Straightjacket (8 page)

“One time when I was little, I told my mother I hated her.”

“And how did she respond?”

“It’s…it’s just really hard to talk about.”

“I understand. If you can, try to tell me what you remember.”

That would be easy. Even though it had happened ten years ago, she had never forgotten. Every detail of that night was seared into her. Maybe she’d give him a little bit, just enough to satisfy him so he’d stop asking.

“Okay, I’ll try.” She sighed. “I had a fight with my mother earlier in the day because I remember she made meat loaf for dinner. I’ve always hated meat loaf and she only ever made it when she was mad at me.”

“I see.”

“I remember sitting at the kitchen table, eating dinner once my dad got home. My mom was telling him about the fight we’d had. I don’t remember what it was about, but she was telling him how ungrateful I was, saying how could I treat her like that after all they’d done for me, the same stuff she’d always say. I remember how much I hated that meat loaf, and I was getting so mad listening to her talk that way about me. I screamed that I hated her.” Anna stopped. She knew exactly what came next. She had relived it hundreds of times, but she’d never put it into words for someone.

“So you told her you hated her.” The sympathy in his face made her
want
to tell.

“Then my dad freaked out and started screaming. I got scared and ran downstairs to the bathroom. It was the only door in the house that had a lock on it. He came down and started banging on the door, screaming that when I came out of there, I was going to get it.”

She didn’t want to tell him now. It was humiliating. She didn’t want to talk about the brown leather belt that her father kept in the closet. It was how she
got it
over and over again. She would skip that part. He couldn’t make her tell him.

“I know this is difficult for you, but try to go on.”

“So that night”—she went on, skipping over the gory details—“I was lying in bed and I started to feel weird. I didn’t know what was happening to me, but I was scared. Scared isn’t even the right word for it, more like terrified. And I felt like I was in a dream or something, but I wasn’t asleep. I felt so sick. Everything felt different.” She had to be done. She just couldn’t relive it any longer.

“Was that the only time you ever felt like that?”

“No.” She wanted to cry, purge herself from the secret that she’d had hundreds of these things since she was eight. Her life revolved around them, terrified of when the next one would hit. They controlled everything she did and thought.

“So you’ve felt like this at other times.”

“Yeah. A lot of other times.”

“Does it still happen?”

“Uh-huh.”

“When it does, how does it make you feel?”

“Like I said, just really scared. I literally feel like I’m going crazy, and sometimes I feel like I’m gonna die.”

“How about physical symptoms? Can you tell me about any of those?”

“Um, I feel dizzy, my heart beats really fast, and when it’s over, I start shaking.”

“Anna, it sounds like you’ve been suffering from panic attacks. There are things you can do to lessen their severity, and we can even medicate you to try to prevent them.”

So there was a name for them. And if they had a name, it meant that they happened to other people. Could it really be that Dr. Blackwell knew how to make them go away? She felt like screaming with relief. Her eyes welled up. This burden she’d been carrying since she was a child might actually disappear. And now somebody knew about it.

“I always thought I was crazy,” she said, starting to cry. “I didn’t know…”

“You’re definitely not crazy.” For the first time, she noticed he was balancing a notepad on his lap. He began to write. She hoped he was writing
not crazy
in his notes, and she almost burst out laughing at how ridiculous that was.

Dr. Blackwell spent the remainder of the session teaching her what to do when she felt a panic attack coming on. It was embarrassing practicing the deep, structured breathing, but if it would stop this hell, she was willing to do anything. He asked if she wanted to try medication. She immediately answered yes. He told her about some side effects she might experience, but she all but ignored his words. If there was a possibility that she would no longer be ruled by this, she would risk anything.

“Our time is up, but I think we made a great deal of progress. There’s a lot more to do, though. Good work today.”

“Thank you so much,” she said with her heart full of boundless gratitude. A thank-you couldn’t even begin to cover it.

“You’re very welcome.” He stood up and opened the door. She followed, but stopped abruptly before leaving with the attendant.

“Just one more thing.”

“Yes?” He smiled.

“Do you think you could have them take me back using the stairs instead of the elevator?”

“Of course, of course.” He nodded at the attendant. “I guess we’ll cover that in our next session.” A tiny spark of hope flickered deep inside Anna, little by little incinerating the dread and misery that had taken root years ago.

Chapter Seven

Caleb spent the rest of the day in his room. He didn’t want to push Anna away more than he already had, so he avoided the common area. Lunch had come and gone. He’d head over for dinner but keep his distance from her, eat quickly, and get back to his room. Hopefully she wouldn’t notice he was there. Maybe after a few days, he could try again.

He kept running through what had happened that morning. She was right; he didn’t know anything about her. He should have waited much, much longer to tell her. Everything was worse, and he probably caused her to plunge deeper into a depression. He couldn’t bear the thought that he’d made her suffer when all he wanted to do was make everything that was bad in her life go away.

Having been at his desk for hours, he had nothing to show for it, just the barest outline of a face looking out from the paper—blank eyes, an expressionless mouth, a line that might become a chin. It was no one, and he didn’t know who it would become. His mind was too busy with thoughts of Anna; there was nothing left over to give to his drawing. Sitting there was useless, but he didn’t want to get up and face the fact that he was failing, face the crushing boredom spanning in front of him until the lights went out.

Maybe if he put on some music it might distract him long enough to get some momentum going. He wiggled the ear buds from his iPod into place and flipped through the menu, settling on a track by the Killers. The music flooded his mind. It felt good to let something outside of himself in. He closed his eyes and let his body slump down over the desk, resting his chin in his palm.

Just as the song ended, Caleb flinched from the sensation of a hand on his shoulder. He spun around to find Anna standing over him. The urge to drift off to sleep vanished instantly thanks to a fresh surge of adrenaline. But then again, maybe he was dreaming, since there was no way this girl would voluntarily get near him. He yanked the ear buds out and stood up, shoving the chair out from behind him. She was still there.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said. “You didn’t answer when I said your name, so I just figured…”

“No, no, it’s okay, you didn’t scare me.” Why did he have to jump up so fast? “What are you doing here?” It didn’t come out right, and he felt like an idiot. “I mean, I thought after what happened, you wouldn’t want anything to do with me. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to make you cry.” Somehow he’d managed to make himself look like an even bigger idiot thanks to his stupid babbling. He prayed for someone to stop him.

She backed away a little. “It’s okay. I actually came to apologize to you. I shouldn’t have freaked out like that. It’s not like you were being awful to me or something.”

“No, you have nothing to apologize for.” His tone was almost scolding. “I’m the one who started talking about things I shouldn’t have.”

“Well, I don’t want to start arguing about who’s more sorry, so let’s just say we both are.”

“Yeah, okay. Let’s just forget it happened,” he said.

Silence.

“It looks like you’re busy, so I guess I’ll go,” Anna said as she glanced down at the portrait on the desk. She turned toward the door.

“No, I’m not busy. Please stay.” He wanted to slap himself for how desperate he sounded. He should offer her a seat, or a cocktail or something, but there was just a bed, a dresser, a desk, a chair, and four walls. He dragged the chair closer to her so she could sit down, but she didn’t. Instead she wouldn’t stop staring at the wall. Maybe she’d forgotten he was even there.

“What’s all this?” she finally asked.

“They’re just some things I like, things I like to look at.” The wall was covered with scraps of paper from the corner all the way to the door. Some were pages torn from magazines, others were drawings. There were also papers with blocks of text on them. She squinted at the words, trying to read them, and moved closer. Her lips mouthed a couple lines, and she just barely whispered:

for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

“Did you write that?”

“No. It’s e.e. cummings.”

“Oh. I like it.” Her gaze continued to weave through the paper mural.

He felt like she wasn’t so much speaking to him as saying out loud what happened to be passing through her mind. Although he stood quietly by as she studied the scraps of paper, what he really wanted to do was rip every last drawing off the wall and squirrel it away somewhere, never to be seen again by anyone except himself. He might as well have been stripped naked in front of her. All that paper on the wall was him, or at least parts of him. He’d hung them up only because he was sure no one else here would ever bother to look. It let him bring a small part of his studio to this awful place.

“Are these all your drawings?”

“Yeah, they are.” He walked over to the bed and sat down.

Now that he’d backed away, she moved closer to the wall so she could make out the details. “This place right here…” She pointed to one of the drawings. “Where is it?”

It would be better to avoid bringing up anything having to do with angels or heaven. “It’s just a studio that I’d like to have someday.” He
did
want that studio back, with all the windows that let the light flood through, where he could work uninterrupted for eternity and wouldn’t need to stop because it was five thirty and time for dinner.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Who are these people?” Her fingers pinched the corner of one of the portraits.

“They’re some of the patients. That one’s George.”

“I didn’t recognize him. I guess I can see it, but he looks so different. I can’t really say how though.”

Caleb knew exactly why he looked different, but again, he wouldn’t tell her. He’d found that he could imagine what people would look like in heaven, erasing all of the earthly burdens that mutilated them. In the portrait George wasn’t compelled to count or slap his thighs. He didn’t have to focus his strength on trying to control what was out of control about him. In the portrait, he just
was
.

And then she took a quick breath in. Her back was to him, but without a doubt she’d found the portraits of herself. He would have hidden them had he known she was coming. Now it was too late.

“Is that me?” Her voice was serious and quiet.

“Um, yeah, it is.”

Five portraits of her hung in a row, smack in the center of the wall, so that they were at Caleb’s eye level when he worked at his desk. In some, a tender smile lit up her face. In others, her eyes zeroed in on the viewer—which had always been him—and though she wasn’t smiling, there was a serenity about her, the kind that made her glow from the inside out.

When the real Anna turned around, her face had changed somehow. There was little difference between it and the face in the portrait. Caleb sat still on the bed even though he wanted to rush over to her.

“I look…so different. Like a model or something.”

“That’s what you look like.” He got up but was careful, only letting himself take one step toward her. “You’re so pretty. Don’t you know that?”

She looked down nervously. “I can’t believe all this. Your drawings, I mean. You’re just really talented.” She moved closer to the wall and turned to touch another one of the drawings—one that wasn’t of her—with her fingertips. “They look so real. How can you do this?”

“Now you know why I stare at you all the time.” He’d meant it as a joke, but neither of them laughed. She turned around. The silence stopped being awkward and turned into something comforting: a cushion they could rest on while their feelings overcame everything around them.

The urge to be near her was so strong that it obliterated any sense of duty or logic in him. He didn’t think about what it meant or what would happen after this. All he knew was that the perfect face in the pictures that he’d carefully drawn and studied was right in front of him. She’d thought enough about him to come see him, and now that she was here, he didn’t want her to leave.

He couldn’t hold back anymore and rushed toward her. She flinched, and at the last minute, he stopped himself right before his arms had a chance to wrap themselves around her. He stood so close, though, that he could feel her breath and smell her hair. It smelled like flowers, and the scent put him in such a daze that he didn’t realize he’d lost control and he was touching her fingers.

“I’m sorry, I just can’t help it,” he whispered as she peered back at him with the blue eyes that made him forget everything else. “You’re so…good and so pretty and…you ask about me and…I can’t believe I found you in this place. You make all the loneliness go away.”

He found himself winding his arms around her waist and pulling her so that she was pressed against his chest. She didn’t pull away, and he started to worry since she didn’t answer, but after a few moments he felt her arms around his back. That was answer enough. No more coldness now. He didn’t feel the slow drag of time pulling on him…he wished time would just stop.