“Sure,” he replied with relief, “I’d like to listen to everyone else first.”

“OK, Richard can you start off for us by letting us know how you got on this month.”

“Here, I find that this helps,” a woman beside Jack whispered and handed him a pamphlet.

“Thank you.” He left it on his lap and decided to wait until Richard had finished his story before reading through it. Richard’s story was a rather absurd tale about an instantly unlikable man and his constant fear of acting on violent impulses. He droned on, painfully and miserably reciting the tale of how an equally painfully miserable man constantly felt overly responsible for the safety of others, to the point that he was afraid to drive out of fear he would run over someone with his car. At times, Jack shook his head and laughed out loud thinking it an obvious, however slightly dark, comedy, but he quickly stopped after receiving numerous odd looks from the group.

Minutes-which felt like hours-later, the room was still echoing the incessant droning of Richard’s story, each word sounding twice in Jack’s ears, which were already bored from hearing them the first time. As the story moved toward being just plain depressing, with the main character’s behavior the cause of the loss of his wife and child, Jack finally tuned out and began to read the pamphlet scrunched beneath his clammy hands.

His relaxed body stiffened as he finally concentrated on the cover of the thin glossy booklet. Hot waves of color spread from his neck all the way to the top of his strawberry-blond head within seconds as he read WELCOME TO OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE ANONYMOUS.

Jack sat quietly through the remainder of the meeting, feeling embarrassed to be there and generally ashamed by his earlier behavior during Richard’s story. Keeping his head down when the hour was up, he filed out of the room, hiding among the rest of the members.

“Jack!” Tracey called out and he froze. He stopped walking and allowed everyone to file past him, watching their faces as they prepared to leave their safety net and battle the world and all its demons, alone. He also saw Dr. Burton, who was waiting outside the room, arms folded and a face like thunder. Jack took a few steps back into the room toward Tracey.

Tracey caught up to him and held out her hand to shake his. “Thank you for coming today,” she said with a smile. “You know your coming here was the first step in helping to heal yourself. It’s a rocky journey; it will be difficult, but please know that we are all here to help you through it.” Jack heard Dr. Burton laugh mirthlessly. “The twelve steps that we mentioned earlier, as originated by Alcoholics Anonymous, and adapted for OCA, can bring relief. I’ve seen that they can reduce and even eliminate our obsessions and compulsions, so do come again next month.” Tracey patted his arm encouragingly.

“Thanks.” He cleared his throat awkwardly, feeling like an impostor.

“Do you know Sandy well?” she asked.

He winced, disliking being asked the question in Dr. Burton’s company. “Kind of,” he said uncomfortably, clearing his voice.

“If you see her, tell her to come back to us. It’s unusual for her to miss a meeting.”

Jack nodded again and felt glad now that Dr. Burton was within earshot. “I’ll do my best.”

“Hear that?” he said to Dr. Burton as soon as Tracey was out of earshot. “She says it’s unusual for Sandy not to be here. I wonder where she is.”

38

I went to the OCA meetings every month. I went because every month that I was there I knew it was another month of deserving to be with Gregory.

“Sandy!” I could hear Gregory calling my name. I was downstairs in his house, half-naked at ten past two in the morning, rooting through my overnight bag that I’d placed, as usual, by the front door when I’d walked in.

“Sandy!” he called again.

There was a thump and the floorboards above me creaked as he climbed out of bed and crossed the bedroom. My heartbeat quickened and my search became more frenzied. Feeling a pressure now that Gregory was making his way toward me, I turned my bag upside down and spilled the contents to the floor. I picked items up, tossed them aside, shook out all my clothes, went through the pockets, laid them flat on the floor, and ironed each point firmly with the palm of my hand, trying to feel for the hidden lump.

“What are you doing?” His voice was suddenly behind me and I jumped. My heart thudded and adrenaline raced through me as I felt like I’d been caught in the act, as though I’d been doing something criminal like stealing or immoral like cheating on him. I hated that he made me feel what I was doing was wrong. It was that same look in his face that I had run from in others, the look that strangely hadn’t chased me away from him yet. Not completely, anyway, although I had run a few times.

The aftershave I bought for him each of the six Christmases we had been together filled the room. I didn’t respond to him, I just laid my navy blue garda uniform out on the carpet, feeling each point for unusual bumps.

“Hello?” he sang out. “I was calling you.”

“I didn’t hear you,” I replied.

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?” I replied calmly, running my hand down the length of the navy blue nylon trouser leg.

“It looks like your clothes are being given a deep massage.” I felt him move further into the room and he sat down before me on the couch, wrapped in the robe I’d bought for him this Christmas, wearing tartan slippers I’d bought for him the previous. “I’m rather jealous,” he murmured, watching me smoothing down the pockets.

“I’m looking for my toothbrush,” I explained, emptying the contents of my wash bag onto the floor.

“I see.” He watched me. He just sat there quietly and watched me, yet this made me feel uncomfortable. His disapproving eyes on me made me feel as if I was sitting on the floor doing drugs instead of merely looking for something. A few minutes passed, searching without results.

“You know that you have a toothbrush upstairs in the bathroom already?”

“I bought a new one today.”

“The old one won’t do?”

“The bristles are too soft.”

“I thought you liked soft bristles.” He ran his hand through his tight beard.

I smiled for his sake.

He watched me for a little while longer.

“I’m going to make a cup of tea, do you want one?” He had the same method as my parents; they too used to keep an easy tone in their voices to pretend to me that everything was all right, to stop me from picking up negative vibes and panicking because something was lost. When I was younger that’s what I thought. Now that I was older, I had learned from Gregory that it wasn’t me he was trying to lighten the atmosphere for; it was himself. I stopped searching and watched him move around the adjoining kitchen as though he made cups of tea at two o’clock every morning. I watched him playing house and pretending that his on/off girlfriend was perfectly normal and correct to be sitting on the carpet half-naked while emptying her bag for a toothbrush she already had sitting in a cup holder upstairs. I watched him pretending to himself, smiling as I fell in love with another flaw I never knew existed within him.

“Maybe it fell out in the car,” I said, more to myself.

“It’s raining, Sandy. You don’t want to go out now, do you?”

He needn’t have asked, he knew the answer but he was still playing along with his own game. Pretending now, that his full-time, eternally faithful girlfriend was going to risk running out into the wet night to look for something. How unusual, how frightfully odd, how attractively kooky. Such fun.

I looked around the living room for a jacket or blanket to throw on. There was none. In this state, although I appear calm on the outside, inside I’m running around, screaming, shouting, looking in all directions, anxious to go, go, go. To run upstairs and throw some clothes on would take too long, would take precious minutes away from finding. I looked at Gregory, who was pouring the boiling water into a witty mug I’d got him for the previous Christmas. He obviously saw the desperate search in my eyes, the silent longing for help. He played it cool, as usual.