Phantom Limb: A Gripping Psychological Thriller

by Lucinda Berry

  “Hi, Elizabeth.”

  “You came.” My body was buzzing.

  She threw her arms around me and squeezed me. “I’m so glad you called.”

  “I’m glad you came.”

  The only person I would’ve been happier to see was Emily.

  “Should we go to your room to talk?” she asked, linking her arm with mine.

  I nodded and we walked to my room in silence. She closed the door behind us and the room felt so much smaller with it closed. I never got to shut my door even at night. She must’ve been given special privileges since she was a therapist. I was glad we got to be alone and uninterrupted.

  I settled onto the bed and she grabbed the desk chair for her seat. She smiled at me. Unlike Dr. Larson, she didn’t start out by asking how I was feeling. She reached into her bag and pulled out Annabelle. I gasped. She handed her to me.

  “I thought you might be able to use her.”

  I was sobbing before all of the words were out of her mouth. I grabbed Annabelle from her and clutched her against my chest. We sat for a few minutes while I cried. When I was finished, Lisa handed me the familiar white comb and I started brushing her hair in the same way I’d done when I was a little girl. My breathing slowly relaxed now like it did then.

  Unlike my sessions with Dr. Larson, I got to take the lead. “I have some questions for you.”

  “Okay. I’d love to answer your questions,” she said.

  “I don’t know how to explain this, but I’m going to try. Emily was always the cutter. I never cut, ever. She’s cut since we were kids, but not me—only her. I couldn’t. I tried. More than once, just because I wanted her to see how it felt. But I—I … could never do it—at least, I thought I could never do it.” I felt like I might throw up again. The taste of bile was in the back of my throat. “I’m rambling. I know I am … I’m trying to tell you this—ask you this, or something. I really am. It’s just so weird, and it’s hard. I don’t know … It’s crazy, or I’m crazy. I mean, I think I really am crazy, and I don’t know what’s going on. I thought if I talked to you—if I talked to you, I don’t know … I just thought … I just thought, you know, talking to you—”

  Lisa got up from her position on the chair and moved to sit next to me on the bed. She put her arm around my shoulder. “Elizabeth, take a deep breath.”

  I tried to take a deep breath, but it felt like I would choke on the air. “I don’t know what’s happening.” I took another deep breath. This one went past my throat and filled my lungs. I let it out slowly. “Okay. Emily was a cutter. You remember that, right? The first time she got caught?”

  Lisa nodded. I sighed, happy she remembered.

  I’d kept my promise never to tell anyone about how Emily hurt herself. From the start, she’d kept her cutting private and in the beginning, she didn’t do it often, so it was easy to keep hidden and secret. Her favorite spot was her thighs because nobody besides me saw her legs since I was the only one who saw her naked. Neither of us liked anyone to see us naked and once we’d learned how to bathe ourselves, Dalila and Bob had respected our privacy and allowed us to shower by ourselves.

  Initially, her cutting wasn’t very deep and stayed on the surface, never drawing a lot of blood. I never knew when she was going to do it, but she always showed me her wounds. She had an odd measure of pride about being able to do it. She was giddy each time she presented her scrapes and scratches to me. Months would pass at a time and she wouldn’t do it. I’d hope she was done for good, but it was only a matter of time before she presented me with another new trophy.

  Emily had always been emotional. Unlike me, anything could make her cry. Sometimes nothing was going on and she’d begin to weep. Any expression of anger was sure to elicit a meltdown. The upside to her emotional lability was that she also had the ability to experience extreme happiness as well. She had an infectious laugh that made everyone around her happy too. She was so alive she was on fire when she was feeling good and bounced with energy. Her emotional bottoms were manageable because they were fleeting. But something happened when we turned thirteen.

  Her sadness and negative emotions no longer passed quickly. She plummeted into periods of deep despair and anguish where I couldn’t reach her. She cried uncontrollably, which she’d always done, but unlike before, she became inconsolable. The happiness and light she’d used to emit so brightly were extinguished.

  Her cutting became almost daily. She carried a purple velvet pouch in her backpack that held a razor blade and a shard of glass. She had it with her at all times. She’d sneak into the bathroom like a heroin addict during lunch or study hall and silently slice into her skin. Her cuts grew deeper, to the point where it was difficult to stop the bleeding. I became her nurse. I watched YouTube videos to learn how to clean and bandage her damage and quickly became skilled at creating butterfly bandages and tight wraps to contain the bleeding as best I could.

  I’d never forget the day Dalila found her in the bathtub. I was in the kitchen making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, my favorite after-school snack. Emily had been locked in the bathroom for the last hour. I never disturbed her when she was in there. I knew what she was doing, but I hated seeing it. My job was to be there when it was over.

  Dalila’s scream was shrill as it rang out and reverberated throughout the house. I dropped the plate on the floor and the shattered porcelain echoed as I took the stairs two at a time. I sprinted into the bathroom to find Dalila standing in the middle of the bathroom, frozen in terror as she stared at Emily’s bloody naked body in the tub. Emily clutched a long butcher knife from the kitchen wood block in her hand. Her legs lay spread wide open, one on each side of the tub, with trails of blood pouring from the middle of them as if she was in the middle of a gruesome miscarriage. Across her chest, she’d scrawled her name in blood.

  I shoved Dalila out of the way and ran toward her. She stared upward at the ceiling with a look of pure bliss in her eyes as if she’d been catapulted to another world. I shook her, trying to snap her out of her dreamy reverie.

  Her head flopped to the side to look at me, eyes rolling slowly as if she was on drugs, and whispered, “Bethy. Hi. I love you so much.”

  “I love you, too, Em,” I said. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

  Dalila hadn’t moved from her spot on the tiled floor. She stood as still as a statue in shock as I began to run the bathwater and erased “Emily” from her chest while her legs continued to bleed. When I got to “i,” Emily’s eyes closed. Dalila sprung to life.

  “Oh my God. Dear Jesus. We have to call someone.” She fled from the bathroom.

  Dalila shook with silent sobs the entire ride to the hospital. She was too upset to provide Emily’s information in the emergency room so I had to do it for her. It was Emily’s first set of stitches. She’d gotten twenty on her right inner thigh and forty-two on her left inner thigh. The doctors said it was lucky we’d found her when we did because she’d already lost a lot of blood. Emily swore she wasn’t trying to kill herself and she’d only wanted to feel good. She said doing so much damage to herself had scared her enough to stop cutting. She promised never to do it again. Emily had to sign a “no-harm” contract in order to not be admitted to the psychiatric hospital and Dalila assured the doctors she would get her psychiatric help.

  We’d stopped seeing Lisa for therapy sessions a few years before, but after Emily’s incident, we started going back to see her. Emily refused to meet with Lisa unless I went with her, so I accompanied her to all of her sessions. Dalila kept Emily out of school for two weeks and took off work to watch her. She drove us back and forth to Lisa’s office every other day.

  “Emily kept cutting even though we told everyone she’d stopped. It didn’t take long until she started cutting again. She switched to cutting on her stomach instead of her legs for a while just in case anyone asked to see her legs, but nobody ever did. I’m not sure why Dalila never asked to see her legs or check her body to see if she was doing i
t. I think she preferred to think she was better. I’m not sure she ever got over that day. She never looked at Emily in the same way again. From then on, Emily made sure to always hide her body. It’s why she never wore shorts or went swimming. She was never afraid of the water.”

  “You always did protect her secrets, huh?” Lisa asked.

  I nodded. “Cutting was Emily’s thing. Never mine. That’s why it makes this so weird. Yesterday, I went to the bathroom with Rose. She’s a friend that I’ve made since I’ve been here. She’s anorexic like those super skinny chicks you see on talk shows and Dateline. She’s convinced she’s fat and no matter what anyone else says to her, she still believes it. I thought if I made her look at herself in the mirror she would see she really isn’t fat.”

  It had seemed like such a good idea yesterday.

  “She took her clothes off with me standing next to her and she’s even skinnier than I thought. She’s completely emaciated. I asked her to show me where she saw the fat, and she kept looking in the mirror and pointing at fat all over her body. The entire time I kept wondering how it was possible she could look into the mirror and see something that wasn’t there. She was literally looking in the mirror and seeing something that wasn’t there. But then, but then … I just knew. I don’t even know how I knew. It just hit me. You can see things that aren’t there …”

  Lisa waited for a few minutes for me to go on, but I couldn’t.

  “Did you see something that really wasn’t there?”

  I shook my head. Tears dropped onto my favorite jeans. I hadn’t realized I was crying.

  Lisa took my hand and held it. Finally, I found my voice again. I had to tell someone.

  “My legs have cuts on them. Everywhere. Just like hers. Just like Emily’s.”

  My brain felt fuzzy, like I was halfway between awake and sleep. Lisa squeezed my hand. She squeezed a second time, harder this time. I felt less muddled.

  “Why do you think you have cuts on your legs?” she asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders and shook my head back and forth. I looked at her. “Please, help me, Lisa. Something’s seriously wrong with me. I’m really messed up. I don’t know what’s going on anymore. I’m so lost and scared.”

  Lisa took me into her arms in the same way Dalila had done hundreds of times, but instead of rejecting her like I rejected Dalila, I let myself sink into her support. I didn’t have a choice because I was afraid if I didn’t then I would fall off the bed. Annabelle was sandwiched between us.

  “Let’s talk about this together and see if we can figure it out. Do you want to do that?” She waited for my nod before continuing. “Are you sure?”

  I nodded again.

  “I know the doctors have explained to you that Emily has been dead for two years, but has anyone told you what happened to her?”

  I shook my head.

  “Do you want to know what happened to Emily?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  Maybe if I knew what happened to her I could figure out what had happened to me.

  “It was a week after the two of you graduated from high school. One of your friends had a party and you went to it together. On the way home from the party, you got into a car accident. It was really bad.” She paused, letting her words sink in and giving me time to process them before going on. “Emily was thrown from the car. Unfortunately, she didn’t make it, but you did. You were devastated. You didn’t speak for three days. Not one word.”

  “God, that’s horrible. She was thrown from the car?”

  Lisa nodded. “Do you remember anything about it?”

  I closed my eyes and willed the memories to come. There was nothing. I shook my head.

  Lisa let go of my hand and patted my leg. “Losing Emily was more than you could handle. There’s probably nobody who will understand what the loss must’ve been like for you. Sometimes when people experience significant trauma, their brains will disconnect to protect them from the loss. After the accident, your brain unplugged itself for a while because it had to shut down.”

  I’d experienced the same thing she was describing two weeks ago when I’d woken up in the hospital and thought I’d lost Emily. My entire system shut down. It was only beginning to turn back on.

  “The thing that was so surprising to everyone around you was how fast you went from being catatonic to walking around and talking like everything was fine within a few weeks of the funeral. You’d been wracked with grief and then bam—you were totally fine. The oddest part was how determined you were to move out of Bob and Dalila’s. Bob tried to talk you out of it, but you were convinced it was what you had to do. Dalila was still reeling from losing Emily and so immersed in her own loss she wasn’t able to be there for you. If she was, she might’ve been able to get you to change your mind. Shortly after you moved out, Bob called me and told me he’d just spoken to you on the phone and you were talking about Emily like she was still alive. He was baffled and had no clue what to do.”

  I caught a glimpse of myself packing boxes in Emily’s old bedroom at Bob and Dalila’s. I remembered how I’d packed all of her clothes and thoughtfully chosen which of her crime books to take and which to leave behind because there were too many to take them all to our new apartment. If Emily had been alive, she would’ve packed her own things. She never would’ve let me pick her books because she was so particular about them and would’ve wanted to be the one to choose which ones should go and which ones should stay.

  Lisa reached out to stroke my head.

  “People’s brains are powerful. Extremely powerful. You’d be amazed at what they can do. This is just my opinion and I could be wrong, but what I’ve seen with the clients I work with who’ve experienced traumatic losses is that our brains don’t let our bodies die from grief even if we want to and it feels like we might. Eventually, our brains force us to start functioning again. Emily being dead was more than your brain could process, and for you to function at all, you had to act as if Emily was still alive. You believed she was still alive. And for you, she really was. Your brain continued to create Emily. But in reality, you’ve been both Emily and Elizabeth for two years.”

  I digested her words slowly. I kept swallowing, trying to get my tongue unstuck from the top of my mouth.

  It’s why she’s here. You have to ask her.

  “I put the marks on my legs, didn’t I?”

  She nodded, confirming what I’d become aware of last night. Much like Rose looked into the mirror and saw fat that didn’t exist, I’d been looking into the mirror for two years and seeing smooth, unblemished skin that didn’t exist. In reality, Rose didn’t have an ounce of fat on her body and I had mutilated legs that looked as if I’d been sliced with glass after being thrown through a window. Rose wasn’t able to see her reality, but I’d seen mine. And I was terrified.

  20

  I couldn’t stay in my room alone after Lisa left, as much as I wanted to. Even though staff dangled the privilege of gaining time alone in your room, no one was allowed to have it. I was exhausted but stood in line waiting for Shelly to get off the phone because I’d promised to call Thomas. Unlike everyone else, who whispered and talked in hushed tones whenever they were on the phone, Shelly made sure everyone heard her conversations.

  “C’mon, baby. You know you still think I’m hot,” she giggled. “You know you want it. I’m going to. Yep … Oh, baby … not here … I can’t. Not here … yes, I’m horny!”

  She kept looking over at me, making sure I was hearing her conversation. It was impossible not to, even the nurses looked uncomfortable. Thankfully, I’d caught her during her last few minutes of her scheduled time and before long I was punching in Thomas’s number. He answered on the second ring.

  “Hey!”

  “Hi.”

  “How was your day?” he asked.

  “It was really long and hard.”

  “What’s up? Your voice sounds sad. Are you okay?”

  “Not really.”

 
; “Do you want to talk about it? Tell me about it? You don’t have to if you don’t want to, though. No pressure.”

  I didn’t know how to explain things. I wanted to talk to him in person, but he had classes tonight and tomorrow night so I wouldn’t see him until Thursday. He couldn’t afford to miss any more classes since he’d missed a week of class while I was in intensive care and was still trying to catch up on all of his homework. I didn’t have a choice except to try to explain things to him now. I felt rushed and hurried to do it since I only had ten minutes before I had to give the phone to the next person in line.

  “Last night something really weird happened to me when I was in the bathroom with Rose. I’m not sure how to explain it. I don’t even understand it myself, but I’m working on it. I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with me.”

  How was I supposed to tell him I wasn’t the person he thought I was? I’d been lying to him since I’d known him, but unlike most liars, I didn’t know I wasn’t telling the truth. Was it considered lying if you weren’t aware you were doing it?

  “I’m crazy. You need to know that.”

  I didn’t want to hurt him any more than I already had.

  “You’re not crazy.”

  “Yes, I am. You have no idea. Emily really has been dead for two years and I’ve been doing more than pretending she was alive. I’ve been doing what she did.” My voice cracked. “I chopped up my legs. If you don’t believe me, you should look at my legs. I’ll show them to you on Thursday. You’ll know why you’ve never seen me naked then.”

  He was silent. All I could hear was the occasional sound of him breathing.

  “I have seen you naked,” he mumbled.

  “What’d you say?” I asked.

  He cleared his throat, “I said I’ve seen you naked.”

  “Huh? When? What are you talking about?”

  “You really don’t remember, do you?”

  “No, I don’t. What are you talking about?”

  “I knew you didn’t really remember having sex. You always said you didn’t, but I thought maybe you felt bad about it so you pretended like it never happened. And well, honestly, I felt guilty too, so it was easier to forget about it and play along with you. But I always kinda had a feeling you didn’t have any idea we’d done it.”