Tessa leaned her elbows on the desk, looked directly at him. ‘You can’t undo it, Nick. It’s best to try to forget the whole thing. If this is a past life, and I’m not convinced that it is, then you’re not supposed to know any of it. This is not what we set out to do.’
‘But what about the hypnosis, we are going to continue with it, aren’t we? I need all the help I can get to stay off the drink … It is helping …’
Tessa sighed and stood up. She indicated for Nick to sit into the chair and covered him with the blanket. ‘We’ll try today,’ she said. ‘But if something happens, if you’re regressed again, then I’m not sure I can continue with you.’ She reached out to turn down the lamp, then paused. ‘Nick, you don’t intend to look for Caitlin, do you? Think how this would sound. She’d think you were crazy.’
Nick shook his head, and, seeming happier, Tessa began the process, gradually taking him under, taking him back to the days before everything had gone wrong.
He heard Tessa’s words, words that by now he knew by heart. He wondered briefly if by summoning them, by conjuring Tessa’s voice, he might be able to hypnotize himself.
‘Think of a time when you were empowered, Nick …’
His first big job. His employer, Ben Carter, has been watching him closely. He comes upon Nick one evening when he’s stayed in the office late, appears at his right shoulder and stares at the plans on the screen. ‘What’s this?’ he asks, and for a moment Nick thinks he’s in trouble.
‘Just something I’ve been working on. A dream …’ he says.
Ben leans in to the screen, clicks the mouse and begins going through his drawings. It’s a house he plans on building – hexagonal, the top floor completely glass. He’ll build it overlooking the sea.
‘Do you have any more designs?’ Ben asks.
‘Yes, a few.’ He clicks on the folder of designs he’s been working on for the past year.
Ben examines each one in detail before instructing him to move to the next. ‘These are terrific,’ he tells him.
A month later when a big commission comes in from a rich businessman who wants a house built on a plot in Wicklow, Ben gives him the job as well as a substantial increase in salary. It’s also the path that leads to Susan.
Nick heard Tessa’s voice. ‘Make a fist, Nick, and try to hold on to that good feeling.’
He’s on the hilltop looking down over the bay.
‘How long have you been doing this?’ Susan asks him, as they stand on the site looking over his plans. Her father had left the negotiations to her. She’s a lawyer, more than capable of negotiating.
‘I’ve been working at the firm for a year,’ he tells her.
‘And how many jobs have you overseen?’
‘This is the first.’ She arches one carefully defined eyebrow and smiles.
‘I hadn’t intended to design it for someone else,’ he says. ‘Not this one.’
The hexagon he’d been keeping for himself, but when Ben had shown Susan’s father, Tom Price, the drawings, he’d insisted that that was the one he wanted, and it was too good an opportunity for Nick to refuse. That one job had made him. When Tom Price’s house appeared in the top magazines, he was proud to see his name mentioned in the articles. He had no idea then that he’d end up living in it, if only for a few years.
Nick made a fist, tried to hold on to the feeling he had on that hilltop with Susan. But even as he did so, the picture was changing.
Susan is laughing at something he’s said, but her features are morphing into the face of another and he finds himself looking at Rachel.
She stoops to straighten a blanket on the ground, the dome of her belly making it difficult to bend. He tells her to be careful and she laughs and tells him not to be silly, she’s fine. They sit and begin to unpack a picnic. The view hasn’t changed, it’s the same place where Tom Price’s house stands now, he’s sure of it, but here there is nothing – just hills and fields and the sea below them.
‘We should build a house in this very spot,’ Rachel tells him. She closes her eyes. ‘It’s so peaceful.’
He lies back, gently rests a hand on Rachel’s belly. He laughs when his touch is met with a kick and Rachel, winded, laughs and lays her own hand on top of his. He wishes he had the money to build her a house in this spot, hopes that someday maybe he will. He still marvels at the life they’re about to bring into the world.
‘Okay, Nick. I’m going to count slowly from one to five. When we reach number five, you’re going to open your eyes. As I count I want you to make a fist and try to hold on to that positive feeling… two, three …’
He could hear Tessa’s voice getting closer, calling him back, but he clutched at the remnants of the past, unwilling to leave Rachel.
‘Nick? Open your eyes, Nick.’
Reluctantly, he opened his eyes.
Tessa looked satisfied. She waited until he was fully conscious before she spoke.
‘Any confabulations?’
He didn’t answer immediately, but then shook his head. ‘No.’ He hoped he hadn’t said anything to the contrary while he was under, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t. He was always conscious; no matter where he was transported to, physically he was still in that room.
Tessa wrote something in the pad. ‘Good,’ she said, and smiled.
He said nothing. She must have taken his silence for disappointment that he hadn’t been regressed. He got up slowly and sat opposite her at the desk.
Tessa looked at him. ‘You’ve done really well today, Nick. I know that you’re still bothered by what happened, but you can’t chase after it … This memory, whether it’s real or imagined, you’ve got to let it go, do you hear me? It’s not going to help with your current problem. There’s a long road ahead and we need you as stable as you can be.’
He nodded, relieved that he’d managed not to reveal what he’d seen. If she was to continue as his therapist, there were things he’d have to try to keep from her. He didn’t know if that was possible under hypnosis, but right now Tessa, whether she wanted to be or not, was his portal to the past and he couldn’t afford for her to refuse to see him.
She opened her diary. ‘Will I put you in for Thursday, same time?’ she asked.
Nick nodded and took out his wallet. He was anxious to be alone now, to process what he had seen during the session and try to figure out what it all meant. He knew why he’d seen himself on the hilltop with Susan, that had happened, but to find himself there with Rachel a lifetime before made him wonder if there was a connection.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Caitlin
Somehow, she’d got through the day. It had been after two in the morning when she’d got to bed and all that wine she’d drunk with Andy hadn’t helped. Dar Bryan had told her all about Lisa, about the fact that they’d had a massive argument before she went out the night she’d disappeared, and he couldn’t get it out of his head. When she hadn’t come home, he’d surmised she’d stayed over at a friend’s house, and when she hadn’t answered his texts the next day, he’d thought she’d been doing it out of spite. It was only when she’d failed to come home again the following night that he’d contacted the guards. What they called that crucial twenty-four hours had passed, and he’d had to explain too why he was only reporting his girlfriend missing two days after the fact. Caitlin felt sorry for him. It was obvious that he’d been continually tormenting himself since Lisa had disappeared.
Caitlin had sent the last message. She’d sat there waiting for Dar’s reply, but it hadn’t come. She’d made tea, thinking it might clear her head a bit after the wine, but when he hadn’t answered twenty minutes later, she had given up and gone to bed. What was she thinking, it was late, if he had any sense, he’d probably have gone to bed before she’d even sent that final message.
At work, she found herself checking Twitter several times to see if there were any messages from Dar Bryan, but the only message she got was spam from a marketing company wanting her to p
ay to advertise the magazine. When five o’clock came, she was glad to shut down the computer and leave. The girls looked at her, surprised; it was the first time she’d left the office on time in months.
As soon as she got home, she went upstairs and changed into her running clothes. Her head still wasn’t good, she could as easily have pulled back the covers and crawled into bed, but she knew she’d feel better if she pushed herself to do it. Leaving her phone on the locker, she tied her hair back, jogged down the stairs and headed for the park.
As Caitlin jogged, she remembered the nightmares she’d had the previous night. She’d been dreaming about her father. It was one of those crazy dreams where everything was jumbled up. David was there, and then he wasn’t. He’d killed Caitlin’s father and then run away before the guards could catch him. He’d wanted Caitlin to go with him, but she’d screamed at him to get out. She’d fallen to her knees, taken off her cardigan and tried to stop the blood that was pumping from her father’s chest. Then her mother had come in and thought that Caitlin had done it. She’d woken in the early hours of the morning and hadn’t wanted to go back to sleep.
She jogged along the pathway that went around the park. There was no one else around. Usually she spotted the same joggers, but then she was earlier than normal. The second time she circled the track, she saw a man sitting on one of the benches near the copse of trees. She passed him, feet thundering on the pavement. He was reading a book and didn’t look up.
The bad dreams, Caitlin tried to put from her mind. She’d suffered from nightmares since she was a child, ever since her parents had died. Violet, her adoptive mother, had had to leave the landing light on and her bedroom door ajar, but even that hadn’t stopped her from waking screaming. It took years for those nightmares to pass. She still had them periodically, but they’d come back with more fury since David’s disappearance. They never made sense these dreams, and now she dismissed them, and ran all the harder to try to forget them.
On her third lap round the park, the man had vanished from the bench, but she caught a movement in the corner of her eye and when she glanced round, she saw him standing at the edge of the copse of trees. He seemed to be looking straight at her. Caitlin increased her speed. She felt uneasy. She didn’t normally feel frightened in the park, but then there were normally more people around. She wondered what the man was doing there. She tried to dismiss it, put it down to being jumpy after the phone call, but she couldn’t help but feel that he was watching her. She ran on, alert for the sound of feet behind her but she heard nothing. When she came round the circuit for the fourth time, the man had disappeared, but the creepy feeling didn’t leave her. Rather than continuing round for a fifth time, as she normally did, she exited the park, watchful for the stranger, but she didn’t see him, wasn’t even sure if she’d recognize him if she did. It had only been a fleeting glance. She jogged back to the house, chiding herself for her paranoia.
When Caitlin let herself into the house, she paused in the hall and listened. It was as quiet as usual. She went into the kitchen, took out the solitary steak she’d bought and the makings of a salad. She opened the sliding door onto the back garden, went out onto the patio and threw charcoal on the barbecue. She knew it was ridiculous to be barbecuing steak for one, but she loved how it tasted. She hadn’t used it until a month ago; it had always been David who’d done the barbecuing. She thought of the time they’d bought it: it had rained for most of that summer, but David had refused to be put off. He’d go outside in a raincoat, cook the steaks and run back inside with them. Caitlin never knew how he managed to keep the thing lit.
She turned on her computer while she was waiting for the barbecue to heat. It pinged to let her know that she had notifications on Twitter. She clicked the icon at the bottom of the screen. She had two new followers: @darbryan1, and @DavidA. She opened her Twitter account, hovered the mouse over David A’s account, stared at the screen in disbelief when she saw that the profile picture was one of a violin. David A: David Anthony Casey. Quickly she scrolled down the page, but all David A’s tweets were retweets. His profile gave no information but that he was a music lover and teacher. Christ. She clicked on photos, nothing but the violin.
She sat back, tried to clear her head. What was this? Was someone fucking with her? David had never had a Twitter account. He didn’t like to put his personal information out there in the ether, he’d said, didn’t like how just anyone could find out about you. Caitlin looked at the dates of David A’s retweets. The first was only two days ago. She stared at the screen. Someone was definitely messing with her head. She thought about how the guards might react if she told them; they’d laugh at her, not to her face, but she was pretty sure what they’d say as soon as she left the station.
She was glad that she rarely posted to Twitter, that there was nothing whatsoever to lead whoever was doing this to her. But then she remembered that there was – the wine bar posts that Andy tweeted and she retweeted. They would know where she played, that it was on Wednesday nights. She went into her own profile, deleted last week’s tweet and all the previous ones about the music nights. It was probably too late, but it was all she could do.
She shuddered when she thought of the man in the park, of the possibility that she was not being paranoid after all. She clicked on @darbryan1’s profile and followed him back. He still hadn’t replied to her message. She was relieved when she viewed his profile picture again and was pretty sure it wasn’t the man in the park, but that wasn’t to say he was innocent. Just because the story about Lisa was true, it didn’t mean that she was his girlfriend. He could have done his research, chosen a case that would assure her sympathy. He would have seen her posts about playing in the wine bar too. Now she wished she’d listened to David about social media. If some psycho did have her in his sights, he knew just where to find her.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Michelle
O negative. When Nick had told her this, she’d felt sick. What were the chances of a donor coming up of this type? She knew it was rare, and if the doctor had said he had a year to live … It didn’t bear thinking about. Her relief that the break-up wasn’t about her had been short-lived. She had to admit that despite her protests about staying with him, there was a part of her that wanted to cut and run. Wouldn’t it be better for her to end it now and let the healing begin, than to stand by and see Nick deteriorate, knowing she was helpless to do anything about it, forced to watch him die the way her mother had?
Michelle had done everything for her mother. She’d worked part-time to take her to her hospital appointments – followed up all the test results with the doctors, monitored everything they did. When her mother had begun to suffer from confusion, unable to structure simple sentences, it was Michelle who’d identified the drug that was causing the problem. The doctors had denied it, said that confusion was not a side effect of that medication, and yet when her mother had, of her own volition, stopped taking it, her confusion had miraculously subsided and she was herself again.
The whole experience had shaken her faith in the medical system. Michelle knew it was the hospital’s fault that her mother was dead. They’d taken their eye off the ball, failed to notice or else failed to tell them that the cancer had returned. They allowed it to run rampant until her mother’s bone marrow had deteriorated to the point that there was no way back. Michelle had queried it, asked why they had not been given the results of a biopsy six months previously – surely this along with the blood tests taken monthly had indicated that the disease was not only present but escalating. When Michelle had pointed that out to the consultant, she’d been told that they didn’t treat patients on numbers but on symptoms. They were not about to admit culpability, but everybody knew that doctors were run ragged – that long hours and too many patients led to these mistakes.
She’d spent all weekend watching over Nick. She’d wanted to stay again that night, but he told her he’d be fine. Besides, she had the soup run and she wouldn’t get
back till late. She called Nick before she went out and was worried when he didn’t answer, but he called her back immediately.
‘Hey, how did the hypnosis session go?’ she asked him.
‘Yeah, it was fine, good.’
He hadn’t told her exactly what happened at the sessions, and for some reason she wasn’t sure if she should ask, it seemed something private. ‘Do you think it’s helping?’ she asked.
Nick laughed. ‘Believe it or not, I do. She tells me to think of something good, a time when I felt empowered – I have to make a fist as I think about it. The theory is that when I feel the urge to drink, I’m to make a fist and try to get back that feeling.’
‘And it works?’
‘It seems to. I often think about you.’ His voice was soft, and she felt relieved. Things had become so strange between them, it was hard to get back to where they’d been before.
‘Will you be okay tonight?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, I just need to sleep. I’ll be fine.’
Michelle was early getting into the centre. Conor was sitting drinking coffee with Barbara and a few of the other volunteers. Michelle smiled as she took her coat off and hung it on the back of a chair. ‘What’s up?’ she said.
Conor shook his head. ‘You haven’t heard?’
She looked round at the grim faces. ‘No, what’s happened?’
‘The lad outside the government offices was found this morning.’ Conor looked at the mug cradled in his hands.
‘Not dead?’
Three nodding heads confirmed it. ‘Hypothermia.’
‘Christ.’ Michelle sat next to Conor. ‘We only chatted to him last week. His name was Dan, remember?’
Conor nodded, looked around at the others. ‘He’d been sleeping outside the Dáil to give them a wake-up call. Usually he was moved on by security before a politician even got near the place, not that they’d have cared.’
When Your Eyes Close Page 7