Alix Ohlin - Inside

“Hi,” she said, and smiled.

She looked prettier, less coltish, and her braces had been removed. She took off her winter coat and threw it on the couch, revealing a low-cut sweater and jeans instead of her usual school uniform. Her posture was straight and confident, and clearly she had no plans to apologize for getting Grace in trouble with her parents.

“How are you?” Grace said.

“I’m terrible ,” she declared, then sat down with a flounce of blond hair. “I’m sure you’ve heard about the catastrophe . I’ve been grounded for weeks. No Ollie, no friends, no mall. My mom found my journal and just flipped . And the whole pregnancy thing? My God.”

“And how are you feeling about the whole pregnancy thing?”

“I’m feeling glad,” Annie said emphatically, “that it’s over.”

“Okay.” Grace felt like she was dealing with an entirely new creature, one who’d molted her previous adolescent skin and had become a shinier, wilder animal.

They talked for a few minutes — about schoolwork, friends, the braces coming off — before circling back to her parents and the turbulence of the past few weeks.

“So I told my teacher, Ms. Van den Berg, that I had the flu. And then I felt, like, ashamed, because lying was so easy. That’s what I never realized before, that you don’t lie, because you don’t think you can get away with it. But you’re really the only person who knows the difference.”

“That’s true, I suppose,” Grace said slowly. “Does this mean you’re not going to lie to your parents anymore?”

Annie laughed. “My parents,” she said, then sighed, shaking her head a little, as if they were her errant children and not the other way around. Something in her face softened then, and her expression grew sincere and sad. She folded her hands in her lap almost piously. “My father has a girlfriend who lives in Saint-Lambert,” she said, her voice quiet, resigned, its timbre altogether different from the bright prattle of the past minutes. “We know all about her. She used to be his secretary but now she just hangs out and he supports her. My parents were arguing about her the other night. They still think I fall asleep early, but at midnight I was just lying there listening. It sounds like she’s pregnant and having his baby. Wouldn’t that have been, like, hilarious , if she and I had had babies at the same time? What would that relationship even be?”

“I don’t know,” Grace said.

“Maybe I’d be my own aunt or something. And my mom’s threatening to have her own affair, as revenge. She’ll never leave my dad, we all know that. She’s too weak. I don’t think she’ll even have an affair. She’ll just get new prescriptions instead.”

She looked down at her hands as if in prayer. She was crying, a quick slipstream of tears that fell silently down her cheeks.

“It’s not your fault,” Grace said gently. “You can’t control any of it.”

“He used to—” she said, then stopped.

Grace waited.

“He used to come lie down with me at night and say I was his special girl. He doesn’t do it anymore.” Now she was crying harder, her shoulders shaking, snot cresting at her nose.

Grace gave her a tissue. “Tell me more about that.”

“No,” Annie said. “No.” When she lifted her face and wiped her eyes, she looked calmer and harder, and her facade reassembled itself like a sliding door closing across her features. The fact that there were cracks in her self-presentation, that she evidently had to work so hard to construct a mask of indifference, made her success at it that much more pitiable to Grace. She was practicing the skill of keeping others at a distance, and the older she got the more proficient she would likely become, at a cost borne mainly by herself.

“Annie,” Grace said firmly, “you’re sixteen. Soon you’ll be an adult.”

“Meaning what?” the girl demanded.

“You can be anything you want to be,” Grace said. “You don’t have to be like them.”

To her surprise, Annie smiled. She wiped her cheeks clean, smearing snot and makeup on the sleeve of her sweater. She seemed more immediately comforted by this thought than Grace had expected. “You know what, you’re right,” she said, suddenly standing up. “You’re totally and completely right.”

Grace’s stomach turned over. When a patient agreed so quickly, it was rarely a good sign. “Let’s talk about what this would mean for you, specifically,” she said.

“No, I think I’m good,” Annie said. Still smiling, she picked up her coat, and indeed she was radiant, her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright. At the door she turned around and said, “Thank you, Grace. You’ve been a huge help.”

It was the first time she had ever expressed anything like gratitude. Then she was gone. Grace sat with her head in her hands. Something had just gone badly wrong, but she wasn’t sure exactly what. The session had slipped through her fingers. She had let the girl go, and now, she felt sure, she’d never get her back.

That night Tug came over, and after she cooked dinner, they ate in silence. Grace couldn’t stop replaying her session with Annie, wondering how truthful her remarks about her father were, what had made her smile so brightly at the end, what Grace could have said or done differently. It had been like she was talking to a brand-new patient, someone she’d never even met before.

If Tug noticed her distraction, he didn’t show it. After they finished dinner, he washed the dishes while she read a magazine in the living room. It was only when he came in half an hour later and asked what was wrong that she realized she was crying.

She put the magazine down. “I can’t do this,” she said.

“What?”

He stood there, his face impassive, and she knew that he held himself apart from her just as the girl had. She couldn’t live with this in two places, at work and at home. It was too much. “I need to know,” she told him.

Tug made an exasperated sound, shrugged his shoulders, and glanced away. “It won’t change anything,” he said, still standing above her, refusing to sit down.

Still crying, she swallowed and said, as calmly as possible, “I disagree.”

“I’m not your patient, Grace,” he said, and his voice was rough. “You can’t fix me. I know this is all some big savior thing for you, but that’s not quite how I see it.”

Grace’s tears were falling freely now. She stood up and faced him, each of them hovering there, poised to leave the room, trembling a little. Whatever delicate balance they’d established between them was breaking down, careening away.

“I have no idea how you see it,” she said, “and until you can tell me, I don’t want to see you anymore.”

“Oh, Gracie,” he said. “We’ve been having a good time.”

He put his arms around her and she closed her eyes, allowing herself to feel the warmth of his body, the scratch of his stubble against her cheek. Then she stepped away. “You should go,” she said.

She lay in bed waiting for him to call, or come back, but he had left without a word of dissent. Her thoughts drifted restlessly to Annie, who seemed to have been freed in some way that Grace had never intended. What had she said to give the girl that smile, so radiant and strange? After a while she started thinking about Tug and the dinner they’d had at the Greek restaurant. What she remembered was his story about the childhood friend who leapt off buildings, the tree climber, the trestle jumper. At the time she’d interpreted it as a story about someone you could only shake your head at, so incomprehensible were his choices. Now she realized that the story meant something different to Tug. To him it was a marvel. A wonder.