Shantih Journal | Page 26

the bedroom door and leave her alone. It seemed to her she was always alone, except when he came to bed and lay on his side, facing the other way.

There had to be more to love than that, she thought. Maybe someone else could relate to her better, even if he couldn’t share her problems.

Just holding the amber bottle in her hand soothed her. Tension drained out, down through her feet and onto the white tiles. I’m a junkie for blood-pressure pills, she thought, and wanted to laugh but didn’t.

As she left the pharmacy, walking back into the bright sunshine of a warm autumn afternoon, she heard herself whisper, “I wonder if there’s a twelve-step meeting for that.”

The new pills made her skin itch. Not like lice, she thought — that was good — but like a bad rash that also kind of burned. I can live with that if the drugs work, she thought. She’d taken them for a week now, and — though after the first few days there had been no termites or fireflies, no walls — she already thought she felt something crawling on the back of her neck. She hoped it was a fly. A real one. She brushed at it with her free hand. Go away, she thought, then took several steady breaths: in through her nose and out through her mouth, just like the doctor said.

Geno, who came to fix the office copier, asked her to dinner. He sweated from his toner-streaked forehead, and his hand shook as he spoke. The smudges of black in his blond hair made him look like a rock star. “You’ll have to forgive me,” he said. “I don’t do this, and I’m nervous. Feels like skeeters chewing on my neck.”

Shelly was sold: This is a guy who might understand me.

They went to a cozy Italian place on Corvis Avenue, just down the street from Dr. Hister’s office. They shared a bottle of inexpensive wine, and she spoke openly to him about her problems: crickets, fleas, lightning bugs, bees. She told him about Jonathan and her father. She demonstrated how Dr. Hister taught her to breathe. Geno seemed to listen, nodded from time to time, and said things like, “Why fireflies?” and, “Are they always bugs?”