The art therapists at CCT were constantly trying new things, mixing and matching techniques and philosophies. No box could contain their creative thinking as they tried to channel debilitating internal pain into liberating external expression.
You never knew what would wake a client up. One week Stef set zen gardens on each of the art tables. Large trays with sand, smooth polished rocks, and a small wooden rake. Geno, typically ambivalent to projects, played with it his entire session, raking patterns around the rocks then smoothing the sand out. Rearranging the rocks and starting over, talking the whole while.
“My brother and I got suspended freshman year,” he said.
Stef raised his eyebrows.
“We had all the same classes and teachers, but different schedules. One day we had both an English test and a math test.” He looked over at Stef. “Can you guess where this is going?”
“I have a pretty good idea.”
As he spoke, Geno took all the stones out of the tray and ran a flat palm over the sand, obliterating the squiggled lines. “I was better at math. He was straight As in English. Teachers were constantly mixing us up anyway. So we swapped places. I took the math test for both of us, he took care of the English.”
“How’d you get busted?”
Geno’s finger flicked every stray grain of sand from the edge of the tray. “Identical tests. Identical mistakes. And when I wrote his name on his test, I put Carlito by mistake. He didn’t use that name in school. It was a family thing.”
“Oops.”
“They called us into the office. Our parents showed up.” The memory must have been visceral, because Geno’s entire body winced as he placed a single stone in the center of the tray. “God, it sucked.”
“Yeah, that’s one you eat for a long time.”
The rake dragged around the perimeter of the stone. A painstaking effort to match up the lines as the circle closed. Geno made a second ring of lines around the first. He pulled the wooden teeth from the rings out to the edge of the tray, a snaking line.
“I don’t have much more to tell,” he said. “Just free-styling my feels. As one does.”
Stef was pleased with the session. At the next one, he tried Geno at the sand table.
Geno snorted at the setup, but soon he was scooping up a fistful of sand and letting it tumble through his fingers. He poured from one palm to the other. Buried a hand beneath the surface and slowly watched it emerge.
“I always loved the beach,” he said, mesmerized by the film of sand on the back of his hand.
“Did you go often?”
“Mm. We had a house in Mantaloking. We spent every summer there, ever since I can remember. Dad always took a picture of me and Carlito at this same place on the boardwalk…”
His body slid sideways, his cheek coming to rest on his knuckles, propped on an elbow while his other hand dug into the past. “The summer I was fifteen was hard. My mom was dying. She died around Halloween and that summer at the beach…we knew it was her last one. I didn’t think we’d go the following year but we did. Dad said she’d want us to.”
His stillness was magical. “Mom loved to collect sea glass. She loved the blue pieces, the real deep cobalt ones. They were like her holy grail. The first summer after she was gone, Carlito and I must’ve found twenty pieces. We weren’t even trying. We just kept glancing down and seeing bits of blue while we were swimming or surfing. Or we’d be walking along and a piece would be sitting there in the sand. Waiting for us. Hey, boys. It’s me.”
His chest expanded and contracted in long even breaths. He’d gone somewhere else. Somewhere peaceful, full of wistful memory more sweet than bitter. Stef let him be, knowing serene moments were few and far between.
“Where are you right now?” he finally asked, softly, not wanting to break the spell.
“On the beach.”
“Who are you with?”
His mouth poised around unspoken words, Geno’s eyes looked around the room, then his head swiveled left and right. “Just me,” he said, looking puzzled. “Weird, I was feeling really young, like eight or nine. But I was walking by myself.”
“You looked peaceful.”
“Yeah.” He sounded even more puzzled. He blinked a few times and sat up. He reached for water and poured it into the center of the sand bin, stirring it around with his fingers to make a thin mud.
“So, I was thinking,” he said. “Something we talked about last time. My brother and I feeling the same thing together and not able to pass it off?” A muscle quivered in Geno’s jaw. Both hands clenched in the wet sand now. It oozed through his fingers. “I feel like I’m holding all of it now,” he said.
“Tell me.” Two words Stef said eighty times a day.
“Carlito killed himself because it was too much to hold. Some days, I don’t give a shit. Other days, I feel like I’m carrying both of us. Some days I hate his fucking guts. Other days I’d…” Geno turned his head to wipe his face on his sleeve. “I’d do anything to see him again. Because he’s the only one who understands.”
Stef rubbed the back of his head, really wanting to rub and scratch at his face. If the kid could only see the howling frustration going on behind the professional mask. This was one of the toughest, most complex cases he’d ever worked. He didn’t expect every session to accomplish something but he struggled hard to corral these issues into place. It was like trying to juggle wet bars of soap.
“He could tell you why he did it,” he said.
“Killed himself?”
“No. Brought you into Anthony’s house.”
“I literally do not want to know that reason,” Geno said. “Ever. No reason could make me feel better. The reason is pointless. Useless. No justification exists for what my brother did to me.”
He opened his hands and regarded the oblongs of sand, molded and creased to fit his palms. He exhaled a tremendous sigh, slumping in the chair. “I’m really scared that I’m just fucked up for life.”
Stef nodded. “That’s a really legit fear.”
“A lot of times, I’m even kind of glad my father’s dead and he can’t see me like this.” A tear snaked its way down the boy’s face. “It would’ve killed him.”
“You know,” Stef said. “I have a dozen ways to explore that statement. But right now I’m going to isolate your concern for your father’s well-being and say something I said before.”
“What’s that?”
“They didn’t get the best of you.”
Geno’s face twisted, his chin dropping toward his chest.
“You still have the best parts of you,” Stef said. “I don’t think they’re lost. I think you put them away somewhere really, really deep inside, where no one can ever touch or hurt or betray or fuck them again.”
“I don’t know where I am,” Geno said, fingers moving through the sand.
“The good parts of you are still there. The best parts of you. You parents are gone but you’re still a good son. Your brother betrayed you, betrayed Nos, yet you still feel one of his stars. These are signs of a decent, compassionate human being, not a fuck-up.”
“Everything hurts so much. I just want it to stop. I can’t get away from it. It follows me everywhere and won’t leave me alone. All day, every day, all I think is that I want to die, and I’m afraid I won’t.”
“You’re afraid you won’t die.”
“Yeah.”
“Can we talk about that?”
The boy’s shoulders flicked up and down.
“How often do you think about suicide?”
“Every day.”
“Do you have a plan?”
The head shook slowly side to side.
“So it’s an ideation of suicide but you don’t have any methods lined up.”
“No.” Now the red-rimmed, blurry eyes found Stef’s gaze. “That’s good, right?”
Stef nodded. “Suicide is often a metaphor for stopping the pain. You want the pain to die while keeping yourself. You have ideas, but no plans. But when suicidal thoughts are accompanied by stockpiling pills or knowing where you can get your hands on a gun or planning which bridge you’ll jump from... That’s different.”
“I want to die,” Geno said. “But I don’t think I want to…kill myself. I mean, you’d think I would’ve done it by now, right?”
“I do,” Stef said. “But if your ideas start making plans, do you think you could tell me? Or Dr. Stein? Or anyone you have a shred of trust for?”
The breath Geno drew in trembled. As if this were the scariest thing he could be thinking. “Yeah,” he said. “I could tell you.”