Okay, I saw a counselor. A therapist. It was just to help me, I don't know. Kind of keep my life and thoughts in order. So much of my time was still spent thinking about Julia. Sometimes it was called a grief reaction. She'd been dead now five years. And sometimes those five years felt like nothing, like no time had passed at all. I'll still turn over in sleep and reach for her, and I'm still as devastated when I find that she's gone.
Every new thing Angie does, I'm acutely conscious of the fact that Julia is missing it. I try not to think of her, I put other women in her place, but it doesn't work.
One person gets me out of my Julia slump. That would be Craig. Craig is far more screwed up than I'd let myself believe. I was raising the kid on auto-pilot after the whole Albert fiasco. I figured, yeah, Albert abused him and he ran away and nearly killed himself and then Albert dies and that had him a little screwed up. Laughing at the funereal. Insisting on going to that luau dance. But he'd got over it, he dealt with it and he was better. He was dating girls and cheating on them, perfectly normal. He was in a band. He had friends. He was doing, I thought, basically okay.
Well, I was wrong. That was clear as I sat in my therapist's office and Craig sat in a psych ward. I'd missed all the signs. The stealing. The lying. The energy, the delusions, the out of control violent behavior. Each one had got by me.
"It's sometimes harder to see it clearly when you live with the person," she said, crossing her nyloned legs, bouncing her foot that dangled in the air.
"Yeah, well, I didn't see anything," I said, picking at the stuffing that was coming out of the chair.
"It's gradual," she said, and I nodded. Maybe she was right. But Snake noticed it, Caitlin noticed it, even Ashley noticed it. Where was I? Why was my head in the sand?
"Maybe part of it was that you wanted him to be okay, so that's what you saw. A sort of desire fulfillment,"
"Yeah," I was beating myself up. I wished I'd noticed some signs earlier, so that I could have helped him somehow. Instead he just kind of crashed and burned without me to cushion the fall.
"It's not all my fault," I said, "Craig, he pretends things are fine when they're not. He's always done that,"
She nodded at me, but it wasn't a good enough excuse. I knew he did that. It was my job to try and see beyond that. When Snake said something was wrong with him I should have listened.
Failing Craig was like failing Julia. She would have wanted me to look out for him and when I failed in this I failed her. I wanted nothing more than to please her.
"Are you angry with him?" she said, and I watched the leather heeled shoe bounce and bounce.
"Me? Angry with him? No. Why would I be?"
She cleared her throat.
"Well, he stole your credit card and maxed it out. He trashed a hotel room that he used your credit card to get. He lied to you. He hurt you. You're not angry with him at all?"
I swallowed and thought about it, the list of sins she'd brought up. But it wasn't like that. Craig was so lost, so broken and so sick that I couldn't be mad at him. He was my child now, and had been ever since I held him in the cemetery that night. I didn't take the things he did personally.
"No. Not at all,"