“Tell me a story.” It’s the first thing Dr. Mendez says when we settle into our chairs. We skip the small talk entirely.
I came ready. Why not? I knew he’d wheedle it out of me eventually and I’d have to invent on the fly. “In 2001, Hiro Takasagawa was a safety engineer at Nissan. He was actually an artist—he built moving sculptures. But people didn’t buy them, so he had to take a real job with his skills.”
“The world is a difficult place for artists.”
“Yeah. But Hiro loved his job because his parents died in a car accident when he was really young. They rear-ended a truck on an icy road. He wanted to prevent that from happening to anybody else. So he designed a safety system for cars where there was a pair of mechanical white wings—a crane’s wings—folded underneath the car. And there was—a radar sensor or something on the front of the car, and if you were coming up on an obstacle too fast, the wings would open and start beating and lift the car over the obstacle. It would glide for a while and you could still steer in the air by using your steering wheel. Until you got to a place where you could land safely.”
Dr. Mendez looks genuinely absorbed in the story. “The year 2001. You were very specific about that.”
“So Hiro took the idea to his boss. The idea was to start putting it in 2002 Nissans. But his boss was furious. ‘Takasagawa, do you have any idea how much this will cost?’ He screamed. ‘But it works,’ Hiro said. ‘I built a prototype and tested it. What are people’s lives worth?’ And the boss is like ‘You idiot! We’re running a business here. You wasted time and money with this?! You’re fired!’ ” I’m getting into the story. I’m doing different voices for Hiro and the boss.
“What’s the boss’s name?” Dr. Mendez asks.
“Yoshikazu Hanawa. CEO of Nissan in 2001. Looked it up.”
“Good,” Dr. Mendez says quietly. “Very good. Sorry. Please.” He gestures for me to continue.
I take a deep breath. “So Hiro leaves Hanawa’s office and he’s devastated. He thinks he failed his parents and brought dishonor to himself. So he goes and gets in his car and drives away. He intends to commit suicide. He tries to drive into the side of a building, but at the last second, a pair of gleaming white crane’s wings unfurls from beneath his car. And the thing is, he wasn’t driving his prototype. These just appear. They carry him up, up, over the building, into the sky. And he never comes down. He’s still soaring on those wings.”
There’s a long pause before Dr. Mendez says: “And Mars drove—”
“A 2002 Nissan Maxima.”
“Unequipped with Hiro’s wings.”
“It would have been too expensive.”
“But if Mr. Hanawa had approved Hiro’s idea—”
“Then even though Mars was texting, the wings would have carried him up over the truck.”
“Billy Scruggs’s truck.”
“Right.”
“No matter what you did or didn’t do.”
“Right.”
“How did it feel to tell that story?”
“Like I’m still lying to myself and trying to blame someone else.”
“Why?”
“Because. Hiro’s story didn’t really happen.”
Dr. Mendez tilts his head with a gleam in his eye and I see the question.
“Fine,” I mutter. “I don’t know.”
Dr. Mendez smiles broadly. “So. How are you?”
I chew on the inside of my lip. “I talked with the cops the other day about the accident. Well. I sat in a room with cops while they asked questions that my attorney said I wouldn’t answer.”
“I’m not used to praising my clients for refusing to talk, but good job.”
“Why good job?”
“Do you remember what we discussed last visit? How we seek causality where there may be none?”
“You don’t think I should accept blame for this right now.”
“What I think doesn’t matter. What matters is what you think. I’m trying to help you do your best thinking. Before you take a step that could have drastic consequences, I want to make sure you’ve considered other perspectives.”
“I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
“Going to jail.”
“I can imagine.” His brow furrows.
I slump in my chair. “Would it sound weird if I told you that I’m also scared of not going to jail?”
“Do you know why you’re afraid of that?”
“Not completely.”
“Is it partly because you feel it would rob you of an opportunity to atone if you weren’t imprisoned?”
“Maybe.”
Dr. Mendez says nothing, but his expression tells me that I should keep running down this path.
“Speaking of atoning,” I say, “I’m doing another goodbye day. With Eli’s parents.”
“You said the experience with Blake’s grandmother was valuable.”
“It was.”
“Having lived with that experience for a little while now, do you have any new reflections on it?”
I stare at the bookshelf behind Dr. Mendez, as if a book’s spine holds the answer to his question. “It…made me wish even more that I’d appreciated the time I had with them more while I had it.”
“That’s a very normal regret to have. You don’t want to live like you’re constantly in the shadow of death, but unless you do that, there’ll almost always be things that went unsaid or unappreciated fully. If you found the goodbye-day experience to be more therapeutic than not, I say go for it with Eli’s parents.”
“Yeah.”
He gives me the look that precedes when he’s about to reach inside my head. “But you have qualms.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because Eli’s family is way different from Blake’s grandma.”
“How so?”
“Like…philosophically, I guess. Their world is a lot more complicated. They’re both way educated. With Blake’s grandma, there’s God and heaven and hell and that’s it. Eli’s parents—I doubt they believe they’ll ever see Eli again the way Blake’s grandma has faith she’s going to see Blake again. They’re definitely not churchgoers. Also, Eli has a twin. Adair. She blames me.”
“Mmmm.”
“I’m not as sure where Eli’s parents stand on the blaming-me thing.”
“I assume, if they held you responsible, they wouldn’t be amenable to the idea and that would be that.”
“I guess. Another thing is that I’ve gotten really close with Jesmyn, Eli’s girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend. Widow-girlfriend. Whatever you call what she is.”
“And that worries you because?”
“I don’t want to look like I’m trying to take anything from Eli. I’m not. There are already rumors at school. I suspect Adair started them.”
“This is the same Jesmyn who would have rightly taken me to task for my unfortunate sexist joke last visit?”
“Exactly. Nice remembering.”
Dr. Mendez makes a triangle with his fingers in front of his mouth. “From the little you’ve told me of her, she wouldn’t acquiesce in the giving or taking of her.”
“Oh, definitely not.”
“So whatever you or Eli’s parents think about your relationship with her is irrelevant. She would never allow herself to be in a relationship that she didn’t want. Fair to say?”
“Definitely. But we’re just friends.” It always sounds wrong to say that. Boners notwithstanding (let’s be honest: a Kmart lingerie ad can get things moving under the right circumstances), I don’t think we’re anything but friends. Yet we’ve shared an emotional intimacy that I’ve never had with a friend before, so I’m not sure if “just friends” totally describes what we have.
“I understand.”
“I talk with her about this whole deal more than with my parents.”
“Are your parents available to listen?”
“Yeah. But I’m not a big talker with my parents. I have a hard time being vulnerable with them. It’s nothing they’ve done. I guess…I don’t want to disappoint them or something? I just want to be independent? I like my space? Maybe I’m weird, I don’t know.”
Dr. Mendez shakes his head. “No, not at all. Look, I’m trained to talk to people and still, my son, Ruben—he’s a little older than you—doesn’t often talk to me. It doesn’t make you weird.”
A few moments pass.
“Allowing yourself to be vulnerable with your parents and open up to them is something we could work on,” Dr. Mendez says.
“Yeah. But I have enough to deal with right now.”
“I know. For the future.”
“Will I ever be okay again?” I ask.
“I expect so. It’ll take time and work. But someday your world will be put right. I’ve never found it to be a matter of purging yourself of feeling, but rather of coming to live with it. Making it a part of you that doesn’t hurt so badly. You know how oysters make pearls?”
I nod.
“Like that,” he says. “Our memories of our loved ones are the pearl that we form around the grain of grief that causes us pain.”
I reflect on this for a while before speaking again. “I remembered something funny and random.”
“I like funny and random.”
“Jesmyn’s dad works for Nissan. Like Hiro. That’s why they moved here.”
Dr. Mendez just smiles.