She spoke to the taxi driver and exchanged pleasantries with her doorman, but she didn’t speak to me.
We rode the elevator up in silence, and I started to fret that she was mad at me. I wouldn’t blame her. I’d always thought we were close, but I’d missed a hell of a lot.
As soon as I closed her apartment door behind us, she burst into tears.
Auden didn’t cry, generally. She got mad. Maybe sometimes she got a little teary watching a sad movie. But even when we’d been kids and things had beenbad, she hadn’t been a crier.
I was having some kind of adrenaline-fueled fight-or-flight response. I felt like we were kids again, at that low point, when we realized Mom was well and truly gone. The worst period of my life. The panic over how to make sure Auden graduated high school. Where we would live. How we’d get money for food.
I took a breath and told myself that we were safe. We had food. We had homes—nice ones with Egyptian cotton sheets and shit. There was nothing to fight, except maybe Auden’s fears, and I didn’t know how to do that. But I could learn. I could rely on her to guide me.
So I opened my arms, and she stepped into them. I didn’t know what to say—I didn’t want to offer false platitudes—so I said, “Remember the lemon tree? The actual tree but also the song?”
“How could I forget?”
“I don’t know. I sometimes don’t know if what I remember is the way it actually went down, or if I’m giving things more importance in retrospect than they actually had.”
“We hated that fucking tree.”
“We did, right?”
She pulled away, wiped her face, and studied mine.
I beckoned her farther inside. We stopped in the kitchen, where I filled two water glasses from the tap and led her to the living room.
“There was a keyboard in my cabin at camp,” I said, “and the first night I got there, ‘Lemon Tree’ came into my mind, and it… got its claws in me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. But I also couldn’t play it. I think I played every other fucking song we sang with Mom back in the day, but I couldn’t play that one.”
I wasn’t sure why I was telling her this. Maybe it was just that I was trying to do what Gretchen said—lean into the bullshit as a way of trying to discharge it. Maybe doing that would help Auden. Show her that it was possible.
“But then the second-to-last day,” I said, “I suddenly played it.”
“And?”
“I don’t know.” Well, that was dumb. I had been there. It was hard to explain, though. But wasn’t that part of the point of the lean-in exercise? Putting to words things that felt ineffable? “It was anticlimactic, but in a good way. It felt like… just a song. I mean, I guess it will never be just a song. But the feelings I used to associate with it felt further away.”
“Why does she still have so much power over us?”
That was the big question. “I don’t know.”
“Over me, anyway,” Auden said. “It sounds like you’re making progress.”
“If I am, it’s accidental. Well, no.” That wasn’t giving credit where credit was due. “It’s more that…”
“What?”
“A friend from camp told me something that resonated with me. She said that when you’re in a situation like we are, where a person, or a memory, or whatever, has a hold on you, you should lean into it.”
“What does that mean?”
“In my case, I thought about those old days. Sang those old songs. The idea is that trying to avoid this stuff only makes it retain its power. But if you face it, you can discharge it.” I shrugged. What did I know? “Maybe?”
“I think that’s basically what the psychologist told me today, though not in exactly those words. And I gather that in my case, the ‘facing it’ part is meant to be slow and controlled and supervised.”
“But you got a good feeling from her? Because if not, you know you can try someone else.”
“I think she’s good. Good enough to get started, anyway. And she recommended a psychiatrist who can prescribe meds, which she thinks is a good idea.”
The relief I felt was massive, but I didn’t want to freak her out, so I just said, “Good.”
