As Sick as Our Secrets

by A B Whelan

  We never saw my uncle after that incident. I overheard my mother telling my father to call the police on my uncle because she believed that his wife’s life was in danger. My father thought it wasn’t our business, and besides, she never asked for our help. A few years later, my uncle’s wife overdosed on prescription pills and died.

  No! I scream in my head. Richard never slapped my butt or pulled my hair, nor did he ask me to do freakish things to him. He’s not like my uncle.

  I need to do more research to see clearly. I spent my entire childhood living with a self-destructive, abusive man, and now, when I have finally gotten away from that life, I’d be damned if I allow another sick man to pull me back into his abyss.

  The FBI in America can track everybody’s Internet activity. If Richard has a bad habit of surfing the net for unforgivable things, cops and agents will show up here one day and arrest him. I won’t go down with him. I love my husband, but that love could be cut like a ceremonial ribbon in a heartbeat.

  I don’t attempt to go into Richard’s computer or laptop that he keeps in his office because I know they are both password-protected. The extent of my computer knowledge is limited to opening a web browser and searching for things that interest me. I wouldn’t even know how to go about cracking someone’s password, and I don’t know any techie who could help me out either.

  I personally don’t own a computer. I don’t need one because Richard gets me the latest iPad every Christmas so that I can keep touch with my family in Europe (as if I want to) and to store my photos and post them on social media. I do have a Facebook account, but I haven’t used it for a long time. Richard posts enough pictures about our perfect married life for the both of us. Every lunch date he schedules with me, every fundraiser I’m requested to doll up for, is commemorated forever in the digital world.

  With my tablet, I curl up on the living room sofa. It’s cold downstairs, and I place a DuraFlame log into the fireplace and light it up. The warmth comes fast, and sitting in the blanket of heat, I start Googling: family man arrested.

  I read an article about a fireman in Utah—a father of two—who had been recently arrested for operating a child pornography website where he exchanged and offered inappropriate pictures of minors for a fee. As the article dissects his life, I learn that he was twenty-eight years old when he met his wife, who was fourteen years old at the time. Two months after her sixteenth birthday, she gave life to their first son, and two years after that, she had their second son. I thought a sexual relationship between an adult and a minor was punishable by law. I guess I should watch less TV and read more law books.

  I look around me in the elegant room. I imagine the white-clothed and gloved investigators of a crime scene unit sweeping through our home, bagging the silver candleholders, dusting for fingerprints, and rummaging through the drawers of antique desks and cabinets. A loud crackling rises from the fireplace. It sounds like gunshots, and I shudder and wrap the blanket around me tighter.

  I do more research about criminals. These pictures all have one thing in common: the soulless eyes of the perpetrators. Richard has kind eyes. People trust him. I trust him.

  By four in the morning I feel guilty about conjuring up nasty thoughts about my husband. I clear my browsing history—it’s not like Richard would ever log in to my iPad, but I’m going to be cautious from now on. Richard has been taking care of me for over a decade. It would break his heart to find out about the revolting thoughts I have about him. My only proof of his guilt is that stupid journal and a woman’s purse. They could have come from anywhere. Richard would have every right to lose his trust in me. Married couples have each other’s backs; they don’t stab them.

  I leave the fire burning and head back to bed. Under the covers it’s warm and inviting, yet I keep my distance from my wheezing husband. I keep telling myself that I’m only imagining things, yet when I think about cozying up to him, my muscles refuse to move. Staring at the painting of Richard and his mother on the wall, illuminated by the moonlight, dressed in an eerie veil of light, I fall asleep on my side at the edge of the bed.

  TUESDAY

  Richard is gone from the bed when my cell phone’s ringtone drags me out of a deep, mindless sleep. The other end of the line is Ashley, my best friend. My only friend.

  “Hey! What’s going on?” I try to sound cheerful, busy, as if she has caught me at the office. I can’t have her knowing that I’m still in bed, whatever time it is.

  “Do you have a moment?” she asks, and I prop myself up on the pillow so that my voice sounds bright and clear.

  “What’s going on? Do I have to come and rescue you again from the clutches of your Tinder lover?”

  Silence. “Um…no, nothing like last time, but I do need your help with something.”

  “Anything. Ask away.” I rub my eyes, trying to scrape out the grime at this late morning hour.

  “Remember when I told you about my first patient?”

  My chest tightens at the name. “Skyler, right?” I say in a crispy voice. My mouth has dried up. My throat scratches.

  “Yeah, Skyler O’Neill. She was supposed to come see me this morning, but she didn’t show up.”

  I almost suggest that maybe something happened to her, but I stop myself. “Well, you didn’t tell me a lot about her, but wasn’t she a junkie? Maybe she’s lying in a ditch somewhere, high as a kite.”

  “Could be, but I’m more worried that she’s been kidnapped again.”

  I can’t swallow. I feel lightheaded. I put the phone down and press my fists against my temples hard. I hear Ashley’s voice, calling my name. I put her on speaker.

  “What makes you say that?” I ask weakly.

  “Just a bad feeling in my stomach that I can’t shake. I feel I need to find her, but I don’t know how to go about it. You work with people like her—I mean, with victims of abuse. You know much more about these things than I do. I’m sure you have connections too.”

  I always knew that my lies would come back to bite me. “What would you have me do?”

  “Can you come by my office sometime today?”

  “Let me check my calendar, and I’ll get back to you with the time.”

  After I hang up the phone, I stare at the blank wall, gasping for air. One avalanche is already crashing down around me; a second one would bury me.

  After a good ten minutes, I text Ashley: I’ll be at your office at 2.

  I check the time with clenched teeth, beating myself up for saying two o’clock. Now I can sit here for hours in nervous anticipation, giving my mind way too much time to spin with crazy ideas.

  Ashley

  TUESDAY

  The antique grandfather clock in the corner shows that it’s twenty-two past ten o’clock in the morning, but Skyler O’Neill, my first and only patient for the day, hasn’t arrived yet. I know something is wrong. I feel it in my guts.

  From the moment I agreed to treat her, I had a feeling she would only bring trouble into my life. Ever since I saw her sitting in the waiting room of my office—scratching the skin on her arm, stooped over, head hanging—my stomach has been uneasy. I should have told Peter that I wasn’t ready for a difficult patient yet. I have the diploma but not the experience. My damn stupid vanity.

  To fill the long minutes of anxious waiting, I rearrange the items on my desk for the third time: a brushed bronze penholder, a porcelain tissue box with hand-painted sparrows, a leather-bound notebook, and the most expensive voice recorder my mother could find online. The imported Victorian-style furnishing in my office was her idea, too. “Until you have some experience to display, you need to display what you do have: family money,” she said, running her finger along the shelves, checking for dust.

  My mother couldn’t always afford to be so generous and smug. She never talked about her childhood, but I learned from my late grandma that before my grandfather found oil on his land in Texas and the money started to flow in direct proportion to the black gold from the earth, my
mother and her six siblings had to dumpster-dive daily to have food to eat. Maybe growing up with nothing brought on her compulsive shopping and flaunting of money for most of her adult life. For me, it’s hard to picture my mother in rags.

  I pop two aspirins to subdue the massive headache that’s pressing at the back of my eyes, and I lean back in my chair, waiting for the promised effect.

  My anxiety is persistent. My heart rattles in my chest. I peek at the clock again. I’m not sure if I’m worried or disappointed about Skyler’s absence, but this was not how I expected my morning to turn out. I could have slept in and allowed myself to wake up in a better mood, more rested. God knows I needed a few more minutes of shut-eye after last night’s fiasco.

  Well, there are worse ways to start a successful career. I guess the old saying “no pain, no gain” does have merit.

  Last Wednesday, I was finishing up the last touches on my office decor, when an old friend of mine rang me up. Peter O’Neill is a recognized bankruptcy lawyer in the City of Angels—the type who grins at you from billboards and magazine ads, as if losing your home and everything you’ve worked for in your entire life is something to be joyful about.

  “What do you want, Peter?” I said with more venom than usual. I’d slept with him once, after a family party to embarrass my mother, but I didn’t know I was fucking a freaking puppy.

  “I ran into your mother yesterday, and she told me you’re opening your practice soon,” he said with the same purring voice he emitted when he whispered in my ear in the back seat of his car.

  A shiver ran through me at the thought of Peter sitting on my couch and spilling his innermost thoughts to me. He isn’t bad-looking—quite the opposite, I mean, if you are into guys whose biggest tragedy in life is when they misplace their gym membership cards. He is too much of a groomed poodle for me. A narcissist.

  I like guys who stare into my eyes while making love to me instead of checking out their flexing biceps and chiseled butt cheeks in the mirror. I don’t bother to explain this to Peter. He wouldn’t understand.

  “Where did you run into my mother? Did you visit her again?” I said, rolling my eyes out of habit. Maybe I allow my parents, especially my mother, to influence my education and career, but I’d never allow her to pick my boyfriends. If Peter tries to win my mother over to get to me, then he’s barking up the wrong tree.

  “No, I was actually playing golf with Judge Patterson and Sheriff Brody this morning, and we crossed paths with your parents.” Am I supposed to fall head over heels now? Peter can never simply say “with two friends of mine” because he has a pathological need to make himself look important. Like my mother, he grew up in deprivation. He worked hard to pull himself out of the mud and never looked back. I bet once he became accustomed to his newfound riches, he forgot his promises to God.

  “Well, it’s not a boutique. You don’t simply open the door and wait for people to walk in, but yes, I’m planning on making some calls later this week.” I drop into my rotating chair and scribble “Peter” on the paper next to the sum of money I owe my parents. I use decorative cursive letters. I’ve always loved art. I took a few drawing lessons at Cal State without my parents’ knowledge or consent. They never thought I was good enough to become an appreciated artist, and being a starving artist was somehow below my social mandate; thus every minute I spent on drawing lessons was a tremendous waste of time.

  “Well, allow me to be the first to refer a patient to you.” At his offer, the pen stopped in my hand. Here we go.

  “Please don’t tell me it’s you.” I sighed.

  He chuckled shortly and then cleared his throat. “I’d lose my charm if I told you my secrets. I’ll let you figure me out on your own.” The hell I will!

  “It’s a serious offer,” he continued after a moment of hesitation. He may have expected some response from me, but I didn’t offer any. “My cousin…she is, um, really troubled…into all kinds of nasty stuff. A dead end, really.” I could only imagine how hard it was for Peter to admit there was something wrong with his family.

  “Okay,” I said. In hindsight, I know that I should have stopped him right then and there.

  “Anyway, something happened to her. Something bad. At least that’s what she says. But I want you to talk to her and help her if you can. After all, she is family. And, Ashley, don’t worry about the money. I’ll pick up the tab.”

  “We can talk numbers later,” I told him, drawing big, aggressive circles on the paper. I hadn’t worked out my hourly rates yet, so our conversation needed to derail from money talk. Peter would be a great mentor on how to start a successful practice, I’m aware of that, but I wouldn’t ask his help if he was the last man on Earth. “Let’s talk about your cousin instead. What do you mean by ‘something bad happened to her’?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if told you.”

  “Try me.” His tug-of-war game in conversation always drives me nuts. Not even the best sushi I ever had on our dinner date was worth his drama. Yes, I slept with him twice. Ok, I lied before about sleeping him once. Go ahead; judge me!

  “Allegedly, some guy took her to his sex dungeon, where he kept her locked up for weeks.” Peter chuckled, and the sound made my face shrink into a condemnatory frown.

  “You don’t believe her?”

  “There are so many stories about her. I don’t know what to believe.”

  “Why do you want me to talk to her then? Why do you even care?”

  “Because I want you to get the truth out of her. I don’t approve of how she let her life spiral out of control, but she was my best friend growing up.”

  We made an appointment for Skyler O’Neill, my very first patient, for Friday at 10:00 a.m.

  *****

  I shouldn’t be worried that Skyler is late for her second appointment. She didn’t want to come in the first place. She was late then, and she is late now; she probably got high on something and entered the world of no time and no responsibilities. I think about it sometimes, about giving in to temptation. I’m only scared that I may never find my way back.

  I straighten the spines of thick antique books on the shelf behind my desk. “If people believe you’ve read such serious books, they’ll think you are very intelligent,” my mother said when she dropped off three huge boxes of them in my half-finished office. I guess that after simply engaging in a conversation with me, people would consider me a dumbass. It’s empowering to know what your mother thinks about you.

  “Damn it,” I grunt with an expression on my face that has become way too frequent as of late. I believed my first patient would be an important case; one that would put my name in the papers or test my abilities at least. Instead, I get a junkie with a wild imagination. Will I ever catch a break?

  I rewind the recording I taped with Skyler last Friday and press play.

  “…was clean faced, like someone who shaves every morning in front of the mirror, using a razor and some fancy aftershave shit, you know? His scent…it’s still in my nose. It doesn’t leave, and I don’t know why. I hate him, and I miss him. I don’t know. I’m so confused. I want to disappear or disintegrate into nothing.”

  “Let’s get back to the part about your capture.” My voice sounds like that of a whisky-drinking burnout on the tape, and I rub the back of my neck, as if that would change anything. There is a scratching sound on the recording, like nails on a chalkboard. I close my eyes and remember Skyler clawing my antique coffee table.

  “His eyes were bright. He looked sophisticated and intelligent. I felt as if I’d be stupid to say anything in his company. Not like I was talking much.”

  I hear the scratching sound again, a series of dry coughs, followed by my repulsive voice. “Would you like a glass of water or a piece of gum?”

  Paper rustling sounds, then silence. I fast-forward the tape.

  “…a glass of milk every night. After a while I figured that he must have put sleeping pills in the milk because I was always out cold t
ill morning. Then I’d wake up with a major headache. He was like that. Everything he did to me was deliberate, controlled, and repeated. If he arrived in my room later than usual, he would be out of balance and hasty. Once, he asked me to eat my dinner faster because we were behind schedule. It was sick. He wasn’t even talking to me while we were eating. Usually he’d ask me how my day was, and he’d tell me how he saw so much goodness in me, so much potential.”

  My voice interrupts Skyler on the tape. “How did you know what time it was?”

  “From the old grandfather clock in the corner of the room. That fucking thing would go off every hour, day and night.” An audible sigh. Then a repeating thumping sound as if someone was tapping the floor with alternating feet. I turn to look at the grandfather clock in my office, and my stomach turns. “I still wake up every hour at night believing I heard the sound of that ugly old clock. I know that I’m only imagining it, but it seems real to me.”

  I speak again. “Did you believe the things he told you? That he considered you someone special?”

  “I don’t know. Yes. Maybe. I’m a nobody. A failure. Someone with no future…”

  I fast-forward the tape again. A click.

  “He was certainly a control freak. I can recognize them from a mile away. If I didn’t follow his instructions, if I held the fork the wrong way, or if I hunched over my food like a peasant, he would get upset. He never raised his voice at me, but there was this cold look in his eyes that made my blood curdle, if that makes any sense…”

  Click again.

  “One night he seemed very tired, and we didn’t play any games. He tied my wrists as usual, and he stripped me naked, but instead of forcing objects inside of me, he just stood in front of the table and moved all his tools around until everything was aligned perfectly. I had freaking goosebumps all over my skin. I hated the anticipation more than the actual torture. I hated it even more that night because I wanted him to touch me. How sick is that? It was as if my body had become accustomed to our daily routine, and when he wasn’t giving it to me, when he didn’t follow our routine, my body didn’t know how to react. Like that dog, a German shepherd or some big-ass dog, whatever, that started drooling when the bell rang. I was just hanging there. My bare toes curled up. I remember swaying a little to get his attention, but he remained by the table with his head hanging. I remember it was very quiet. Usually there was music playing and the fire would be burning…”