Roger Dodger

School hired a grief counsellor and I was one of the only students required to go. More often than not I stared at the man with silence for an hour. He would hand me a pamphlet at the end of every session. They had titles like 'It is not Your Fault', 'Grief and You', 'Depressed?', 'Not Getting Closure'. I knew this man only wanted to help, but I didn't want it.

His name was Roger. The poor man would sit and ask me a question. Something like "how are you this week?", and I'd shrug.

It was one of those visits. He had just asked his usual question and had gotten his usual answer.

"I see..." He tapped his fingers against his clipboard. "Still not talking about him."

Even just the mention of the presence of a him stung. Silence, who waited so patiently with me, sat beside me. His cold hand on my back, rubbing softly, chilling my body.

"You need to let some sort of emotion out Dana and here is the safest place for you."

I shook my head.

"Arent you sad?"

Yes. "No."

He looked doubtful. "Angry?"

Yes. "I guess."

"Good, good. Now we've got something, yeah?" Roger smiled, shifting in his seat so he could lean towards me. "Now again, are you angry?"

"Yes. I am."

"What about?"

"If nobody knew, I wouldn't be here."

"Do you even know?" he asked.

I glared at him. I could feel the heat rising on my skin. "Do you?"

"What I am angry about?"

"Yeah. What makes you angry?"

"Sitting here with possibly the least cooperative person I have ever met, handing out pamphlets instead of helping, babies crying in restaurants, hearing the same song three times within an hour on the radio, sticky floors in movie theaters, among other things."

I actually smiled. He began it with a lecture that I was about to sink into the chair and disappear during, but he had changed tactics. I liked these better.

"Now what makes you angry?"

What made me angry? What a question. These days, what didn't?

"Dana," Roger insisted. The expectant pause followed.

Dana... Dana... Dana... Dana, pause, then something awful always came out of his mouth. I was waiting for Roger's awful and before I knew it I had started sobbing inconsolably. My throat kept clenching, forcing these animal sounds out of my mouth.

I finally choked out something along the lines of ‘I need to go’, grabbed my things and left.

The next week Roger was waiting for me, ready to go. “Hi Dana.”

“Roger,” I said and sat down.

“How are we this week?”

I shrugged.

“Angry?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I breathed. “As always.”

"About what exactly?"

"Everybody called him Theodore... it's just Theo."

"Mhm," Roger added.

"It's so stupid. But... it just gets me so angry. Get his f*****g name right..." I trailed off.

"Something tells me that, that's not all there is to it Dana."

"It's all I really want to talk about."

"Alright then. How has this week been?"

"About the same? Okay?”

We fell to silence.

“... He didn’t do it on purpose… I mean I don’t think he did.”

“What?”

“The lake. It wasn’t on purpose.”

“Do you know that for sure?”

“I know him.”

The rest of our hour went to our usual staredown.

The sessions afterward were varied. Roger never pushed, or mostly never pushed. Time healed, slowly. With every memory of him that popped up, the constant pain in my chest became normal, it was there all the time. I got used to it.

Derek avoided me for  months and there were times when I wanted nothing more than to blame him. I thought of the screaming matches we could have had. Then there were days where I only wanted Derek's arms around me, some form of familiar comfort. Most of all I wanted Theo to stargaze with, to get drunk with. I desperately wanted to listen to his tired voice mumbling out a fable.

However, Derek couldn't avoid me forever. Roger had his lovely hand in the meeting of us two. Derek had been seeing Roger too. He was always the more talkative and open one. Theo wasn’t as monumental to him. Roger got him on the topic of me and Derek let him know I hadn’t talked to him since it happened.

So we sat in the familiar surroundings of Roger’s office, all three of us, just staring at each other.

Derek spoke first, “Dana, I’m sorry.”

Big mistake. I would have started shouting at him, all the arguments I had already pictured. I was afraid I’d punch him in the face or worse. So I stood up and walked out. Roger was saying some nonsense behind me, but I just left.

I couldn’t bring myself to speak to him there. Not with Roger watching and filtering everything we said to be some ‘healthy’ resolution. All I could do was blame him, or hit him. Roger wouldn’t let me do either so this had to be on our own time.

For the first time since Theo died, I went to the boulder. When I walked over things went silent. My friend had been an all encompassing shadow lately. His reach was beginning to touch others around me, they weren’t able to think of a way to get rid of him. Jackie offered me a consoling and welcoming hug, Red held out a joint. I refused, my eyes on Derek. He snubbed out the cigarette he was smoking and stood up.

“Headin’ to the lake,” he said with eyes that didn’t stray from mine.

No one spoke, no one moved to follow him. He jumped down from the boulder and I followed in his footsteps.

HIs hands slid into his pockets as I fell in step with him. There wasn’t much to be said as the lake came into view. A tremor threatened to run through my body at the sight of the luminescent waters.

“Look Dana, I know it’s my fault.”

“He didn’t do it on purpose.”
“But he did it.”

I paused, “Yeah he did.”

“He was here ‘cause of me. I know it. Roger thinks he’s guided me safely away from blaming myself, but it’s fact.”

I nod. “I forgive you…”

“No you don’t. You can say it as much as you want, but you and I know we can’t be friends again. Not like it used to be.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“So if you don’t mean it, take it back.”

“Alright, I take it back. I’ll probably blame you for the rest of my life.”

“Good. When you think of me, from your office or whatever job you get, picture me here. At the boulder. Still getting high. Still getting drunk.”

“I don’t want to picture that. If I have to move on so do you. Because this mourning, grief s**t sucks. It hurts Derek, and I can’t make it stop. God, I don’t know what it was about him that pulled me in so deep. I didn’t even know it. But f**k you if you think I want to see you wasting away in your haze of self-pity. I want you to not be able to breathe when you wake up, when nothing is crushing you. I want you to feel like it’s raining and your eyes are racing the damn sky. I want you to feel like the same knife that was in his mother’s stomach is twisting in yours. But God forbid I ever want you to get away with feeling nothing.”

He stared at me for a long moment, watching the way my chest heaved with each breath. “Got it.”

“No Derek… you don’t, and I really can’t explain it to you.”

“Try me.”

“I want you to feel like the pine tree that finds out the sand is burning.”

He shrugs.

“That’s what I want.”

“Okay.” He takes out a cigarette and offers it to me. I refuse. His hand paused in the air holding the cigarette delicately. When I don’t take it he puts it back in the box and slips it back into his pocket. “No?”

“No. You know how sometimes if you have a headache for a while, you start to feel it less and less?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“But it’s still there. I’ve found it’s pretty much the same. If I forget him for a minute, I’ll really feel it for a few days.”

“You really need to pull together.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re the one everyone thinks will make it out of this f*****g town now. You need to pick up and pull together Dana. Take it with you, whatever, but don’t sit here telling me about not medicating your headache because you just want it constantly.”

“You think I want it?”

“No, I think you just want to sit and soak it in while you still can. You feel like you deserve it or some s**t. I don’t know. Just start using it for something.”

“Like what?”

“How about getting the f**k out? Leave your f*****g mom and dad, start making it for yourself.”

“You all think I’m leaving here?”

“You have to. You hang around here they’re going to find you in the lake… Theo wasn’t supposed to do that. This place just sucks the life out of you. You don’t want that, you don’t want to sit and get high and pretend its all okay. You want something Dana! F**k, and it’s not this!”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to see you on the news, or hear your name over the intercom, flag half staff.”

“Now imagine they say my name wrong.”

“Dana’s hard to get wrong.”

“Just picture it. Jerk.”

“Yeah. I got it. Theodore…”

“Just Theo,” I said softly.

“Just Theo,” he repeats.

“Don’t even f*****g get his name right. Like he’s not worth it.”

“I think it’s for you Dana. No one gets to remember him like you will.”

It’s hard to pinpoint when exactly I stopped being angry with him, but it was during that conversation at the lake. I still didn’t forgive him, he didn’t ask me to. I probably would do it now, but he still wouldn’t ask for it, but now it was finally okay to stop being angry with him.

We looked out at the still waters of the lake.

“It’s so quiet,” he says.

“Yeah I guess that’s what it’s like when no one’s here.”

It must have been so quiet that night. I could imagine how eerily calm he was as he stared into the glowing porridge below. I could even hear the sound of his body when it hit the water, just like that first time. It was a solid smack. He resurfaced and shook out his shaggy brown hair as the water numbed him. His dead smile from before turned genuine as he reveled in nothing. I really think it was an accident. I can picture how he closed his eyes and laid on his back, floating in the numbing cold. It must have felt so peaceful to him.  He was able to just ignore the cold and the nothing until it overtook him. It must have only felt like a slight chill. Someone so used to cold shouldn't have died by freezing.

The picture on the news of him is still burned in my mind. His skin was corpse blue with frost formed on his lips. I had kissed those lips. His hands had held me in an embrace. I had marveled at the way his now still chest used to rise and fall. He taught about having more to live for and what a cruel irony I found myself in the middle of.