“Theresa Marie Blaxton—”
I say her name out loud, using her name the way Flagellants would have lashed themselves to remember the Passion of Christ.
“Theresa Marie Blaxton—”
I may be the only one on earth who remembers her, who remembers to speak her name.
11, 25—
Paperwork for Simka to sign, to transfer my care to Timothy. Visiting him, this morning, I actually wear a suit—to impress him, I think, even though it’s been years since I’ve worn this suit and the fit isn’t quite right anymore. Out of style now, or just too tight over my waist and rear, the jacket shoulders pinched, the collar like a stranglehold. Up the central stairwell to where his secretary, a cousin of his, a plump woman with a thatch of cranberry-red curls and heavy blue eye shadow, buzzes me into the reception room.
“Domi!” she says, “I don’t recall having an appointment for you today. Here, have a brownie—”
“It’s just a social call,” I try to explain, but take a brownie anyway. And another.
Nervous. Twenty minutes or so, drinking a complimentary Keurig. Simka escorts a patient from his office, a teenage boy—fourteen, maybe fifteen—studded with a Mohawk of pins and pierced with chains through his face. They’re talking about woodworking, Simka going on about his Zen theory of the lathe. He has the boy working on a project, a chair it sounds like.
“Excellent, excellent,” says Simka, “but remember, too, that you had trouble making picture frames at first, but now—”
Simka gives the boy his full attention—he asks about something the boy was to have read, The Woodworker’s Guide, Amazon portals linking Add to cart, but when the boy fesses up that he hasn’t yet read the chapters, Simka smiles and nods and says, “Next time, next time—”
Simka’s secretary mentions that I’ve been waiting. He’s surprised to see me, saying, “I didn’t recognize you in the suit!” He shakes my hand and asks how I’ve been. He tells me I look suave, stroking his mustache and grinning, asking if the suit’s new, complimenting the fabric. I tell him the last time I wore this suit was when I eulogized my wife.
“Well, you look good,” he says.
He invites me into his office—the familiar room—and I take my usual sofa seat. Simka doesn’t sit in his usual seat, though, a leather recliner near the sofa, but rather wheels around the ergonomic chair from behind his desk. There’s a potted ficus, but otherwise the room’s bare. Comfortable, though. The furniture’s oversize leather—I’ve been so tired recently I feel I could curl up on the sofa and sleep. He asks how I am and I answer. He offers me more coffee. He asks about Timothy and I tell him everything’s fine. Awkward gaps stud the pleasantries until I realize I’m hesitant, that I’ve been waiting for him to pick up his notebook and pen, the usual signal that our session has started. I’m not his patient anymore—
“I just brought some paperwork for you to sign,” I tell him.
“Oh, yes,” he says, and I hand the sheets over. “You know, you didn’t have to hand deliver these forms—”
He takes them to his desk, flattens out the creases I’ve made in them and reads them over. Everything’s standard, I’ve been told—but Simka is thorough. He removes an ink pen from a small box he keeps on his desk, shakes it twice, then signs in his looping official script. One page and the next. The third. He looks over what he’s done—ending an almost eight-year relationship with a few swipes of his pen.
“Since you’re here, though, I wanted to show you something,” he says, pulling a file from his desk. “When you transferred to Dr. Reynolds, I went through your old paperwork to pass along anything relevant and found some drawings you made. Do you remember these?”
He folds open several sheets of sketch pad paper—of course I remember these drawings, but haven’t thought of them in years. Drawings I’d made during our first sessions together, when I was defensive, cautious to talk with Simka about anything personal. I’d been sent to mandatory counseling by the Employee Assistance Program when the depression and drugs began to affect my work—my case was slotted to Simka. At first, our sessions were largely silent on my part, businesslike—Simka asking questions about the nature of my work, my work environment, wondering if I got along with my coworkers, with my boss, fishing for reasons why I might be having so much trouble. I rarely answered, or was vague. One afternoon several sets of crayons and a few pads of newsprint were spread out on an activity table in his office.
“I didn’t bring these for you,” I remember him telling me when I noticed the art supplies. “I run an art therapy group for teenagers. After-school stuff—”
I remember I told him that my wife used to do some art therapy as a volunteer at a place called the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild. It was the first time I’d mentioned Theresa to him.
“We’ve been making memory maps,” Simka explained. “You draw the house you grew up in and write in everything you can remember about it, every detail. You’d be surprised how much you remember when you’re filling in a memory map, the specificity of the details. The kids never have enough room to write everything they want, so we journal, too—”
“What’s the point of all this?” I think I asked him.
“It helps you remember,” said Simka. “It helps you to understand yourself. The memory maps help people understand what is important to them, what they’re passionate about—it helps them remember significant signposts that they may have ignored, it helps them recover. Then you start drawing in the neighborhood you grew up in, sometimes on a separate sheet of paper. Everything you remember—”
I don’t remember how, exactly, he coaxed me into picking up a crayon to draw—I may have even suggested it, or maybe I just started drawing—but that’s how we spent our sessions for quite some time. Here’s the house in Bloomfield where I grew up, a brick three-bedroom row house, the building almost a hundred fifty years old when I’d lived there, my handwriting on the map impossible to read now, but I remember describing the crab apple tree in the back lot; the plank of wood my father had nailed between the branches to serve as a little bench up there; the shells of locusts left on the bark of the cherry tree; my dog, Bozworth—a German shepherd. Here’s my drawing of Bozworth—noodles of black and brown crayon, hardly recognizable as a dog if I hadn’t labeled him in pencil. I used to walk him down by the tracks and we’d stand aside on the gravel slopes to watch trains trundle by. Fourteen years old when we put him down. Simka hadn’t even known I was from Pittsburgh until I drew the rivers.
“I do remember these,” I tell him. Here’s one of Phipps Conservatory, where Theresa worked in the education department—I tried to draw in the walkways through the gardens, the vanilla bean trees, the butterfly forest and the café where we used to meet. Another map, labeled The Georgian—Room 208. Our shelves filled with vinyl records and books, our cupboards filled with exotic ingredients for Theresa’s cooking. Boxes of poetry manuscripts people had sent for my fledgling poetry line, Confluence Press, all unread when they burned. A few programming books, when I was studying coding to make Confluence Press viable as an e-book enterprise. Here’s the second bedroom, converted into Theresa’s office. I opened up to Simka through these drawings, and eventually I could talk freely without them. Simka had helped me immensely those early years—I used to collect things, back then. Hoard things. I used to buy crates full of old newspapers—anything printed from before the bomb. Simka helped me realize I couldn’t hold on to the past in that way, that I indulged in unhealthy obsessions that were bankrupting me and contributing to the squalor I lived in. “Let go,” he’d told me. He stabilized me.