by Luke Fegenbush
“I don’t know why I do the things I do. It feels like an accident, but I’m just the way I am. People hate it. I don’t want to impress anyone. I just want to be and I can’t even do that.” His knees were up by his chest in a defensive gesture, with his shoes on the coffee table, nudging the box of tissues aside.
The boy’s name was Jace and, due to him being twenty-something, I afforded him a little self-loathing before I stepped in. I let the evening’s late-spring shower patter its soft rhythms on the window until it was clear he was finished. “It’s a common sentiment. A lot of people feel that way, but I can tell you from experience that it’s worse in your head than it is out here.”
“Is that supposed to be better? That everyone hates living?”
“I didn’t say everyone hates living,” I leaned forward in my armchair. “It’s common to feel dissatisfaction with life. But that’s what drives us to try for something better.”
“Do you ever feel dissatisfied?” Jace, who was usually uncomfortable, shifted more than usual, crossing his legs on the couch now, picking at the chipped, black nail polish that tipped his fingers. He would leave a small pile of black shavings on the coffee table for me to clean up after his session. “You know, with this job?” His blue eyes searched my face. He was not like the self-absorbed clients who lost themselves in their monologues. He eternally searched my face. He challenged me.
I nodded. I had seen this question coming from Jace. Ironically, young men expressing independence usually did it in the same manner: turning the lens back on the examiner. “There are parts of my life I feel dissatisfaction with. There are also parts of my life that I’ve felt such dissatisfaction with that I’ve changed them and felt happier for it.”
“But here, though.” He motioned to the quiet, dimly lit office space, painted an inoffensive pale green. His hands moved from putting pressure on his temples to quickly brushing the carefully controlled mess of his hair with his fingertips. He had dyed it black to match most of his wardrobe.
“I went through a lot of jobs before I found what I wanted to spend my life doing.” I gave an impartial smile, a ‘there you go, bud’ grin I had practiced many times before.
“I couldn’t listen to people whine all day. I’d go insane.”
We had to be careful here. The clock was ticking down the final minutes of Jace’s session. Of course, the truth was that he was right. I didn’t want to be sitting in a leather armchair, listening to someone in the prime of their life making the same complaints that most every young person makes at that time. I would sit back in my armchair, wishing for more back support, jealous of the lack of a paunch, the full head of hair. I wanted to either have the strength of youth or be retired, but I chose to spend my life shouldering other people’s problems.
My mind continued a worn path to my mother. I was the oldest son. I’m sure it never happened, but I imagine myself sat up with my too-fat toddler feet dangling over the edge of an ironing board as my mother smoked and ironed, depositing a dusting of ash on my father’s white shirts as she pushed the wrinkles out in ripples and waves, the fabric pliable under the iron’s steam. As she ironed, she would complain. As she complained, I would listen, unable to reply.
Whether it was a real memory, or one fabricated from a feeling, I pushed the image aside. “Of course. It’s a job. It doesn’t change the fact that I sought out this profession because I want to help people.”
At some point, I believed what had now become a canned response. The image of my mother, the feeling of being held hostage, made my words feel cheap. “Even on my worst days, I still feel the need to help others.” Tamp down the unruly ape-brain. Bring it home. “For the next session, I want you to write down some of your motivations. Think of when you do something and what drives you to do those things.”
Jace sat up slowly. “I don’t think there’s going to be a next session.”
This had happened before, but it would always catch me off guard. I fumbled for this lesser used script. “I’m sorry if I’m not meeting your needs. I–”
“I can’t keep doing this.” The words came out quickly, with an edge of panic. “I feel like I’m doing the same thing over and over again.”
“Recognizing that is a change I haven’t seen in you yet. Deciding to change your life, even if it means leaving my care, is another change you are choosing to make. I applaud you for taking charge of your life.”
“You’re so fucking fake.” He was sitting up now, yelling. He wanted to look me in the eye for it. I recognized it as something he’d wanted to do for a while. I didn’t interrupt. I let him do it on his terms. “You messed up. You did a bad job. And now you’re framing it so you’re right.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I shrugged. “Maybe I’m a fake who swindles people for money. But I’m giving you real advice that at this moment, you’re the one who has to make that call. You did, and I see that as a victory for someone who has spent his entire time here complaining about a lack of independence.” That last part might have taken a personal turn. Just a little of my frustration with him leaking into my therapy. Complaining. I hope he didn’t catch it.
His gaze of disbelief told me he had.
Fortunately, he left without saying much else, just shaking his head and slamming the door on the way out. I really did feel like he would be fine. Most people were once they worked through the angst of youth. If he had to make me a target to do that, so be it.
Or maybe he was hoping for more push back. Maybe, in his own way, he was reaching out and then I rejected him. I put away my notes with the rest of Jace’s file, moved it from its place amongst the active patients. He was my last client and the Chinese food place downstairs was still open for another hour. I considered Doordashing it for convenience’s sake, but I knew Alan, the owner, would bring it up later if I did.
I picked up the desk phone, more of a dusty relic–a desk ornament–than a functioning part of my office at this point. It became useful as a way to dial downstairs without giving Alan my real number.
The concession to Alan’s insistent friendliness paid off. One of the delivery boys with his iron-on “Szechuan Palace” shirt stomped up the carpeted steps about ten minutes later, the bag bulging with way more than the Beijing pork I had ordered.
“Dr. Johnson! You eating in here or do you want me to drop it off upstairs?” If I wasn’t mistaken, this was Alan’s teenage son, whose name I forgot. He spoke without Alan’s thick Chinese accent, but I could see his father’s serious expression gaining gravity in his eyes.
“You know, I just finished up here, so I can take it upstairs.” I pushed aside the paper I had been doodling on, hoping he didn’t see the lazy circles I had been making over and over again.
“OK.” He stood there in the doorway to my office in the building’s shared stairwell, waiting for me to come get the bag, I supposed. “The kid who just left looked pissed,” he said.
I forced a smile. “He did seem that way.”
“I thought people came here to feel better.”
I made a mental note to Doordash the food next time. “Sometimes people feel worse before they feel better.”
“Yeah, maybe. Jace is a bad kid. I figured he had to come because of court or something.”
Legally, I couldn’t tell him Jace only went to court so often because he was still seventeen and Child Services was removing him and his younger brother from his parent’s custody. Jace hadn’t mentioned the details, but he had come in with enough bruises to tell the story for him.
“Sometimes, people are more complicated than bad or good.”
The delivery boy shrugged as I got up as quickly as my back would allow. “Not to me,” he said. “Good people don’t kick my ass. Jace is a bad kid.”
I nodded. It used to be I would see the entire web of cause and effect and the bad spilling from nexus to nexus. I used to think it was my job to be the stop-point for all the bad I could find. I was the dam holding it all back. I was the one who listened impartially and then sponged up the bad before it could gather into a dark little void in someone, before it could spill into other lives.
Now, I felt helpless to even keep that dark void from gathering in myself, let alone the patients that I saw every day. “We’re all bad people at one time or another.”
The kid nodded seriously, dangled the plastic bags in front of me. “Is the blonde girl coming back? The one who would leave in the morning sometimes?”
I winced, hopefully only mentally. “I don’t think so.” I took the bag from where it rested at his side. “Thank you for running this up for me.”
“Hey, no problem. Up the stairs is better than across town.” I stepped past him in the hallway, trying not to think of the blonde girl. I thought it was strange how he lingered outside the landing of my door, only realizing when I reached the top of the stairs that he had been waiting for a tip. I turned to look back down, but he had already abandoned my office doorstep and was most of the way down the steps leading to the restaurant.
I sorted through my keys, to my office, my car, paused at my old house key. The small silver piece of metal, stamped with the Ace hardware logo, was more familiar to me than anything else I owned. We had been so happy to get it.
I could still see the look in Theresa’s eyes when I handed her her copy. They lit up like Christmas, even though it had been a hot summer day in Cincinnati. They still hadn’t turned the power on and even in the suburbs, the sun was without mercy. We decided we wanted to spend the night in our new home anyway, so we laid on blankets in the empty house with as few clothes as we could manage with the windows wide open. Sometime during the night the power kicked on as we dozed holding hands. In the morning, Theresa jumped up giggling, screaming, “The AC’s on! Wake up!” She shoved me with a foot. “We’re not paying to cool the whole neighborhood.”
I found the battered brass key leading to the upstairs apartment. A piece of white masking tape had a number three scrawled on it in sharpie. The battered, white door opened, releasing a burst of mildew and failed cleaning supplies. Before, I used the space to decompress between sessions. I had been living here for the last three months, ever since Theresa found out I used the space to cheat on her.
I mentally congratulated myself for admitting that I cheated. In the past, I was not the one cheating. While it was happening, I was the one on the verge of telling Laura that we had to stop. Not only would my wife find out, but Laura was one of my clients. Did she have any idea how fucked up it was?
I never went through with it. My image as the well-intentioned but weak-willed victim of temptation evaporated as soon as I passed the threshold of our home that night and found Theresa waiting, eyes swollen, hurt, furious.
Alan had stuffed the bag with eggrolls, crab rangoon, Beijing pork and lo mein: enough food for two people. I would have leftovers.
I removed the bag’s components, sat them on the kitchenette’s small, chipped countertop, whose pale pink color came from sometime in the last century. That and a single stool served as my kitchen table. From this vantage point, I could see the entire apartment: single bed with its wiry mattress, two windows where the steady raindrops showed the red neon of the Chinese food sign. The only concession I made to comfort was a small TV I hauled up from the old house when I was still living there.
When I was Jace’s age, I lived in a similar space. I had friends that I split the rent with and we walked to campus every day from the dilapidated house just outside of the bounds of the fraternity housing, but close enough to attend all the parties.
I wondered if Jace had friends like that. He was in college, on the verge of dropping out of a Creative Arts program, and complained that he didn’t know anyone, although many of his college stories involved him hanging out at other people’s apartments or getting in trouble for being loud in the library. I had spent a lot of our sessions gently nudging him into the reality that he did, in fact, know people.
I dismissed the thought. He was no longer my client.
I thought about calling Theresa again, but our last conversation ended with a gentle, but firm reminder that we probably shouldn’t talk with our settlement being so close.
I thought of Laura, her dark, short, hair framing her round face. She was younger than me by at least five years, perfect for the role of homewrecker.
I remember how I had slowly allowed boundaries to dissolve during our sessions. What started out as a rule to not ask for personal details, a rule against flirting, turned into teasing points of light contention, turned into her sessions being moved to last in the evening due to their tendency to run over, turned to…
It had, of course, been after Theresa and I were fighting. At that point, it could’ve been about anything. She was frustrated with medical school, frustrated with the post she had at the free clinic. I thought I knew what bachelorhood felt like then. I would spend all day in sessions, come home, cook, watch TV too late while I waited on Theresa. Too often, I would wake to her gently guiding me from the couch to bed, or later, when it was more contentious, to the cold sunlight pouring through our living room windows.
Rationalization. Excuses. I wouldn’t let my clients off the hook so easily.
Laura and I were discussing a topic that I should have steered clear of, some Freud bullshit about her preferring older men and wanting to find the root of it. Laura was well off, but chronically bored and unfulfilled. She treated her life like she was a tourist, like it was an amusement park. I had come to the conclusion that she didn’t feel satisfaction in her relationships because she never stuck around long enough for the deep stuff, never wanted to deal with anything like consequences. Some of this, I told her.
I remembered feeling the heat from her body when she stood from her couch and approached me.
“What are you doing?”
She smiled, and continued. She placed one warm hand on my cheek, turned my head towards her. She had told me this is what she would do to other men. That she loved the feeling of their disbelief.
The kiss was more genuine than anything she said in any of her sessions. It began tender and exploratory, and left just when it flirted with gravity. Then it was gone.
I sat, eyes closed, with the warmth of her evaporating from my face. “I know a place,” I said.
Now, I lay back on the bed that should have been more temporary, eyes closed to the dirty walls around me, their looming presence four feet away in any given direction. To my disgust, I felt my hand inching towards my belt. I did not stop.
Adelaide’s onboarding paperwork said that she was a college student who sought out help after a recent tragedy. This was weeks after Jace had stopped coming and I was happy to get a new client, but wished it was not another young person.
She entered tentatively, a pale weepy blonde girl. Even after I gave her a warm introduction, she seemed uncertain that she was in the right place. She sat upright on the couch, as if it was a piano bench, and spoke in short, emotional bursts.
“I haven’t been able to concentrate. I can’t sleep. Yesterday they held a moment of silence and it just seemed so fake.”
Her legs were long and white under a pleated skirt, pushed together with her ankles kicked out to one side. I caught myself staring at them and raised my gaze to meet her watering eyes. “I, uh, you said it was another student?”
She nodded, sniffed. She was too innocent it seemed, to attribute my gaze to anything as lewd as desire, or she was too distracted to react to it. “He was my friend, I thought. I mean I’d like to think I’m everyone’s friend. And he wasn’t the best guy, either. He stole and did pills and stuff.”
My stomach tightened. Around the edges of my consciousness I felt a falling feeling, but my fears were too impossible to give credence to.
“People are complicated,” I smiled, attempting to gain equilibrium.
She returned my smile in spite of the tears. “They all act like he’s a saint, but Jace would hate that, you know?”
I felt the color drain from my face. “His name was Jace?”
She nodded. “We weren’t dating or anything, and this is dumb, but in elementary school, he was my first kiss and now he’s…” She reached for the tissues. The action was more to fill the space. Her tears had flowed unchecked for almost the entire time she had been here.
“I… I’m so sorry.” I saw Jace in my mind, the clear blue eyes, mocking mouth. We had never talked about pills; would never talk about his first kiss.
Later, I would find an article about him in a local publication. It was adorned with a rare smiling picture, taken several years earlier. His face was still boyishly plump, but his piercing blue eyes were unmistakable.
“We can’t take on the blame. His death is a weight that we’ll carry, but we can’t let it define us. Guilt…”
Adelaide looked up. She had been nodding along to my fumbling defenses against grief, my useless resistance against the coils of a dark world tightening.
“But I don’t feel guilty,” said Adelaide, her young face wrinkling in confusion. “I just miss him. And I hate that the… the heaviness of what he did is taking over. I’m going to college next year. I just want my life to be about that.”
“That’s good.” I breathed, still reeling. I had not felt this lost, this panicked in a session, since I had started trial sessions in school. “Those are normal feelings and… I think…” The clock was counting down the minutes. “I think expressing those will help these feelings pass and maybe you would see your life shift focus as you move past these feelings.” The convoluted explanation was delivered with just enough gravitas and slowly enough that she seemed comforted by it. “Unfortunately, I think that’s the end of our session.”
“OK. Wow. I didn’t… the time.” She scrambled for her phone then laughed at her reflection. “I have tennis practice in like an hour. Do you mind if I…” She held up a makeup bag.
“Sure,” I croaked. “Take your time.” It was the last spot of the day. Laura’s old spot.
I moved from the armchair I sat in during sessions to my desk, unfolded the laptop that was there. I had two emails to write. The first was to a very good therapist I know, a kind older woman, who had helped me a lot at the beginning of my practice. She would be perfect for Adelaide.
The second email was sent to a contact at the National Board for Certified Counselors. Someone who was fair, but that I knew. I picked out the right words, my admission of guilt, throwing myself at the mercy of the board. I had applied my signature when Adelaide’s soft voice surprised me. I had thought that she left.
“Excuse me.”
I looked up from the email. “Oh hey, sorry, I was…”
“I wanted you to know,” she said carefully, “That Jace said you helped.”
“Oh.” The syllable was like a drop of water in a deep well. “I didn’t know you knew.”
She smiled. “I don’t know if I’ll be back.”
I returned her smile. “Me neither.”
Luke Fegenbush
Luke Fegenbush is a writer of fiction and poetry who currently lives in Bellevue, KY with his wife and two dogs. He has previously had fiction and poetry published in Shale, the University of Kentucky’s undergraduate literary magazine, and has written non-fiction for the Atlantic Publishing Group.
Mary Catherine Harper
Mary Catherine Harper, Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award recipient and 2019 Poet in Residence at Cape Cod Fine Arts Work Center, has two published collections—The Found Object Imagines a Life: New and Selected Poems (2022) and Some Gods Don’t Need Saints (2016)—as well as numerous poems in journals and art forthcoming in several online journals. She has presented her hybrid art/poetry works at the Nelson Gallery in Lansing, MI (“The Sights and Sounds of Haunted Lives,” 2024). See marycatherineharper.org, swampfire.org and facebook.com/groups/swampfire for her support of fellow artists and writers.