Daryl Gregory: Second Person, Present Tense

I laugh. “Yeah, it does. Did she tell you I wanted you and Mitch to be at the next session?”

“We’ll be there.” She works around the room, picking up t-shirts and underwear. I stand up to get out of the way. Somehow she manages to straighten up as she moves-righting books that had fallen over, setting Boo W. Bear back to his place on the bed, sweeping an empty chip bag into the garbage can-so that as she collects my dirty laundry she’s cleaning the entire room, like the Cat in the Hat’s cleaner-upper machine.

“Alice, in the last session I remembered being at Sea World, but there was a girl next to me. Next to Therese.”

“Sea World? Oh, that was the Hammel girl, Marcy. They took you to Ohio with them on their vacation that year.”

“Who did?”

“The Hammels. You were gone all week. All you wanted for your birthday was spending money for the trip.”

“You weren’t there?”

She picks up the jeans I left at the foot of the bed. “We always meant to go to Sea World, but your father and I never got out there.”

“This is our last session,” I say.

Alice, Mitch, Dr. Mehldau: I have their complete attention.

The doctor, of course, is the first to recover. “It sounds like you’ve got something you want to tell us.”

“Oh yeah.”

Alice seems frozen, holding herself in check. Mitch rubs the back of his neck, suddenly intent on the carpet.

“I’m not going along with this anymore.” I make a vague gesture. “Everything: the memory exercises, all this imagining of what Therese felt. I finally figured it out. It doesn’t matter to you if I’m Therese or not. You just want me to think I’m her. I’m not going along with the manipulation anymore.”

Mitch shakes his head. “Honey, you took a drug.” He glances at me, looks back at his feet. “If you took LSD and saw God, that doesn’t mean you really saw God. Nobody’s trying to manipulate you, we’re trying to undo the manipulation.”

“That’s bullshit, Mitch. You all keep acting like I’m schizophrenic, that I don’t know what’s real or not. Well, part of the problem is that the longer I talk to Dr. Mehldau here, the more fucked up I am.”

Alice gasps.

Dr. Mehldau puts out a hand to soothe her, but her eyes are on me. “Terry, what your father’s trying to say is that even though you feel like a new person, there’s a you that existed before the drug. That exists now.”

“Yeah? You know all those O.D.-ers in your book who say they’ve ‘reclaimed’ themselves? Maybe they only feel like their old selves.”

“It’s possible,” she says. “But I don’t think they’re fooling themselves. They’ve come to accept the parts of themselves they’ve lost, the family members they’ve left behind. They’re people like you.” She regards me with that standard-issue look of concern that doctors pick up with their diplomas. “Do you really want to feel like an orphan the rest of your life?”

“What?” From out of nowhere, tears well in my eyes. I cough to clear my throat, and the tears keep coming, until I smear them off on my arm. I feel like I’ve been sucker punched. “Hey, look Alice, just like you,” I say.

“It’s normal,” Dr. Mehldau says. “When you woke up in the hospital, you felt completely alone. You felt like a brand new person, no family, no friends. And you’re still just starting down this road. In a lot of ways you’re not even two years old.”

“Damn you’re good,” I say. “I didn’t even see that one coming.”

“Please, don’t leave. Let’s-”

“Don’t worry, I’m not leaving yet.” I’m at the door, pulling my backpack from the peg by the door. I dig into the pocket, and pull out the brochure. “You know about this?”

Alice speaks for the first time. “Oh honey, no . . .”

Dr. Mehldau takes it from me, frowning. On the front is a nicely posed picture of a smiling teenage boy hugging relieved parents. She looks at Alice and Mitch. “Are you considering this?”

“It’s their big stick, Dr. Mehldau. If you can’t come through for them, or I bail out, boom. You know what goes on there?”

She opens the pages, looking at pictures of the cabins, the obstacle course, the big lodge where kids just like me engage in “intense group sessions with trained counselors” where they can “recover their true identities.” She shakes her head. “Their approach is different than mine . . .”

“I don’t know, doc. Their approach sounds an awful lot like ‘reclaiming.’ I got to hand it to you, you had me going for awhile. Those visualization exercises? I was getting so good that I could even visualize stuff that never happened. I bet you could visualize me right into Therese’s head.”

I turn to Alice and Mitch. “You’ve got a decision to make. Dr. Mehldau’s program is a bust. So are you sending me off to brainwashing camp or not?”

Mitch has his arm around his wife. Alice, amazingly, is dry-eyed. Her eyes are wide, and she’s staring at me like a stranger.

It rains the entire trip back from Baltimore, and it’s still raining when we pull up to the house. Alice and I run to the porch step, illuminated by the glare of headlights. Mitch waits until Alice unlocks the door and we move inside, and then pulls away.

“Does he do that a lot?” I ask.

“He likes to drive when he’s upset.”

“Oh.” Alice goes through the house, turning on lights. I follow her into the kitchen.

“Don’t worry, he’ll be all right.” She opens the refrigerator door and crouches down. “He just doesn’t know what to do with you.”

“He wants to put me in the camp, then.”

“Oh, not that. He just never had a daughter who talked back to him before.” She carries a Tupperware cake holder to the table. “I made carrot cake. Can you get down the plates?”

She’s such a small woman. Face to face, she comes up only to my chin. The hair on the top of her head is thin, made thinner by the rain, and her scalp is pink.

“I’m not Therese. I never will be Therese.”

“Oh, I know,” she says, half sighing. And she does know it; I can see it in her face. “It’s just that you look so much like her.”

I laugh. “I can dye my hair. Maybe get a nose job.”

“It wouldn’t work, I’d still recognize you.” She pops the lid and sets it aside. The cake is a wheel with icing that looks half an inch thick. Miniature candy carrots line the edge.

“Wow, you made that before we left? Why?”

Alice shrugs, and cuts into it. She turns the knife on its side and uses the blade to lever a huge triangular wedge onto my plate. “I thought we might need it, one way or another.”

She places the plate in front of me, and touches me lightly on the arm. “I know you want to move out. I know you may never want to come back.”

“It’s not that I-”

“We’re not going to stop you. But wherever you go, you’ll still be my daughter, whether you like it or not. You don’t get to decide who loves you.”

“Alice . . .”

“Shhh. Eat your cake.”