Riptide

Originally published by Elegant Literature, Issue #40 "Crossroads and Consequence"

Recipient of the Spoken Award

“I’m glad you decided to come in today.”

I’m not. I stare at the spot on the wall. It’s the same one I stare at every time I sit through a session of inane psycho-babble and saccharine platitudes about expressing our feelings. The spot is nothing special—just another patch of calm, sea-blue paint slicked over plasterboard—but its nothingness is the point.

“The traffic was brutal,” Michael says from my left. I don’t need to look at him to know there’s a smile on his insufferable face. It will be lopsided, and charming, and at odds with the purple bags under his eyes. He looks at our therapist like that every time. As if we’re all friends here, and we’ve just popped in for a little bit of conflict resolution.

In another universe, I would say, ‘He never helps around the house.’ And he would say, ‘You just need to ask—I’m not a mindreader!’ And I would say, ‘I shouldn’t have to ask!’ And on and on we’d bicker, like normal couples do.

I wish we were here to resolve the unfair division of domestic labour. I really do.

“How have you been, Astrid?”

My gaze flickers to the therapist. She leans back, congenial, in her mesh office chair, her clipboard resting on black-slacked thighs. Behind her, an electronic diffuser sputters a bergamot scented mist into the air, desperately trying to alleviate the tension through the power of essential oils.

I purse my lips. “I’m fine.”

“Are you really?” She looks at me as if that kind of question is deserving of an answer.

No. How could I be ‘fine’?

“It’s alright to be honest with me. We’re not here for pleasantries—we’re here to do work.”

Michael holds his breath beside me. He’s hoping I’ll answer. He wants me to snap, like he’s snapped, over and over and over. Like a sick, sadistic voyeur, he watches me for signs that he’s not the only one drowning.

Bastard.

I want to sneer at her, at him and this ridiculous façade of healing. I let my eyes drift back up to the spot on the wall. Blue. Calm.

“I’m fine,” I repeat, because saying anything else is impossible. Saying anything else would break the dam, release a tide that would shatter me on the rocks of anguish and loathing.

The therapist nods in my periphery. “Alright. Michael? How are you?”

My husband sighs. “I’m… okay. Maybe. I don’t know.”

He’s not being honest. He’s not okay. He can’t be. It wouldn’t be fair if he were.

“That’s very normal. Healing isn’t linear. Why don’t you tell me about your week?”

He shifts his weight, squeaking the leather cushions on his side of the couch. He brushes away the plastic fingers of the potted fern beside him, and I realise my gaze is suddenly trained on it; part of me wishes they’ll wrap around his neck and choke the life out of him.

Not that it would change anything.

Michael sputters and starts over the recap of his mundane week: his first few days back at work, the relief of turning his mind to something else, the six months of overgrown lawn he finally wrangled, the toys he finally packed into boxes in the downstairs playroom. His voice goes wobbly, and my throat burns.

“Astrid?” She offers me a box of tissues and I grimace, shaking my head. She sets them gently on the coffee table between us.

The room feels unsteady. I’m a buoy on disturbed waters, the current impossible to fight. “I’m fine.”

I hate the sympathetic set of her mouth almost as much as I hate the hitch in Michael’s voice when he continues.

“It’s hard to breathe around his stuff,” he says. “It’s not helping us move on.”

His hand inches toward me across the leather seat, and mine inches away. The therapist clocks the exchange but doesn’t comment or write anything on her clipboard. I’m convinced it’s a prop. It’s supposed to make us believe she’s a professional, and not a twenty-something child churned out of a middling university while she was practically still in diapers.

It’s meant to make us believe that she has any capacity at all to understand the scale of what’s happened to us.

“How do you feel about Michael packing away Bodhi’s things, Astrid?”

“Fine.” But my stare should be peeling the stupid blue paint and boring laser-hot holes into the plaster ocean underneath.

The room is full of squeaking leather and springs; a shuffling more meaningful than all the words we’ve spoken.

“Astrid…” Her voice is so gentle and compassionate. A scream rises and dies as a choked sob in the back of my throat. “Michael is reaching for you—can you see that? He wants to be here for you. I want to be here for you. Can you meet us halfway?”

I clamp down my tongue, teeth and lips. I stare until I don’t know if my eyes are blurring with grief, or pain, or the salt I haven’t been able to wash away. It clings to my hair and skin, rattles in my lungs as I breathe through the sting of it.

“I’m trying, Astrid,” Michael says as his hand takes mine. I’m his lifeline. He used to say it all the time. “Please.”

I’m trying, too.

I’m trying to forgive. To forget. But the waves keep rising up, swallowing down, breaking my screams for help into nothing but bubbles and foam. The current is still dragging, and that little hand is still slipping from mine in water that is still too dark and cold and enormous.

I don’t know how to find the surface, even with Michael’s arms around me, trying to drag me back up—and I don’t know that I want to find it.

I need to dive deeper, need to disappear in the eddying tides and find the place where I last knew who I was.

Michael’s voice breaks. “I lost him, too.”

Yes, I want to say. Yes, we both lost him. But you chose.

“Talk to me, please.”

You chose. The stronger swimmer, the head still above water. You chose. You chose.

And you chose wrong.