How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?

“I really thought you died this time.” Gwen signed. “I know I shouldn’t freak out, but every week I just think, Well, this is it, you know? It’s going to happen, and I’m going to be the one to find her.”

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She stood in the threshold, shifting from foot to foot, until Magda gestured toward the couch. “Please.”

Gwen shrugged past her. “Sorry. I know that’s insensitive, and, like, age is just a number.”

“It is,” Magda said, easing into her own chair. She reached for her notepad, added, “Let’s talk about how that makes you feel.”

Magda already knew the answer, though; the creeping wave of existential dread had not slowed for Gwen since her mother’s death a few years prior. Following that initial grieving period, Gwen’s resultant issue was a fixation with mortality that sank tenterhooks into her daily life, rendering most endeavors doomed from the outset. “Like, if we’re all going to die anyway, I mean.”

In recent weeks, Gwen had begun arriving at their sessions early—by five, ten, fifteen minutes—her presence alert and agitated. “The psychological Cerberus” was what Magda’s colleagues called her, having seen Gwen, on various occasions, pacing the waiting area. Magda could usually sense Gwen just beyond the wooden doors, the dog-eared paperback of Fear and Trembling upon her lap, running again through the scenario: Okay, I find her, then what?

At the moment, Gwen was saying how she didn’t disagree with what Magda had said in their previous session, exactly, about how the fear might be actively diminishing her quality of life. “Like with Steve,” she said. “I get that it’s not good for our marriage, the being together all the time. And him feeling like he’s managing me, you know, always talking me off a ledge. But I keep feeling like, I don’t know, the bad things can’t happen if I’m there. If I’m focused enough. Like how . . .” She motioned vaguely toward Magda. “You know.”

Magda set down her pen, steepled her fingers. “What if we try, in this moment, to turn away from the fear. Let’s shift our focus to the present. What do you observe is happening, right now?”

“I mean, you’re alive.”

A glance at the clock, then: forty-seven minutes to go.

*

Magda was examining the lines on her face when the buzzer rang to announce her next patient. She saw Bill every Tuesday, and had, without fail, for many years. In January, he had begun to caution Magda that this year—their thirteenth—was suspicious, and that if something were to go wrong with their working relationship, they were perhaps on the brink of that moment. He had said as much during years seven and eleven as well. “It’s the prime numbers that are suspect,” he said grimly, rubbing at his chin. “But thirteen especially so.”

Hirsute and tall, Bill crouched reflexively upon approaching a door. He wore the rote uniform of bankers: fitted suits, loafers, never without pomade. He had a loud and confident way of speaking about things that held little or no value to him; he could bloviate about market-rate housing in Manhattan for indefinite periods, but could not talk easily about—or to—his wife. If he tried, his movements became agitated—worrying at his beard, a fastening and unfastening of his watch, a slow rotation of the wedding band encircling his thick finger.

After more than a decade of Magda’s gentle prompting, and of granular strategizing, Bill still couldn’t admit to his wife that he was only attracted to men. Nor could he come clean about the affair he’d been conducting with a bookkeeper from the office, a man named Ernesto. During their last session, he told Magda that the thing he dreaded was not the inevitable divorce, but that his wife would think he didn’t care for her. “That, and the reputation. You remember what happened to Chet Lundberg.”

Magda had nodded. The banker whose affair with the building mailman was made public after an ill-timed tryst in the stairwell. Bill brought him up at least twice a month, shudderingly, to say that the man now lived in Iowa. He worked in insurance.

Bill had interrupted himself, saying, “I know, I know, I wouldn’t need to move to Iowa.”

That day, as he sat down, Magda said, “Let’s start with one good thing.”

“A good thing,” Bill repeated. He opened his mouth, closed it again.

“Or,” she said. “Is there another place you’d like to begin today?”

The grooves in Bill’s forehead deepened as he squinted over at her. He cleared his throat.

“I don’t even know where to start. I just have a bad feeling about this summer, that’s all.”

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From How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?by Anna Montague. Copyright © 2024 by Anna Louise Montague Field. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.