Page 75 of She's Like the Wind
She nodded, leaned back in her chair, and for a long moment said nothing.
“I have no idea why I’m talking to you,” I blurted out.
She grinned. “Would it help,bébé, if I told you I have a PhD in psychology?”
I blinked at her and then had to close my jaw. “What?”
She rotated her neck from side to side, and sighed elaborately. “Dr. Jane Lapointe. PhD. Clinical psychology. Tulane. Private practice uptown.”
I looked around the store.
“That voodoo auntie thing? That’s just my side hustle.” She winked. “You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to get men into therapy unless they think they’re being hexed.”
I let out a soft laugh. “I thought the drink was hexed.”
“Just your garden variety amaro—well, literally garden variety because it’s homemade.” She pulled a tiny Moleskine notebook from under a tarot deck and flipped it open. “Now that you’ve confessed to my alter ego, you’ve officially had your intake session,bébé.”
“What’s your diagnosis?”
“Have you ever been in therapy before?”
I shook my head.
“Well then, let me burst your bubble. Therapy is a process where you learn more about yourself so you can live authentically and well. What therapy is not isTylenol that you can pop andvoila,the headache is gone.”
My eyes narrowed in confusion.
“Now, what I can tell you is that you are textbook grief-avoidant, romantically dissociative, and emotionally constipated. But you’re trying. I’ll give you that.”
I let out a rusty laugh. “So…I should probably make an appointment with Dr. Lapointe?”
She smirked and shrugged. “Yes. You can come to my office on Prytania. Or you can come back here and spill your guts next to Baron Samedi and my grandma’s old spice rack. Whatever gets you talking.”
She wandered to one of the shelves and came back with a small muslin pouch of herbs. She dropped them on the table in front of me.
“Let me leave you with this, Gage, what you’re feeling isnormal. Youarenormal. You think you’re broken, fucked up…you’re not. Death is traumatic, and how you lost Lia is not something you just get over—healing requires effort, which I think you’re finally making.”
I picked up the bag of herbs and sniffed it. Rosemary. Sage. And other things….
“When we grieve, we let the dead lead us deeper into the woods and forget that the living don’t need us haunting them; they need us to come home.”
“Which is what Naomi needs?” I mused.
Her features softened with tenderness. “You know how they say in airplanes you have to put the mask onyourself first? Right now,youneed to heal, and then you’ll be in a place to heal Naomi from the hurt you caused her.”
I walked out of Auntie Griselle/Mama Lune/Dr. Jane Lapointe’s shop with a pouch of herbs (for tea, it’ll be cleansing, bébé) in my pocket, and a thousand new thoughts crowding my brain, the main one that what I was feeling was grief and it was something I could heal from. My problems weren’t exclusive to me, they werenormal.
I had to give it to Delphi.
If he’d suggested seeing his aunt, who’s a therapist, I’d have flipped him off—hell, I still didn’t know how he managed to get me to see his Voodoo Auntie Griselle, but I was grateful he had.
CHAPTER 26
Naomi
Soft jazz played from the record player in the corner—Ella tonight, all velvet and ache—and the afternoon light filtered through the window, catching on the strands of pearls I’d draped along the edge of the display table.
Aire Noire smelled like orange blossom, beeswax polish, and the faintest trace of powdery perfume from a scarf someone tried on earlier.
