Chapter Ten

            I SAT IN MELODY’S OFFICE THE FOLLOWING WEEK listening to the soft, tinkling sound of her new rock fountain nestled in the corner. It was one of Sam’s favorite sounds.

            “I’m bored out of my skull,” I complained. “I’ve read and re-read all the books we own, watched every episode of every crap show on TV, and it’s too damn hot to sit outside and feed the ducks.”

            Melody grinned in approval. “That’s good. It means you’re ready to stop living in a state of flux. So what now?”

            The question stood before me like a black hole waiting to suck me into its eternal oblivion.

            “Jeff asked me about coming back to school.”

            “He’s your friend who runs the department, right?”

            “Yes.”

            “How do you feel about it?”

            I squirmed in my chair. “I don’t know, Melody. Since I left in April, my assistant director Jackie, who’s been the interim director of the writing program during my absence, occasionally calls me with an administrative question. And for a split second, when I answer her I feel a charge of electricity, like the way it used to be.”

            “Do you miss it?”

            “I guess I do. I mean, it’s always been a lot of pressure, but it was something I used to thrive in. But this past semester, it just felt like I was buried under a pile of bricks the whole time. I’m afraid that if I go back that’ll happen again, and I’ll handle it even worse than I did before.”

            “What if you just go back to teaching, then?”

            I took a sip of water from my Dasani bottle and glared at her.

            “They won’t let me go back into the classroom.”

            “How do you know that? You can’t be the first teacher who’s had an outburst.”

            “I called my students ‘feckless crackbabies hooked on Ritalin and porn’.”

            Melody winced.

            “Yeah,” I acknowledged her gesture. “It’s harsh. Unforgivable.”

            “It’s not unforgivable. I don’t think there’s anything that’s unforgivable. Isn’t there something you can do? A formal apology?”

            I shook my head. “No one’s accountable for their actions anymore. I harp on my students all the time about responsibility, and taking the consequences of their actions. Say what you will about the guys involved in Watergate thirty-something years ago, but they all paid for their mistakes—most of them either wound up doing time or resigning. These days, if you fuck up you get a promotion, a commuted sentence, increased media coverage, and a book deal. You get ‘Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job’.”

            Melody cocked her head slightly to the side. “You don’t think you’ve taken responsibility or accepted the consequences? You voluntarily left your position, yes? You offered to resign.”

            “I never should’ve gone back to begin with. I should’ve taken another semester’s leave, like my friend Maggie and everyone else told me to do.”

            “It’s futile to ‘should’ on yourself,” she said.

            “Whatever,” I replied in an obstinate tone. “The point is that my behavior shouldn’t—ought not to be rewarded with a finger-wagging, ‘don’t do it again’.”

            “I don’t think it is. Everyone deserves a second chance. From what you’ve told me, this was an isolated incident. You don’t have a history of incompetence or abuse. You’ve been an advocate of the student body. Even now—you’re advocating on their behalf, considering their well-being by questioning your return. You’re living up to your lessons of integrity by being the example. And let’s not forget that you were under emotional duress.”

            “What, have you been talking to Jeff?”

            “Andi, your husband was killed by a drunk driver.”

            As if I needed reminding.

            “Let’s not use Sam as the get-out-of-jail-free card,” I said. “Let’s not insult him like that.”

            “Aren’t you already doing it? Isn’t that your reason for sleeping in, for watching mindless television and re-reading the books that the two of you used to read together? Isn’t that your excuse for not moving on?”

            Shit, man.

            “I can’t go back into the classroom, even if they let me,” I said after a bout of silence.

            “Why?”

            “Because I hate them.”

            “Hate who?”

            “All of them. Those kids.”

I always resented teachers that called their students “kids”.

“They bitch and moan and take no responsibility and get drunk every night and have no regard for anyone outside their calling circle or their Facebook page.”

            “It’s not about them and you know it,” said Melody. “It’s about the one young man who made some despicable choices that night.”

            “Unforgivable choices,” I added.

            “You think he’s unforgivable?”

            “He’ll never get my pardon.” I took a swig of water so forceful it splashed.

            “So be it,” she said.

I looked at her, bewildered. I had expected her to advise me to make the effort to try.

“So, if going back to the university isn’t an option, then what is? Have you ever considered doing something completely new and different?”

“Like what?” I asked.

“You tell me.”

I gazed past her and fixed my stare on the new rock fountain.

“I can’t think of anything.”

“There must be something…when was the last time you saw your family?”

“Not since the funeral. I didn’t go home for Christmas.”

“Give them a call.”

“My brothers are usually on the road. My mother…” I drew in a breath and exhaled a huff, “I can only take my mother in small doses.”

I’d shared some of my experiences with my mother in previous sessions with Melody: her systematic destruction of my self-esteem during my adolescent years by criticizing my body; her lack of consolation every time I broke up with a boyfriend; her lack of affection (and affect) since my father’s death.

“Things are different now, Andi. You may find that you and your mother have a lot more in common now. You both lost a spouse.”

“I’d prefer that we both knitted or something.”

She ignored the quip. “Think about it.”

“My mother has always treated me as her rival rather than her daughter.”

“And why is that?”

“I have no idea.”

“Andi, think about it. You were born in the wake of the women’s lib movement, and you had a father and mother who came from a male-dominated society.”

“So?”

“So, think of what that must have been like for your parents. Here is their little girl, precocious and free. Your father wants no part of it. He wants to rein her in, keep her under his thumb. He probably wanted to do the same with your mother. But she was conflicted. She probably wanted to be the good wife and mother that she was instructed to be; but she probably also wanted to be the new, liberated woman that was screaming to get out. You weren’t burdened with that choice. So rather than nurture you, she resented you. You took the path that she likely wanted for herself.

I listened to Melody, astounded.

“Your parents probably had no idea how to raise you. And your brothers got caught in the middle. They tried to protect you from both sides.”

I sat there, dumbfounded. It was as if my entire life had suddenly come into focus, and it all made sense. As if I’d just been absolved of a crime for which I’d been convicted, even though I’d been innocent all along. And then I began to cry like a little girl.

            Later that evening, after a dinner consisting of a grilled cheese sandwich, canned soup, and four handfuls of chocolate chips, I went into the living room. Second only to the kitchen, the living room had been the social center of the house. I remembered the first night Sam and I made out like horny adolescents on the floor in front of the fireplace, when he wanted to wait to have sex, the gentleman. And later, how many times we did make love on that very spot… Since his death, the space had become desolate, like so many other places in the house.

            The last rays of sunlight formed beams across the floor and spotlighted the photographs sitting on the banquet table against the wall. I perused them like paintings at the galleries and museums I used to attend in New York, and stopped at one of our many wedding photos. There I stood between my brothers, who had reluctantly surrendered their ripped jeans and biker jackets that day in exchange for sleek, black tuxedos with white silk shirts and silk ties in Windsor knots. They were clean-shaven, their hair neatly groomed, as if they’d spent a day with the Queer Eye guys. They looked so handsome, pinup perfect for a couple of Italian musicians in their forties.

            I’d practically worshipped my brothers while growing up. All my friends had crushes on them. Boys envied their guitars and talent and the fact that they got all the girls, while the girls gushed over their looks. They’d sheltered me to a fault. I know that now. But back then, I reveled in their overprotection and accepted it as a token of the love and attention I so desperately craved from my parents. Could it be that my parents had never wanted me?

            I malingered into my home office and sat at my cluttered desk, digging through the top drawer in search of my address book. It bulged with post-its and envelopes with return addresses circled and MapQuest directions to places that Sam had insisted I save. I opened it and flipped a couple of pages, then picked up the receiver of the vintage, push-button office phone, complete with extension lights at the bottom that still lit up when the phone rang.

            Joey picked up on the second ring.

            “Hey Joey,” my voice wavered; I had expected voice mail.

            “Hey And. Long time.” He sounded happy to hear my voice. “Everything okay?”

            “Yeah. You know. The usual.” I decided to get right to it. “Whattya think about coming out here for a visit? I need an excuse to finish cleaning my house.”

            “That’d be great! I haven’t had a break in ages.”

            “I was thinking of inviting Tony, too. I mean, when was the last time the three of us got together without Mom or spouses?”

            “Geez, I can’t even remember.” He paused for a few beats to mull it over. “I know Tone’s got some gigs in Connecticut in the coming weeks. How about next month? I could meet him and then we could drive up together.”

            “That works. We could barbeque. That poor grill hasn’t seen any action since Sam—” I stopped myself, “—since last summer.”

            Joey ignored the slip. “Let me call Tony and call you back. I gotta ask him about the MIDI files he sent me last week anyway.”

            “Okay. Call me back even if you get his voice mail.”

            “Okay.”

            Twenty minutes later, the phone rang. I was still sitting at the desk.

            “It’s all set,” Joey said.

            We finalized plans. “Bring the guitars,” I said.

            “You got it. This is gonna be fun,” he said after a beat.

            “Yeah. I’m looking forward to it.”

            “Mom is so gonna kill us when she finds out that we left her out.”

“So don’t tell her. See you soon.”

            When I hung up the phone, I glanced at the clock on the desk: 10:14 p.m.

            “What the hell,” I said out loud, and picked up the receiver again. I dialed Melody’s office number. When her voice mail picked up, I spoke with a rather superior tone: “I’ll have you know that I just made plans with my brothers for them to come visit me next month. At my house. So there.” I hung up. Then I cleaned until midnight.

            For the first time in ten months, I had something to look forward to. And for the first time in just as long, I smiled—albeit alone—in mere anticipation.

             

           

           

Chapter Eleven

August

THEY HAD ARRIVED IN MID-AUGUST, GUITARS and duffle bags in tow. I unexpectedly bawled like a baby when I saw them pull into the driveway, and practically knocked them over when I ran out to the car to hug them. But they were cool and let me get it out of my system. Neither of them said a word about my weight gain; then again, they had seen me yo-yo with my weight for most of my young life. In fact, the six years with Sam was the only time I’d maintained a decent weight—I’d looked and felt good. What’s more, when I was with Sam, I didn’t think about my body, didn’t have the obsessive preoccupation that took up so much of my time and energy in the past. I’d accepted it as it was.  Besides, all bodies are beautiful…

Joey and Tony and I spent most of our time in the kitchen or out on the deck, grilling. One evening, they took out their guitars and started playing all the old Beatle songs we used to sing as kids, in three-part harmony. By the fourth or fifth song, several of the neighbors, including the adolescents, had wandered into the yard or peered over the fence to watch the free show. One of them shouted a request: “You know any Dylan?”

Tony scowled, but acquiesced and the two of them did a flawless Bob Dylan impersonation of “Like a Rolling Stone” without the harmonica part. After that, requests came left and right. And after all the applause and invitations to play at future parties, we looked at each other and knew we were done sharing ourselves with them. My brothers said thanks, packed up, and went into the house, much to the crowd’s disappointment. “What a treat,” I heard an older woman, who lived two doors down, say. It wasn’t until well after midnight, when I lay awake in my bed, Sam’s absence ever omniscient, that I’d realized that during the entire jam session, I’d enjoyed myself so much that I’d forgotten to miss him for the first time. The revelation resulted in a mix of accomplishment and guilt.

Best of all was how much I laughed that week. And although there was always a hint of sadness looming in the air, like a cloud of dust, I felt a sense of comfort amidst that cloud. For the first time since Sam’s death, our house felt like home to me, the empty bed notwithstanding.

On our last evening together, the three of us sat out on the deck, Joey and Tony drinking Sam Adams while I drank birch beer, the citronella candles casting soft orange glows on our faces and protecting us from the nasty New England mosquitoes. The night air was chilly, and the salty scent of the distant sea wafted occasionally with the breeze.

“Do you guys remember Dad dying?” I asked.

They looked at each other, then back at me, a little wary of indulging me in a heavy topic of conversation, one that could put a damper on the entire week.

“Sure,” they said.

“What do you remember most?”

“The suddenness of it,” Joey said. “It was out of the blue.”

“Me too,” said Tony. “I just remember being in shock.”

“Do you remember grieving it? Because I don’t remember grieving it.”

“Actually, I don’t remember a lot of that time,” Joey said. “But a few years ago, I dug out some songs that I wrote back then. They were all really sad. I must’ve taken it out on the music.”

“Oh, I definitely channeled into the music,” said Tony. “I played so much blues back then. It was the only way to get it out. Mom wouldn’t talk about it. At least not with us.”

“Yeah, mom was just so out of it,” said Joey.

I looked out at the bench swing in the yard, seeing Sam and me sitting on it during summer nights, clasped hands in each other’s laps, saying nothing and looking at the sky, rocking rhythmically. The image then morphed into me at thirteen years old:

 

I come home from school to find both Joey and Tony sitting on the couch in the living room, which we only use for company. Quiet. Pale as ghosts.

“Whose car is in the driveway?” I ask.

“Aunt Jane’s,” either Tony or Joey say.

“Why is Aunt Jane here?” Every fiber of my being already knows that the answer is not something I want to hear.

“Dad had a heart attack at work today.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s, um…”

“Where’s Mom?”

“Upstairs with Aunt Jane.”

He’s dead. I know it.

I couldn’t remember who first said the words. I couldn’t remember the funeral, other than the sea of black—strange, that was just about all I remembered of Sam’s funeral. That and the crappy eulogy, of course. But who eulogized my father?

“They were our age, weren’t they,” said as I came out of my reverie. “I mean, as old as we are now.”

My brothers did the math between them. “He had to be in his mid-forties, I guess. Mom’s a couple years younger,” said Joey. He then added, “Wow” at the realization.

Yeah. Wow.

“My God, he was just a couple of years older than Sam. I never realized how young he was. To die of a heart attack, especially.”

And Mom was my age—she was me.

“He had hypertension that he ignored. Probably saw it as a sign of weakness if he couldn’t suck it up. He was stubborn that way,” said Tony.

“But don’t you think that’s the type of thing we should talk about? Especially if it’s genetic. You guys see a doctor regularly, don’t you?” I asked.

“You doin’ okay, And?” asked Joey. “In general, I mean.”

“Yeah, I guess so. I’m seeing a therapist, and my friend Jeff is trying to get me to go back to school—he’s the department chair.” I paused. “It’ll be a year, soon.”

“Hard to believe.”

I took a swig of birch beer. “You’re tellin’ me.”

We sat quietly and looked up at the stars.

“Do you think Mom and Dad wanted me?”

They both looked at me in shock and spoke at the same time. “How could you even think such a thing? Of course they did!”

“They treated you both differently,” I said. “Don’t pretend you never noticed. You’ve protected me—and them—long enough.”

“You may have been a surprise,” said Tony. “I really don’t know. But you know how they were raised. They didn’t talk about things like that. They loved you, Andi. I think you just… I don’t know. You were the only girl, and you had a fire in your eyes when you were really little. I think it scared them. Where they came from, a fire like that spelled trouble later on in life. They just went too far to keep you safe.”

I nodded my head. Just like what Melody had said.

“Then why did it feel like love from you but oppression from them? You guys at least hugged me and let me tag along with you.”

“How could we not?” said Joey. “You were so cute. But we wanted to keep you safe too. You were our precious jewel. I know that’s all sexist now, but we just didn’t want anyone to hurt you. And neither did Mom and Dad. They just fucked it all up the way parents do.”

I couldn’t help but laugh, my brothers joining me.

“How’s that for therapy?” said Joey.

“I wouldn’t put it on a fortune cookie,” I said. With that, my brothers picked up their guitars again and broke out into The Beatles’ “Oh Darlin’”. I swooned, tears streaming down my cheeks.

They left the next day. We held each other, in tears, and I begged them not to go. I felt like a child seeking their brotherly protection from the big bad world all over again. It’d been ages since they’d had their little sister all to themselves, they said. We exchanged genuine I-love-yous, and as they drove away, I re-entered the empty house, restored to its former state of sullen silence. I’d become so used to that hollow feeling before they’d arrived that I never even noticed it. But now that they were gone, it physically hurt. I took the leftover pizza crusts, crushed them in a plastic bag, and headed to the lake at EdmundCollege to feed the ducks who were grateful for the bounty but oblivious to me sitting on the bench, mourning for what I’d lost as well as what I’d never had.

***

A few days later, Jeff called to tell me that everything was “squared away” with the dean. “You’ll take unpaid course waivers and focus solely on directing the freshman writing program. And you’ll have one performance evaluation. Come January we’ll check in again. Fair enough?”

“Are you sure?”

“The dean’s behind you all the way. So is most of the department, with the exception of the usual grotesques. Face it, kid: we can’t live without you.”

I hesitated. “I don’t know…”

“Kid, I’m not gonna let you do any damage to yourself or anyone else. I promise. Mainly ‘cause Jerry’ll beat the shit out of me if you do.”

I smiled; he suddenly reminded me of my brothers.

“I thought you said he was behind me all the way,” I said.

“He was after I suggested the unpaid waivers. Besides, if Jerry can’t at least threaten to beat the shit out of me, then he starts moping around and brings in his banjo.”

“Eek,” I shuddered at the thought. I’d heard Jerry Donnelly play the banjo. “Okay,” I said in a surprisingly confident voice. “See you the day after Labor Day.”

“I can’t wait, kid. Welcome back.”

Chapter Twelve

October

LIFE MOVED AGAIN.

When I returned to school, I found myself refreshed—the workload no longer felt like the heavy blanket trying to suffocate my grief, but rather was like a sieve that I could pour myself into and strain out the unwanted muck. What’s more, if Jeff’s visit that day of the Yankee game was the crack in the wall, then my brothers’ visit broke the floodgates open. They had awakened my craving for company. I started spending more time with Miranda, and Jeff and Patsy had me over every other week. Heck, even I made dinner for them at my place one day. I had to take away the chair where Sam would’ve sat—seeing the empty seat was too much for me.

Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling of living in someone else’s skin, or on a backwards planet. Anything but an ordinary world.

I saw Melody twice during the week of the anniversary of Sam’s death, which was also our sixth wedding anniversary.

            “So, it’s been a year,” she said.

            “Yeah,” I replied. You’d think she said “nice day”.

            “How does it feel?”

            “Well, considering that I went through it in a semi-conscious stupor, it doesn’t really feel like anything special.”

             She let out a cynical laugh. “Were you always this sarcastic?”

            “I used to be. Actually, I was just uptight.”

            “When?”

            “Awhile ago. Before I met Sam.”

            “What softened you up? Or who? Was it Sam?”

            “No. It was New York, of all things. And Devin.”

            “Who?” she asked.

            “This guy I knew when I lived in New York.”

            A flood of memories suddenly washed over me: Versace suits. Sienna eyes. Vibrators.

            “Were you dating him?”

            “Sort of. It was a complicated relationship.” I paused and looked at the poster of a coastal beach with a sunset on the wall behind her. “Wow…Devin. I haven’t thought about him in ages.”

            “Tell me about him.”

            “Well, when I met him, he was an escort. He knew a lot of the women that I worked with, if you get my drift. We sort of had an arrangement. I shared my expertise in writing and he shared his expertise in sex. He was an unusual escort in that he didn’t actually go all the way with his clients.”

            I felt silly saying the last part—it sounded so junior high.

            She looked surprised. “Why didn’t he go all the way?”

            I shrugged. “Don’t know. And yet, that didn’t seem to bother any of them. He was very popular.”

            “What made you form this arrangement? Did he come to you or did you seek him out?”

            “I called him.”

            “You thought you didn’t know enough about sex?”

            “I thought I didn’t know anything about sex.”

 “Why?” she asked.

I paused for a minute, trying to decide whether I really wanted to go back to this place. Sure, Melody was my therapist; but my old, self-conscious behaviors kicked in and I worried what kind of nutcase she would think I was if I told her the truth.

“Well, I was inexperienced,” I answered.

“In what way?”

“In the way that I’d never technically had intercourse with anyone until Devin.”

Melody’s eyes widened. That was enough to get me to pull my knees to my chest and curl up in the chair in attempt to get lost somewhere in it.

“Was that a choice you made?”

“To not have sex, you mean?”

She nodded.

I shrugged my shoulders. “Do we really have to talk about this?”

“Why do you feel uncomfortable?”

“Funny, Devin used to push my buttons like this. He was determined to make me less inhibited, less self-conscious. And he succeeded, too. Or, I succeeded. I don’t know. Anyway, when I met Sam, I wasn’t so worried about it anymore, and we had a fabulous sex life.”

“Whatever became of Devin?”

“His name is David, actually. Devin was his escort name. He left the business, moved to Boston, and bought an art gallery. He was a real art buff. Talented, too. The guy could make you look at Picasso in ways Picasso never saw it.”

“Did you keep in touch?” she asked.

“Sam and I went to one of his gallery shows—I mean, I didn’t know Devin was going to be there. That was a total shock. We met for coffee a couple of weeks later and that was that. This was all years ago. Sam and I weren’t even married yet. But I would occasionally look for him on the T or the streets whenever we went to Boston. We never went back to his gallery, either. I don’t know why. Sam didn’t know anything about the nature of Devin’s and my relationship.”

“You never told him?”

“Not exactly. I mean, I never gave him specifics. He never put Devin and David together as the same person.”

“Why didn’t you tell him?”

“Didn’t seem to be a need to.”

Melody contemplated this. I expected her to push me on the subject, the way Maggie had countless times. “I can’t believe you’ve never told him! What if he finds out? Things like that can wreck a marriage, you know,” Maggie would say.

“What good comes out of it?” I would shout back.

Instead, Melody asked, “Why didn’t you and Devin keep in touch?”

“Like I said, it was a complicated relationship. I had feelings for him, and then he had feelings for me…it never quite clicked, I guess.”

Melody looked down at her pad. I wasn’t sure if she’d written anything. She looked back at me while I took a sip of water. Silence filled the room.

“When was the last time you and Sam had sex?”

The question took me by surprise, but in an instant my mind raced with thoughts about Sam’s and my sex life. It was like great jazz, the way our bodies were in perfect syncopation, the way we knew and improvised and explored each other with our lips and fingers, the way we so thoroughly lost ourselves in our lovemaking, be it through bouts of heavy breathing or moaning, or giggles and laughter when we were especially playful. It was hard to believe that I had gone so long prior to knowing him without having known such pleasure, that I’d been so afraid. Then again, maybe I had just simply been waiting all along for Sam, even though Devin was my first.

Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined that sex could be like this, or that I could be so free, so uninhibited, so secure with my lover, my best friend, my Sam.

I’d occasionally wondered how much Devin had to do with this, or whether it was Sam’s doing simply because he was just so good in bed, so caring and accepting and wanting and respectful and appreciative of my body and me. God, how my body hungered and ached to feel his heat, his firmness, his hands and lips and body intertwined with mine…

I wiped my mouth with my hand, feeling a hot flash followed by a punch in my gut.

“You wanna hear something really stupid?” I asked. “We decided not to do it for almost a week, to wait until our anniversary celebration night. We thought it’d be fun to get so horny and frustrated that we wouldn’t be able to keep our hands off each other and would just ravish each other that night. It was working, too. I was so ready to jump his bones—forget dinner and the damn cider. We were gonna do it all night and then play hooky the next day. Do you know how pissed off I am that we did that? Do you know how idiotic I feel?”

“How could you have known?” she asked.

“That’s just the thing—how does anyone know?” I looked away, wistful. “It’s so clichéd, but we take life so for granted.”

“Have you had any kind of sexual stimulation since?”

“Are you kidding? I haven’t had any kind of stimulation, period. I’m a blob. I eat Malomars at nine p.m. and watch TV all day and surf the net occasionally. I’ve all but stopped reading and writing.”

I paused for a moment in reverie, my breath seemingly stuck in my throat, before uttering, “Sex with Sam was fucking fabulous,” more to myself than Melody, who seemed to ignore this utterance and asked her next question.

“You don’t masturbate?”

There was a time when the word “masturbate” would’ve made me want to crawl under the chair in which I was sitting.

I shook my head. “Too much work. Besides, I don’t want to be touched.”

“Because if you did, then you’ll have to feel. And you don’t want to feel anything, do you,” she said.

Bull’s-eye. The truth smacked me right in the middle of my chest like a poison arrow.

I nodded slowly, my eyes watering. Again, silence filled the room, and this time it entered my gut and squeezed tight.

Say something.

“So, Andi. You made it through this week. You made it through a year since Sam’s death and your wedding anniversary and you’re still here.”

“Barely,” I said.

“But that’s your choice. Tell me: if Sam hadn’t gone out for that sparkling cider, if that car hadn’t hit him, what would you have done? What did you have planned for your sixth year of marriage? Surely you must have thought about it. What possibilities had entered your life?”

I pondered the question.

“Sam wanted to start traveling. He wanted to start writing novels, too. He was feeling burnt out with both nonfiction and comp, I think. He seemed restless. He put in a request for a sabbatical.”

“That’s what Sam wanted. I asked what you wanted.”

I sat and stared at nothingness. I honestly couldn’t remember.

“I don’t know,” I finally said.

“You didn’t have any goals, any plans?”

“I was content. Everything in my life was good. I had tenure, money in the bank, publications, a home, friends, a cat, and a man I loved who loved me back. What more did I need?”

“Well, start thinking about it now. What do you want to do?”

“I want to get the last year of my life and my husband back.”

“You can’t. So what else is there to do?”

“Wait for the next year, I guess.”

“If that’s all you want, then so be it. But I’m not going to enable your inertia in the meantime. And if you don’t want anything for yourself, then why don’t you do Sam the honor of fulfilling the things he wanted to do. Because no doubt he was including you in his plans.”

I felt myself get hot, humiliated in a way.

“Are we done?” I asked.

Melody looked at her watch. “We are.” She stood up and opened her arms to give me a hug. We usually ended the session with a hug. “Happy Anniversary,” she said. I fought the urge to cry, and lost. I could feel the warmth of her hug this time.