Holiday Work In many families, Graham had gathered, it was customary for late December and early January to be a time of togetherness. In his family, however, this had never been the case. His mother saw fewer clients, he thought, during the winter holiday than she did during the summer one, but the winter holiday clients tended to be her worst cases.
“Someone’s crazy again?” he asked, entering the kitchen and finding only his father and sister on barstools near the polished granite island where they ate most of their family meals. The vast wooden apparatuses of the dining room were reserved for dinner parties, when his mother was around long enough to throw one.
“Graham,” his father said, a note of warning in his voice. “You know your mother wouldn’t like to hear you talk about her clients that way.”
“It’s not my fault,” protested Graham. “What else would you call them?”
“Your mother’s clients.”
“I don’t know,” said Claire, slicing her pancakes – breakfast for lunch, then. That made sense. Dad did things like this when he or Mom or the two of them together felt some burst of guilt about the frequency with which they were essentially absent without Graham or Claire’s leave, anyway. Graham wasn’t exactly sure why they sometimes felt guilty and sometimes did not, but so it went. He now got to basically have cake and call it lunch, so he was going to count the win and ignore the rest. “I guess some of them are whatever, but some of them have got to be actually crazy. Like – not being mean, they just – are.”
“Like this one she’s had to work with all year,” said Graham, taking encouragement from Claire’s support as he went over to the stove and began awkwardly shuffling pancakes onto his own plate. “The one she schedules as M,” he added, referring to the initial his mother used in her day planners to refer to the apparently worse-than-usual head case she actually had to travel to see twice a month at this point. He and Claire had already been thoroughly scolded and punished for breaking into Mom’s work bag last month and flipping through her planner, so there was no harm in admitting he knew that M was a thing. “Do you even know what kind of client could get her to do that?”
“You know I don’t know any more about the clients than you do,” said Dad. “Confidentiality.”
“What is even wrong with that one, anyway?” asked Claire.
“Claire, what did I just say?”
* * * * * * * *
“Did you hear what I just said?”
The snow was falling thickly outside the window, giving Nathaniel something to focus on as he avoided looking at Dr. Greene. He tried to follow the patterns of any given section of snow as it fell into view and then toward the ground, but they swirled in and out of formation in such disorder that it proved nearly impossible – which, of course, was all to the good, as it gave him the excuse to keep looking, keep trying.
“Nathaniel?” prompted Dr. Greene, seemingly unfazed by Nathaniel’s decision to swear and walk away in response to her very first question of the session. Nathaniel drew in a sharp breath, closing his eyes as the same annoyance rushed back, breaking his focus on the snow.
“I heard you perfectly,” he said through his teeth. “My ears are in perfect working order.” He ignored the fact that they had had sessions before where he had gotten so upset, or at least so occupied with controlling himself, that he hadn’t noticed when he was spoken to. “I’m just controlling my annoyance at being asked such a stupid question. In what possible universe would I possibly have improved any from last time, when this time is now?”
Now – back at home, but not really, as this was not, and never would be, his home. Now – almost exactly one year since his mother had betrayed him. Now – when it was Christmas, a holiday he had detested since he was nine, though he had previously never admitted this to anyone. Now, though, he was considering doing so, because he could tell that he was going to have to give up something if he wanted any chance of not being goaded into a proper rage by her, and that seemed as harmless as anything he could think of.
“Did you try any of the strategies for managing your feelings that we talked about last month?” asked Dr. Greene.
“Of course,” said Nathaniel, struggling not to roll his eyes. He was fairly sure he would have said the same thing to her no matter what, and that she knew this, but this time it wasn’t even really a lie. “You’ll forgive me, though, if the loss of my mother is a slightly larger issue for me than your thought-framing nonsense is really equipped to handle.”
“Despite your best efforts.”
“What?”
“Nathaniel, we’ve been working together for months,” said Dr. Greene. “You seem very aware of the causes of your negative feelings. We’ve been through many assignments now. Now, you could have just said that the techniques we’ve been trying lately – and all the ones we’ve tried before – are nonsense because they aren’t working…but is it possible that you want to stay angry?”
Nathaniel glared at her. “You think I want to feel like this?” he asked.
“No,” said Dr. Greene. “But there is such a thing as choosing between two undesirable options. Most things exist – “
“On a continuum,” interrupted Nathaniel, repeating the words he had heard too often before. “But please, Doctor – tell me what I could possibly think was worse than feeling like this?”
“You tell me,” said Dr. Greene. “There are a lot of negative emotions we feel as human beings. Grief. Loneliness. Helplessness. Fear. Do any of those sound worse to you than anger?”
Nathaniel grimaced and looked back out the window. “Yes,” he said reluctantly. “Actually – all of them do.”
* * * * * * * *
It was always hard to tell with Nathaniel, but by the time they parted ways, Lillian was cautiously inclined to think that her session with the boy had been somewhat productive. Only somewhat, true, and speaking relatively to some of their other sessions – but somewhat.
As she always did after sessions, she paused to review her notes, toying with the tiny gold fleur-de-lis pendant she always wore as she checked over them for anything she had forgotten to write down and thought was worth including, or which she had written down in the moment and realized now that she needed to expunge to ensure confidentiality, especially since that incident last month with her planner.
She had thought for a while that the customary routes of anxiety and anger management counselling might not be working with Nathaniel, and today’s session largely proved her right. He had responded to the techniques well enough when it came to the worst of his anxiety – his careful dodging of certain questions during their bimonthly sessions while he’d been at Sonora made her think that he was still having panic attacks, but that they were no longer as disabling as they had been for him before he became her patient, which she supposed was the best one could really hope for under these circumstances, at least for now – but the lessening of the anxiety seemed to have only allowed room for the anger to expand, and anger was harder to work with in some ways. Nathaniel had, however reluctantly and however much he had fought her at each step of the process, largely accepted that the spiraling thoughts which left him blind or weeping were irrational and had put in an effort to learning to get them under some degree of control, but he clung stubbornly to the idea that the thoughts that pushed him into anger were entirely correct and rational thoughts to have.
Lillian felt a surge of frustration of her own. It was impossible to tell for sure if he had an organic anxiety, a chemical imbalance, or if the parents had simply kept him walking on so many razors’ edges for so long that his brain simply didn’t know any other way to respond to the world, but the boy was quite clearly depressed now on top of that and using rage as a coping mechanism – a way to push himself out of the fog of his symptoms enough to appear more or less functional, despite the fact that his charting clearly indicated that he was still struggling, and at the moment, with the anniversary of his mother’s disownment upon them, was rapidly sliding toward losing control of his anger again. She had told his uncle before that he ought to be medicated, and she supposed she would tell Mordue that again, though she didn’t expect it to do any more good than it had the first time. Damn, damn stubborn purebloods….
Purebloods, however, had always been that way, and most of them probably would be, right up until the day they inbred themselves out of existence. She knew this. She breathed in, acknowledged her frustration at seeing the problem and having her hands tied in a way which made it impossible for her to implement a major step toward a solution, and breathed out, letting it go.
She put a star beside two notes. First, that the brother was an increasingly large concern for her patient, who was as concerned about Jeremy’s quiet now as he had been by the violence earlier in the year, and who felt guilty about the fact he didn’t feel he had it in him right now to help the younger boy. Second, that she needed to pull together the research on Plans B she had been working on for some time. That done, she took several more deep breaths, consciously relaxing muscle groups from head to toe, one after another. She visualized the conversation being placed on a carpet and then sent away into the clouds, leaving her mind. Dr. Lillian Greene opened her eyes after this exercise, but by the time she stood up, she was Lili Osbrook.
“Os?” she called as she reentered her house. Her common-law husband’s name was James, but socially, he was generally Os, just as she was generally Lili. Os called out from the living room, then met her in the door as she entered it.
“Right on time, as always,” he said, giving her a kiss. “Did you have a good day at work?”
“Not bad,” said Lillian. “Four clients today. Some sessions were more productive than others, but there were no real disasters. How was your day?”
“Leisurely,” said Os, who had taken two weeks away from the company he owned for the holidays, spending more time with the kids to make up for Lillian spending less. “We had breakfast for lunch today.”
“Oh, my,” said Lillian. “I’m sure you made sure there won’t be any dessert with supper now, right?”
“Sure he did,” said Graham, grinning from where he was playing chess with his sister, and Claire laughed. “Hi, Mom.”
“Hello,” said Lillian. “Who’s winning?” she asked, looking at the board, and smiling to herself as Graham and Claire began to argue over the answer to that question, giving her time to go fix a drink.