How Not to Let Go by Emily Foster

Author:Emily Foster [Foster, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

Doctor Scientist

The first time I walked back into Clarissa’s office after moving, I was in a cast, with a bad limp and a bruise going green on my temple, and she said peacefully, “You look like you’ve been in a war.”

And I just sank onto the couch and sobbed for most of the two hours. Gradually, I explained how, at the first merest suggestion that I had lost Annie, that I was too late, I had, like a fool, climbed a 10b route with a tricky overhang, when I knew for sure that I ought to stick to easy climbing and spend more time doing physio. I told her how Annie had met me on my steps. How she had touched me with such tenderness, so that I wondered if this is why men get into fights—so they can go home and be cared for by tenderhearted women with cool, gentle fingertips and pretty eyes. How she had stayed with me all night. How she left for her study group with a cheerful kiss on my unbruised eyebrow and a promise to come back the next day.

And Clarissa said placidly, “Okay. We’ve got a lot to work with here.”

And work we have.

It’s been three months now—three months of climbing together each week, and working across a café table from each other every Monday at seven.

Three months, too, of watching Linton, who has every virtue I might dare to claim, and all the virtues I know very well I lack. And if I’ve had more fantasies than I can count of dragging him into the street by his shirt and beating him to a pulp, I’ve never once lost sight of the fact that it’s not really him I want to destroy. It is my funhouse mirror image, reflecting back my every shortcoming, my every failure, all my guilt, my shame. It is that image that I want to smash. It just happens to look like a Jamaican-Canadian son of a playwright, a poet scientist with big brown eyes and an ego the size of a small nation-state.

“Annie and I have been negotiating boundaries,” I tell Clarissa in November. “The question is whether we keep or share the things that could be potentially uncomfortable or hurtful to the other.”

Clarissa says, “What could she tell you that you’re too fragile to bear, or what could you tell Annie that she’s too fragile to bear?”

“It’s me who’s fragile,” I say, realizing it at last. “I thought I was afraid of hurting her, but really I’m afraid of her turning away from me . . . and she might do that even if I don’t hurt her.”

“And she might not turn away, even if you do.”

I frown at my hands. “I hadn’t thought about it that way.”

“That’s why they pay me the big bucks, Charlie,” she says. “You’ve got a plane to catch, hot shot.”

* * *

On a Saturday afternoon in mid-December, I’m walking back from the rock gym with Annie.

“Bring climbing gear,” she tells me.

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