He’d finish the race in a half hour or so, the run so fast he couldn’t even go into the alternate mind. That was a place he journeyed to only through the numbing of everything, the shutting out of the painful world.
“Hey, you okay?” The breathless words cut through him like a razor blade as he jerked his head to the left, following the sound. Shelly, the red-headed girl from the office again. He used “girl” in the most appropriate way; if she was eighteen he’d be surprised, and she acted like a tomboy.
“Why?” he asked, confused and suddenly self-conscious. The feeling was all wrong. When he ran, he blended into the world, becoming part of it for once. Feeling like an outsider every waking minute was exhausting. Meeting Jill and Dylan had put an end to some of that, and Jill’s death brought so much of it back.
“You’re crying,” she said with a shrug, pulling back slightly as she struggled to match his pace.
He reached up and felt the tears, though he didn’t understand why Shelly assumed he was crying. Sweat mingled with the tears to make all the wetness seem the same.
“And who’s Jill?” she grunted, making Mike stumble slightly, his calf muscles screaming as he righted himself, finding balance once more. His center of gravity felt so out of kilter that his vision swam slightly.
“Jill? Why?”
“You’re repeating her name over and over,” Shelly called forward as Mike’s legs turned into rubber, his mind going completely still as her statement sank in. The echo of Jill’s name had, indeed, become a sonorous loop in his mind, but had his obsession and grief gone so far as to manifest it as a chant he said aloud as he ran in a gigantic group?
Legs stretching, he swallowed the ground whole with strides that were three times the length of Shelly’s as he pulled away and finished the course with a completely empty mind. Barren. Desolate. As wiped clear of any semblance of the person “Mike” who inhabited his body as Jill’s corporeal form had been wiped of her soul the day she died.
Spectators cheered on the tunnel-like sidelines as he reached the finish line, and then Mike just kept running, four more miles through the city, all the way to the parking garage where his Jeep sat waiting for him.
By the time he got there, he had no more tears.
*
“I’m only here because Dylan insisted,” Mike ground out, sitting on the red velour chair surrounded by tiny throw pillows that made up the rainbow if he sorted them in order.
He did not.
Never had.
Dr. Harr was a kindly looking woman who looked a bit like Michelle Obama, though her hair, pulled back in a fierce and always-tidy bun, was streaked with white. Her face was impassive, with a high forehead and strong cheekbones. Eyes that flickered with strength and intelligence peered at him through fashionable glasses.
Her office was primary colors and light, all glass and spider plants. His fingers picked at the quilted pillow next to him. He’d cried into this very pillow.
Dr. Harr was the psychotherapist Jill’s oncology nurse had referred him to as Jill’s death became imminent. He’d seen the psychologist for twelve sessions, declared himself cured, and had carefully avoided all thoughts of being in this room, an expansive office at the top of an old mansion in Harvard Square, her view of the Charles River both breathtaking and daunting.
Just like Dr. Harr.
“Is it important that I know that?” Dr. Harr asked, eyes blinking slowly, like an owl’s.
“What?”
“I am assuming that you find that detail important. Is it important?”
Mike was nonplussed, but scrambled internally not to show it. “No.”
“Then why lead with it?”
“I don’t know.” Those three words bedeviled him, because while they were absolutely correct—his internal emotional state was one he simply could not understand, no matter how hard he tried—he knew they were inadequate. Unfair, even. People had asked him his entire life to describe what he felt, and when he tried, it was like trying to explain how it felt to watch a beautiful sunrise, or to have a knife slice through your thumb, or to watch your best friend score a touchdown.
Describing a feeling seemed as stupid as asking Mike to give birth to a baby.
