Page 68 of Drawing Home
“What I think is that after all these years of hearing basically nothing from you, I don’t need your input now!” she yelled.
“It’s not about what you need. It’s about what Penny needs. And I have a right to be in the loop.”
Be careful what you wish for,Emma thought with a chill. How many times had she lamented being in this parenting thing alone? And now he was here. And it felt all wrong.
“Okay, Mark,” she said evenly. “I’ll keep you in the loop.”Just please leave. Leave this lobby, and leave this town.
He smiled in a way that set her further on edge. “I appreciate that, Emma. Let’s talk later in the week.” He headed for the door, but then he turned around and said, “You know I just want what’s best for Penny, right?”
She nodded. But she didn’t know that. Not at all.
Penny handed Dr. Wang her worksheet. It was a four-part chart logging triggering situations, the obsessions and compulsions that resulted, and her anxiety levels.
“So I see that the bathroom light switches are still a problem,” Dr. Wang said. Her reading glasses were narrow rectangles framed in gold wire. Dr. Wang was such a style icon! And yet annoying.
“Yeah,” Penny said. It was the top of her list. If she had to touch the bathroom light switch before lunch or dinner (trigger), she worried she’d get sick (obsession), and then she had to wash her hands for a full five minutes (compulsion), and her anxiety level was at 10.
“But this is a new one,” she said, reading farther down Penny’s chart. “Tell me what happened at the beach.”
Penny had tried to forget about the compulsive counting at the ocean the day with her friends. But when it happened again with her father, she realized it wasn’t going away.
“I don’t know. I just had the feeling that if the water didn’t touch my feet in a certain way a specific number of times, it would be bad luck.”
“Okay. When you were in this situation, were you able to think at all about some of our bossing-back techniques?”
“I tried telling myself I didn’t have to listen to the OCD, that it was lying to me. That I had to trust myself. That, okay, realistically there was no connection between the water and something bad happening. But it didn’t help.” Penny burst into tears. It was so frustrating!
Dr. Wang passed her a box of tissues. “Penny, I know it’s hard. And you’re going to have good days and bad days. I want you to also remember the floating-by strategy: Don’t overthink it when it’s too difficult. Don’t try to shut the thought down. Just let it pass over you like a cloud without acting on it.”
Penny nodded. In her back pocket, her phone vibrated with a text. “I need to use the bathroom,” she said.
She went in, locked the door, and leaned against it, her heart pounding. As usual, the soap was missing. Dr. Wang never forgot to hide it from her.
Ru coming 2nite?
The party at Mindy’s.
Yes. Telling my mom I’m sleeping at ur place.
Mindy’s house, with the little white pills.
Penny slipped her phone back into one pocket, pulled out her mini–emergency bottle of hand sanitizer from another, and slathered it on until her skin burned.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Printing out the photographs of Henry’s drawings from her phone had been surprisingly easy. Well, easy after she tipped the young man at Walgreens to do it for her. It was amazing what modern technology and a little cash could accomplish. Of course, she would eventually buy all the originals. But that was a different project entirely. She had to prioritize.
Bea spread the images out on the dining-room table. She had drawings from several places: The American Hotel, the library, the art gallery, and the whaling museum—over a dozen prints altogether. The challenge was to organize them into some sort of narrative order. But where to begin?
She stood and paced, then stopped in front of a geometric cube in the corner of the room, one of Henry’s earliest sculptures, done that first summer in Sag Harbor. When Henry refused to go back to Manhattan with her, Bea had thought for sure he would quickly grow stir-crazy and then appear one morning at the Spring Street office as if he’d never left. But that didn’t happen.
In response, Bea filled her calendar, hitting the smaller galleries and underground shows like she hadn’t in years. Every season brought a new crop of young artists to the city, so if Henry wanted to exile himself to the backwoods of Long Island, there were plenty of ambitious young people eager to take his place. Of course, this was no consolation. Henry Wyatt was a once-in-a-generation artist.
When he finally called and invited her to visit, her pride answered for her. “I’m busy,” she said. But Henry knew how to get to her.
“I have some work to show you.”
Fine. If there were paintings to see, she would go.
