Annie and the Wolves

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  Reece shook his head. “Staying home isn’t the answer. Whatever’s going on, my advice, and I mean this, is to show up. Just come to school and lay low. I promise you, if you’re gone, people will talk about you more . . .”

  “I don’t care if they talk.”

  Of course he did. Everyone did. “Then what?”

  “Then nothing.”

  Reece sighed. “Then I’ll see you at practice tomorrow. And Caleb, if you’re getting hassled by anyone I know, especially if it’s someone in the Rockets, like Gerald and his friends . . .”

  “I know it’s no big deal. They’re just joking.”

  “No. If you’re feeling hassled, then they’re being dicks, and I want you to tell me.”

  Caleb didn’t answer, but Reece had to assume that was it. Sometimes you just had to ride out a reputation or grow beyond people’s limited expectations. Already, Caleb looked and sounded a lot different than last year’s freshman “Kale.”

  Back in his room, Reece texted Ruth, since the sun was setting and she might have already finished the rest of the journal. No answer.

  He had an English assignment to do. But an argumentative essay about the politics of gerrymandering seemed so much less interesting than trying to find out whether someone was committing a historical hoax.

  He did a little online browsing. As it turned out, Ruth McClintock no longer taught at the local community college, and though she had published a few academic papers about the 1800s, she didn’t seem to have a book out anywhere.

  That had been ridiculously easy.

  He texted her again. Have you read it all yet? It was like he had another underclassman on his hands, someone to encourage and take care of. And she probably thought she was doing him a favor.

  An hour passed with no answer. People over twenty-five had no manners.

  6

  Ruth

  When Reece was out of sight, Ruth stood slowly, hand on her hip, ready to go back into the house, still thinking of the journal entry’s first line: The mind has an uncanny way of saving us from unendurable pain.

  Well, yes and no. During her own accident, Ruth’s mind hadn’t protected her with gauzy, soft imagery or any sense of slow-motion serenity. Instead, it had flooded her with fear and terror, then gut-punched her with a confusing hallucination.

  Comparing her own traumatic experience to Annie’s was a senseless distraction. She should be thinking only of Oakley herself, once a strong, independent girl from a humble background, not only talented with guns but a survivor. In her teens, she started beating men at shooting matches, and from there she kept going, rising to the very top of her domain, in control of her own image, determined, unstoppable.

  These were just some reasons Ruth admired Annie. But none of them adequately explained why Ruth, as a third-year grad student, had suddenly become interested in the Victorian sharpshooter, abandoning her first subject—a study of Western photographer Edward Curtis.

  She was even less sure why a healthy academic interest had—after her car accident two years ago—turned into a life-altering obsession. Whatever the reason, Ruth knew it was complicated, because all of her life after the accident was more complicated. The past, present and future had buckled together like the accordioned front of her car where it had caught on the barrier of the Fifteenth Street Bridge.

  Ruth didn’t expect this journal to answer all the big questions, but one answer, for now, would do.

  The mind has an uncanny way of saving us from unendurable pain.

  Ruth wondered if her own mind was protecting itself from something best forgotten.

  Ruth took out her contacts, slipped on glasses and changed into her comfiest U of Iowa sweatshirt. She tugged an elastic off her wrist and pulled her hair through it into a ponytail, her default for long days and nights of concentration alone.

  Then, from her perch on the couch, she went back to the start, transcribing the parts she’d read to Reece and then continuing, taking in each new sentence slowly.

  It was a warm fall night. This was in the Carolinas, a place in the American South, she informed me. Her husband was in another car, up late exchanging stories with some other performers. The train’s windows were open, admitting a deep perfume that she had been savoring just before she nodded off.

  Now that perfume was replaced with an acrid smell, the mournful whistle and the shrieking brakes, the catapulting motion as her body left its narrow bed, train car aglow, white light, feathers.

  When her recall slowed, I prompted her: Did she see actual feathers, or was she just making a comparison with the appearance of the slow-falling train cars? Could she better describe this experience of floating? How long did this last?

  She didn’t answer. Her eyes remained opened, unfocused. Her body, tense at first on the couch, finally relaxed. I didn’t intrude but watched her agitated right hand, set limp and trembling against her waist.

  She wanted to stare, she told me. She wanted to remember: tens of thousands of feather-filled glass ball targets—hundreds of thousands—shot in a lifetime. She saw the moment this way, a moment of weighted silence, a moment of dazzling light.

  A perception of slowed time. One that she could slow further yet through force of attention.

  And finally, a sense of acceleration again, of the oncoming train or the past rushing up to swallow the present, in that moment before everything sped up, before things hurt. In that great rush of pain, she breathed deeply, as if gathering up some kind of diffuse energy, and skipped forward, like a stone across a pond.

  “How so?”

  “Like I might land, and sink, or skip yet again. In any case, I am moving forward, purposefully but without any control. I understand that it’s the trauma, that it makes one want to flee the danger. I’ve thought about this, you see.”

  I didn’t interrupt, even while sensing she had moved from memory to self-diagnosis. There is a temptation, especially among intelligent women, to play the doctor, when what is truly necessary is for the patient to surrender and speak without the need to impress, charm or disguise.

  “You are on the train.”

  “Not any longer. I removed myself. To a spot where I could see the wrecked train and the rescuers starting to shoot the first injured horses, the ones that had been removed from the first of many stock cars.”

  “This was upsetting?”

  “Terribly. First, to see them injured, and then to see that man doing such a bad job of putting the horses down. It upset me enough that I suddenly found myself back on the train.”

  “Back on the demolished train?”

  “No. On the train as it was before, just prior to the crash. I’d only skipped from one sort of pain to another, and then, when this second place was equally upsetting, I returned to where I’d been. But now I knew exactly what would happen next. Soon enough, I’d be on the other side once again, but slower if I did nothing to accelerate it, hours after the accident, hearing the horses being put down again, knowing precisely how many shots it would take . . .”

  “Remarkable. Of course, you know there are explanations for this apparent clairvoyance.”

  “I am more than able to distinguish fact from fantasy. I’m not interested in explanations, and I’m not interested in clairvoyance. I simply accepted that I had slipped or skipped forward somehow.”

  She was becoming combative.

  “You’re taking notes?”

  I explained that it was part of the method and that I would never use her real name in any notes, private or public. This mollified her, because she continued.

  “I’d done it before. Moved forward or slowed time down, or at least had the sensation that it was advancing or slowing. The former, when I was in an unpleasant situation as a child. Removing myself, as I believe many people have done, in situations of discomfort or shame. But never so vividly and completely. Never
to a second place as bad as the first.”

  “Many people do this, you believe.”

  “Maybe more women than men. I haven’t done a study of it. I hoped that you or someone in your field might have.”

  “Dissociation.”

  “If you’d like to call it that.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “Survival.”

  I pressed her to continue, and she explained how she recovered after the accident and how, during this time, she kept returning to the experience, reliving the brief wonder and deeper terror of the crash. I informed her that the revisiting of the event is a common response, a way of working through it, as if the mind has an unfinished task. It was a classic fixation, a traumatic neurosis created in the moment of the accident.

  She listened and considered, but did not seem reassured or compelled, as if this exercise were mere child’s play and she had not yet arrived at the memory she truly wished to discuss. She reviewed the other details of the crash, but only because I asked, with less enthusiasm and without the emotional changes I have come to expect.

  Willful ignorance, denial, the refusal to accept what lies buried in the subconscious—these are the very producers of illness. But I was beginning to suspect that this ZN might not be a typical hysteric. She admitted to only one physical symptom, though her reticence to talk about it was a powerful indicator. Unlike a typical sufferer, she did not seem to experience any great relief upon divulging details of either her hallucination or the accident itself. If there was any neutralizing of the episode, or discharging of the imprisoned emotion, she did not seem to experience its benefit. Having found some facility in repeatedly reliving the train accident and its immediate precedents, even while it pained her to do so, she became even more fixated on remembering further back, before the crash. With equal vividness, she insisted.

  “How so?”

  “I’m accustomed to repetition and practice, and this was target practice of another kind. I kept going, trying to find my way into moments before the accident, knowing that if I could inhabit the minutes before, the hours and even days before, there might be no limit. I had seen something—done something—that I had not realized was possible, and now that I knew, I couldn’t leave it alone.”

  It was only now that I sensed that her case was not only one of traumatic neurosis, but perhaps a spontaneous neurosis that had existed before that. The fixation was elsewhere. The train crash had only reminded her of it, or had triggered an associated fear or frustration, even while she insisted its main role was providing her a capacity she’d never had before: this increasingly controlled “skipping or sliding,” as she understood it.

  I asked when the hand shake had begun.

  “About a month after the accident.”

  “Not immediately after.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “And does that later period correspond with any emotional upset?”

  “No. Only with the effort of visiting the past. The strain of it, mental and physical, perhaps even spiritual, I’m not sure.

  “The effort of remembering.”

  “No, of visiting. I haven’t gone far. I’ve not mastered it yet.”

  I noted that she had, in every instance, refused to use the words “remember” or “memory.” For her, the only acceptable terms seem to be “visit,” “inhabit,” “relive,” “episode.”

  I told her that remembering should be a healing process overall, not a physically injurious one.

  A knock at the door. We’d run out of time, a fact that seemed to inspire her to greater candor.

  “I am not remembering, Doctor.”

  “If I’m to help you, I must ask you to be more clear.”

  “I’ll try.”

  She looked relieved, at last, and just as quickly, tense again, still holding back.

  I told her we could examine her symptom and her conflict in greater detail, but I had another patient waiting and a full schedule. If she didn’t plan to be in our city for long, the options were limited. The last time I dealt with a patient with her sort of nervous problems, we met twice daily for many months.

  This provoked nervous laughter. It seems a distinctly American trait, to believe every problem can be solved overnight.

  On leaving, she was anxious about how we would continue with an ocean between us.

  “I can recommend analysts in your country. The method in America may not be precisely the same, but at least you might find a professional confidante.”

  “Impossible.”

  “You could extend your stay abroad.”

  “Also impossible.”

  “That leaves only corresponding by mail, if you’re willing to be candid in your letters.”

  “I’ll try. But if I say everything without consideration, you may stop me. Sometimes, I want to be stopped. More often, I don’t. If someone . . . an expert, a doctor . . . told me I must not keep doing this thing, that I must stop or surely I’d lose my mind and my health, both, then maybe I could stop.”

  “And this is why you’ve come to me: To ask if you should stop confronting your past?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can assure you, I’m the last person to advise you to stop. It’s only by reliving the past that we are relieved of it.”

  7

  Ruth

  Here, Ruth turned the page and saw, rather than the continuation of the narrative, a page written in German.

  “Oh,” she said out loud, a single disappointed syllable that hung in the air like the dust motes dancing in the slanting autumn light before settling onto the scratched oak floor.

  The journal’s sudden return from English to German had thrown her out of the trance in which she’d spent the last hour. Not only the switch in language, but also topic. Now she read about an unnamed patient with trouble breathing, another with ringing in his ears.

  She turned the next page. The handwriting was the same, but the tone impersonal and the details dull.

  Ruth read about a third patient with respiratory troubles. And fourth with sinus headaches, just as her own headache was coming on, because the handwriting took considerable time to decipher, the unfamiliar words refusing to give up their secrets as easily due to the additional barriers of a second language and medical terminology.

  “Too bad,” she whispered. She didn’t even have a cat with whom to share the frustrating news.

  Her phone dinged. She picked it up, hoping—what, exactly? It wasn’t like Scott had texted in ages. But it was Reece, barely home and already bothering her. For the moment, she ignored him.

  Ruth closed the journal and rose from the couch, went to the bathroom, walked to the kitchen and filled a glass of water. She was in such a distracted state, she couldn’t remember if she’d just taken two ibuprofen in the bathroom as she’d intended.

  There is a sense of acceleration again, of the oncoming train or the past rushing up to swallow the present, in that moment before everything speeds up, in that moment before things hurt.

  Ruth thought of her own accident, that moment that had seemed to last forever: careening toward the car in front of her, then swinging away as she braked. The certainty that her car would crash through the barrier and slide off the bridge—and then everything speeding up again, all too fast. Sirens and faces. The rescuers, the bystanders. None of them knowing what she had experienced, what had run through her mind just when she thought she was about to die: out of nowhere, an image of Scott, injured and bleeding. All this time later, she’d told only her two therapists. Scott had never found out.

  Ruth walked back to the bathroom and opened the bottom left drawer of the apothecary cabinet, the first piece of furniture she had ever bought herself after she’d moved back into her mother’s house, as an unsuccessful attempt to add her own adult personality to a home that would never truly be hers. The ti
ghtly fitted drawers had to be tugged in order to open. Surely she would remember having done that if she’d already taken the ibuprofen?

  Ruth found herself staring at the cabinet with its five rows of drawers, remembering what she’d first loved about it: how it kept everything separate, taming the random items inside. Every pill bottle, memento or extra key had its own small dark wood-scented space.

  You like old shit, Kennidy would have said.

  You simply appreciate pretty things, Scott would have said.

  Compartmentalization, her grad-school buddy Joe Grandlouis would have said—would still say, if Ruth ever called him, something she’d been meaning to do for ages.

  What’s wrong with that?

  Nothing—until it can’t be done anymore.

  Ruth’s mom, Gwen, wouldn’t have said anything at all. She didn’t notice when new things entered the house, when her daughters were troubled, or even when her youngest daughter, prone to substance abuse, had gone into her bedroom and not come out for nearly twenty-four hours.

  “All of you are right,” said Ruth as she twisted off the bottle’s lid and shook two orange caplets into her hand. She stared at them. Had she just taken these, or had she only been thinking of taking them? Luckily, they weren’t Vicodin or Xanax or any of the stronger medications off which she’d mostly weaned herself. More important now was the question: How could we expect to remember what had happened in our lives two or even twenty years ago when we weren’t sure what had happened a minute ago?

  “A few more can’t hurt, in any case.”

  She swallowed the pills.

  Memory was fickle, but this journal was clearly not just about memories, not just about trauma, though that was how a Viennese psychoanalyst would see it, of course. It was about clairvoyance, maybe more.

  Back in the living room, Ruth continued reviewing what she’d read, thinking of Annie’s train crash, her own car accident and what Annie had disclosed to the man taking notes.