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Feeling better than I had in some time.45CharlieI jerked when the door to Dr. Woolcott’s office finally opened. Roy followed her out, his eyes sunken and fatigued but oddly brighter than I’d seen them in a few days.
“Hey,” I said softly.
“Hey, silver.”
Dr. Woolcott walked toward the reception desk. “Nan, what do we have available in the next couple days for Mr. Wolfe?”
“You’re busy all day tomorrow. There’s Sunday, but that’s your only day off.”
“Hmm.” She looked over Nan’s shoulder at the computer. “I don’t usually work on Saturday evenings, Mr. Wolfe, but since you did so well today I’ll make an exception if you’re willing to come back tomorrow, same time. Of course, I’m sure you already have plans.”
We didn’t. In fact, I had plans for dinner with Blaine, something I wasn’t excited about conveying to Roy.
He looked to me. “You mind?”
“Of course not. If this is working, you should continue as soon as you can.”
“I’ll be here,” he said to Dr. Woolcott.
“Great,” she said. “See you both tomorrow.”
See you both. She’d actually only see Roy. I had a dinner date with Blaine. Now to find the right time to let Roy know.
I smiled and took his hand, pushing Blaine to the back of my mind. “How did it go?”
“It was strange,” he said. “But I think…it was good.”
“That’s great! You want to tell me about it?”
He paused a moment. “I’m not sure. It’s not like I want to hide it from you, but I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about it.”
“That’s okay.” I tried to sound bright, but I was a little bummed that he didn’t want to talk about the session. Frankly, I found the whole thing fascinating and wanted to know more.
Maybe Lacey would be willing to talk about her session, but that wouldn’t be until Monday at noon.
“What now?” I asked, as we got into a cab.
“Let’s go back to my place,” he said. “I want to show you the piece I’ve been working on.”“Wow.”
Words scrambled in my mind, words of magnitude and beauty for the piece Roy showed me. But all that came out was, “Wow.”
“Not everyone appreciates abstract the way you do,” Roy said.
“I appreciate all art,” I said. “Especially yours.”
The blues and grays were haunting. They created a spiral—sort of. When I looked closer, I saw that the spiral was only an illusion. What I was actually seeing were tiny brushstrokes that all flicked downward. Quickly downward, as if someone were freefalling from the sky.
“Have you ever gone skydiving?” I asked.
“No. Why?”
“The movement of the painting. I feel like I’m falling. Falling fast.”
“Yes. Falling.”
“Have you ever fallen off something?”
“No,” he said again.
“Hmm.” What could he be saying in this painting? “Why did you paint this, Roy?”
“I felt it. So I painted it.”
A-ha. Perhaps he felt like he was falling into a pit as a result of this buried memory. His attempt to find the key.
“Don’t overthink it,” he said.
“I’m not.”
He chuckled. “You are. Your cute little forehead is all wrinkled.”
When he said the words, I consciously relaxed my facial muscles. Yeah, I was overthinking it.
“Do you ever paint something without a reason?” I asked.
“Every piece of art has a reason,” he said, “but it’s not always something esoteric and philosophical. Sometimes, I just feel like painting, so I do.”
Right. Made perfect sense. I didn’t always have some deep-seated reason when I used to paint. But Roy? This painting was too engaging for him to have “just felt like painting it.”
“I don’t buy it.”
“You don’t have to buy anything.”
“This is a clear descent, Roy. What does it mean?”
He wrinkled his forehead this time. “I’ve never fallen.”
“So you’ve said.”
“But there was one time…in an elevator…”
The elevator again. I’d seen him tense up more than once in an elevator. And he didn’t want to have sex in an elevator. Most men would jump at that.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I’m not sure, still. It’s kind of blurry in my head. It might have been a dream. But I was scared shitless. It was like the floor fell out from under me.”
“The cable must have broken. It happens every once in a while.”
He nodded. “I swear my stomach came out through my mouth.”
“You got sick?”
“No, just felt like that.”
“The negative Gs,” I said.
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“So you don’t have any desire to ride those kind of features in an amusement park, huh?”
“God, not in the slightest. The feeling of plummeting to my death isn’t anything I want to relive.”
I found his word usage interesting. Relive. This hadn’t been a dream. Whatever happened in an elevator was part of whatever Roy had buried in his brain. Should I push it? Or should I let it go?
The fact that he’d painted this—indeed, that he’d stayed up the previous night working on it—meant it was becoming unburied in his mind.
That was a good thing, and I should probably let it happen naturally, not push.
