Broken Read online

  She sobbed into her hands as though her heart was breaking, and I had nothing to do for her but sit beside her and rub her back and hand her tissues.

  She gripped my hand so tightly my fingers went numb. Her tears wet my fingers like hot splashes of acid. Her body shook, each sob sounding as harsh as broken glass.

  “It’s all right to be afraid,” I said at last.

  She nodded and wiped her face, the tears tapering off into a series of small, hitching sobs that eventually became a soft sigh. She let go of my hand and wiped her face with another handful of tissues. She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear and stared at her hands again.

  “I’ve been counting again.”

  I patted her shoulder and got up to pour us both glasses of lemonade from the pitcher in the small fridge. She drank hers in a gulp and I poured more, then took my glass and sat next to her.

  “And that upsets you.”

  “Of course it does,” she said. “But it helps me, too.”

  Elle counted things—tiles, leaves, window panes, whatever was on hand—when she felt stressed.

  “So long as you understand your reasons for doing it,” I said, “It’s a way of self-soothing. That’s all. You’re not drinking or anything like that, are you?”

  She shook her head. “No. No, but I’m wearing Dan out, poor guy.”

  She laughed, after a moment, and her laughter was good to hear. “He says he doesn’t mind, but…three times a day is a lot for any guy. You know?”

  I’d known once, but it had been a long, long time since I’d had to worry about that. “I bet he doesn’t mind.”

  She laughed again and finished the second glass of lemonade and put the glass down. She wiped her eyes once more and pressed her fingertips to her swollen eyes.

  “He says he doesn’t care what it takes to get me to walk down that aisle. If I have to wear him down to a nub, he’ll do it.”

  I moved back behind my desk, now that she’d gotten a bit more control of herself. “But you’re still afraid. Of what?”

  Two of the things that made her such a great patient were her willingness to embrace discussion and the sense of self-awareness that made her emotional problems so poignant. Elle knew exactly what had caused her issues and what she needed to do to overcome them—she struggled with feeling inadequate in her ability to do it, not with not understanding what she needed to do.

  “That marrying him will ruin what we have. That I won’t be able to do the domestic thing.”

  “You live together now.”

  She laughed. “Yes. To my mother’s chagrin.”

  “But your mother likes Dan, doesn’t she?”

  “She wants me to be married,” Elle said, pointing a finger to the ceiling. “She accepts Dan because it’s pretty obvious he’s the one I’m with and she’d rather see me nicely settled into wedded bliss than be single.”

  We’d spent a lot of hours discussing Elle’s mother. We could probably have spent twice as many more and never reached the bottom of that barrel. They tell us in school not to project our patient’s lives onto our own but I could never help but be grateful for my relationship with my mom whenever Elle talked about hers.

  “I’m afraid,” she continued, “that I said yes to Dan because I’m still trying to please my mother. And not because I really want to be married to him.”

  “Hmmm,” I said, agreeing she had a point. “Struggling with your desire to please your mother is something you’ve worked on for a while. Do you think you haven’t made progress?”

  “Do you think I have?” She deftly turned that one around on me, but shot me a grin that told me her hysterics were over.

  “Yes.” I hesitated. “I’m very pleased with the progress you’ve made, Elle. You’ve come a long way.”

  “Farther than you ever thought I would?” She asked, rather sagely, I thought.

  “I think you’ve come farther than you ever thought you would.”

  She nodded slowly. “Yes. I think so, too.”

  “This will be a good thing for you,” I told her, thinking she needed affirmation.

  Again, she nodded, the wad of tissues crumpled in her hand. “My heart says so. But my head…” She shook her head and gave me a watery smile. “My head’s filled up with all the reasons it won’t work. And I keep running the figures, over and over, but I can’t seem to come up with an answer.”

  “You can’t distill life down into a set of calculations. I wish we could. It would make things so much easier, wouldn’t it?”

  “Hell, yeah,” she said, and laughed again.

  We looked at each other across my desk. Every doctor-patient relationship has to end at some point. Either the healing is done, or it never will be.

  “I’d like you to come,” Elle said. “I’d like you to be there.”

  “I’d be happy to come,” I told her.

  Her smile was like the sun through a prism, all scattered pieces of brightness, but I could tell it was genuine. I returned it. She wiped her eyes again and it was time for her to go.

  To really go, and we both knew it.

  She stood and offered me her hand. “Thank you, Dr. Danning.”

  I shook the hand she offered me. “Good luck, Elle.”

  She nodded again and lifted her chin.

  “Take care,” she said, a statement that could have been trite but wasn’t.

  “You, too.”

  There was distance between us again, the way it had been when she’d first started coming to me. A necessary distance. I watched her leave and wished there was a way to know for sure she’d be all right.

  But the problem was, there never is a way to know.

  Chapter

  11

  July

  This month, my name is Priscilla, and I’m an investment banker. I wear my blond hair in a tight French twist. I wear pearl earrings in the tiny, perfect lobes of my ears. Everything about me is flawless, slim, put-together. I’m not beautiful, but nobody ever notices.

  My friend Tandy’s party is sedate and leisurely. Conversation buzzes about stocks, bonds, the theater, books. The background music is something classical with strings and piano, and I don’t bother pretending I care what it is. I’ve got wine in my hand, but nothing to eat although the table’s laden with plates of fancy food.

  “But if you compare the Utopian future of Huxley’s Brave New World and the Dystopian future of Orwell’s 1984,” the man beside me says earnestly, “don’t you have to agree that neither one is a viable scenario when you take into consideration the current financial and moral climate?”

  Save me, I mouth to the man inching past me toward the buffet. He’s a couple inches taller than I am, and I’m wearing my tall shoes. He’s blond, too, with light eyes of which I can’t tell the exact color. Like attracts like, and it’s evident even from the first that we’re a nicely matched set.

  “The point is,” the new man says easily, “both are fiction, Benson. Fiction. Means made up. Get it? And both of those novels reflect the society the author was living in at the time, so of course their ideas of what the future will be like are way different than what we can extrapolate now.”

  I’m impressed. He’s fast, this one. He reaches around behind me to snag a couple biscuit-wrapped frankfurters, putting a casual hand on my forearm to keep from bumping into me as he does. Benson’s eyes lock onto the hand on my arm and he steps up the argument.

  Do men really still think it’s about the conquest?

  Apparently Benson does, because he leans in closer, sandwiching me effectively between the two of them. “I know it’s fiction, Wilder. I’m not a moron.”

  Wilder, who hasn’t moved away from me although he could, laughs. “Of course you’re not.”

  Benson seems to think Wilder’s mocking him, because he scowls. “Look, man, I’m just saying that today’s society doesn’t leave room for a Utopian future, but nobody expects Big Brother, either.”

  Beside me, his shoulder brushing mine w