Sex & Violence (4 page)

Like I’d know.

“Soren had a thing about the loons,” my father continued.

“He beat up this kid Tyson Murphy once, who was two grades older, just for saying he was going out to Story Island with his BB gun to practice on the loons. Took Tyson’s BB gun too.

Soren was very territorial about Pearl Lake—he loved it and knew everything about it, which I always thought was odd.

But we never agreed on much, so I suppose the feeling was mutual.”

There was something in his voice that made me worry he might cry. So I didn’t say anything, and a few minutes later we motored off.

***

One Friday afternoon, my father came into my room where I was reading and said, “You’ve got an appointment in town.”

Marchant Falls was what he meant by “town,” and it was about twenty miles south of Pearl Lake. It was small and dumpy and reminded me of Havford, the little shitty town near Remington Chase where kids would sneak off to buy cigarettes and alcohol.

Everything about Marchant Falls was piddly and subpar. The grocery store was called Cub Foods and the high school mascot was a beaver and the sidewalks were covered in trash from the receding dirty snow. We passed the high school, where kids hung around the front doors, playing Frisbee and Hacky Sack.

I pretended not to see them. I didn’t want my father to think about enrolling me back in school.

He pulled up to a yellow house with a white door on a residential street.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Your appointment’s in five minutes,” he said.

“But this is somebody’s house.”

“It’s an office.”

I had thought I was going to the clinic, like always. I had some damn checkup every week, it seemed. Hearing and blood work and my sprained wrist and other stuff you need checked when you suddenly have no spleen. So I looked awful.

Deranged. I barely had any hair. Unable to shake the memory of Patrick Ramsey grabbing my hair, I kept it cut super short, which wasn’t hard as they’d shaved it off in the hospital to stitch up parts of my scalp. But with short hair, my ears stuck up, all pointy, like an elf, totally noticeable because of the big strip of scab on the left one. And I reeked too. The shower in the cabin was so tiny I could barely stand up straight in it and tended to have spiders crawling everywhere. Most importantly, the bathroom had a flimsy door with no lock. So I’d only washed my entire body a couple of times since coming to Minnesota, and that was in the freezing cold lake, at night and not for long, either, since the temperature made my nuts jump up my neck.

My father knocked on the door, which had a row of brass bells lining the upper part of it. They jingled when the door opened, and a short red-haired woman appeared.

“You must be Adrian Carter.” She shook my father’s hand.

“I’m Dr. Janice Penny.”

My father introduced me, and the red-haired woman shook my hand. Her hand was white and cool to the touch, like a sea-shell. I’ve never understood people whose handshakes are cool like that. I’m always a sweating ball of nerves.

We went inside, and I looked around, trying not to seem as freaked as I was. The room was outfitted in white wicker furniture and paintings of flowers and smelled like dried roses.

Dr. Penny handed my father some forms and told him to take a seat in one of the wicker chairs, which creaked when my father sat down.

“Evan, please come into my office,” she said.

I looked at my dad, but he was busy with the forms. I wanted to kill him. He hadn’t told me I was seeing a shrink, and I knew why. Because I wouldn’t have come.

Dr. Penny sat in a white wooden chair and invited me to sit too. There were two options: a little pink sofa with poofy pil-lows and a rocking chair. The pink sofa was so …
pink
. Plus it was closer to her. I sat in the rocking chair, trying not to make it squeak and failing.

“It’s nice to meet you, Evan,” Dr. Penny said. “How are you feeling today?”

“Fine.”

“Good,” she said. “I thought we’d start off by getting acquainted with one another.”

“Yeah, but um, I’m not really sure I need to be here. I mean, I don’t really get
why
I’m here, exactly.

“Your father is worried about you,” she said. “He knows how much you’re hurting.”

“I’m healing up pretty good, actually,” I said. “My ribs are healed, and the doctors said that …”

“I know physically you’re doing well,” she interrupted.

“You’re a very strong young man. An athlete, your father said.

But you’ve undergone something very traumatic. You have fears. And with good reason. Your father wishes to help you with these matters.”

“Then why doesn’t
he
help me?” I asked, sounding whiny.

“Maybe he doesn’t think he can,” she said.

“And you think you can?” I asked. Which was dickish of me, but it just sort of came out.

“I can help you with some ways to think about your life and choices,” she said. “It’s really your job to get better. I’m just offering some perspective on how you look at things.”

I’d never had therapy. Even when my mother died. I’d never known my father to consider such a thing. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in psychological principles; he just didn’t seem to think about me that way at all. About emotional things.

He treated stuff like that how I’d imagine a father would treat his daughter’s menstrual cycle—with caution and distance.

Him talking to me about my feelings was like him buying a strange woman a box of tampons, I guess. Which I had actually done once, when we lived in San Diego. A girl I met at the mall asked me to give her some cash because she needed some tampons. Mandy was her name. She was cute and fit my left-of-normal profile. We later did mushrooms together at a movie theater, and I got so annihilated by the black-and-white tiled men’s room that Mandy had to pull me out of there by the wrist.

Thinking of Mandy made me shiver. Because I had been a guy who just met girls like that. Like I’d met Collette.

Though more often, I pursued them, looking for an angle to get what I wanted. It was something I was good at. At least I thought I was. I hadn’t known how close to danger I’d been that whole time. Oblivious of all the history of all these places. How many Tate Kerrigans and Patrick Ramseys had I almost missed?

“Let’s get started,” Dr. Penny said.

Therapy with Dr. Penny was either the weirdest thing in the world or I didn’t know anything about therapy. I expected her to ask me about sad things, my mother dying and all the places we’d lived and left, and how we never saw any of my relatives, because my father rarely mentioned them and my mother’s side fell away from us after she died. Or I thought she’d ask whether I drank or did drugs or looked at porn. But Dr. Penny just talked about Marchant Falls and how she grew up here and how her parents had a cabin on Pearl Lake too and how she’d gone there every summer, swimming and fishing until Labor Day. How Pearl Lake was one of the oldest lakes to have settled residents. How
Marchant
was the French word for “merchant,”

because the town was a hub for French beaver fur traders, hence the high school mascot. How the high school had an amazing hockey team and offered AP courses. And there was a track team too, if I was interested.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to return to school for any reason. I wanted to take the damn GED. I was done walking into new buildings and seeing how things played out as the Fucking New Guy.

But Dr. Penny didn’t care that I was silent. She just kept talking. She sounded like a brochure from a travel website.

I was starting to wonder who exactly this therapy was for, when she asked me the first question.

“Have you ever written a letter to anyone, Evan?” Dr.

Penny asked. “Or a long e-mail? Something that went on at length?”

“No,” I said. “I used to write my mother from Scout camp.

But I quit going after she died.”

“Didn’t you like Scout camp? Being outdoors?”

“No,” I said. “I like the outdoors fine. I just didn’t like going somewhere like that and … then, you know, how something bad could happen while I was gone.”

Then I felt stupid, because my eyes filled with tears, which I didn’t expect.

But Dr. Penny said, “I want you to think of someone you’d like to write a letter to. You can send it. Or not. The sending isn’t the point. Just think of someone. This week, write a letter telling that person how you are now. Where you are. What you are doing.”

“Do I have to bring it in?” I asked. “Like homework?”

“You can if you want,” she said. “You don’t have to show me. But you have to do it. Okay?”

I nodded.

“Our time is up for today,” she said. “I will see you next week. Same time.”

As I left Dr. Penny’s office, my right hand was already in a fist. Ready to explode at my father. I felt like a giant loser for having to talk to this woman, for having to write a letter I wouldn’t send, like I was in some bullshit English class. Though I’d never hit anyone before, the thought of smashing my father’s face sounded pretty satisfying.

But when I got to the car, my father shocked the shit out of me.

“I know you’re pissed,” he said, holding up a hand. “So I’m giving you two choices. You can unload on me all you want.

Scream your damn head off. Or I can just buy you a car. Right now.”

He opened his wallet, and I saw a huge flap of hundreds.

My father always carried around cash, but never that much. He made a lot of money, but rarely spent it and always forced me to get a job to pay for stuff I wanted. He had never offered me a car, would barely let me drive his Mercedes once I got my license.

“So,” he said. “What’s your decision?”

It wasn’t a decision at all. I felt further tricked as I drove behind him back to Pearl Lake in my new car, a used Subaru Outback, the only four-wheel drive on the lot that I could stand, I had said, again sounding whiny. I bitched that the bumper was mashed in and the interior smelled like wet dogs. Though I actually really liked the car a lot.

My father took the scenic route back to Pearl Lake. I couldn’t tell if this was his idea of letting me enjoy myself or just showing me where things were. Either way I felt mixed.

I felt bought and I felt awesome and I felt like I would get a headache if I didn’t do something about the goddamn rattly ski rack on the roof.

So now I had a therapist, and now I could drive myself places, in my own car. Where I would go besides Dr. Penny’s office was a good question. And with who, another one.

Dear Collette,

I’m writing because another redheaded woman is currently boss-ing me around. Apparently, I have a thing for redheads. I would tell
this to Dr. Penny, but she might think I was hitting on her and things
are already crazy enough. Plus she’s like fifty years old and wears
Swedish grandma clogs. I don’t think I have a thing for redheads,
though I always thought you were cute. Thinking of you makes my
stomach hurt, though. And not just because of the hole where they
yanked out my spleen. It was all my fault, what they did to you. Makes
me think of a million other things I’d like to do that aren’t legal or
sportsmanlike. Which I don’t have the balls to do anyway. I hope
you’re enjoying whatever you’re doing in Boston. Your new school.

I’m sorry I caused this.

I live on a biologically unique lake. I’ve been reading all about it.

The study of lakes is called limnology. “Limnos” is Greek for “lake.”

Pearl Lake was formed by glacial movement, as well as the result
of an oxbow lake from the Beauchant River. This means one side of
the lake is amazingly deep and the other is shallow. The shallow side
is subject to much agricultural runoff, while the deep side is colder,
ideal habitat for a large fish with teeth called a northern pike. Did
you know that all lakes experience a phenomenon each spring and fall
called turnover? Because of the density of water, as the temperature
increases in the spring, the water from the top sinks, while the water
at the bottom rises to the surface. The reverse happens in the fall. I
wonder what the fish think of that shit or if they even notice, since it
happens every year. If they just get used to that kind of turbulence to
the point it doesn’t even register anymore.

I would never send you this, Collette, because a) I doubt you’d care
b) we never talked about anything, anyway. I never knew if you liked
chemistry, for example. I know you thought I was good at chemistry,
but it’s actually not my favorite science. Beyond that you were from
Boston and swore a lot, I just knew you liked track and liked me. And
I liked you too, but mostly I just wanted to get naked with you, because
I was miserable at Remington Chase and you were one thing I could
look forward to. Because I am a dick. A slutty seventeen-year-old guy
who didn’t care what it cost you until it cost me something. A spleen
and a left ear and a broken nose and ribs. More stuff too, but I’m too
pussy to talk about it to you or anyone else.