The mirror was an old one, blackened with time, but Lucas could still make out his face in the dim light of the bedroom. He was hideous. His hair had thinned to streaks of an ink pen on a white canvas. A scar of waxy skin covered his right cheek. The red of his eyes was only made worse by the empty bottle at his feet. He carried a constant pain in his right cheek from a rotten molar and he cherished the pain as penance for his sins. He held it tight like a mouthful of Hail Marys, each throb another bead on a black rosary. He flipped up the hood of his sweatshirt and turned away from his reflection, relief flooding through him that this time the mirror hadn’t turned into a windshield flying toward his face, and that he wouldn’t have to look again until tomorrow morning when he’d dress to face another day that didn’t want him in it. Everyday since the accident had been a day that didn’t want him here. He was supposed to have died with them that night, but here he was, preparing for another visit to a couch, a bright room that saw his every flaw, and a man who never listened when Lucas asked him not to look so closely.
He walked to the kitchen where he could still smell the memory of steak and Elena’s body wash. He shook out the pills the doctor had prescribed and washed them down with yesterday’s cold coffee. He felt their movement all the way down his throat as if they too wanted to seal off his share of air. He shut his eyes and for an instant the kitchen seemed to melt around him, replaced with a wet street soaking into his pant legs, blood pouring over his hands, and the smell of gas registering like an alarm in his amygdala telling him to flee. His breath quickened and his eyes shot open, searching for five things in the room he could see, hear, and touch, just as the doctor had instructed. When his breath slowed, Lucas grabbed his backpack and set out through his old neighborhood.
The potted flowers on the steps of his townhouse were long dead, the chipped paint on the white railing revealed a patina of old metal beneath. As Lucas started down the steps, he shrunk back in horror as the railing turned to bone, the paint into burnt flesh peeling back from muscle and vein. He squeezed his eyes shut as he had learned to do over the past few months. Wait it out. It was just a memory. It was just his damn, messed up memory. He hurried past the melting arm and continued toward the psychiatrist’s office. He could no longer drive or ride in anything with an engine. He no longer trusted anything but his tennis shoes on familiar sidewalks.
At the corner shop, Mr. Peterson was putting up a sign advertising a sale on fresh cut steaks. Mr. Peterson’s shop was a staple of the neighborhood run by a gentle, welcoming man who chuckled at local gossip and suddenly remembered something was on sale when a customer didn’t have enough money. Over the years Lucas went from buying candy bars on his way home from school, to stopping in on Friday evenings to buy flowers and cheap wine to take home to Elena. He always remembered to ask Mr. Peterson about his son who was studying at M.I.T. Lucas had heard the pride in Mr. Peterson’s voice and he had hoped he too would one day speak of his own child like that. But his child never became more than blood on a street corner from a dead womb.
Mr. Peterson looked up from his sign and gave Lucas a sad smile, “Lucas, it’s been so long. How are you, son? Would you like to come in?”
Lucas caught a glimpse of himself in the reflection of the shop window, black holes where his eyes once looked to the future and a twisted mouth that had once made vows of forever rippled in the glass. Lucas didn’t know how Mr. Peterson could stand to look at him with his scars and his shame and his loss dripping like rain water from his skin.
“No thank you, Mr. Peterson. I’m sorry. I have somewhere to be,” Lucas mumbled without looking up from the sidewalk. He wouldn’t drag Mr. Peterson into a life of pills, shrinks, and visions of mirrors that shattered over him like shards of windshield glass.
This is why he kept his eyes staring forward at the changing stoplights. There were too many people who wanted to see him smile with perfect white teeth and to admit that he was the one who should have had a steering wheel embedded in his chest, since he was the reason Elena had been driving that night when the rain had turned to sleet, and the black road had turned to black ice. Because he had too much to drink. Because he had argued with her over the baby. Only a few more blocks. Only a few more haunted landmarks. He could see the windows in his peripheral vision, bulging outwards to look more closely at his sins. No longer a child on a bicycle in a long stretch of summer, but a monster hiding from the burning of autumn.
Slowly the quiet neighborhood melted into a busy business district and Lucas tried to melt into the crowd of people with lives that hadn’t crashed and burned on a January street. When he arrived at the psychiatrist’s office, he stopped underneath the reddening maple to ready himself for what came next. As he watched, the shadows of the leaves became tiny lost souls crawling over the sidewalk. He could almost hear them calling out to him to save them. He closed his eyes at the thought of the soul of his unborn child drifting somewhere, alone, maybe afraid, and he wanted to scoop these tiny shadows into his pocket and take them home. Instead he convinced himself to look away and entered the building for another round of lies. Always “it’s not your fault” and “you can’t blame yourself.” Fuck if he couldn’t. He’d been doing a pretty damn good job of it for months now.
Dr. McClellan’s office was blessedly dimly lit. He had no receptionist and the office was always empty at the time of his regular Friday afternoon appointment. He counted the squares on the beige rug while he waited with the magazines on mindfulness, the sign reading, “Please Silence Your Phone,” and the wall clock whose hands never moved. It was always 11:17 on Friday at Dr. McClellan’s office.
Within minutes, Dr. McClellan, in his brown blazer and white beard, opened the door to his inner office. He waved Lucas in and settled himself in his leather arm chair, moleskin notebook on his knee, fountain pen in his hand, wireframes perched on the bridge of his nose. Lucas again felt the feeling of time standing still. He sat on the couch opposite the doctor and pulled off the hood of his sweatshirt. He adjusted his sparse hair as he sighed and steeled himself for what he knew was coming.
“How have you been feeling, Lucas?” asked Dr. McClellan in his Freudian voice, an accent Lucas couldn’t quite place.
“Like my brain is fucking with me. Like nothing is solid. Like everything is just waiting to melt.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“Yes.”
“Too much?”
There was no use lying. “Yes.”
The doctor only nodded in reply. “Have you been taking your medication?”
“Yes. I took some before I left the house.”
“Good,” the doctor nodded. “It will help. Do you want to get started where we left off last week? With that night?”
Lucas clenched his eyes shut, every cell of his body screaming at him to just get up and leave and not ever tell anyone about that night. Sell the townhouse, move away. Die a slow death alone and rot into the soil, if the ground would have him. Somewhere from outside the office he heard a ticking, like a clock, but the clock was broken he reminded himself. He felt his limbs grow heavy, his thoughts quiet until all of the self hatred was gathered in a pinprick in the center of his forehead. He began to unwind the clock.
“I got off early that day. It was a Friday. I stopped at Peterson’s and bought a bottle of champagne for me and a sparkling cider for Elena. A dozen roses. Two fresh steaks. I told Mr. Peterson that we were going to celebrate. I got a raise, we were having a baby. Everything was going to get better. Mr. Peterson was so happy for us. I was so happy for us.”
Lucas’s voice seemed to give out. He didn’t think he could continue. The ticking grew louder for a moment, his mind shrank again to a pinprick, and the doctor said in his soothing, unknown voice, “It’s ok, Lucas. You are safe. Thoughts, memories, they can’t hurt you anymore. Just go on.”
“Elena was home when I walked in the door, sitting at the kitchen table with a notepad in front of her, writing quickly. When she saw me come in, she turned the pad over and said she wasn’t expecting me so early. I said I wanted to celebrate the baby, and the fact I got a raise. She didn’t seem excited about the raise which seemed strange since we were barely getting by with just the two of us. We needed the money for the baby. I said that. The money will help with the baby. The baby.”
Lucas stopped again. A tear slid over the scar of his cheek. He barely felt it. He only felt a slight nudge of his mind from the hand of the doctor, yet no words were spoken.
“Elena said I didn’t need to worry about the baby. I didn’t even need to worry about her. She said that she had done something stupid. She had been writing me a letter to tell me. She pushed the notebook to me and I read what she couldn’t say. She wasn’t sure the baby was mine. She was sorry. It wasn’t supposed to have meant anything. I wasn’t supposed to have known. I didn’t know what to say. We had a few problems, sure, but she had seemed happy. We had seemed happy. She sat looking at me with such sad eyes. Such beautiful, sad eyes. I left the house. I walked for an hour. I stopped in the neighborhood pub. I drank too much. In the haze I realized I didn’t care. So what? So what if the baby wasn’t mine? We could still make it work.”
Another pause, another nudge, another feeling like he was suspended between ticks of an unseen clock.
“I left the pub to walk home. It was just turning from a cold rain to a sleet. As I was waiting to cross the street, I saw a familiar car pass in front of me. Elena was driving our car and she turned her head and saw me. Those sad eyes. They held mine and in that moment I thought everything was going to be ok. We were going to work it all out. Our whole future felt like it was hanging in that moment.”
“Did she stop the car? Did she pick you up to take you home?”
“No. I… I looked away and saw that the stoplight had turned red while she had been looking at me. I started to wave at her to stop. She looked ahead and slammed on the breaks, but it was too late. The road had turned icy. And… and she slid headfirst into a truck that was turning left in front of her. The sound. Oh, God, Dr. McClellan! The sound! I don’t want to hear the sound!”
Lucas could hear the gnashing of metal against metal. He could feel the teeth of the truck biting into the hood of their car. He was there on the sidewalk while Elena was smashing into the steering wheel and ice was falling in his eyes and he was running, running toward her to save what was left.
“Lucas. Focus. Look at me. You are at my office. We are just talking. I want you to look at my face, Lucas.”
Lucas concentrated on slowing his breath. He looked at the doctor’s face and tried to place where he had seen the man before. Not here in the office, but somewhere. He nodded that he was ready to continue.
“I ran up to the car and tried to open the door, but it wouldn’t open. The man in the truck was bleeding, but ok. He got out and tried to help me open the door. We finally managed to get it open and Elena… Elena was, hardly Elena. The airbag hadn’t gone off. She was…”
“It’s ok, Lucas. You don’t have to tell me those details now. You don’t have to look so closely at her right now. Let’s just move on to what happened next.”
Tears streamed down Lucas’s face and mixed with the freezing rain on a couch on a street in a winter in an autumn, and he decided not to look away.
“The man in the truck and I pulled her out of the car. There was so much blood. It was everywhere. The man said we needed to move away from the crash because he could see gas leaking and it might be dangerous. We lifted Elena from the street and I could hear sirens in the distance. We laid her down on the sidewalk. Her chest, her chest… nothing but blood. As the paramedics arrived, the fire started. It was so hot even from that distance. I felt like I was melting in spite of the sleet. The paramedics took Elena and I climbed in the back of the ambulance. The firetruck was just pulling in as we pulled out. Sirens screaming. Maybe I was screaming. The paramedics tried. They did! They tried! But there was no Elena left. There was only her blood mixed with our baby on the sheets. They told me she was dead at the hospital. I looked at my watch. 11:17. 11:17 on a Friday night. Because of me.”
“Lucas, why do you think it’s because of you? What did you do?”
“I left. I got drunk. I should have stayed and talked it out. She wouldn’t have been driving on the icy streets to look for me if I had been a fucking man and stayed and worked it out with her!”
The doctor handed Lucas a familiar piece of notebook paper. “Or not. Read this, Lucas.”
Lucas unfolded the paper and saw Elena’s slanted handwriting. It was the letter she had been writing, only she had added to it after he left for the pub. Lucas read that while Elena had thought the other man didn’t matter to her, he had. That she was leaving Lucas to be with him. That she was sorry. He refolded the paper and looked at the doctor, who looked much less like Sigmund Freud than he had when Lucas came in.
“She was leaving me? She wasn’t coming to pick me up that night? She was leaving to be with him? I don’t understand. That’s not what I remember at all.”
“Do you remember when you first came to see me you described what had happened? That you had gotten drunk and Elena came to get you at the bar? She had been angry with you for drinking when she needed you at home. How you had caused the accident? All I saw was a young man with PTSD and a head full of false memories. When the standard therapy wasn’t working, I thought you would be a good candidate for a new trial therapy. We haven’t been giving you Xanax. We have been microdosing you with a mild hallucinogenic which has proven very effective in the treatment of PTSD.”
“But you told me I was taking Xanax. You lied to me! Isn’t that against some kind of Hippocratic oath?”
“Do you remember that you agreed to be a part of a PTSD study? You agreed to undergo experimental treatment. I have your signature here.”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember. I don’t know. I… I… She was leaving me. It wasn’t my baby. I wasn’t with her in the car when it happened. But I remember it so clearly! I have this scar.” Lucas ran his hands over his face, feeling only smooth skin, ran his hands through his thick, unkempt hair. “I really don’t know what’s happening. The pills! Is that why I’ve been seeing such weird shit?”
“PTSD has been known to cause false memories. The hallucinations were an unexpected side effect of the medication that I hoped would resolve itself before now, especially the view you had of yourself. It seems you somehow developed an outer perception of yourself that you felt matched the inner you. Very interesting, actually.”
Lucas grabbed his hair in his hands and looked again at the beige carpet where Elena now lay as if asleep. He began to wail like that January night as he slid from the couch to the floor and cradled her in his arms.
“I’m sorry, Elena. I’m sorry I couldn’t save you. I’m sorry I couldn’t let you go before now.” He saw every detail of her flawless skin before her image dissolved and he was left kneeling in an ordinary office on an everyday Friday. The doctor reached out a hand and placed it on Lucas’s shoulder.
“Now we begin the work of healing.”
The doctor was just an average man, the room an average room, the silence not as deep, the ticking just a regular wall clock. Lucas nodded and sat back on the couch.
“I can’t say that I understand anything that’s happened. I can’t say today what’s even real. It wasn’t my fault, but Elena deserved so much better. It all feels unresolved. It all feels wrong. Can you help me make sense of it?”
“I will certainly try, Lucas.”
As he left the office and walked home down the same uneven sidewalks, Lucas still wasn’t sure that the shadows weren’t trying to pull him under, but he felt the clock begin to move forward again. It was Friday at noon, the beginning of fall. He stopped in front of Mr Petersons’s shop, and caught his reflection in the window. Just a broken man with shaggy brown hair, teeth that needed brushing, and a body that could use a good meal. Lucas hesitated, pushed open the door, heard the familiar jingle of the bell, and stepped inside.