Part Two

Daniel Isn't Talking
by Marti Leimbach

(Page 2 of 3)

I call my shrink, Shrink. Not to his face, of course. I also call him Jacob. He seems as fascinated by my being American as I am by his being black, a Londoner, and having almost no visible hair on his body at all except this one thing, his graying mustache, which he is often seen poking at with a slim forefinger. He has the delicate hands of a surgeon, but everything else about him is stocky, compact. His leather chair is faded where his head rests, and there are cracks around the edge of the cushion where his legs bend.

"So that's it, that's all you want to say about your mother?" he says. He sighs, crosses his legs. His laconic air is in direct contrast to my own pulsating, nervous energy. He says, "She died and you weren't there. Okay, how about before that? What about when you were growing up?"

My shrink is a man who wants to reveal me, and yet I know nothing about him. I am sure this is the right and proper way for a patient and therapist to operate, but it feels cold to me. I cannot think of anyone in my life now who wants to see inside me for what is good and right, only those who want to find what is wrong. And that's so easy — everything is wrong. I tell Jacob, "My mother was at work. I don't remember. It doesn't matter."

"Run that by me again?" he says.

"What about how I feel right now?"

It is as though I've eaten a vat of speed; my mind races along trailing incoherencies and half-finished thoughts. There's a continual restlessness in all four of my limbs; I am hungry almost all the time, except when I eat. Two bites and I feel sick. All this has come upon me gradually over the past months. That confident, breezy woman who Stephen saw at a party all those years ago is not me anymore. I am her shadow.

"Jacob," I sigh. "Be a pal and medicate me."

He says, "Melanie, you're going to need to relax about all that or else we won't get anywhere at all."

But I can't relax, which is why I am here. I used to read books by the score but now I find I am unable to concentrate. I go to the library, trying to find a book that might help me, but even the self-help books seem indecipherable. I'm lucky if I can remember a phone number. So instead I wander. I visit all-night cafés on the Edgware Road where teenagers suck sweet tobacco from hookahs; I go traipsing round the New Covent Garden Market, picking lonely flower stems from the shiny cement floor. I'll be at a train station at midnight with no ticket. I might be writing a list on a notepad held in my palm. Or staring at the blank walls of the station or wherever I am, which is anywhere you can linger instead of sleep. During the day, my hands sometimes tremble with fatigue. I squint at sunlight, splash cold water on my face, review the notes I have written to myself reminding me what to do. I set the alarm on my ugly electronic watch, a watch I found in a public toilet at Paddington, in case I fall asleep by accident. I have children to look after, to sing to, play with. I regard them as one might the queen's largest jewels. They receive my best — my only — real efforts.

"I'm just after some help," I tell Jacob. "I am worried all the time."

"I'm trying to help you," he says. He smiles and his teeth are like piano keys, his lips like a sweet fruit, tender and large. His children are grown now. That is all I know about him. "Tell me what troubles you," Jacob says. I am meant to pour myself into him as though he is an empty jug. This I cannot do.

At home I frantically organize clothes and toys, collect the sticks from Popsicles, the interesting wrappers from packets. Egg cartons turn into caterpillars; jam jars become pencil holders, decorated in collage or made garish in glass paint. Setting out the paints and crayons and shallow dishes of craft glue, I prepare for when Emily wakes, my little girl who loves animals and art. Daniel will not draw, will only break the crayons in half, rip the paper. I tell myself he is young yet. A voice inside me says, "Wait and you'll see!" But the voice isn't real and the boy won't even scribble on paper. This is part of the trouble.

"My son," I tell Jacob. He nods. I am meant to continue.

Every morning I take the children to the park, hanging on to them as though someone might snatch them from me, drug them and spirit them away from me forever. This is a great fear of mine. One of my fears. The only reason I haven't been to the doctor for Prozac is that I am convinced that the doctor would alert social services who might then come and take the children away. This is a completely ridiculous idea and I know it — but that's why I'm at the shrink's. Although I have to admit I'm not getting anywhere here.

I say now to my shrink, to Jacob, "Medicate me or I will fire you."

"What's that mean?" Jacob says. "Fire?"

I shake my head. I feel like a seed husk spent beside a loamy soil, like an emptied wineskin drying in the sun. "It means I stop paying you," I sigh.

He smiles, nods. But he does not, at this point anyway, prescribe.

Emily has a mop of blond curls billowing around her face, smiling eyes, aquamarine. Her baby teeth, spread wide in her mouth, remind me of a jack-o'-lantern, and when she laughs it is as though there are bubbles inside her, a sea of contentment. She carries Mickey Mouse by his neck, and wears a length of cord pinned to her trousers so that she, too, has a tail. Kneeling on a chair beside the dining table, she instructs me on the various ways one can paint Dumbo's relatives, who wear decorated blankets which require much precision. Unlike most children, who only paint on paper, Emily enjoys painting three-dimensional objects and so, for this reason, we own nine gray rubber elephants, some with trunks up and some with trunks down, that she has decorated many times. She has yet to find an elephant she thinks is a suitable Dumbo, and so we just have the nine so far.

Daniel has one toy he likes and hundreds he ignores. The one toy he likes is a wooden Brio model of Thomas the Tank Engine. It has a face like a clock, framed in black, with a chimney that serves almost as a kind of hat. The train must go with him everywhere and must either be in his hand or in his mouth. Never in Emily's hand and never washed in the sink, as I am now doing. No amount of reassurance from me, no promise that this will take only one minute, less than a minute, does anything to soothe Daniel, who pounds at my thighs with his small hands, screams like a monkey, opening his mouth so wide I can see down his throat.

Copyright © 2006 by Marti Leimbach. Excerpted by permission of Nan A. Talese, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Marti Leimbach is the author of several novels, including the international and New York Times bestseller Dying Young, which was made into a major motion picture starring Julia Roberts. Born in Washington, D.C., she currently lives outside London, England, with her husband and two children, one of whom is autistic. She teaches at Oxford University's Creative Writing Program.