"I never slept with anyone!" I slammed my open palms down on the table, still standing. "I haven't even seen Aaron Whitman in over a month, so there's no argument there." I pulled on the ends of my hair. "None of this makes sense, though. You do realize that, right? Why even have a fucking psychiatrist on staff if you don't want them to do their job? Huh? My job is to help people, to talk to them through their problems to study their minds and try to fix them. Why even bother with this position anyway?"
My words had turned to a shout. My chest heaved as I stared down into Gary Waters' eyes. They were spaced too far apart, the color a dirty brown.
"Your job here, Dr. Violet, was to protect and ensure the safety of not only this hospital, but the entire United States. These people are the most volatile criminals in our country ma'am and you have been having sexual relations with one of them and have taken another off the medication that prevents her from being a danger to our nation. We care about who treats these people because it ensures a greater safety for the country. Someone who is having sexual relations with a patient poses a danger to all of us." He shuffled the papers around in his hands before pulling a single sheet out and sliding it across the table.
"These are your termination papers. Please—"
"No." I shook my head in denial. "You can't do that. You can't fire me. Please. This isn't right!"
Gary stood and put the rest of his paper work in his leather briefcase. "There's more footage, you know. I don't know if you realized that? Footage of you in Aaron Whitman's room in the middle of the night without his chains engaged." Gary smiled. "Just because I didn't show it to you doesn't mean that it doesn't exist." He slid the papers closer to me. "And quite frankly, you're lucky this is all we're doing. We could have you committed. Multiple of your coworkers have submitted testimony about how you walk around having full-blown conversations with yourself."
"Committed? What the hell are you talking about? I don't do that. That's crazy!"
"You need to gather your things from your office as well as any personal belongings you brought into the home and pack them up. You'll be flown out tonight."
Tears sprang to my eyes as I lifted the paper off the table. My job was over. My life. My work in Ward Z. I'd never work as a psychiatrist again.
"Please." Begging was all I had left. "Don't do this to me."
Gary didn't even look sorry, no one did. The smug look on Christopher's face made me want to scream.
Gary's smile didn't reach his eyes when he spoke. "You did this to yourself."
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
My feet carried me out into the hallway of Ward Z. The white walls, the yellowed lights, they surrounded me in a different way than they ever had. I stood here alone, everyone else stayed behind in the conference room, per Gary's request, but not me. I had been dismissed, not only from their presence, but from my job. The only job I had ever wanted and I'd barely made it a year before being fired. A job I studied for, for years. Years. Thousands of dollars in debt. Unemployed. That's who I was now.
A nobody.
I stopped in front in Patricia's door. Z07. I wanted peer in the window one last time. Maybe she would be coloring, like little girls were supposed to do, like I did. I realized now, probably too late, that Patricia reminded me of myself. Our situations had been different sure, but we both had a childhood trauma where we made a choice that changed who we were as person forever. I'd come out of it okay because I hid the truth from myself, because I let my dad take the fall for my dirty, terrible deed.
I peered in the window, my breath fogged the glass. I wiped it away to reveal something wrong. Wrong. So wrong. I blinked trying to wipe it away, but it didn't work. The scene remained the same. Patricia hung from the rafter in her room, the identical one in Aaron's room where he did pull-ups every day. But Patricia wasn't doing pull-ups. Instead she hung lifeless, some sort of braided rope around her neck. Her face was purple, blue. Violet.
"No!" I pressed my hand against the sensor on the wall. Her door swung open and I rushed forward, grabbing the chair I sat in during our sessions, to stand on, I pulled her body down, she was so light, limp, that it took hardly any effort at all. "Patricia, no, no, no, no, no, please. No." I started CPR, pumping on her chest.
She wasn't dead. She couldn't be. I was helping her. She was getting better. Closer. She was going to be fine. She had a future no matter what anyone else said. Assholes like Gary Waters – and whoever the fuck else – they didn't know anything about her. They didn't know Patricia. They hadn't spent hours with her, staring at her sad little face, imagining what kind of horrors she had lived through. They had no idea. They didn't know how she would change. How she would get better and go on to do something wonderful and miraculous. Her story didn't end here in Ward Z. It didn't. It couldn't. I wouldn't let it.
I pumped harder, faster. "Fuck, come on, Patricia. Don't do this, don't die. You can't!" The tears were hot against my face, dripping down onto my hands as I pumped. "You have to live! You have to prove them all wrong!"
But she didn't. Patricia laid there dead as I pumped on her chest. She was gone and she didn't come back. I sobbed over her dead body, lying there on the white tile. The room smelled awful, and I realized it was because she'd released her bladder when she hung herself. I fingered the rope and realized it was made of tiny little individual threads she had braided together. There were hundreds if not thousands of them.
I glanced over at her bed and noticed one side of the sheet was frayed. Realization hit me. She'd been taking thread from her sheets each week, it had to only be just one or two otherwise we would have noticed.
She planned this. Was this why she had become restless, was this why her moods had seemed to improve, even if only in the slightest.
"You were excited to die," I whispered. "You wanted this." I dropped the rope and stood, backing away. But then, she wasn't Patricia anymore. Instead I was back on Wuthering Lane with Maria's broken body. The impact had all but crushed her, breaking her back. I could remember it like it was yesterday. The way one of her arms, the one that wasn't reaching for me, had stuck out awkwardly in the wrong direction.
"Little Line?" Daddy's hands fumbled with mine. "Are you okay? I didn't mean to, oh shit, I didn't mean to. I'm so sorry." His voice shook, his breath smelled like whiskey. I couldn't look at him. I tried. But I couldn't look at his face. Only his hands.
He didn't go over to Maria. He didn't try to see if she was okay. Instead he wrapped his arms around me. "I'm so sorry, Little Line. I'm so sorry. Please forgive me. I'm a piece of shit and I'm sorry. I didn't mean to. I didn't mean it. I was gonna quit." He continued to babble on while I stood there in his arms. He was warm in the chilliness of the day. His embrace meant things were going to be okay. I was going to be okay.
"No, fuck, no." My own voice drug me out the memory shoving me into the present. I was back in Patricia's room. I sniffled, sucking in deep breaths. "No." I backed away from her body and made a beeline for the door. I had to get out of there. I couldn't stay in here not with her, not anymore.
Out in the hall, things were still silent, quiet, just as I'd left them, as if the men were all still in the conference room. My feet carried me down the hall toward my office. Toward Z15. I was someone else now, some outside being watching myself move through mechanisms of walking. Watching as I pressed my hand against the pad that gave me entrance into Aaron's room. I didn't bother with the remote, the chains, it sat heavy in my pocket.
I didn't need it. It was over. I was done.
I faced him now. He stood just across the room. I hadn't seen him in so long I had almost forgotten the utter beauty of him. The words in his skin, the twitchiness of his eyes. His wounds had healed from when I last saw him. The swelling of his face gone, the gore on his clothes replaced with pristine white ones. How could I forget his perfection? But I had. He took my breath away.
"Love," I said.
He stalked toward me. I could see the monster, the demon, reflected in hi
s eyes.
"The memories of me. They were in your memories of Love. That's what I had Dr. Wintrone type in. Love." I repeated. "I knew I was lost to you. You weren't really mine, but I was yours." I quoted his own words back to him. The words he said to the camera. The words I didn't hear until it was too late and I'd already ruined everything.
Aaron, a master of words, for once, didn't want to talk. His feet reached me followed swiftly by the explosion of pain in my head. I welcomed the darkness.
I awoke to chaos. That's the only way I could describe it. Someone screamed in the distance. Not a scream out of fear, but one out of pain, torture. The sort of screams you hear when someone was being mutilated, destroyed. The sounds were everywhere. Not just one, but many. They seemed to echo around me. I stared up at the white ceiling. There was a crack there, just above me, a chip of paint. I studied it. Who chipped it?
"Finally awake, my one letter away?"
I turned my head to see Aaron. He sat in an office chair, one much like the one I had in my office. He wore a white lab coat over his white uniform, except it wasn't white, not anymore. Blood covered him, but unlike last time, it didn't seem to be his own. The blood spatter on his face wasn't accompanied by swelling or anything else. Just blood. Whose?
I looked down at myself and simultaneously tried to move my arms. They wouldn't budge. I was strapped to a table on my back. There was blood on me too. I could see it on my white button up blouse and on my legs, but I didn't hurt in any of those places.
Not my blood.
My head, however, had a dull ache, but I surmised it came from Aaron. He must have hit me and knocked me out.
"What's going on?" But then I remembered Patricia. "Oh, God, no. She's dead." The image of Patricia's lifeless body superimposed itself in my mind on top of Maria's. The Huffy bloody bicycle, a limp, broken body. Blood. The carefully woven rope. The urine of the floor. The gore on my dad's truck bumper.
"Remember when you played around with my mind, Violet. When you fucked around in my head like you belonged there? Do you?" Aaron's words cut through the air as he leaned over me, his lips spread to reveal his teeth and his eyebrows dipped simultaneously creating his terrifying frowning smile, the one made for nightmares.
"Yes." I breathed the word out on a sigh, while the screams outside the door continued.
"Remember when you made yourself an audience to things that didn't belong to you? To memories you had no business watching? Do you remember those things, Violet?"
"I do." I knew where I was now. What table I had been strapped to.
He continued to smile down at me. "Well it looks like the tables have turned haven't they?"
I swallowed, the spit going down like a lump in my throat, but I wasn't afraid. I expected the fear to come, but it didn't. "They have."
I stared up into his eyes, those eyes that I had fallen for. Eyes so gray they were black. Perceptive eyes. Shades for the brilliant mind behind it. A mind that had fallen in love with once, until I ruined it. I'd tried to reason with him, to explain, but it hadn't mattered a month ago, and I knew it wouldn't matter now. I had taken him the edge of his mental illness, and precariously thrust him over the edge. I broke the control he had over his mind.
Me.
I did that. My own lips spread into a grin, the movement seemed wrong, but it happened anyway. "Do your worst, Aaron."
He continued to smile down at me while screams echoed around us. "I intend to."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I didn't know where reality ended and truth began, and that was a fact. If facts can even be facts. How did one really know truth from a lie, reality from imagination? Was there such a difference? A psychiatric methodology course I took years ago spent most of the semester looking at these questions. I had hoped at the conclusion of the class there would be light at the end of the tunnel, but of course I was only left with more questions. Reality – could it be defined? How does one know and understand reality? Is reality the same for everyone, is it different? Was it possible for things to be real? Relationships, actions? Was life just one long rabbit hole, with a depth unknown? Did most people spend their life merely looking down into that bottomless pit? Was it only those we deemed mentally ill who actually climbed in?
I didn't have the answers. I didn't know if I wanted them. Truth always seemed that much harder to swallow. Lies were easy. Cushy. Simple.
I didn't know how long I had been hooked up to the MEI machine. It could have been a lifetime or only minutes. The pain funneled through my body, lighting me up from the inside, scrambling my mind around until it was forced to produce the images that had been bidden. I relived Maria's death. I relived the funeral and Maria's mom's words: "It should have been you." I relived those lonely days after Maria's family had moved out and we were the only family at the end of Wuthering Lane, when I missed having a friend to play with.
I relived the relationships I'd had in college, the one with Anthony, and other short relationships that had amounted to nothing more than bad sex and loneliness. But then, the memories changed. I was here in Ward Z. I sat on the floor outside of one of the rooms. Aaron's room. I looked up at the ceiling and smiled. My lips moved. I said things, but I couldn't hear them for some reason. The memory changed. I watched the surveillance camera. Lewis walked down the hallway alone.
It changed again.
I stood in my kitchen, a spoon in hand, I stirred it in batter. The house was silent around me. I stirred meticulously before pouring the batter into a tin. A muffin tin. I stood in front of the oven, watching them bake. The muffins. I didn't move – not until they were done. I put them in a basket and headed toward the door. I sat them on them on the porch before moving inside. I changed into my nightgown and went into the surveillance room, my very first time inside. I read through Aaron's file, I watched him on the screen until I jumped, but there was no noise. I answered the door, but no one was there. I spoke, but I couldn't hear my words. I picked up the basket of muffins and took them back inside lingering for a moment, looking out at the empty, darkened path beyond my home.
The memory changed again. I sat on my couch alone. A TV show played before me. I spoke words I couldn't hear. I laughed awkwardly and felt uncomfortable at times. I heard the song, I got excited. I found my iPod, but I was alone.
The memories came one after another after another. I blinked up at stars hidden behind a canopy of trees. Cold seeped into my jacket. I seemed to awaken from some sort of stupor. I walked home alone. I drew my own bath and fell asleep, waking up to cold water.
I stood in Aaron's room, he spoke about love, and I cut my gaze to the shower area, but no one was there. No one cleaned the space while Aaron and I talked. It was just him and I in the room, no one else.
I walked to work alone. The snow crunched against my boots. I spoke silent words, to no one. I dropped the papers I carried. I stared down at the Rorschach inkblot – the one that resembled the month. My fingers trembled, only it didn't move in my memory – just stationary ink on a page.
I cooked a pizza. I spread the sauce on pillow-like dough. I moved meticulously, spreading the cheese, the pepperoni. I watched as it baked in the oven, through the little window. The crust rose, the cheese melted, until it was done. I cut up the pieces and placed them on a plate and wrapped it in foil. I walked to the door and sat it on the porch before going about my business – doing the dishes, cleaning off the counter. A silent noise caused me to jump and I opened the door. More silent words. I picked up the plate, once inside I frowned, removing the foil. Cold pizza?
The memory changed. I was home again. Cold, my body this time, not pizza. I stood in the foyer alone, with melting snow around my boots but soon I was in my bed, hands tearing my clothes off. My hands. I threw them on the floor. I touched myself all over, until I was touching myself there. Rocking into my fingers, screaming silently as I came.
The memories moved more quickly. I smiled and giggled at my empty office wall. I chatted with no one as I mov
ed down the long hallway of Ward Z. One after another they came until they were gone. Until I was back on Wuthering Lane again. Daddy got out of his truck, worn, brown, unlaced boots. They were all I could see until he slammed the door. The engine roared as he moved toward me, but this time I could see him. I looked up and up and up, he was a mountain of a man, that's what my mom always said. My gaze moved from his those old brown boots he never laced until I came to the scuffed nametag on his chest, the one he had to wear for work. My mind's eye frowned at it. The word. The name. His name. Daddy's name.
Richard.
I looked into Daddy's eyes. Dark, deep, blue like a stormy ocean. His hair buzzed close to his head, a short wiry beard on his face. He reached me, fumbling with my hands. He spoke words, but I didn't hear them, not this time, because all I could see were his teeth, how they were slightly crooked in his mouth. He smelled like whiskey. He embraced me. Warmth in the chilliness of the day. Maria's body broken and dead just feet away. I didn't cry because I was safe – safe in Daddy's arms.
Things would be okay.
A blaring white light took the memory from me and shoved me back into consciousness. As quickly as they all began, they ended. I was back in that room with Aaron Whitman. He leaned over me, shadowing the light.
"Well, well, well, look at you, Violet. Look at that obscurity in you. You pushed that little girl. That's a fucked up thing to do." Aaron laughed, it was that heinous laugh the one that drove me from Ward Z on that first day. It made the pounding pain in my head more intense.
"He's not real," I whispered.
"You're a fucking monster."
I tried to focus on his face but I couldn't. I couldn't do it. The image of Richard covered my irises, but it wasn't Richard not the Richard I thought I knew. He wasn't real. A figment of my imagination.
Viole[n]t Obscurity Page 17