Lisa Unger - Under My Skin

“The other night when I left the gym, there was someone standing across the street. I think I saw him again this morning on a park bench near my office.”

Even thinking about it, there’s a flutter of unease.

The doctor shifts in her leather Eames chair; it’s too well made to creak beneath her weight. She’s a wisp of a woman. The leather just whispers against the fabric of her pants. Afternoon light washes in, touching her hair and the side of her face. There are these longish pauses in our conversation where she chooses her words, letting mine ring back to me. She takes one now, considering me.

“Are you certain it was the same man?” she asks finally.

A cool October breeze wafts in the open window, street noise carrying up from nine floors below. A horn, the rumble of a manhole cover wobbling beneath the weight of passing vehicles, the yipping of some small dog. I imagine a Yorkie in a little sweater, straining against a slender leash.

“No,” I admit.

“But certain enough that you’re uneasy about it.”

I’m already sorry I brought it up. I did see someone, a man in a black hoodie, sneakers, faded jeans. He stood in a dark doorway across the street when I left the gym last Tuesday. Then on Thursday as I headed to my office clutching my daily quadruple espresso, I saw him again. I felt his eyes on me, the details of his face hidden in the dark shadow of that hood.

I dismissed it. There are lots of staring men clad in jeans and hoodies in this city. Any girl will tell you, there are always eyes on you, unsolicited comments, unwanted noises, unwelcome approaches. But then maybe I saw him once more over the weekend, when I was coming home from the farmers’ market. Still, it’s hard to be certain.

“Well,” I backpedal. “Maybe it wasn’t the same man.”

I shouldn’t have said anything. I don’t want her to think I’m backsliding. Stumbling toward another breakdown . When something like that happens to you, there’s this energy to the people who care about you, like they’re always waiting for signs that it’s going to happen again. I get it; they don’t want to miss the tells a second time and run the risk of losing you again, maybe for good. Even I’m wary. I feel a little sick about that black spot in my memory where I took a vacation from reality, how fuzzy are the days surrounding Jack’s murder.

So. I try not to think about it. It’s one of the things from which I am trying to move on . That’s what you’re supposed to do, you know, when the worst thing happens and you’re still standing. Everyone’s very clear about it: you’re supposed to move on.

“It’s probably nothing,” I say, stealing a surreptitious glance at my watch. My smartphone, my tether as Jack liked to call it, is off and tucked into my bag, as per Dr. Nash’s office rules. Here we free ourselves of distractions and try to be present in a world that conspires against it , she has said more than once.

Dr. Nash watches me, prettily brushing away an errant strand of her lovely gray-blond bob. Behind her there’s a picture of her family—her chiseled-jaw, graying husband, her grown children both with her same delicate features, intelligent eyes. They all stand together on a terrace overlooking a beach sunset, smiling, faces pressed together. We’re perfect , it seems to say. Wealthy and gorgeous, without a single stain of darkness on our lives. I look away.

“I noticed you’re not wearing your rings,” she says.

I look down at my left hand. The finger is slightly indented from my wedding and engagement rings, but bare.

“When did you make that decision?”

My hands swelled the other night, and I took the rings off and put them in the dish beside my bed. I haven’t put them back on. I tell her as much. Jack has been dead almost a year. I’m not married anymore. Time to stop wearing the jewelry, right? Even though the sight of my bare hand puts a painful squeeze on my heart, it’s time.

“Was it before or after that you started seeing the hooded figure?”

Dr. Nash is the master of the pointed question.

“I see where you’re going with this.”

“I’m just asking.”

I smile a little. “You’re never just asking , Dr. Nash.”

We like each other. Sometimes, lately, our sessions devolve into chats—which she says is a sign I need her less. A good thing, according to her. Progress on the road to healing, the new normal as she likes to call it.

“How are you sleeping?” she asks, letting her other question rest.

I have the nearly empty pill bottle in my purse. Last time I asked for more, she wrote me a scrip but lowered the dosage. I’d like you to try to get off these . Honestly, it hasn’t been going well. My dreams are too vivid. I’m less rested, so edgier, jumpier during the day.

“I was going to ask for my refill.”

“How’s that lower dosage?”

I shrug, trying for nonchalance. I don’t want to appear fragile, not to her, not to anyone. Even though I am, terribly. “I’m dreaming more. Maybe I feel a little less rested.”

“You’re not taking more of them, though, are you?”

I am. I’m also doing other things I shouldn’t be doing. Like taking them with alcohol, for one.

“No,” I lie.

She nods carefully, watching me in her shrink way. “You’ve been taking them for eleven months. I’d like to go down to the minimum dosage with an eye toward your being off them altogether. Want to give it a try?”

I hesitate. That chemical slumber is the best place in my life right now. I don’t say that, though. It sounds too grim. Instead I find myself agreeing.

“Great,” she says. “If it’s an issue, we’ll go back up to the dosage you’re on now. And those dreams? Go back to the dream journal you were keeping when Jack first died. It’s an important part of our lives, our dream world. As we’ve discussed, we can learn a lot about ourselves there. Do you still keep it by your bed?”

“Yes.”

She hands me the white slip of paper.

“Well,” she says. I stare at the crisp sheet, her doctor’s scrawl. “I think our time is up for today.”

I’m always a little startled by the end of a session, the abrupt reminder that no matter how intimate, how I strip myself bare in these sessions, ours is a professional relationship. If I stopped paying, these chats with Dr. Nash would come to an unceremonious end.

“And, Poppy? If you see him again, call me.”

A siren from the street below drifts up, a distant and ghostly wail. This sound, so frequent in the cacophony of city noise, always makes me think of Jack. About an hour after he left that morning, emergency vehicles howled up the avenue beneath our window. There should have been some premonition, some dark dawning, but there wasn’t.

A lingering head cold had kept me in bed instead of going with him as I normally would have.

You could have died that morning, too , Layla says when we go over and over it.

Or maybe it wouldn’t have happened at all. Maybe we would have run in a different direction. Or maybe we could have fought off the attacker together.

Or maybe, or maybe, or maybe—on and on. Infinite possibilities, myriad ways Jack might still be with me. He overslept; a light caused him to cross another street; I was there and twisted my ankle, causing us to return home. I turn to those scenarios in blank moments, in dreams, when I should be paying attention in meetings. So many other paths he could have taken and didn’t.

“I’m not imagining him.” It seems to come out of nowhere.

Dr. Nash cocks her head at me. “I didn’t say you were.”

I bend down and grab my bag, come to standing as she does.