Primary Obsessions, page 11
Which is why at first, standing in the reception area, reading Sanjay’s letter to herself while Supriya watched her face for reactions, Annick hadn’t even recognized that it was starting. The desperate gravity of the missive pulled her in so crushingly that she couldn’t feel her eyes stinging or the muscles trembling in her face, and when the first splashes hit the paper, she had actually looked up at the ceiling.
“Are you alright?” Supriya had asked with angry concern. “What does he say?”
Feeling as dizzy and derealized as any of her panic disorder patients in the midst of an attack, Annick had started by mutely waving Supriya off, shaking her head, No, as though she could pretend that it wasn’t happening.
“I’m fine, I’m sorry, Supriya. It’s been a very long day.” Supriya eyed her skeptically. “In a very long week,” she added, taking a deep breath and managing to stop the waterworks.
“But what does my son say, that you would react this way? Don’t I have a right to know? I am the boy’s mother, Dr. Boudreau.”
Annick shook her head, grateful for having been addressed by her professional title. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Desai. I really can’t share it without Sanjay’s permission. I know that to you he’s your boy, but in this office he is a grown man, he’s my patient, and the protection of his confidentiality is one of my primary responsibilities.”
“Well, this is outrageous,” Supriya answered with as much resignation as chagrin. Annick reached out to touch her arm, and Supriya allowed her to.
“Supriya, the entire situation—it’s like nothing I’ve ever been through, been a part of. And I know I’m not going through a fraction of what you and Sanjay are feeling.” Annick watched Supriya’s eyes as they softened into a focus outside of the room. Her anger was dissolving visibly. Annick guided her to one of the seats, pouring her a glass of water from the cooler. “I want you just to sit here for a second, have a glass of water, and I’m just going to write Sanjay a message for you to take back to him. Can you do that for me?”
Supriya nodded.
“Thank you. I will be right back, okay?” Annick could hear her voice crashing over solicitousness and now in danger of falling into condescension. She backed out of the foyer, the letter from her patient beginning to shake with her hand, and she was positive that she wouldn’t make it down the short corridor before her knees buckled.
With the door to her office closed behind her, she squeezed her eyes as though wringing the tears out of them, screaming silently into her palm. Then she sat at her desk, and she typed.
Dear Sanjay—
No.
For some time, she couldn’t think of anything else to add. Then, the only non-bathetic response she could muster came from anger, from professional indignation, and so she gave it vent.
I need you to understand that I have a much more accurate understanding than you do of what goes through your mind. You are stuck inside of something you’ve never seen the outside of, and I’ve been studying it my entire life. I’ve seen it from every angle. I’ve helped dozens, maybe more, people out of it. And I need for you to listen to me as your doctor: YOU DID NOT DO ANYTHING WRONG. THERE IS NOTHING EVIL IN YOU. THERE IS NO DANGER THAT YOU REPRESENT, AND SACRIFICING YOURSELF IN THIS WAY PROTECTS NO ONE. NO ONE, SANJAY.
There is a world out there that understands nothing at all about OCD, and Sanjay, I say this with as much kindness as I can: right now, you are a part of that world. You’re just as wrong as every one of those imbeciles on Facebook.
I need for you to tell your lawyer to bring me in. You don’t have to tell them why if you don’t want to, I can explain the entire thing. You don’t have to tell your mother, although Sanjay, she loves you, and she is a brilliant woman, and she will understand. Better than you do.
It’s possible that your lawyer will tell you that if he brings me into the situation, they can subpoena my notes. We can cross that bridge when we get to it, I will fight like fucking hell for your privacy, but I also wouldn’t be saying this if I didn’t think that my clinical notes from our sessions would absolve you completely. Tell your lawyer that I said that. Tell him that the more rocks they turn over, the less they are going to have on you. Because you didn’t do it.
The very last thing I told you, Sanjay, was that you are not a monster, you are not a killer. It was so obvious to me that I considered your even having to ask it to be counterproductive, reassurance-seeking behaviour. But I will tell it to anyone who asks, if you give me the right to.
Don’t do this. Don’t do this. For you, for your mother. For Jason, your asshole roommate whose actual killer is still loose. For me.
Just tell your lawyer to bring me in. Give me the chance to explain all this. Let me continue my work.
Dr. Boudreau
Annick walked back to the reception area in a daze. Mechanically, she slipped the folded letter into an envelope and handed it to Supriya, who was now standing, leaning on the front counter.
“I need you to get this to him.” Annick spoke in a voice so raw that Supriya simply nodded. “Can you get this to him?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“As soon as I can—this evening. I’ll call the lawyer, pass it to him, he can give it to Sanjay.”
“Okay.”
“Dr. Boudreau, I am ground down. They are killing my child, and I have no one. What are you prepared to do?”
“Everything that I possibly can. But he’s the only one who can make it happen. Please, please get him that letter.”
“Alright.” Supriya nodded, curtly, and turned to walk out. Annick ran to the door before it closed and shouted down the hallway.
“Let me know when he gets it, please!”
“Yes. I will.” Supriya turned to call the elevator and didn’t turn back.
Annick closed the door to the clinic, locked it and collapsed into one of the chairs in the waiting area. Her head pounded as though her first tears in decades had left her completely dehydrated, and she stood and poured herself small, wax-paper cup of water after small, wax-paper cup of water, hugging the tank for support.
After her sixth cup, she realized that she hadn’t sealed the envelope.
Freud said that there was no such thing as accidents, that accidents were just the acting out of forbidden desires, sublimated by the super-ego. In this reading—this archaic, disproven, well-out-of-favour reading—Annick hadn’t innocently forgotten to seal the envelope, but had set out precisely to give Supriya an insight that she was otherwise bound not to share; in this reading, she was flailing at her lowest, most desolate and destroyed moment, trying to recruit an ally. In this reading, Annick wanted to send the message to Supriya that her son was not only decent and innocent, but that he was in trouble much worse than he had to be in, and that if she could convince him to only let his doctor help them, then they all had a chance.
Annick Boudreau thought Sigmund Freud was full of shit.
But Freud might call that disavowal.
* * *
“Bonjour toi.”
“Allo, Pa. J’pensais à toi.”
“Ah oui? And what did I do to have you thinking of me?” asked Roméo.
“Well, I’m calling from the office—”
“Sure, sure. I’ve heard that one before. Tell me another one.”
“Non, je te jure, Papa—I promise. This time I’m really calling from the office.”
“You can’t prove it. You’re like that little boy with his wolf.”
“You’ll have to believe me.”
“You didn’t listen to the story then, eh? That’s the whole moral, the wolf really does come, and it’s too late, nobody believe him. Tant pis pour toi, le petit menteur. Ou la petite menteuse,” he said, and she could hear her father grinning, giving both the masculine and the feminine for “liar.” She sighed. She didn’t have time to explain to her father that she spent all day, every day, dealing with flight-or-fight responses on the fritz, imperfect and misfiring clusters of instincts handed down from a time when wolves actually did present an immediate danger to a large percentage of the population. But these were different times; in Annick’s line of work, she’d come to learn that there never really was a wolf.
“Non, Roméo—I called because I had a patient today, made me think of you.”
“I thought you tell me all the time, you can’t talk to me about your patients anyway.”
“I’m not allowed to tell you their names, Papa, any recognizable features. I can speak in generalities.”
“Like the Pope.”
“I can tell Maman is out; you said that above a whisper.”
“You know Maman is out because I answered the phone,” he said, giggling. Annick laughed too, but she couldn’t keep herself from scanning the sound of his laughter for the exhaustion that her mother had reported. The idea of her father heavy-lidded, slow to rise, was like the hiss of water pouring onto the white ashes of a bonfire. It both undermined and exaggerated the memories of what came before. But she hadn’t imagined it, she was sure; her father leaning into his fiddle at parties, tickling her under the jaw in the middle of Sunday Mass, then pretending to be angry when Thérèse noticed her laughing—he had lived. “She’s out late, who knows where. Must be with her boyfriend.”
“It was bound to happen.”
“So what did this patient do to make you think of me? He had delusions of grandeur, about his kid?”
“The patient suffers from health anxiety.”
“‘Health anxiety’—c’est quoi? Like health food? An anxiety that’s better for you? He should bottle it, all your neighbours in Vancouver will line up to buy it.”
“I never said the patient was a ‘he.’ Hypochondria, Papa. Always in a panic about their health.”
“Ah, okay, I can see why you thought of me.”
“Très drôle. In fact, I was thinking about how nice it would be if the two of you could cancel each other out.”
“That’s a nice thing to say.”
Annick laughed in the perfect and unique combination of frustration and adoration with which daughters can laugh at their fathers. “Don’t be so sensitive. I meant, if only the two of you could crash together, and each leave the collision as a sensible person with a perfectly constructive level of interest in their own personal health.”
“Ah.”
“My patient would leave worrying much, much less—pay far fewer visits to the doctor, the emergency room…”
“I’ve heard about those…”
“And you. You would leave as someone who would at least take his family’s love seriously enough to go and see about—”
“Non, non, non. Ça là, c’est trop. You go too far. That’s blackmail.”
“Papa, if you’re tired all the time—”
“I’m not tired, goddamn, I’m old!”
“You’re not old.”
“Not in Vancouver, non. But in the real world, oui, I am old.”
“To be tired all the time,” Annick continued, barrelling through his defences, “and to be having trouble in the bathroom consistently, and to have—to have blood, in your stools—”
“And who sends you these updates on my shits, maudit hell?” he yelled. There was no more playful parrying or thrusting. He would dig his Acadian heels into the dirt, the heels of a man raised from the beginning to believe that there was no greater human attribute than spiteful stubbornness. But she, too, was in the family line.
“Papa, what you’re describing—”
“I never described to you a goddamn thing!”
“Your symptoms add up badly. They don’t look good together, like that.”
“And aren’t you the little girl who won’t stop telling us she’s not that kind of doctor?”
“Papa, it could be cancer.”
They each stopped talking, caught their breath. They offered each other, and themselves, a chance to step down from the heights. When the conversation resumed, it was more muted, almost anglophone in the washed-out tones of its passions.
“It’s not cancer,” said Roméo.
“And how do you know?”
“God gave it to my granddaughter. He’s not going to stick it on me. It would be cruel.”
Annick closed her eyes and rubbed her thumb in the space between her eyebrows. “God doesn’t give people cancer, Papa.”
“Non?”
“No. He gives them little girls who love them, wives who love them—and get them to go see a doctor.”
They sat breathing together, separated by the whole continent, brought back together with each inhalation, exhalation. Somewhere, Cedric was smiling smugly.
“S’il te plaît, Papa. Go see Dr. Breaux. For me? For Maman?”
“I’ll tell Maman you called.”
“Papa…”
“I’ll call Dr. Breaux.”
“Merci.”
Annick looked at the phone, running her finger along the receiver, making a face she’d probably started making when she was a child, and only dusted off for the moments when one or both of her parents broke her heart.
For all the promises, she had lied to her father. It hadn’t been David who had made her think to call Roméo. It had been Sanjay. And Supriya. And the responsibility that came from the cosmic accident of being somebody’s kin in a terrifying and chaotic, a fallen, world. A place where very bad things happened, even to people who came as close as it was possible to being good.
16
The Starbucks looked like any other Starbucks, and contained roughly the same number of people. By the evening, even on a weeknight, the Smithe Street windows would face out onto the sophisticated beige and silver patrons of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, while the Granville Street windows would act as something like the glass of a terrarium showcasing the city’s thriving margarita-vomiting scene. But in the middle of the afternoon, outdoors was a downtown grab bag of every and any type of pedestrian, while inside the store it was the standard-issue demographic of youngish men and women with laptops but no offices, and ESL students conspiring to produce the next generation of half-Korean, half-Brazilian babies.
Annick sucked a tall flat white through the hole in her plastic cup, once more quietly conceding to the multinational corporation that their coffee wasn’t as bad as she’d have liked it to be, ideologically. She had chosen a table in one of the corners where the wall met a Smithe Street window, and was seated with her back to the corner as she was given to understand, from film and television, that was the place where she was supposed to sit. She brushed a phantom strand of hair out from her face and behind her ear.
She was running down the list of things she would look for to push her towards something like certainty that it had been Lina who’d killed Jason. The real murderer had bled on the scene, so there would still be a cut—maybe bruising from the scuffle. She would float the same story that she had used with Mike, that she’d known Jason growing up, and see what her reaction was. Besides that, it wasn’t clear what she could do, beyond what she did for a living: let people know, via a thousand tiny cues of voice and body, that they could and should take her into their confidence.
When it finally happened, Lina’s entrance threw off the whole balance of the room. Like the very slight turn at the end of her jaw, the whole energy of the café seemed to bend, as though her beauty brought everyone else into its orbit. Even without looking at her, the men, the women in the room, everyone seemed at least to notice that now things were somehow different. She was several steps down in glamour today from both the portfolio shots and her alleyway argument with Mike, but it was just as if a lampshade had been taken off of a light. Her hair was piled in an intricate latticework of bobby pins, and she wore high-end sweatpants and a long-sleeved turtleneck, which seemed out of place given the heat from the returned power of the summer sun. Annick stood and smiled, and Lina gave her a look of acknowledgement without greeting or warmth, and joined her at the table.
“Hi, Lina? I’m Annick, Dr. Boudreau, from the West Coast CBT Clinic.”
Lina nodded, and sat. The graceful posture of her walking died in the chair, her shoulders hunching down. Annick noticed that Lina’s eyes were glassy, her face impassive. She tried giving her a smile.
“Can I get you anything to eat or drink?”
“I’m fine.”
“Right,” Annick said, sitting. “Okay. Well, first of all, I want to thank you for meeting with me. Obviously we’re going to pay you for your time here, but I know that a pre-shoot meeting like this isn’t very typical, is it?”
Lina shrugged, then shook her head. “No. I’ve never had this happen before. It’s weird.” She looked out the window at the Orpheum theatre.
“Sure, I get that. But what we do at the clinic has, you know, a philosophy around it, in a way, and these are sort of interesting times with the stigmatization of mental illness, for instance this viral Facebook post and everything.” Annick stopped and drank from her coffee, angry at herself for having come so close to the topic so early on. She was sure that she could see Lina raising a perfect, tattooed eyebrow. “Are you sure I can’t get you anything to drink?”
“I said I was fine.”
“Do you know anything about cognitive behavioural therapy? How it works?”
“No.”
Annick waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t. “No?”
