“Sure.”
“I stopped being able to listen to people talk about God.”
Charlie raised his eyebrows.
“Go on,” he said.
“I just…I couldn’t handle hearing about how someone’s Higher Power never gives them anything they can’t handle. If that was the case, we wouldn’t have rape or child abuse or incest or domestic violence, and people wouldn’t develop PTSD or complex trauma or crippling drug dependencies, all of which are the direct results of being given exactly what you can’t handle.”
Charlie was listening to her closely, with respect or reservation Avery couldn’t tell.
“So you don’t believe everything happens for a reason and all that?” he asked.
She took a deep breath. She could give some pat, newcomer-appropriate answer, but she was, indeed, a lawyer and the compulsion to be right, to hammer home her case, was as deeply entrenched in her as breathing.
“I believe that everything happens,” she said. “Period. Or full stop, as you would say. That’s it. Things happen and we have to learn to live with them, as long as suicide is off the table, that is. If we can find meaning in them, fine, but even if we can’t, we still have to live with them. The meaning is an afterthought, an anesthesia. Happens is the only word in that statement that’s empirical. The rest is whatever helps you sleep at night.”
Charlie looked at her as if he were evaluating the cover of a book he’d picked up but wasn’t sure he wanted to read.
“I guess I can’t argue with that,” he said.
They walked together in silence through the quiet residential streets. From over an ivy-covered brick wall two children on a trampoline in their garden careened in and out of view, their blond hair lifting and falling around their faces as they shrieked with joy.
“Also, my sister died,” Avery said.
When Charlie looked at her again, his assessment seemed to shift and soften. There was a tenderness in his face that was entirely unforced.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “Recently?”
Avery nodded.
“Last year.”
“Do you mind if I ask you how?”
“No, it’s fine.” Avery cleared her throat. “She overdosed.”
“Oh man.” Charlie shook his head softly. “Your sister was an addict too?”
Avery shook her head. She had never thought of Nicky like that when she was alive, and it felt like a betrayal to do so now.
“No,” she said firmly. “She had chronic pain. It’s this condition called endometriosis. Men don’t get it.” She tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice as she continued. “She went to lots of doctors, she had surgeries, but they couldn’t seem to help her. In fact, they were fucking useless.”
She remembered sitting with Nicky in the emergency room when the pain had become too much to sleep. Her sister curled in on herself, as though she could make herself small enough for the hurt not to find her. The nurses in the hospital treated her like a criminal. They thought she was there for the drugs. All she was asking for was comfort, a little relief. In that sense, perhaps she was no different from an addict. Weren’t all addicts looking for relief from some invisible pain? Weren’t all people?
Avery tried to modulate her voice, so she sounded reasonable, like someone simply conveying a tragic series of events and not a woman half mad with rage and grief.
“Understandably, given the pain she was in,” she began judiciously, “she took painkillers. That’s what they’re there for. They kill pain. But she developed a dependency and ended up buying a batch on the street that contained fentanyl and…”
Avery inhaled sharply. Would it ever be easier to tell this story? Would it ever not make her want to grab the world like a sheet of drawing paper on which a terrible mistake had been made and rip it up, rip it down, and start again?
But there had been a slither of relief, too, which Avery never admitted to anyone. Nicky had been suffering for years by the time she died. The problem with her pain was that it was invisible. Avery wished she could have given it crutches, some object that made it obvious to everyone around her, but she had learned now that most pain is private.
Language grasped at, but never caught, it. Each time Nicky tried to find the right words, it seemed to change shape. Sometimes she said it was a dull, low ache, foreboding and inevitable, like the darkening of the sky before a storm. Sometimes it was hot electric bursts that shot and pinged through her, leaving her doubled over and gasping for air. Sometimes she said it felt like crashing waves gathering momentum and receding, her insides the beaten and unyielding shore. And when it was gone, she waited for it, like a volatile husband who has left in a rage but will inevitably return. Sometimes, she said, the waiting felt like the worst part of all.
Where language failed, numbers were no better. How many times had Nicky been asked to rate her pain on a scale of one to ten? It was a riddle: Choose too low and she might not get the relief she needed, choose too high and she’d be dismissed as hysterical. What was the magic number? She tried six, seven, eight, nine…She never dared consider herself a ten. Avery had watched her writhe in hospital waiting rooms and doctors’ offices trying to find the right combination of words and numbers that would unlock permanent relief.
She never found it, but Avery left for London anyway. She could still remember the howl of grief escaping through the phone when Nicky called to tell her what the doctors had said. It was late on a Friday night in London and Avery was at a bar in Soho, where she’d been meeting some of Chiti’s other therapist friends. She had wanted to make a good impression, was unwilling to answer the call. But she did, she reminded herself now, she did answer. The rain had stopped just in time for the weekend and the streets were still slick when she stepped outside. Hysterectomy. She’d pressed a hand to her ear to drown out the noise of passing revelers, everyone drunk and high-spirited after the rain. Could you repeat that? The neon lights of the bar splashed and smeared along the wet pavement. Hysterectomy. That was the word she hadn’t been able to hear. The removal of the uterus. The key to permanent relief.
The last time Avery saw Nicky, she knew her sister was different, though it was impossible to say exactly why. Afterward, it was her eyes she remembered. Her pupils were too small, two tiny dots that would not hold Avery’s gaze. Nicky had a face like water, always moving, rippling, dancing. Their mother used to say she should have been an actress; she could convey any emotion—amusement, irritation, incredulity—with the slightest widening of her eyes or jump of her eyebrow. But the last time Avery saw her, she was strangely still, as if holding herself braced against something.
They were walking in Regents Park; Nicky had come to stay for spring break, and it was her final day before returning to New York. She had been herself for most of the trip, but during the last two days she became withdrawn. Avery realized afterward that she had likely been running out of pills, lengthening the space between each dose to make her supply last until she got home. It was an unseasonably warm spring day, so Avery bought them both Cornettos from the café by the pond. As they walked, Nicky struggled to unwrap the paper from the cone, her hands seemingly uncooperative.
Are you okay, Nicks? Avery asked, glancing at her trembling fingers. She took Nicky’s ice cream and smoothly unpeeled the wrapper, then passed it back. You sure you feel up for flying?
Why do people keep asking if I’m okay? snapped Nicky.
Avery glanced at her in surprise; she didn’t know that anyone else was asking.
My period’s due, relented Nicky after a pause.
Oh, I’m sorry. Avery motioned toward a bench they could go sit on. Is it…painful?
She never knew quite how to talk about Nicky’s condition, aware, as she was, of the unfair fact that her own periods had always been remarkably uneventful.
Yeah, well, obviously, said Nicky sharply, then seemed to try to mollify her peevishness. And it’s a busy semester, so I have a lot of grading to do on the plane. But it’s not a big deal. I’m good, I promise.
I get it, said Avery, wary of pushing her further. They’re lucky to have a teacher who cares as much as you do. Remember the nuns?
