EMILY DICKINSON
Monday morning I wake confused by the light streaming through the window. Rubbing sleep from my eyes, I reach for my phone on the nightstand. It’s nine o’clock. I’m beyond late. Hitch lies on the floor, head raised on high alert, sphinxlike, waiting for me to drag myself out of bed.
When I swing my legs to the floor, the fog in my head clears. Ugh. Mom let me sleep in because I have an appointment with Dr. Wellesley.
I fall back on the pillows, not sure if I have the strength to prove my emotional growth this morning. Hitch jumps up on the bed, licking my fingers and face, wiggling his nose under my hand, unable to stand my laziness any longer.
“What a good man,” I coo, patting the bed beside me.
He plops down on top of the quilt, curling into the angle of my hip, and I pull all eighty-five pounds of him into my chest. My heart tangles when I think about how much I love him. If anything ever happened to him, I’d die.
“I love you, Hitch,” I whisper, tugging at a tuft of velvety hair in front of his ear.
He exhales—the contented sigh of a dog happy with life and satisfied with the quality of his work. I concentrate on his breathing, trying to block out the anxiety snowballing in my chest. My sleep’s all messed up. I have no answers for the questions about Cindy and her family that have kept me up the last two nights.
Hitch and I are inhaling our fourth synchronized breath when Mom pushes open the bedroom door. “Let’s hit it,” she says. “We need to leave in thirty-two minutes.”
I can almost bear the hour-long counseling sessions. It’s easy enough to tell Dr. Wellesley what he wants to hear to inflate his ego. He so needs to believe he’s guiding me through my grieving and out of my depression. What gets me every time, though, is when Mom comes in for the last fifteen minutes. It’s way harder to convince him of my emotional and social improvements when Mom’s in the room ready to call me out on every mood swing and snide comment.
I take my time getting ready. The sound of her rattling keys sends me into one final flurry of activity—rubber-banding my ponytail, throwing on the Cape Hatteras National Seashore hoodie, and sliding into the first pair of matching flip-flops I manage to dig out of the closet. Hitch follows me from the bathroom to my room to the front door in hopes we’ll take him with us. Without asking Mom, I grab his service collar and leash and slide into the backseat with him. She starts the car, and we head north wrapped in silence.
We’re crossing the northbound bridge headed for Elizabeth City when she smiles at me in the rearview mirror.
“What?” I meet her reflected gaze, wondering what happened to the closeness we shared Saturday night. Part of the problem is my lack of sleep and resulting crankiness; I know that. The other part is we’ve been distant for so long that one or two nights of connecting again can’t erase it all.
The woman driving this green Honda is not the same woman who demanded we sit down together for family-style meals my entire childhood—the woman who moved a card table into the master bedroom so she and I could eat every meal with Dad when he was too exhausted from the chemo to make it to the kitchen.
“I was just going to tell you the school board made a decision.” She pauses to glance at me through the mirror, eyebrows raised expectantly.
“And?” I know what she’s going to say, but I can’t stand the suspense. I have to hear it.
“And . . .” She pauses, turning to look over her shoulder. “And . . . Hitch can go to school with you.” She bounces on the driver’s seat.
When I don’t respond, she repeats the “good” news. “Hitch can go to school with you.”
I pull Hitch to my side, burying my face in his neck without answering.
“Aren’t you excited?” she asks, settling back into the faded upholstery.
“I am. I just . . .” I speak into Hitch’s fur, unable to put my conflicting emotions into words. She wouldn’t understand anyway.
“Just what?” she asks, her voice rising. “I thought you’d be thrilled. He’s your best friend.”
Ouch. “He is. I just . . .”
“What’s wrong, Emilie?” Her knuckles whiten on the steering wheel.
I have to do something to release the tension building in the car. “It’s just I don’t know what everyone will think.”
“Why would you care what anyone else thinks?” She changes lanes to let someone pass. “Plus, you’ve already told your friends.”
When I don’t respond, she takes her foot off the gas, craning her head around to look directly at my face.
Uh-oh.
“You said you told your friends.” There’s ice in her voice. “You have, right?”
Crap. I resist the urge to cross my fingers behind my back the way I did in elementary school. “Yes, Mom.” I have told Ayla. And Chatham’s technically more of a crush, right? So it’s not exactly a lie. “I’ve told a few people. But I don’t know that many people very well. I’m not sure I want to answer all their questions.”
“We can’t pretend you don’t have epilepsy.” Her voice squeaks on the word epilepsy.
I sigh. “You’re right, Mom. We can’t. Can I just wait a few more weeks, please? I want people to judge me for me—not because of my seizures.”
She meets my gaze again. “What if you seize at school?”
“Maybe I won’t. Maybe my meds are working.” I fiddle with the tag on Hitch’s collar. “It’s been three months since my last seizure.”
A hand flies to her mouth. She stomps on the brake, veering toward the shoulder of the road. Hitch and I flop against the seat when she stops short. I peek out the back window to make sure we’re not about to be rear-ended.
“Oh, Emilie.” She turns in her seat to face me, reaching for my arm. “How did I miss that?”
I pull back a couple of inches and look her square in the face. “Maybe because you were so busy boxing up Dad’s stuff and hanging out with your friend Roger.”
Did I just say that? What’s wrong with me? She was trying to be nice, trying to connect with me.
Her arm falls short of mine. Cold, hard silence pierces the Honda’s interior. We sit frozen in time until an eighteen-wheeler whooshes past, shaking us out of our petrified stillness.
“Mom, I’m sorry.” I reach for her shoulder this time.
She scoots away before my fingers make contact, turning back to the wheel and flicking her turn signal so hard I can’t believe it doesn’t snap off the steering column. The Honda lurches back onto the highway, and neither of us speaks until we’re turning into the hospital parking lot.
“We’ll just see what Dr. Wellesley thinks.” The actual words sound harmless enough, but the tone feels like a noose tightening around my neck.
I keep my mouth shut, which is what I wish I’d done earlier. Sometimes I fear she and I will never be in sync again without Dad. He was the fulcrum that balanced our out-of-whack see-saw, the counterweight that balanced our scales. Without him, there’s no middle ground. When she’s up, I’m down. When she’s reaching out to me, I’m pulling away. When she’s thinking logically, I’m thinking emotionally.
I swallow my feelings and pray for a miracle at Dr. Wellesley’s office.