Sing You Home: A Novel Read online

  He grins, like a shark. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, sugar,” he says.

  On Friday, Lucy is fifteen minutes late for our session. I decide to give her the benefit of the doubt, since we have been moved to the photography studio on the third floor—a room that I didn’t even know existed. “Hi,” I say, when she walks in. “You had trouble finding it, too?”

  Lucy doesn’t answer. She sits down at a desk, takes out a book, and buries her nose in it.

  “Okay, you’re still mad at me. That’s coming through loud and clear. So let’s talk about it.” I lean forward, my hands clasped between my knees. “It’s perfectly normal for a client to misinterpret a relationship with her therapist—Freud even talked about it being a key to finding out something from your past that’s still upsetting to you. So maybe we can look constructively at why you want me to be your friend. What does that say about who you are, and what you need right now?”

  Stone-faced, she flips a page.

  The book is a collection of short stories by Anton Chekhov. “You’re taking Russian lit,” I surmise. “Impressive.”

  Lucy ignores me.

  “I never took Russian lit. Too much of a wimp. I have enough trouble understanding all that stuff when it’s in English.” I reach for my guitar and pluck out a Slavic, minor run of notes. “If I were going to play Russian literature, I think it would sound like this,” I muse. “Except I really need a violin.”

  Lucy slams the book shut, shoots me a look of death, and puts her head down on the desk.

  I pull my chair closer to her. “Maybe you don’t want to tell me what’s on your mind. Maybe you’d like to play it, instead.”

  No response.

  I reach for my djembe and put it between my knees, tilted so that she can drum on it. “Are you this angry,” I ask, striking it lightly, “or this angry?” I smack it, hard, with my palm.

  Lucy continues facing in the opposite direction. I begin to play a beat, thump-thump-thump-THUMP, thump-thump-thump-THUMP.

  Eventually, I stop. “If you don’t want to talk, maybe we’ll just listen today.”

  I set my iPod on the portable speaker system and begin to play some of the music that Lucy has reacted to before—either positively or negatively. At this point, I just want to get a rise out of her. I think I’ve finally cracked her shell when she sits up, twists in her chair, and digs in her backpack. A moment later, she comes up with a ratty, crushed tissue.

  Lucy tears off two tiny scraps of the tissue. She balls them up and sticks them in her ears.

  I shut off the music.

  When I first started working with Lucy and she behaved like this, I saw it as a challenge I had to overcome, the same way I faced challenges with all my other patients. But after months of progress . . . this feels like a personal affront.

  Freud would call that countertransference. Or in other words, what happens when the therapist’s emotions get tangled up with a patient’s. I am supposed to step back and wonder why Lucy might try to elicit this anger in me. That way, I regain control of the emotions in our therapeutic relationship again . . . and, more important, I discover another missing piece of the puzzle that is Lucy.

  The thing is, Freud got it all wrong.

  When Max and I first met, he took me fishing. I’d never been, and I didn’t understand how people could spend entire days bobbing around on the ocean waiting for a bite that never came. It seemed silly, an utter waste of time. But that day, the striped bass were running. He baited my hook and cast the line and showed me how to hold the fishing rod. After about fifteen minutes, I felt a tug on the line. I’ve got one, I said, excited and nervous. I listened to Max carefully as he told me what to do—move rhythmically and slowly, never let up on the pull of the line—but then, suddenly, it went slack. When I reeled in, the bait was gone, and so was the striper. I was utterly deflated, and in that moment I understood why fishermen would wait all day to catch something: you have to understand what you’re missing before you can really feel a loss.

  That’s why Lucy’s boycott of this session hurts so much more than it did at the beginning. I know her now. I’ve connected with her. So her withdrawal isn’t a challenge; it’s a setback.

  After a few minutes, I turn off the music, and we sit out the rest of the session in silence.

  When Max and I were trying to have a baby, we had to see a social worker at the IVF clinic—but I don’t remember the questions being anything like the ones that Vanessa and I are hearing now.

  The social worker’s name is Felicity Grimes, and she looks like she didn’t get the memo that the eighties are over. Her red suit jacket is asymmetrical, with enormous shoulder pads. Her hair is piled so high it could function as a sail in the wind. “Do you really think you’ll stay together?” she asks.

  “We’re married,” I say. “I think that’s a pretty good indicator of our commitment.”

  “Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce,” Felicity says.

  I am nearly certain that, when Max and I met with the social worker, she didn’t question whether or not our relationship would stand the test of time.

  “That’s true of opposite-sex marriages,” Vanessa says. “But gay marriage hasn’t been around long enough to really have any statistics. Then again, considering the lengths we had to go to to get married, you could argue we’re even more committed than the average straight couple.”

  I squeeze Vanessa’s hand, a warning. I’ve tried to explain to her that, no matter how stupid the questions get, we have to just stay calm and answer them. The objective here is not to wave a rainbow banner. It’s to get a social worker’s check mark, so that we can move on to the next step. “What she means is that we’re in this for the long haul,” I say, and smile tentatively.

  We had to fight the clinic director to begin the process of in vitro—in spite of the fact that a court order held the frozen embryos in limbo. She agreed to allow us to get the psychological components completed, and then—if the court ruled in our favor—to start Vanessa immediately on the drug regimen. But, she pointed out, if Max wanted Reid and Liddy to have the same privilege, she would have to give it to them.

  We have already explained to the counselor how we met, how long we’ve been together. “Have you considered the legal ramifications of being same-sex parents?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I’ll adopt the baby, after Vanessa gives birth.”

  “I assume you both have powers of attorney?”

  We look at each other. Unlike straight couples, if I were in a car crash and dying, Vanessa wouldn’t have the rights as my spouse to sit by me at the hospital, to make the decision to turn off life support. Because our marriage isn’t federally recognized, we have to jump through all these extra legal hoops to get the same rights—1,138 of them—that come naturally to heterosexual couples who get married. Vanessa and I had been planning to sit down with a bottle of bourbon one night and ask each other questions no one ever wants to have to answer—about organ donation and hospice care and brain death—but then we were served with a lawsuit and, ironically, asking a lawyer to draft a power of attorney was moved to the back burner. “We’re in the process of getting that taken care of.” It’s not a lie if we meant to do it, is it?

  “Why do you want to have a child?” Felicity asks.

  “I won’t speak for Vanessa,” I say, “but I’ve always wanted one. I tried for almost a decade, with my ex-husband. I don’t think I’ll feel complete if I don’t have the chance to be a mother.”

  The social worker turns to Vanessa. “I see kids every day at work. Some of them are shy, or funny, or complete pains in the neck. But every single one of them is living proof that, at one point, their parents believed they’d have a future together. I want to have Zoe’s baby so that she can grow up with two mothers who have moved heaven and earth to bring her into this world.”

  “But how do you feel about being a parent?”

  “I’m obviously fine with it,” Vanessa says.