The Second Stranger

by J P Tompkins

  Chapter 2

  “How’s the sleeping? Any better?”

  “Not really.” I pause, looking past Dr. Benson, over his shoulder and out the window that has a layer of condensation on it. I’ve been looking at it off and on since my appointment started, watching droplets form at the top of the window before they slide down the glass.

  It’s calming, relaxing, the kind of thing that could make you want to sleep. If only I could. In fact, now that I think about it, this might be the only place where I could find sleep. His office is like a comfortable reading room, the kind where you’d close the door to get away from everyone, open a good book, and become so relaxed that you’d wake up an hour later on the couch, your body rested and warm.

  I’m only here because my editor, Neil Elliot, told me a few months ago that I had to get myself into therapy. He made it a condition of my employment, once he saw the toll this case was taking on me.

  The conversation started as a negotiation. Neil told me to take two weeks off, go see my parents, go do something, anything, just get some rest. No way am I going to be responsible for you losing your mind, Kate, he told me.

  I resisted, using the only leverage I had: I’ve broken every major story since the murders began, thanks to an inside source. So Neil wasn’t going to take me off the story entirely. I also figured he didn’t really want me gone for two weeks, as anything could happen, and that’s how we ended up agreeing on this course of action.

  “Good sleeping weather,” Dr. Benson is saying now. “Have you been taking the medication?”

  “I have.” I scan his face to see if there’s any sign that he knows I have just lied to him. He has a poker face, maybe a good thing for a therapist, the ability to hide their reaction to what they’re hearing, when behind those kind eyes and straight face they’re thinking: What the fuck did this person just tell me? So there’s nothing to see there, no indication that he knows I’m not being truthful. Just his straight face: dark eyes behind small round glasses, the kind of beard that’s been growing just a few days, not out of laziness or sloppiness, but rather the kind that’s going for stylish. It works on him.

  Dr. Benson prescribed the sleeping aid at the end of our last session. I got it filled, but haven’t taken it yet.

  Sleep has been eluding me for several months now. Not just because I’m working on this story so much, but also because when I lie down at night, my mind races with thoughts of what I could be doing, what I should be doing, what I might have missed that day. And thoughts of how the story could be advanced by the time I wake up. Another attack? A person of interest? An arrest?

  “Every night?” Dr. Benson asks. His face is blank at first, free of any expression. But the longer I wait to answer, his eyebrows creep up his forehead a little. He knows.

  I shake my head. “You know how I feel about medicine. But I did try it. Once.” I feel an undeserved sense of relief. Like I’m almost telling him the truth, even though I’m just adding to the lie. I’m too exhausted to care, though.

  The first time he suggested medication was when he told me I was depressed, and he asked me how I felt about trying something for it. I told him I didn’t want to try it. I told him I didn’t even like taking medication for a headache, and how I never take anything for a cold. The closest thing I’ll take is a cough drop. I don’t know when this started, this aversion to medication, but it goes back as far as I can remember. We talked about it and he backed off on the idea of giving me a prescription, but told me if he saw more serious signs of depression, we were going to have to revisit the topic.

  We compromised and he taught me diaphragmatic breathing. “Breathe in slowly through your nose, hold it for just a second, now let it out slowly through your mouth.” I did as he instructed. “Okay, this time, when you take the deep breath, make sure your stomach rises, rather than your chest. We’re going for deep breathing here.” I got the hang of it—it’s really not that hard once you know what you’re supposed to be doing—and he told me I could do this anytime I needed to relax a little. Even when I was trying to sleep, he added. And I said I’d give that a go. It didn’t work for me.

  Last week, when we talked about how I’d been sleeping for maybe two hours a night, he raised the issue of medication again. He once again suggested a sleeping pill. It was more than a suggestion—he was adamant that I try it.

  “It’s safe,” he told me that day. “There are some side effects. Dizziness, fatigue or drowsiness during the day, nausea in some cases. And hallucinations, though those are a little less common as the others I mentioned.”

  “I already feel like that during the day sometimes,” I said. “The fatigue and drowsiness, I mean.”

  “Exactly. And that’s from not sleeping. Might as well get some sleep. We’ve discussed the negative effects on your overall health from lack of sleep, so I won’t put you through that again.” That’s when he scrawled his signature on the little prescription pad, tore off the sheet, and handed it to me.

  “Did you sleep last night?” he asks me now.

  “No.”

  He just looks at me, but says nothing. He does this sometimes: asks a question, lets me answer, then says nothing. Giving me time to think about what we’re discussing. It was uncomfortable at first and I found myself filling the silence mostly with what I would later realize was babbling, but now I wait and let him resume the discussion.

  He shifts in his seat, crossing one leg over the other, propping his pad on his knee. “Up late writing the story about the rally? I read it online this morning.”

  “That was part of it,” I say. “But also, more of the usual.”

  He looks at me, not needing an explanation of what “the usual” means. We talk about it all the time—how I stay up through the night, going through police reports, looking at crime scene photos, every piece of information on all the evidence in the case I’ve been able to get.

  “And,” I continue, “I heard something last night that kept me up.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A conversation.” I tell him about the young couple talking about the attack on Payton Donnelly and Brad Starke.

  He jots a note down on his pad. “The guilt.”

  We’ve talked about this guilt a lot in our sessions over the last several weeks. That attack occurred barely three weeks after I wrote a story about the killer’s MO, including speculation that the offender was only targeting women who live alone.

  My intention was pure: report on what I know and what the working theory is. But I’m convinced I had unwittingly issued him a challenge and he accepted it.

  “Right, the guilt,” I say now.

  Dr. Benson takes a deep breath and adjusts his glasses. “You like evidence. You’re very hard on people who come up with theories about the case when they don’t have evidence, facts and logic for it. What’s the evidence that your article had anything to do with this offender’s choice of victims?”

  “The timing,” I say, “and he broke from his pattern—”

  “There’s a correlation, but that’s not the same as causation.”

  It’s the first time he’s confronted me on this. Before today, we’ve just discussed my feelings and how to react to them.

  “You can’t tell me my story had nothing to do with it.”

  “You’re right. I can’t. But you can’t tell me it couldn’t simply be coincidence,” Dr. Benson says.

  I don’t say anything.

  “Look at it this way,” he says. “What are you gaining from blaming yourself for something that you’re not even sure you had anything to do with? And even if you could prove it, what would you gain from beating yourself up over it?”

  I know he’s right, but that’s easier said than done. “I don’t think I can just flip a switch and stop thinking about it.”

  “I’m not suggesting you do that. But you’re all about facts and evidence and logic. It serves you well professionally. Use it personally. Speaking of personally, I hope you�
��re still giving some thought to your social life.”

  Every time he brings this up, my eyes wander to one of the pictures on his windowsill just behind where he sits. It’s a photo of Dr. Benson and his wife, taken a few years ago, he told me when I asked. They were on vacation when it was taken a few years ago. They’re standing against the railing of some museum in Paris, the sun setting behind them, casting a golden glow all around them. Smiling faces. They’re happy, having fun.

  I’m not even close to having anything like that in my life right now, but it’s not something I long for.

  “I’m giving it some thought,” I lie, just to get him to move on to another subject, and he does.

  He mentions my posture, specifically my hunched shoulders, something he tells me I do when I’m nervous. The first time he brought it up, he said it was like I was folding into myself, a self-protection thing. I’ve tried to pay attention to it ever since, but sometimes it just happens. “Don’t forget to breathe,” he adds now. “And I don’t just mean right now.”

  I realize I’ve been shallow-breathing. And he can tell. We’ve talked about this as well—using deep breathing as a way to relax, clear my mind. It works, but sometimes I forget.

  Dr. Benson changes the subject. “How are things working out with your new roommate?”

  “It’s fine. It’s good. I like having her there.”

  “Your lack of sleep,” he says. “Not an issue between you and her?”

  “No, I don’t think so. She hasn’t said anything about it, anyway. I mean, beyond telling me I’m going to run myself down before I even hit thirty.”

  Dr. Benson smiles. “That’ll depend on us making you more aware of how you approach your job. That’s why you’re here, after all. I think we should continue with three sessions per week,” Dr. Benson says. “At least for now.” He picks up his appointment book. “And of course, you can call me anytime you need to. If I think you should come in, we’ll make room on the schedule.” He smiles.

  “Thank you,” I say, and I mean it. It still surprises me that I look forward to these sessions, especially after my first experience with therapy.

  My parents took me to a therapist after Amanda was kidnapped. I wasn’t sleeping then, either. I spent nights in my bed crying, feeling guilty, afraid. The guy saw me. I always believed he would come for me, too.

  Weeks and months I spent like that—waiting for him to come get me, sneak into my bedroom at night, or snatch me off the sidewalk. As time went on—the two years between the kidnapping and his arrest—I often wondered if he was still alive. He could have become sick and died, or been killed in an accident. Sometimes I thought of the possibility that he was killed in pursuit of another victim. I actually did more than think about that. I hoped that’s what happened to him.

  I spent just over a year in therapy. My mother picked me up after school twice a week to take me to the appointments. I didn’t want anyone to think there was something wrong with me, so I lied and told classmates and friends that she was picking me up and taking me to piano lessons.

  I also lied to the therapist. A lot.

  I told her I rarely had dreams to begin with, no nightmares. The truth was, I had them often, several times a week, and they were all replays of exactly what I saw that afternoon in the rain when the guy took Amanda.

  Sometimes in the dreams, I tried to run but couldn’t lift my legs. Other times the water rushing from the storm drain prevented me from making any forward progress. It bothered me that the focus of the dream wasn’t that I couldn’t help Amanda, but that I couldn’t get away. The therapist probably would have had a lot to say about that, but I never told her.

  I’m sure she also would have had something to say about those books hidden in the back of my closet, the ones I stole from the library, but she never knew about those either.

  “Kate,” Dr. Benson is saying now. “I’m serious. Take your medication tonight.”

  “I promise you, I will.” The words come out of my mouth before I can stop them. I know I’ve overstated it, I know it came across like I was just saying it to get him off my back about it. But I do intend on taking it. I’m desperate for sleep.

  “Promising me won’t do any good. Make the promise to yourself. You deserve it.”

  Chapter 3

  “Your eyes.”

  That’s the first thing Erin says to me when I get home after my appointment with Dr. Benson.

  “I know,” I say. I looked at them in the mirror in my car when I was sitting at a stoplight on the way home. I raised my sunglasses, expecting them to be bloodshot. I wasn’t expecting the puffy, purple-gray bags under them. “I look like I’m sixty-eight, not twenty-eight.”

  She laughs, lifts a finger. “Wait right here.”

  I wait in the kitchen while she walks down the hall. She turns the corner and her long blonde ponytail swings over her shoulder. I hear her flip on the light in the bathroom. I turn around and see my reflection in the mirror that hangs in the living room. Even from this distance, I can see the bags under my eyes.

  On the counter, there’s a salad on a plate that’s big enough for two. Erin eats this kind of stuff all the time, avoiding the greasy and fried food she serves at the restaurant where she waits tables.

  “I thought I had another tube of this,” she says from the bathroom.

  “Of what?”

  She rounds the corner, back into the kitchen, extending her hand. “This. There’s only a little bit left, but it doesn’t take much.”

  I look at the tube. It’s some kind of cream for puffy eyes. I hand it back to her. “No, thanks. I don’t want to use up the last of it. I’ll be fine. I just need some sleep.”

  “Like that’s gonna happen.” She says it with a smile.

  I open the freezer to see what I’ve got to eat. It’s packed with microwavable dinners.

  My eating habits over the last several months have changed. Just like everything else in my life. I used to eat better. I used to enjoy it. Now it’s simply a necessary routine, fueling up.

  “Really,” I say. “I’m definitely sleeping tonight.”

  “Wow. That actually sounds sincere.” She leans against the counter, grabs her fork, stabs a carrot with it and pops it into her mouth.

  “It is sincere. I am going to get some sleep tonight.”

  “I like the confidence.”

  “And I like your sarcasm.”

  She laughs. “No, I mean it. Sorry.”

  I give her a smile and look back in the freezer, choosing one of the frozen dinners.

  My certainty about getting some sleep tonight isn’t coming from within. It’s coming from the little bottle of pills at the back of a drawer in my bathroom.

  But Erin doesn’t know about the medicine. No one does. That’s why the pills are no longer in the bottle the pharmacy gave me. I put them in a huge bottle of ibuprofen—six white tablets among two hundred or so orange ones.

  I put the tray in the microwave, close the door and set it to heat up for five minutes.

  “Sure you don’t want some of this?” Erin asks as she chews, pointing with her fork at the salad. “There’s a ton of it here.”

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  Her phone rings. She looks at the screen, leaves it lying flat on the table, rolls her eyes and says, “Ugh.” Then she pokes at the screen with her forefinger, almost jabbing at it as she declines the call and sends the caller to voicemail.

  Erin looks back at her food without saying anything. I couldn’t see the name displayed on her caller ID, but I know it’s probably Paul, her ex-fiancée, who had a girlfriend through most of their engagement. It has now been almost four months since Erin found out, then moved out.

  I had the extra bedroom, but had never thought of taking in a roommate. When Erin called the night she discovered Paul’s secret, I didn’t hesitate to offer her a place to stay. She came right over, suitcases in tow, eyes red and shiny from crying.

  I had spent the hour or so aft
er she called rushing around and moving things from the living room to my bedroom. The living room had been crowded with boxes containing copies of police reports from all the murders. The walls had pictures of the crime scenes and a large map with push-pins, color-coded markings of important sites for each case. Most of this stuff was obtained from a law enforcement source who risks his career every time he passes something along to me.

  The next morning, she thanked me again for letting her stay here for a while. “And we get to catch up,” she said. “I hardly ever see you or talk to you anymore.”

  It wasn’t just her that I didn’t see or talk with much anymore. It was everyone—other than people at work and people I interviewed for stories.

  I don’t have much of a social life these days. I don’t even think about it. So in a way, it’s good having her here. It’s good to have human contact. At least when we’re both home at the same time, which isn’t often.

  We have done some catching up, but haven’t so much as gone out to dinner since she moved in. There was a time when we would make plans all week for the coming weekend, a time when a weekend night in which we were both free would be considered squandered if we didn’t go out and do something.

  Erin and I met in college. We were assigned to be roommates and hit it off from the start. We quickly discovered that we had similar backgrounds: neither of us had siblings, which meant that was the first time either of us would be dealing with living in close quarters with someone our age; we were both from small towns hours away from the school, which meant we both had to adjust to living in a bigger city and we would do it together.

  She was then—as she is now—the kind of woman people pay attention to when they see her. Tall and athletic, she’d been a volleyball player in high school, the kind of physique that commands attention. That, along with the big brown eyes and always at least a trace of a smile on her face, made her very popular with the guys on campus. She never settled into a relationship and neither did I. We didn’t have a pact, exactly, didn’t need one—we both preferred the freedom to do what we wanted, and this meant no steady boyfriends.