Clarity Page 8

Chapter 8

  Balance – that’s the word and the concept that kept appearing to me. How to pay attention, be aware, but not be overwhelmed. Observing and thinking and perceiving but also just letting the world flow by.

  I went to Hillside and had a normal, hot flash and panic free visit with Mags. We just talked about the regular things. I read from the paper, and she told me what Liza and Curtis were up to, and we talked about the warmer weather and how it was probably affecting local gardens. She spoke of the community garden where she used to volunteer, the people there and even the vegetables that were growing, as if they were unchanged from her last visit over two years ago. I said nothing to contradict her, but just enjoyed the pleasure she took from her own descriptive words.

  And I stopped in to give Della a little progress report, able to laugh with her at my own intensity. She told me it was heartening to her to watch my progress. Heartening. I smiled as I left the facility, carrying that word like a torch to light my way – that I could give any sort of inspiration to a person at this odd juncture in my life.

  At home that evening, I spent extra time on dinner, trying something new that I thought Doug would like. He had been working late nearly every night, and coming home looking tired and drained. Nothing he cared to talk about, though.

  A couple nights ago I had watched him, really honing in, observing till I knew it made him uncomfortable. Just to assure myself that it was work stress and nothing more. Everything I could see about him pointed there; this was clearly not a man newly energized by love. Good to know, although that knowledge didn’t improve our quiet evenings together.

  I fixed the food, trying to enjoy the simple acts of slicing, simmering, preparing the marinade. When it was ready except for the last ten minutes or so to sear the scallops, I returned to the living room. Clark trotted after me, a puzzled look on his furry face at this change in the order of things.

  Doug called, sounding harried, to say he would be a little longer. By the time he made it home, the salad was wilted, the main course a bit dried out, and I had nibbled a bit. In other words the meal was not so much special as at least ready to eat. Doug and I sat across from each other, more shoveling the food in than savoring it. If he noticed the extra time I had put in, he didn’t comment.

  “How long do you think this case is going to go,” I asked.

  He shook his head. “It’s three different ones. We’re crunched, they still haven’t replaced anyone.” Various attorneys and assistants came and went at his firm, but they had been slow in their hiring. The newer partners were more budget conscious than the old ones used to be. The firm had never really built back up since the recession. It had just become the norm for the long time attorneys to shoulder more work.

  That wasn’t so different from where I worked, or anywhere. But still, I made a point to limit my extra hours. I never had taken back the hours we’d all given up back during the recession. Intentionally – I valued the Fridays off. Doug seemed to be letting his work take over his life the way a brand new kid out of law school might.

  “What’s going on with you?” he asked, several beats later.

  I reeled back in from my private thought track. “Not that much,” I said. I told him a little about work, a new grant we were likely to get that would enable more research on possible flu mutations. He sometimes enjoyed pondering the legal ramifications of our research.

  “Mags told me a funny story about Curtis,” I added, when the first topic ran out of steam. It was one of those Curtis stories from a geologic site that had to be better in the telling than during the actual experience, this one involving washed out roads and almost running out of gas.

  That reminded me that I needed to call Curtis. Well, call one of them, him or Liza – as usual, I would try Curtis first. Mags seemed to be developing an intolerance for one of her pain medications. It might be nothing, but he should at least be aware. None of us wanted her to get into the habit of upping her doses or putting up with unnecessary discomfort.

  I excused myself to make this call. Doug nodded solemnly, looking a bit relieved that he had done his husbandly duty and could now zone out in front of the TV. I glanced at the time on my phone before I called. It wasn’t that late, but you never knew with Curtis – he might have just flown in from a distant time zone, or take the call in the middle of a date.

  “Hey Clarissa,” he answered immediately and a bit warily. “How’s it going?”

  “Jeez, Curtis, I hate to think my calls are starting to remind you of Mrs. Delcecco’s to your mom,” I said. She was the teacher each of us had for sixth grade, stern and not afraid to get a mom involved if she thought there was a behavior issue in the classroom.

  That made him laugh so hard he almost dropped the phone. And hopefully it made my little warning about Mags easier to swallow.

  He got it right away, and promised to follow up during his next check in with her doctors. Aside from just liking the guy better, I had an easier time communicating with him. Liza would have been demanding details that no one could possibly know, and issuing general proclamations in that my-way’s-the-only-way tone of hers.

  Where Curtis appreciated my visits and interventions – and even thought to thank me regularly – Liza felt resentful. At least she usually had several things to say about her busy life and the complex demands upon it. And even now that we had all, even Curtis, hit middle age, she still spoke down to both of us as if we were the twin annoyances she had faced back in the tenth grade, never mind that I’d been a grade ahead.

  Curtis asked me what was new. The same question as Doug, but different. I mean, we didn’t talk that often, he really wanted to know. I hesitated, but then thought what the hell. He might have already heard something about this from Mags anyway. “I’m exploring some, um, unusual personal phenomena,” I began. “Kind of weird, I know, but psychic stuff. Things that I knew or learned before I heard about them directly, if that makes any sense.”

  “Cool,” he said. Open, non-judgmental, interested but a bit skeptical.

  I pulled all that from his one word? But I’d known him forever. I could picture his face. I glanced down the hall to see if Doug was in earshot, worried to start antagonizing him any further with my strange new obsession. He wasn’t, and I gave a run down Curtis about the seminar I’d gone to, and Daniel’s research and the various similar stories he had heard.

  Curtis asked a couple obvious questions about my experiences, but backed off in the face of my reticence. I told him, honestly, that it was all still hard for me to articulate but that I would definitely send a copy of Daniel’s article when it finally came out.

  We chatted a little more. He told me he and girlfriend had broken up, but he didn’t sound bothered by this. His idea, I guessed, though he was tactful in his phrasing. I let him know when Sam would be home and made him promise to come have dinner with all of us.

  I hung up the phone and wandered back to the living room, idling wondering if Doug or I knew any eligible women we could casually invite too. Unlikely. I thought of Kylie. She was single, dating sporadically, but hard pressed to find someone who could appreciate her combination of quiet and sensitivity, her need for solitude and regeneration time. Anyway, she was far too young. I liked seeing Curtis with his own peers. The last girlfriend of his I’d really liked had been older than him, older than me even.

  Maybe Doug would have some ideas. I watched him for a moment. His face had finally slackened into something approaching relaxed, and I didn’t have the heart to make him think about work again. Work, because where else did he know anybody at all?

  A shiver passed, an unpleasantness radiating from my nerves, as a sudden vision of my parents came to my head. How they would sit silently every evening, nothing to say to each other or to me, no friends calling or coming over. As a kid I had compared our household to Liza and Curtis Henley’s and found ours lacking. I’d told myself
I would never end up like that. But here I was with a husband all wrapped up in his work, my kid off at college, living myself much in my own head. Funny that the thing pushing me outward socially turned out to be the same thing I’d apparently been hiding from for all these years.

  Work – I guess this wasn’t such a bad thing – took much of my attention the next few days. Just regular deadlines, but made all the more stressful by our team being more like a group of feral cats than amiable colleagues. It was a challenge to carve out the time for my long lunch/chat with Daniel.

  Yet I hesitated to postpone it. More than that, I found I really wanted to have the conversation. Without probing why, I just made it happen. Did the key things I needed to get done, and emailed out revised timelines on the rest. The diseases would still be there if we were a few days behind, after all.

  Daniel phoned from our front lobby at the appointed hour. Our offices were a bit out of the way, within the labyrinth of the university’s buildings, so I just told him to sit tight and grabbed my light jacket. I found him leaning over the central reception desk, laughing with the girl there over something she had up on her computer.

  “Clarissa, thanks so much for taking the time,” he said, turning toward me with a warm handshake. He added a quick thanks to the receptionist, who smiled glowingly at him. Was she just bored, I wondered, or was there really something about him?

  I directed us back outside and down the side set of stairs that led to our half hidden courtyard. A little path there wound past the quietest part of the campus and up over the small wooded hills to the south. It was pretty and little known outside the people who worked or studied here.

  Daniel matched my pace next to me, his expression soft and receptive. We stepped through a leafy, vine covered trellis onto the dirt path that headed up toward the trees. “I didn’t know this was here,” he said.

  “It’s a nice little refuge,” I answered. We passed a student sitting and reading on a bench, and a couple others walking and talking earnestly. It was a peaceful place – event the students seemed less stressed out back here. The dark greens of the leaves, the graceful twists of tree trunks, the lack of traffic noise or harsh angles of those seventies style buildings all combined to make this a soothing walk.

  “So, the physical thing,” Daniel began, after a few moments contemplative silence.

  I glanced at him. Walking, he looked less like a tough guy/jaded reporter and more like a boy in the woods. Or a young man hiking in a wild place, trying to contain his enthusiasm. I pictured Sam for a moment – was that part of what drew me to Daniel, did I see something of my son in him? But our eyes met and held for a second, and he wasn’t like my boy at all.

  “It’s hard to explain,” I said. “You must get that all the time,” I added, as a wry expression darted across his face.

  “I know it’s hard to articulate, but you’d be surprised how many of the same images, the same words even, I hear over and over,” he said.

  “Okay.” I took a deep breath. “This is a recent recollection of something that happened when I was a child. My mother’s good friend – I was visiting her at the care facility at Hillside – mentioned that my mother had experienced a painful miscarriage.” I stopped for a moment on the uphill trail, catching my breath, either from exertion or the tightness of breath that came with this memory.

  He gave a little nod, his eyes alert, warm, encouraging.

  “And I realized I had been there, as a child. I remember knowing my mother was upset and in pain, but more than that, I felt the pain.” My hand drifted to my belly, to that same spot. “She didn’t say what was wrong, in fact she tried to cover it up, but I knew – I felt it. And it was so scary that I guess I pushed the whole thing away. Then when it happened later to me, I had one during my first marriage, the physical thing seemed oddly familiar.” I glanced at him, then back away, not sure I was saying enough or too much.

  Daniel said nothing, waiting me out.

  “Even then, I didn’t probe it, why something brand new like that would be so recognizable – I mean maybe I just figured, sure, any woman would immediately know how this should feel… But when I suddenly remembered, there with Mags and Della – Della’s the friend who really gets it, she’s been encouraging to me – anyway, just this flood of memories and physical sensations came over me.” I glanced at him again. “I actually had to leave, I got kind of panicky about it.”

  “So just remembering this particular occurrence from years ago made you feel it internally again? I’m sorry to hear about your loss, by the way,” he added.

  He must have had a wife or girlfriend who’d been through it, I thought, nodding, appreciative of this sensitive reaction. But I told myself not to get hung up in trying to read his experiences from his face. This was supposed to be about figuring out my stuff. “Well, partly I guess it’s like anything when you think about it, the sensations are more noticeable. Like if you try to describe a headache, or think about how often you blink in a minute.” I watched his eyes, smiling. “You see, you’re thinking about it now, right?”

  He turned away with a small smile. “Somehow I think this is more than that.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “And I guess the hardest part for me is not feeling like it’s in my control.” I stopped cold for a moment. This thought resonated in my brain, a revelation: so much of this whole thing seemed wrapped up in the degree to which it was beyond my control. Hadn’t that been an issue my whole life, one of those bossy only child things since forever? I’d always wanted to be in the drivers seat.

  Daniel stood patiently beside me. His eyes were warm, his face radiating interest and encouragement. “I don’t know, Clarissa,” he said. “It seems to me that you do have a lot of control.” He looked away from me, back toward the path and the trees ahead of us. “I mean in general, just the sort of person you are, but also in the way you’re approaching these memories. These revelations. You seem to have made a discovery and then followed up in a pretty straightforward way. I’ve certainly talked to people who with a lot less, I don’t know, self confidence. Presence about themselves.”

  “But what do you think this is about,” I demanded. I needed an expert, I realized, and there wasn’t one. “Why can some people be so attuned to someone else that they literally feel their pain? Why is it coming back to me now, when I should be relaxing with my husband towards retirement and instead I’m looking up crazy stuff online and stirring up years past memories?” And keeping a journal that makes me sound like a raving hormonal lunatic, I added to myself. And wandering the outskirts of the campus with you when I should be inside working?

  Daniel had resumed his pace beside me, and I was relieved not to be looking him in the eye. Or rather, that he couldn’t see my face. “Something I’ve gleaned,” he said slowly, “and not just in this research – is that becoming middle aged seems like the end of a long journey to find your comfort zone. People reach this place and you can see it in their faces and hear it in their voices. This sense of comfort, of being relaxed with who they are. But then they kind of realize that staying there is the path towards staleness and gradual decline. You know? The more interesting people are the ones who set aside their fears of the unknown and keep having new adventures.”

  These words resonated pretty strongly. Staleness. You could almost taste it at our house sometimes. Doug and I used to joke about couples we knew who were very set in their ways. Now it would hardly be funny.

  “But I don’t have an answer about the sensitivity,” Daniel continued. “All I can tell you is that it’s unusual but not unique.”

  “Sensitivity,” I repeated back. Such a positive, nice sounding word, and indeed one that came to mind thinking about Kylie. “I just sense more. So currents of emotion and rivulets of pain are wafting through the air, and I’m just good at plucking them out?” I flicked my fingers into the air in a sarcastic de
monstration.

  He was not offended and chuckled. “You know there are people who see it that way. The aura testers, the good energy people. You should go to one of those fairs some time, you’d be amazed.” More seriously, he added, “But I’ve spoken to more than one actual neuro-physiology expert who will admit that they don’t really get it. I mean the whole how-neurons-become-thoughts thing. And how one person’s brain chemistry might possibly react with another’s. Even over time or space.”

  This seemed, again, faintly ridiculous. Chemical impulses from brain cells radiating out into the universe? Lingering in a particular place over time? And yet, and yet – surely anyone could see that people who spent a lot of time together developed certain ways of understanding each other. Call it what you will, but maybe there was something of this involved. I use my wireless phone without a second thought; voice carried somehow from mouth to far away ear. Is this really so different? “There always was a strong connection with my mother,” I admitted to him. “I’m sure of that now, however it came about or I understood it.”

  He nodded. “That’s quite common. Running in families and sensitivities between family members.”

  “And I think the I had fewer of the dream sequence thingees after she died, now that I think about it.” I paused, scrolling back the mental calendar and wishing I had my journal here in front of me. “But they didn’t stop. Mags,” I added. “Mags has been kind of a mother figure to me, and we became closer after I lost my mom. And then since she’s been incapacitated. You think I could have picked up something from her? She’s the one who would have known that Yvette died.”

  Daniel looked confused, and I mapped out the players to him: Mags being friends with Yvette, me having the dream, Mags having known right away about her death – she and Della had both heard the commotion in the night.

  He nodded. “So she was kind of link with your mother, or her relationship to you was similar. But I’m still fascinated by how you’d experience the sensation your mother did, or later, just from thinking about it.”

  “Well, I’d like to know that too. Or more to the point, how not to.”

  He raised an eyebrow, questioning.

  “That’s the thing about it, Daniel. That’s why Kylie can’t stand crowded places, and I’m pretty sure it’s why I just blocked it all out for so long. Bad enough to feel my own pain, much less take on someone else’s.”

  “But wouldn’t that run the other way too? Other’s joy and wellbeing? Techniques to feel better, to help yourself heal?” He looked antsy, like he wished he could write all this down.

  “I haven’t heard many people talk about this sort of thing in happy terms,” I observed. “And it hasn’t been my experience. I mean, I’ve felt picked up at a kid’s birthday party of something, laughed at infectious laughter. But not felt it,” I patted my chest, “not known it from the inside.”

  “No, me either,” he said. “In my research, I mean.”

  “Della – the woman at Hillside – told me a story about how she fainted at the same time as her mother when her mother received bad news. I mean she was in school and her mother was home. But again, from something shocking and painful.”

  “Really.” His dark eyes were intent, and I was reminded of the first time I’d seen him, how he seemed to drink in the room around him at that seminar.

  We were on the far side of the loop, now, headed toward the back side of the bigger campus buildings. I wondered if he had gotten what he needed from me. We had hardly discussed the article, and I brought it up, reiterating my earlier thoughts about edits.

  He assured me he had taken notes, would make the changes. And he deliberated aloud, but decided against adding any more of this. “Fascinating though it is,” he added warmly.

  I agreed that it was almost another side topic. He was struggling to contain the whole thing in a smaller than hoped word count – wacky lady feels her mother’s pain wouldn’t help that challenge.

  We said a hasty goodbye back at my building, my workload suddenly pressing on me. And my denial; I both wanted and didn’t want this to be strictly business between us. Anyway, I was glad for the churning stream of passersby elbowing past us – this was about as un-intimate a setting as I could have hoped for.

  I dashed back up to my office, ducking in and hoping no one noticed how long I had been gone with all the deadlines looming. No one said anything. As usual, people were pretty focused on whatever was right in front of them.

  Sitting at my computer, I glanced at the stack of new emails, and wondered how much of this morning’s work would have to be redone. But I forced myself to pause, just for a couple minutes, before delving in. I needed not to just push aside the whole conversation that had just happened, not swallow away or deny any small revelations.

  What had Daniel said – the path toward staleness, versus setting aside your fear of the unknown. Meantime I was hung up not so much on the unknown as the uncontrollable. The idea of my extra sensitivity enabling random sensations to swamp me with no warning just freaked me out. No wonder I’d shut it all down.

  But there was no turning back now, I could see that. Maybe that’s why I’d wanted to meet him in person, for the confirmation that this was real and that denial wouldn’t cut it anymore. Yes, I enjoyed talking to him, and walking close together like that did get my pulse running a bit. (I imagined saying this to Kylie, and how clearly her face would tell me she was aware of my attraction to him.) What I was getting from him went deeper though – it was like he had brought me up a hill I’d been avoiding and pointed out a whole new vista.

  There were two things I had to do, after work. One was get a better handle on my heightened perceptions and my reactions to them, whether it was practicing meditation or putting everything in the journal or just forcing myself to be quiet and still. And the second was have a real conversation with Doug. However busy he was, carve out some time and let him know that this was something I would pursue. If he couldn’t be positive about it, he would at least need to be as tolerant as I was about his less than stellar hobbies.

  I set my shoulders back, took a calming breath, and got back to work.