He repeated the surgical strike. Kendra dropped to the floor and hunkered on all fours. After trapping her between his legs, he entangled a second tuft of hair around his treacherous grip and delighted in pulling the strands taut against her scalp. Her cries for help went unheard. He waited for her to still while the executioner’s blade hovered inches above the nape of her bowed neck. Gladness accompanied the clean downstroke of the blade. Freed from his grasp, she let out an involuntary squeal. A sinister silence followed. She dared to emerge from her cave and open her eyes. His blistering fist opened, and curls of hair ... her beautiful hair ... floated into a pile at her fingertips.
His smile was for her, a secret pact between husband and wife.
Bent on finalizing the job, he rushed her. His quickness was ephemeral, his strength superhuman, his resolve unwavering, his glee heartless, and his accuracy lethal.
She scurried like a beetle across the floor, legs and arms tucked beneath her body. But her wavy hair, shining in the dark, was impossible to shield. He had the length of the dormer to complete his hideous task, nothing to stop him. When he finished hacking and sawing, she collapsed into a fetal ball, hurled her arms over her cropped hair, and quaked.
“Get up,” he said. “Get to your feet. We have to finish this thing. Company is coming, and I want to get this over with.” The blade slipped under her chin and pried her head off the floor.
She scrambled away, propelling her hands before her. “Why, Joel? Why are you doing this? You could have come to me. We could have worked it out. The money is nothing. The house, nothing. We could have sold everything and started over.”
“We are selling everything. We are starting over.” The knife was insistent. “And anyway, that’s not what this is about. It’s about getting you help.” He used his shirtsleeve to wipe perspiration from his brow. The knife quivered in his slack grip. “I tried. I really did try. To make it go away. But madness is a tricky thing. Look what it’s done to you. Up, I said!”
She balanced to her feet and bumped her head against the pitched ceiling. “You, Joel. You’re the one who’s mad.”
The beast in him growled. He raised the carving knife above his head, point down. With his other hand, he reached out and touched her. She recoiled, but there was no room for escape. He ran his fingers behind her ear and picked away the detached strands. “Your hair. Your beautiful hair. I had to do it. To show everyone how truly mad you are.”
He snatched up her hand and pried open her fingers until they lay flat in his grasp. Transferring the knife into her palm, he closed her defiant fingers over the grip. The handle was cool but burned her flesh. She wanted to let go, but he clamped both his fists over hers, locking the three hands into a Celtic knot, fingers overlapping fingers, white and pink with tension. She didn’t want to go where he led, but Joel had his way and guided her to the middle of the room. Rotating her wrist, he forced the knifepoint outward.
With the fingernails of her free hand, she clawed at his hands. He didn’t feel a thing. “No, Joel! I won’t let you!”
“Do you hear the sirens?” He aimed the point of the knife at his chest. The steel shook. The sharpened edge flashed silver.
“I won’t let you! I won’t!” Her bones ached inside the iron grip of his fists.
“Who will stop me, my darling?” The pupils of his eyes were fully dilated, obliterating the beguiling blue. Sweat ran in runnels off the sides of his face. He chuckled. She threw herself off-center. He anticipated resistance, countered it, and drove the blade irrevocably toward his heart. The tip slashed his shirt. Gory blood seeped through the cloth and spread across the fibers.
“Oh God! God, no!”
If he experienced anything, it wasn’t pain. His mouth coiled. Success exhilarated him. His blackened eyes admired the results. “Everything I do,” he said, “I do for you. It’s a sacrifice, but one I must bear.”
Once more, he guided her hand and swept the blade across his body, this time truer and deeper. The cutting edge sliced his throat from ear to Adam’s apple. Every muscle convulsed in an effort to squelch the pain. His whitened face became a mask of tragedy. Kendra shied away from the gash and the spray of blood shooting out from it. He let her go. She reeled back, taking the carving knife with her.
“You need help,” he said, “and I’m the only one who can get it for you.” Joel staggered sideways, twitched his head at an odd angle, and swiped an unsteady hand across his neck. A smear of blood came away. “I did that rather too well.”
Kendra peered down. The knife lay crosswise upon her open palm. As an object of beauty, it was perfect, the way the blade sent out sparks of captured light and how blood dripped in perfect roundels from the cutting edge. Joel made a threatening gesture. She closed her fingers over the haft and pounced forward.
“Very good, my love. You’ve convinced even me.” He took several more hobbling steps and sank to his haunches. “It’s not blood. Not really. It’s a trick. A trick of the eye.” He fell forward, his cheek hitting the floor and his limbs convulsing.
Sirens screamed onto the scene. Brakes screeched on arrival. Car doors slammed. Glass broke. The front door crashed open. Shouts filled the bungalow. A rush of feet pounded upstairs, harkening the arrival of madness.
Kendra opened her fingers and watched the knife tumble to the floor. Seconds later, she was surrounded, grappled to the floor, and subdued with strong hands. Her arms were yanked behind her. The cold steel of handcuffs closed around her wrists.
“She didn’t mean it,” Joel was saying, his voice weak with pain. “She was going to kill herself. I had to stop her, didn’t I? I love her, don’t I? Be kind to her.”
The last words Kendra remembered was the cop asking, “How much y’give her?” and the paramedic answering, “Three milligrams,” and her thinking, This is what it’s like to be mad.
She closed her eyes and willed the world to go away. “Poor Emily,” she said, her mouth moving mutely to the words. “Poor, poor Emily.”
Sanity, she decided, was the delusion. And insanity, the truth.
Chapter 34
EVELYN SILVERSTEIN WAS the epitome of success. She enjoyed an enviable profession, a picture-perfect family, a wardrobe of expensive tastes but modest hemlines, time to devote to charity events, and the respect of her peers. She just didn’t have a clue. She said to Kendra, “Your beautiful hair.”
Kendra ran shaky fingers over her skull, where uneven clumps lay flat across knobby bones.
“Why did you do it?” the doctor asked.
Kendra’s voice had stopped working spontaneously. She timed the malady to the moment she stood over her beloved husband with a bloody knife in her hand. From then on, she had to rehearse words in her mind before speaking them. Sometimes they didn’t come out at all. Other times they came out haltingly, and even then, with a voice made rough from unspent cries of anguish. “I didn’t do it. Joel did.”
In the hospital, she hadn’t been given the opportunity to examine the full impact of butchery done to her in the name of kindness. For safety reasons, mirrors—even fake mirrors—were in short supply. Still, in the polished surfaces that chance made available to her, she had seen enough to know what she looked like. She looked the part of a madwoman who had been to hell and back, and lived to tell of it. Even if no one listened. Or believed.
To replace the vindication she desperately needed, she relived the savagery. Minute by minute. Every hour of every day.
As the story went, nearly a full week had passed since Mrs. Swain of North Marshfield Avenue tried to kill Mr. Swain with a six-inch kitchen knife. Husband and wife had been taken away by separate ambulances. The husband to the nearest ER and thence to the operating room for emergency surgery followed by a stay in the intensive care unit. And the wife to Cook County Hospital, followed by a brief incarceration at Cook County Jail, and finally and most ironically, transported to the same hospital where her husband was listed as a patient. The wife, though, was destined for a much long
er sojourn in the psychiatric unit.
Thereafter, Kendra McSweeney Swain entered the legal and medical gauntlet proscribed by law.
By early morning of the next day, Doctor Silverstein evaluated her former patient and issued a certificate attesting to the fact that Kendra McSweeney Swain was a danger to herself or others, and should be involuntarily committed until the court determined her legal status. The patient was put on 24-hour hold. Before the 24 hours were up, another physician completed a second certification that deemed her insufficiently recovered from her delusional state, thus earning her a permanent stay until court review.
To Kendra, her transfer from police custody to hospital admission seemed like one endless day, where shackles and detention cells, questions and incoherent responses, heavy blankets and soft restraints, comings and goings, hypodermics and intravenous fluids, catheters and bloodletting, concerned looks and obsequious words, and finally mood lights and new age music mingled with nightmarish scenes of knives, blood, and lunacy that played and replayed in her mind like reruns of B-grade horror flicks.
Five days after the incident, the State’s Attorney and Kendra’s court-appointed lawyer presented their cases to the judge, calling on witnesses to testify to the facts in the case. Testimony was given by police and paramedics on the scene. Being incapacitated and unable to speak while on a ventilator in the ICU, the husband signed a statement attesting to his version of the events, thereby convincing the court he was injured only in the act of preventing his wife from committing suicide with a seven-inch knife, this according to news reports, where the length of the knife steadily grew. The wife likewise never saw the inside of the courtroom since her catatonic incapacitation prevented her from doing so. A close friend by the name of Bernice Jellinek wanted to speak on the defendant’s behalf, but she wasn’t given the opportunity since she had no legal connection to either Mr. or Mrs. Swain.
Therefore, in the absence of contradictory evidence that the husband had somehow set up his wife, both sides persuaded the Court that Kendra McSweeney Swain was a mentally ill person who required treatment to keep her from inflicting further harm on herself or others, in particular her husband. The judge had no alternative but to involuntarily commit said Mrs. Swain to a psychiatric facility for a period of not more than ninety days. Thereafter, if her physicians considered her unfit to rejoin society, her case would be considered once more, at which time the judge would decide if another involuntary commitment of ninety days was warranted.
Having been deprived of her liberty through legal means, she was officially committed to the hospital as an involuntary psychiatric patient. Should she show signs of improvement, her case could be reviewed for early release. A week into her stay, though, she showed no such signs of improvement.
At this point, Kendra didn’t care one way or another what the future held for her. Her medical file was stamped with insanity so she may as well act the part. Sometimes, she decided, being committed to a psych ward can turn an otherwise sane person into a psycho, proving everyone else must also be insane but haven’t been sufficiently tested to prove it.
Doctor Silverstein pressed her lips together and scribbled a note into Kendra’s thickening file. “Have you given consideration to your situation?”
What could Kendra say about a boy who, though born with so many advantages, was destined never to become a man? How could she describe the loving parents who paved a path of glory for their son, only to watch him take a shortcut to self-destruction? How could she excuse herself from not reading the signs ahead of time and stop what was about to happen? What could she add to the biography of her brother Danny that didn’t also apply to Joel ... and Hunter ... and Robbie Cutler?
Kendra fingered the princess collar of her hospital-issue flannel robe and avoided the doctor’s question with a question of her own. “How’s Birdie taking this?”
“She wants to see you.”
“What’s stopping her?”
“She’s not a family member.”
“My father’s mistress is the only person who gives a crap about me.” She stared at the fuzzy pink slippers adorning her feet and the pajama bottoms imprinted with smiley teddy bears. “Anyway ... Joel probably got to her by now. He can be extremely persuasive.”
“Can he?”
To demonstrate the sine qua non of her situation, she indicated their immediate surroundings with upturned hands.
“You don’t think you belong here.”
“Oh, but I do. Here, at least, I know I’m sane. When do I get real clothes?” Off the doctor’s uncertain tilt of her head, Kendra understood. “I see. Not until Joel can pack a bag.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Evelyn said, and made a note.
When Kendra first arrived for her one o’clock appointment, Doctor Silverstein directed her to the stiff leather chair. Formalities and decorum, however, were observed in light of the patient’s recent behavior.
In the initial days, when Kendra was run through the mandatory admittance conventions, the doctor met with her inside the psychiatric unit. Once the patient proved compliant, and in light of their prior relationship, the doctor arranged a special pass. Given the court order, measures were necessary to make sure she didn’t wander off. She was assigned a two-ton attendant to escort her from the ward to the professional wing. He was standing behind her now, slightly to the right. He smelled of cheap aftershave. Kendra motioned back. “What does he have to do with our discussion?”
Doctor Silverstein didn’t blink when she read the name off his badge. “Gerald? He’s not here to listen.”
“But here he remains.” She turned around. “Isn’t that so, Gerald?”
Yellow wisps standing straight up from his scalp made him look like a fat pencil capped with a fresh eraser top. His stance was steady. His eyes looked her over like a piece of meat. It was insulting, particularly in light of her remembering him from before. Many days had gone by since her arrival from Cook County Jail, so fagged out on Haldol that she could barely walk or talk. Gerald hadn’t regarded her in any sexual way, even though he stood at the ready should she become violent as the staff stripped her down and put her to bed. But that was because she had become invisible. She had been rubbed out with his eraser head. She had been turned into a blank piece of paper. She didn’t have the strength then to tell him to go fuck himself. She didn’t have the will now. Though she wasn’t certain how many days had gone by since losing all sense of dignity, she was still a blank piece of paper. Her greatest fear was that she would stay that way, even when she walked out of the hospital. If she ever walked out a free woman.
The doctor said, “He’s heard it all before.”
“Not all.” Kendra bent her knee and folded a bare foot beneath her. “And not one more peep from me if he stays.”
A puff of air, reeking like antagonism, brushed past her neck. The doctor made eye contact with the orderly. After he departed, Kendra brought her eyesight back around to meet Evelyn’s stern though slightly amused expression. “I like your spirit, Kendra. I like the way you stand up for yourself.”
Kendra shrugged her indifference. “Joel didn’t.” Forced to stay in a place she didn’t want to be and didn’t think she belonged, her thoughts naturally fixated on escape. But she wasn’t going anywhere wearing teddy bears and pink slippers except back to a psych ward equipped with locked doors, observation windows, video cameras, and platters of synthetic food brought to her on Styrofoam trays supplied with plastic cups and polyvinyl utensils.
“You really are a mess,” Evelyn said.
“I was hoping it was a simple matter of graduating to the green pill.”
“This time around, Kendra, it’ll take more than that.”
“I wish you’d stop invoking my name like a swear word.” She brought out the artificial smile, the one that translated into happiness. Mac had been fooled by it a hundred times over.
Doctor Silverstein was having none of it. “You’re doing yourself a greater harm
by pretending it never happened.”
“Remind me again?” She said the phrase like a question, even though she already knew the answer.
Evelyn let the fountain pen roll from her fingertips. “When you attempted to kill your husband with a common kitchen utensil.”
They’d been over this ground before, but she repeated the obvious. “He did that to himself.”
“He was protecting you.”
“Yes, I know. The suicide ruse.”
“You had no intention of killing yourself?”
“Not then, no.”
“Then why the knife?” When Kendra could offer no observation, the doctor said, “Either to do in Joel or yourself.”
“And since I deny trying to kill myself ...?”
“Joel was your target.”
“When you give me only two choices, it sort of backs me into a corner.”
“Does that make you uncomfortable?”
“That makes me pity you and the judge.”
The doctor shifted. “Nothing gets to you.”
“The way it came down, sure it does. It’s impossible pretending anymore. I keep seeing him coming at me with the knife.”
“It was a frightening experience. So frightening that you imagined the circumstances reversed. It’s called transference. You imagined Joel holding the knife because the truth is too difficult to face.”
“He was holding the knife.”
“And not you?”
“At the end, yes. It’s complicated.” It was difficult to explain the unexplainable. If she recounted every step, no one would believe her anyway. So why bother. Kendra referred to the doctor’s file. “Everything’s written down there, isn’t it? The blow-by-blow account according to Joel Swain, witness for the prosecution. But only when he was able to speak. How long did that take? He must have sweet-talked the state’s attorney. Or his daddy did. That’s what they do for a living. Lawyers. Persuade and justify. They’re very good at it. I might be here forever. If not here, another hospital, perhaps in another state, very private and discreet but costing an arm and a leg.”
Trick of the Mind Page 24