Torey Hayden - Overheard in a Dream

Laura materialized beside him. “Let me help you.” She pulled napkins out of the holder on one of the small tables. “Morgana, you and Becky go in the restroom and bring us some paper towels.”

Becky hadn’t been exaggerating. Mikey had vomited over his clothes, across the console, the gear shift and onto the adjacent seat.

“Hey, fella, you okay?” James asked, reaching in to ruffle his son’s hair, which was just about the only part of him free from vomit.

“Sorry, Daddy,” Mikey whimpered.

“Accidents happen. As long as you’re okay.” Standing in the brisk October dusk, James felt bleak at the prospect of trying to clean up Mikey and the car with a handful of deli napkins.

Laura put a hand on his arm. “Why don’t we just mop things up enough for you to take Mikey home? Becky can come in my car and I’ll follow you. That would be easiest.”

James knew it was a bad idea. As he drove home, he tried to reassure himself that letting Laura do this was not breaking the rules. It was so important that he not make any mistakes this time around. Good boundaries with clients did not include any kind of personal relationships with them. But then he was in a genuinely bad situation. She was simply helping him, like any decent person would. Besides … if he was honest with himself, James had to admit she intrigued him. She wore her fame, her accomplishments so lightly they were almost illusory, as if they were nothing more than stories themselves, and yet there was something also illusory about Laura, the way she could be so friendly, so concerned and willing to help with Mikey and yet eluded James’s efforts to get her in to talk about her own son.

When they arrived at the apartment, the two girls bounded off together, Becky chattering excitedly about a toy horse she wanted to show Morgana. Laura lifted Mikey out of the car and took him inside while James went in search of cleaning supplies and a rag out of the box at the back of the garage. By the time he came into the apartment, Laura had run a bath and was washing Mikey, as if it were the most natural thing to enter a strange house and bathe a child she’d never met before.

James took over from there. With Mikey finally clean and tucked into bed, he came back into the living room to find Laura, hands sunk deep into the pockets of her jeans, scanning the bookshelves. Embarrassment shot through him. While he owned most of her books, they were all in his office, because the only point of buying them had been so people at work could see he owned them. The novels on these shelves were the sort he actually read – Terry Pratchett, Tom Clancy, Stephen King – relaxing, unpretentious storytelling that you could leave on the back of the toilet or risk dropping in the bath.

“That’s my fun reading,” he said sheepishly.

She smiled enigmatically.

“I do have yours,” he added quickly. “But they’re at the office at the moment. I’m always switching back and forth.”

Her smile eased into a grin and she glanced over. “So does that mean you’ve actually read any of them?”

James felt his cheeks redden. There was an uncomfortable pause and then he admitted, “I wish I could say yes. I intend to. It’s just been very busy since moving out here.”

“At least you’re honest.”

Desperate to move the conversation away from his embarrassing lack of intellectual reading, James said, “Would you like a cup of coffee? Then we can try to pull the girls apart.”

Laura followed him into the kitchen. Hands still deep in her pockets she strolled around the room, studying the kitchen with the same care as she had his bookshelf. The way she circled the room, inspecting everything, reminded James of Conor.

That brought to mind the fact that Laura had not yet mentioned her son. Normally parents he met outside the office pounced on him, anxious to ask how things were going, to tell of their child’s progress or get some free advice. James was grateful, of course, that she hadn’t done any of these things, since it would have been inappropriate to discuss a case outside the privacy of the office, but it was still curious that she never mentioned Conor at all, even casually.

Taking the coffee to the table, James sat down. “I’ve been hoping to see you in the office,” he said.

Laura ignored his comment. She lifted the coffee and sipped it. “Mmmm. Good coffee. Tastes like New York coffee.”

“Can I get Dulcie to give you a call this week and make an appointment?” James asked.

Laura’s brow drew down as she looked into the mug of steaming liquid. A silence developed and several moments slipped by with no response. “I’ve got to admit, I’m not really into that concept,” she said at last.

“Which concept is this?”

“Therapy.”

“Why?” James asked.

Setting the mug down on the table, Laura leaned forward on her forearms and stared into it as if some answer were in there. Finally she smiled at him. “Because everyone’s reality is different.”

That was an unexpected answer. James cocked an eyebrow.

“Therapy, the way I see it, trades on the assumption that ‘normal’ exists and that my perceptions, whatever they might be, should be brought into line with it,” she said. “Whereas I think there is no ‘real world’ out there. No absolute reality. Everything is subjective. So why should I accept what you tell me is reality?”

“That’s an interesting take,” James said. “I get the impression you’re worried your perspective will be overridden or judged as not as good or acceptable as other perspectives. Perhaps you think that a therapist might get in there and try to change perceptions you don’t feel are wrong.” He smiled at her. “But that’s not quite what therapy is. It’s simply about fixing things that don’t work. Just as if your car stopped working. You’d take it to a garage and let a mechanic repair it. You wouldn’t expect him to do stuff you hadn’t wanted done or to customize the car to his liking and not give it back to you. You’d expect him simply to find out what’s wrong and repair it so that you can enjoy your car again. Same here, except that I work with people, not cars. Your relationship with Conor has stopped working. So you’ve brought Conor to see if I can fix that. And because relationships always involve more than one person, I need to see everyone involved to do my job properly. I’m not going to make anyone think or do anything they don’t want to. I’m just going to try and fix what’s broken.”

Her cheeks flushed. She ducked her head and James saw tears come to the corners of her eyes. He sat back in a casual manner to lessen the intensity of the moment, because this wasn’t the time or the place. Indeed, he was deeply relieved that the girls had remained occupied playing in Becky’s room.