Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,120

reset before he can take anything in.

“Tell me about the dream,” I say.

Miraculously, he doesn’t balk. I notice that John isn’t fighting me right now, and he hasn’t once looked over at his phone today. He hasn’t even taken it out of his pocket. He simply sits up, folds his legs under him, takes a breath, and begins.

“So, Gabe is sixteen. I mean, he was, in the dream—”

I nod.

“Okay, so he’s sixteen and he’s taking his driving test. He’s been waiting for this day and now it’s here. We’re standing outside by the car in the parking lot at the DMV and Gabe looks so confident. He’s started to shave, and I see some stubble, and I notice how grown up he’s become.” John’s voice breaks.

“What was that like, seeing him so grown up?”

John smiles. “I felt proud. So proud of who he was. But also, I don’t know, sad. Like he was going to leave for college soon. Did I spend enough time with him? Had I been a good father? I was trying not to cry—in the dream, I mean—and I didn’t know if these were tears of pride or regret or . . . who the fuck knows. Anyway—”

John looks away, like he’s trying not to cry now.

“So we’re talking about what he’s going to do after the test—he says he’s going out with some friends—and I’m telling him to make sure never to get in the car if he’s been drinking or if his friends have. And he says, ‘I know, Dad. I’m not an idiot.’ The way teenagers do, you know? And then I go on to tell him never to text and drive.”

John laughs, a dark laugh. “How on the nose is this dream, Sherlock?”

I don’t smile. I bring him back by waiting.

“Anyway,” he continues, “the examiner walks over, and Gabe and I give each other a thumbs-up—like the day I dropped him off at kindergarten right before he walked into his classroom. A quick You’ll do great. But something about the examiner makes me nervous.”

“How so?” I ask.

“I just have a bad feeling about her. Unsettling. I don’t trust her. Like she’s got it in for Gabe and he won’t pass the test. Anyway, I watch them pull away. I see Gabe make his first right turn out of the driveway and it goes well. So I start to relax, but then Margo calls. She says that my mom keeps calling and Margo wants to know if she should pick up the phone. In the dream my mom is still alive, and I don’t know why Margo’s asking me this, why she doesn’t just answer the goddamned phone. Why the hell wouldn’t she pick up? So she says, ‘Remember, we agreed, don’t pick up the phone unless somebody’s dying?’ And all of a sudden I think that if Margo picks up the phone, it means my mom is dying. That she’ll die. But if Margo doesn’t pick up, nobody’s dying—my mom’s not dying.

“So I say, ‘You’re right. Whatever you do, don’t pick up the phone. Let it ring.’

“So we hang up and I’m still waiting for Gabe at the DMV. I look at my watch. Where are they? They said they’d be back in twenty minutes. Thirty minutes go by. Forty. Then the examiner returns but Gabe isn’t there. She walks toward me, and I know.

“‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘There’s been an accident. A man on his cell phone.’ And that’s when I see that the examiner is my mom. She’s the one telling me that Gabe is dead. And that’s why she was calling Margo over and over, because somebody was dying—it was Gabe. Some idiot on a cell phone killed him while he was taking his driving test!

“So I say, ‘Who is this man? Have you called the police? I’ll murder him!’ And my mom just looks at me. And I realize that the man is me. I killed Gabe.”

John takes a breath, then continues his story. After Gabe died, he says, he and Margo bitterly blamed each other. In the emergency room, Margo growled at John, “A gift? You said the phone was a gift? Gabe was the gift, you fucking moron.” Later, after the toxicology report indicated that the driver was drunk, Margo apologized to John, but he knew that deep down, Margo still blamed him. He knew because, deep down, John blamed her. Part of him felt that she was responsible, that if she hadn’t been so stubborn