“Declan liked dogs?”
“He loved them.”
“Tell me about your wife.”
Spencer reached out to his hand sanitizer, pumped a portion onto his hand, and again rubbed his hands together.
“Isabella was a very loving mother. This has been hard on her.”
“Yes, I would expect it to be. Molly is very worried about her daughter’s emotional state.”
Spencer nodded.
“Do you think she’s right to be concerned?”
“She knows her daughter better than I do. I know Isabella is unhappy… but that’s how I would expect her to feel…”
“Like you.”
Spencer gave a brief nod.
“Where did the two of you meet?”
“When I moved here, I was looking for a support group. Isabella had been put into a program by her therapist. We met. We really hit it off. It’s hard for people to understand what it’s like…” he trailed off uncomfortably.
“What it’s like to have OCD,” Zachary guessed.
Spencer didn’t look surprised that Zachary had figured it out. It wasn’t like he had tried to hide his compulsions.
“Yes.”
“You and Isabella both have OCD?” Molly hadn’t mentioned what kind of mental illness Isabella suffered from. “What’s that like? It must be nice having someone who understands what it’s like.” Zachary made a motion to encompass the room. “It’s a very tidy household,” he observed with a smile.
“What you have seen so far. I thought it would be easier, living with someone like me; someone who understood; but we are very different. I think probably more different than it would have been to marry someone without compulsions.”
Zachary shook his head, not understanding. Spencer tipped his chair back a little. He let out a sigh.
“Combining our households was a challenge. Isabella had accumulated so much stuff. They didn’t live at Molly’s current place, which you already saw. They lived in a little bungalow, and it was full to the brim with things. Isabella obviously couldn’t bring everything here. She did her best to only bring a reasonable amount, and we tried to make a home.”
Zachary nodded, following the story, though he wasn’t sure where it was going to lead.
“The dishes were a combination of what I already had and what she brought. I went through them, getting rid of duplicate items or anything that was cracked or damaged. There was a plate that didn’t match anything. A chipped blue dish. I got rid of it. This was all done while she was on a business trip, so she would be out of the way and wouldn’t know what all I had gotten rid of. So, it wouldn’t upset her.”
With a little smile, Zachary could see what was coming. “But she noticed the loss of the blue plate.”
A longer sigh from Spencer this time. Almost a groan. “That blue plate was the only one she would eat off.”
“Oops.”
Spencer swiveled to look at him. “That isn’t an exaggeration, Mr. Goldman. She really would not eat off any other plate in the house. In the eight years we have been married, she has never eaten off another plate within these walls.”
“Never? Then, what…?”
“If she’s out at a restaurant, she can eat off their plates. At home, she can’t. She can drink out of a cup. She can eat out of a bowl or straight out of the package.” Spencer wrinkled his nose at this. “But she cannot bring herself to eat off a plate other than the chipped blue plate I threw out.”
“Couldn’t you get another one to replace it?”
“No. Even if I got one that was identical, she would know it wasn’t the same plate, and she still wouldn’t be able to use it.”
“Oh.” Zachary knew he should be making notes about the experience, but he was too baffled to write anything down.
“Compulsions can be very disruptive,” Spencer said. “They can take over your life, out of nowhere. It isn’t just a comfortable ritual.” As if to demonstrate, Spencer leaned forward to squirt another stream of antibacterial gel onto his hands and scrub it away. For the first time, Zachary was aware of the sharp tang in the air, and noticed how red and chapped Spencer’s hands were. “It isn’t just a habit; it is something you must do. You can’t move forward until you do. Do you want to know why I moved to Vermont?”
Zachary leaned forward. “Yes, of course.”
“The sign law.”
“The no-billboards law?”
Spencer nodded. “Before I came here, I had a compulsion to count billboards. I knew exactly how many there were on every route I traveled. If I was distracted and missed one of them, I had to go back to the beginning of the route and start over again. I was spending hours on the highway, just counting signs. If the advertisement on one of them changed, I had to drive by it twenty times. It had taken over my life.”
“And you can’t do anything about that?”
“There are therapies. Some people can get over their compulsions without replacing them with something new.” His chair creaked. “I came to Vermont.”
“Because you knew there weren’t any billboards to count.”
“Does that sound crazy to you?”
Zachary scratched his head, considering it. It certainly seemed extreme. As did refusing to eat off any other plate for eight years; but Spencer wasn’t claiming to be normal. He was describing a pathology. A deviation from the norm.
“I can understand how it must have disrupted your life,” he said slowly. “Moving to Vermont and starting over here seems like a disruption too, though. It can’t have been easy.”
Spencer drummed his fingers on the desk and gave a little shrug. “Yes, it was hard to leave Ohio to come here. Sometimes, even if it’s painful, you just need to find a way to get away from your triggers. If I were still living in Ohio, I wouldn’t have any kind of life now. I’d be driving up and down the highway endlessly. I never would have met Isabella. Deck would never have been a part of my life.”
Zachary was uncomfortably aware of his own circumstances. All that had been taken away from him that everybody else
