The headlights flick on, and Megan pulls away. As soon as I shut myself in my room, I see the cardboard boxes spread around the room and break down and cry. When the tears are all used up, I pull out Alice’s recorder and tell another story about love and pain.

“There once was a young man who believed he was in love with a beautiful woman,” Grandmother said. “So he went to the woman’s father, who was the Chief, and told him that he wished to marry his daughter.

“‘Bring me many horses,’ the Chief answered, ‘and you may marry my daughter.’ So the young man set out into the wild in search of horses to please the Chief.

“While the man was away, the tribe moved on, and though the man caught several beautiful horses for the Chief, when he returned his tribe was gone. The man planned to go in search of his lost tribe, but the sun was very low in the sky, so first he decided to rest. He went to a lodge nearby but could find no doors, no matter how many times he circled it. Finally, he dug his way through the sod surrounding the lodge and made his way inside, where he found a burial bed supported by four high posts.

“On the burial bed lay a young woman in clothes decorated with the teeth of elk. The woman turned and looked at him. He recognized her right away as a member of his tribe, who must have died while he was away. But the woman sat up and greeted him by name, for she remembered him, too, from her life.

“The man stayed with the Ghost Woman for many nights. As time passed, he thought less and less of the Chief’s daughter and more and more of the Ghost Woman bound to her burial bed, until finally she became his wife.

“Though the man loved his wife and their lodge and the land where they lived, he awoke one morning, hungering for a buffalo hunt, something of which he had not taken part since before he left to find the Chief’s horses. He said nothing aloud of the hunt, but the Ghost Woman knew his thoughts. She told him, ‘Mount your horse and ride to the bluffs. There, the buffalo await you. When you see the herd, rush into the center and kill the fattest bull to bring home. Roast the meat and bring me a share before you eat yours.’

“The man followed her commands. When he brought the roasted meat to her, he found her standing in the lodge, which startled him. ‘Please don’t be afraid of me, my husband,’ she said, because she knew his thoughts.

“His heart was calmed, and he knew his wife better than he had before he saw her ghostly form standing there. They shared the meat and spoke freely of everything, living and dead, making plans for the things they would like to do. ‘Let us pitch our tent by day and travel by night,’ the Ghost Woman said. ‘In this way we can see the world.’

“And it was as she said: The Ghost Woman floated ahead of her husband, her head covered and her mouth silent. Whenever the man thought something, the Ghost Woman heard it clearly, until eventually, the man became a Ghost as well. Then they passed their thoughts back and forth to one another like water poured between bowls with no drops spilled, and they knew each other as they knew themselves. Their tribe never found them again, and the Chief’s daughter often wondered what had become of her young love, though in the end she married someone else.

“The Ghost Woman gave up her rest, and the brave gave up the world of the living, and they loved one another well. And that, Natalie, is your happy ending.”

“But he died,” I protested.

“It’s a condition of living,” she said. “Besides, judging a story by the ending alone, or a life by its death alone, is as pointless as judging a long hike through the mountains by the fact that when you get back to where you parked your car, there’s a pit toilet full of you-know-what and beer cans.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Why not stay out in the woods forever?”

“Because,” she said. “You need that car to get to the next hike. I want you to understand something, Natalie. No matter how hard it feels, you don’t need to be afraid to move on, and you don’t need to be afraid to stay either. There’s always more to see and feel.”

“You really think so?” I said.

“I know so.”

13

Alice closes her notebook thirty minutes early, while I’m mid-sentence. “You’re not stressed, Natalie. You’re sad. I can’t do anything for you if you’re sad.”

“It’s a little bit hard to control that,” I reply edgily. It’s been a week since Megan left. The Wrong Things have all but vanished. It probably doesn’t help that I’ve barely left my house in the past three days.

“It shouldn’t be. Stress starts to overshadow, transform sadness when you’re overcommitting your time, keeping yourself awake all night, spending time with people when you need to rest and be alone.”

“You’re the worst therapist in the world.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m a research psychologist, not a therapist. Look, I’m starting to see some threads forming in your history, and I agree with what your last doctor said—there’s some other trauma there, something you haven’t worked through. All of your behaviors, your decisions and habits suggest so.”

“What behaviors—?”

“The fact that you can’t pinpoint a new aspect of the memory,” she cuts me off, “or recall any other event indicates that either you’ve suppressed the memory or it’s something that seemed really mundane to you at the time. I once read a case about a girl who was abandoned by her father, who went through EMDR and recovered a memory of opening the mailbox on her birthday. It wasn’t her parents’ fights or the memory of the day he walked out. It was the absence of a stupid birthday card. We’ve got to find your missing birthday card.”

“What if I don’t have one?”

“You do,” she says. “I feel it. I’m going to start bringing in a colleague to do hypnotherapy on Thursdays. We’ll keep having our normal one-on-one Tuesday sessions. Meanwhile, you need to push yourself. Do things that make you uncomfortable; overextend yourself. In the long run it’ll be good for you, and in the short run it will overrun you.”

Mom gets back from a run looking like a Nike advertisement, dressed in her sleek pink and gray workout clothes and only dewy and bright with sweat. “Hey, honey,” she says, ruffling my hair from behind the couch. She takes a long swig from her matching pink water bottle then comes to sit beside me. “Everything okay?”