a sign I need her less. A good thing, according to her. Progress on the road to healing, the new normal as she likes to call it.
“How are you sleeping?” she asks, letting her other question rest.
I have the nearly empty pill bottle in my purse. Last time I asked for more, she wrote me a scrip but lowered the dosage. I’d like you to try to get off these. Honestly, it hasn’t been going well. My dreams are too vivid. I’m less rested, so edgier, jumpier during the day.
“I was going to ask for my refill.”
“How’s that lower dosage?”
I shrug, trying for nonchalance. I don’t want to appear fragile, not to her, not to anyone. Even though I am, terribly. “I’m dreaming more. Maybe I feel a little less rested.”
“You’re not taking more of them, though, are you?”
I am. I’m also doing other things I shouldn’t be doing. Like taking them with alcohol, for one.
“No,” I lie.
She nods carefully, watching me in her shrink way. “You’ve been taking them for eleven months. I’d like to go down to the minimum dosage with an eye toward your being off them altogether. Want to give it a try?”
I hesitate. That chemical slumber is the best place in my life right now. I don’t say that, though. It sounds too grim. Instead I find myself agreeing.
“Great,” she says. “If it’s an issue, we’ll go back up to the dosage you’re on now. And those dreams? Go back to the dream journal you were keeping when Jack first died. It’s an important part of our lives, our dream world. As we’ve discussed, we can learn a lot about ourselves there. Do you still keep it by your bed?”
“Yes.”
She hands me the white slip of paper.
“Well,” she says. I stare at the crisp sheet, her doctor’s scrawl. “I think our time is up for today.”
I’m always a little startled by the end of a session, the abrupt reminder that no matter how intimate, how I strip myself bare in these sessions, ours is a professional relationship. If I stopped paying, these chats with Dr. Nash would come to an unceremonious end.
“And, Poppy? If you see him again, call me.”
A siren from the street below drifts up, a distant and ghostly wail. This sound, so frequent in the cacophony of city noise, always makes me think of Jack. About an hour after he left that morning, emergency vehicles howled up the avenue beneath our window. There should have been some premonition, some dark dawning, but there wasn’t.
A lingering head cold had kept me in bed instead of going with him as I normally would have.
You could have died that morning, too, Layla says when we go over and over it.
Or maybe it wouldn’t have happened at all. Maybe we would have run in a different direction. Or maybe we could have fought off the attacker together.
Or maybe, or maybe, or maybe—on and on. Infinite possibilities, myriad ways Jack might still be with me. He overslept; a light caused him to cross another street; I was there and twisted my ankle, causing us to return home. I turn to those scenarios in blank moments, in dreams, when I should be paying attention in meetings. So many other paths he could have taken and didn’t.
“I’m not imagining him.” It seems to come out of nowhere.
Dr. Nash cocks her head at me. “I didn’t say you were.”
I bend down and grab my bag, come to standing as she does.
“And lock your doors. Be mindful,” she adds.
“You sound like my mother.”
She chuckles. “We can talk about that next session.”
“Very funny.”
* * *
I walk toward the subway, needing to get back downtown for a two o’clock meeting. I’m probably going to be late—again. The city is such a mess, a constant crush of traffic and delayed trains. I think about a cab or an Uber, but sometimes that’s even worse, snaking through jammed streets, trapped in a box, trying to decide if it would be faster to just get out and walk. The whole city seems to conspire against promptness.
I text my assistant, Ben. Running late, I tap in quickly and descend beneath the street. It’s Monday midday, so it’s not as crowded as it could be. Though the day is mild, the platform is hot as an oven and smells like piss. My stress level starts to tick up.
Jack wanted us to leave Manhattan; he’d grown to hate it. Everything that was cool about it is gone. It’s just an island for the rich. He dreamed of a historic property upstate, something with a lot of land, trees, trails to wander. Something we could renovate and make ours. He longed to disconnect from the rush of wanting, grasping, striving, at least on the weekends. He wanted time back behind the camera. He didn’t get any of those things.
We were packing when he died, boxing up the one-bedroom Upper West Side apartment we’d shared for five years. But instead of moving out of the city, we were moving to The Tate, a luxury high-rise in Chelsea—a gleaming tower of apartments with floor-to-ceiling windows, offering stunning vistas, high ceilings, wood floors, chic open-plan kitchens, pool and gym, a 24/7 building staff. It was me. I was the one who wanted it; he acquiesced.
He loved our dark, cozy place on Ninety-Seventh—with views of the other building across the street, with radiators that clanked, and mice in our ridiculously dated kitchen, and the old doorman Richie, who’d worked there forever and was sometimes asleep when we walked in. He loved our crazy, colorful cast of neighbors—Merlinda, the psychic who read clients in her apartment; Chuck—or Chica—accountant by day, drag queen by night, who had the most beautiful singing voice I’d ever heard; Bruce, Linda and Chloe, public school teachers and their adorable, gifted daughter, our next-door neighbors who never failed to invite us for Sunday dinner.
Now I live in a starkly beautiful space that looks out onto lower Manhattan—alone. I don’t even know who lives in the apartment next to me. The hallways are gray tunnels, lined with doors that seem to rarely open. In my apartment, the furniture is placed appropriately—bed in the bedroom, couch in the living area—but most of the boxes are still unpacked. To say I miss my husband, our wacky neighbors, that dark old apartment, our life—well, why? There are no words to adequately describe that slick-walled gully of despair. Suffice it to say that I can’t seem to fully move into my new life without Jack.
I’m sorry, I tell him. I wish I had listened to you.
Dr. Nash says it’s okay to talk to him, if I understand he’s not talking back.
Time drags and I’m ever more fidgety, annoyed. More people file down the stairs. The platform grows dense with bodies, the air thickening with impatience. Still the train doesn’t come. I lean over the edge of the platform to see if I can spot the glow of an oncoming headlamp. No.
I glance at the clock. There is officially no way to be on time now. A bead of perspiration trails down my spine. A glance at my phone reveals that there’s no signal.
When
