Chapter 19
Ihad a hard time staying asleep since she left my apartment.
I’d fall asleep, even get a few hours in, but every time I got close to true relaxation, my brain served up memories I didn’t want, images I’d buried deep.
Paired with the reminder of the heat of her arm brushing against mine, it had my mind busy activating those memories all night, despite my numerous attempts to fully scrub my brain of them.
By the time I showed up at Iris’s office a week after our sushi lunch together, I was so sleep deprived that I was practically drunk from it. I was sure I looked like I’d been hit by a truck. I certainly felt like it; emotionally and physically.
She opened the door and tilted her head.
“Are you okay?” She was a vision in her brown leather skirt and yellow blouse.
Her dark hair was braided away from her face, accentuating her big eyes and freckles.
I gulped and looked away. I laughed; it came out as a hollow, dry sound.
“Am I ever okay?” Then added, “I haven’t been sleeping well. ”
Instead of pushing back to inquire why that was, she stepped aside and gestured to the couch behind her. “Lie down.”
I blinked at her; my eyes burned with exhaustion. “What is this? Nap time?”
She smiled faintly. “Just lie down, Danny.”
I walked in, too tired to argue. The couch was so comfortable.
Just like I’d remembered. So soft that as I sank into the cushions, it almost felt like being held.
A sensation I was not well acquainted with but one I could still think of fondly despite my visceral reaction to Iris’s accidental touch the other day.
Iris, who now stood before me and held out a folded throw blanket.
I hesitated before taking it. Something about her quiet gesture, the gentleness that it held made the inside of my chest twist. But I took it anyway and wrapped myself in it, almost letting out a sigh as the thick, soft material enveloped my body.
I turned my face away from her, practically burying my nose into one of the cushions of the couch, and my eyes closed of their own volition.
Iris didn’t have to tell me to do it. The blanket smelled of her.
I breathed it in. It was a soothing scent, warm with a bite of sweetness.
I tried not to fall asleep, I really gave it a gallant effort, but it was next to impossible not to slip off into oblivion.
I was surrounded by softness and warmth.
Plus, Iris was here; she would watch over me.
She would keep the nightmares at bay so I could finally get a break.
One I’d been chasing after for so long. It was like years of keeping one eye open and watching my back fell away and, in an instant, I was dead to the world.
Not the dead I so fervently desired but good enough for now.
Then I truly slept. No nightmares found me in my slumber.
It was just dark, quiet, peaceful, and nothing at all.
When I woke up, my brain went straight into fight mode.
That twitchy, half-awake moment where you don’t know if you’re safe or if you should already be running.
My heart was thudding, my mouth tasted like old pennies, and for a second, I didn’t even know where the hell I was.
Not until I heard the soft ticking of a clock, a clock I didn’t have.
I turned and looked at said clock, it was 4:22 p.m. The stupid clock reminded me where I was.
I was still in Iris’s office. I was on her couch, wrapped up in her blanket.
I had actually slept. And not that half-sleep where your body jerks every two seconds because it’s bracing for a memory.
No, I had experienced real sleep, with no nightmares.
That realization had me sitting up quickly.
“Shit. I slept through your whole day.”
Iris was still at her desk, sipping something, tea maybe. A book sat in front of her. She looked up when I spoke, startled to find me awake and talking. “You needed it.”
“I will pay you for the time.” I rubbed at my face. I needed to brush my teeth; my eyes were still thick with sleep. “Or I’ll pay double next session. Whatever you want. I’m so sorry.”
She set her mug down. “Has no one ever just done something kind for you, without needing something in return?”
The question caught me so off guard I actually froze.
I stared at her. “What?” Her words had knocked the air right out of me.
The muscles in my neck clenched, my brain scrambled for a sarcastic one-liner to throw back at her, but I came up with nothing.
All that reverberated within me was a growing and heavy discomfort.
I sat there, frozen, my only movement was my eyes blinking, wondering if I had misheard her.
I peeled my tongue from the roof of my mouth and pressed my lips closed, holding back the words that crawled up my throat.
“I mean it.” Her voice was quiet. “Has anyone ever done something kind for you, just because they cared?”
I looked away. My throat felt raw, and when I swallowed, it burned like I’d chewed on glass.
“I feel like maybe I haven’t been really clear with you from the start, and it seems like it’s left some confusion on your part.
So let me spell it out for you, fully. My birth mother left me at a gas station when I was three,” I said.
“She told the attendant she’d be right back.
She never came back.” I hadn’t planned on saying that today, if ever, but here we were.
“After that, from ages four to ten, I was passed around from foster home to foster home. I never stayed in one place long enough to really unpack a suitcase. Or have a place that felt like home. I never stayed in one school long enough to make friends. Some of the houses and families were decent, even okay. Some weren’t.
Then I landed in the one that kept me the longest, but it was the one I wished hadn’t. ”
Iris didn’t interrupt me. She just listened, like she always did.
“He was a church deacon,” I said, and the words felt like poison on my tongue. “I was ten when I was placed there. I was forced to stay until I was seventeen. You can fill in the blanks however you’d like, because whatever you come up with, probably happened to me there.”
She didn’t move. She didn’t look shocked or horrified either. She just sat still. A steady counterpart to my chaos. My voice cracked.
“He called me Danny Boy. Told me I was a good boy when I held still. He broke my ribs when I didn’t.
So no, just Iris, no one has done anything kind for me.
No one has ever cared about me. And they certainly didn’t do anything for me with nothing expected in return.
” I hadn’t said that name out loud in years.
I just heard it reverberating in my head in my nightmares.
I pressed the heels of my palms against my eyes as they burned with the pain of my memories.
Hard enough that I almost saw pinpricks of light in the darkness.
Like I was trying to shove everything back, deep where it belonged.
I didn’t want to cry. I couldn’t let it happen.
I had done such a good job of bottling it all up and packing it away, but it didn’t work.
To my sheer embarrassment, the defenses to the dam broke.
I was horrified as it started, but once it did, I couldn’t take it back.
Couldn’t make it stop. At first my sobs were silent; my body shook with tears that came harder the more I tried to stop them.
Then my shoulders began to vibrate with all the emotion that burst out of me at once.
Then the ugly sobs started, and they ripped out of me, having been stored in a place inside of me that I hadn’t acknowledged in years.
The burn of the pain, the yearning for something different, the wish that what had happened to me wasn’t tattooed into my very soul—it all burst from me in such body wracking cries that I scared myself from the magnitude of them.
I hated the noise, the snot, and the way my body shook like I was a little kid.
Nothing I did would make it stop, so I let myself get swept away in the grief, the pain and the enormity of my feelings that had been buried so deep for so long.
Iris didn’t speak. At least she didn’t say anything that I could hear over the racket I was making.
But I did feel her move to sit down next to me on the couch.
Not too close, not touching me. She was just near me, and I was so aware of her.
For the first time in my life another person’s presence next to me felt safe.
“I’m not weak,” I said through clenched teeth once the tears finally dried up and my body stopped shaking.
“I know,” she said, her voice sweet and gentle.
More tears came at that. My nose was running, and I wiped it unceremoniously on the sleeve of my shirt. She could think I was disgusting; I didn’t care. She already knew I was crazy; I may as well also be gross.
And then—a soft hand landed on my arm. So light I barely registered it.
It was almost nothing, but I still felt a jolt run through me when I realized what was happening.
I didn’t have the energy to move away or make a joke or ignore it.
Instead, I leaned into it. Just a little.
We sat like that, me breathing in the aftermath of my heightened emotions, her breathing out comfort and safety.
Then she opened her arms a little more, and I shifted my body just a bit until suddenly I was wrapped up in her.
She was warm, fragile, strong, and soft.
It felt real. I may have sighed out a groan, I wasn’t sure.
I couldn’t even summon up embarrassment if I wanted to, I was completely depleted of energy.
I had never been hugged like this before. The hugs I remembered all came with a price, and this one felt like the first human contact I’d ever had that hadn’t cost me something.
My body collapsed against her, and my arms went around her waist, resting on her back. She didn’t falter. She didn’t try to fix it. Didn’t say it would be okay. She just let me be, and it undid me all over again.
When I pulled away, I sat up and wiped at my face.
“You’re just trying to get through my list by checking off a hug for me.
” I was finally able to get out a joke, and I said it in an attempt to push away all this unfamiliar heaviness.
It was like I knew if I didn’t, I would collapse under the pressure of trying to gather all my secrets back up and push them back down to where they had come from.
She laughed, gently. “You’re on to me, Danny.”
We sat there in the quiet, just breathing. Right when the silence stretched on long enough to make me feel like I should go, she asked, “Do you think maybe this obsession with dying is because you’re avoiding pain and anger?”
I snorted. “That sounds like something a therapist would say.”
“Good thing I’m not one.”
“I’m pretty sure you need to feel safe to experience sadness and anger.
And I’ve never had that.” I didn’t answer her question.
Not really. Because deep down I wasn’t sure if she was wrong.
Maybe I didn’t want to die as much as I didn’t want to sit with my pain.
I didn’t want to ponder why life had given me the hand it had.
Why had other kids grown up with love, warm dinners and safety, and I’d been abandoned, forgotten and worse?
With a brief, “Thank you, just Iris,” I stood and walked out before she could say anything kind again. Because the kindness was starting to hurt worse than the pain I was used to.