Sara: You are too kind. Thank you, but no, I really need to decompress. It's just been a long day.
Alex: You're sure? I feel like I've screwed things up.
Sara: Not at all! No, please don't think that. I swear, I'd tell you if there was an issue.
Alex: Would you though?
Sara: Yeah, of course. Sorry, I really need to get some sleep.
Control was tricky for me.
The less I had, the more I needed and that more often required borrowing from the most high-interest sources. The cost never mattered in the moment. The only thing that mattered was getting my hands around the neck of one thing—just one, that was all I needed—and squeezing it hard enough to make the stress and upheaval in my life feel manageable.
It had always worked for me. It didn't matter if my homelife was going off the rails once again or med school was insane or residency kicked my ass. It didn't matter if I traded greater and greater pieces of myself every time I went in search of that control and it definitely didn't matter that I'd made myself brittle and broken in all the places I was meant to be soft and pliable. All I had to do was get from here to there, so what was the trouble with killing myself for the journey?
Unlearning those rules had been difficult. The desire to be quiet and obedient and worthy of external validation never quite disappeared, but I could grab ahold of the threads of it now. I could twist them around, turn obedient into the practice of caring for myself without exception, turn quiet into a sensation I kept inside my body rather than a lock on my voice, my needs—and that was the plain core of it. Good little girls who grew up into people-pleasing women didn't get that way through any innate altruism or feminine urge to keep the peace. We got there because we learned, at some point, that our needs were a problem best kept to ourselves. We were most worthy when our existence didn't bother anyone.
There were days when I was great at bothering people. I'd bothered Sebastian into a paralyzing game of bickering, insults, and sex. Other days, I couldn't accept the simply offered aid of a friend without viewing it as the byproduct of being pitifully and disgustingly needy. I couldn't impose. I physically could not allow that to happen—because control was tricky for me. It didn't pack itself up and move on to another host. It changed. It shape-shifted. It turned into an obsessive need to heal, a cycle of interrogating my thoughts until I'd bled out the most invasive of them, an endless battle between the perfectionist and the savage inside me.
I couldn't pry my fingers loose from the stranglehold I had on those last few fringes. I wasn't strip-mining my body and spirit for control any longer, but the mission was unchanged. Find peace from the chaos, no price too high.
Chapter 24
Sara
The first half of the week seemed to pass in dashes and dots, some hours flying by while others dragged on until I was certain I could feel the weight of every passing second gathering on my skin. I couldn't stop myself from looking for Sebastian down every hall and in every stairwell. I knew he wasn't there. I mean, I'd peeked out from behind my curtains to watch him climb into a cab early Saturday morning, a black ball cap pulled low over his eyes and his scowl loud enough to stop traffic. I knew he wasn't here but I couldn't stop myself from looking.
On several occasions, I seriously considered bailing on this conference. I never wanted to attend these things but this one in particular was ripe for any reason to beg off. The topics being presented were only obliquely related to my daily work and I'd already met everyone worth networking with, and worst of all, my father was attending.
And that was why I had to be there.
The thing about hardcore narcissists like my father was that attention was their oxygen. If they didn't get enough, they suffocated. By that logic, I could cut off contact with my father—which I'd done at various points since moving out on my own—and live a happy, narcissist-free life. Except that logic held no water, not when I worked in his field and he had the personal cell numbers of all the people who made decisions that directly impacted my career.
Unless I wanted my father to turn blue and prove which one of us really knew how to throw tantrums, I had to show up at this boondoggle and play along. If you asked him, he'd say we were as close as any father-daughter plastic surgeon pair could be and he'd weave a very convincing tale about handing over his practice in Orange County to me whenever I was ready to return home.
The list of things I'd do before I'd ever move home and take over a practice focused almost exclusively on cosmetic surgery was miles and miles long. Aside from that, my father would sooner burst into flames than hand over a damn thing. His practice was the only thing in the world he loved in a real, true sense. He admired many people and had fondness for many others, but he loved the empire he'd built. If, for some unimaginable reason, I returned to California, he'd micromanage and second-guess me into a complete and total breakdown and that didn't begin to cover the ways he'd erode my mental health. The only things that had ever saved me were distance and independence, and I had to do whatever it took to preserve both of those.
It got ugly when I didn't.
That was the thought living rent-free in my head through takeoff and landing, while waiting for my luggage, and the dark cab ride to the resort. That ugliness was the reason my hair was freshly cut and colored, my nails professionally manicured, the creases in my forehead paralyzed with the most precise, careful injections of Botox in the land. It was the reason for the inexcusably expensive sandals and dresses I'd ordered as well as the refills on all of my gastrointestinal meds and the multitude of plain crackers I'd packed.
It was late when I arrived at the resort, too late to get any feel for the surroundings. Not that I wanted to go exploring. I hadn't slept well since the last evening I'd spent with Sebastian. I couldn't keep replaying the conversation and trying to parse out why he'd been so upset with me. I still didn't know, but now I was tired enough from traveling that I'd probably manage a few hours of deep sleep before I had to gird myself for these next few days.
I waved off the help of the resort staff because I couldn't manage small talking when I just wanted to be alone, instead accepting a map with lots of scribbled highlighter as a guide and steering my suitcase in the vague direction of my bungalow. That was how this resort rolled—bungalows. Nothing so dreadful as a building with rooms lined up, one beside another, on top of another. No, this place was all about bungalows, beach huts, villas. If I had to suffer through this event, at least I could stay in a beachfront bungalow with a fully stocked fridge and an outdoor rain shower. Seemed only fair.
"Sara."
I whirled around, searching the lobby for the too-familiar voice. When I found the source of that voice, it felt like I'd ripped a giant bag of jelly beans clear open and now they were spilling out of my hands, pinging off the stone floor at my feet, rolling and scattering and shooting across the room. I'd never be able to gather them all up and I'd never be able to put them back in the bag because the bag was a tattered scrap of plastic that could never exist the way it had before I'd torn it open. All it could be now was a blown-open wreck, something that'd once contained every single one of these jelly beans. I couldn't go back to the before, to anything other than a reality where Sebastian Stremmel was no more than ten feet away from me in shorts and a t-shirt.