Little Black Lies

by Sandra Block

  I nod, picking up the heavy iron puzzle on the table.

  “It may also signal that you’re not quite ready to go back to that night, the night of the fire. Your brain is good at self-defense. It usually won’t go any further than it’s ready to.”

  “Funny you should say that.”

  “What do you mean?” he asks.

  “Because, actually”—I take a deep breath—“I was thinking maybe we should take a break. On the whole hypnosis thing.”

  “Oh.” He nods, trying not to look too relieved. I am probably single-handedly destroying his psychiatry practice with my weekly mommy screaming. “I think it was valuable,” I add, not sure if this is true or not.

  “Right,” he agrees, probably wondering the same. I feel as if this is a breakup of sorts. And we are telling each other: It’s not you, it’s me. “Any specific reason you want to stop right now? It did seem like it was bringing up some answers for you.”

  “I don’t know. Like you said, maybe my brain was just trying to protect me. Maybe it’s not such a good idea to go digging around in there.” I play with the metal puzzle again. “We could always try again another time,” I say, clinking two loops together. But I’m lying. I’d never go back there, to the sweltering pit of that laundry room, the bone-marrow-deep fear waiting in there. The wind whistles outside, and a shiver rushes through me. “So where do we go from here?”

  “That’s a good question,” Sam says. “Maybe it’s time to turn our focus on to what’s happening with your mom.”

  “Which mom?”

  “Your other mom. Not your biological mother.”

  “But why?” I ask. “Just completely give up on finding out about my real mom?” I sound peevish and whiny, even to myself.

  “I’m not saying that exactly,” Sam says. “But maybe we need to go in a different direction. As we already discussed, we think the reason you’re so…” He pauses. I know he wants to say obsessed, but he decides that has too many implications for a psychiatrist-to-be. “Fixated on the idea of finding out more about your birth mother is that you feel like you’re losing your real mother. So if we can get you to work through that issue in a healthier manner, maybe you can then come to grips with your relationship with your birth mother as well.”

  “Maybe,” I answer as vaguely as I feel. I still feel finding out more about my birth mother is the key to everything, but I can’t explain why, and I have to concede that I might be wrong. And, I will concede further, I might even be “fixated” on the subject, to put it nicely. “How’s everything else going?” he asks. “How’s Jean Luc?”

  “Still in love with someone else, I assume.”

  “And your mom?”

  “No change there either, I’m afraid.”

  Sam nods and, following the tick of the pewter clock, opens up his squeaky drawer and writes scripts for my scads of pills, with some extra Xanax for good measure.

  I pocket my scripts and walk against the bitter wind to my car, past the bare white tree. The snow crunches under my boots, fine salt lines rimming the black leather. At once everything seems unaccountably sad to me, punctured. Jean Luc: failure. Hypnosis: failure.

  My phone chirps a message.

  what’s up? It’s Mike.

  Not much, u?

  any plans 2nite?

  no, i am a loser

  I get to my car. The door handle is freezing.

  dinner at my place, loser?

  I laugh. :) not feeling gr8…maybe another time?

  I don’t feel like imposing my crappy mood on anyone else. This loser is having a glass of wine, a warm bath, then it’s lights out.

  u sure? I make a mean manicotti

  I type in, another nite, I promise

  ok, ttyl

  ttyl

  I sit on the cold vinyl seat, rubbing my hands together as the dusk darkens to night, while the whole evening looms ahead of me: the gray living room, the fake fireplace, the journal articles I should read but won’t.

  And I wonder why the hell I didn’t just say yes.

  BOOK THREE: JANUARY

  Chapter Twenty

  Sofia is not her usual self.

  Her casual, laissez-faire demeanor has evaporated. Sitting before me, gray, glum, and angry, she looks like a stranger. She is not drawing, she is not filing, she is just sitting, staring at the gray-blue wall in front of her.

  “You look down today,” I observe.

  “Bad night,” she says. Her voice is exhausted, as if she was up all night partying, though I know she wasn’t.

  “Couldn’t sleep?”

  “Yeah.”

  My brain catalogs medications for sleep. Ambien, Lunesta, Restoril. Xanax, too, but not the best if there’s no anxiety, and I’ve never gotten the anxiety vibe from Sofia Vallano, except when her brother, Jack, came to visit. “Any particular reason?”

  “Yeah.” She doesn’t offer more.

  “Is it about Jack?” I ask.

  “Kind of,” she says. “Memories.”

  “They started coming back?”

  “Yeah.”

  I wait, but Sofia doesn’t say any more. She is oddly motionless. No flipping magazines, no examining her nails, no playing with her hair. Just this dead staring.

  “Are the memories about that night?”

  “No.”

  I don’t want to play Twenty Questions, but I don’t think she’s goading me, more that she doesn’t have the energy to explain. So we sit, her staring at the wall, me looking out the window. Gray sky, gray wall. No snow, no sleet, no rain, no wind today. Motionless, like Sofia.

  I decide to change tacks. “Would you like something to help you sleep?”

  “No. I don’t need anything.”

  “Okay.”

  Sofia looks down at her bed, the bare mattress poking through one of the corners, worn white sheets rumpled up around it.

  “Are you having any nightmares?”

  “No,” she says. “And yes.” She slaps her hands together to catch a bug, then settles down to stare at the wall again. “Waking nightmares more like.”

  I nod. “Do you want to talk about it?” I ask, though it’s obvious she doesn’t.

  She doesn’t say anything for some time. “It’s about my father,” she answers finally, her voice toneless.

  “All right.” This is not the answer I expected. She’s never spoken of him before, except with Jack, talking about how he left them.

  “My father was involved in that night.”

  “Oh,” I say. This was not in Jack’s account or any of the old notes. So if it’s true, this is new information.

  “He wasn’t there, exactly,” she says. “But he was involved.”

  “Can you tell me more about that?”

  Sofia shakes her head. “Not now,” she says, lying down on the bed, on her side. She cradles her head in her pillow. “I just want to go to sleep.”

  “Okay. I’ll let you be for now. But tell one of the nurses if you need to talk. Or you need anything.”

  She nods, closing her eyes, asking for sleep.

  * * *

  “Yeah, I’m a cutter,” the girl says as I’m examining her arms. She says it not as an admission, but as a challenge. Her arms are covered with soft, pink horizontal scars.

  “What do you use?” I ask.

  “Usually a razor,” she says with a shrug. “Sometimes scissors if I can’t get my hands on one.”

  I’m on call in the PER. She came in around seven, when I was just shoving the last of a turkey sub down my throat.

  “You a cutter, too?” she asks.

  “Uh, no,” I say, caught off guard. We’re not supposed to discuss our own state of psychiatric health. “Why do you ask?”

  “I noticed your hands,” she says. “I’ve never seen anyone cut on their hands.”

  “Oh,” I say, putting my palms up reflexively. “No, that was from something else.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” I
flip through her chart. “Do you want to talk about why you’re cutting?”

  “It’s not even a big deal. My mom just freaked out about it.” She motions her head over to the haggard, worried-looking woman in the waiting room. “I told her I wasn’t trying to kill myself.”

  “Do you have any thoughts about that? Killing yourself.”

  She shakes her head no.

  “So what are you trying to do?”

  She shrugs. “Feel better, I guess.”

  I nod. “What’s going on that you need to feel better about?”

  She shrugs again. “Nothing special. Grades, friends, life.”

  She couldn’t have put it better. Nothing special, just the everyday horror of high school life. It used to be a rarity, this cutting, but now I see it every day, kids cutting themselves to let the sadness seep out. As if it were that easy.

  “Do you feel you need to stay overnight in the hospital?”

  Unexpectedly, this question breaks down her well-constructed wall, and she starts crying. “Yes,” she nods.

  “You know”—I touch her arm—“you can tell me. You can tell me anything. Has anything happened?”

  “No,” she cries, a full-fledged sob now. “I don’t even know why I’m so sad.”

  I hold her arm a second, my fine scars meshing with her new, pink, raised ones. “Don’t worry. We’ll get through this.”

  She nods, wipes her nose, and I hand her a tissue from the hospital-issued white box. The PER comes well stocked with tissue boxes. I leave the room to grab some order sheets and start writing up admission orders in the Fishbowl. I don’t write for any medications yet, figuring the group will discuss this tomorrow. Most likely an SSRI with some antianxiety effect. I am signing the admission note when my cell phone rings. It’s the psychiatric floor.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Dr. Goldman. You’re on call, right?”

  “That’d be me.”

  “Ms. Vallano told me you said she could talk to you? I told her we don’t usually call the residents unless it’s an emergency.”

  “No, that’s okay. I’m here anyway. I’ll shoot right up.”

  “Oh, great, thank you so much,” the nurse says, relieved.

  When I get there, Sofia is sitting on the edge of her bed. The sky is black outside the window, the outline of the maple tree barely visible.

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” she says, launching right into it without even a hello.

  “Okay.”

  She stares down at the tile floor, twisting a lock of black hair in her fingers. “It’s hard to talk about.”

  “That’s fine.” I steal a forbidden glance up at her clock—it’s nine. I fight back a yawn.

  “It’s about my father.” Sofia shifts around on her bed. “He raped me.”

  Her eyes meet mine, then fall again. My exhaustion drops away instantly. “I’ve never told anyone before,” she says, her voice soft and emotionless, flat.

  “Do you know why not?” I ask.

  She kicks her legs to and fro, like a toddler who wants out of the high chair. “I don’t know. I guess I never wanted to believe it.”

  I nod. “And now?”

  Sofia is twisting her hair again, choking the tip of her finger purple. “It’s been on my mind for a while, since I saw Jack. But last night, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I had nightmares about it all night.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  She’s silent.

  “Why do you think the visit with Jack brought it on?”

  “I’m not sure. But he looks just like my father. His hair, his freckles. I forgot how he looked, my dad. Completely blocked him out.”

  “Right.”

  “But then I forgot how my mom looks, too, so I don’t know.”

  A food cart rumbles by the hallway behind me, sounding like a small earthquake.

  “You were saying Jack reminds you of your father?”

  “Yes,” she says. “And these thoughts have been invading my head since Jack left. Things I thought I got over years ago.” She lets out a tremulous breath. “Bad things.”

  “What kind of things?” I ask.

  Sofia holds her arms as if a shiver ran through her. She twirls and untwirls her hair again, eyes still focused on the teal tiles. “The sound of his belt buckle.”

  I nod. “Okay?”

  “It makes me want to throw up.”

  I run my fingers against the top of the vinyl chart. “I can understand that.”

  “But I can’t get them out of my brain. All these images.” She shakes her head as if trying to shake them out. “I thought I’d forgotten about them.”

  “Sometimes,” I say, “an emotional event, like seeing Jack, for instance, can bring them up again.”

  Sofia swings her legs, creaking the springs in her bed. “When Jack was yelling at me, it’s like I saw my father again. All those memories poured out, like the dam burst open or something.”

  “You don’t have to talk about them,” I say, giving her permission to stop.

  “No, I think I need to talk about it or I’ll go crazy.” Sofia grabs the hospital blanket, grips it tightly. “My dad was always angry at me for something. Jack doesn’t believe anything I say, but even he would admit that. He was just always mad. Yelling at me, grabbing my hair, slapping my face.” Here her voice does gather some emotion, but she does not cry. “One time I had a bloody lip from him hitting me, and I was crying to my mom and she yelled at me. Yelled at me!” Sofia looks up at me, incredulous anger shining in her eyes.

  “Don’t talk back to him! You’re just provoking him, Sofia!” She says this in a whiny voice, imitating her mother. “Like it was my fault. My problem. She sat there drinking her vodka every night while he’s holding me down, raping me in my bedroom, and telling me to stop being such a baby about it.”

  “Wow,” I say. Mmm-hmm just doesn’t seem to cut it. “What about your mom?”

  “What about her?” she asks. Sofia’s eyes have dark rings, as if they are black and blue.

  “Did she know, do you think?”

  Sofia laughs bitterly. “Of course she knew.” She pulls her knees up to her chest, the bottoms of her white socks gray and dirty. “All the better for her. She didn’t have to deal with the bastard anymore. Let her teenage daughter deal with him instead. Let her see how it feels to be raped.” Her voice is pure venom.

  “I can’t imagine that, Sofia.” I pause then, trying to arrange my words in the best way possible. “I could see how that could make a person extremely angry.”

  “Yes,” she nods. “It did.”

  “Angry enough even, to kill.”

  There is no answer for a full minute. Sofia hugs her knees tighter like a life jacket, and I wait for her response.

  “I could see it, too. It makes sense.” Then she releases her knees and sits on her hands, as if she is afraid they might fly up and hit her. “But I still don’t remember doing it.”

  I lean toward her. “I want you to know, though, Sofia, everyone would understand if you did remember. If you were so angry, so blinded by rage about what your father did, and your mother not doing anything, not protecting you, that you stabbed her to death.”

  She nods, eyes stuck on the floor.

  “We would understand it,” I repeat. “You were only a young girl.”

  “Right. But like I told you,” she says, her voice harboring some irritation now, “I don’t remember any of it.” She sighs, as if she is telling a story she has already told a million times. “I remember getting high. I remember feeling unbelievably full of rage. I remember my brother being stabbed, seeing blood. That’s all I remember. And believe me, that’s more than enough.”

  I sit back in the chair again, folding my hands. Her speech sounds almost rehearsed. “Okay,” I answer.

  “Why? Do you think I’m lying about it? Do you think I actually remember killing her and I’m just not saying?” Her voice grows louder, accusing.

  I don’
t answer her.

  Sofia bounces on her hands, swinging her legs again. All motion. “You think I’ll say whatever I need to to get out of here. Of course I want to get out of here. I’d be crazy not to. I want to live life while I can, while I’m young. Well, relatively young.”

  I nod, toying with the metal rings in her chart. Thirty-six is relatively young.

  “I want to be released, Dr. Goldman. More than anything.” Sofia’s shoulders slump down. “But at the same time, I can only tell you what I can remember.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It could be complete bullshit, you know,” Jason says.

  The next morning we are in the hallway, waiting for Dr. Grant to come out of a patient room.

  “Pshaw!” Dr. A breaks in, looking up from his reading. I have never actually heard someone say the actual word pshaw before. “Who would lie about such a thing? No one in their right head.”

  “Yeah,” says Jason. “That’s the thing. I’m not sure we’re looking at the poster child of mental health here.”

  “It would explain a lot,” I say. “A possible fugue state. How she could have been pushed into killing her mother.”

  “But why didn’t she kill her father then?” Jason asks.

  “He was already gone. He wasn’t an easy target. And she felt like her mother abandoned her to him, so she had a lot of anger.”

  He rolls his eyes. “I know this is heresy in our line of work. But what if she’s just making shit up? I mean, really, she never told anyone all this before? Even when it could have helped her case? I don’t buy it.”

  I tap my fingers on the table, thinking. “She said she hadn’t thought about it for years until she saw her brother. His presence appears to have unleashed a torrent of memories.”

  “What about the sister, what does she say?”

  “MIA.”

  “Still?”

  “Yeah. We found Jack in, like, two seconds, but the sister appears to be lost in social-services-land somewhere.”

  Jason shrugs. “What did you say to the patient?”

  “Not much. I gave her an out. Told her everyone would understand her killing her mother under such circumstances. I mean, some asshole rapes his fourteen-year-old daughter, there’s bound to be consequences of some sort.”