Tortured Teardrops

by P. D. Workman

  Tamara hated the rooms with the bright lights and big observation windows, feeling like a fish in an aquarium. It was enough to make even a stable person break down. Dr. Sutherland made the trip to see her there instead of having her brought to his office.

  “Mind if I come in?”

  Tamara shifted uncomfortably. “Did you tell them they can’t listen in?” she demanded, nodding to the window. “This is doctor-patient, so they can’t be listening in. Tell them to take a break. Get lost.”

  Sutherland moved into the room, despite her less-than-welcoming response. There was nowhere for him to sit down other than on the bunk, so he leaned against the wall opposite the observation window, giving a reassuring smile.

  “Actually, I can’t tell them to go away. You’re right, they can’t listen in on a consultation between doctor and patient, but they still need to be watching. For your own protection.”

  “My protection? What are you going to do in here?”

  He just smiled and didn’t bother to answer.

  “So… how are you feeling today?”

  Tamara was sitting on the bunk, back to the wall, knees bent to her chest. She sighed. “Fine. So can I go back to my own room?”

  “I think I’m going to actually need a little more information than that. Just a little.”

  “The hospital said I’m good as new. No permanent damage.”

  “That’s good. Maybe you’d like to talk to me about what happened. It sounds like it was a pretty rough day.”

  “It wasn’t the best.”

  “We could start with that. I thought you were ready for your court appearance.”

  “Yeah. That’s what Ritter said. I was all ready, and I just had to tell everybody what I knew…”

  “So what happened?”

  Tamara shook her head. “I dunno. I kind of freaked out. I wasn’t feeling good…”

  “It was physical, you think?”

  “What else would it be?” Tamara snapped.

  “I think we’ve talked about your anxiety before. Anxiety can show up in a lot of ways. Maybe you weren’t quite as prepared as you had hoped.”

  “I was just sick. It was too hot in the room where I had to wait.”

  “And that’s why you were unable to testify.”

  “Yeah. I was sick. Ask Zobel. He’s the one who had to take me to hospital.”

  “Yes. I’ve already heard from him. He also got as much information as he could about what happened during the trial.”

  “So you know. I was sick. I couldn’t stay in there. I had to go sit down.”

  “In the room that was too hot. And you didn’t ask for any water or medical care.”

  “Do you think they would have given it to me? They wouldn’t even point the fan at me. That guard had it in for me.”

  “I see.”

  “Maybe I could go back,” Tamara offered, knowing full well that it was too late to fix what she had so royally screwed up. The judge had made it clear that if she didn’t testify, that was it. She wasn’t getting another chance.

  “No, I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

  Tamara gave a shrug like she didn’t care. She wondered what would happen to Mr. Baker. Would the recording and Mrs. Baker’s testimony be enough to convict him? Had Mrs. Baker decided not to testify or had she gone ahead?

  “How do you feel today?” Dr. Sutherland asked.

  “I know I screwed up.” Tamara stared off into space, not looking at Dr. Sutherland. “So, I feel pretty crappy, if you want to know the truth.”

  He nodded. “That’s understandable. I wouldn’t expect you to be feeling too good about the way it turned out.”

  “Thanks,” she snarled.

  “Would it be better if I tried to cheer you up?”

  Tamara shook her head. “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. Then I won’t do that.”

  Tamara tightened her grip around her knees and pressed her face into them. “I screwed up so bad. I was gonna go in there and tell everyone what a sick creep he was and make sure that he couldn’t ever hurt anyone again. I thought I could do it.” Tamara looked at Dr. Sutherland, shaking her head. “I couldn’t even tell my lawyer without freaking out, so how did I think I was going to tell the whole courtroom? With him sitting right there in front of me?”

  “Your intentions were good. And I was hoping that with the progress we were making with your relaxation exercises…”

  Tamara knew very well that they had made no progress. Sutherland was seeing what he wanted to or she was getting better at hiding the flashbacks and other crazy stuff. Or he was testing her to see if she’d admit that it wasn’t getting any better.

  She didn’t.

  “I really thought I’d be able to do it.”

  “Well… water under the bridge, now. We need to live in the present, not in the past. Where do we go from here?”

  Tamara closed her eyes. “Nowhere.”

  “Nowhere? What do you mean by that?”

  “I’m not going anywhere. I’m stuck here until I serve out my sentence. I’m here until I age, and then transferred to the women’s prison.”

  “That doesn’t mean you can’t improve yourself. It doesn’t mean you can’t go forward in other ways. People earn degrees in prison, learn new things, make new friends. You don’t have to stagnate.”

  “None of that is going to happen to me.”

  “It doesn’t just happen to you. It’s something that you make happen. Because you decide that you don’t want to just stay here and stagnate, but to move forward and improve yourself. You can’t just wait for things to happen to you.”

  Tamara opened her eyes again and looked at him. “Not me. I give up.”

  Dr. Sutherland lowered his head, studying her carefully. “Are you thinking of harming yourself, Tamara?”

  “No.”

  “That’s not what you mean when you say you’ve given up?”

  “No. I just mean… I’m not trying anymore. I just fail. I just end up worse off than where I started. So I give up. That’s it. I’m not trying anymore.”

  “I think you’ll change your mind after a while.”

  “No. I won’t. Why would you think that?”

  “I just don’t think you’re the kind of person who can stand to sit in one place and not do anything for a long period of time. I think you’re the type who can’t stand to be still and gets an itch. And after a while, the itch becomes uncontrollable. You have to act on it. You can’t just sit and not do anything.”

  “Huh.” Tamara rested her head back against the wall. “Shows how much you know.”

  Dr. Sutherland pulled a small notebook out of his pocket. Tamara watched curiously as he opened it up and flipped through a couple of pages.

  “What’s that?”

  “Just some notes I made. Things I might want to talk to you about.”

  “Like what?”

  Sutherland rubbed his chin. “Things like whether you were having hallucinations in the courtroom.”

  “Oh.” Tamara bit her lip. “No.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Tamara. I can’t help you if you lie to me.”

  “I was… confused. I don’t know. Lots was going on.”

  “A couple of people said that you seemed to be talking to someone who wasn’t there, and that you said, ‘Did you hear what he said?’ when no one had said anything.”

  “That doesn’t mean I was seeing things.”

  “How about hearing things?” Dr. Sutherland asked shrewdly.

  “I… what does it matter if I was hearing things or seeing things or just freaked out? It’s all the same. What difference does it make?”

  “It might.”

  “It’s just like you told me before. It doesn’t make any difference if I was seeing or hearing things. You said it didn’t matter if I was having hallucinations when I… did what I did… when I killed Corrine and Julie.”

  “That’s not exactly what I said. Why don’t you answer
my question? Were you having hallucinations in the courtroom? Were you seeing things, or hearing things, or having some other kind of hallucination?”

  “I was sick,” Tamara said. “I was overheated when I went in there. That could make you confused, could make you see or hear things…”

  “Yes. And did you?”

  Tamara still didn’t want to answer in the affirmative. Even though he’d given her an out, agreed that it might have just been her heatstroke and dehydration, she couldn’t bring herself to say that she had been hallucinating. Especially since she knew what the next question would be after that.

  “Tamara. Tell me the truth now. Were you?”

  Tamara dug her fingernails into her palms and clenched her teeth. “Yes.”

  “Thank you.” Dr. Sutherland nodded. “Is that the first time you’ve had hallucinations?”

  “Before. When I was pregnant. When I… did what I did.”

  “And any time in between? Any time… recently?”

  Tamara scratched the heavy fabric of her uniform. She chewed on a nail.

  “Tamara. I need you to be honest.”

  “Why does it matter? It doesn’t matter!”

  “If it doesn’t matter to you then why are you having such a hard time answering the question? If it didn’t matter to you, you would just answer me without thinking about it or trying to lie to me.”

  Tamara blew out her breath impatiently. “Sometimes, okay?” She looked at the window, feeling the eyes of the observers on her. “Sometimes maybe I do. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make any difference. I’m still guilty of murder, right? I still didn’t testify against Mr. Baker, after everything he did to me and the little girls. It doesn’t make any difference whether I was having… weird crap happening to me when I did.”

  “Sometimes. I said before I would like to try out some meds to see if we can help you. If you’re having these hallucinations, and not just flashbacks from PTSD, then relaxation exercises are not going to cut it. We need to try some antipsychotics. See if we can… even you out again. It’s been several months now and I think we need to step up your treatment.”

  “I don’t want pills. Pills are for losers who can’t control themselves.”

  Dr. Sutherland just stood there looking at her. Tamara’s face heated. She grew angry and embarrassed.

  “I’m not a loser!”

  “I didn’t say you were, Tamara. But I want you to think about your behavior, both in court, and over the last few months. Have you been able to keep yourself under control? Or do you need help? I think things are… slipping. That’s not your fault. You can’t decide to control your brain simply by willpower. If you have psychosis, we need to treat it.”

  Tamara clamped her mouth closed and refused to engage with him. If she didn’t answer him, he didn’t have anyone to argue with. She had told him before that she wasn’t going to take any meds and he couldn’t force her to. He’d just have to deal with it.

  “I know you don’t want to. But you haven’t tried. You don’t know what kind of a difference it will make for you. I promise that if it gives you side effects, we’ll do our best to deal with them. There are a lot of different options out there. There’s no reason to think that they won’t work.”

  She still didn’t answer. Sutherland sighed and looked down at the notes in his little notepad again.

  “Maybe we could try this. I want you to tell me about Corrine and Julie. I want you to describe in detail what happened and what symptoms you were having at the time. Hallucinations, intrusive thoughts, disordered thinking… I’d like you to go through all of it.”

  Tamara examined his request from several angles. She had already been convicted of Corrine’s and Julie’s deaths. So it didn’t matter what she said about them now. Nothing could get any worse. Dr. Sutherland knew that she had been pregnant at the time and had said that her pregnancy had triggered the psychosis. Since she wasn’t pregnant again, there was no need for him to suggest that she was having psychosis again. He knew she hadn’t been treated for it, and it had just gone away naturally.

  “What do you want me to tell you?”

  “You told me that you were expected to take care of the children all the time, other than when you were at school.”

  “Yeah. All the time.”

  “What felt like all the time, anyway. Obviously, if you saw Mr. Baker taking care of them, there were times that you weren’t.”

  Tamara frowned at this suggestion, but shrugged. “Okay. Most of the time.” Sometimes he liked to take one of them off of her hands. He’d say it was to give her a break, or because he wanted to spend some time with his daughters. But now she realized those had just been lies.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to interrupt. So you were taking care of them most of the time. And it was too much. You were feeling… tired…?”

  “Exhausted,” Tamara agreed. “I couldn’t get any sleep. They were always waking me up, and when I got them down to sleep, my brain… kept going. I couldn’t shut it off. It wouldn’t let me sleep. So I’d fall asleep at my desk at school or when I was supposed to be taking care of the girls. Mrs. Baker woke me up once when I was supposed to be giving them their baths. I fell asleep while Corrine was playing in the tub. I hadn’t bathed Julie yet. But when I went to bed… nothing. I couldn’t get my body comfortable. I couldn’t tell my brain it was time to sleep. I was walking around like a zombie all the time.”

  “That must have been very difficult. Falling asleep when Corrine was in the bath… was that what… made you think about drowning her, when you felt so overwhelmed?”

  Tamara nodded. It was such a clear and overpowering memory. Mrs. Baker waking her up as she sat beside the tub, Julie in her arms and Corrine in the tub, screaming that Corrine was going to drown because Tamara had closed her eyes for a few minutes. Corrine splashed happily in the water beside her, completely unharmed, and Mrs. Baker acted like Tamara had killed her. She could remember the idea starting to form in her head, like a black fog curling around her brain.

  How would Mrs. Baker feel if Corrine really did drown? What would she think then? Maybe then she wouldn’t be so nasty. People didn’t hit when they were sad, only when they were angry. And if they were both dead, then the Bakers wouldn’t want Tamara anymore. She could get away from them. She could be free. And if the children were dead, Mr. Baker couldn’t hurt them anymore either. They would be safe from his abuse.

  “Tamara.”

  “They would be safe,” Tamara said softly. “I could get them away from him for good.”

  “Is that what you thought?”

  She nodded. But she was still back there, not in the same timeline as Dr. Sutherland. “I didn’t want to hurt them. I just wanted to stop it. To stop them from hurting me. And from hurting the babies.”

  “But you planned to run away, too. You didn’t just stay there, thinking the Bakers would be nicer to you if the other children were out of the way.”

  “I could run away. But Corrine and Julie couldn’t. I couldn’t take them with me. They wouldn’t be able to get away from him, not for years.”

  “You could have called the police. Reported them.”

  Tamara had been so tired and confused. Every time she had tried to tell someone, to reach out to someone, it had backfired, and each punishment had been worse than the last.

  “What did you see and hear? Do you remember? You told me you had wild dreams, but that they weren’t always sleeping dreams. Sometimes you were awake.”

  “I’d hear her coming when she wasn’t even home… see a car and be sure it was him. And sometimes… bugs or snakes or other scary stuff…”

  “Funny how when we hallucinate, it is never fluffy bunnies or puppies,” Dr. Sutherland said.

  “I was going crazy. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted it all to stop.”

  “That must have been very scary. You must have felt very alone.”

  “No one cared.”

  “Did you hear voic
es telling you to do things?”

  “Sometimes… her voice, or his voice…” Tamara hesitated, trying to explain. “Not just… random voices, or Satan…”

  “And what did their voices say?”

  “What to do… all the chores… taking care of the babies… or him, whispering disgusting things… filling my brain…”

  “And have you been hearing those voices again? The Bakers’? Or other voices, ones that are more recent, people who are here at the prison?”

  “It was him. His voice at the trial.”

  “And other times when you were here and were hearing things?”

  “I hear… babies crying… Things that happened to me here. Glock… Vernon…”

  “You have been through some very traumatic things. Do you hear voices telling you to do things?”

  “No.” Tamara frowned, listening. “I don’t know.”

  “Are you hearing voices right now, Tamara?”

  “I hear you.”

  Dr. Sutherland chuckled. “But I’m here,” he said. “I mean any other voices?”

  He didn’t seem to understand that he wasn’t there with her, where she was. He was in a different time and place, and she was with the Bakers, slogging through the mud in her brain, trying to make sense of it.

  “No. Just the Bakers. Mr. Baker…” His voice seemed vague and changeable, like it was in a dream, where reality was always shifting and changing. She wasn’t sure where he was or what he was saying. And she really didn’t want to find out.

  “He’s the one you heard at the trial. Why are you hearing him now, do you think?”

  “He still wants me. He kept… looking at me… talking to me.”

  “And you’re afraid? You don’t want him to talk to you?”

  “No.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to shut his voice off? So you didn’t have to listen to him talking to you anymore?”

  “I can just…” Tamara’s voice faded away into nothing.

  For a while, neither of them said anything.

  “You drowned Corrine,” Dr. Sutherland said. “But not Julie. Why was that?”

  Tamara’s throat tightened. She was fully immersed in the memory, alert and aware of every detail. She could feel the lukewarm water, Corrine’s slippery, smooth skin, the strong muscles that she had to fight against, using all her strength to keep Corrine under the water. “She fought so hard. I thought… drowning was peaceful. I thought she would just breathe in the water, and slide away… she wouldn’t even know… it would be calm and peaceful.”