January was a much colder period than I realized. That should have been something people knew innately--something I should have known innately. It's just another aspect of the City. Snow is cold. Winter is cold. January, the tentpole of winter, was when snow most likely fell.
Oh and did it fall. The entire city was covered in a thin blanket of white snow.
Well, that wasn't entirely true, the idea that I didn't realize it. I had my suspicions that reality wasn't really how I thought it should be. Frost on the windows. Snow on the street. Days when we blew a fuse and the heat stopped for a few hours.
I was a very sheltered child. Days floated by without anything meaningfully abrasive in my life. Friction was a spilled drink, a slight draft, a bruised knee. Outside, the cold was everything. The cold was real friction. Something that I had no control over.
In the middle of one awfully cold January an apartment on fifth avenue, nestled at the sipping lip of Midtown Acadia, seared itself in the public consciousness like a burning pyre of iron and brick. The city had witnessed an event pulled straight out of the history books. Deserving of both date and name. The Fifth Ave. Tragedy. An event that terrorized the public, that riled up newspapers and politicians like a tiger wandering onto a golf course: completely unexpected and damn right terrifying. It made headlines.
Thirty lives lost. A hundred injured. More victims died from smoke inhalation than the actual explosion. I didn't die--but that should have been obvious.
Columns of smoke rose above the Sutherland River. The smell of burnt plaster and charcoal lifted high into the sky. Across the river, bystanders waited with bated breath for news of the accident. News crews babbled in front of their bulky cameras.
Freighters drifted down the river, silent, foreboding steel clouds.
People forgot what it was like to feel afraid. To watch as their facade of safety crumbled in front of them. People who have lived in their home for more than a decade could do nothing to save what little they had, regardless of who they were, what they were like, or who they knew. There was nothing I could do to save what little we had.
I woke up in the ambulance shortly after it happened. My vision wavered as light seared into my eyes.
My hands remembered the crumbling walls of my apartment. Scarred white as snow. My ears remembered the sound of rubble falling and shattering vases and tables, an orchestra collapsing under its own weight. My skin fizzles with the shock of the explosion, the ripples of heat as it enveloped me, the taste of electric ozone filling my lungs; My parents.
When I looked at my hands I had a hard time believing that anything in the last hour actually happened. I somehow managed to make it out unscathed--to an extent. Barely a scratch on me. Yet, I could barely move.
Paramedics leaned over me. They strapped me down onto a stretcher and held an odd-looking mask over my nose and mouth. The odd device pumped oxygen straight into my lungs. I felt like I had been abducted by aliens. Their gloves sent cold shivers crawling over my skin.
I blinked in and out of consciousness on the ride to the hospital. The whole time I clutched onto the memory of my mother and father carrying me over their shoulders on a walk in the park. It played in my mind like a black and white film. I forgot the words, and it was hard to see the trees and the grass. I still smelled the wet soil and forget-me-nots.
I closed my eyes. I was desperate to wake up from this nightmare. I pleaded with whoever would listen. In my wallowing, I offered up anything to make things go back to the way they were.
I wished that it all had been nothing more than a bad dream.
In the evening, dreams did not come. Instead of wading into a shallow pool of sleep, I woke up in a cold sweat. I lay in a hospital bed, as if I had been pulled from the deep end of a pool with water splashing around in my lungs.
They must have pumped me full of painkillers in that deathtrap of an ambulance. My fingers were numb. I blinked my eyes open, but my vision had trouble focusing.
My breathing stabilized. The cool hospital air worked its magic on my headache.
The room I woke up in was stark white; My eyes strained to open. Clinical white walls, sheets, and curtains. Maybe they made a mistake and lugged me to the morgue. It was that kind of white. White like the flash of a doctor's teeth as he told you the bad news. White like a flashlight shined on ashy snow.
Above my head, the ceiling lights worsened my mood. Their glare strained against my eyes.
I tried to get up and leave but I managed only to sit upright, shrimp-backed and struggling to not collapse.
A chair squeaked next to the bed. The nurse blinked through exhaustion. As her attention switched on, her eyes lit up, like she was watching a corpse spring to life. She ran from my room in a hurry and called for a doctor outside.
I waited a while until a rapt at the door drew my attention. Two figures entered, a man and woman. "Do you know where you are, young man?" A doctor asked me. The doctor waited a beat for me to answer.
The nurse urged him on. He followed her further into the room and stood by the foot of my bed, examining me like a frog being dissected.
"You took quite the hit, kid. I'm sorry." I stared at him. Bandages wrapped my chest in thin swaths of linen, like a mummy. The doctor picked at his five o'clock shadow and studied me. He wanted to be honest, but courtesy and professional protocol held him back. Clipboard in his hand, he swam around to the bedside and parked in the nurses chair next to me.
He shifted in his chair, getting comfortable, as he flipped through the papers attached to his clipboard. Crimson ink marked the paper. "I took a look at your notes. Hopefully, we won't have to keep you too long."
I nodded.
Like a programmed robot executing a list of commands, he told me everything without holding back. He talked about the dreadful aftermath. His voice spoke in flat, long sentences, strung along in sequential order.
The longer he spoke the softer his voice became. It continued on until I felt no different than as if I was hearing a muffled announcement from under water. And then, after realizing it was useless to continue, he left me alone to stew in my own helplessness, but not without taking one final glance out of the corner of his eye at the threshold of the door. Pity, his eyes said.
I lay in bed. A numbness in my chest slowed my heart beat to a Pre-Cambrion crawl.
A couple of months of eating hospital food and wearing medical gowns later, I started to feel like I was only waiting to be picked up. One day, I would walk down to the lobby and see my mother standing by the front desk, negotiating for my release. All the while I stayed there, the cold winter weeks receded into memory and spring arrived to fill the void they left.
Throughout my stay at the hospital the doctor visited me to check in on my physical health. I wished I remembered his name. It faded from my memory, like how a lot of stuff from that time in my life did. Days melded together into a wad of half-written notes and journal entries I struggled to reread. A zettelstaten of the mind, as light as fresh snow but as deep as a frozen lake.
For breakfast I ate alone. I bathed alone. I watched the news from the hospital bed while searching for signs of anybody surviving the tragedy, alone. And people did make it out. Not everyone. The young couple down the hall, the old man with an unruly dog that we would pass on the first floor, the woman who lived a few floors above us with the lavishly floral hat. They survived to tell their stories while I watched alone from my bed, changing the channel and scanning intensely for anyone else I could recognize.
It was like that for a couple months. I waited and waited until I could finally wake up from that nightmare. At any time, my parents could walk through those hospital doors, gift baskets in-hand, smiles on their faces. Every day, I waited, eager to throw myself back into their arms, as if it all had been a bad dream.
I stepped out into the blinding midday sun, backpack in-hand, carried by the light breeze and a budding numbness in my chest. A cloud of thoughts encircled me as I descended the hospital steps, like crows. I miss the snow.
Afternoon light broke through a pair of window shades, painting the carpet in bars of gray and gold. It was the only bit of color to stand out in the office. The walls, couch, bookcases, and even the carpet itself was drab. Shelves lined with faded books collected dust.
"And what did you see in these dreams?" a man in a dark suit asked. He sat in a chair across from me. A notepad and pen rested in his lap.
"I see my parents," I said.
"What about anything else? Do you see the apartment, for instance?"
"No. Well, kinda. It's gray and foggy. Like a vignette."
He nodded. "As opposed to being full of color, I reckon," he said, as if he was on the cusp of a profound breakthrough. I drew my hand back in my hair, cut down to a short fringe. I felt my scalp.
"I don't see the point of that," I said.
The pen clicked open. "Maybe it'll jog your memory a bit. Sometimes, it helps to start with the details. What your father's coffee smelled like. What the color of your mother's earrings were. Even how this 'static' sounded. Electric-like, you said? Like a cat's purr or a hissing neon sign."
I sighed. "Yea 'electric-like'. Do you know what static sounds like?"
He wrote down something in his notebook before glancing up at me.
"I feel it too, sometimes. Like a phantom limb. It just…I get a tingle."
"A tingle?"
"Like static."
"Again, Monty. We're going in circles," he said.
"I don't know what you want from me. It's been the same thing for months now. I feel like my whole mind is just trapped in a cycle of remembering and forgetting. One day I remember the color of the curtains, or the prickliness of my dad's beard, and another I might remember the smell of mom's perfume. It just never sticks."
"You're frustrated. I know," he said. "Maybe we can try some exercises."
My hand balled up into a fist. I only kept it there for a moment before loosening my grip.
"Would you rather try something else, Monty? Or maybe it's that you find these talks futile. You can speak your mind."
I moved my hand to the side. "What's the point? It won't help me feel any better to tell you that. I'm here to get better, right? I can't get better if I don't try whatever you want me to try." Was that really how I felt? I felt bad, if anything. I felt bad that his efforts to help me weren't working. Maybe I just needed to try harder.
"That's awfully mature of you," he said with little change in tone. Was that meant as a jab? Maybe he thought I was trying to "beat" him. I heard of therapists like that, who get exhausted with their patients because they were always just one step ahead of their questions--beating them at their own game, for lack of better phrasing.
"Let's try something simple. Describe how you're feeling right now with a color." I raised an eyebrow. He crossed over his leg and began to tap the heel.
"I don't know," I said. "Yellow."
"Okay, now that's interesting."
"Why?"
"Don't usually hear that a lot. Many people say they feel 'blue' or 'red'. Maybe even green. Yellow sits in a peculiar spot. Associated with the 'slow down' signal of a traffic light. A sun that's a little too bright. Not melancholy like blue, or angry like red."
"You asked me to say a color, so I just thought of the first thing that came to mind. It doesn't really matter."
"You could have said purple," he said as he held up his pen. "You could have even said gray."
"Yellow is an anxious color, right?" I said. "That's how I feel. Anxious. Like something terrible is always about to happen."
"That's a normal feeling for people in your shoes. It must have been a sudden experience--a jolt, if you will--to witness the tragedy that transpired. It's no wonder you can't feel comfortable."
"Right on the money," I said as I looked out the window. His voice already started to fade from my ears. I heard him ask something else, but I gave a quick answer. It was like swatting a gnat.
"Do you blame yourself?"
"What?"
"Your parent's deaths. Do you feel as though you played some part in what happened?"
I stood up.
"How could you say that? What sort of therapist brings up that kind of question?"
He smiled. "Good. That caught you off-guard. You seem like a composed person. What can you tell me about that feeling?"
"No," I said. "I don't feel as though I played some 'part' in their deaths."
"You are confident about that. You weren't before when I asked about your memories."
"That seems like the kind of question a therapist asks someone he has rapport with. We don't have that kind of familiarity."
"I'm one of the best in my field. I ask hard-hitting questions. I tread lines. I cross them. It's how I've gotten a reputation for being efficient."
"Is this all this is for you? A boost to your reputation?"
"It's proof that my efforts bring real change. I heal people. Monty, you seem to think you're different."
"Excuse me?"
"Do you want my help, or no?"
Who did he think he was? His smug grin beckoned me on. Maybe this was a part of his routine, to rile me up. I didn't care if that was the case, I played right into it.
The man took a look at his phone and sat in silence for a minute. "I'm afraid that's all we have time for. Same time in the next couple weeks?"
Outside the sun was low to the street casting long shadows across the sidewalk. The snow hasn't even melted fully yet. Waiting for me, across the stoop, a woman leaned against a silver hatchback. She wore an overcoat over her blazer and khakis.
She asked, "How'd the session go?"
I rolled my eyes. "Fine."
"Fine?" She turned around and swung open her car door. "Freedom awaits."
We drove along the scenic view. Northtown, a dreary and dull place, eventually slipped from view. The MacColgan Bridge hangs over a canal separating Acadia Island from its northern brother. We drove into Uptown, taking the eastern turnpike as it ran along the bank of the river, towards the hospital.
"Why do you think we travel so far to see him? He's supposed to be one of the best in the business. A real popstar psychologist."
"I don't think therapy is for me," I said. "Like in general."
Casey shrugged. "Therapy is not for everyone. Hell, it's never worked for me."
The hatchback lurched. The seatbelt dug into the skin of my neck. A smaller sports car veered into view, cutting Casey off. She stuck her arm out of the car window and gave him the finger.
"Jackwad!"
She glanced back at me through her rearview mirror and said, "Give it a bit more time, before you decide to drop it. These kinds of things take a bit of time too. I can also look for another therapist in the meanwhile that better suits you."
"Are they supposed to be so hard on you? It's like I'm getting grilled in an eighties cop show."
"I think they try their best to gauge the right measures in treating their patients. Obviously, I'm not a therapist, so take my word with a grain of salt but hey, kid, that's life. Things are just going to be hard, at least for a little while."
"He asked me if I felt responsible for what happened."
She did not react. Her eyes continued to scan the road. "Well, he does sound like a bit of a prick. We might have to consider moving your therapist anyway. How are you feeling about tonight? Ready to meet him?"
"Someone closer?"
"Yes. I did a little research. There may not be any therapists in Octoberfaire itself. But Easttown has a lot of great practices. You wouldn't have to leave the ward if you really wanted to."
"I'll consider it," I said. "And, yeah. I don't know if I'm ready to meet him tonight."
"It's a good thing, Monty. A fresh start. He's eager to meet you, you know?"
"Doesn't make me feel any less anxious."
"Come on. You're not even the littlest excited to meet your cousin?"
"I haven't seen him in like, I don't know, six years? I was just a kid. For all I know he's just itching for the extra cash."
"You are still a kid. Besides, he works at a museum. He's definitely not doing it for the money, let me tell you."
"Even more of an incentive."
"Monty, he is excited to meet you."
"Sure, whatever."
"What's with the hangup, dude? You're not usually chippy after a session, but you're super not chippy today. Anti-chipper radars going through the roof. That rough, huh?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
She sighed--rather loudly--and curled over the steering wheel. "You could lighten up a little."
"Doom and gloom are my middle names."
"Wait, you get two?"
"Seemed appropriate."
"Right, and I'm little Miss Sunshine all the time," she said with sarcasm. "The point is no one is always doom and gloom."
"Maybe I am," I said as we pulled up to the hospital entrance.
I stepped out of the car, but before I entered the hospital she leaned out the car window and said, "I'll pick you up around six. Don't be late. And don't do anything I wouldn't do."
"Not sure what that's supposed to mean."
"See you, Monty!"
My case worker drove off into the distance, almost taking out the side mirror of a parked ambulance.
I remembered the day she entered my hospital room for the first time with a basket of sweets, flowers, and comic books, expecting some bed-stricken child on the verge of death's door. She had a kind smile. It rolled smoothly across her cheeks, and dimples that made her look rather foolish, but she was far from it.
"So, what does a kid do around here to stay sane? Wallow in bed?"
She looked around the barren room, at the white walls and humming tv.
"Can't really do much else. They won't let me leave yet," I said.
She sequestered one of the nurses and after waiting fifteen minutes for an answer, she led me to the outside courtyard. It wrapped around the hospital with trees lining the perimeter. The trail was quiet. We only saw maybe three other people, other kids walking around with one or two adults. Might have been their parents. I was probably the only one with a babysitter.
I was happy to get out of bed. The sun was framed right above my hospital wing, shining out across the bushes and the low-lying trees of the courtyard. We passed a hedge surgically trimmed to not look too formidable, like a big block of green soap. We passed a bed of flowers and when Casey knelt down to pick one, she got yelled at by a passing nurse. I tried not to laugh too hard. It was the first time I smiled in a few weeks.
We talked about my plans for after my discharge; what I would do once the hospital kicked me out. Casey mentioned an orphanage, but the idea of being surrounded by other miserable kids did not appeal to me in the slightest. I tried not to say it like that, but I think Casey got the idea.
She said that her agency looked into my closest relatives and found a cousin of mine who could take me in. He was my mom's sister's kid, living in an apartment in Easton. I was not too enthused with leaving the inner city, but it was better than the alternative.
She asked if I knew him well but I told her honestly that my aunt was never really close to my mom. They had a bit of a falling out and stopped coming to holiday parties because of it. I only had vague memories of David from when I was really little. He was a tall dude, and like me had black hair that went to his shoulders. I remembered my dad saying that I looked like him. It was surprising, since people often said I looked more like my dad than my mom. It was a weird quirk of our family.
I had thought she would find me too depressing to deal with. Part of that I still thought was true, but it was still hard to say no to her.
Just as she said, she returned later around six, as rain had begun to sprinkle. Shallow puddles filled up around the entrance to the hospital. She drove up to the drop-off section, splashing one puddle with the front wheel tire and dampening my shoes.
"Some weather!" she said laughing.
The ride took all afternoon. We crossed a bridge from Midtown Acadia into Easttown, riding out across the bay, hundreds of feet above the water.
The traffic was always bad on the island, and I have never heard Easton to be better. We waited almost an hour just for the cars to even get across the bridge, let alone navigating through the city's dense streets. But once we finally made it over the river, we toured the south bank, getting a view of the bay and skipping across lanes to reach quiet Octoberfaire, a bayside neighborhood overlooking the ocean, just south of Acadia. Along the water, a wharf blinked in rainbow lights.
The glow of the street lamps passed by in sprints, eager to paint the car's interior with flashes of orange light. I tried to imagine myself living here. I could see my mom and I out on the pier getting ice cream, browsing brochures. My dad walked along the beachfront with me, scanning the bay for schooners. I could not call this place home without them.
Did David really even want to deal with me? It might have been pity that convinced him. Did he feel obligated because we were family? The questions rolled around in my brain the whole ride over. Casey had not been too helpful. She just reassured me that he wanted to help me every time I tried to prod her more about it.
What would living with him be like? What kind of person was he?
"He seemed rather soft-spoken over the phone," Casey said, watching the road. "Let's meet him first. Who knows? Maybe the two of you will hit it off."
Twilight fell when Casey pulled in front of David's apartment, an old shoe factory turned into a fairly nice brownstone complex. She walked me up to his apartment. While we explored the place, she whistled, impressed with what they did with the old, unused factory.
We rode the elevator up, clinging onto the hope that maybe everything these last few months had been a dream. Standing outside his apartment, I glanced over at Casey. She nodded, so I knocked on the door twice. When I went to knock a third time, the door swung open.
David stood in the door frame. He looked at us with deep, entrenched eyes. As if I pulled him from some important work. He looked like a deer in the headlights. But, his features were soft, tired, rounded at the edges.
"Nice to see you again, Monty. It's been a while," he said. He waved the two of us into the apartment.