Running Against Traffic Page 6

  “Hello,” she called, softly, craning to peek around the door. The inner office was much like the waiting room, only darker. It was stuffed with heavy looking books, a writing desk, a large purple armchair and a brown leather sofa. The small lamp on the desk and a beam of sunlight through a high window were the room’s only light. A round, ancient looking man with tufts of white hair coming out of his ears and none on his blotchy head was slumped over in the armchair, inert. Crap, Paige thought. He’s dead. He’s dead, and I have to tell his son.

  She reached into her purse for her cell phone but Dr. Hackney lifted his head and made a coughing noise that sounded like hurroch. “Oh, my,” he said, pushing himself to his feet. “Must have dozed off, I apologize. You must be Miss Scott.”

  Paige moved to shake his hand. His grip was surprisingly firm. “Please, call me Paige.”

  “Yes, yes. Have a seat.”

  Paige perched on the brown leather sofa that had several tears with yellow foam peeking out.

  “Now let me see,” Dr. Hackney began, adjusting his thick glasses and reaching for some papers from the desk. He thumbed through them. “I understand that you have some issues.”

  “Oh yes, I do have issues.”

  He settled back into his chair and raised his white, freakishly bushy eyebrows. “Sexual issues.”

  “Wha…”

  “I understand you are having some difficulty maintaining a platonic relationship with your employer?”

  Paige shook her head vigorously. “No, no, no, where does he get these ideas!”

  But Dr. Hackney was looking at his notebook and talking right over her. Dr. Hackney was clearly quite hard of hearing.

  “It’s a very serious issue,” he meandered on, “to be pursuing sexual favors from your employer.”

  “Trust me, sex with your son would be doing no one any favors.”

  “And we need to figure out where these misdirected desires really stem from.”

  Paige felt pain in her temples. “Misdirected would be an understatement. Well, I’m going to go, now,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m going, now! See you Thursday,” she yelled, and veered out of the office and into the fresh air, gulping it in with her hands on her knees.

  Once she was breathing normally again, she walked to the lake and sat on a bench, watching Dingbat splash around, nibbling at water weeds. She kept a supply of crackers in a plastic bread bag in her purse for him, in case they happened to meet, and she pulled it out and tossed a few saltines into the water. The duck swam to the water’s edge, his neck jutting forward, and ate the crackers with gusto before splashing away to the far side of the lake. Ungrateful mooch, Paige thought, darkly. Her Anger nodded approvingly.

  She walked slowly back to the law office and told Mr. Hackney that Dr. Hackney had advised her to go home and think about her life for a while. Her boss muttered something about actually getting his calls and waved her out the door.

  Thursday came, and Paige sat at her desk watching the clock until she could escape at ten o'clock for her appointment. Ignoring her housemate’s cat calls from the beer truck outside of Darnell’s where he was signing for a delivery, she marched on her way. Since Dr. Hackney could not hear her unless she shouted, she had spent the previous evening scribbling in a notebook, explaining how she came to live in Wells Lake. She had tried to pen her true issues, but she would start and stop, start and stop, unsure of what to say. I’m alone? I am sitting on a scrap of wreckage from my life in the middle of a wide sea, with nothing and no one for as far as I can see? There is no point to my existence? It seemed a bit over this old man’s head.

  In any case, she could not bear to hear any more talk about her sexual deviance when the closest she had come to anything sexual in the past year was licking ice cream from Al’s spoon. It would be maddening.

  This time she only sat for a few moments in the waiting room before letting herself into Dr. Hackney’s inner office and perching on the couch. She felt comforted by the dim light and the smell of old wood. The room reminded her of her Aunt and Uncle’s attic. It was the only space in their house where she could relax, that she felt was her own, when she was sent to live with them, because no one ever went up there except the young housekeeper, Chloe, to haul her uncle’s suits up and down, to and from storage at the change of the seasons. Paige once watched her drag the zipped, heavy plastic garment bags up the steep wood staircase, off of one of the guest rooms. They looked so bulky, she thought, not flat and foldable at all, and she went to help Chloe, who in turn looked alarmed and tried to shoo her away.

  “What’s the matter?” Paige had asked, feeling her skin prickle. Even the housekeeper, though only a few years older than Paige, was waving her away like a fly. She was angry that this woman was nothing like Inez, who at least would sit at the table and eat ice cream with her.

  Chloe instantly softened, obviously pitying her state of affairs in the house, probably having noted that no other teenagers come to visit, and having seen her spending all of her time in the quiet wings of the house, where her Aunt and Uncle rarely went.

  “Sorry,” Chloe said. “Yes, please take that end.”

  Paige grasped the end of the bag and was surprised to feel something poking her through the plastic. She glanced up as Chloe led the way up the narrow steps. Chloe met her questioning gaze, and let one hand go to press a finger to her lips, smiling. “Come on, I’ll show you. I know you won’t tell.” How does she know that? Paige wondered.

  They reached the attic and Paige helped her to hoist the bag upright and hook it by the hanger on a long bar that had been installed for the garment bags amid the old furniture, boxes and trunks. Chloe tucked her chin-length white blond hair behind her ears and unzipped a corner of the bag. Paige peered in at greenery, almost a bush, hanging upside down.

  “What is this,” she asked, guessing already. She leaned in and inhaled the scent. “It’s my college fund,” Chloe said. “It needs to dry out. I have some already dried and ready to smoke in that last bag there, if you want some. But leave the other bags be.” She stood watching Paige take it all in.

  “Where do you grow it?” Paige asked, in wonder.

  Chloe giggled. “Never you mind.” She turned to leave. “Be sure to open the window over there so the smell gets out.”

  Paige caught herself deeply inhaling the smell of Dr. Hackney’s musty office. It felt hidden, the way her Wells Lake house had felt before the great end-of-summer squatter invasion.

  Dr. Hackney held out his hand for the notebook she proffered, and read in silence, before nodding and then shaking his head. “Okay,” he finally said, handing it back to her. “I thought that was unlikely.” He smiled kindly and clasped his hands in his lap. “Let’s start over.”

  Paige nodded, hot tears suddenly filling her eyes and spilling down her face. She put her head in her hands and sobbed in wretched pain, crushing, cold despair. Her Anger hesitated, then burst into tears as well, melting itself into a sniveling puddle. Through the blackness Paige felt a hand on her arm, gently patting. She clutched at it and opened her eyes, trying to see underwater, and eventually her cries eased and her breath settled into jagged sighs. The hand was warm and stayed with her.

  Paige didn’t return to the office right away. She stumbled back to bench at the side of the lake again, her eyes swollen to slits, feeling nauseous and shaky. Her outer layer had split, and the deep, murky mess inside of her had spilled out, and now hung around her in a cloak of dank vapor.

  When she finally felt able to wobble like a baby giraffe back to the office, Howard Hackney looked at her with great horror and sent her home.

  Al and Bryce had knocked off work for the day. Bryce was nowhere to be found and Al had left a note that he would be working for Darnell late into the evening. Paige stepped over dusty stacks of floorboards that had appeared in the living room, to get to the kitchen for a glass of wine. She had bought a bottle with the last of her money before the
next payday.

  The wine was gone. She found the empty bottle in the recycling bin under the sink.

  Chapter 9

  Dr. Hackney sent her to the town doctor to pick up a prescription for what might have been hog tranquilizers for all Paige could tell. She didn’t like taking even aspirin, so she tossed the slip of paper onto the kitchen counter. The next morning as she was measuring coffee grounds, she noticed it was gone. She checked the trash can and the recycle bin, but didn’t see it. When she returned home from work that evening it was back on the counter.

  “Did you take this?” she asked Bryce, who was hunting in the fridge for something to eat. He lifted his head to see what she was holding. “Yes,” he said. “I didn’t think you were going to use it.”

  “You tried to get it filled? What did you tell the pharmacist?”

  “I told them it was for my mother.”

  “And they didn’t buy it?”

  “No, the pharmacist is my aunt. But she should know, if anyone needs those pills, it’s my mother.”

  “I’m sensing a pattern here, Bryce.”

  He rolled his eyes. “God, you are so uptight.” He picked up her hand and pressed her fingers into a fist around the slip of paper. “I think your shrink is right. You do need this.”

  “I needed a glass of wine the other night, but we were all out,” she said. “What do you know about that?”

  Bryce turned away and waved a hand in the air as if to say darling, you are going mad over nothing.

  She went to mope in the back yard for a while. Bryce was correct about one thing, she was going mad.

  Paige darted back inside and grabbed her notebook and a pen out of her tote bag, and returned to her chair in the back yard to jot down more for Dr. Hackney to read, starting with how much she despised David and what he had done to her, how much she wanted to exact devastating revenge, and so forth. The old man would take it with a grain of salt. Or, he would have her committed so that she could do no harm to David, herself, or society. Particularly the society living in her house.

  The words flowed out of her, filling the pages. Her thoughts drifted away from David, and all of her dark misery churned out of her and onto the pages. She began to cry as she wrote, quickly erupting into sobbing once again with the raw, gut-grinding abandonment that she felt from everyone, her parents, her family, David, herself, how much of her life had been wasted, how she had nothing and was nothing. She felt as fragile as wet paper, and all of these feelings were burning their way out, setting her tears near boiling.

  Ten pages later she flung the notebook away from her onto the grass, exhausted and hiccupping. Al was standing over her with a wet washcloth and she took it and pressed it to her face.

  Al picked the notebook up off of the ground and set it on the table. “Is that for your shrink?” he asked.

  Paige nodded, draping the washcloth over her face and lying back in the chair. “This is terrible,” she moaned.

  “What is?”

  “This! All this crying and ugliness flowing out of me all the time. I never cry. I don’t yell. I don’t know myself anymore!”

  Al raised a finger. “Or, this is you, and you’re just getting to know yourself for the first time.”

  This brought on fresh tears. “That’s even worse!”

  “Hold up, maybe you’re changing?”

  Paige pulled the washcloth off her face. “Into what?”

  “No idea, but I guess we’ll all find out eventually. How ‘bout a drink?”

  “God, yes.”

  “Well, clean yourself up because we’re going to have to go to Darnell’s. We’re out of everything.”

  Paige sat upright, the washcloth falling to her lap. “Out of everything? We have wine, at least, I know because I brought home a bottle of red. It’s a cheap one, but when you’re broke, you know…”

  Al shook his head. “I’m telling you, there is no wine in there. I was trying to find something to give you because I could hear you wailing all the way in there.”

  They looked at each other for a few moments. Paige frowned. “Bryce,” she said.

  Communication with Dr. Hackney was going well. Paige found that the quiet of the experience, not having to hear her own voice, and not feeling the pressure of opening up during a one-hour window, like unzipping your coat and then zipping it back up an hour later, made it easier to ramble on honestly. This was new territory for her, as she never let these things bubble up to the surface, or even to a point where it was something that she could articulate just to herself.

  Paige lay on the couch in Dr. Hackney’s office, flipping through a catalogue specializing in exercise gear, while the doctor read through her latest vomited diatribe, a torrent that she assumed would earn her a few more prescriptions. She would have to burn them before they reached Bryce’s sticky fingers.

  She found herself turning back to certain pages, drawn to the pictures of the runners in the catalogue. They were just models, of course, but they looked so self-assured and free, bounding forward with willing abandonment. She wondered if real runners lived that way, out in the open air, feeling the joy every day that radiated from these pictures. She wondered if anyone lived that way.

  She closed the catalogue and tried to focus. Dr. Hackney was advising her to write down small goals for each day, to give herself a sense of accomplishment and forward motion in her life. She nodded, but wondered what the hell she would try to accomplish in Wells Lake. She would have to come up with something. Just getting out of bed was an accomplishment of some magnitude.

  She slipped the catalogue into her bag on the way out. She told herself she would return it next week, but she wasn’t quite ready to let it go. Back at the house, she called the company and ordered a pair of running shoes. They cost eighty-nine dollars, which meant she would have to re-think luxuries that week, like food, and cut corners somewhere. She could barely remember a time when she didn’t give a second glance at a price tag, or didn’t consider giving up one thing in order to pay for another, or how many dollars were left in her bank account to scrape out before the next pay day. This is what it is like to live paycheck to paycheck, she thought, with new respect for all the people who could make it work. And all the people who couldn’t.

  “You have got to get out of this funk,” Deirdre said. She was sitting in the large, screaming pink living room chair next to the sofa where Paige was sprawled. Paige had invited her over for tea and to discuss a possible line of credit at Carmen’s Grocery. Deirdre’s response had been to arrive within an hour, laden with boxes of food and other household supplies. After stashing the perishables in the fridge, waving off Paige’s meek protests, she finally snapped that it wasn’t only for Paige, after all, it was for Al and Bryce, as well. “Stop thinking of just yourself”, she said. Paige had fled to the kitchen in shame to fix the tea. Of course she had no tea. She filled up two glasses of water and returned to the living room.

  Paige set her own glass on the coffee table and lay on her back on the couch. She held her journal up to her face to see what had been accomplished. Dr. Hackney wanted her to set goals for herself, and achieve them, every day, no matter how small. As he was solely responsible for getting her out of her office twice a week for a few hours, she owed it to him to at least take a stab at it.

  Got out of bed. No work, is Saturday. Realized still in Wells Lake. Went back to bed.

  Went outside to pick up mail and put my foot through the porch. Al seemed a bit snippy when asked when he could fix it. Still piles and piles of wood in living room. Must stay on couch as no room to walk around.

  “You see,” Paige said, waiving the journal at Deirdre, “I’m accomplishing things. I’m not in a funk, I have goals.”

  “Did you sleep in that?” Deirdre asked, nodding at Paige’s linty yoga pants and Al’s oversized sweatshirt that she had filched from the laundry.

  “Maybe.”

  “You know, Al is right. You don’t have it so bad.”

 
Paige shot her a dark look.

  Deirdre looked disgusted. “You made your life this way. Where you are today is because of your own footsteps.”

  Paige sat up. “But how do I step back to where I was?” she whined.

  “You don’t want to go back there. You were living in a hole. You need to be out here, living, breathing, feeling the sunshine. This wallowing shit is no way to live.”

  “You are way too happy,” Paige said.

  Deirdre snorted. “Are you kidding? You don’t think life is tough for the rest of us?” She sipped her water thoughtfully. “But yes, I still live it. I don’t hide from it. Hell, I don’t have a choice, I have a kid.”

  “Look,” Paige said, “that’s deep, but I don’t know how to do that. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  “Start by faking it.”

  Paige raised her eyebrows.

  Deirdre laughed. Her laugh was like gurgling water. “Oh honey, I mean fake being cheerful. I’m guessing you’re a pretty good actress. Find something gush over. Find something, anything, to be wildly happy about, and pretend to be happy about it for a while.” She stood and fluffed her bangs so that they stood impressively tall. She reached to pat Paige’s hand. “You might end up fooling yourself,” she said, and then she picked her way around the lumber piles to the door.

  Paige sat cross-legged on her bed, examining the gleaming new running shoes that had arrived a few days earlier. She had left the box in her room, unsure of what to do with it, but now lifting the shoes from the tissue paper inside and inhaling the clean, new rubbery scent, she felt a step closer to the free, breezy confidence that she had seen in the catalogue pictures. Maybe she could fake this, she thought, as she laced up the shoes and stood.