The Hypnotist's Love Story (43 page)

Perhaps they’ll make me godmother.

Oh, I’m a riot.

It was a big busy waiting room, filled with plump pregnant bellies, and couples holding hands while they chatted softly, and slim women reading magazines while secretive smiles played across their faces. These were all people who fitted as snugly into society as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle: clean, wholesome people who loved and were loved back.

I sat down on the first seat I saw, close to the door, and picked up a magazine. As I did, I heard a nurse say, “Ellen O’Farrell.” There was a pause and then again, louder this time, “Ellen O’Farrell.”

I looked up and saw that Ellen had been in the middle of helping herself to two plastic cups of water from one of those water cylinders, and now she was flustered, in that charming, girlish way of hers, uncertain what to do with the cups, her bag slipping off her shoulder as she straightened up too quickly. I saw Patrick and Jack walk toward her, and Patrick took the cups out of her hands while Jack lifted the strap of the bag back up over her shoulder—so grown-up, so
well mannered. I taught him those manners. Then the nurse said something I didn’t hear, and they all smiled, and off they went down a corridor, the three of them; they hadn’t noticed me at all.

A woman sitting next to me said, “Are you all right?”

I hadn’t even realized I was crying.

“If you died,” said Jack to Ellen, “would the baby die too?”

“Jack!” said Patrick. “What sort of question is that?”

They’d gone out for an early dinner at a local pizza restaurant, and Jack was studying the ultrasound photos while they waited for their pizza to arrive.

“The baby needs me to be alive to keep growing,” said Ellen. Should she reassure him that she wasn’t going to die, like his mother? Or was he just interested? Or was he hoping she
would
die? Maybe he was sick to death of the healthy lunches.

“Did you eat your lunch today, Jack?” she asked.

“So, like, when Armageddon comes, and all the pregnant women die—” began Jack.

“Jesus! Enough with the Armageddon,” said Patrick. “This is why you’re having nightmares and this is why you’re falling asleep in class.”

“I didn’t actually fall asleep,” said Jack. He put the ultrasound photos down and Ellen slid her finger across the table and pulled them back toward her. “I just closed my eyes for a minute to concentrate.”

“They couldn’t wake you up, mate,” said Patrick.

Just before Ellen and Patrick had been due to leave for the ultrasound, the school had called to say that Jack had put his head on the desk and fallen so soundly asleep that the teacher had carried him all the way to sick bay without being able to wake him up. They’d assumed he was coming down with something, but he seemed in perfectly high spirits now, thrilled to have been given the day off school and taken along for the ultrasound.

“You were probably snoring,” said Patrick. “Nobody else could concentrate.”

He put his head on one side and gave a convincing rumbly snore.

Jack grinned. “
You
snore. I never snore.”

“Me? I don’t snore,” said Patrick. “Do I, Ellen?”

“No,” said Ellen. He did snore, in fact; she was considering earplugs. She picked up the ultrasound photo and studied it. Mine, she thought. My baby. She glanced at Patrick and amended it:
Our
baby. The photo had a ghostly look to it, as if it was a photo of some supernatural phenomenon. “Everything looks just as it should,” the woman doing the ultrasound had said. “Congratulations.” And then she’d said, “Oh look! He or she is waving at you!” and she’d pointed out a tiny, ghostly hand, and Patrick, Ellen and Jack had all waved back.

“You snore like an earthquake!” Jack jabbed his finger at Patrick. He leaned forward with his elbows on the table and the tablecloth began to slip. “You snore like a volcano!”

“Careful, mate.” Patrick adjusted the cloth. “Actually, your mum taped me snoring once. I did sound a bit like a volcano.”

Ding!
Fourth Colleen reference in the last hour, thought Ellen. She couldn’t seem to stop noticing it, no matter how hard she tried.

“There’s a volcano in America called the Yellowstone Supervolcano,” said Jack. “And when it erupts—POW!” He banged his fist on the table and a glass full of sugar packets tipped over. “That’s the end of the world. It could happen any minute.”

“Really?” said Ellen.

“I don’t think so,” said Patrick. “Where’s our pizza? Don’t they know we’re starving over here? Let’s see that photo again.” He took the photo from Ellen.

“Have you got a photo of me like that somewhere?” said Jack.

“Yeah, your mum put it in your baby book, remember? You’ve seen it before.”

Ding!

Oh, Ellen, give it a rest. What was the poor man meant to do? Ignore his son’s questions? Pretend Colleen never existed?

“I’m going to the toilet,” announced Jack.

He always went to the toilet whenever they went out. It was his excuse for wandering around the restaurant, checking out whatever interested him.

“I bet he stops right there, where you can see into the kitchen,” said Ellen.

Jack stopped on cue, looking nonchalantly casual as he pressed himself up against a potted plant, and stood on tippy-toes so he could see over a ledge into where they were tossing pizza dough up into the air.

Ellen and Patrick laughed, and for a moment it felt like they were both his parents. Patrick smiled. “Funny kid.” He lifted up the photo and looked at it. “I wonder if you’ll be worried about Armageddon one day, baby? Or will you be a serene, spiritual soul like your mother?”

“I’m not feeling that serene at the moment,” said Ellen. “What a day. First Luisa wanting her money back, and then Ian Roman threatening to ‘bring me down.’ I think this qualifies as the worst day in my professional life.”

“Ian Roman is just throwing his weight around,” said Patrick. “Don’t worry about him. He’ll get distracted buying his next television station or whatever.” He paused. “So are you really hypnotizing his wife to fall in love with him?”

“Of course not,” said Ellen. “I can’t make anyone feel something that isn’t genuine. Rosie
asked
me to do that and I suggested that we do some work on her self-esteem issues instead. You can’t love someone unless you feel good about yourself. I can’t tell you too much, but I just said I would try and help give her enough self-confidence to either leave him or to try and make it work.”

“Mmmm,” said Patrick. He looked doubtful.

“What?” said Ellen.

“I don’t know. I guess it sounds a bit … airy-fairy?”

Ellen felt quite profoundly irritated. “Oh, so now you think I’m some sort of charlatan as well, do you?”

“Of course not. Look. I’m a simple surveyor. A man of the land. Obviously I have no idea what I’m talking about.”

“Obviously,” said Ellen.

“Quick! Change of subject! How about our beautiful baby? Hey?” He handed her the photo, and Ellen smiled in spite of herself.

After a second, Patrick said, his tone changed, “Did you see her?”

Ellen kept looking at the photo. She knew exactly whom he was talking about.

“Yes,” she said.

“I have to do something about it,” said Patrick. “With the baby coming…” He pressed a fingertip to the photo. “I’ve never thought of her as dangerous, but she looked a bit … I don’t know, unhinged. Crazier than usual.”

Ellen thought of Luisa today, crazy with grief and envy over Ellen’s pregnancy. She thought of Saskia’s face when she walked into the waiting room. Ellen had seen her immediately. She had a feverish, desperate look about her, as if she was hurrying to catch an important flight.

“Did Saskia want to have a baby with you?” she asked.

“Who cares if she did?” said Patrick roughly. “There is no justification for this!”

“I just wondered,” said Ellen.
I just want to understand.

“Family-size supreme?” interrupted a waitress.

When they got home, there was a message on Ellen’s voice-mail from a journalist named Lisa Hamilton. She said she was working on a story for the
Daily News
about hypnotherapy and “its claims” and had been speaking to some of Ellen’s clients. “I wondered if you would care to comment about some of the allegations that are being made,” she said.

Her voice was cold and clipped, full of certainty and authority with a faint edge of disgust.

Ellen put down the phone.

“Everything OK?” said Patrick.

“I think I know how Ian Roman is planning to put me out of business.”

W
hat’s that old cliché? All publicity is good publicity?” said Patrick.

Ellen was already in bed and Patrick had just come in from checking on Jack.

“This isn’t going to be good publicity,” said Ellen. She’d called back the journalist and had agreed to meet her for an interview the following morning at eleven. Ellen had talked to plenty of journalists over the years, and normally she quite enjoyed it. Ever since she’d attended a seminar a few years back called “Marketing Your Hypnotherapy Practice,” she’d actively looked for opportunities and made herself available for comment. Every December she was called up by journalists writing articles to appear in the new year with headlines like “How to Stick to Those Resolutions: We Ask Our Panel of Experts!” She’d been interviewed for health magazines about weight loss, and business magazines about overcoming public speaking nerves. She contributed to a weekly “mental health” column for her local paper, and she was a regular guest on various midmorning radio shows. She’d even been on television a few times.

In every case the journalists she’d dealt with had been, if not respectful,
at least perfectly friendly and interested. She was soft news. The human-interest angle. Something a bit different for the women readers. A bit of fun. Nobody was really too fussed about what she had to say. They didn’t
really
believe in hypnosis, but they didn’t care too much either way.

But as soon as she spoke to Lisa Hamilton, she knew that this was going to be a different sort of interview than anything she’d done before. Her manner didn’t even warm when Ellen, in a blatant plea for sympathy, had mentioned that she was pregnant and suffering terrible morning sickness and would therefore prefer not to meet too early in the morning. Lisa was clearly not the sort of person who could fake the charm in order to get Ellen to reveal more. If she was going to write an article trashing Ellen, she had to hate her.

Ellen had no experience being hated.

It wasn’t helping her nausea.

“I remember Colleen saying that they didn’t mind if they got a bad product review because the only part that stuck in people’s minds was the name of the product.” Patrick pulled back the quilt and climbed in next to her.

Colleen had been a marketing assistant. Ellen wondered if she just imagined that Patrick’s face automatically softened whenever he mentioned Colleen’s name, in the same way that her father’s face had softened when he mentioned his real children.

And so what if it did?

(And just what did she mean by “
real
children”? How sulky and silly and obvious of her. She was behaving as if her father had deserted her. Was that what she subconsciously thought? She thought her subconscious was more mature than that.)

“I’m not a product,” said Ellen, although the marketing course she’d taken had encouraged her to think of herself as a “brand.”

“You know what I mean,” said Patrick. “I just don’t want you getting yourself worked up about this when it probably means nothing. It might not even be related to Ian I’ve-got-a-big-dick Roman.”

“He owns that paper,” said Ellen. “I looked it up on the Internet. It’s too much of a coincidence.”

“Have you called his wife?” said Patrick. “She’s the one who needs to put a stop to all this.”

“I’ve left two messages,” said Ellen. “I don’t think she could help now anyway. He’s got me in his sights.”

She paused. “Did I just say, ‘He’s got me in his sights’? I can’t believe I said that.”