I sighed. Yeah, not everyone had jobs they could take off from at a moment’s notice. “I know.”
“No, I mean, Ican’t.”
“What?”
“Teddy, I’ve never left New York City.”
“That’s not true.”Was it?“You went to that retreat in the Hamptons last summer. We were just talking about that the other day.”
“I went to that retreat for one day, had a full-blown panic attack while wading in the water, faked food poisoning, and left early.”
What? My mind was having trouble grabbing on to the notion that my sister had never been farther from the city than the Hamptons. Auden was wealthy. She went to spas and Broadway shows and lived in a large—by New York standards—apartment filled with art. Some of it was by friends, but some of it was top-shelf stuff she bought at galleries. She had a guest room she wasn’t letting me occupy this summer and a spare walk-in closet she used as a darkroom.
Surely she was overstating things, forgetting a business trip at the very least. Her firm had a secondary headquarters in Los Angeles. But… I thought of all the times I’d suggested she take the train up to Boston to see a show. She’d always declined. “I went to like three hundred Concrete Temple shows when I was a teenager,” she would say, referring to our early gigs in dives around New York. “These days, I can see you once a year at Madison Square Garden and call it good.”
“That promotion you turned down last year…,” I wondered aloud.
“Would have required me to spend a ton of time at the LA office.”
“Auden, I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything. But now you know why I can’t come to see your camp show. I would love to, but I can’t.”
“And that’s it?”You’re just going to be like this for the rest of your life?I didn’t want to say it quite so bluntly, though. I was still reeling from this bomb she’d dropped, and I didn’t want to overreact. The Hilton Garden Inn episode had represented my lifetime allotment of overreaction.
She sighed. “Sometimes I think maybe I should try another big city, one that doesn’t feel that different on the ground from New York. Chicago, maybe? Toronto? Now that you’re not touring so much, maybe we could… try to go somewhere together?”
“Of course, anytime. But maybe you need a therapist. Maybe you need—”
“Massive pharmaceutical intervention?”
She was trying to be funny, but I wasn’t feeling it. “Possibly. But mostly a therapist. I feel like you can drug yourself, sure, and maybe that’s part of the fix, but is it really going to get better—really, actually better—if you don’t understand the root cause?”
“I’m pretty sure the root cause is Mom.”
I huffed a bitter laugh. “Yeah.” Of course it was. “But then you need to talk about the root cause.” All that shit Gretchen had said—she’d been right. “You have to talk about it before you can get it to loosen its hold on you.”
“I guess.”
She didn’t sound enthused. “Do you want to talk about it with me?” I was no therapist, but maybe I could get her comfortable with the idea of talking. Hell,Iwanted to talk. Wasn’t that half the reason I’d invited her to Wild Arts?
That gave me pause. Auden and I had talked a lot this summer, but it was always about me. What I was doing. What I was—or wasn’t—writing. I wanted her to come visit becauseIwanted to see her. I wanted to feel the things I would feel if she came here.
“You know,” she said quietly, “this is why I didn’t want you staying with me this summer. I didn’t want you to figure it out.”
“I feel terrible that I never realized this.”
“I worked hard to hide it from you.”
“But you’re not hiding anymore.”
She shrugged, but the gesture was too casual. “I guess it’s getting too exhausting to keep hiding it. From you, anyway.”
“Is it agoraphobia?” My mind was searching for a diagnosis. A word.
“I feel like it’s the opposite. Fear of empty places. In New York, there are always people around. You’re always close to anything you could need—food, friends, hospitals. You can get anywhere on foot.”
“What happens if you try to… push yourself? You said you had a panic attack in the Hamptons.”
