Hunting BLind: It's Every Family's Deepest Fear

by Richardson, Paddy

  It was like we were all trapped there. Beth, her father, her mother locked together in pain and fright not knowing what to do. Hoping she wouldn’t become ill again, somehow enduring it when she did. Beth watching her mother for signs. Feeling the house winding about her, pressing in, binding her like a shroud. Her mother in the bedroom. The door tightly shut, keeping her inside, preventing Beth from coming in. All of them trapped.

  Was that the way it was? But what about Tracy. Who is Tracy?

  17.

  ‘I feel better. Weird but— I don’t know. Better.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘All the time up until last time I saw you I felt like I wasn’t properly there, like I was walking through glue. That sounds so crazy, doesn’t it?’

  Stephanie watches Beth’s face. That way she has of working out what she wants to say, her head tilted slightly as she thinks it through, her eyes still and intent. She’s like someone skating for the first time: a tentative step out, a brief skim and glide, all the time looking back to the safety of the rail.

  ‘What would you like to start with?’

  ‘About leaving here. I talked to the social worker. Sally. She’s really helpful. She said she can get me a flat if that’s what I want.’ She breathes sharply inwards. ‘I’ve never lived on my own. But I don’t want to live with Peter and I don’t want to go back to Dad’s. So.’

  ‘So a flat seems a good choice.’

  ‘I’m a bit nervous. But—’

  ‘But overall you’re okay with the idea?’

  ‘I think I’ll be okay. Sally said the place she could get for me is sunny and quite new. It’s in a block of flats. There’s a small garden for each one so there’s a bit of privacy but there’d be other people around as well. It’s quite near here so I can easily walk to day clinic and there’s a bus stop close by.’

  ‘It sounds good, Beth.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ She’s looking eagerly at Stephanie. ‘It does sound perfect but I don’t know. I think I’ll be fine and then I get really scared. Everything’s changed so much. Just a couple of months ago I was living with Peter. I was having a, a baby.’

  ‘It sounds as if you’re finding these changes exciting but distressing as well.’

  ‘I, it’s like I don’t really know who I am any more. I told Dad that me and Peter were, were having a break. He said I should come home and live with him for a while. What he thinks – what he says he thinks – is things have got on top of me and I need a rest.’

  ‘You’re suggesting that your dad isn’t being entirely honest with what he’s telling you?’

  ‘Probably he’s thinking Beth’s just like her mother and here we go again.’ She says it quickly.

  ‘That’s one of the things you told me you’re afraid of.’

  Her voice is urgent. ‘You have to be honest with me. Even if it’s really bad I have to know. What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t believe that.’

  ‘But I’m in a crazy hospital. If that’s not just like her I don’t know what is.’

  ‘Beth, there are so many people who are hospitalised at some time in their lives in a place like this because things have got too much for them. That doesn’t mean their lives are over. Not by any means. You’d be surprised at who’s been here over the years.’

  ‘Like who?’ She’s looking curiously at Stephanie.

  ‘Writers, musicians, painters, designers.’

  She screws up her face, gives a faint laugh, ‘Yeah, well they’re all arty types aren’t they? They, they’re the sort who think too much.’

  ‘Doctors, architects, teachers, bank managers, accountants, lawyers.’

  ‘Bank managers?’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  She’s grinning openly. ‘Can’t see old Billy Roy in here. That’s my boss at the bank. Can’t see him at ward meeting. Billy Roy having a dust-up with Rowan. Jesus.’

  Stephanie grins back. ‘Might do him some good.’

  ‘But these people, they get better? They don’t have to keep coming back?’

  ‘I’d say the large majority of patients don’t come back.’

  ‘How can you say I’m going to be one of the lucky ones who won’t get sick again?’

  ‘Because I’ve got to know you. I believe you’ll stay well.’

  ‘If I really am okay I could do things, couldn’t I?

  ‘Whatever you want.’

  ‘But what if I did get sick again? I’d be on my own. And, and sometimes I have this dream. It just, it keeps coming back. I don’t want to be on my own when I have it.’

  ‘We could talk about what you could do if you were on your own and had the dream.’

  She makes a face. ‘Get up and make yourself a cup of tea and think about something nice.’

  ‘Why did you say that?’

  ‘Because that’s what Dad told me to do. Dad, he doesn’t like talking about things. He says it’s all a closed book and it’s no use dwelling on the past.’

  ‘Are you talking about your mother, Beth? Is it your mum you dream about?’

  ‘It’s Gracie. In the dream I can see her and I’m trying to make my legs and my arms move but they’re stuck and my voice won’t work.’

  It was Gracie she was saying when she was so distraught. Stephanie meets her eyes and says gently, ‘If it gets too hard, you can stop, okay?’

  ‘Okay. I, we woke up and she wasn’t there. She used to sleepwalk. Mum always locked the door but this one night she forgot and Gracie got out. They said she walked into the sea. The current was really strong, we were never allowed down there on our own. They said she probably didn’t even wake up before she drowned. She was my little sister.’

  It comes unexpectedly, slamming into her and she feels her mouth turn dry.

  She’s back there running along the edge of the lake, her breathing ragged, her heart beating too fast too loud.

  She can’t swim. Gemma can’t swim.

  Beth’s voice is slow, dreamlike. ‘Remember what I said, about not being able to leave the house? It was because of Gracie. I thought she might come back and find us gone.’

  When Minna left the house had to be sold. And Stephanie knew, absolutely knew Gemma wouldn’t come back, but what if the stories she’d made up in her head about the nice lady finding Gemma and loving her too much to let her go were true?

  What if Gemma found her way back home and they weren’t there?

  ‘You said she drowned, Beth. Did you think about the possibility of her coming back to the house because it was just too hard to accept that?’

  ‘They never found her. Maybe. Maybe sharks?’

  She’s silent, staring down at her hands.

  ‘I could never believe she’d really gone. I kept on looking for her ages after everyone stopped. I thought what if she was out there somewhere and nobody came for her? Then Mum got really sick and had to go away. Dad cleared out Gracie’s room. He said Mum blamed herself and seeing Gracie’s things made it worse. He said we mustn’t talk about her any more.’

  Stephanie’s on automatic pilot. Voice calm, expression calm and, Jesus, all she wants is to lurch out of her chair and run.

  ‘That must have hurt you.’

  ‘My friends were really embarrassed if I said anything about her. There wasn’t anyone I could talk to. So everything just kept on going round in my head.’

  ‘What was it you wanted to say, Beth?’

  Her voice is muffled. ‘I wanted to say I missed her so much. I wanted to talk about how smart she was and how pretty. I wanted to say she was so sweet and how it hurt me all the time that she wasn’t there.’ She hesitates.

  ‘What else?’

  ‘And I wanted, I wanted to say I couldn’t understand how Gracie could have opened the door all by herself. It was heavy, she couldn’t even open it when she was awake. They said it must have blown open in the wind but I didn’t hear any wind that night. I, I kept thinking about it. Thinking it could be my fault.’

  Ho
ld on. You have to hold on. You have to end the session safely.

  ‘When Dad was away for the night I always crept out to check the door was locked. I had to make sure because I never felt properly safe when he was away. I thought I’d done it that night. But I can’t have, can I? Because the morning Gracie went missing the door was wide open. But what I was afraid of was I’d gone to the door like I usually did and I was so sleepy that instead of making sure the door was locked I opened it. I still wake up at night and think about it. Gracie had trouble even reaching the doorknob of that door. It could have been me. I could have opened it.’

  You have to help her.

  ‘Beth, what you’re telling me, that you felt and even still feel responsible for what happened, is a very normal response and it’s been made so much worse because you were denied permission to talk about it.’

  ‘So you think I’m imagining it? That I didn’t go to the door, that I didn’t open it by mistake?’

  ‘You weren’t responsible for what happened, Beth.’

  ‘It’s like everything about Gracie getting lost. I suppose I couldn’t accept that she was gone so I imagined things. Like about the door. And other things. Like I thought I heard this voice some time in the night. But I must have imagined that as well.’

  18.

  She shifts in her bed. Her legs and arms feel cumbersome, inflexible, and she moves around trying to loosen up. She needs to sleep. She’s got a full day ahead of her tomorrow and she has to sleep.

  Gemma. Gracie. Lost little girls. Stephanie looked up the details on the internet after Beth left her office. Gracie Clark was a sleepwalker; she went out into the night and was drowned. That’s what the newspaper reports said, what the coroner decided was the most likely explanation. She turns on the light, checks the time. Perhaps she should make a cup of tea and read. If she reads she may drift off to sleep.

  The Jungians would make something of her and Beth meeting like this. What do they call it? Synchronicity. All such crap. Hocus-pocus mysticism. There’s nothing remarkable going on here, merely happenstance and she has to deal with it.

  But what should she do? Professionally, what should she do? She’s become far too close to Beth, lost her objectivity and she’s spending too much time with her, possibly to the detriment of her other patients. And now her own experiences are too similar; even two days later she can’t sleep, can’t move Beth’s story out of her head despite the two hefty brandies she gulped down around midnight.

  Because she’s going over and over it, the lost little girl, the lost little sister. Waves of pain, a lump under her ribs like a hard, heavy stone, images flickering through her head. Minna’s agonised stare blistering out at her from the TV screen, Mary-Anne and her mother standing outside their house holding out the basket of muffins. The Peters’ living room. The police cars. The helicopter. The boats. The grim-faced searchers. It’s an endless slide show she’s locked in front of, incapable of averting her eyes.

  I feel so trapped.

  You saw how easily something like that could happen; something nobody could ever predict. A plane soars from over the mountain onto a lake on a perfect golden day and the person you love most in the world is lost. It comes at you out of the blue, smashes up your life and you see how random it all is, how chancy. How you have to be so cautious. Don’t take risks. Don’t get close. Because losing anyone again is an agony you will not be able to bear. Beth’s wail of anguish is her own cry, her entrapment her own.

  Stop it. Stop it right now.

  Think now. Think rationally. What must she do? Her training tells her that when a patient’s story is similar to her own she must ‘bracket’ personal experiences, keeping them at a distance, not allowing what has happened to interfere with working with the patient.

  How close did she come to that on Friday?

  Beth, I lost my sister too. We think she drowned as well.

  The words tumbled into her throat ready to explode out into the room. Jesus. She came so close to breaking every rule and she’s broken enough rules already with Beth, become too deeply involved and made poor decisions. She was trusted by her superiors because, up till now, she was doing well. They assigned her with more autonomy than was usual for someone at her level and stage and now she’s fucked up. For them, for herself and, most dangerously, for a patient.

  What she must do is go to her supervisor, explain that she’s become too close to Beth and lost impartiality. She should have done that weeks ago. She must ask to be relieved of her involvement and allow someone else to take over. She also must ask for her own therapy. She’s set aside what happened all those years ago long enough; she has to work through it, she can’t risk something like this happening ever again.

  But what about Beth? She’d be deserting her at a crucial time in her therapy. Beth relies on her. It was her she first trusted, her she opened up to. She can’t abandon her. Beth may get lost.

  And you’d miss Beth?

  But it’s not about herself. She doesn’t come into it. What she has to think of is what’s right for Beth. She picks up her pillow, punches it until it’s flat and smooth. She pushes off the duvet. She’s hot, too hot.

  She knows now about Gracie. Now she knows that, nothing else will be such a surprise. She’ll be in control; prepared and wary. She can do it. She can. For her patient. Her patient needs continuity. A change of therapist at this critical point could throw her completely. Stephanie has to do it. She has to remain rational, stay in control.

  They said she walked into the sea.

  ‘Beth. Come on in. How are you?’

  ‘I’ve been talking to Peter.’

  ‘You’d like to start there?’

  ‘Every time I saw him after, after what happened I felt like he was hanging out for an apology. I’m fairly sure he acted like he didn’t want me to go home because he wanted me to say sorry first so he could forgive me and everything could go back to how it was.’

  She looks directly at Stephanie as if for confirmation.

  ‘Sounds to me as if you regularly apologised to Peter.’

  She grins. ‘Yeah, well, you’d be right about that. What used to happen is I’d do something he didn’t like and he’d act kind of miserable, like he was this big sad victim, then I’d feel so bad I’d say sorry. But anyway I just said it right out. Peter, I’m not sorry about what I did so don’t expect me to say it.’

  ‘That must have given him a shock.’

  ‘He was shocked all right. He said “I can’t believe you said that. Everything was going along just fine then you go off and have an abortion without telling your own husband and try to kill yourself and you say you’re not even sorry? I don’t know what they tell you in this place but what I think is you were out of your mind when you did that and you still must be to think what you did was right.”

  ‘Usually what happens when Peter gets mad with me is I get angry with myself. Like, I think Peter’s this really nice guy and here I am being a total bitch. But this time I got angry with him. I said, I might have been out of my mind but I wasn’t crazy, I was desperate because I couldn’t go through with it. I tried to tell you but you wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘I’m proud of you, Beth.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m proud of me too. Because then I told him I just wasn’t ready to have babies. Christ, I’m only twenty-two and it’s like I’m this middle-aged lady with a house and a mortgage. Nothing about my life is what I chose.’

  ‘Did you tell him what you’ve chosen to do?’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah. I told him I was going to live on my own for a while and I wasn’t going back to work at the bank, not yet anyway. I’ve got heaps of sick leave owing. I’m just going to take my time to think about it.’

  ‘How did he take it?’

  She shrugs. ‘In a way, in a way I think he was quite relieved. I don’t think he knows who I am any more. Hell, I don’t even know who I am.’

  She leans forward, her face solemn. ‘I’ve got to tell you something. When
I was coming here all those weeks. Well, what I was thinking was nothing’s going to change and I’ll just have to go back to Peter and— You know, this is really bad, but what I thought was if it gets too hard I’ll do it again, and next time I’ll do it properly. But then Peter actually did me a big favour acting like he didn’t want me back. It made me scared but it made me think about working things out on my own.’

  ‘It’s good you’ve told me that, Beth. Now I just want to go back to something you said. You told Peter you weren’t sorry about the abortion and the attempted suicide. Then you said you did it not because you were crazy but because you were desperate. Have I got that right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you want to talk more about that?’

  ‘About the, about the abortion and trying to kill myself, you mean?’

  ‘I can understand talking about that will be hard.’

  ‘The hardest thing I had to talk about was Gracie. Once I did that and got it over with, I felt different, like I’d had this big lump in my gut and it’d started to go away.’

  ‘All those feelings about Gracie that you talked about have been stuck inside you?’

  ‘I didn’t know it, though. I never even thought about it all that much. But when I got pregnant, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.’

  ‘Take it slowly, Beth. You’re doing fine.’

  ‘I started thinking about her all the time and I got so scared I could hurt the baby or lose it, not on purpose but it could happen. I didn’t want to love it because I couldn’t stand it if all that happened again. I had the abortion. It was so easy. I walked out of the clinic and I felt like I’d been let out of prison. But then it hit me. This feeling I was still trapped because as soon as a few months had gone by Peter’d be on at me again about having a baby and I’d be right back at square one. The only way out I could think of was to kill myself.’

  ‘You said you felt trapped. How do you feel now?’

  ‘I feel more scared than trapped. As well as that I feel quite—quite excited.’