I hung up the phone and took a deep breath, staring up at my therapist’s office building for a moment. I was going more regularly now. I really wanted to figure out why I couldn’t seem to let go of Harper. Even the tricks I’d always used to calm the noise in my head, the punching bag, and the bike rides and running, none of that seemed to help. I was always thinking about her, wondering what she was up to at the moment or if she was thinking about me.
It was starting to get to the point where I accepted that I had a problem. I knew that the crazy had been there right from the start, from when I’d biked down her block four times just hoping to catch a glimpse of her. Or really, since before that. Since I’d refused to talk to any other reporter at the Globe.
Deep down, I knew that nothing good could come of this. But it was like watching a slow-moving car crash on a movie theater screen: I just couldn’t seem to avert my eyes, and there was nothing I could do to make the outcome any different, no matter what I might try.
I shook my head and headed inside.
For a moment, while I sat idly in the waiting room, I wondered what Harper would say if she knew how much I talked about her there with my therapist. I usually steered clear of telling anyone that I was in therapy. Even though I knew it was perfectly normal in this day and age, I felt like I always got a look of pity when people found out that I needed to have my head examined on a regular basis. And as much as I wanted to dismiss it entirely, it felt like it was helping. Like maybe, after enough of these visits, we might get somewhere or figure out something important about me.
I did appreciate that Nancy never said anything about PTSD to me, not after that first session when I’d insisted that it wasn’t PTSD I was dealing with. She let me talk about whatever I needed to talk about, without putting labels on things. That was just what I needed.
“I want to talk to you today about your childhood,” Nancy said as she shut the door behind me.
I grimaced. That was the last thing that I wanted to talk to her about, but I knew that we had been building toward that. Every time I brought up Harper, I brought up Ava and my mixed feelings toward children.
“I know, I know,” Nancy said, holding up both of her hands. “As always, if there’s anything that you really don’t want to discuss, we can table those things. But I can tell that you’ve been avoiding talking about it, and I also can tell that it’s the last obstacle that you’ve put up. In order to figure out why Harper is so important to you, you need to figure out what you’re feeling toward her and what you’re trying to keep buried.”
I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t going to talk about it. My shitty past had nothing to do with how I felt about Harper. In fact, part of why I liked Harper so much was because she didn’t ask me about my past. She took us all at face value when she was over there in Kuwait. I had really appreciated that.
But I also knew that I needed to face my past, especially if I was going to work through the tangled emotions I had for Ava.
She wasn’t even my kid, but somehow, I was terrified about screwing up her life. Harper would take care of that baby over anything else, though. If I really trusted Harper, which I did, then I needed to trust that she wouldn’t let me do anything terrible to her daughter.
I shook my head and stared down at the exercise that Nancy handed me. Write down three good things from my childhood. I blew out a noisy breath. “That’s a hard one,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t think there’s any good stuff there.”
“Troubled family life?” Nancy asked, raising an eyebrow at me.
“You could say that,” I said sourly, thinking back to my dad. I shrugged. “I guess the first good thing was getting put into the foster care system. Not that there’s anything good about the foster care system, but at least I didn’t have to live with my dad anymore.”
Nancy nodded slowly. “Then let’s narrow it down a little further,” she said. “Why don’t you try to write down three positive things from your time in the foster care system. How long was it?”
“A couple years,” I told her. “I was emancipated at seventeen and graduated high school. Joined the military because what the hell else was I going to do with my life.” I frowned down at the paper, anxiously tapping my pencil against the edge of the desk. “Does it have to be three things?” I asked.
“However many you can think of,” Nancy said generously. “I just want you to try and think of anything good that happened to you.”
“Right,” I muttered, thinking back.
They were memories that I didn’t normally like to delve into, although they were always there, behind everything else. Part of the background noise that I usually needed to silence with repetition and physical exertion.
The three separate homes were crap. I had a hard time thinking of a single good thing that had happened to me in any of those places. Oh, it was better than being back with my dad, don’t get me wrong. But between houses that were bursting at the seams with more kids than your local zoo and houses where people just pitied me, where they walked on eggshells around me like I was some bomb that might go off at any time, it was just rough. I’d been glad to get out of the system and really get to start my life.
It was what had made me shoot through the ranks in the military, too. I didn’t have anywhere else to go, nothing else to do with my life. I needed the direction that it gave me, and I was desperate not to lose that. I was desperate, especially in those first years, not to screw up.
I had to wonder, in retrospect, if maybe a little bit of that desperation was why I hadn’t gone back to say goodbye to Harper when I’d found out we were headed out on a mission. If they’d kicked me out, I wasn’t sure what I’d do with myself.
But that was neither here nor there now. I tried to concentrate on the task that Nancy had given me. “There was one girl in my senior year, right after I aged out of the foster care system, who was nice to me,” I told her. “Does that count, if it was after I was out of the foster care system?”
“That’s all right,” Nancy said encouragingly. “I want you to really think about her. You don’t have to tell me about her, just think about her.”
Wasn’t that something?
When I really thought about her, Claire, I realized that Harper reminded me a lot of her, in both looks and personality. Could this be why I was having a hard time forgetting about H
arper? Probably. I just expected her to be full of that warmth and comfort and kindness. She was vivacious and caring.
She reminded me of Claire.
It was so obvious, now, that I didn’t know why it had taken me so long to notice. I also didn’t know how Nancy had managed to hit on it so quickly. I looked at the therapist in a new light. Maybe we really were working toward something here.