OOM: Problem
Hannah can't remember a time when her parents didn't fight. She assumes there was one, in a once-upon-a-time that's no more a part of her life than glass slippers and enchanted spindles are. But she could be wrong about that.
When she was young (or "younger" perhaps, if you don't think sixteen is grown up enough to not be "young," but Hannah would just leave it at "young"), the fights were generally small, short, infrequent, almost routine. "You're two hours late." Or, "I asked you three times to pick up milk on your way home." A lot of variations on, "That cost how much?" And, on one memorable occasion, "I am not spending my only vacation this year in a two bedroom cabin in the middle of no where with your mother!"
The only one Hannah remembers being distressed by happened when she was six. Her father, after a routine surgery became a mess of complications, went out for a drink (or three) and forgot to that he was supposed to pick up Hannah at 5:30, after dance class, because her mother had an appointment. It had been 7:00 by the time the increasingly irritated instructor tracked down her mother to come get her.
It was (and remains) the maddest Hannah had ever seen her mother, terrifying because at six it's hard to understand the difference in anger directed at you and anger you just happen to be present for. Because her parents yelled late into the night that time, and they kept mentioning her name.
The fighting became suddenly, markedly worse when she was thirteen. The arguments were no longer small, or short, or infrequent, and they were almost always about money. Hannah, in the grand tradition of anyone born to feuding parents after headphones were invented, shut her door and turned up her iPod as loud as she could stand it. There are songs that she will probably always associate with using them to try to drown out the accusations and denials and insults and stormy silences that came from the kitchen and the living room and her parents' bedroom.
Still, nothing was quite as bad as that fight when she was six.
It hadn't been a surprise, and it had almost been a relief, when her parents had sat her down, nine days after Christmas when she was fourteen, and explained that they had "grown apart" and that her father was moving out. And Hannah realized that "grown apart" was the polite fiction they'd all agree to, and nodded, and deleted her "Loud Music" playlist.
They still fight, two years after her father moved out, but she's never recreated the playlist. Because now, when they fight, she always listens. After all, with separate homes, lives, and bank accounts, the only thing Tom Griffith and Steph Denenberg still have in common (the only thing they still fight about) is their daughter. And so when Hannah hears her mother snap, around the time Daddy is supposed to pick her up for dinner, "You had absolutely no right to make that decision without consulting me," she knows that whatever the decision was, it was about her.
In this case, her father has decided that, given the events in DC, it would do Hannah good to "talk to someone." Because it has clearly profoundly affected her.
His evidence for this decision is that Hannah is thinner than she was when she left for DC, three weeks ago. It's only a couple of pounds, but a couple of pounds show up on Hannah. And since he doesn't know that she spent two and half weeks fretting (and not eating) at the end of the universe not so long ago, he's decided that she has distorted body image and possibly disordered eating. These are logical assumptions for someone in his line of work -- he sees a lot a girls his daughter's age who have both. They just don't include his daughter.
He's also concerned because he came downstairs at 4:00 am last weekend, and found her curled up on the couch, watching (of all things) a modern day, Mormon version of Pride and Prejudice, the best of a weak set of choices on the movie channels at that hour. And when he asked her why she was up, she'd shrugged and said, "Nightmare. No big deal, just couldn't get back to sleep." And he'd said "All right," and gone back upstairs.
And so without consulting Hannah or Steph, he has made an appointment for Hannah to see a psychiatrist. "She's a child, Steph, and I'm her father," he tells his ex-wife. "That actually does give me a right to make decisions for her. You're just never willing to admit there are problems where Hannah is concerned."
Steph is not amused. "Hannah does not need to see a shrink, Tom, which you would know if you had bothered to have a meaningful conversation with your daughter in the last six months."
Hannah has talked a lot about Epps, with her mother, and with Dr. Brennan, who called to check up on her a few times. And while Steph suspects that there's something Hannah isn't telling her, she also suspects that ordering her very stubborn daughter to talk is the best way to make her clam up.
In the end, though, Steph is the one to back down this time, telling Tom that if he wants to send Hannah to "talk to someone," he's welcome to try, and more power to him.
Which is how Hannah finds herself here, in a very soothing waiting room on a Wednesday afternoon, drumming her fingers on the arm of her chair.
She's given this a great deal of thought. There's really no way to actually talk about the Epps stuff, or the weight loss; she's fairly certain mentioning how stressful it is to spend seventeen days fretting at a bar at the end of the universe puts you on the fast track for a padded cell. (And that's before you try to talk about the complications of dating someone who was born 205 years before you were, on a different version of Earth.)
Besides, in Hannah's opinion, nothing that has to do with Epps, or even Milliways, is the Problem.
Dr. Eliot Markby's office is even more soothing than his waiting room. He is a non-threatening sort of man in his mid-fifties and a sweater vest. And before he can say much more than, "Hello, Hannah, I'm Dr. Markby," she has interrupted him.
"Look, my dad thinks I need to talk to you, because of some stuff that happened in DC. And I really don't. I've talked about it, and I'm dealing with it, and I'm fairly certain it's all under control. My actual problem, and you can write this down if you want, is that my father would rather pay a total stranger to talk to me than try to do it himself. And see, if I talk to you, then I'm complicit in making that an okay solution. Which it's not. Not to me. So I don't care what you do for the next forty-five minutes, Sigmund -- work a crossword, practice your putting, whatever. Go ahead and bill Daddy for your time. But I have nothing else to say to you, and anyway, psychology is a soft science."
It takes thirty-five of the remaining forty-four minutes before Dr. Markby stops trying to get her to talk to him, and she almost feels sorry for him. It's really not his fault.
When her dad picks her up, he asks if it went well, and she shrugs and says, "Fine."
It's the last thing either of them says until he drops her off at her mother's house.