“Do you know what hurricane shutters are?” she asked.
“Protection for windows in hurricanes, right?”
“Yes, but it’s more complicated. High wind causes negative pressure when a hurricane whips over your house. When you have broken windows during a storm, the air pressure in the house rises, and the difference in pressure means the roof could collapse.”
“So hurricane shutters don’t just prevent the windows from breaking, they protect the whole house.”
She nodded. “It’s too heavy-handed a metaphor, isn’t it?”
“I think you and I specialize in metaphors that are too heavy-handed, don’t we?”
She smiled, experiencing a wave of affection and appreciation for this man, her unlikely friend and ally. “Therewasthat one time you were stuck on a plane and you couldn’t write your book.”
“Exactly.”
She and Jack had made up, over text. They’d both apologized for how things had gone down in LA. She had shared her diagnoses. She hadn’t been sure how much more she was going to tell him when they reunited in person. He didn’t need to know everything, she’d told herself.
From this vantage point, here on a stool in a cozy, candlelit bar, she couldn’t remember why she had ever thought that.
“What you saw was the third episode in my lifetime of what I always used to call ‘the cyclone.’ I thought of the cyclone as a storm, like inThe Wizard of Oz, which in some ways wasn’t wrong, but they were of course panic attacks. And when I say ‘episode,’ I don’t mean a singular episode, but a period of time—months, generally—when I’ve dealt with them. The first was when I was a teenager, in the months after my debutante ball, when I was facing all the uncertainty of the future. The second was COVID.”
“When everyone was facing the uncertainty of the future.”
“Right. And then…” How to begin to explain when she was still struggling to grasp it all herself?
“When you were alone for the first time in your life, andGreenLight, which had become a huge symbolic thing both because you loved it so much and because Angela died, was falling apart.”
She blew out a breath. “Hey, you should become a therapist if this writing thing doesn’t work out.” He made a face. “I was kidding. It’s going to work out. Itisworking out.”
“Maybe. But my turn for the shrink’s sofa later.”
“Really?”
He rolled his eyes and made a dismissive gesture, but it was uncharacteristically self-deprecating.
“Anyway,” she went on, “so, generalized anxiety disorder. But OCD, too, as I said. That part is new. Apparently perimenopause can trigger it—lucky me.”
“Perimenopause,” he echoed.
“Yeah. The ten-or-so-year period before my ovaries give up the ghost—although since I don’t need them anymore, I wish they would just hurry up already. Apparently there’s a lot of hormonal stuff going on.” Who would have thought, back at the Zoom of Doom, that she’d be sitting in a bar with Jack Branksome talking about the slow death of her reproductive system?
“Anyway, I have this psychologist now who kind of embraced this metaphor of a cyclone, except, in all our talking about my childhood in Savannah, she suggested we change it to a hurricane.”
“Hence the hurricane shutters.”
“Yes. If you want your house to withstand a hurricane, you put up the shutters. It’s a lot of work, and here’s the key: The shutters aren’t just one thing. Different levels of hurricanes might require different interventions. Medication, talk therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, which is about redirecting your thoughts. All that hippie-dippy stuff.”
“Doesn’t sound that hippie-dippy to me.”
“Yeah, I guess it could get a lot hippier-dippier. I could be chanting in a circle of crystals.”
“Exactly. Chanting in a circle of crystals is not a proven method for repelling hurricanes.”
Why was he being so nice? She wasn’t sure what to do with this version of Jack.
“What I want to know,” he said, “is why no one ever noticed this.”
“You noticed.”
