Like what she’d said meant anything to him. He didn’t have a clue, because unless you had lived with an addict, you could not imagine how addiction could throw an entire family into a tailspin and how sometimes you really wanted to step out of the room. Or out of a life. Or out of your own body. “I really don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay.” He tapped on his knee a moment. “I can imagine it must be very painful.”
“Enraging is more like it.”
“It looks like we have a lot of ground to cover before we design a program for you.”
“Nope. Think we covered it,” Lorna said firmly, trying to regain her internal composure. “They are in Florida, I’m in Austin. It’s all good.”
“Okay,” he said, and smiled again. But this time, his smile seemed piteous, and she had to get out of there before she did something terrible like smash her fist through one of his elephant paintings.
She rolled onto her knees from the beanbag to get up, wondering how she was going to get to her feet without humiliatingherself. But she had no time for grace and poise. “I’m sorry, I have a prior engagement. I should get going.”
“Sure, Lorna,” Micah said. “We’ll pick back up tomorrow. I’ve got a pamphlet I’d like you to read on the power of meditation as a gateway to healing.” He leaped up like a cat and walked to his desk, sparing her the humiliation of sticking her ass in his face while she gained her feet.
He picked up a brochure and handed it to her. “I look forward to working with you,” he said. “And if I may, I think you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from this experience.”
“Uh-huh.” This room—and her jacket, and her life—was unbearably tight and hot. She had to get outside and breathe. “See you,” she said, and walked out of his office before a torrent of sweat broke from her forehead.
Chapter 4Lorna Now
She had stopped hyperventilating by the time she pulled into the gravel square before her house, but feared she might have another go when she noticed that a cornice from the corner of the house had fallen and broken into pieces on the patchy lawn. She pulled out her phone and made a note to call Mr. Contreras. Normally she would call right away, but she was still feeling nauseated and perturbed that Micah Feelgood, or whatever his last name was, thought he could just start asking personal questions. She would like to know what Kristen had to do with software sales.
She banged in through the front door and immediately stripped off her jacket, still hot, still perspiring. She picked up her mail—two window replacement flyers and an official-looking State Farm envelope. She was not insured by State Farm. She shoved them in her bag and turned to stride for her door. Her mind was a million miles away, which was why she almost tripped over a long plastic piece of something on the floor.
She realized it was a toy racetrack that went down the stairs, looped three times, and then ended right here in front of the door, so that any unsuspecting person entering the building could be nailed in the shin by a small metal object.
The boy was sitting with his back to his apartment door, a book on his lap and a crumpled sheet of paper on top of the open page. His T-shirt had ridden up a little over his belly. He was beating a chewed-up pencil on the floor like a drumstick.
Across the hall, she could hear Agnes whimpering on the other side of her door.
Lorna stared at the kid. He said, “I have cookies. Do you want one? Miss Liz made them.”
“Who?”
“Miss Liz. She lives upstairs. She has a cat, and his name is Garfield, and he’ssuperfat.”
Miss Liz? Elizabeth Foster? The tenant in 2B? “What are you doing here?” Lorna asked.
“My homework.”
“I mean, what are you doing here on the floor? And what is all this?”
The kid looked confused by her questions. “There’s not a chair.”
Lorna sighed.
“That’s my racetrack. But my car went into that hole,” he said, pointing out a heretofore unseen hole in the baseboard. “You should have seen it fly!”
Agnes barked behind the door.
“Of course it did,” Lorna said impatiently. “Your loops are too big. It’s physics. Have you started physics yet?”
“What?”
She groaned. “Where is your dad?”
“He’s at work.”
