choice. At first, she didn’t know how to answer. She stayed silent and I waited, let her process the question and its implications.
“It quiets the other pain,” she said finally. “The pain inside.”
“Does it work?”
Another moment or two of silence. “Maybe for a while. But there’s always more pain.”
“When you’re in pain, hurting inside, what other choices are there besides taking a razor to your flesh?”
It was a breakthrough for her, the idea that she had a reason for doing it, and a choice not to hurt herself.
Today she sits in my office. Fuller, pinker—healing. She always curls herself up in a ball, as if she is trying to make herself as tiny as she can be. Her mother is a cold and graceful beauty. She drips with diamonds and expensive fabrics, one of those women who exudes confidence, an easy comfort in her own petite and perfect body. Grace is a beauty, too. Her blond hair a wild mane, her limbs long and coltish. She has been given everything. It was the first thing her mother told me. All of me; I stayed home with her, have always been here. There’s been world travel, every material thing and opportunity money can buy. Why wasn’t it enough?
It was enough, I assured her. It’s not about that. Mental illness is not about that. We are all an impossibly complicated web of biology and circumstance, nature and nurture. The event that cripples one child, gives another child wings. The trauma that breaks one person in two, imbues another with a supernatural strength of spirit. We cannot apply intellect and logic to our humanity. We can only try to understand ourselves, to heal the broken, to make strong again the injured.
Grace lifts her skirt for me and shows me her thighs. She’s not teasing me, though many of my young female patients have. I am not a man to Grace, just a kind teacher, a friend. Her thighs are creamy and white, her scars fading.
“See?”
“Very nice,” I say. “No uncontrollable urges?”
She shrugs, tugs her long hair around the back of her neck, strokes it on one side.
“I breathe,” she says. “I say my mantra. I am enough. I am more than enough. I don’t have to be anyone else but who I am.”
We came up with that one together. There are some drugs, too. A light dose of antianxiety meds, which I’ll wean her off slowly. Sometimes I use medication to take the edge off, but I like to teach my patients techniques for managing anxieties and chaotic thoughts. I teach them to meditate, to journal, to draw. I encourage punishing exercise for some, especially my young male patients. Physical exertion, and the brain chemicals that flow from it, the exhaustion that follows, work beautifully to quiet the mind. I am a distance runner, taking winding trails through the woods, along the twisting roads of this town, up into the foothills of the mountains that surround us. Sometimes when I’m at my most anxious I can log nearly sixty, seventy miles a week.
“Nice, Grace,” I say. “Good work on yourself, kid. You seem a lot stronger. I’m super proud of you.”
She smiles broadly. If only more grown-ups knew: it’s okay to push, but a little praise goes a long way with kids.
“Thanks, Dr. Hank. Thanks for helping me.”
After she leaves I do the invoicing, filing. I type up my notes. I am organized and efficient. I always have been—a good student, a good doctor. I was a good friend, too, wasn’t I? A good lover. I might have been a good boyfriend, husband, father. Don’t you think so, Lara? Might have been.
I keep the Toyota in a parking garage about an hour away. I drive my red Volvo there and park it. I am mindful, watchful, have been since the FBI knocked on my door. I don’t think they’re watching me. As the days have passed, I’ve come to think that Agent Brower really was just looking for help, looking for someone who might know what seems unknowable. Why people do the things they do? Isn’t that what we’re really all trying to figure out—detectives, doctors, writers? Aren’t we all just trying to unravel the mysteries of ourselves?
She hasn’t visited again, or called. Still. I have been keeping to my routine. The hospital. My office. Home. I am not seeing anyone. You are my only friend. (And you’re not much of one, are you?) Sometimes I take my secretary to dinner, or on