I wanted to shake her. She thought he was some imaginary devil sitting on my shoulder, whispering evil thoughts in my ear.
“Do you think Jude is alive?” she asked again.
I wanted to take her by the collar of her perfectly pressed silk blouse and scream, “He is alive!” in her face. It took a mammoth force of will just to say the word, “No.”
Dr. Kells sighed. “Mara, when you lie, I have to adjust your course of treatment for that. I don’t want to have to treat you like you’re a pathological liar. I want to be able to trust you.”
She wouldn’t trust me if I told her the truth, but at the moment, I wasn’t convincingly lying. “I don’t think he’s alive,” I said, steadily. “I know he isn’t. But sometimes . . .”
“Sometimes . . .”
“Sometimes it scares me, you know?” I hedged. “The idea that he might be? Like a monster hiding in my closet, or under the bed.” There. Maybe that would give her what she wanted without making me sound like too much of a lunatic.
She nodded her head. “I understand completely. I think your fear makes sense, and it’s something I’d like to work on during your time here.”
I exhaled with relief. “Me too,” I lied again.
“Let’s say, hypothetically, that Jude didn’t die in the asylum.”
I didn’t mean I wanted to work on it today. “Okay . . .”
“Let’s say he’s in Florida.”
“Okay . . .”
“What do you think he’d be doing here? What’s your fear?”
I was in dangerous territory, but I didn’t know how to evade the question. “That he’s—that he would be stalking me.” Which he was.
“Why would he want to come all the way to Florida just to stalk you?”
The mutilated cat. The words on my mirror, written in blood. The pictures. My pulse spiked when I thought of them. “To make me afraid,” I said.
“Why would he want that?”
Because I tried to kill him. Because I killed his sister.
Those were the answers that came to mind, but of course I couldn’t voice them. I shook my head instead and asked, “Why would he assault me in the first place?”
“Those questions are different, Mara. Rapists—”
“He didn’t rape me.”
Dr. Kells stared at me a beat too long.
“He didn’t. I—” I stopped him before he had the chance. “He didn’t,” was all I said. “What were you saying?”
“I was saying that rape is about power, not sex,” she began. “It’s about using force or the threat of it to take control over another person.”
“So maybe, if he were alive, which he isn’t, he’d stalk me to show that he can control me. That he can make me afraid.” That fit.
Dr. Kells looked at me intently. “You’ve told me a lot of things, today, Mara. And I’m going to be thinking about them for a while. But if you’re interested, I can tell you what I’m thinking right now.”
I was about as excited for her insight as I would be for an enema. “Sure.”
“When you were at the police station,” she said, “you told the detective that you killed Claire and Rachel.”
Here it comes.
“That makes me think that you feel very guilty, very responsible for the death of your best friend. For moving your family to Florida. For everything that has happened to your family since. I think that you’ve experienced two traumas—the sexual assault by Jude, and then the collapse—and I think that, in some way, it makes you feel more powerful to imagine that you stopped Jude from doing what you thought he was going to try to do. And that for every negative event or coincidence that has happened since, imagining that you triggered them, that you made them happen makes you feel like you possess a degree of control that you don’t have. But subconsciously, you believe that you don’t have control; and that’s manifesting in your fear that Jude is actually alive.”
I wasn’t sure how I would manage staying sane while I was constantly being told that I was crazy. “That’s really interesting,” I said slowly.
“Can I ask you something, Mara?”
Do I have a choice? “Sure.”
“What do you want?”
I tilted my head. “Right now?”
“No. In general.”
“I want . . . I want.” I tried to think. What did I want?
To go back? To when my biggest problem was that Claire was trying to steal my best friend? To rewind to before I even met Claire? And Jude?
But that was also before Noah.
I saw him in my mind, kneeling at my feet. Tying my shoelaces. Looking up at me with those blue eyes, flashing that half-smile I loved so much.
I wouldn’t want to go back to before him. I didn’t want to lose him. I just wanted—
“To be better,” I said finally. For my family. For Noah. For myself. I wanted to worry about things like early admission, not involuntary commitment. I would never be normal but maybe I could figure out how to live a somewhat normal life.
“I’m so glad to hear you say that,” Dr. Kells said, and stood up. “We can help you be better, but you have to want it, or there’s nothing we can do.”
I nodded and tried to stand too, but stumbled. I tried to lean against the desk to steady myself, but my synapses were slow, and I just hunched.
Dr. Kells rested a hand on my back. “Are you feeling ill?”
I heard an echo of her words—in someone else’s voice.
In my mind.
I blinked. Dr. Kells’s eyes were full of concern. I managed to nod but the movement blurred my thoughts. What was wrong with me?
“What’s the matter?” Dr. Kells asked. She looked at me curiously and I felt strange. Like she was waiting for something to happen.
I felt paranoid. Suspicious.
As I tried to speak, she shifted out of focus.
“Water?” she asked, and I heard an echo again, from far away.
I must have nodded because Dr. Kells helped me sit and said she’d be right back. I heard the door open behind me, then close.
And then I blacked out.
16
BEFORE
Calcutta, India
I RESTED MY CHEEK AGAINST THE OPENING OF THE carriage and peeked out from behind the curtain at the creamy wax blossoms that sprouted from the trees and the thick green growth that clung to their trunks. Creepers hung from the branches above us, low enough for me to touch, but I did not care to. I knew that world, the green world of moss-covered rocks and glistening leaves, the jewel colored world of jungle flowers and sunsets. It no longer interested me. It was the tiny world of this carriage that was fascinating and new.