holding it in for a while. When the light turns green, I cross and head toward the parking lot but today I don’t go straight to my car. I keep walking up the street until I’m in front of a glass storefront—a salon.
I catch sight of myself in the window’s reflection and stop to adjust my top—the one from Anthropologie, which I’d chosen for tonight’s date—and then hurry inside.
I’m just in time for my appointment at the waxing place.
Part Four
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
46
The Bees
A minute before Charlotte’s appointment, I get a text from my mother. Please call me. She doesn’t normally send texts like this, so I dial her cell. She answers on the first ring.
“Don’t be alarmed,” she says, which always means that something alarming has happened. “But Dad’s in the hospital.”
My hand tenses on the phone.
“He’s fine,” she says quickly. Fine people aren’t admitted to the hospital, I think. “What happened?” I ask.
Well, she says, they don’t know yet. She explains that my father was eating lunch when he said he didn’t feel well. Then he started shaking and had trouble breathing, and now they’re at the hospital. It looks like he has an infection but they don’t know if it’s related to his heart or something else. He’s fine, she keeps repeating. He’ll be fine. I think she says this as much for herself as for me. We both want—need—my father to be fine.
“Really,” she says, “he’s fine. Here, see for yourself.” I hear her mumble something to my father as she hands him the phone.
“I’m fine,” he says by way of hello, but I can hear his labored breathing. He tells me the same story about having lunch and not feeling well, leaving out the shaking and difficulty-breathing parts. He’ll probably be out by tomorrow, he says, once the antibiotics kick in, though when my mom gets back on the phone, we wonder whether it’s something more serious. (Later that night, when I go to the hospital, I’ll see that my father looks pregnant—his abdomen filled with fluid—and that he’s on several different IV antibiotics because a serious bacterial infection has spread throughout his body. He will be hospitalized for a week, the fluid around his lungs aspirated, his heart rate stabilized.)
But right now, getting off the phone with my parents, I realize that I’m twelve minutes late for Charlotte’s appointment. I try to shift focus as I head to the waiting room.
Charlotte jumps up from her seat when I open the door. “Oh, phew!” she says. “I thought maybe I had the wrong time, but this is always my time, and then I thought I had the wrong day, but no, it’s Monday”—she holds up her phone to show me the date—“so then I thought maybe, I don’t know, but here you are.”
This all comes out as one long sentence. “Anyway, hi,” she says, moving past me into my office.
This may seem surprising, but when therapists are late, many patients are shaken. Though we try to avoid this, every therapist I know has let a patient down this way. And when we do, it can bring up old experiences of distrust or abandonment, leaving patients feeling anything from discombobulated to enraged.
In my office, I explain that I was on an urgent phone call and apologize for the delay.
“It’s fine,” Charlotte says nonchalantly, but she seems out of sorts. Or maybe I am, after the call with my father. I’m fine, he had said. Just like Charlotte says it’s fine. Are they both really fine? Charlotte fidgets in her chair, twirling her hair, looking around the room. I try to help her locate herself by meeting her eyes, but they’re darting from the window to a picture on the wall to the pillow she always keeps on her lap. One leg is crossed over the other, and she’s rapidly kicking that leg in the air.
“I wonder what it was like for you, not knowing where I was,” I say, remembering how, a few months ago, I’d been in the same position, sitting in Wendell’s waiting room and wondering where he was. Killing time on my phone, I noticed that he was four minutes late, then eight. After ten minutes, the thought crossed my mind that maybe he’d been in an accident or fallen ill and was at this moment in the emergency room.
I debated whether to call