The Fragile World. Paula DeBoard Treick
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I’d like to suggest a few activities that you can do together.”
Mom looked up, brightening. This was just her thing—a to-do list. Give her a thousand tasks, and she would tackle them all.
For the rest of the summer, I visited Dr. Fisher every week, not having any other choice. Mom went to her sessions and reported on them over dinner, determined to model “good communication” for us. As far as I could tell, Dad went only twice on his own; whatever was said in his sessions stayed there. Or maybe he said nothing at all and only stared alternately at his shoes or his car in the parking lot. Mom worked her way through a family togetherness checklist, insisting that we plan meals, visit the Youth Symphony Orchestra to make a donation in Daniel’s memory and spend at least one weekend night together doing something new—even if it was just wandering through a Pier 1, where we immediately branched off on our own and gathered again at the cash register. The week before school began, we took a vacation to Coronado, which involved a long drive from Sacramento to San Diego, nights in hotels with dubious cleanliness, a tour of the island on rented bikes and a long drive home. Somehow when Mom coaxed me into the trip, she’d neglected to mention the word “island,” and I had a full-on panic attack on the bridge, with Mom holding on to my head while I breathed into a Subway bag that had contained, ten minutes earlier, Dad’s pastrami sandwich.
The morning we left the island, Mom crushed a pill and slipped it into my yogurt, so Dad basically had to carry me to the car, wedge me into my seat and wrangle with my seat belt. I hardly remembered anything about the trip, but the photographic evidence was stored on Mom’s camera—a dozen or so pictures where none of us was exactly smiling, even though Coronado was beautiful. Despite my worrying—or maybe because of it?—nothing horrible had happened, after all. The bridge didn’t collapse, the island didn’t suddenly sink into the Pacific and, although I’d seen a shocking special news report about how rarely hotel bedding was washed, we didn’t take home a single bedbug.
When we finally arrived home, Mom dumped the contents of our suitcases into the washing machine and announced that she was going to bed for the night and didn’t want to be disturbed. It was four-thirty in the afternoon.
After that, she stopped seeing Dr. Fisher herself, but kept dropping me off for my appointments. And Dr. Fisher was helping me—it was her idea for me to find a new “coping mechanism” since I’d been more or less refusing to take my anxiety pills since the Coronado debacle. “Why don’t we do this?” she suggested, although I was pretty sure there would be no we involved. “Why don’t we keep a record of these things you’re afraid of? If you write them down during the week, we can discuss each fear at our next session.”
This turned out to be a fabulous suggestion. In a week, I filled ten pages, single-spaced. Dr. Fisher’s eyes widened in surprise at first, but as she kept reading, I had the distinct feeling that she was trying very hard not to laugh.
“Hair dryers?” she asked, looking up.
“Because hair could get caught in the little vents,” I explained.
“Right. That could happen. Has it happened to you, with a hair dryer in your home?”
“Not yet.”
“Okay. What about this one—open-toed shoes?”
“Because toes can get caught in escalators.” Anticipating her next question, I added, “It didn’t happen to me, but I heard about it happening to someone else, a cousin of a girl who was in my homeroom last year.”
“Fairly rare, though, I would think,” Dr. Fisher said, closing my notebook. “And I notice you have escalators on the list, as well.”
I nodded.
“It would seem to me that the escalator is relatively benign, though—provided one is wearing close-toed shoes, of course,” Dr. Fisher qualified quickly. “But I would think, compared to elevators—”
I shuddered. “Elevators are in a class unto themselves. The sudden plummeting, the claustrophobia...”
“Whereas with an escalator, if it stops working, you simply walk the rest of the way.”
“In that case, you might as well just take the stairs,” I pointed out. “Or, better yet, just stay on the ground floor.”
Dr. Fisher smiled, the skin around her eyes crinkling. “Well! Okay. That’s definitely a good start, then, Olivia. I think the next step might be for us to begin sorting through these fears, putting them into categories.” I must have looked puzzled, because she explained, “You know—like things that have happened to you before, or are likely to happen, versus things that are not at all likely to happen—that kind of thing.”
I agreed to think about it, although I didn’t see the value in this. It didn’t particularly matter what category things were in—I was equally scared of everything. But I kept writing fears down, filling one notebook and starting another. During the day I carried it in my backpack, sealed in a jumbo-sized Ziploc bag so it wouldn’t fall victim to a leaking pen or a spilled water bottle. At night, I kept the notebook on the floor next to my bed, in case something new came to me while I should have been sleeping.
Dad began referring to the notebook as my Fear Journal.
Mom called it my security blanket.
And it did give me security—enough, at least, that I had stopped taking medication completely by the time I entered eighth grade. I kept a single pill with me, wrapped in a ball of cellophane at the bottom of my backpack for an emergency situation, like a shooter on campus or an unannounced field trip. The busier I was with my classes and the more obsessed I grew with writing things down, the less I saw Dr. Fisher, until one day it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen her in months.
It had been a good idea—family therapy. But my family had approached it like a ride on a merry-go-round in the world’s saddest theme park, until one by one, we’d all simply flung ourselves off.
I can’t say I didn’t see it coming. The trouble was that it had been coming for so long, it never seemed real—like a tsunami, where the waters recede and you watch them go, go, go, but remain unprepared for the reversal, for the sudden, gushing onslaught.
Kathleen had been talking to her brother in Omaha, making arrangements about the house where she’d grown up, which had been sitting vacant. She had reconnected with one of her best friends from high school, Stella something-or-other, who was divorced, living again in Omaha and hoping to open an upscale boutique furniture store. Kathleen had researched the local high schools for Olivia; she had found a family physician, a veterinarian.
I know this because she told me. I’d been coming to bed later and later at night, but still Kathleen was awake, stubbornly waiting for me, propped up by pillows, scribbling items on a to-do list. There was something triumphant about this, something smug: See—I’m doing the work. I’m putting in the effort.
I laughed at first. Back to Omaha?
“It makes sense,” she had insisted. “It’s exactly what we need.”
“It’s exactly what you need,” I countered, but there wasn’t much heat behind my words. I couldn’t summon the energy to be bitter. I’d been building up a wall between us, one giant rock upon another. Dr. Fisher had told me as much. “If you keep this up, you’ll get what you seem to want—to be alone,” she told me on our second counseling session, and I had agreed, thanked her and never returned.
“You’re right,” Kathleen admitted. “It is exactly what I need.”
“That’s it, then?” I asked, gesturing to her list, noticing that just about everything had been checked off.
“Curtis, listen to me. You can be part of this change. It’s not too late.”
Wasn’t it? I turned away, loosening the belt on my khakis.