Fifty Minutes
Disclaimer: I don't own The OC or any of its characters. They are the sole property of FOX, Josh Schwartz, etc.
Description: Kirsten goes to rehab; Seth goes to therapy. Set in between seasons 2 and 3. Mostly dialogue, kind of a character/relationship study. Probably a one shot, but could end up a two-shot.
Lengthy author's note that you can feel free to skip: I'm a big fan of The OC and it will always have a special place in my heart, but I struggled with some of the directions it went in after Season 1, and how some of the characters evolved or didn't evolve. I consider myself a cafeteria OC fan, in that I've picked and chosen which parts I keep in my head as canon, and which I've kind of dismissed as "not really The OC", if that makes sense.
I guess one way I've coped with the parts I haven't liked is to send Seth to therapy, in between some of the other fanfictions I've been working on. I think some of his misbehaviors and inconsistencies in his character were more related to plot devices and generating tension, but I found it interesting to try to think about his character through the lens of the child of someone with an alcohol use disorder. Probably because of that, the story focuses more on Kirsten's drinking than everything that happened with Trey.
As with real life therapy, none of this is to demonize Kirsten (or any parent). She's actually one of the characters who I think evolves most in a positive way. Kirsten in Season 1 had a few moments that I found really striking and kind of inspired this story. Two of those moments were Kirsten's response to the Oliver fallout and Kirsten responding to Sandy wanting to move everyone out of Newport.
Anyway, that's enough outta me.
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"So…" Ruth trails off and adjusts her forest green cardigan on her shoulders. She smiles warmly at Seth, probably waiting to see if he'll jump in, before swiftly realizing that he won't. "What's on your mind today?" She takes a small sip of her coffee and leans back in her chair, settling in.
Seth shrugs. He looks down and notices a loose thread hanging from the hem of his t-shirt. He stares intently at the thread, feeling his heart beating a too fast rhythm in his chest. He hates that he's nervous.
Ruth nods, smile never wavering. "You seem pretty closed off today," she observes, tilting her head slightly, trying to catch Seth's eye.
Seth shrugs again. In avoiding Ruth's gaze, he glances down at himself and sees that his arms are crossed tightly across his chest, and his fists are clenched under his armpits. He suddenly becomes aware of the knotty tension in his shoulders, hunched practically to his ears. He feels his muscles unclench as he uncrosses his arms and slides them to a resting position on his lap.
"I'm not quite sure I know what you're referring to," he says, arching one eyebrow, grudgingly amused.
Ruth gives him a knowing smile and gives another small nod, waiting for him to start.
He hates starting.
He sighs, fingers unconsciously moving to start fiddling with the loose thread on his shirt. He hates loose threads. When he finds them, he must immediately go find a pair of scissors, or he'll inevitably start pulling it out with his fingers. Sometimes the thread tears free easily, no harm done. Sometimes it leads to a hole in his shirt and a lecture from his mother.
Impulse control can be hard.
He stares at the string and addresses his next words to the string, because it's easier than looking at his therapist.
He doesn't like having a therapist. Ryan doesn't have to have a therapist, and his brother is in a coma.
It's not like Seth wants to trade lives or places with Ryan—he gets how lucky he, Seth Cohen, is and has been, in so many ways—but it would be nice if his dad would walk on eggshells a little more around him, feel just a little more reluctant to tell him what to do with his mental health.
Ryan can say no to therapy and brood in the pool house in peace, but Seth has to sit in a therapist's office spending fifty minutes a week desperately evading Ruth's perfectly reasonable and perfectly kindly attempts at connecting with him. It's not fair, even if Ruth is kind of nice to look at, in a moderately disturbing, hot aging Miss Frizzle fashion.
"Seth…?"
Seth closes his eyes and leans backs on the couch, interlacing his fingers behind his head.
"My dad won't let me stop coming here until I talk to you," he mumbles, face flushing slightly. He opens his eyes and darts a quick look at Ruth. "Like, actually talk to you or whatever." He rolls his eyes.
"Ah." Ruth gives a sympathetic wince. "So, not just about comic books then?"
"Yup." Seth snickers. "Sorry, as I know we were just about halfway through my analysis of the latest Legion."
"So, you have to talk to me…so that you don't have to talk to me anymore."
"Correct." Seth scuffs the toe of his shoes on the carpet. He swallows a lump in his throat.
He continues to hate that he is so nervous.
"I, uh, I don't really know how to start," he admits. He takes a deep breath. "I know I'm supposed to talk about my mom or whatever, but I don't know what to say." He twirls the loose thread around his right index finger. "Or if there's anything to say about it. Like, she's in rehab. It sucks. What else is there?"
"And your dad is saying you have to say stuff about it, more than just that it sucks."
Seth holds his hands out, palms up, as if presenting a sight to behold. "And so here we both are."
"So, what do we do?"
"I dunno." Seth scratches the back of his neck. "I don't wanna mess with your methods or whatever, but could you maybe give me somewhere to start? Like ask a question or something?" His mouth twists into a small smile. "I'll actually try to answer it this time. Although no promises, of course."
"Starting can be hard." Ruth takes a long sip of coffee, looking thoughtful. "Okay, your dad said you didn't want to participate in your mom's intervention initially. Let's start there."
"Hmm, pass," Seth replies, head bobbing, brow furrowed in mock consideration.
Ruth snickers. She doesn't say anything, but she doesn't look fazed either. She raises her eyebrows at Seth, a playful challenge shining in her eyes.
Seth holds up his hands in surrender. "Fine, okay," he mutters. "What about the intervention?" His mouth twitches at the word. He realizes how much he's been avoiding so many of the words associated with that day, with his mother, with where his mother is right now. And already in the span of just a few minutes, he's gone and said both "rehab" and "intervention."
"What were you thinking and feeling when the idea of an intervention was brought up?"
"I guess I was in denial or whatever." Seth frowns.
Ruth smiles gently at him. "Seth, I want you to try to separate all of the stuff you know about addiction, or all of the stuff you've been talking about to try to make sense of everything." Seth starts to speak, but she holds up a hand. "Bear with me here, okay? I know it's hard to do that, but I want to really focus on what you thought and felt at that time, not what you'd label those thoughts and feelings as now. Does that make sense?"
Seth nods, resigned.
"So, what thoughts and feelings do you remember?"
Seth leans forward on the couch. Ruth has one of those Zen garden mini-sandboxes on her coffee table. He grabs one of the wooden rakes and starts playing with it, tapping it against the palm of his right hand.
"I was confused," he says finally.
"Can you say more about that?"
"I just…" He keeps rapping the tiny wooden rake against his hand. "I didn't get why it was happening now, ya know?"
"As opposed to…?"
Seth leans further forward and starts slowly raking an erratic non-pattern through the sand, swerving around seashell and rock obstacles. He imagines his eyes as twin lasers boring a hole through the little wooden box.
"She always drank," he says quietly, voice barely above a whisper. He clears his throat and glances up at Ruth before looking away. "I mean, not always," he clarifies emphatically. "But she always drank when she was stressed." He makes a large loopy figure-eight in the sand. "I didn't get what was so different about this time. I knew she was drinking more, but she was also more stressed." He scratches at the bottom of the sandbox with the tines of the rake. "I didn't get why we couldn't just deal with it like we always did."
"Okay, so you were confused. We'll look at that. But first, any other feelings coming up?"
"Bad."
"Can you say more about that bad feeling?"
"I just..." Seth pauses. "Guilty. I didn't like the whole thing, my dad inviting someone into the house to talk to my mom like that." He tries another loopy figure eight in the sand. "She's like this uber-WASP, really intense about privacy and decorum. A stranger in her house telling her she's fucked up is basically her worst nightmare." He blinks. "I didn't want to embarrass her," he admits, voice cracking slightly. "Or like, scare her."
"It felt like you were betraying her? Exposing her?"
"Yeah." Seth swallows thickly. "She said once that she always used to try to hide the bad stuff she'd done." He shakes his head "She said she was mean enough to herself about what she'd done wrong, she didn't need anyone else piling on."
"So maybe it wasn't just about embarrassing her in front of a stranger, there's that public exposure element, but it sounds like there's another element, feeling like she was going to feel ashamed, or worse about her drinking than maybe she already did?"
"I guess."
"You said you were confused as to why your family wasn't handling her drinking like you'd done in the past. How did you all handle it in the past?"
"It didn't really seem like a problem we were handling. Or it wasn't a problem then. I don't really know when it became one." Seth picks up a few of the seashells and moves them to the other end of the Zen garden. "It was like a joke, like it was some tv wine mom kinda thing."
"Played for laughs?"
Seth nods. "One time when I was five, I guess my dad said my grandfather was coming to visit, and I immediately went to the wine rack and came back with a bottle of Merlot for my mom." Seth rolls his eyes. "My parents told that story all the time, like it was the funniest thing ever. They'd call wine 'Grandpa Nichol juice,' stuff like that." He frowns. "And she thought it was funny too, like she didn't seem mad about it or anything."
"No one seemed worried."
Seth nods. "And then there'd be other stuff." He starts raking long slow lines in the sand. "Really cliche stuff. Like if it were just her and me at home, she'd pour her third drink or something and look at me and say 'If your father asks, this is my first.' But like it was another stupid wine mom joke..."
"Not like it was some big dark secret?"
"Yeah, and there'd be jokes about it for awhile, but then whatever was bugging her would pass, and it would be normal again." He pauses. "You know, no more throwing plates or yelling, just a glass of wine or two at dinner, that kind of thing."
"How do you feel, thinking back on all this?"
Seth snorts. "Stupid."
"Stupid?"
"I went along with the joke." Seth shoots Ruth a small, bitter smile.
"So you missed that there was an issue, and if you hadn't missed it..."
"Maybe I wouldn't have been so surprised by the whole intervention thing." Seth pauses. "Or lied about her drinking when she asked me to." He scratches at the sand with the rake. "I didn't even know I was covering for her," he mumbles. "Sometimes the covering for her was part of the joke, but talking to my dad, it seems like sometimes it wasn't, even a long time ago. I mean, it sounds like there were other times he was worried about it; it just never got as bad as it is now."
There's a moment of quiet. Seth becomes very aware of the ticking of the clock behind him, and the sweat gathering in his palms.
"Families with addiction, or with some level of dysfunction, they tend to have some pretty hard and fast but unspoken rules. It sounds like one of your family's rules was that the drinking couldn't be acknowledged unless it was as a, like you said, stupid wine mom kind of thing." Ruth gives Seth a steady look.
Seth shrugs, noncommittally, eyes drifting back to the miniature sandbox.
"And so the intervention wasn't just a surprise, it was breaking the unspoken rule you followed for many years. Ultimately though, you did join the intervention."
"Yeah, well…Ryan thought she needed help, and I figured with everything with his mother, he'd know better than me." Seth pauses with the rake, frowning. "And she was drinking all the time, not just when something happened."
"So that felt different?"
"Yeah, I mean, there's stress drinking maybe, and then there's needing to be hammered all the time." Seth winces at his own choice of words and plunges the rake back into the sand. His dad keeps telling him that this stuff shouldn't be embarrassing to talk about, but it just keeps...being embarrassing to talk about.
"Do you remember any time when you were younger that her drinking felt different? Like it wasn't a joke?"
Seth shakes his head automatically.
"Really think about it," Ruth encourages. "Families rewrite their history sometimes, and it sounds like things got quickly covered over with humor, but often there can be a few moments when the veil is lifted a little."
There's a beat of silence, Seth raking away in the little sandbox, which is actually pretty fucking therapeutic, he thinks, and wondering how long he has to pretend to think about it before Ruth will believe him when he says no, it was all a big laugh riot for roughly sixteen years at the Cohen household, when suddenly he stops. His hand stops raking, and he stares at it for a beat, before forcing himself to start up again. He knows without looking up that Ruth has seen the whole thing because she is totally not an idiot and actually really smart and annoyingly observant, and he suddenly wishes he'd shopped around a little to find a therapist who was more of an idiot.
"I see that you've got something," Ruth says gently, although Seth thinks he detects just a hint of triumph in her voice. "Why don't we look at it?"
Seth shrugs in what he hopes is a casual fashion. "My dad said that my mom drank a lot after my grandma died. I don't really remember, but I'll take his word for it." He glances up at Ruth and shoots her a lopsided smile. "I haven't known the man to lie."
Ruth lets the statement hang in the air for a moment before narrowing her eyes at Seth in exaggerated skepticism. "I suspect that there was something else you were thinking of. You looked a little surprised, like maybe something popped into your head that you didn't expect."
Dropping the rake on the coffee table, Seth leans back and crosses his arms across his chest. "You're pretty good at this," he admits with just a touch of a pout in his tone.
"Yeah, well, not my first rodeo," Ruth responds, snickering and leaning back in her easy chair.
Seth's arms drop again to his lap, annoyed but semi-disarmed by Ruth's whole demeanor. He'd expected someone a little hokier and more woo-woo, but she's actually kind of funny and she says things pretty matter-of-factly, not like it's some big emotional thing. Still, he continues to wish he'd shopped around for an idiot, or at least someone a little harder to want to talk to.
"So what is it you want to know?" He asks, picking up the rake again. If he's going to bare his soul to another human being, he's for sure not going to do it while looking directly at them.
"Well, I'd like to explore whatever it was that came to mind for you. A memory, I take it?"
Seth nods reluctantly.
"So let's look at it. Sometimes those early memories of a parent's substance use can tell us a lot." Ruth pauses. "And I'd like you to try to tell the memory like it's a story, but in the present tense, like it's happening right now. Don't worry if you mess up at times; I know it's a little awkward to get used to." Ruth pauses again. "That all sound doable?"
"No, but fine."
"Let's start with how old you are, and then you can go from there. You can fill in any context that feels necessary, just remember to try to keep things in the present tense." Seth glances up and notices Ruth settling back into her chair.
Seth sighs and runs a hand through his hair. He's pretty sure he's not going to get full credit for therapy if he doesn't go along with this. And maybe he's just slightly curious about what it means, the memory ping-ponging around in his brain right now.
"Okay, so I'm 8 or maybe 9 years old," Seth starts, raking methodical lines in the sand. "I come home from school, and I go into the kitchen for some juice or something. I say hi to my mom, and she tells me that Rosa found my new jacket buried in the back of my closet, and just like, covered in mud. I'd been trying to hide it, but I swear, there's no privacy when someone deep cleans your house every day." Seth's jaw twitches slightly. He hates that he's nervous, but he's never told anyone this story before, and if he thought he'd felt embarrassed talking about his mom's drinking problem, well...
"I mean, I know it's the most ridiculous thing to complain about, having a maid or whatever, but I never felt comfortable building up any kind of a respectable porn stash, because that woman would've for sure been able to smoke it out."
Ruth clears her throat and Seth looks up to see her giving him a pointed yet somehow kindly look.
It's like everyone can convey everything with a look these days except Seth Cohen.
Seth takes a deep breath and tries to steer himself back on-track. "So my mom is waving this jacket in my face and demanding to know what happened." He pauses, face flushing. "And I tell her this big story about like, trying to pole vault with a giant stick I found and falling in the tug-o-war pit at school and trying to get up but I just kept falling and getting muddier and muddier." Seth rolls his eyes. "And she gives me this whole lecture on being more careful with my stuff." Seth realizes he's raking with one hand and playing with the loose thread of his t-shirt with the other, and he wonders just how unhinged he's looking right now. He goes quiet.
"Okay, and what happens next?" Ruth probes.
Seth closes his eyes. "Then the phone rings. My mom picks it up, and she just keeps looking at me. She gets this like intense face that she gets sometimes when she's scary pissed. And she says something like 'thanks for letting me know,' and then she hands me the phone." Seth has decided that he can never look at Ruth's face again. This whole thing is entirely too mortifying.
"So you take the phone..."
"So I take the phone and it's this kid, Chip, and his mom. I guess his mom is making him apologize to me for throwing my jacket in the mud...and I listen to his phony apology and I watch my mom open the fridge and take out a bottle of wine. And she like..." he trails off, eyes still shut.
"She...?"
"She pours this huge glass of wine in this really intensely angry way and then she grabs the bottle and just leaves the room." Seth lets out a frustrated breath, eyes popping open. "I'm sorry...I'm not telling this right. I'm making her sound horrible, or like she was doing something on purpose-"
"Let's try not to editorialize right now, okay?" Ruth interjects firmly. "We're just looking at what you're seeing and feeling in this moment. Try not to get too caught up on what's correct or fair here." Ruth pauses. "So you lie about what happened to your jacket, and the lie gets exposed pretty quickly, and then your mom seems upset with you."
Seth nods slowly.
"And how do you feel?"
"I feel like I made her sad." Seth frowns. "We'd moved to Newport when my grandma got sick, and it was supposed to be temporary, but then we stayed after she died. But I didn't have any friends and I got dumped on a lot by other kids. My dad wanted to move back to Berkeley-he didn't really like Newport either-, and my mom used to get mad at him for taking my side, or she'd get mad at me for taking his side, whichever. She used to say things to me like 'You like your big bedroom here better than that tiny one back in Berkeley, right?'." Seth rolls his eyes. "And there was only one answer she was looking for to that question, ya know? So I tried to hide how bad it was at school, because it made her sad or disappointed in me or something, and because it just made my parents fight, which was really annoying to be in the middle of."
"So you felt like you made her sad, but what were you feeling in that moment, when you found out who was calling?"
"I felt horrible, like I'd done something really bad." It had been deeper than that, really, a white hot shame that had spread through his chest as he listened to Chip's bored, half-hearted apology. He'd gone up to his room afterwards and hid in his closet until his dad had come home and made him come down for dinner. "But I was also mad." Seth's mouth curls into a surprised frown.
"Mad?"
"She knew I was lying," Seth says sharply. He takes a deep breath. "And I know it sounds crazy, but she wanted me to lie. She asked me what happened hoping I'd lie about it. She wasn't mad because I lied to her; she was mad because Chip's mom called, which wasn't even my fault." Seth closes his eyes and leans back on the couch, abandoning the Zen garden for the moment. "And then she just stares at me the whole time she's pouring her wine, like she needs me to know how badly I've fucked up. By getting beaten up, by her finding out, whichever." He pauses. "Or maybe she wasn't staring at me the whole time, I don't know if that really happened."
"But she didn't try to hide that she was upset, or that she was drinking."
Seth nods.
"And it felt like she was saying that you'd fucked up, like you didn't protect her?"
Seth shrugs. "More or less."
"It sounds like it felt like your job to protect her from your problems."
"I don't think she meant it to be like that," Seth says softly. He stares back down at the loose thread on his shirt, hating it. "She was really stressed out. She hated fighting with my dad so much." He pauses. "And she wanted to know that I was happy and okay, that I liked school, that I got along okay with the other kids."
"She wanted to know all of those things, even if none of them were true?" Ruth leans forward, looking at Seth with that steady, matter-of-fact look that she gets.
"I guess."
"And she wanted you to tell her those things, even if none of them were true? Even if you didn't get along with the other kids, even if you didn't like school?" She pauses. "Even if you weren't happy or okay?"
"Maybe." Seth shrugs and swallows thickly, feeling heat behind his eyes.
"That sounds pretty lonely," Ruth says simply, leaning forward and holding out a box of tissues.
Seth waves away the tissues. He's not sure why he's even getting weirdly choked up. He's not mad at his mom about stuff that happened almost a decade ago. He clears his throat.
"When bad things happen, my mom likes things to go back to normal right away," he says thoughtfully, feeling like he's pivoting away from less comfortable emotional territory. "She wants everyone to meet her there, in The Normal."
"Sometimes you needed things before you could join her in The Normal." Ruth sits back slightly in her chair. "Sometimes things can't really go back to The Normal."
"Yeah, I guess. And she didn't care how you got there, or it didn't seem like she did. When my dad wanted to move again, she would always remind him that he'd agree to stay in Newport. Like no one can change their minds on anything. She got me to say I liked my Newport bedroom better, so that was final, ya know?" Seth bites his lip. "And like it was okay to lie, as long as it was in service of The Normal."
"Another unspoken rule? Normality by any means? Even lying?"
"I guess." Seth looks thoughtful. "My girlfriend says I lie to get out of trouble."
"What do you think?"
"It's fair. I mean, I do lie to her. I don't even think I mean to sometimes." Seth holds up a hand. "Not that that makes it okay. She also tells me that I lie to avoid responsibility too, so I probably shouldn't do it now." He pauses. "Avoid responsibility, I mean."
Ruth gives him a bemused smile. "Okay, so you don't necessarily set out to lie to her. So what happens?"
"I don't really know." Seth sighs. "Sometimes things are so just messy or needlessly complicated that it's almost like this shortcut I can take, to just lie and try to clean up the problem in private, ya know?"
"Not have to deal with the mess of other peoples' feelings?" Ruth ventures.
"Ouch. And also, yes. Probably." Seth bobs his head in affirmation. "I mean, I think I don't want to hurt her too, but probably I'm just trying not to deal with her."
"It can be both at once," Ruth concedes with a small shrug. "But either way, you don't tell the truth, you don't give other people the space to feel and share what they feel about the truth, you don't get the chance to work out those feelings together. Sometimes we lie to avoid conflict, but lies also help us avoid intimacy." Ruth rubs her chin with one hand, like she's thinking through the whole thing. "And, even if you succeed in pulling off the lie, you don't even give yourself the chance to be forgiven. So you either clean up the mess yourself and hide away to resolve any bad feelings on your own, or you get caught in the lie and the mess gets even bigger."
Seth blinks, taken aback.
"That sounds pretty lonely too," Ruth says, face twisting in a slight wince.
"Ouch. And also, again, yes. Probably." Seth leans forward, his brow wrinkling in concern. "And also," he hisses in a conspiratorial whisper, "you might be some kind of a wizard."
Ruth laughs.
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Sandy taps his hands against the steering wheel and smiles as he sees Seth emerge from the office building, shuffling towards the car with his hands in his pockets.
He has come to terms with the likelihood that Seth may never actually utilize therapy to talk about anything real, but it still feels important to him to perform this routine and ritual, and to participate in it in whatever way he can. Seth's therapist declined his offer to sit in on a session, saying that they'd talk about that sometime down the road, if it felt appropriate, so Sandy has relegated himself to being his son's therapy chauffeur. Seth had insisted that he could ferry himself back and forth, but Sandy isn't so sure his son wouldn't find his way to the comic book store or to a plate of chili fries at the pier, so here he is.
The car door swings open.
"How was therapy, kiddo?" Sandy turns his head to give Seth an overly cheerful smile, his overly cheerful tone harkening back to every other week, Seth rolling his eyes and mumbling his weekly 'A waste of time,' in response to Sandy's weekly inquiry of 'How was therapy, kiddo?'
It's kind of a bit they've developed.
Sandy does a double take as his eyes settle on Seth, taking in his slightly flushed face, the subtle redness under and around his eyes. He blinks in surprise, feeling a pang of concern mixed with some degree of hope, and hoping neither make themselves evident in his facial expression. He wonders if Seth and Ruth finally hit on something important in therapy, but he knows he needs to tread carefully.
"It was fine," Seth mutters in response to his father, listlessly buckling his seatbelt. He crosses his arms across his chest and stares out the window.
Sandy looks both ways and pulls out of the parking lot.
Seth continues to gaze out the window, not even attempting to change the music from the Les Mis soundtrack Sandy's been blasting on every drive they've taken for the past two months.
Sandy raises his eyebrows, thinking Hoo boy, Ruth must've done a number on the kid if he's not messing with the showtunes. He smiles to himself, hoping it's a good thing.
"So, pit stop for chili fries?" Sandy asks, trying to keep his tone bright and casual, afraid that any eagerness on his part will tank whatever emotional progress his son might be making, cause him to retreat even further into irony and seeming indifference.
Chili fries on the way home are another part of the routine, and part-reward, part-bribe for the whole therapy thing.
"I'd rather just go home, if that's cool," Seth says quietly, pressing his forehead to the passenger side window and closing his eyes. "I'm a little tired."
"Sounds good to me," Sandy responds, glancing over at Seth and smiling fondly, though a little sadly. "Home it is."