The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B (22 page)

“Yeah, great.” He grabbed his things. “That would be great.”

His mother stayed rooted to the kitchen, wearing his father’s fraying cable-knit sweater and holding a green garbage bag.

“Uh, I hope that Sweetie is … Tell them … well, say that I …”

“I will, Mom. Don’t worry, I’ll make them understand.” He shut the door as fast as he could.

Each time he left for
them
, he felt he was abandoning
her
.

At 1:39 a.m., Adam blinked at the brightness and then at a sleeping Sweetie. The cast alone took up most of the bed. Sweetie’s accident—that was a close one. Too close. He was doing a crappy job all around.

Adam got up carefully, stretched and began. He paced in concentric rectangles while tapping into his left hand. This kind of pacing required tapping. Ninety-seven sets. Adam tapped to thirty-three and then started again.

And again.

At 3:17 a.m., Adam sat down on Sweetie’s bed, watching his little brother breathe. He guarded him while not breaking pattern.
Seventeen, nineteen, twenty-one
 … He could
not
mess up again; the consequences were too dire, and already those he loved were paying the price. It still didn’t feel “just right,” so Adam had to focus hard on a few more rounds. This required seventeen sets of fast tapping and two rounds slow into the one-elevens. Sweetie loved one hundred and eleven. But Adam was tiring and he’d get muddled and have to start all over again.

At 4:57 a.m., Adam unplugged all of the night-lights. “It was all my fault, little guy.” He smooshed Sweetie up tight just the way he liked before climbing into the sliver of bed that was left for him.

“It won’t happen again,” he promised the dawn.

And at 5:03 a.m., Adam Spencer Ross finally fell asleep.

“Nice to see you, Adam.” Chuck directed him to the overstuffed armchair and pulled up his own across the little coffee table from Adam. He clicked on a recorder, a Zoom H2 Handy Portable Stereo Recorder. Chuck cleared his throat.

“March second, five-thirty-five p.m., with Adam Ross.”

This was new.

“Hope you don’t mind—all the best shrinks have been recording since the Stone Age. I’m a little late to the party.” Chuck tapped the tiny black box. “I think it’s on, but I’m not sure, so I’m still going to take notes if you don’t mind.”

Adam nodded and looked around the office as if he had never seen it before. Chuck’s office, like all psychiatric offices in the Queensway Hospital, was in the basement. The room was smothered in beige on beige on beige. Each shade
fought to be more muted than the next. It was a fight to the death. Chuck stood against this in a riot of color. Today he had on his favorite Jamaican Olympic bobsled team jersey plus red skinny jeans. It was hard for Adam to take his eyes off the therapist in all that super-subdued nothing.

Probably what Chuck had in mind to begin with.

“The last time …” Chuck riffled through his file. “Ah, found it—it was the impromptu appointment. It’s been a while, right?”

Adam nodded. He actually had little to no memory of that session. He remembered being agitated. But then, he was always agitated. He needed some sleep. Adam had taken to swallowing Advil PMs each night, having convinced himself that this was way preferred to upping the Ativan dosage any more. Besides, he was out and he couldn’t ask Chuck for another prescription. The Advils didn’t work.

“Adam?”

“Sorry, I’m not sleeping much.” What were they talking about? “I’m kind of up and down and up and … And yeah, so my immediate response to all my fear and anxiety stuff is still to count and … well, I may not have been clear about this in Group, but the counting is escalating and becoming more involved with patterns, grouping and speeds.”

“Including right now.”

It wasn’t a question. Adam felt caught out. He
was
counting and he wasn’t even aware of it. “Including now,” he admitted. “In my head.”

“In an effort to neutralize the anxiety of being here?”

“Little bit.”

“Okay, don’t concern yourself about that. It’s okay, Adam. I know you’re worried about the escalation, but you’ve also grown so much in the months since Group began.” The therapist smiled at him. “Literally and figuratively.”

Five quick breaths. “Look, I know you’re all keen on starting the ERP thing …”

Chuck nodded. “We will commence with the exposure response and prevention therapy. We’ll tackle and take down each one of your maladaptive coping strategies, one by one. Documenting, challenging and grading them. It’s the only way, Adam. Whether your condition is genetic or environmental, or some combination of the two, I believe that ERP with the right combination of meds is the gold standard for this thing.”

Adam nodded but he didn’t buy it. He sucked at sticking to stuff like that. He couldn’t even remember to do the List. The List! Damn, he’d forgotten to do the List. Maybe Chuck had forgotten too.

“You are ready, or I wouldn’t have suggested it.”

“And I want to, sort of. Look, I
do
want to get better, actually. But I’m in a god-awful hurry … I can’t right this—”

“I don’t mean today. Relax. Today we talk, get caught up.” Chuck started writing.

Okay, Adam knew how this went. This he could do, no sweat. He exhaled and stopped counting heartbeats.

“Let’s begin at the beginning. How are things at home, er, homes?”

“Uh, complex.”

“It’s extremely stressful to be in a shared-custody situation, even in the most ideal circumstances, but you layer in OCD and your mother’s, uh, coping techniques, and that is a recipe for disaster.”

“Welcome to my nightmare.”

Adam caught Chuck up on Sweetie’s broken arm and the increasing hostility between the two houses. He glossed over his mom’s hoarding.

Chuck asked about the letters.

You are an abortion
.

“I can’t, sorry.” Warning shots rang out from the deepest part of him. “I promised her. I can’t talk about her letters. They’re supposed to be a secret and I blew it by blabbing in Group.”

The therapist was quiet for a long time. How would that sound when he hit play on his fancy new machine? “But the letters are a serious factor, Adam, and they affect you directly. It may well be time for action. I want you to check in on that after every Group session. Let me know if there’s a new one.”

“There hasn’t been a new one in a long time.” Adam tried to keep the fear—the lie—out of his voice. Would the machine hear it?

“But if there is, it may be time to call in the proper authorities. We have to get to the bottom of this. I believe your recovery is tied to this.”

And there you have it!
His mother had warned him, pleaded with him, but he had to open his big fat freaky mouth, and now …

“We need to talk about the letters and their effect on
you next session. I can almost guarantee that it will help.” Chuck glanced back to his notes. “How about the threshold issues? You talked about the church door, I believe, and your own? Are the thresholds escalating?”

Jesus, what a whack-job list. When they went through them—his
things
—that way, there was nowhere to hide. He was the opposite of fixed; he was broken and getting brokener.

“Yeah.” Adam slumped lower in the chair. “Lots of them, actually. There’s the church and tons of classrooms at school, but especially the large biology lab. Three subway entrances. The side door to Brenda’s and, like, four random store-type places. Robyn’s front door, although she doesn’t know that yet. I just walked by a couple of times in the last week.”

“And …”

Adam wrapped his right foot behind his left and tapped. “And the worst is my house. Next thing you know, I’ll be wearing a tinfoil hat.” He shook his head. “My own house. It’s escalating.”

Chuck didn’t seem to be impressed. “Front or side or back door?”

“All of them, but the front is the real problem, and to tell you the truth, I don’t think you could get in through the side or back doors anymore.”

“How involved?”

“The quickest I can now do is twenty-seven minutes.”

Chuck let out a long, slow exhale. “That’s a tough one, but again I want to assure you that it is entirely normal and within the scope of this disorder that a progressive deterioration might occur. You are
not
crazy, and I need you to
stop calling yourself that in your head. I know you do that. At the root, as you know, is fear, dread, anxiety. I personally believe that OCD has more of a neurobiological than a psychological basis, although one’s emotional environment is critical to the presentation. And bear in mind that most threshold issues present most prominently at the patient’s principal abode.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Adam crossed and recrossed his legs. This was going nowhere. Chuck didn’t understand, wasn’t getting it. “But I
have
to get fixed, like
totally
this time, right? Like, counting actual things and the Internet scrolling went away, and now I’ve got all this crap and it’s worse. Look, I know
cure
isn’t in the cards, but control—that’s possible, isn’t it? You said so that one time. So I’ll do that exposure thing. I will. I’ll do it all, whatever it takes.” Adam couldn’t stop shivering. “You’ve seen my Lists, the old ones. I have to get better for Robyn. I have to protect her and … well, Robyn and me …”

Chuck put down his notepad and his pen, and smiled. Nobody smiled like Chuck. “You have strong feelings for her.”

“Well, yeah, that’s putting it mildly.” Adam stared at the blinking recording machine. “But it’s like she’s way ahead of me in this race. I can feel it. She seems … so much better.”

Chuck pressed pause on the machine.

“She is, Adam.”

“She is.” He nodded solemnly. “I am not her attending therapist, so this is only a theory, only hypothetical, but I think Robyn is struggling to accept that. It’s for her attending to call the shots. But you see, sometimes participants have trouble letting go, even when it is in their best interests.”

“Huh?”

“OCD symptoms can, as we know, fluctuate over time.” Chuck leaned forward, closing the distance between himself and Adam. “And in five to ten percent of all cases, patients experience a spontaneous and complete remission of all their OCD symptoms. Some believe it might have a hormonal link, but”—he removed his glasses—“we don’t know.”

Remission
. Adam did not hear a single word after “remission.” That was like
cure
, right? They never talked about cure with him.
Never
. Here
he
was, going to hang his guts out to dry for a chance at
controlling
his symptoms. And
she
was fixed!

“In my experience, it can be an episodic remission, meaning it
can
return, months or years later, but every day would be—”

“A day in heaven,” Adam whispered. What
would
that be like? To wake up one morning and be
normal
? To not bite down and parcel out each second of each day. To not wrestle and negotiate with your obsessions. To not have thoughts that ran you into the ground.

To have a quiet mind
.

A quiet mind
.

Quiet
.

Shh
.

But
he
was keeping her in hell, with him, watching him, fretting over him.

“The remission, uh, how long has it …?”

Chuck didn’t answer directly. “Again, academically speaking, I believe that a person experiencing said remission should continue with her attending therapist, but that an OCD group may be more of a hindrance than a helping element, especially if a person like that were vulnerable to a comorbidity, the most common of which is depression. I believe that is where the focus should be concentrated.”

Adam’s stomach gnarled itself into ever-tighter knots. He said nothing.

“Adam.” Chuck leaned closer to him. “You will reach that point too. I know it. You will do the work. You will no longer need us, me.”
Blah, blah, blah, blah
.

One, three, five, seven, nine, eleven …

They spent the last fifteen minutes reviewing and reality-checking. Chuck offered a couple of good suggestions about the doors, but later Adam couldn’t remember them because he hadn’t been paying attention. Still, whatever it was he said, Chuck’s soft, warm voice calmed his chattering heart.

Temporarily.

The dread came charging back as soon as the hour was up.

“Adam? One more quick thing.” Chuck took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Do you ever cry? I mean lately. I know you haven’t in the past few years, but recently, with all the upheaval and turmoil. Do you ever cry?”

The question surprised him. He had to think about it. “Uh, okay, I’m not much of a guy, I’ll grant you, but I am a guy, so, no, I don’t cry, and no, I haven’t been crying lately.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“It might be a good thing, a healthy thing, if you did, if you could. We’ll note it to talk about and explore in—”

Adam was already heading for the doors.

He rode up and down the hospital elevators. “Shit!” he yelled as he pressed all the odd numbers. He didn’t care if anyone heard; he was leaving the shrink floor. They’d all be used to twitchy psychos muttering to themselves. “Batman my ass. Some protector I am!”