Tell Me No Secrets by Joy Fielding

fumbled with it again trying to put it in the lock. By the time she got behind the wheel, she was soaked through, her hair dripping into her eyes, her sweater clinging clammily to her body, like a cold sweat. She threw her coat into the backseat, then spread out across the front,letting the dampness cool her. She swallowed the cold night air, savoring it in her mouth as if it were a fine wine. She lay like this until gradually, her breathing returned to normal.
    The panic subsided, then died.
    Jess sat up, quickly turned on the car’s ignition. The windshield wipers shot immediately into action. Or, at least, one of them did. The other one merely sputtered into approximate position, then dragged itself along the window, like chalk across a blackboard. She’d definitely have to get it taken care of. She could barely see to drive.
    She pulled the car out of her parking space onto the street, heading south on Central. She flipped on the radio, listened as Mariah Carey’s high whine reverberated throughout the small car, ricocheting off the doors and windows. Something about feeling emotions. Jess wondered absently what else there was to feel.
    She didn’t see the white car until it was coming right at her. Instinctively, Jess swerved the car to the side of the road, the wheels losing their grip on the wet pavement, the car spinning to a halt as her foot frantically pumped the brake. “Jesus Christ!” she shouted over Mariah Carey’s oblivious pyrotechnics. “You moron! You could have gotten us both killed!”
    But the white car was long gone. She was screaming at air.
    That was twice today she’d barely missed being demolished by a white car, the first a Chrysler, this one … she wasn’t sure. Could have been a Chrysler, she supposed, trying to get a fix on the car’s basic shape. But it had sped by too quickly, and it was raining and dark. And one of her windshield wipers didn’t work. And what difference did itmake anyway? It was probably her fault. She wasn’t concentrating on what she was doing, where she was going. Too preoccupied with other things. Too preoccupied with not being preoccupied. About her sister. Her father. Her anxiety attacks.
    Maybe she
should
give Maureen’s friend Stephanie Banack a call. Jess felt in the pocket of her black slacks for the piece of paper on which her sister had written the therapist’s address and phone number.
    Jess recalled Stephanie Banack as a studious, no-frills type of woman whose shoulders stooped slightly forward and whose nose had always been too wide for the rest of her narrow face. Stephanie and her sister went all the way back to high school, and they still kept in frequent touch. Jess hadn’t seen her in years, had forgotten she’d become a therapist, decided against seeing her now. She didn’t need a therapist; she needed a good night’s sleep.
    Central Street became Sheraton Road, then eventually Lake Shore Drive. Jess started to relax, feeling better as she approached Lincoln Park, almost normal when she turned right onto North Avenue. Almost home, she thought, noting that the rain was turning to snow.
    Home was the top floor of a three-story brownstone on Orchard Street, near Armitage. The old, increasingly gentrified area was lined with beautiful old houses, many of them semidetached, most having undergone extensive renovations during the last decade. The houses were an eclectic bunch: some large, some tiny, some brick, others painted clapboard, a hodgepodge of shapes and styles, rental units next to single-family dwellings, few with any front yard, fewer still with attached garages. Most residents, anequally eclectic mix parked on the street, their parking permits prominently displayed on the dashboards of their cars.
    The redbrick facade of the house Jess lived in had been sandblasted over the summer and its wood shutters had received a fresh coat of shiny black paint. Jess felt good every time she saw the old house, knew how lucky she’d been to be