Chapter Thirty-Two
Well.
He was fucking miserable.
Tuesdays were almost exclusively miserable now, not that he could really remember Tuesdays before.
But Tuesdays now were absolute bullshit for him, sunup to sundown of coming face-to-face with his own limitations.
He drove a far way on Tuesdays, which was part of the problem; driving was uncomfortable unless he stopped frequently, which he did now, goddammit, because A person cannot expect to change without making changes.
If there was a positive to the stopping frequently, he supposed it was that he’d gotten familiar with a few of the places along the way.
A gas station that was clean if he needed to take a leak, a good Dunkin’ drive-through where there was always decaf, never one of those Oh, we’ll have to make a pot situations.
There was even a little shop he’d found one day on the way home when he’d had a particularly bad moment, needing to get out and walk up and down a street in a way that absolutely looked suspicious unless he eventually found a convincing-looking reason to stop in somewhere.
It was a model train shop, which honestly was very fucking annoying at first, really ratcheting things up on the don’t-think-about-Paris pain scale, but in the end, it was still model trains, and he still had his pretend brain, which always enjoyed a 3D model.
There was a kid who worked there, a teenager, and Griffin thought that was extremely strange, because in Paris the man in the model train shop had been—well, it didn’t fucking matter, did it?
The point was, a teenager named Kevin—sort of an old man name, to be honest—worked in this one, or at least he worked there on Tuesday afternoons.
Whatever Griffin thought his own interest in 3D models was, this kid’s was a different order of magnitude.
The first time Griffin went in there it took him a full fucking hour to get back out.
This despite the fact that Kevin literally called him Scarface, to his actual face.
As in, “Hey, I’m going to call you Scarface!
” No pause after to see if Griffin would laugh or maybe strangle him to death, just a turn of his avid attention to the next model he wanted to show off.
Anyway, he eventually bought a set to build.
He worked on it on Thursdays, which were objectively better than Tuesdays.
The reason he had to go so far on Tuesdays was for the pain management specialist he’d ghosted all those years ago, when his injuries were fresher and also easier to treat.
That guy did not, thankfully, call him Scarface, but at times some garden-variety insults would not have gone amiss, since pretty much every other second of the time they spent in each other’s company was challenging either physically or emotionally, and sometimes both at the same time.
Or, actually, as the specialist would probably say, it was always both at the same time.
One pain feeding the other, which didn’t mean either one was less real.
For a long time on Tuesdays—the first six, at least—the most miserable part had been the reckoning with that in a way he’d avoided doing before.
He’d always had good doctors, good therapists, so it wasn’t as though no one had ever told him about the link between his mental health and his neuropathic pain.
But he hadn’t wanted to hear it. He hadn’t wanted to practice it.
He had always held fast to his pain.
Now, it had been eleven Tuesdays, and he was learning to let it go.
He stayed all day, did the works, which actually meant meditation and a group session with other chronic pain patients, both of which took more collective time than any of the other stuff—water tank, ultrasound therapy, whatever.
It hurt, and some days it humiliated him, and on two specific Tuesdays he’d gotten back to his car and fucking cried in the front seat, and the worst part of that was how he felt better afterward, and also that his mother could tell when he arrived, two hours later, to her house for dinner.
He always went to dinner at her house on Tuesdays now.
Peter usually came, one of his two Mom-allowed nights per week.
Before—before the place he still could not think about much in the presence of other people—Griffin had sometimes come to dinner.
But he’d never stayed beyond the meal, and now, on Tuesdays, he did, which made it so he and his mother could talk about other things besides what number he was on the pain scale.
These days, sometimes she didn’t even ask at all.
Sometimes she asked about Paris. About the Placketts—about whom she no longer curbed her tongue—and about whether he’d heard anything from Michael.
Usually, he said little.
He saved that for his Fridays for now—individual therapy, here in town. Not too hard to get to, and not near as bad as Tuesdays.
Almost exclusively miserable Tuesdays.
Tonight, he was getting restless for the part of Tuesday that kept it in almost territory.
He was sitting on the couch with Peter, Mom in her recliner working on a crochet blanket for Leonard, who “did like to be cozy!” Peter was asking Griffin about whether he’d thought any more about school, about Griffin going back to work on that master’s degree he’d never gotten started on because of the fire, and despite himself—despite the way he was thinking about how, at group therapy, one of his cohort had talked about this sort of conversation, the well-meaning people in your life wanting timelines for what you were doing because of their own fears, their own confrontation with the reality that life sometimes didn’t live itself according to anyone’s timelines—he was still weighted with annoyance.
Maybe at Peter, and maybe at himself, maybe at his mentor for even suggesting the thing about the master’s program—six Wednesdays ago, that’s when he’d made the suggestion, because Wednesdays were Griffin’s day to work, to actually involve himself more meaningfully in the business that made him enough money for things like all-day pain management therapy.
“No decisions yet, Pete,” Griff said, softening the curtness with the nickname, which Peter genuinely seemed to like, probably because it wasn’t something like Scarface.
Almost exclusively miserable, he thought, taking the last swig of his bottled root beer and standing from the couch.
“Well,” he said, which over the course of now eleven Tuesdays he had come to understand was a more polite way to warm up to his exit, as opposed to simply walking out the door.
“Wait a minute,” his mother said, and he suppressed a groan. Thirteen Tuesdays ago—before, before—he might have released it. But he didn’t now.
He didn’t really have anything to groan at his mother about. He never had.
He was lucky she was his family.
She was balling up Leonard’s blanket haphazardly, shoving it into the basket she kept by her chair.
Outside, with everything for the animals, his mother was almost ruthlessly organized.
But in the house, she had a much more…casual approach.
So when she stood and drew him back toward her small den, he was not surprised by the mess on her desk.
She had her fists set on her hips and she was saying, “Now where did I—oh, there it is,” then she was bending over and shoving a stack of god knew what out of the way.
When she straightened, she was holding a few crinkled sheets of white paper, paper-clipped messily together.
“Printed this out at the library!” she said.
Again, he did not groan. In fairness to the impulse, though, his mother printing out things at the library for him did have a groan-worthy history, back in the early days after the fire.
Anything she could find—treatments, testimonials from victims with similar injuries, sometimes even accounts of other fires, as though it would soothe him to know that the one he’d lived through wasn’t unique—she would bring to him like this, on these white sheets, with these little paper clips.
“It’s about something called the Paris Syndrome,” she said, and then she was doing the thing that she did back in those early days. Licking her index finger and paging right into the thing, like she was getting ready to read it off. “You ever hear of that?”
“Don’t think so,” he said, but already he didn’t like this—what it meant, that his mom printed out this article the same way she’d printed out articles about burn trauma. He knew he had not told her much about Paris; he knew what she knew was mostly confined to Michael.
And sure.
Not talking to Michael in twelve weeks was pretty traumatic.
But he didn’t want her to think he had some kind of syndrome.
“Well, I thought you’d enjoy it,” she said. “It’s about how people get this big idea about Paris, about how perfect it’ll be. And when they get there, it’s a complete disappointment! It’s more complex than that, actually, there’s an actual psychiatric condition, but—”
He took the article from her. Folded it longways and tucked it into his back pocket.
That is definitely not what I have from Paris, he thought. It isn’t a disappointment at all. You’d hardly believe how not-disappointing it is.
“I’ll read it,” he promised her gently, then he bent and kissed her wrinkled cheek, and she patted his scarred one. Ten Tuesdays, they’d done that, and every time she looked like he’d held out the whole world to her. Happier than she had looked even on the day he’d bought her this farm.
He waved at Peter as he left, made his way back home, his heart kicking up as he got closer.
It was a ritual, waiting until he got home, until the hardest parts of the hardest day of his week were over, until he finally walked in his front door and realized that, this time, it had not been quite as hard as the week before, or the week before that.
Until he realized that he was not, in fact, really miserable at all.
But he was not…he was not not miserable enough. Not yet.