Page 24 of Counting the Days

Her tics and twitches continued. Since she refused to medicate them, Aunt Tarah’s assistant sought out alternative therapies. Rhea’s weekly schedule involved acupuncture, Reiki, a life coach, hypnotherapy, and hot yoga. Aunt Tarah paid for all of it, mostly out of spite. She figured,If Rhea is too stubborn to listen to a real doctor and wants to waste her time with these quacks, fine by me.She looked forward to the day when Rhea would admit nothing was working and ask if she could go back to the psychiatrist.

One of the people her aunt’s assistant sent Rhea to was aninner-child specialist. A gentle man whose soft voice did not match his six-foot-seven frame. After Rhea told him about her mother’s passing, he suggested Rhea write her a letter.

“And do what with it?” Rhea asked.

“Throw it away? Save it? Bring it here? Whatever you want…it might help you process some of the confusing emotions you’re feeling.”

It took Rhea a very long time to write the letter. Every time she wroteDear Mom,she sobbed until her vision was too blurry to continue. When she finally completed the task, she brought it to her inner-child specialist. Handing him the piece of paper felt oddly similar to turning in an essay for a letter grade.

Dear Mom,

I miss you so much. I think about you all the time and wish you hadn’t died. Do you think about me? What is it like after you die? Are you with Snickers and Rusty? I miss them too. Well, I hope you aren’t annoyed with this letter. See you soon!

Her therapist silently read the letter and asked how she felt after writing it.

“Um, fine, I guess,” Rhea said.

She wished she didn’t want him to compliment her writing skills and tell her she’d earned an A+ on the assignment.

He gently asked, “Why did you think your mom would be annoyed with the letter?”

“…Oh, I don’t know, she just didn’t really like sappy stuff….”

He read the letter silently again, then asked ifSee you soon!meant Rhea was contemplating taking her own life.

To which Rhea responded, “No, I was just trying to end the letter with something happy.”

But the therapist’s question scared her so much, she did not write another letter to her mother for five years.

After several months of these alternative therapies, Rhea’s tics and twitches lessened. Aunt Tarah wondered if all the spastic motions had been fake; maybe her niece was doing it all for attention and finally grew bored with the charade. Rhea, however, knew she was not faking. The symptoms had been very real and were miraculously easing up. Because of this, she continued frequenting her various healers and, by adulthood, had managed to cure all signs of the anxiety disorder, except two.

Every time she got in her Prius, she had to shift the car in and out of drive six times; over and over again, she would slide the little gear stick soothingly in and out of the D position. She could not drive until she had completed this ritual.

The second twitch she could not quite shed was blinking. Whenever life became overwhelming, she would press her upper eyelids into her lower eyelids, and the more she pressed, the easier it was to breathe. One week after her date with Danny Beckett, she sat in her Prius for over an hour, staring out the window, blinking. Eventually, she shifted in and out of drive six times before backing down her vertical driveway and blinking her way across town.

She stopped at a CVS and bought all the remaining Peeps in the store.

“Wow, you’ve got someluckykiddos,” the elderly cashier said, referring to the large stack of bright yellow marshmallow chicks she was bagging.

“Uh-huh,” Rhea said.

“Happy Easter,” the cashier said as Rhea blinked out the door and blinked back to her car.

Rhea pulled up to Zoe’s modern box house and carried her bag of Peeps down the paver-stoned driveway to the fogged-glass front door. Zoe’s house was all sharp corners and hard edges cohabitating with a contradictory fragility, a black iron entryway table holding a delicate vase. Rhea wondered if the house was perhaps a metaphor for Zoe herself, although Rhea had been looking for the delicate fragility part for decades and had yet to find it.

Rhea followed the sounds of laughing children through the house. She slid open a glass door and stepped into an Easter egg hunt. A few dozen kids raced around the grass, hunting for plastic eggs, screaming with delight when their hunt was fruitful.

When Zoe’s daughter was one year old, Zoe decided to throw an Easter party, and to keep the children motivated, she filled the plastic eggs with dollar bills. These budding capitalists hunted with a fervor their parents had never seen before, and Zoe’s Easter parties became an annual event. Rhea and Tiny had always been the only childless adults in attendance, but that was about to change.

“No, do not climb the tree, Payton,” Zoe’s husband yelled. “Isaidthere are no eggs in the trees.”

“Ree Kee!” Ada said as Rhea entered the patio. Ada was breastfeeding Ekele, who looked up to glare at Rhea, then resumed siphoning the life out of his mother.

Rhea could not help but feel strange whenever Ada breastfed this young man who could speak in complete sentences. Hearing Ekele say in crystal-clear English, “Mommy, can I please have num-nums?” made Rhea feel squirmy.

“I’m barely making any milk, he just does it for comfort,” Ada would say.

Rhea could not imagine Ekele ever giving up this comfort and pictured him coming home from college on Christmas breakto suck on his mom’s tits. Ada was seated at a table with Zoe and Tiny, three pregnant women gratefully resting their feet while their husbands refereed the mayhem.