Real Actual Words

SESSION ONE

Dr. McKinney has too round of a face, Vada decides. His smile is a touch too wide, his teeth a touch too white. Both sides of his face have dimples. His eyes are the bright, hypnotizing blue that sirens must envy. Vada watches him sit at the metal table, his hands clasped in front of him. A wedding ring adorns his finger. It’s simple and gold and glints in the harsh light of the room, as if accompanied by a billboard with the words, NOTICE ME! It makes up for the fact that the rest of him is perpetually unremarkable; his combed salt and pepper hair is neat, his clothes in pristine shape, his tie pin straight.

He leans toward her, wide smile on display. “Would you like some water? A snack, maybe? The vending machine’s just down the hall.”

Vada blinks, distracted by the light reflecting off his canines. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? This must have been tough for you. I’m sorry for making you wait so long to see me.”

It had only been a few days. Now, sitting before him, Vada wishes it were more. “I’m okay, really.”

“Alright. Let’s get to it, then.” Dr. McKinney takes a glance at the clipboard in front of him. “Vada. How old are you, again?”

“Sixteen.”

“Sixteen! Wow! I met you when you were little, you know. You’ve grown so tall!”

His teeth seem to get brighter with every word he speaks. Does he use some Super-Trident toothpaste, or does his dentist have a vendetta against him? The world will never know. “Thanks.”

“Now, it says here that things have been a little different at home as of late,” he says. “You want to tell me what’s been going on?”

Vada waits for him to continue or backtrack, but nothing comes. What’s been going on with her lately? “Do you mean my mom?”

“Would you like to talk about her?”

No. Not with you, not ever. Vada swallows it down. “I’m okay, thanks.”

“That’s what I’m here for, you know.”

“I know.”

Dr. McKinney tilts his head. He reminds Vada of someone so used to getting his way that he stumbles when he doesn’t. He looks at her like she’s a puzzle he’s yet to crack. “When did you first hear of her diagnosis?”

Vada shifts in her chair. She can feel the heat climbing her neck, every bead of sweat that dribbles down her collar. It comes up blank. When had she first heard? Last week? Last month? Last year?

She remembers the rain, that’s for sure. The mud clinging to her shoes and the umbrella she hung in the front room of her house. She recalls the sharp bang of the door behind her. The voices of her parents in the kitchen that shouldn’t reach her ears, but do.

“A while ago,” is what Vada settles on. She nods to his clipboard. “Isn’t it in there?”

“I know when your mom’s appointments were and her MRIs,” Dr. McKinney says, “but not when they sat you down.”

“They didn’t ‘sit me down,’” it slips from her, unbidden. “I overheard.”

“I’m sorry, Vada. It shouldn’t have gone like that.”

You don’t have to tell me. Vada wants to scream it in his face. Watch his perfect smile falter and fall. What would he do then? Would he try to soothe her? Or, God forbid, tell her to calm down? “You don’t know anything.”

“I don’t have the same experience, I admit,” Dr. McKinney says. “I can’t imagine how hard it is to have a parent diagnosed with cancer.”

There’s that ugly word. Cancer. It thunders in Vada’s head, mocking her, the host of her every nightmare. Her throat is sandpaper dry. “Mhm.”

“And I understand you were sick, as well? Not with cancer, obviously, but you were sick at the same time your mother was in the hospital?”

That had been weeks ago. The sickness had stolen Vada’s voice. She remembers riding in the car with the friendly neighbor.

“It’s a shame your father had to go to the city to work,” the neighbor, Mrs. Taylor, said. “I’m so sorry about this, Vada. Has your fever gone down? Did you have breakfast?”

At the time, Vada was thankful that her voice was gone because she didn’t think admitting her only breakfast was a handful of popcorn would go over well. She remembers the oppressive heat in the car. Her fever hadn’t broken, so every sense amplified a hundredfold.

“My mom had an infection with her port,” Vada says. “Her port—you know, where they put the medicine in. Something was wrong with it.” The fear is back, sitting atop her lungs like an anvil. Even treatment had gone wrong. “The infection is gone now, but they didn’t know what I was sick with, so they had to keep running tests on me.”

Vada can still feel the prick in her skin, can still see the vivid, red blood filling tubes beside her. Mrs. Taylor had tried to distract her. She asked silly questions about sports, and what classes Vada was in, and what teachers she complained about. It was soothing, despite Vada’s initial doubt.

Dr. McKinney scribbles in his notes. “And what did they say you had?”

“Mono, I think.”

“But you’re feeling better now?”

“If I weren’t, I wouldn’t be here,” Vada snaps. It comes out harsher than intended. “Sorry. I mean, I’m better now. It took a long time.”

“I’d imagine that wasn’t easy. Being sick while your mom was battling an infection.”

Vada doesn’t answer. She doesn’t tell him that it had been better when she’d been in the hospital. She doesn’t say that in the hospital, she’d felt more connected to her mom than ever. In the hospital, Vada and her mom were on the same plane of the universe.

“How are your siblings?” Dr. McKinney asks. His pen is poised in his hand, ready for notetaking.

Vada shrugs. “Fine.”

“You have two brothers and a sister?”

Vada nods stiffly.

“How are they holding up? Have you talked to them about your mom?”

Her words stick in her throat. She swallows thickly. “We don’t talk much. We mostly do what Dad wants us to when he asks.”

“And what does he ask you to do?”

“Pick up the slack, kind of.” Vada winces. “It sounds like—Dad’s not being mean, exactly, there’s just a lot more responsibility.” And I can’t complain, she thinks but doesn’t say. I can’t complain because I have to do this for Mom.

“What kinds of responsibilities?”

“Driving my little brothers, helping with their homework, stuff like that. My sister cooks when she’s home. We’ve been getting a lot of meals from neighbors.” Vada doesn’t think she can eat another casserole without it tasting like ash. Even thinking of it makes her stomach churn. She looks up, right into the doctor’s too-blue eyes. “Can I go now?”

Dr. McKinney glances at his watch. Vada catalogues it without meaning to. Expensive, off-brand Rolex, almost identical but not quite. “We can be done for the day. I’ll see you next—”

But Vada’s out the door before he can finish. She catches her breath in the hall, tears stinging her eyes and her head pounding.

SESSION TWO

“How’ve you been?”

Vada sits and stares. Empty, she wants to say. She itches to, the word ready on her lips, but she decides against it at the last minute. “Fine.”

“How’s school?” Dr. McKinney asks. He’s holding a Sharpie this time. He uncaps it with a click, ready to jot down her every word.

The acrid smell hits her with the force of a semi-truck. “School’s the same.” Liar, a nasty voice accuses in her mind. Vada tries to forget the scathing red Ds and Fs on her recent quizzes and tests. What does it matter, anyway? Why does her comprehension of Shakespeare matter when her mom is hooked up to wires in hospital hell?

Dr. McKinney, oblivious to her emotional crisis, says, “You’ve been keeping up on homework? Asking for help when you need to?”

“Mhm.”

Doubtful. Everything at school is a blur. Vada doesn’t walk down the hallway without stares on her back, without the coiling nausea fizzing in her stomach.

Dr. McKinney makes a note with his Sharpie. The ink bleeds through the paper. “Do you find it hard to concentrate at school? With everything going on with your mom?”

Everything going on is the understatement of the year. Vada almost laughs. The constant fear, the rising bile on her tongue, the anxiety. Waiting with bated breath for her mom’s chemo sessions to end, and then doing it all over again with radiation, and watching the healthy glow to her skin fade... 

“I try not to think about it,” Vada says. She does try, honestly. It’s not her fault it won’t go away.

“It’s healthy to think about it. It’s even healthier to talk about it.”

Silence. Vada picks at her fingernails. They’re bitten down to the quick and rimmed with crusted blood. It’s been getting worse.

Dr. McKinney sighs, long and slow. He leans forward. “How do you feel right now, Vada?”

For once, Vada doesn’t struggle with an answer. “I don’t.”

SESSION THREE

Dr. McKinney has a cup of coffee with him. He props open his notes and turns to an empty page. Vada can smell the coffee from where she sits.

“Hello,” he says. “Crazy weather today, huh?”

The rain pitter-patters against the window. The overcast sky is pitch black, even though it’s three in the afternoon. Vada shrugs.

“I would like to ask you more things about your mom,” Dr. McKinney says. He’s launching right into it, apparently. “What was the first chemo session like? How did you feel?”

“You look like a skydiver,” Vada said, pointing to her mom’s neon green cap. It was a ColdCap, to help her mom preserve her hair during treatment.

Her mom smiled. “Get a picture. It’ll freak out your dad.”

“Why?”

“I always said I would jump out of a plane one day.”

Vada straightens her spine and shoves the memory away. She says nothing.

Dr. McKinney asks three more times. Vada keeps her mouth shut.

The rain drums against the window. Pitter-patter. Pitter-patter.

        SESSION FOUR

“Vada? Can we chat?”

Vada stares just over his shoulder. She counts the panels on the wall. One, two, three, four... 

“I’m sorry if I upset you last time,” Dr. McKinney says, and he does sound earnest. He does. But Vada can’t stomach the pity in his eyes. She’s too used to it on the faces of neighbors, PTA parents, counselors. It feels stale. Stale and fake.

“What would help?” Dr. McKinney asks. “Would you like me to leave the room? Do you want some water or a coffee?”

Coffee sounds like the best thing in the world. Maybe it would shock her out of this numbness.

As much as she wants to, Vada can’t bring herself to it.

She shakes her head.

“Okay.” Dr. McKinney settles back in his chair. The Sharpie hasn’t been opened. He closes his notebook. “We’ll just sit, then. We can do that.”

And so they sit.

SESSION EIGHT

Vada enters the room, entirely expecting them to continue their routine as usual. She and Dr. McKinney have been having “quiet sessions,” where Vada would sit and stare, and the doctor would do the same. Vada prefers it this way. It gives her time to think.

Not about her mother, of course. If she can, Vada dodges that train of thought as much as possible.

She halts.

A woman sits at the desk in Dr. McKinney’s place. Her sleek black hair is pulled back in an intricate braid, and her soft brown eyes follow Vada to her chair. This woman is less put-together than Dr. McKinney, but artfully; her shirt is a simple, deep forest green, and her jeans are cuffed at the bottom. She has a lanyard around her neck with the name DR. JACOBS emblazoned in bold.

“Hi,” the new doctor says. “Vada, right?”

Vada nods.

“It’s nice to meet you. I’m Dr. Jacobs, but you can just call me Summer.” She reaches down from beneath the desk and produces two coffee cups, handing one to Vada. “This one’s for you.”

Vada sips it carefully, expecting Dr. McKinney’s black, no-sweetener, a splash of cream monstrosity. She swallows, surprised. It tastes... perfect. “How did you know—”

Summer smiles. “I asked your mom.”

Vada jolts. Her head buzzes with a cocktail of skepticism and panic. “You talked to my mom?”

“Does that surprise you?”

“I mean, Dr. McKinney never...” Vada stops, about to say that he never bothered, but doesn’t think it’ll make a good first impression. “He didn’t talk to my mom before he met with me.”

“He and I go about things differently.” Summer sips her coffee. “Does that upset you, that he never talked to your mom?”

Does it? Vada can’t untangle her own feelings anymore. Fury, resentment, sadness... it rotates, like a Wheel of Fortune of depression. “I guess.”

“Dr. McKinney also talked to me about you, by the way.”

It startles a laugh from her lips. “Yeah?” Vada says. “Did you gossip?”

“Of course. He says you’re very bright, but a little withdrawn.”

Withdrawn. Guilt riddles through her. Vada fidgets, picking at the cap on her cup. “I suppose that’s true.”

“Can you tell me why that is?”

“I don’t know.”

Summer leans back in her chair. Her smile is soft at the edges, her eyes encouraging and light. “You can talk to me. I’m not going to tell on you.”

“You won’t?”

“Of course not. You can rant if you’d like. I just want to make you feel safe.”

Vada hesitates. For a moment, she feels irrational. She had been a jerk when Dr. McKinney only wanted to help her.

“You don’t have to apologize for feeling, you know,” her mother said, one night after a particularly brutal chemo session. She held the side of Vada’s face with tender care. She was so warm. “It’s allowed.”

Vada takes a sip of coffee. Armed with her mother’s words, she says, “I felt like I couldn’t tell him anything. Anything I’d say would be wrong, or disappointing. Is that... okay?”

Summer nods. “That’s perfectly okay. What else?”

“He would ask pressing questions, and it didn’t feel like he had any regard for how it affected me.” She draws in a shaky breath. “To him, I was something he could fix. My feelings are real and vivid, and I just want to be able to share them with someone who’ll treat me like I’m an actual person.”

“You, Vada, are an important person to me,” Summer says. “You’re sixteen. I don’t expect you to be perfect.” She leans forward. “Let’s just talk it out, okay? Two imperfect people, spit-balling feelings. Can you do that?”

Faintly, Vada smiles. For once, it’s real. “I think I can.”