“And what are you planning on saying when you see Derek next?”
“I don’t know,” Meghan lied, for she had already made up her mind. She lowered her head, afraid to meet Anne’s eyes.
“Do you ever face up to the fact you will never be able to truly meet Thomas?” Anne asked. “If he existed at all, it was far away in time, in the distant past. For now, he exists, and always will, only when you dream.”
“You make him sound like a figment,” Meghan objected. “He’s more than that. He’s proven that.”
“Has he?”
“He thanked me for my medical advice. He told me all about Derek’s visit to his mother, something I couldn’t have known.”
“He told you about it in your dreams. People do occasionally dream things that turn out to be true.”
“He’s more than a dream.”
Meghan’s face was set in hard defiance. Anne looked at her and thought for a moment. “I’m going to suggest something,” she said finally. “I’m going to give you a prescription for a specific sleeping pill. One of its side effects is that you will not have dreams, or rather if you do, you won’t be troubled by them, because you won’t remember them.” She went to her desk and scribbled a prescription on a pad, then handed it to Meghan.
“You’re telling me to get over him.”
“Let me put it this way—for an attractive, newly single woman like yourself, there are plenty of potential partners around with advantages over Thomas, or Derek.”
“I thought I was your special case, that you’d want to see this all the way through, not cut it short with medication,” Meghan protested.
“As a doctor it’s my duty to act in your best interest. If I see that you’re starting to engage in behaviours that are self-destructive or inappropriate, then I need to intervene.”
Meghan looked at the prescription in her hands. The writing was a typical doctor’s scrawl, indecipherable to her. “I don’t think I’m ready for this,” she said. She folded the paper in half, then half again, then wrapped it like a cast around her index finger. “I don’t want to suppress it. Just the opposite, really—I feel what’s happening to me is something organic, something alive, and I want to respect it, and let it live. Cutting it off now would be like cutting down a strange tree that’s about to flower. I want to see what the flowers look like.”
“Well, it is your call,” Anne replied. “I’m still very interested in what’s happening with you, and I do want you to come back again next week. But you know my opinion.”
“When Jan told me about you, she said you were into the occult, that you studied witches.”
“I did. I do. But not because I believe in their world-view, in fact just the opposite. I study them as a rationalist, because I don’t believe the things they do, and I’m interested in what makes them believe it. But that doesn’t mean I’m not sympathetic to them. In fact I envy them the certainty of belief.”
“You don’t believe them—that means you probably don’t believe me.”
“Here’s how I operate,” Anne said. “I act like I believe everyone I see, because they need that to open up to me. On a certain level, I try to stay with them—if it’s real to them, it’s real to me. I also try to think of them as a best friend would, look out for them, and offer them the best possible advice I can give. And I’ve given you my advice.”
“Okay,” Meghan said. “I think I need to go kill a bottle of Chardonnay with Jan, my other best friend. I need it. Job sucks, house sucks, divorce sucks, relationship with Betsy sucks—the only thing I look forward to is my time with Thomas,” she mused. “Whatever it is, I’m grateful for it. It’s teaching me a lot. If I take some drug to cut myself off from it, I’ll never know how it’s meant to end. I’ve got a part to play, and I want to follow it through to the bitter end.” She paused a moment. “You think I’m on the verge of doing something self-destructive, but I’d be doing it for love, and all love has an element of self-destruction, don’t you think? Giving yourself completely to another, you lose something of yourself.”
“I call love self-altering,” Anne replied. “In love we alter ourselves to please the loved one. But in your case this loved one is not physically present, yet