Paula plays with her children on the living-room floor like a regular loving engaged mother. Dinner is in the slow cooker, the washing machine whirs in an industrious duet with the dishwasher. These are the precious moments that make up a life! All her thoughts are acceptable and pleasant. All her actions are normal and nonrepetitive. She is not obsessing. She is living in the present and she is not thinking about the fourth death, not at all.
“What a dee-yight-ful cup of tea.” Willow doesn’t sit, she crouches down on her haunches and purses her lips as she sips from a tiny plastic teacup: a regency matriarch in pigtails.
“Do you need more sugar, madam?” Paula’s role in these games is often unclear. Sometimes she is a fellow guest but often she’s the maid. She needs to be ready to pivot.
“Oh, yes, please, madam.” Willow holds out her cup.
Timmy commando-crawls beside them, grunting with effort like a wounded soldier. He is much more graceful in the water than on land, but he’s missing today’s lesson because he has a head cold. Paula can see snail trails of snot on the carpet. He climbs into her lap, pulls himself up by her shirt, and flattens his snotty nose in her eye.
“Thanks, Timmy.” She wipes her face.
“Mim, Mim, Mim!” Timmy babbles.
Swim. She is pretty sure he’s saying “swim.” She has not translated for Matt.
“No swimming lessons today,” says Paula.
This is proof that Timmy’s multiple secret swimming lessons do not fall under the definition of a compulsion. She does not need Dr. Donnelly. She knows what he’d say: Life is unpredictable. Timmy might drown. Timmy might not drown. You are not your thoughts. Bad things can happen. Blah blah blah. She knocks her knuckle against her front teeth.
His cold is not that bad. Just a sniffly nose. She could bundle both kids into the car right now and still make it. It might even make him feel better.
“Do you have a tummyache, darling?” Willow stands next to Paula, her little dimpled hand on Paula’s shoulder, staring into Paula’s face with motherly concern.
“We might take Timmy swimming,” says Paula. She can already feel the relief it will bring, just being in the pool.
“Not swimming again!” Willow throws both hands up in disgust.
“Mim! Mim!” Timmy claps.
Paula’s phone beeps with a message from her sister. Dr. D still practicing. Hasn’t retired! They offer telehealth. I remember you liked him. Just sayin’! Not interfering! Your life, etc. etc.
There is a link to a psychotherapist’s office: Dr. Donnelly.
It’s like her sister can read her mind.
Dr. Donnelly came into Paula’s life when she was seventeen.
She had just gotten her driver’s license, was living her best life, studying for her final exams, dating her first boyfriend, when one day she braked at a pedestrian crossing and watched as people strode in front of her car, some of them close enough to touch the hood, but they didn’t even glance her way. That’s how trusting they were. How did they know they could trust her? How did they know she would continue to keep her foot on the brake, when the accelerator was right there?
What was to stop her slamming her foot on the accelerator?
Nothing.
She could mow them all over. The little girl in a tutu holding her mother’s hand. The old man with a limp. Paula sweated and shook. Panic flooded her body.
She put the handbrake on. Not enough.
She turned the car ignition off. Not enough.
She got out of the car with her car keys. Not enough.
She locked the car.
The little girl in the tutu and the old man with the limp reached the other side of the road. She had not killed them.
She saw the person in the car behind her looking at her curiously. She raised a hand in apology, jumped back in the car. That became the ritual every time she stopped at a crossing. Sometimes people honked but that didn’t matter.
It might have gone on forever. She might still be doing it now.
But one day it happened in front of her sister when she was giving her a lift. She tried so hard. She squeezed the steering wheel so tight. She told herself she wouldn’t run anyone over with Lisa in the car. But what if she did?
After she got back in the car, Lisa looked straight ahead as if her bizarre ritual had been perfectly normal. They drove for a while in silence and finally Lisa spoke up, her tone mild and nonjudgmental. “Is it because you’re scared you’ll run them over?”
Paula nodded. Just the once.
“You would never do that,” said Lisa. “I promise. I know you. You would never do that.”
But Paula didn’t believe her.
Lisa snitched to their parents. “I conveyed information,” she said. “I did not snitch.”
Up until then she’d always done her best to cover for her sister’s weirdness. “Paula is just cleaning her teeth,” she’d say when they were kids, when in fact, as their parents well knew, Paula was taking off all her clothes and putting them on again in the correct order because she’d messed up the first time around and her elaborate routine had to be followed exactly or else she couldn’t leave the room.
When her parents heard about her street-crossing ritual they insisted she go to the GP and ask for yet another referral to someone who might help. Exiting the car every time she stopped at a crossing was a dangerous, unsustainable, frightening habit.
Prior to then, there had been various therapists over the years, none of whom helped much, probably because they never got the full story. Paula excelled at secrecy.
Nobody knew that the reason for the dark shadows under her eyes when she was ten was that she had to stay up late each night reciting her twelve times tables twelve times in a row. This, for some reason, would prevent Mittens, the family cat, from being run over. She didn’t even like Mittens all that much.
