“Mother superior’s office,” Viola corrected him. And no, that had happened after Sister Baylor had yelled at her in front of everyone. After which, Viola had called her a ‘sexually frustrated 1950’s throwback.’ Or something to that effect.
“So, what happened when your mother arrived?”
Of course, he’d come back to that. The stinky old psychiatrist was like a pit bull with a chew toy, unable to let go of his original—and totally false—impression.
“Nothing,” Viola said. “She listened, nodding obediently, while the mother superior told her what a spoiled, disobedient little brat her daughter was. How I needed to learn humility and respect, because I obviously didn’t hold adults in high enough esteem. When it was over, my mother thanked her for putting up with me, and we went home.”
Dr. Horace nodded, like she’d just revealed something very profound about herself. He wrote something down in his notebook. Viola wanted to laugh at him.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“How much do you know about…dream interpretation?”
“Quite a bit, actually,” Dr. Horace smiled proudly. How anyone could be proud of that smile, Viola couldn’t imagine. “During my undergraduate studies, I wrote a thesis on Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.”
Viola nodded. She’d just finished reading that one. But she wasn’t telling him that.
“So…” Viola chose her next words very carefully. “If I told you I’d been dreaming about…birds, for example. What would you say that means?”
“Oh,” Dr. Horace scratched his head. “Well, you see dream symbolism is an entirely different matter than dream interpretation. For those of us in the medical field, it’s looked down upon as a soft science; viewed more like palm reading or fortune telling. Symbols can mean different things to different people, you understand.”
Frustrated, Viola tried another track. There had to be a way for her to test him, without revealing too much about herself in the process. Without letting him in on her secrets, or giving him more details he could use to have her permanently committed.
“What if I had a dream about birds…falling from the sky?”
He eyed her speculatively. “I’d say that you were feeling disappointed.”
“Disappointed?” Was that it? For crying out loud, talk about vague. Who was giving science a soft-on now? “Disappointed about what?”
“Birds—and flying in general—tend to symbolize a person’s dreams—not in the sleep sense, but more their waking hopes and aspirations. To see them falling would indicate that you’re disappointed about something in your life not living up to your expectations.” He paused. “Unless, for you, birds have a particular significance? Something relating to your childhood, maybe?” Or your mother, his eyes added silently. Hopefully.
Viola shook her head. “No. No dead birds in my childhood.”
Dr. Horace’s beady eyes grew suddenly sharp. Damn. She’d given away too much.
“Oh, so they were dead birds? That’s a much more serious interpretation. It signifies a loss of self. Sometimes even a lack of faith in your own grasp of reality.”
Viola blinked. That wasn’t what it meant at all. But what did it mean for Viola, in terms of Dr. Horace? Was he just a hack, or was it something more sinister? Was he actually a liar, hired by Jacques to make sure she got a psychotic diagnosis? She’d looked up everything, and according to most interpretations, blue birds signified purification and ongoing struggle against conflicts.
“These birds…they weren’t deformed in any way, were they?”
She shook her head. “No, they were just regular, dead canaries.”
Canaries represented happiness. Harmony. To lie and say that canaries were dying in her dream was the equivalent of admitting to breathing and eating. Her parents had just died. She’d just broken up with Aiden, her first love—or whatever—and boyfriend of two years. Anyone would be sad. Let him try to make that sound crazy.
“Hmm…” Dr. Horace wrote something down, then looked back up at her as if he was annoyed that she hadn’t told him something more Clockwork Orange-like. Something that could give him grounds for a court order. “Do you have any other dreams you’d like to talk about?”
“Not really.” Viola folded her arms. It was official. She didn’t trust Dr. Horace any further than she could throw him. But as long as she kept coming to his stupid, pointless sessions, he wouldn’t be able to stop her from leaving in a few days.
“All right then,” he flipped the pages of his notebook in the wrong direction, maybe scanning for something she’d told him before. “Tell me about…Hannah Truitt.”
Immediately, Viola’s jaw clamped shut. After a few seconds of shallow breathing, she willed it to relax.
“Who told you about that?” Jacques. It had to be Jacques.
“It doesn’t matter,” Dr. Horace said sternly. “I’d like to hear your side of the story.”
Viola closed her eyes. Her side of the story. That was the worst side.
“Extra, extra!” In her mind’s eye, she saw herself standing on the edge of the fountain, in front of the statue of St. Vincent Ferrer, the ‘Angel of Judgment.’ It had seemed so poetic at the time. Even now, Viola remembered the feeling of importance she’d had, looking down on the upturned faces of her classmates, who were waiting with baited breath to hear which name she was about to make infamous. “Today’s scandal concerns our very own blessed virgin, Hannah Truitt.”
“I’m not going to break down, if that’s what you’re hoping for,” Viola said. Taking a deep breath, she forced herself to relay the facts with as little emotion as possible—even if doing so made her sound like a total sociopath. Crying and falling over herself about how sorry she was, or spewing excuses, wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference.
“That’s fine, Viola.” Dr. Horace was enjoying himself now. There was excitement hidden beneath his coffee-stained smirk of arrogance. “Just tell me how the rumor got started.”
Viola shook her head. Why was she even telling him this story? She could just as easily refuse, but some part of her never had been able to resist giving the people what they wanted. If they wanted to talk about her, she’d give them something to talk about. If Dr. Horace wanted to write about her in his stupid little notebook, well then she’d give him enough for a whole new thesis. That ought to keep him busy for the next three days, while she waited for her letter to take effect. While she planned her escape.
“It was something we used to do, back at St. Catherine’s. We called it the ‘Scandal of the Day.’”
“We?”
“My friends and I.” Viola waved a hand. “It doesn’t really matter who else was involved, though. I was the mouthpiece. I’m the only one people remember.”
The other girls didn’t matter on any level, not anymore. Like Viola, they’d all just been trying to survive the shark tank environment of an all-girl school. Unlike everyone else, though, her friends had been blessed with more resources and creativity. Especially when it came to putting would-be challengers of the social status quo in their place. They hadn’t kept in touch after graduation, probably because their tenuous alliances hadn’t been strong enough to withstand the survivor’s guilt. Like mountaineers who’d cannibalized their fallen brethren, there was a natural dread of reuniting with people who’d seen you at your most ruthless.
But Viola didn’t feel like explaining any of that to Dr. Horace. So instead, she stuck to the cold, hard facts.
“One of my friends said she saw Hannah going off alone with Dorian Van Allen at the co-ed Halloween party. The next day, a bunch of people asked her about it, but Hannah lied and said she wasn’t even there that night. We all thought she was being prudish, because she didn’t want to smudge her pristine reputation.” Viola shook her head, looking at the edge of Dr. Horace’s desk and its peeling wood grain paper, as she remembered.
The girls around the fountain had cried out in exultatio
n, hungry for a sacrifice. But not just any sacrifice. Virgin blood.
“Dear Hannah might claim to be the patron saint of chastity,” she’d told them, pausing for dramatic effect. “But I have it on good authority that Dorian Van Allen from Gillcrest Prep has had his hand in the good virgin’s offering plate.”
As she’d looked across the crowd, basking in the gale of appreciative laughter that followed her oh-so clever play on words, Viola’s eyes had fallen on Hannah Truitt. She’d been standing at the back of the crowd, clutching—of all things—a Bible to her chest. Her face had been white, eyes round with horror, before she turned and ran away. It was a dramatic reaction, she remembered thinking, even for someone as straitlaced as Hannah.
Viola cleared her throat, bringing herself back to the present. “A few days later, Hannah slit her wrists in the dormitory bathroom.” She raised her chin, turning her expression into one of defiance, almost daring him to pity her or take her side. “She didn’t do a very good job of it, though. One of the nuns found her and called an ambulance.”
“And how did that make you feel?”
“Honestly?” Viola unfolded her arms, and re-folded them, tighter. “At the time, I didn’t think it had anything to do with me. Her parents had just split up a few months before. We thought she’d just had enough of all the drama. If it wasn’t for the note she’d left in her room, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Hannah wasn’t the first girl who’d tried something like that to get out of St. Catherine’s. Not even the tenth, probably.”
“What did the note say?”
Viola’s patience with his games was at an end. She sneered. “I think you know what the note said.”
“Indulge me.”
So his plan was to torture her into another ‘violent episode,’ was it? Well, nice try.
“It said that Dorian Van Allen had raped her the night of the Halloween party,” she told the psychiatrist, without so much as a quiver in her voice. “It said she was ashamed, that she was afraid if she accused him, no one would believe her. She didn’t want to take that chance, didn’t want anyone to find out what had happened.”
Dr. Horace was nodding. “But then, you went and told the entire school.”
There was a burning at the back of her throat. Viola swallowed. “That’s right.”
“And that was when you got expelled for the first time?”
Viola nodded. “Yes.”
But it was a lie. Viola had barely gotten a slap on the wrist for what had happened to Hannah. Her father had spoken to the mother superior, and all of it had just…gone away. No, what she’d really been expelled for was what she’d done a month later. To Dorian Van Allen.
That hadn’t made it into any school records, of course. Viola didn’t expect Dr. Horace to know about that, because not even Jacques had known about it. And there was no way in hell she was going to expose that dark little secret to either of them.
“If you could go back to that time,” Dr. Horace asked, “knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently?”
Oh, so many things. But that wasn’t really what Dr. Horace was asking. Viola knew this was a test. He wanted to see if she understood that her actions had been wrong. He wanted to try and prove that she was a sociopath, or at the very least, suffering from borderline personality disorder. She’d been doing her homework, though, so she knew the right answer.
Yet, she just couldn’t resist getting in one last dig.
“You know,” she told the psychologist, casually and dispassionately. “Freud defines guilt as a symptom of the superego, which basically comes from parental examples. I’m not going to blame my parents for the way I turned out, even if some old German guy says it was their fault. I know that Uncle Jack”—and Viola actually used air quotes as she said the nickname—“likes to say that I wasn’t disciplined enough as a child. But do you think Hannah’s parents care about that?”
Dr. Horace wrinkled his forehead. “I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying.”
Viola spelled it out for him.
“Hannah was an honor student. She was captain of the equestrian team. She would’ve had a full-ride scholarship to…anywhere she wanted to go. Instead, because of something I said, she ended up at one of those fake spas for b-list celebrities. I heard…she makes pottery now.” She paused for effect; fixing the psychiatrist with that same, condescending look he seemed to love using on her. “Do you think she cares if I’m sorry?”
“I don’t know, Viola. Are you sorry?”
Viola shook her head. God, but she really had been a monster. What would Sam think of her, if he knew?
“I can’t change what I did in the past. I can’t change the person I was.” Slowly, carefully, she uncrossed her arms, then her legs. Then she stood up, fluidly, without a hint of disability. “But here’s what I can do. I can use every last ounce of strength that’s left in my body, to make sure that anyone…who had anything to do with my parents’ death…is more sorry than they ever could have imagined. And when I’m done? I’ll go back…and try to make penance for all the mistakes I made…when I was young and stupid.”
The pompous psychologist—who Viola was now pretty sure was taking orders from Jacques—cleared his throat, then looked down at his notebook as he wrote something down. Was it her imagination, or did he look a little bit scared?
Turning on her heel, Viola went for the door.
“Good talk, Dr. Horace,” she said, over her shoulder, as she left. “See you next week.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.” –Sigmund Freud
Sam was losing it.
After three days of being left with nothing but work and the torture of his own thoughts, unable to talk to Viola or gain any insight into what had happened between them, he was almost on the verge of faking a psychotic breakdown—just so he could be admitted and find out what the hell was going on with the girl he couldn’t stop thinking about.
Then again… As he angrily struggled out of his scrubs in the locker room, slamming doors and muttering curses at the knots in his shoelaces, despite the growing number of people giving him sideways glances, Sam realized he might not have to fake it if things continued the way they had been.
Every night, he fell asleep thinking about her voice in his ear, telling him to ‘prove it.’ Every morning, he woke up with a fresh resolve to find a way to show her that he could, without breaking half a dozen laws to bust her out of there. And every day, when he tried to go see her, she refused to let him in. Even Dustin, who was usually so willing to help, had thrown up his hands and told him he had no idea what was going on. For the past twenty-four hours, she hadn’t allowed any visitors. Not even her supposed ‘family psychologist,’ Dr. Horace. And as far as the psych intern knew, she wasn’t being released anytime soon.
Sam was starting to seriously wonder if she was working on something much more nefarious than a simple escape plan. God willing, she wouldn’t do anything drastic, like take somebody hostage. Or if she did, please, God, let it be him.
“Okay, that right there?” Brady grabbed his shoulder, startling him. “That Daniel Day Lewis, There Will Be Blood look you’ve got going on right now? That is why the nurses have started asking me to walk them to their cars at night.” He smiled, while Sam scowled. “Thanks for that, by the way. Whatever form of mania you’re contemplating, keep it up. I think even Candace has started coming around.”
“Glad I could help,” Sam told him testily, slamming the door of his locker as hard as he could. The few day-shift interns who had still been in the area quickly left, pulling on jackets and shouldering bags as they booked it to the door.
“So, uh….” Leaning against the lockers—casually, as if he’d decided to pretend like his best friend wasn’t acting like a psycho—Brady tapped his watch. “Happy hour?”
Snorting derisively, Sam stared at his friend�
��s wrist.
That was when the idea hit him like a ton of bricks. The grand gesture, the ultimate sign of penance. Oh, it was so simple, how could he not have thought of it before? Because it was insane, that was why. His brain had probably just been waiting for the moment he would finally abandon all restraint.
“Not tonight,” he said, shaking his head. “There’s something important I have to do. But if you’re game to break a few rules, I could use your help.”
Brady closed his eyes, smiling as he bit his lip in mock rapture. “Oh, I cannot tell you how long I have waited for this moment.”
Ten minutes later, Sam stood outside the doorway of the security office on the first floor. It was a plain, steel door. Unassuming. No windows. Behind the door, there was a reception desk and a few other steel desks with short cubicle walls, and behind that, a small break room.
Sam only knew the basic layout, because he had needed to come here to get his badge picture taken on the first day of work. But Brady had been in there quite a few times. For various complaints and misunderstandings, which he always seemed to be able to miraculously clear up, with no apparent lasting consequences. Like the time last October, when Brady had been caught carrying a huge box of hospital toilet paper to his car, and he’d told the security guards it was a donation for the Boy Scouts of America’s ‘Build a Mummy’ project.
Okay, enough stalling. It was time to do this. Taking one last deep breath, to calm his nerves, Sam knocked on the door.
The security guard who opened it was an elderly guy with white hair and a mustache. His first name was Ken, or maybe Kent. Sam knew he was a retired traffic cop, because his wife worked as a nurse up on the seventh floor—Beverly. She was always showing Sam pictures of her grandchildren.
“Hey Dr. Philips.” The guard’s smile was friendly, and Sam felt bad that the guy remembered who he was, despite the fact that he wasn’t wearing his scrubs or his name tag. “What can I do you for?”
“Uh…” Sam felt his face heat with shame as he hovered in the open doorway, but he played it off as embarrassment. “Actually, I think I might have lost my security badge.”
Wake for Me (Life or Death Series) Page 17