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trip."
    "You weren’t there?"
    She picks up the jeans I left at the foot of the bed. "We always meant to go to Sea World, but your father and I never got out there."

    "This is our last session," I say.
    Alice, Mitch, Dr. Mehldau: I have their complete attention.
    The doctor, of course, is the first to recover. "It sounds like you’ve got something you want to tell us."
    " Oh yeah."
    Alice seems frozen, holding her self in check. Mitch rubs the back of his neck, suddenly intent on the carpet.
    "I’m not going along with this anymore." I make a vague gesture. "Everything: the memory exercises, all this imagining of what Therese felt. I finally figured it out. It doesn’t matter to you if I’m Therese or not. You just want me to think I’m her. I’m not going along with the manipulation anymore."
    Mitch shakes his head. "Honey, you took a drug ." He glances at me, looks back at his feet. "If you took LSD and saw God, that doesn’t mean you really saw God. Nobody’s trying to manipulate you, we’re trying to undo the manipulation."
    "That’s bullshit, Mitch. You all keep acting like I’m schizophrenic, that I don’t know what’s real or not. Well, part of the problem is that the longer I talk to Dr. Mehldau here, the more fucked up I am."
    Alice gasps.
    Dr. Mehldau puts out a hand to soothe her, but her eyes are on me. "Terry, what your father’s trying to say is that even though you feel like a new person, there’s a you that existed before the drug. That exists now."
    "Yeah? You know all those O.D.-ers in your book who say they’ve ‘reclaimed’ themselves? Maybe they only feel like their old selves."
    "It’s possible ," she says. "But I don’t think they’re fooling themselves. They’ve come to accept the parts of themselves they’ve lost, the family members they’ve left behind. They’re people like you." She regards me with that standard-issue look of concern that doctors pick up with their diplomas. "Do you really want to feel like an orphan the rest of your life?"
    "What?" From out of nowhere, tears well in my eyes. I cough to clear my throat, and the tears keep coming, until I smear them off on my arm. I feel like I’ve been sucker punched. "Hey, look Alice, just like you," I say.
    "It’s normal," Dr. Mehldau says. "When you woke up in the hospital, you felt completely alone. You felt like a brand new person, no family, no friends. And you’re still just starting down this road. In a lot of ways you’re not even two years old."
    " Damn you’re good," I say. "I didn’t even see that one coming."
    "Please, don’t leave. Let’s—"
    "Don’t worry, I’m not leaving yet." I’m at the door, pulling my backpack from the peg by the door. I dig into the pocket, and pull out the brochure. "You know about this?"
    Alice speaks for the first time. "Oh honey, no ... "
    Dr. Mehldau takes it from me, frowning. On the front is a nicely posed picture of a smiling teenage boy hugging relieved parents. She looks at Alice and Mitch. "Are you considering this?"
    "It’s their big stick, Dr. Mehldau. If you can’t come through for them, or I bail out, boom . You know what goes on there?"
    She opens the pages, looking at pictures of the cabins, the obstacle course, the big lodge where kids just like me engage in "intense group sessions with trained counselors" where they can "recover their true identities." She shakes her head. "Their approach is different than mine ... "
    "I don’t know, doc. Their approach sounds an awful lot like ‘reclaiming.’ I got to hand it to you, you had me going for awhile. Those visualization exercises? I was getting so good that I could even visualize stuff that never happened. I bet you could visualize me right into Therese’s head."
    I turn to Alice and Mitch. "You’ve got a decision to make. Dr. Mehldau’s program is a bust. So are you sending me off to brainwashing camp or not?"
    Mitch has his arm around his wife. Alice, amazingly, is dry-eyed. Her eyes are wide, and