Free Objects of My Affection by Jill Smolinski Page B

in our last session.”
    When Dr. Paul doesn’t elaborate—probably writing on his pad the way the therapists always do on TV—I give him a prod. “So what did he say?”
    â€œHe chose not to read it. But don’t worry. That doesn’t mean—”
    â€œHe didn’t read it?” I flop back on the couch. It’s as if someone let the air out of me. It’s all I can do to keep the phone to my ear, I’m so deflated.
    â€œNot yet … no.”
    â€œIt was only one page. How much must he hate me to not bother reading it?” I picture Ash glancing at the envelope, seeing my handwriting on the outside, and sneering. Hating the cream-colored stationery I used. Hating the swirls of my penmanship and the way I folded the paper into three parts. Hating me.
    â€œIt’s not that he didn’t bother. And he doesn’t hate you.”
    â€œThen why is he writing to some girl, but he won’t even open a letter from his own mother? What did he say when you gave it to him?”
    â€œI can’t tell you what Ash and I discuss in therapy. But …” I hear him sigh. The sigh is a good thing. It means he’s about to violate the therapists’ code of confidentiality or whatever it is they swear to and spill dirt. I sit back up. “He was afraid you were going to be angry. Even when I told him it was a friendly letter—and that I was here to help him if anything you wrote bothered him—he said he didn’t want to deal with it.”
    â€œHe said that? He doesn’t want to deal with me?”
    â€œ It. He didn’t want to deal with it. The letter.”
    â€œSame thing,” I say morosely.
    I suppose in some ways I can’t blame Ash for his avoidance. The last time he had a letter from me, it was the one I read to him at his intervention. That letter wasn’t quite so upbeat—it wasn’t supposed to be.
    I’d worked on it for days, following the instructions e-mailed to me by the interventionist I’d hired (and I suspect if I’d done the number of rewrites on my book that I did on that one letter, I’d probably have had a bestseller). The first part of the letter was easy enough, where I was to confront Ash with the ways his drug habit was affecting both him and me. It felt downright cathartic to scribble down how the fallout from his drug use had progressed—from his dropping out ofclasses at the community college to lately where I didn’t dare leave the house for fear he’d be in trouble and need me.
    But the part of the letter where I was supposed to let Ash know what he means to me had me stuck for the longest time. Maybe it was because I was actually sitting on a chair looking at Ash passed out on the couch as I wrote it. The grief settled into my bones so deep it felt as if I were penning his eulogy. As if I were being visited by the ghosts of Ashes past as I remembered little moments … how he’d build these intricate waterways for hours in the sandbox in our backyard … the sheer joy on his face the first time he mastered a two-wheeler bike … his determination to learn to make the perfect grilled cheese sandwich … the time he unself-consciously hugged me good-bye in front of all his friends before leaving for the eighth-grade overnight trip.
    None of those by itself seemed significant enough to compete with the pull that the drugs had on him, but they mattered to me. All those little things made Ash … well, Ash. Maybe not needed by the world because he’s sure to grow up and, say, discover a cure for cancer, but needed by me. Just to be my son.
    Eventually I wrote about when our car hydroplaned off the highway on a road trip to Wisconsin. Stuck in the mud and shaken up, we spent a night curled up in clothes we pulled from the suitcase, playing cards by flashlight and eating the popcorn I’d brought to give as gifts. After we were towed the next