“Lyric I believe you need to talk about this.”
Dr. Samuels sighs and starts fidgeting with some papers on his desk. “It’s been a half and hour of your session and you have yet to speak once.” I begin to play with my cross necklace. “You don’t have to talk. You can choose not to of course. But it seems to me like that would be a sad waste of an hour of your time.” We sit silent for a few more minutes. Trapped in some sort of strange mental stalemate. We both know, from being gin these sessions once a week for the past year, he will eventually win. He always does. So I start. “Heaven and hell. There is no one with out the other. But if that’s true then why is it that I seem to only experience hell? Well that’s not true I was happy once upon a time.”
When I was twelve everything changed. All of the sudden my dad wasn’t there. It was Sunday and my dad always makes pancakes on Sunday. There was no smell of pancakes wafting through our three-story house that was always being redecorated by my cheery mother. There was nothing. I stayed in bed a full hour past when I usually would get up to my breakfast alarm. Waiting as long as I could to smell the warm pancakes with a hint of vanilla and syrup. Finally I got up and went to the kitchen and my mother was just standing there drinking coffee and staring at the stove.
My mother never drank coffee but I could see why she was. Her delicate features looked beaten and it appeared as if she had aged thirty years over night. One of her green eyes that looked so much like mine was swollen and bruised. Her lip was also split. I was afraid that if I said something about them it would make them real instead of what I hoped was just a bad dream.
“Where’s dad?” My words seemed to fall dead at my feet as she stared at the sparkling stove. I probably would have dropped it but the question became so huge in my mind. As if I already knew he was gone and I was begging for her to prove me wrong. So I tried again.
“Mom? Where’s Dad?” She didn’t even look away from the stove. Her voice sounded robotic and monotone, “He’s dead.” I froze time stopped and in that one second my world imploded. I blinked and it all ended.
“Did your mother explain? Tell you what happened?” It’s funny I had forgotten he was even there. For a therapist he’s really very quiet. But that’s his way. Dr.Samuels always asks his questions and waits for me to elaborate.
He’s only my second therapist but I like him better than Mr. Harrington, who was my therapist when I was thirteen and usually ended up telling me all of his problems.
Dr. Samuels clears his throat and I remember his question. “They say he died in a car accident.” I barely manage to whisper the lie I had heard repeated a thousand times by cops and at the memorial service. But I underestimated Dr. Samuels; he heard the hate coating my words like a thick poison. “But did your mother tell you that?” I star fidgeting with my necklace again, “No. It says in your records doesn’t it? That she was insane.”
“Was she?” He’s asking but I know he’s really testing me. Seeing if I need to be put away like her. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of seeing me caged up. It would only make it easier for them to get to me. So I’ll lie to the well-meaning Dr. Samuels. The truth? My mother started having “episodes” after my father died.
For the first three month I had learned to accept the new form of normalcy that had settled over our lives. Get up, make my own breakfast, have our driver take me to my privet school, go through the motions at school, get picked up by our driver and taken home, then make myself dinner, eat, go to bed, then start it all over again in the morning. Days would go by before I would see my mother get up and occasionally eat. Those three months we never spoke once. The doctors later said she was in a catatonic state. My life became very quiet.
Until one night in October, I woke up and she was screaming. Her room is far down the hall from mine. So I ran past the doors for what seemed like ages all the while hearing her scream.
I ran to her door and threw it open to find her on the floor, with cut all over her and blood soaking into her robe and the carpet. The window was open and she was sobbing. At first I was frozen. I just stood there in horror almost wishing I could just disappear.
A breeze came in from the window reminding that this wasn’t a dream I could just wake up from and forget. This was real. Though I kept asking her what happened she wouldn’t say. After she had calmed down she told me to go back to my room.
The next morning I went down to the dining room and to my surprise there was my mother. Neatly dressed and looking very seriously into her cup of tea, as if all the answers to life’s questions lied within the cup.
“There’s something I need to tell you Lyric.” I didn’t want to know. God I didn’t want to know. So instead I focused on the beams of light that were just starting to come through the window making the different facets on the granite counter top sparkle and shine. I focused on the dust swirling in the air doing it’s own kind of dance. I focused on anything anything besides my mother.
“Lyric! You must listen to what I have to say!” Her voice was so sharp and commanding. She looked so different from the empty shell she had become over the last few months. I was afraid of what she was going to say, but I was more afraid of what would happen if I left. So I sat down and forced myself to pay attention instead of looking away as I so desperately wanted to. She cleared her throat and looked back into her tea cup which seamed to hold the answers I just couldn’t see. I waited.
“We need to talk about what happened that night your father died. There was a car crash but it wasn’t how everyone says.” She pauses then looks up. “Your aunt Sarah had just had the baby and we were driving down the road to visit her in the hospital.” The baby she was referring to was my cousin Lila. Since she was born the night my father died I didn’t even find out she was born until I saw her with aunt Sarah and Uncle Jack at the memorial service. I’m getting side tracked again and had to force myself to pay attention.
“… out of nowhere this black car slams into us and we spin off the road. The next thing I saw was a man getting out of the car. I was dizzy, my head was spinning and your father was passed out against the wheel. The man however looked fine. I thought he was coming to help but I was wrong.” At this she closes her eyes as if the mere discussion of the memory was draining her. “He moved strangely quick jagged movements to your fathers side of the car. We had smashed into a pole on your father’s side and the door was jutting in. The man tore away the door like it was made of tin foil and started dragging David away. I tried calling out but when I opened my mouth he looked at me, this man who seemed so strange. He looked at me and my words froze in my throat.”
She had just been closing her eyes and talking as if in a trance but now she was staring at me, talking to me. Trying to get me to understand, and maybe to help her better understand what had happened and what she had seen. “He looked cold unfeeling. It was like he was seeing into my mind, almost daring me to try and make a move against him. And it was that instant that I knew, I just knew, that he wasn’t there to help and that he would come back. And there was nothing I could ever do to stop him.”
“He did come back last night.” At this her voice was calm but her hands shook as she lifted the sleeve of her pink sweater. I couldn’t help but gasp. Deep and jagged scratches ran down her forearms. What wasn’t shredded was bruised black and encrusted in blood. The blood I had seen last night.
She waited calmly as my eyes traveled over the marks. “I don’t know why he hasn’t killed me, but I think he’s trying to send a message. And I’m afraid. Afraid that he will come after you.” When she pauses before her next words I can actually see her fear. It’s as if the energy of it is hanging in the air. “I’m sorry. I have to send you away somewhere he won’t go after you. You’re going to a boarding school. Just for a little while , until things get better. I promise.” Her eyes were apologetic and pleading with me to understand. But I couldn’t. And she saw it. She saw I would never understand and she looked away. She suddenly looked down at her necklace. “Here you should have this. To help you remember home. It was your great grandmothers you know.” She undoes the clasp and hands me the delicate silver cross. Not meeting my eyes once the who time.
I couldn’t understand how after everything that had happened; my mother was going insane, my father was dead, and now my mother was sending me away.
My mother was institutionalized six months later. I had never felt so alone and that’s how I came to be here, Archer Hills Boarding School. Staring at the clock. Watching it tick my life away.
“Times up.”
Excuse me?” Dr.Samuels cleared his throat, “Your session? You’re out of time.” Neither of us had any idea just how right he was. I pulled back the heavy door and walk. Completely oblivious to how much my life was about to change.
