And, actually, she did.
-3-
JULY
“Tell me why this one didn’t work out.”
Tessa could tell that Shawntay Green was disappointed, maybe even suspicious. Since this was one of their follow-up phone calls, Tessa was spared ‘the look’ that went with ‘the tone.’
“I’m sure Dr. Felton is a good doctor, but I couldn’t get comfortable with her. I couldn’t open up. Tell her the things I needed to.”
“Same as with Dr. Howard?” Shawntay said.
“Yes.” Tessa paused, thinking of her first shrink, and then quickly thereafter, her second. Shawntay didn’t fill in the silence, so Tessa continued. “I think I’d do better with a woman doctor.” Thinking of her last doctor, Patricia Felton, she added, “one with less clinical coolness.”
Two months ago, Tessa had been rushed to the ER, and since then, she’d spent most of her waking hours looking for the path Shawntay had promised to help her find. Tessa hadn’t found that path yet. She knew she needed a therapist, but she had to find one that was both clinical and personal, part mother and part drill sergeant. She needed someone she could tell things to that she never thought she could share with anyone. Her secrets. Her shame.
Tessa was afraid, deep fear that made her hands shake during the day and her heart pound in the middle of the night. She thought of that classic Dylan Thomas poem, the one about going gentle into that goodnight, and it terrified her; it’s what she had tried to do when she swallowed those pills, and worse, what she might still be capable of.
“We all think our own stuff is unique,” Shawntay said. “We think it’s horrifying. Understandable by very few. Impossible to fix unless led by the most exceptional. What aren’t you telling me about your stuff that keeps me from finding a good therapist for you?”
Tessa paused. She’d not been asked that before, and it was a fair question. But to answer it meant giving Shawntay a cold hard look into her shame. Could she do it?
Tessa took a deep breath, and Shawntay remained silent. After a moment, Tessa spoke. She began with Mark, her first and only love. The man she’d met as a boy in high school, the boy she’d followed to college, the man she’d married two weeks after graduation. Their marriage wasn’t perfect, she knew, and she shared that with Shawntay. But she loved Mark and Mark had loved her. Tessa had always been an introvert, both socially and sexually. Mark had coaxed her and coached her, in both arenas, and he was the only thing she knew.
“Mark quit on me, Shawntay,” Tessa said, surprised by the anger in her voice.
“We’ve talked about this before, Tessa. Mark died on you and that’s not the same thing.”
“It was to me! He shouldn’t have been in that Fiat.”
“Because he went on a business trip without you? How realistic, how fair, is that Tessa?” Shawntay’s tone was scalding water, blanching the skin off Tessa’s reserve.
“The Milan police found him crushed in a sports car. The driver was a local woman.”
“Oh come on, Tessa. You just finished telling me that Mark loved you. Because he died in a car with a woman while on a business trip you’re…”
“It was a sports car, Shawntay. Mark was the passenger. I found online pictures of the local woman. She was a gorgeous, sexy woman.” Tessa was under a full head of steam and she wasn’t going to stop until she’d said it. All of it. “The police report said the Fiat rounded a curve too fast and the driver hadn’t slowed down because she’d probably taken her eyes off the road and, when or if she did see the problem, she couldn’t have braked effectively because her ankles were constrained.” Tessa took a breath and forced herself to say the next words. “Shawntay, her right ankle was twisted up in her underwear, which was found wrapped around both ankles.”