeping. I love sleeping.”
I snort, and he gives me a pleasant smile. “Have you thought about what you want to be working on today?”
“Yeah,” I say, not looking at him. “I’ve met someone and I’m afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Of not knowing the difference between holding on to her because I like her so much or holding on because I’m me.”
He nods. “When you’re talking about that right now, what are you noticing?”
I hate this exercise. Like I don’t overanalyze every thought in my head enough, I also have to overanalyze my body.
Experience has taught me I can’t be glib about it, though, so I sit and let myself feel it all.
“My chest feels tight. Kind of fluttery. I have a hard time swallowing. There’s a pit in my stomach. My hands are cold.”
“Your hands?” he repeats.
“Yeah. It’s all the cliché crap.”
“Cliché how?”
I look out at the field, not focusing on anything but the green of the grass. The crisp, clean lines. “Every song about falling in love, about missing someone. You know.”
He nods again. “On a one to ten scale, how strongly do you feel it all?”
“Probably a six.” The lump I can’t swallow tells me it’s more like a seven, but six is already dramatic enough.
“Thank you. I’m going to help you find a brain spot now, and your only job is to notice how it feels.”
I settle into the chair, plant my feet, and let my hands rest on my knees the way he’s taught me as I put on headphones.
Gentle ambient tones play over the headphones, panning back and forth from one ear to the other as Dr. Chang holds his pen up at the edge of my visual field, sweeping slowly until I feel a tightening behind my ribs.
“There,” I say.
“And up and down now,” he says, the headphones muffling his voice. He moves his pen vertically. “Let me know where the feeling is strongest.”
He goes up, and there’s nothing. But when he starts going back down, I brace myself.
The tightening intensifies until I feel choked.
“There,” I say again.
It’s low, a little to the left of seven o’clock. It’s always this same stupid spot. Dr. Chang never asks me what’s there; he simply holds his pen and I stare at the end and pay way too much attention to my body.
We sit like that for a long time.
A really long time.
After I don’t know how long, Dr. Chang asks, “While staying on that spot, what are you noticing?”
“That tightness in my chest.” I keep my eyes on the spot. “And in my hands. They’re cold.”
“Stay with the cold,” he says. “Keep looking at the spot and sit with that feeling.”
I don’t answer right away. After months of this, I’ve learned the easy answer isn’t the only answer. With my eyes firmly at seven o’clock, I let my mind flit wherever it will.
And it takes too long to get there, but it gets there.
“Georgie,” I say. “The girl I told you about. Two nights ago at dinner, she fainted. It was terrifying. She went limp and cold, and I—” I stop.
“What?”
“I panicked.”
“What did panic look like?”
“Nothing. Action. I dropped down to the ground and got her help, but during that instant … and then waiting—”
“Stay with it. Think about it.”
I do as he says, sitting with the feeling in all of its discomfort. The tightness in my chest expands, climbing up my throat where it throbs, but it takes up space lower, too. This all-consuming fear that nothing I did would be enough to save her, this unwillingness to let go.
I’m still staring at the pen low and to the left in my field of vision. I blink and the pen disappears, and I see Georgie’s colorless lips, the way her fingertips were almost blue.
“I gripped. I couldn’t let her go, couldn’t let her out of my sight. I stayed over and barely slept. Watched her all night.”
“Keep looking. Is there anything else there?”
I keep my eyes on the end of his pen and let the question linger.
“I don’t know.”
“Does this feeling tell you anything about what’s happening right now? With Georgie?”
I stare at the blue tip and think. “No,” I say slowly. “It’s just there.”
“Keep looking. Keep feeling it all,” he says. “Let your eyes come back when it feels done, not before.”
My eyes stay fixed on that spot while I breathe.
The tightness loosens by degrees, easing so slowly and subtly, I don’t notice how much easier it is to breathe until I’m inhaling fully, like there was a rubber band around my lungs that’s finally snapped.
I remove the headphones, the air on my ears making me shiver.
“How do you feel?” he asks.
“Looser. Less like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“That’s good.” He sets the pen down. “Anything you want to talk about now?”
I turn my focus back outside, to the field, where the lawn mower is cutting perfect diagonal stripes into the grass.
“Yeah. That question I asked when I first got here.”
I turn the thought over in my head, trying to orient it so it’s facing up in my head. My texts with Georgie flitter past until there’s a snag. My text to her about the Tree.
Is it really giving freely if she never knew there was another choice?
I think about Tuesdays with Morrie and that section on detachment.
“How do you know the difference,” I say, “between holding onto someone because you love them and holding onto them because gripping too hard is your MO?”
Dr. Chang picks his pen back up, but he’s not writing anything or having me track the movement. I wonder if this is how he thinks through things.
“Have you ever felt the difference before?”
“That’s the whole problem: I don’t know.
Watching Liesel and Lucas both move on with their lives has felt disproportionately big for something so natural.
When I lost my mom, I felt like a part of me was cut out forever, and it can never grow back.
Every change in my life feels like a smaller version of that.
These chunks of me keep getting taken out, and then they’re just gone forever. ”
“Okay. And what’s the problem with that?”
“Like I said: They don’t grow back.”
“What if they don’t need to grow back? What if you’re allowed to grow around them?”
My mind goes instantly to a tree—not the Tree, but a willow in my backyard in Chicago.
It’s a big beautiful tree with a gnarly-looking trunk that Lucas once gouged out with an axe when we were nine.
He always hated school, and our fourth grade teacher made it worse.
Our teacher compared Lucas to me and especially Liesel a lot.
One day after being humiliated, he came home and grabbed an axe from the garage and started whaling on the tree.
Mom flipped when she saw him from the kitchen window.
She ran outside, grabbed the axe, and sent him to our room until dinner.
She never knew the teacher was belittling him, saying it was a good thing he was athletic, because any career where he had to read a book would never be an option.
My mom never knew it, but Liesel and I did. I think we were all shocked when the tree didn’t die. A tough, bumpy callus started forming around the wound, and the tree miraculously kept growing.
Dad had a landscaper come out, and the man explained that the willow would probably close the gap over the injury but that the part around the wound would likely decay and leave a hollow core as the tree grew.
There’s something beautiful about that to me.
“Maybe,” I tell Dr. Chang.
“Logan, we’ve been doing this for, what, four, five months? You’ve been gripping too long for two seasons—ever since you switched to throwing a knuckleball. Why don’t you go back to your other pitches?”
“Doug wants a knuckleballer.”
“Doug wants good pitchers, and you were on his radar before you even made the switch. Knuckleball is the hardest pitch to throw. Of every pitch out there, why that one?”
I feel like I’m staring at his pen again, my chest getting tight, my throat closing. “I don’t know.”
A soft clicking comes from his desk clock—a sign we’re out of time—but after he turns it off, he doesn’t kick me out. “You should spend some time thinking about this. Maybe in the tank Thursday morning.”
I glance back out the window. The riding lawn mower has moved halfway across the field, still cutting the kind of diagonal patterns into the grass that I get nostalgic for the second every season ends.
“Logan.” He waits until I look at him. “I don’t know how to tell you the difference between clinging to this girl and caring about her. But I don’t think you’re asking for permission to care about her, are you?”
“No.”
“Right. Because you already do.”
“Yes.”
“Then I imagine you’re wondering how much caring about her will cost you.”
“Yes.”
“A lot.” He smiles. “The more she’s worth, so to speak, the more it’ll cost you, no matter how or when things end—in eight weeks or eighty years. Caring comes with a steep price. The question is whether or not you’re willing to pay it. And whether it’ll pay off.”
“That’s what I want. I want to know if it’s going to work out. If it’s going to last.”
“Nobody knows that going in. You have to decide if the pain of not trying outweighs the pain of trying and getting hurt. I’m sure there’s a baseball metaphor somewhere in there I’m missing.”