A Very Paranormal Holiday

by J. T. Bock

  “I’d certainly recommend a couple more sessions to follow up,” I said.

  “We’ll talk again,” he replied, full of assurance, or maybe arrogance.

  With that, he walked away.

  Damn the man.

  The receptionists, Carrie and Lena, were whispering behind me, convinced that I couldn’t possibly hear what they were saying. They were wrong.

  “Now that’s what I call putting the hot in psychotic,” Carrie said.

  “He could so drive me crazy,” Lena replied.

  Totally inappropriate. Good thing I hadn’t heard it. I almost smiled. At least I wasn’t the only one afflicted.

  Speaking of which, I had an appointment.

  Chapter 2

  My cell pinged and I answered it with a curt, “Willard, you have ten seconds. Less.”

  As always, the call had come in just as Dr. Henderson’s office door opened. In a second, the nurse would emerge and she’d be annoyed that I was speaking to the attorney when the doctor was finally ready to see me.

  But no, it wasn’t the nurse. It was Dr. Henderson himself, alone. That meant bad news.

  Well, what did you expect?

  I held up one hand to Henderson and turned slightly away, as if that gave me more privacy.

  “Amanda.” Willard Morton’s voice always sounded creakier on the cell. “I have the witness schedule. Schaeffer could still change it a little, but I’m convinced it’s going to be as I predicted. He’s going to call you last.”

  Last up before the summaries and verdict. Schaeffer, the defense attorney, wanted me in that position so that the memory of my testimony being eviscerated on the stand would be fresh in the jury’s mind when they retired to consider their verdict. Wonderful.

  “I hear you, Willard. Thanks to you, it’s not such a surprise. We’ll just have to go with it.” I wouldn’t back down. Willard knew that really. He’d seen me dismiss the anonymous threatening letters that I received; he knew I wasn’t going to be put off by scheduling.

  As for what Schaeffer planned to do when I was on the stand, he might find challenging my testimony harder than he expected. Willard had told me that defense strategies like this had backfired before. As a public prosecutor of long standing, he’d seen it all.

  So, we just had to make sure the challenge backfired this time too.

  “I know you’ll do everything you can,” he said, “but—”

  “I’ll be there, Willard. Let’s talk tomorrow. Got to go.”

  I turned the cell off and put it away.

  “I apologize, Dr. Henderson,” I said.

  “Not at all,” he murmured. “Come on in.”

  I straightened my back and walked past him into the spartan little office which had become all too familiar to me.

  “Please, take a seat.” Henderson remained standing, slightly bent over behind his desk, until I was sitting.

  He was a neat man with quick eyes and steady hands. His receding black hair was brushed straight back, which made his forehead look even larger. There were no golf trophy cabinets in the office, but his fading summer outdoor tan hinted at his passion for the game. There would be little chance for him to indulge this winter.

  Above all, he was a very good specialist, which was why I was here. That, and he would usually do as I asked. Given the amount I had paid him over the last year, maybe that wasn’t so surprising.

  Best of all, he also refrained from talking down to me.

  He opened his mouth. I saw the automatic small talk all assembled and ready to come trotting out. But he changed his mind and instead, laid his hands softly on the buff folder in front of him. As softly as if the folders might explode.

  “The results are back, of course, as I said they would be.” He paused and gathered himself, then looked me in the eyes. “Dr. Lloyd, I have nothing here I can use to ameliorate my previous prognosis.”

  The office was silent.

  Well, again, what did you expect?

  “I see. Thank you,” I said finally. “How long?”

  He took off his glasses and began to concentrate on polishing them.

  “Now we move from science to speculation,” he replied. “I can only work from the observations that I’ve accumulated over the past few months.”

  He peered at me and I nodded.

  “The aggressive transfusion therapy we adopted looked, initially, to be promising.”

  He didn’t add that he’d adopted it only at my insistence. And ‘initially promising’ from a medical doctor meant it had now failed.

  “The degenerative symptoms you presented with appeared to halt, and even reverse in some particulars. But, as I suggested at our last meeting, the subsequent transfusions have each had a diminishing effect. The last two, no effect at all.” He pursed his lips, replaced his glasses and tapped the folder. “Your body is simply shutting down. The treatment no longer has a delaying action, and if I extrapolate from the readings I have…” he shrugged. “One month, possibly two.”

  “Not three.”

  He shook his head, his lips tight together.

  So maybe Christmas, but go easy on plans for the new year.

  Unfair, I wanted to say. Doubly unfair.

  Unfair, because any person looking at the end of their life rushing up on them feels that it’s unfair. More because I wasn’t old. I was in the prime of my life. That is, apart from the small matter that I was dying.

  Doubly unfair, because I didn’t have a wealth of memories to console me as I faced my last days. I’d woken up in an apartment a year ago with my previous life an almost unrelieved blank.

  I’d stumbled from bed to bathroom. Yes, I knew the way. The passing face in the mirror was mine; puffy and veiled with bed-hair, but familiar.

  I remembered thinking I’d need an extra couple of minutes to brush that out and wind it up in a bun for…

  The sleep cleared from my brain and the panic set in.

  Do my hair for what?

  I knew I wound my hair in a bun and I dressed neatly. There was a pair of glasses on a table that felt right on my face, but my eyesight was fine. I tested it by looking out the window. I saw a street that I knew was where I lived, but…

  What day is it?

  Where am I?

  Who am I?

  My body knew its way around. It got me dressed in sweats. It made the coffee, even though I was trembling so badly I had to lift the mug with both hands and sip the scalding liquid over the sink so I didn’t spill it on the floor.

  I am an organized person, I said to myself as I looked around at the tidy, one-bedroom apartment.

  My name is Amanda. Amanda Lloyd. Something else. Doctor Amanda Lloyd.

  There was no TV. A shelf of books covered a wall and a silver laptop sat on the coffee table. I switched it on and my fingers knew the peculiar password; Cologny1816. I wrote it down in case my fingers forgot later.

  In the course of the next hour I discovered myself and the world around me. It was a Sunday. It was December. I lived and worked in Detroit. I knew how to do things without remembering how I knew.

  It was as if I were a new person. One that, although I hadn’t known it at that time, had only a year to discover herself.

  “What? I’m sorry,” I looked up at Dr. Henderson. He’d said something while I’d been distracted.

  “I was just saying that if we could see our way to some more tests,” Henderson said, “there might be other treatments that suggest themselves, and if not, the additional data could provide us with a more accurate forecast.”

  “Thank you, no.” I stood up again. “I believe we’re finished here.”

  I held my hand out. Henderson got up and shook it gently, as if he were afraid my arm would come off.

  “You’ve been a great help and I appreciate the way you’ve spoken so openly to me,” I said.

  “I feel I’ve been very little help.”

  I knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to sweep me off into the hospital, monitor ever
y vital sign while he pumped me full of experimental drugs and recorded every heartbeat. I knew the arguments he could make: that whatever it was that was killing me, they could at least get some information about it, and the next person might have a better chance to live.

  But Henderson had an empathy for his patients and he knew my feelings on this.

  I felt guilty, but I just couldn’t. I had a date in court, not in the hospital.

  He escorted me to the door and, in the absence of anything to say, we shook hands again, one final time.

  I concentrated on walking away.

  A year. Like a damned mayfly. Wake up. Live. Die.

  Unaware I had so little time, in that silent winter-wrapped apartment a year ago, I’d stumbled from clue to clue, trying to work out the mystery of who I was and what had happened to me.

  There were elegant, professional clothes in the closet that I knew were for work. Casuals for weekends. Sweats, jogging and gym clothes. Some high-end cosmetics.

  The music system played jazz. I liked it, and the apartment wasn’t so silent any more.

  A bowl on a table by the front door held keys and a cell phone.

  I opened the cellphone and looked at the callers. I was on the point of calling one, but what would I have said? Who am I? Or rather, who is this Dr. Amanda Lloyd?

  Next to the bowl was a purse. I dug out my wallet and driver’s license. I knew how to drive and, according to the key fob, I owned a Volvo. I had to go to the basement parking garage and click the fob to learn which car was mine. A late-model XC90.

  I had ID. Bank cards. Money in the bank.

  I signed my name on blank paper. It matched the ID and it felt right.

  Family? Friends? No. Not a single photograph. Nothing.

  The laptop was obsessively organized and held nothing but work files. It turned out I was a therapist. A freaking shrink. And obsessive. A photo and description of each of my colleagues at work, that level of obsessive.

  The email account was the same—all work. No social media, no chat.

  Had I had an accident and been hit on the head? I went back to the bathroom and did a fingertip search of my head without finding any suspicious bumps.

  Some kind of medical or psychological experiment?

  It was crazy, but humans aren’t designed to be scared while sitting safe in a snug apartment with jazz playing. By about midday I’d almost calmed down.

  Then I found the box file.

  Chapter 3

  It started simply enough. It was a box of documents and I went digging through it.

  The latest utility bills, all paid.

  The last four electronic bank statements printed out and annotated. Yes, it seemed I checked my income and expenditures, line by line.

  Salary and tax documents for the last six years, neatly labeled and sorted into color coded plastic binders.

  Orderly? If it hadn’t been for the healthy bank balance I might have hated myself.

  My passport, with no travel stamps.

  My service agreement with a psychiatric practice of eight partners downtown. It was dated just over six years before.

  A house sale and purchase of this apartment a month before. I stared at the house details. It was a magnificent house. The salary was good, and Detroit house prices were low, but it seemed a step higher than I could have afforded. And too big. Had it been inherited? How long had I lived there? Nothing. I got an impression of empty rooms, one after the other, as if I faintly recalled walking around the house after it had been cleared out. The shadowy emptiness seemed to make me ache.

  Regret? Sorrow?

  I looked around me at the furniture in the apartment. All new. All…anonymous somehow. Nothing that provided a link to a former life. Had that been deliberate?

  There was also a diploma and some university memorabilia like student ID cards. A graduation photo. I had a degree from Pitt, nine years ago. I stared at the woman in the photo. She looked like me. That was my hair, cut shorter. The eyes were focused behind the photographer. She was smiling, as if there was a secret she knew, this neat and tidy blank person.

  Putting aside the fact that I couldn’t remember any of it, the documentation all made sense and it all connected up. I’d graduated, spent a couple of years as a resident somewhere, then moved to join the private practice I was in now. Maybe inherited my parents’ house. Sold it and bought an apartment. There was a sense of normalcy coming off the documents like the aroma of Sunday cooking.

  But beneath the university file was a large white envelope. The glue on the seal had gone dry and brown, and the flap was open, but I hesitated before reaching in. That was about as stupid as I could have gotten. These weren’t someone else’s private files, they were mine. Weren’t they?

  Like a Russian doll, inside the envelope was another person, another image of me.

  I’d just been starting to build up a picture of myself. The person I could be. Doctor Amanda Lloyd, a therapist in a practice in Detroit who’d graduated just down the way in Pittsburgh. A reputable, normal woman, a bit eccentric and lonely maybe, who’d had some kind of accident or illness that had affected her memory. My memory.

  Except I had a passport, ID and bank account for a Jane Flanagan as well. And $10,000 in cash.

  I’d dropped it on the floor and sat there, my gut twisted in fear and my hands shaking.

  Who was Jane Flanagan? Was that my real name? Or was I really Amanda Lloyd? Or were both identities false? Was I someone else entirely? Someone who might need to disappear at any moment?

  The worst part was, a year later, I still didn’t know.

  I could smell the tension as I walked back into the office after seeing Henderson, shedding my coat and hanging it over my arm.

  “Oh, Amanda, good, you’re back.”

  Frances Langley’s voice was her usual blend of sharp and sweet. There was nothing you could point at and say that’s unpleasant, but nevertheless I always felt her voice was like a fileting knife opening me up for inspection.

  She’d outdone me in the clothes department, but I’d long ago realized I wasn’t going to win on that front. I was wearing a soft gray dress and cream jacket, with warm ankle boots. She was in a pantsuit. It was darker than mine, nearly charcoal gray. Her jacket had bigger, sharper lapels, and her silk scarf, so casually thrown around her neck, was beautiful and bright.

  My bun was neat. Despite her protests that she never spent any time on her appearance, her honey-colored bun was still so tightly done, halfway through the afternoon, that it must have been working as a facelift this morning.

  She balanced elegantly on her black Vuitton shoes. She had to have something more sensible to go outside in the snow. Then again, maybe her fiancé would come in and carry her out to the car.

  I really should write that article ‘Female psychiatrists; the use of personal appearance as a competitive analogue.’ Or maybe, ‘The severity of hairstyles as social status symbols in professional women.’

  I smiled at her. “Hello, Frances. Yes, I’m back.”

  “Amanda, I’m so sorry if I misunderstood, but I was sure you said you weren’t taking on new patients in the practice.”

  What on earth is this about?

  “I’m not.”

  “Well, there’s clearly been some confusion at the front desk.” She waved a languid hand at Carrie, the head receptionist. “When Mr. Scott came in today he should have been directed to me.”

  Carrie was pale, looking down at her hands.

  “Normally, of course a new potential patient would,” I said. “Carrie’s well aware of that, and she tried to send Mr. Scott up to you.”

  Frances’ eyes narrowed.

  “So what changed?”

  “Nothing changed. It’s simply that Mr. Scott asked for me specifically. I understand he was quite adamant.”

  “He was very persuasive, Dr. Langley,” Carrie said.

  “If I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it.” The Vuitton shoe tapped on the fl
oor. That was a signal like a cat lashing its tail back and forth. She fixed her gaze back on me. “And why was he so determined to be seen by you?”

  “I have no idea, Frances. It didn’t seem appropriate to ask that at a preliminary consultation.”

  “Just a preliminary?” Frances glared at Carrie, who’d obviously not made her aware of that distinction.

  “Yes. I’m not sure he really needs therapy,” I said. My recommendations were none of Frances’ business, and I really shouldn’t have said anything, but I was getting annoyed by her attitude to Carrie.

  “I can completely see that makes sense for you, Amanda. We all understand the pressures you’re under, the time you need to put aside for the court case and your personal issues. We applaud your decision to stand up in court, honestly, we do. But that’s not necessarily the best thing for Mr. Scott, is it? Isn’t the very fact that he’s asking for help an indication that he needs it?”

  My colleagues all knew about the court case, naturally. They knew because they’d shied away from getting involved in the first place. The ‘personal’ issues—that was just speculation on Frances’ part.

  “Anyway, he called asking for another appointment.” Frances lifted her chin. “You have my calendar, Carrie.”

  “No,” I said quietly. Something snapped in me. I’d had enough of this. “He asked to see me again, didn’t he, Carrie?”

  She nodded.

  “Forward his information to me, please.”

  I walked past the desk and headed for my office.

  “But you’re not taking new patients,” Frances said.

  I half-turned at my office door and spoke over my shoulder. “Not into the practice, no. I’ll see him privately, at his request.” I gave Frances my medium-wattage smile and closed the door gently behind me so that she wouldn’t know she’d gotten under my skin.

  I had no idea why Frances Langley regarded me as a threat. Although I hadn’t given any formal notice of withdrawing from the practice, the fact that I was taking no new patients must signal to everyone that I was withdrawing. Yet some hard-wired part of her subconscious brain still perceived me as a threat.