“You were so young then.”
“But he made an impression. Like our childhood was pretty much a chaotic mess except for this one little part when Eddie lived with us, even though I can’t remember what he did to make it feel that way. He was a nice guy, wasn’t he?”
“That’s my memory.” Leda’s living room offered no end of seating options, but we both took our place on the same smallish couch, our shoes off and feet touching.
“Did he seem happy when you saw him?”
I opened my seltzer and drank. Crying makes me thirsty, which was psychosomatic, I know. I had not wept away the equivalent of this seltzer can. “I think he did, but who can say if another person is happy based on one lunch? He was shocked to see me, that much was clear. We were both shocked. I burst into tears when he introduced himself. Sobbed. I have no idea where that came from.”
“Where do you think it came from?” Leda cracked her seltzer and tucked her feet beneath herself like a swan.
“Don’t go getting professional on me,” I said. I admired my sister’s professionalism and wanted no part of it.
“I’m serious. Why do you think you cried? It’s not exactly your go-to emotional response.”
I picked up a throw pillow with a giant red poppy needlepointed on the front and held it against my chest, my blooming, bleeding heart. One of her clients had made it for her when she moved away, obviously to ensure that Leda would never again walk through her own living room without thinking about this missing woman. Why did I cry when I realized Eddie was Eddie? Why was I so close to crying again now? Because I had loved him and I had ruined his life. “There was a time I carried a lot of guilt, about the divorce, about Eddie losing his job—childish stuff, I know that. I would have told you it wasn’t in me now, but I guess there was a splinter of it left. Subconscious, not conscious. I haven’t thought about him in decades.”
Leda nodded and then took a long slug from her can. “I felt the same way.”
That was the difference between being the client and being the sister—the sister-therapist was free to join in. “What could you have done to Eddie?” I asked. “You were in the first grade when he left. You were a baby.”
“Logic doesn’t have anything to do with it, and for the record, I was in the second grade. I was almost eight. I had appendicitis, then you and Eddie were in the car accident, then he was in the hospital—”
“—and after that he was gone.”
She nodded. “Exactly. If I hadn’t said I was sick, then the whole chain of events wouldn’t have gone into motion and he wouldn’t have had to leave.”
“And you would have died of a ruptured appendix.”
“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
“Did you ever work through any of this as an adult?” Leda had to go through plenty of therapy on her way to becoming a therapist herself.
“Interestingly, I have not. Somehow this brief but meaningful chapter remained subterranean. This is a revelation in real time. So did you and Eddie talk about the accident?”
“In the Dining Room at the Met? It didn’t come up. To tell the truth, the accident isn’t something I talked about with anyone, I mean, aside from you.”
“And Jonathan.”
I drank my seltzer, held my pillow. “Not really. I mean, he knows I was in a car accident when I was a kid.” I tapped the thin white line that ran down the left side of my forehead and disappeared into my hairline near the top of my ear. You couldn’t see it if my hair was down, and for that reason, my hair remained down. Jonathan saw it when we were in bed for the first time. He leaned over me and traced it with his finger. “What’s the story on this?” he asked, and I told him. I’d been in a car accident when I was a kid, not a big deal, no one seriously hurt.
“Did he ask you who was driving?” This was the reason my sister was Dr. Ha, “Your Therapist.” She always knew the follow-up question.
“I told him Mom was driving.”
Leda opened her mouth and left it open, an incredibly affecting gesture. I wondered if she tried it with her patients.
“I know, I know.”
“Get thee to therapy, sister.”
“Why? Because I didn’t tell the guy I’d gone to bed withabout Eddie Triplett? It was an oversimplification.”
“In my profession we call that a lie.”
“I didn’t feel like opening up to him at that moment.”
“You didn’t feel like opening up to him, but you’d just had sex with him?”
