“That’s an awful lot.” If anything, I wish that I could remember less of those days. But right now I am mostly worried about getting it all down before the trial. “I’ll get it done somehow.”
“Okay. Don’t worry about dinner. You can order a pizza. I’ll leave you some cash.” He winks and then laughs softly as he sees my eyes light up. Junk food is still a novelty after so long.
When breakfast is done, I follow him to the door, and we kiss again before I scoop up the cat and shoo the dogs back inside. The door closes as he turns to jog up the walk—and the echo of it closing makes me jump. It sounds far too final.
I take a deep breath and look around the cavernous living room. Then, I go into my usual ritual: a series of actions I take every time that Aaron leaves, to feel more secure in his absence.
I check the locks on the doors and the bottom floor windows, and also the basement door. I check outside before letting the dogs out to poop, and once they are in, I set the alarm and lock the door again.
I never told Aaron this, but for about the first three weeks that I lived at his home, I actually drew all the shades, propped a chair under the knobs of each of the doors, and walked around with his baseball bat in hand. But as time went on, I just made sure the baseball bat was in the same room, and left off with the chairs.
Now I just lock the doors and bottom floor windows once, and leave the improvised weapons. I still draw the shades after dark, though.
I realize I’m procrastinating when I catch myself wandering around looking for stuff that needs cleaning or straightening. Aaron doesn’t even ask me to contribute to chores, but I don’t want to be a freeloader. But it’s still not what I should be doing right now.
Taking a deep breath, I force myself to go into Aaron’s office. It’s cavernous and cluttered, the floor-to-ceiling bookcases stuffed with medical books and folders of case files. It’s long, and a touch narrow, the desk at one end facing the one window which looks out over the sprawling back garden.
I go to the desk, open the laptop—and my stomach flips and my mind goes blank. No. Stop and think, damn it, don’t cop out because you blank on the password. I carefully type it in and let out a sigh of relief when it actually works.
One of the lawyers has sent me an email. I freeze for a moment, then open it, bracing myself. The whole situation gets very hard to deal with sometimes.
Ms. Deacon:
Just letting you know that your mother has been calling our office with demands that we drop the case. She may attempt to contact you. I know your number is unlisted, but the address where you are staying is on the legal paperwork that Dr. Westridge’s lawyer got a copy of.
We had discussed the possibility that she has been in league with Westridge in some way. She may be afraid that her own involvement in this case will expose her and her husband. I’m going to advise that you have no contact with her, as she can only cloud the issue.
In other news, I have information about Westridge which may interest you. It appears that he has had other victims, one of which has agreed to act as a witness. She has related quite a story to me. I will forward it to you in the hopes it will help bring you some closure. Please do not discuss it with anyone but Aaron or members of your legal team.
I sit back, already shivering and wondering if I can deal with writing anything knowing that. I imagine my mother knocking on my door to try and intimidate or worse, to weep and wheedle. No, no, no the bitch abandoned me; she doesn’t get to try and control me now. Angry and tired, I close the email and go to the document I started yesterday.
I just won’t answer the door unless I’m expecting a pizza.
I go past the circumstances leading up to my mother abandoning me at the mental hospital. Her man shoving his hand down my shirt, me biting him, her throwing me out on the street in my socks. The suicide attempt.
I’m way luckier than a lot of the girls at the inpatient wing. I don’t have flashbacks when I think about this crap, it’s just really uncomfortable. It takes me a few minutes of procrastinating and distracting myself online, but finally, I start writing again.
I could not tell you if there was sexual contact or not, because I spent so much time drugged, sometimes into unconsciousness. The doctor seemed obsessed with making me as passive as possible. I couldn’t tell you why, but he kept calling me his doll.
The nurses all seemed to be too frightened of him to do anything about what was happening. Some of them seemed to accept that I was violently insane. Others seemed to want to make my captivity up to me, and would tend to me, helping me to keep clean, keep my hair tended to, and so on.
I don’t know if there were other victims kept like me. I suspect he only kept one of us at a time, for I never met anyone else that he drugged and dressed up and posed and took photographs of. I didn’t dare speak up myself, because if I did I would be immobilized, sometimes for days.
My mother visited the hospital at least once, but she didn’t visit me. I was still ten at the time, a month after I was committed. I saw her in the hallway and tried to hurry after her and call her name, but she just ignored me. Maybe she was making some kind of deal with the doctor. I don’t know.
The doctor would discourage me from moving or speaking. Sometimes the nurses would have to take me out walking after he left, late at night, so my muscles would not atrophy.
I asked one of them, Molly Green, once, why they couldn’t help me escape. She explained that the staff on the ward are all people who either couldn’t qualify for a transfer and couldn’t go without a job, or people that the doctor “has something on.” I don’t fully understand what form of blackmail was being used.
The doctor had a lot of rules that I had to follow to keep him happy. I could not gain weight. I could not try to escape. I could not wear my hair up or cut it. I could not attempt contact with the outside world.
If I broke the rules, I would be immobilized. If I kept to the rules, he would find excuses to immobilize me anyway. I don’t know why having me strapped down was so important to me, but sometimes he would just sit there in the room with me, staring, for hours.
The chime telling me that I have mail makes me jump in my seat. I look up and realize that I’ve been pecking away at the document for over an hour. I save, and check my email, quickly seeing a long letter from the lawyer.
I skim down past his greeting, and my eyes widen when I see the name of his witness. Anna Westridge, younger sister of Dr. Emmanuel Westridge. There’s even a photo of her, which I open after a moment’s hesitation.
My eyes widen and I feel the breath freeze in my lungs for a long, terrible moment. A small, waiflike woman in delicate, lacy clothes, with long, straight black hair, soft brown eyes, a pale face ... and a wheelchair. She looks more like me than my own mother.
I realize even before I start reading the story that I have uncovered something terrible. My chest hitches and my skin crawls as I start to read, bracing myself the whole time.
My brother was very spoiled, growing up. He was always getting into trouble because he would get so angry whenever people did not do what he wanted. By the time I came along, he had withdrawn from almost everyone out of sheer frustration.
He liked me, though, because I was helpless. He could control me. He could decide where I went, how long I would stay there, what I ate, what I wore.
He asked to be put in charge of caring for me. My parents were dissipated, wealthy Georgians who didn’t much care for parenthood, so this worked well for them. Soon, he wouldn’t even let the nanny go near me unless I was sick.
He called me his doll. For about a year he was quite happy with me, according to my mother. But then I started wanting to move around on my own. Explore. Crawl. Walk.
He didn’t like that very much. If I could move on my own, it was one less thing that was under his control. According to my mother, who at first told me that I had never been able to walk, his solution was to push me down the stairs.
Certainly, I couldn’t
walk after that.
I reel back away from the screen on the desk chair’s casters and come to rest against the bookcase behind me, gagging in horror. I sit there shaking, bathed in cold sweat, knowing that I have to finish reading the letter but terrified of whatever fresh horrors it might reveal.
Finally I force myself back in front of the computer and start reading again. I still have my own story to finish telling.
Be brave. Be strong. You know that the lawyers, the police, and Aaron have all said that we have this bastard dead to rights.
All I have to do is prepare, face my part in the trials, and wait for it to be official. The doctor is in deep trouble. He’s never going to get a chance to turn a girl into a doll again.
I take a deep breath and continue reading.
For six months, my brother successfully hid the fact that he had pushed me, instead of simply being inattentive enough to allow me to fall. But he had not anticipated that my parents, having learned too late not to leave me with him, would restrict his access to me regardless. He threw such a violent tantrum that he ended up attacking my nurse.
I did not see him again for ten years. He was sent away to military boarding school, and from there entered a premedical college program and made his climb from there. He graduated early from his undergraduate studies, and I saw him once during this period, during the ceremony.
I remember that he looked right through me the whole time, even when I greeted him. It was if he could not stand the sight of me wheeling around in my chair in the sun, active and happy. Just before we took our leave, he slipped up behind me once and hissed something very strange in my ear.
“You were supposed to be my doll!” With such venom in his voice, as if I had betrayed him somehow.
Emmanuel became a psychiatrist, which I found quite ironic. I broke contact with him, for the sake of my own mental health, and eventually completed my own doctorate and married. I spent several comfortable years pretending that I had no brother at all.
Then, in 2007, he left me a very strange text message. I ended up keeping it because it was so bizarre. He told me that he had found himself a new doll, and that my “services” were no longer required. I had not seen him in years, and he refused to answer queries from myself or our mother.
I had no idea that he would misuse his powers at the hospital in such a way, because I always assumed there would be too much oversight. But as of the beginning of this correspondence, I understand to my horror that I was wrong. I will, of course, testify on behalf of the plaintiff, in the hope that I might do something to correct my earlier error.
My hands are shaking violently; my stomach boils. I imagine the doctor, a sick, wicked thing even as a boy, pushing his baby sister down the stairs and breaking her spine to make her more helpless. To make her a doll: helpless, controllable, like me.
It all makes too damn much sense, and when I graduate from shaking to sobbing, I can’t get it under control for a long while. The fact that his sister’s help will definitely seal the doctor’s doom doesn’t mitigate my horror and grief much.
Finally, I give up, and call Aaron.
He picks up after two rings. “Is everything okay?” he asks at once. He hears me sob in a breath, and observes, “No, it isn’t. Can you tell me what’s going on?”
It all spills out of me, every bit, and all I can do is avoid rambling. But I tell him: my mother trying to interfere, the nurses blackmailed into silence, the doctor’s sister—and what he did to her. He listens, coaxing me to keep going when I need it, but doesn’t comment otherwise until I run out of words.
“Holy shit,” he mumbles in horror as I go quiet. “Okay. I’m going to get coverage here and have one of my assistants run me home.”
“You don’t have to—” I start, but he cuts me off.
“Yes, I do.”
My eyes tear up again. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. You’re not the one who did this; you’re one of the ones that got hurt by it. I’ll be home as soon as I can. I love you.” His voice is gentle, reassuring—and that only makes more silent tears spill down my cheeks.
“I love you,” I mumble, and hang up. Then I sit there struggling to pull myself together enough that I can finish my own story.
It helps that Aaron will be home soon. But it also makes me feel terribly guilty. He has so much that he has to get done at work before the trial, and I have no business keeping him from it.
But it’s his choice if he wants to come running. And I’m grateful. I try to focus on that, and start rereading my writing so I can pick up smoothly where I left off.
I have added no more than a paragraph when someone bangs on the front door. I look up in a hurry; has it been that long? Is Aaron home, and did he forget his key? I’m so desperately eager to see him that I’m hurrying for the door before I think.
The dogs, who have been napping at my feet, chase after me, and start barking at the door when I reach it. I think they’re doing it out of excitement, and quickly reach for the door handle.
When I pull open the door, I know at once that I should not have. My mother is standing on the other side of the locked screen door, staring in at me with a strangely determined look.
The years have not been kind. Her hair has the straw pile look of having had the gray dyed out of it so often, and her face is taut from too many plastic surgeries. Her fancy cream suit has a high collar and a blue silk scarf tied around her neck to hide her sagging throat skin.
I look at her and barely feel anything at all except anger and disgust.
“Madelyne, we need to talk,” she says in a stern voice, as if I have just broken one of her dishes.
“No, we really don’t. You disowned me, remember? You disowned me, and you left me in a hospital run by a psychopath. What the hell could we have to say to each other?” But I can’t quite bring myself to slam the door in her face.
“I know, and you were too young to understand why. But you really were sick, honey—” she starts, in such a syrupy, condescending tone that I easily find the anger to cut her off.
“No, I wasn’t. I was just inconvenient.” I stare into her eyes ... and she slowly looks away. “You got rid of me because I wouldn’t let your boyfriend molest me.”
She goes white as a sheet and her hand darts into her expensive handbag, probably for a cigarette. “He never did any such thing!”
“Didn’t he leave you after you sent me away?” I ask in a cold tone, and see the corner of her eye twitch.
“...Yes,” she finally admits grudgingly.
“And what did he get arrested for in 2013 again?” I’ve been catching up on a lot of things since getting out, and now, I use the truth as a weapon. “Producing child pornography, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, shut up, you crazy little slut!” She whips out a small, snub-nosed silver revolver and points it right at me.
I freeze. I might be able to duck out of her gunsight in time, but there’s no guarantee. “So that’s what the doctor conned you into doing, huh?” I have a sudden flash of insight. “Or did he blackmail you?”
Her eyes are huge, and her aim wavers. “If this case goes to trial it will bring up my involvement. My having you committed and relinquishing custody. And ... and everything else.”
“And if you shoot me, you’ll go down for murder on top of all that,” I try to reason with her.
“They’ll never know it was me,” she brags, and resettles her aim at me.
I point up at the security camera recording the porch and see all color drain from her face. Inside, I’m so scared I want to throw up, but I don’t want to give her the satisfaction of seeing that.
Her aim wavers again, and she starts to lower the weapon. But then the doubt in her face is replaced with rage, and she lets out a screech and fires.
In that moment, before it can even register that I might be dead, a huge figure steps in behind her and forces her gun hand down. It goes off, all right—and sends its slug right through her
foot.
She wails in horror and sits down hard while Aaron yanks the gun away from her. His eyes are full of rage, but soften as he looks up at me. “You all right?”
Sure, I just almost got holed out, but other than that, I’m fine. “I am now that you’re here,” I reassure him, and he smiles.
It’s a good hour before the police and paramedics are both done with everything from patching up the world’s worst would-be assassin to taking our statements. Once they collect the woman who was once my mother and leave, we go inside, and I collapse a little. Aaron holds me for a long time while I cry in relief.
I know now that the doctor is well and truly damned, and that that woman has just damned herself as well. I understand that this was his last shot in making sure that I could never, ever testify, and it failed.
Dr. Orgasm (A Holiday Romance Collection Book 2) Page 7