The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (14 page)

“I don’t
think he has my best interests in mind,” Ellen added, a little afraid of what
she had set in motion; once begun, some things could never go back the way they
were.

So what. Things
weren’t going all that well before, anyway.

“I hope you don’t mind my asking, but if you don’t think he’s
helping, why do you see him?”

Ellen exhaled, searching
for answers and finishing her tea instead.

Serena refilled Ellen’s
cup without asking. “I shouldn’t have pried,” she said apologetically.

“No, it’s okay. If I had
a choice, I wouldn’t see him at all.”

“But you don’t?”

She shook her head. “My
release is conditional: I keep a job, I stay in town, I check in regularly with
my assigned social worker—she’s like a parole officer, only without the
stigma—and I see Dr. Kohler twice a week.”

Rather kindly, Serena did
not ask what she had been released from, either out of politeness or simple
disinterest. “But if he’s not helping, how can that be beneficial? You should
have him replaced. There are plenty of psychiatrists out there. How hard can it
be to find one if their profession advertises on the radio?”

Ellen smiled. “It’s more complicated than that. Dr. Kohler
and my father have an arrangement. If Dr. Kohler were to suggest it, I’m sure
my father wouldn’t hesitate to put me back in the hospital where he could
safely forget about me, one less drug-addicted, screw-up daughter ruining his
political aspirations.”

“I’m sorry, Ellen.”

And it was the
conversation with Mrs. Desmond all over again, only now she was on the other
side. When it all came out, no one could offer you anything but apologies. “I
guess all of that would be okay—not okay, I mean, but I could understand it,
you know—except that Dr. Kohler isn’t just interested in fixing my head. There’s
something about the way he looks at me …”

Her voice failed. She felt the words surging forth, the
trickle of a confession that had somehow become a flood of jetsam and debris
entangling one unwary coffee shop owner whose only fault was being kind enough
to offer her shelter from the rain. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be bothering you
with all this. Thank you for the tea.” Ellen was halfway to reaching for her
bag, rising from her chair.

“Nonsense,” Serena said crisply, laying a hand upon Ellen’s
arm and making her stay. “Sit. Clearly you have a lot going on right now. If it
helps to talk about it, then it’s the least I can do. Nothing bad will happen
to you in here, I promise you.”

Ellen relaxed a little,
eyes on the thickly varnished floor. “I appreciate that.”

“Understand, of course,
advice comes with the tea. This doctor of yours, I don’t like. I don’t place much
store in doctors, psychiatrists least of all. If he harbors any interest in you
other than as a patient, he’s not a professional, and that certainly can’t be
helpful. Do you know what he prescribed for you?” Serena asked, an edge in her
voice.

“Lithium, I think,” Ellen
confessed.

Serena gave Ellen’s arm a
friendly squeeze. “It’s only my opinion, so take it for what it’s worth, but you
should get yourself away from this doctor. Lithium is typically used to treat
manic-depression and mood swings, and the only depression I have ever seen in
you since you first walked through my door is on Tuesdays and Fridays when you
see your doctor. He sounds more like the problem than the solution.”

“I was diagnosed as
delusional and manic-depressive.” Ellen whispered. “I killed someone; I think
they were attacking me, but the truth is I was so high at the time I don’t really
remember what happened. I hardly remember my past at all, and what I do seems
an awful lot like what happened in a book I read. So maybe that makes me crazy
after all. Everyone’s convinced I self-medicated my depression with hallucinogens,
which is stupid, and that I intentionally overdosed because I wanted to kill
myself—”

“Did you?”

“Not that I remember, but
my memory is just bits and pieces, and what there is doesn’t make any sense
anyway. If I try to accuse Dr. Kohler of anything, they’ll just think I was lying.
It might just reinforce his recommendation for my committal.” An exhausted
breath of air stumbled from Ellen’s mouth, a low, bitter laugh. “Maybe they’re
right. I mean, I don’t think I can tell the difference between reality and
fantasy anymore anyway, so maybe I am crazy.”

Serena reached across the
table, closing her hands over Ellen’s, trapping her to the warmth of the
teacup. Looking up, Ellen was struck by the brilliance of the coffee shop
owner’s eyes, vibrant and jewel-like. “Ellen, you are
not
crazy.”

Despite the palpable
certainty of Serena’s words, there were things the coffee shop owner did not
know, could not know: the Sanity’s Edge Saloon, the Wasteland, Jack and the
book that all of these things were based upon.
Or is the book based upon all
of these things?
What would Serena think if she knew the truth?
What’s
that, Ellen? You believe you were magically transported to a world that doesn’t
exist except in a piece of drugstore fiction, and there you fell in love with a
guy who doesn’t exist except in your dreams? Well, fetch the butterfly nets,
fellas, ‘cause we got ourselves a live one here.
Without knowing the truth,
it was easy for Serena to insist Ellen was sane.

For her part, Ellen wasn’t so sure.

So tell her the truth,
a voice in her head said cheerily.
If she still insists you’re sane, at least you’ll know she’s making an informed
decision
—just like Dr. Kohler is
. And hey, if she calls the cops and has
you hauled away as a lunatic or a stalker or a whatever, well, that tells you
something too, doesn’t it?

“Before I moved here, I was in an asylum. I killed someone, a
pusher who attacked me while we were getting high. I remember waking up and
seeing him die. I also remember being taken out of the hospital to a place on
the edge of reality. I met a man there, a writer named Jack who could control
reality with his writing, only he was new and not very good at it. Eventually,
Jack managed to send me here … at least, I think he meant to send me here. I
remember climbing aboard a train that was leaving the Wasteland. Then the next
thing I remember, I was back here in the real world and I was reading a book
written by Jack Lantirn about events that happened at the Sanity’s Edge Saloon.
Only
I’m
a character in this book. Like it all happened for real, and
Jack was just writing it down. Or I made it all up after reading the book
because I’m crazy. No one seems to know anything about where the book came
from, or about Jack Lantirn. They figure I’m crazy and this is all some delusional
byproduct of my imagination.” Ellen let go a long, shaky breath. “A part of me
wants to believe them, to forget it all. But I can’t. I’m pretty sure Jack is
still back there, and that he needs my help. He saved me, and now I have to
save him. But I don’t know how, or even where to start.”

She said it all without
even looking up, concentrating only on spitting it all out at once so that
there would be no more questions, no more secrets, no more unmentioned details.
All your cards are on the table; now we’ll see what’s what.

Serena looked at her directly,
no suspicion or fear or the lying smile used to humor the deranged. Her
expression was both serious and sober. “You are coming to a crossroads, Ellen
Monroe. A choice must be made. If even a little of what you say is true, you
must never go back to Dr. Kohler again. He cannot grasp the possibilities of
what you know. I understand the considerable authority he holds over you, but
soon you will have to choose: the illusion of normalcy or true freedom.”

Then Serena straightened
up, leaning back a little as if struck with inspiration. “I want you to take
some of my special blend with you.”

Ellen blinked, wondering
if she had blacked out momentarily.
Tea? How was this back to being about
tea? Wasn’t she listening?

But Serena was already up
and moving towards the counter. “Forget about anything this so-called “doctor”
is prescribing to you, and take some of this tea. Drink it before bedtime. Don’t
worry, it won’t keep you awake. It will help you sleep, help you dream; and
that’s what you need right now, a nice restful sleep. Dreams help clear your
mind.”

“Mine don’t,” Ellen said
darkly.

“They will,” Serena replied, looking up at her from behind
the counter, “if you pay attention. Your dreams are telling you something,
Ellen.” Serena returned with a small paper bag and one large coffee. “It’s
important that you listen to them. Your head knows a lot more about you than
any psychiatrist could ever hope to. You just need to listen. I want you to
take this.”

“Serena, I appreciate
this, but—”

“I insist,” Serena said.
“You can pay for the coffee if you like. I expect it’s why you really came in,
and you might need it if you’re going to spend the night poring over Nicky’s little
inventory project. But the tea is a gift, and you should never question when
fate hands something to you.”

Even through the paper,
the tea smelled exotic, the aroma of stately pleasure domes. “Thank you. Can I
ask what’s in it?”

“It’s a special blend, oolong
and herbs, mostly, with a little thyme to ward off nightmares, and a little
chamomile to help you sleep, and a little of …
other things
.”

*     *     *

Ellen thanked her again while
paying for her coffee, and apologized once more for the trouble. Serena
dismissed both with that same regal wave, her gifts easily spared. Then Ellen
left, dashing across the street to
Dabble’s Books
with a fresh cup of
cinnamon-hazelnut in hand, cream and sugar already added because Serena knew
that about the troubled young woman.

Serena knew a great many
things about Ellen Monroe, in fact, and was learning more by the moment. What
troubled her however, were the things she did
not
know. “What are you
hiding, Nicky?”

Serena returned to the table, sitting opposite Ellen’s empty chair.

Curiouser and
curiouser
, she thought,
the situation less amusing than earlier. Something was going on around her, and
she had no idea what. And that was more than a little bit alarming.

With deliberate slowness,
she reached across the small table, taking Ellen’s teacup and bringing it
towards her. She turned it, looking carefully at the side Ellen drank from,
careful not to touch it. Amber-green liquid rocked gently in the bone china,
fragments of leaves dancing along the bottom. There was the aroma of lukewarm
tea and the lightest trace of Ellen’s lips on the edge of the cup. Not
lipstick, no, just the print of warm flesh against the smooth edge of ceramic
like a fingerprint left behind, the tale of the traveler who had passed this
way and was now gone.

Serena raised the cup
very deliberately, running her tongue along the lip print, tasting it. Then she
tilted the cup back and drank in the flavor of Ellen’s forgotten tea, breathing
in her aroma from the cooling liquid.

Yes
, Serena thought.
There it is.
There … it … isssssssss
.

No one entered
Serena’s Coffee Shoppe
for the rest of
that evening, or bothered to wonder why the proprietor sat alone in the dark, a
teacup halfway between the table and her lips, frozen in the moment like an
insect trapped in amber.

After more than seven
weeks of treatment, Dr. Kohler had a revelation about Ellen Monroe.

It was not a
revelation that would help her, but it
was a revelation all the same.

He grew up in a farm town
at the furthest western edge of New York State, trapped between a failing city
to the east and the forgotten corner of Pennsylvania to the west, its existence
almost pointless. Confined by the lethargic pace of rural life, he grew
anxious, angry. Not the restless angst of teenage rebellion, but a distinct sense
that even at thirteen, life was already passing him by. From the distance of
Cornell, post-grad work in Syracuse, a position in Chicago General before
coming here to settle into private practice—big places with big ideas and big
futures—his formative years, his entire childhood, existed only as a source of
irritation, even embarrassment. He moved to a high-rise apartment in the city, suburbs
too much like the country for his taste. He liked the smell of pavement and car
exhaust, the noise of traffic and police sirens, the hustle and bustle, the
attitude, people both purpose-driven and oblivious. It was reassuring to be
where things were happening, the heart of the matter, the thick of it all. Nothing
like where he grew up, that modern-day ghost town doomed to history, its useful
life spent out long ago.

Besides, small towns had
ways of knowing things about
you that were never meant to be known.

The center of town where
he grew up was an intersection, a junction of two roads with a corner gas
station and a hardware and feed store. Farms spread over acres of planted hills
and valleys with deteriorating roads binding neighbor to neighbor. People
gathered after Sunday services—you were either a Methodist or a Lutheran—to
talk about the rain or lack of it, the price of feed, how many gallons of milk
they were averaging from their herd, or the slump in corn prices.

Back then he was not Dr.
Frederick Kohler, that still years away. Back then he was Freddy, youngest son
of John and Lilly Kohler. He grew up with three older brothers that he hated,
and a younger cousin who came to live with them so that his unmarried aunt
could work. His cousin’s name was Catherine, but everyone called her Cassie.

Cassie overdosed on
heroin at nineteen.

Back then, everyone
thought drugs were a city issue, the scourge of the urban ghetto, a problem for
the blacks, and maybe the Chicanos. No one thought you could get heroin where
he grew up, God’s country, small-town U.S.A.

Cassie’s death at
nineteen was the death of innocence in yet another small town that long
believed itself immune to the ills of the world at large.

For Freddy, innocence
died well before that day.

Cassie was nineteen; younger than Ellen Monroe, but not much.
Ellen had issues with substance abuse, even overdosed. And the similarities did
not end there.

He found himself inexplicably drawn to Ellen Monroe, unable
to get her out of his head: her story, her delusions, her thoughts,
her face
.
The picture album from her father began to fill in the holes. Mostly childhood
photos. Not too many, and fewer and fewer as she grew up. Gabriel Monroe was
not a man given to nostalgia. There was a single note in the box the photo
album came in:
Keep it
. Most were unenlightening save to prove Ellen had
a past she was repressing—as if there was any doubt. But there was one picture
that caught his attention. Ellen was hanging by her hands from a tree branch, a
summer day in the country for a little girl of six or seven. Dressed in shorts
and a T-shirt and cheap tennis shoes, she was staring at the camera, her gaze
wistful and untroubled, beautiful and somehow familiar. In her smile, a missing
tooth, a spray of freckles across her nose.

Cassie.

Revelation
hits like lightning, and everything he’d left behind came back in the blink of
an eye. A patient he was treating for manic depression, delusional
schizophrenia and amnesia was reminding
him
of a very specific afternoon
one very specific summer when he was ten and a half years old, Cassie just
turning seven. The two of them were playing cowboys and Indians with his three
older brothers; politically incorrect, certainly, but it was a different time.
You could still tell ethnic jokes about Polocks and Wops and Mexicans.
Homosexuals were not even talked about. And African-Americans were still blacks,
or, depending on the social gathering, nigger in a low whisper. His father routinely
complained about the Japs taking jobs from honest Americans because they worked
for a bowl of rice, and how could an American company compete with that; the
goddamn bleeding heart liberals were to blame. It was a different time, forever
ago.

But as
with most things from the past, it is a simpler matter to bury them than to
forget them.

Freddy could barely
contain his excitement at the prospect of going out with his older brothers to
shoot B-B guns in the woods behind their home. As a rule, his older brothers
never included him. He was four years behind his next oldest brother, Tommy,
and those four years were insurmountable. They said he was a baby; that he
couldn’t keep up; that he would cry; that he would tell mom. There was always a
reason not to bring him along, not to let him play with them. The reasons were
simply excuses; they didn’t want him around.

But this time was
different. Jake had asked him to come, and Jake was the oldest so the others
would do as he said. Jake graduated in June and was going to join the army this
fall when he turned eighteen. If Jake said it was okay, the other two would
have to go along. Then they would tell Freddy things; secret things they
stopped talking about when they knew he was listening. Freddy could hardly
contain himself.

Catastrophe was
inevitable; their mother decided that Cassie was going along, too.

Cassie was no good at
playing cowboys and Indians! She was only seven. And she was a
girl!
She
should be back at the house playing on the swing, or with her dolls, or …
something
,
anything but tagging along on his first time playing cowboys and Indians with
his older brothers, shooting B-B guns in the woods at beer cans and squirrels.

Cassie would ruin everything.

He made it a point to ignore her as he followed his brothers
down the dirt road that ran alongside the fallow field of grass. Next year it
would be alfalfa. The year after, corn. Now it was only drowsy grass thick with
wildflowers and bees all hot and sticky on this late July day. He would have
liked to carry one of the B-B guns, but when he asked, Jake said maybe later.
That was all right; he could be patient. So long as he had a chance to shoot
Jake’s B-B gun, he could wait all day.

Cassie trailed a little
behind, carrying on incessantly while skipping and sidestepping so that she
could watch the dirt clouds scraped up by her sneakers. She was not taking the
patrol very seriously; this was certainly no way to hunt renegade savages. “I
wanna be a Indian, Freddy. I wanna be a Indian. I wanna be Thakaweha. Let me be
Thakaweha, Freddy.”

Cassie always liked
Freddy; he was her favorite.

Freddy assumed she meant
the Indian guide, Sacagawea, but had confused the name. Missing front teeth
further garbled her words. He had no idea how she had gotten the name into her
head, and didn’t much care. He just wanted her to shut up and stop annoying his
older brothers. The more she prattled on, the faster they seemed to walk. If Jake
got really mad, he might not let him shoot the B-B gun, and Freddy really
wanted to shoot Jake’s B-B gun.

Nearly a mile from the
house, the meadow dipped down and became woods. It was here, under a large
maple with low branches—good for climbing and scouting out Indians—that his
brothers declared they would make their fort. Jake, seventeen and the oldest,
took a knee in front of Freddy and informed him that he would be in charge of
the fort. It was his duty to guard all Indians that the brothers brought back.
Jake told him this was very important, and that if he did it well, he would
personally take Freddy out into the forest and let him shoot beer cans with his
B-B gun. Jake’s air rifle had unlimited pump-action, unlike some of the newer
ones with safety features to discharge excess pressure; Jake boasted that
twelve pumps would put a B-B right
through
a beer can. God, Freddy
wanted to see that!

Of
course, the first Indian to guard was the self-proclaimed Indian Princess, Thakaweha.
Like Freddy, Jake had no idea who Cassie was prattling on about. As far as he
was concerned, that was not his problem. And neither was
Cassie
; at
least, not for long.

The day
was hot and windless, the air still and thick with the sweet smell of uncut hay
and wildflowers and hard-baked earth, the drone of insects and the nattering of
his cousin.

Half an
hour passed before Freddy first began to suspect something. Enthusiasm and the
promise of firing Jake’s B-B gun held him for nearly fifteen minutes more. But
enthusiasm doesn’t count for much when you’re ten years old, and bored. Clearly
Jake’s only motivation for inviting him along to play cowboys and Indians—a
game his brothers had declared on several occasions was for babies—was to ditch
Cassie with Freddy. Their mother probably told Jake to look after Freddy and
his cousin, and would not let his brothers leave the house without the other
two. The pretense of playing cowboys and Indians was merely a clever way of
getting out from under their mother’s eye, out to a place where the brothers could
slip away and leave Freddy to watch over Cassie while they pursued squirrels
and birds, and shot beer cans out in the woods. And as the day grew hotter,
this kernel of an idea took root, sprouting greater and greater detail until
finally it blossomed into one undeniable fact: he had been ditched! He wasn’t
going to explore the woods with his brothers or play cowboys and Indians, and
he was never going to fire Jake’s B-B gun or learn all the secrets that they
whispered when he was around because they thought he was just as much a baby as
Cassie.
He would slow them down. He would get hurt or tired, and cry. He
would tell on them.
Just a little baby that they didn’t want around.

Knowing
a thing does little to change it; sometimes knowing only makes the agony worse.

“Freddy, leth do
thomething,” Cassie whined, missing teeth ruining her S’s; it would have been
funny if he didn’t hate her so much just then. “When are we gonna play cowboyth
and Indianth, huh? Jake thaid I could be Thakaweha.”

“We are playing cowboys
and Indians, you dodo,” Freddy said, swinging back and forth from a low branch
on the tree. It wasn’t as much fun as it sounded; not like shooting a B-B gun.
“I’m the cowboy. You’re the Indian. And you’re my prisoner, so be quiet.”

He couldn’t very well
tell her that all the other cowboys had ditched them. And anyway, it was her
fault.

“I don’t wanna be a
prithoner, Freddy. Jake thaid I could be Thakaweha. Just like on TV. I’m
thuppothed to be an Indian printheth.”

He felt like an idiot. He
wanted to cry, but knew he was too big for that. And he wanted to punch his
older brothers, each of them; really
hard
. But he was too little for
that. Jake might not bother, but Kevin and Tommy would definitely beat the
grease out of him, even if it meant his father would smack them both within an
inch of their lives and mom would ground them. He was trapped in the middle and
did the only thing a ten-and-a-half-year-old could do in that situation. He
blamed someone else.

Funny how we never really
outgrow our childhood.

“Leave me alone,” he said
sullenly. “As soon as Jake gets back, we’ll play. We have to wait for him.”

This wasn’t the answer Cassie
was looking for. “Why?”

“Cuz!”

While giving no answer
seemed better than telling her the truth, it only held Cassie for about a
minute. Sitting on the ground, staring at the soles of her sneakers for lack of
anything else to look at, she said, “Freddy, thith ith boring. Leth do
thomething.”

“We gotta wait for Jake,”
he grumbled, and plopped down on the ground and stared at the tree.

“Then help me make an
Indian cothtume,” she offered.

Freddy felt the sun
cleave through the gaps in the leaves, felt it bake down upon his skin, already
prickling with sweat and dirt, feverish from sun and undirected anger. His
brain felt swollen, ready to explode, filled with hate for Jake and his
brothers, for Cassie, for himself. All he could hear was Cassie’s complaints
and the drone of insects whirring in the summer haze, moving slowly through the
languid heat of the summer field to mix with the buzz of accusations in his
skull:
dodo, dummy, dodo-head, baby, stupid, idiot.
He didn’t want to
make costumes; he wanted to shoot Jake’s B-B gun, to be a grown-up. He didn’t
want to play silly, baby games with Cassie!

“Indians didn’t wear costumes,
dummy,” he said, losing patience. “They didn’t wear anything. You wanna look
like an Indian; take off your clothes and you’ll look like a real Indian.
Stupid.”