An hour later, I handed the train conductor my ticket without looking up. I’d made a decision: when I returned to group, I would break up with Dr. Rosen. My hurt and anger wasn’t hot and fiery. It was cold and sharp. A decision made. A contract signed. A door locked. If I was sinking all the way down, then let my feet hit the bottom. Dr. Rosen proved he couldn’t tend to me when I needed him most, so I didn’t want to be in his care. I’d look up Linda or Francis. Get myself a real therapist. One who gave a shit about me.
I curled toward the window, not seeing the German countryside zooming by. I was supposed to be better by now. No one else had made so little progress after so many years of treatment. Other group members came in and got better. Their careers shot off in promising new directions. They paid off debts. Their kids graduated and went to liberal arts colleges. They moved in with their boyfriends. They got married. They had babies.
And then there was me. Relationships kept slipping through my hands no matter how many groups I joined. What a damn fool. Maybe Dr. Rosen was mad at me because I ruined his track record. I was the quarter horse who was expected to win but couldn’t make a clean lap around the course. Someone should shoot me. I was back to where I was before I ever called Dr. Rosen, except this was worse because I’d learned to feel so much more. All those one- and two-syllable words: Angry. Hurt. Lonely. Ashamed.
I pulled out my BlackBerry so I could let someone know I would be arriving in Chicago six hours later than expected. But who? I could tell my parents that I was now on a train instead of a plane, but that made me feel like a thirty-three-year-old loser. Who cared where I was at this very minute? No one. Absolutely no one.
I typed a message to Dr. Rosen: I’m so sorry. I really tried. I swear I did.
On Monday morning in group, I did not say a single word for the first hour and twenty-five minutes of the ninety-minute session. Everyone seemed to sense I needed space. I felt Max and Grandma Maggie staring at me, but they said nothing. I lacked the energy to break up with Dr. Rosen. It would take too many words, spawn too much discussion. For now, I would float until my head went under.
“I won’t be here next week,” Patrice said at five minutes to nine. “Conference in San Francisco.” Dr. Rosen pulled out the blue appointment book he kept in his pocket—his customary practice for when someone announced they would be gone from group. I once asked why he always wrote our absences down in his little book, and he’d said it was because he cared where we were. I remembered when I believed that.
He looked at me, his pen poised, waiting for me to announce when I’d be back in Germany—so he could write my initials in the Monday, Tuesday, Thursday squares. I said nothing. My head slipped below the waterline.
Dr. Rosen clipped his pen to his book and cleared his throat. “I need to turn something over to the group.” His lips were a straight line, his eyes blazed serious. I felt him looking at me, but my gaze bored into Brad’s New Balances.
“When I got your last e-mail, Christie, for the first time ever”—he paused and looked around the room—“I feared for your safety.”
I’d scared the impervious Dr. Rosen? The guy who thought everything was hilarious, useful fodder for emotional growth?
“Normally, you’re full of passion and fury.” He waved his hands spastically and bobbed his head back and forth, imitating me. “You’re screaming and frothing and outraged. This was different. Scary.”
It couldn’t be good to scare your therapist.
A memory flashed into my head: two summers earlier, I hunkered down with bar exam study guides seven days a week, and in my off-hours, dug my claws into my dwindling relationship with Jeremy.
“Can I borrow one of those?” I pointed at the motley stash of stuffed animals that Dr. Rosen kept in the group room. “I could sleep with it at Jeremy’s house when he’s too busy playing video games to sleep with me.” Dr. Rosen opened his palms like go ahead, and Carlos tossed me a careworn brown teddy bear. I tucked it under my chin and pretended to snooze. “Perfect.”
One Sunday night that summer, my youngest cousin—the one whose diapers I’d changed growing up—called to tell me that she and her fiancé had signed a contract on a house in Houston. When I got off the phone, I burned with shame. I hadn’t even known my cousin was engaged. I also burned with envy at her forward momentum, while my boyfriend couldn’t be bothered to swivel away from his computer screen. Now, couples composed my entire family tree. It was only I who still dangled alone on a branch by myself.
When Jeremy fell asleep that night, I sat in his darkened living room, mentally decorating my cousin’s new house: a Mission-style dining room table, a sleigh bed in the master. As I dreamed up her perfect life, a streetlight glared through the window, emitting just enough buttery light to see a pair of orange-handled scissors on Jeremy’s desk. I grabbed them and hacked at the teddy bear’s right arm with the scissors. The following Tuesday, I tossed the dismembered bear and the Ziploc bag full of its arm stuffing onto the floor in the middle of group.
Dr. Rosen stared hard.
“My baby cousin’s buying a house. It’s two stories.” The group was used to my outbursts by then, but Dr. Rosen sat still as poured concrete.
“He looks mad.” Rory sounded anxious.
“Why is his jaw twitching?” Carlos said.
The Colonel
