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She was alone.
“Marah!”
It was Tully. She’d yelled twice. That meant she could be on her way down the hall.
Marah fisted her hands, felt the pinch of fingernails in the fleshy middle of her palms. “Coming,” she said, although her voice was dry and small, barely audible even to her.
She left the bedroom and shut the door with a little click.
In no time, Tully was beside her, holding her by the arm, guiding Marah out of the condominium, as if she were blind.
As they walked uptown, Tully talked.
Marah tried to listen, but her heart was beating so fast it deafened her to anything else. Her hands were sweating. She didn’t want to sit down with some stranger and talk about cutting herself.
“Here we are,” Tully said at last, and Marah came out of the gray fog and found herself standing in front of a tall glass building. When had they passed the park where the homeless people gathered beneath the totem pole? She didn’t remember. That scared her.
She followed Tully into the elevator and up to the doctor’s office, where a serious young woman with a lot of freckles offered them seats in the waiting room.
Marah perched uncomfortably on an overstuffed blue chair by an aquarium.
“I guess fish are supposed to be calming,” Tully said. She sat down beside Marah and took hold of her hand. “Marah?”
“What?”
“Look at me. ”
She didn’t want to, but one thing she knew: it was a waste of time to ignore Tully. Slowly she turned. “Uh-huh?”
“There’s nothing wrong with how you feel,” she said gently. “Sometimes missing her hurts more than I can stand, too. ”
No one ever said stuff like this anymore. Oh, they’d talked about Mom all the time eighteen months ago, but apparently there was an expiration date on grief. It was like an exterior door closing; once it shut and you were in the dark, you were supposed to forget how much you missed the light. “What do you do when it, you know, hurts to remember?”
“If I told you, your mom would come down from heaven and kick my ass. I’m supposed to be the responsible adult here. ”
“Fine,” Marah said. “Don’t fricking tell me how you handle it. No one ever does. ” She glanced sideways to see if the receptionist was eavesdropping, but the woman wasn’t paying attention to them.
Tully didn’t respond for a minute, which seemed to go on too long. Finally, she nodded and said, “I started having panic attacks after her death, so I take Xanax. And I can’t sleep for shit anymore. And sometimes I drink too much. What do you do?”
“I cut myself,” Marah said quietly. It felt surprisingly good to admit.
“We are quite a pair,” Tully said with a wan smile.
Behind them, a door opened and a slim woman emerged from the office. She was beautiful, in a gritted-teeth, angry kind of way that Marah recognized as pain. The woman wore a heavy plaid scarf wrapped around her upper body and held it closed with a gloved hand, as if she were heading out into a snowstorm instead of a Seattle day in June.
“See you next week, Jude,” said the receptionist.
The woman nodded and put on sunglasses. She didn’t glance at either Marah or Tully as she left the office.
“You must be Marah Ryan. ”
Marah hadn’t even noticed the other woman who’d come into the waiting room.
“I’m Dr. Harriet Bloom,” the woman said, extending a hand.
Marah stood up reluctantly. Now she really wanted to bolt. “Hi. ”
Tully got to her feet. “Hi, Harriet. Thanks for agreeing to help us on such short notice. I know you had to change your schedule. You’ll need some background information, of course. I’ll come in for—”
