“Sure,” Mr. Sanders said.
“Wait,” Lorna said, panicking slightly. “There are only three days until Friday. I couldn’t possibly learn the part. And you forget, I vomited the last time I was onstage.”
“That was a long time ago. And the part is easy.” He pivoted and walked to a piano at the corner of the stage. He played some basic chords and sang her line. “‘I will lend you the money for your troubles, but you must return it doubled.’ You sing the line, the kids attack, and you fall on the mattress. Easy. So?”
What could she say? She’d made her stand, had said how important making amends was to her. But just the thought of returning to a stage, of ruining his performance again, made her feel nauseous. She had not considered that her amends would involve something like this.
“Okay,” she said weakly.
“Yay!” Bean said. “I’ll help you practice!”
“You do that, young man,” Mr. Sanders said. “Let’s do a quick robe check on you, but I’m pretty sure it will fit.” He walked briskly offstage, and while he was gone, Bean flung himself on the mattress again. Dissatisfied with that fall, he tried again. “You have to do it like this.” He clutched his chest, shouted, “Aaauuugh,” dramatically, and fell back on the mattress.
By the time Mr. Sanders returned with what was essentially a choir robe and a wig, Bean had died about ten times.
Bean chattered about the musical all the way home. He was terribly excited about her role. “You’ll do really, really good if you practice,” he assured her. “But make sure Aggie isn’t sleeping on the bed when you do, because if you landed on her, you would smash her.”
Lorna’s belly was twisting with anxiety. She imagined walking on that stage and making a mess of the small role.
The next day at Bodhi, Lorna told Micah about Mr. Sanders and her return to the stage.
“This is amazing, Lorna,” Micah said.
“How so? Back then he gave me a pity role and I didn’t pick up on it. I’m not sure my apology tour is accomplishing anything other than pointing out what a fool I’ve been all these years.”
“I think the bigger takeaway is that you were not responsible for the chaos in your life. You were not responsible for Kristen’s actions, or Mr. Sanders’s for that matter. You weren’t even responsible for the nerves that made you sick. You did the best you knew how, and so did he. And you are both still doing that. So what have you learned about yourself so far in your journey?”
She thought about it. “That I’m a glutton for punishment?”
“Besides that.”
“That maybe I wasn’t as unlikable as I thought.”
Micah grinned. “Anything else?”
She squirmed on her beanbag. She was wearing her one pair of shorts today, and her legs stuck to the vinyl. “That as I work on getting myself out of my bomb shelter, I need to practice giving myself some credit.”
“You’re doing great,” Micah said, beaming. “You’re changing, and that is excellent progress. Do you know how hard it is to change? You have to really want it.” He leaned closer. “You really want it, Lorna Lott.”
“Not so fast. I haven’t gone onstage yet. What if I throw up again?”
Micah shrugged. “You’ll clean it up, make your apologies, and go on with your life. But don’t use that as a reason to close yourself off to the world. No one is perfect. No one expects anyone to be perfect. Except, well, you seem to expect it of yourself. So!” He clapped his hands together. “How was the vision-board process?”
Lorna groaned. “It’s hard to imagine your ideal world when you haven’t actually seen the world in a while. But I’ve got a house on my board. And pictures of Paris.”
“Keep imagining your life after the bomb shelter. Now, are you ready for your float?”
She threw her head back with a long sigh. “Is it necessary?” The float, so to speak, involved her, naked, in a pod filled with a high concentration of salt water so she would float effortlessly, without sound or light, for an hour. Sensory-deprivation therapy during which she was supposedly going to gain clarity on her life.
“It is,” Micah said. He stood, offering her a hand to help her up. “I hope you will dig a little deeper into your negative thoughts. Maybe start to think about the real reasons why you don’t like yourself and whether they are fair reasons.”
“Great! This ought to be totally relaxing. That should be your slogan for this program—focus on the negative.”
“I think our current slogans are pretty good,” he said, and walked to his office door and opened it, handing her off to Montreal.
At first, Lorna was too worried about who might walk in on her, floating naked in salt water with no lights or sound, to focus on her negative thoughts. But as the minutes ticked by in the tank—she imagined them ticking, as there was no sound but thescreaming cacophony of her thoughts—she began to worry less about being found and more about why she didn’t like herself.
She had always thought it was because she was not pretty in a conventional way, or because she didn’t have a good girl’s personality. Plus the many familial issues she was saddled with made her undesirable as a friend or a girlfriend. But even as those things had gone away over the years, she still found herself unbearable.Why?What had she ever done to deserve her own disdain? The only thing she knew with certainty was that there was no one who would be there just for her. No one. Well, except for Bean. But she felt immeasurable sorrow for the girl she’d been, who could count on no one, and the woman she’d become, who was so afraid to count on anyone for fear of being disappointed that she’d built a barrier so no one could even know her. Wasthatit? Was she so afraid to be vulnerable that she couldn’t even face herself?
