sixty-six stories

It rained so much she began to wonder if she would ever see the sun again. Sometimes she thought this temperamental weather existed only for her, that maybe everyone else wandered around with the sun on their faces; that maybe she was somehow absorbing everybody else's storms. She didn't mind. She sat in the comfortable chair by the window and watched the rain stream in fits and starts down the glass. She'd never been this high before, not even on the cliff. Portland spread wide below her, a tangle of ivy and rain-worn concrete. The cars threading across the bridges looked like doodlebugs.

The man in the rose-colored sweater sat with both feet on the floor, hands clasped in his lap, and studied Eleanor patiently. She wondered how many first sessions went precisely this way, and if it was advantageous in any way, or if this was more like the slow, strategic dance of two bucks before the clatter of their collision, all spittle and rippling muscle. She resisted the urge to smile as she tried to decide: if he charged, could she take him?

He spoke first, fifty-five minutes into the session, precisely. "Eleanor, I want you to understand two things," he began, and he unfolded his hands and placed them on his knees. She didn't dislike him, or her mother for bringing her here. (Her mother was in the lobby, pretending to read Elle and U.S. News, staring through the magazines, the floor, the sixty-five floors beneath her feet, the foundation of the building, staring straight through the ground, through the core of the earth and through China, her unfocused stare tied to some shapeless nothing a hundred billion miles away).

"Two things," he repeated, and she listened. "The first," he said, hooking his leg over his knee, "is that you can say absolutely anything you like in these conversations. You can tell me things you've never told anybody else, or you can say nothing at all. You'll never waste my time, or your own, by being here."

Eleanor nodded.

"The second thing is: you aren't crazy. Disassociate yourself from the stigma of therapy as the outside world sees it. That you are here does not mean that I think, or that your mother thinks, you are crazy. Do you understand?"

She nodded again.

"Our first session is almost over. Would you like to say anything?"

She considered this, considered his comfortable silence and the gentle break of waves on the hulls of the ships navigating the Willamette River. She liked this room, she thought. She imagined throwing open the window and leaping out into the thin, damp air.

"Whenever you're ready," he said gently.

Eleanor glanced at the clock: sixty seconds remained in the session. He noticed this, leaned forward, said, "You're my last appointment of the day, Eleanor. It's your first session." He shrugged. "We'll bend the rules just this once."

She said, "My mother is worried that I'm crazy."

He interrupted. "Remember the second thing I told you?"

"I'm not crazy," she went on. "I'm sure of that. Mom is afraid I'm losing my mind because of what happened to me in the coma. She calls it 'the coma' all the time. Everyone else calls it 'the incident,' like naming it what it is makes it more horrific."

"It must've been terrifying to you."

"It wasn't terrifying. I wasn't scared. The doctors have told me that they can't prove comatose patients are still aware of things -- outside influences, sure, they can prove that a person in a coma is helped by the sound of, say, their dad's voice, or a massage or something. But what they're telling me is that I shouldn't be able to remember the things I say I remember. What they're not telling me is that everybody thinks I'm lying about what I say I remember."

"What do you remember about your coma, Eleanor?"

She closed her eyes. "This is the part you'll want to record. It's great."

She told him everything she remembered, and when she opened her eyes again, his face was as blank as it had been before. And Eleanor recognized a current beneath that drawn face, the same twitch of disbelief and impatience that her father exhibited, that her mother tried so hard to hide, the same weariness that snagged on everyone's face no matter how hard they tried to swallow it. She reminded herself that she was just a kid, felt shamed by her arrogance, her cockiness, the recorder statement she'd made. She guessed that in the locked cabinets behind the doctor's desk were hundreds and thousands of similar cassette tapes. She was nothing new, after all. People swore they'd seen God every day, or that they were God.

But Jack believed her. She decided then and there, impetuously, that she would never share this with anyone but him, ever. She was wrong, of course, as children who close all doors but one often are.