by Tonya Hurley
Several masked and hooded men brandishing knives ran past her, knocking her sideways and laughing. Catherine locked eyes with one and could’ve sworn his pupils were burning. She couldn’t be sure but she’d seen a look like that before from Ricky’s crew when they held her down and assaulted her. Demons possessed by the same monstrous spirit.
“Don’t we know each other?” he asked, bringing his blade to her eye.
Cat shook her head no.
“My bad.” He kicked her in the ribs as he passed and took off.
Dazed and bruised, Catherine tried to stand and limped toward the center of the melee as the crowd thinned. She didn’t run away; she ran toward the ones that might need help, despite any danger to herself.
A few yards closer to the hospital entrance and Cat saw the reason for the panic. Bodies were strewn across the sidewalk and bleeding. The old couple and teenagers who’d been interviewed. A cameraman and the frustrated reporter. All injured, or worse. Bloodstained. Some gasping for breath, moaning in pain. Clothes torn and stained. Sitting upright, looking blankly off in the distance. Shell-shocked. The old couple hadn’t moved at all. She got close and could see they were already ghostly pale and turning blue. Blood from their wounds pooling around them. She turned her attention to the girls.
Catherine knelt before them, reassuring them until help arrived.
“I don’t want to die,” one of the girls cried. “Please don’t let me die.”
“I won’t,” Catherine swore.
She pulled off her jacket and tore at the bottom of her T-shirt, trying to staunch their bleeding. She screamed to the stunned hot dog vendor for water, which he tossed over to her. She picked up the girls in the TEAM SEBASTIAN shirts one at a time and gently washed the blood from their faces and offered them a drink. Following Cat’s example, strangers began to offer comfort, sympathy, and help to other injured strangers. Runners stopped and picked up a few girls, darting with them through the ER doors at Perpetual Help. Blood-soaked Sebastian shirts and all.
Emergency room personnel soon burst out from the ER entrance with gurneys and medic bags as fire trucks, police cruisers, and EMTs arrived. Some officers began to cordon off the scene, using police tape stretched from lightpost to lightpost down the block. Some began to interview witnesses, others took off in hot pursuit of the vandals who were responsible for the attack. Some in the earlier crowd began to slowly return, ashen-faced and with tears in their eyes, but nevertheless they had returned. Most, praying.
“Hey! You! Nurse Jackie!” a gruff voice shouted almost directly in her ear.
Catherine turned to see a beefy male hand reaching for her shoulder. She froze for a second and then swung awkwardly at him in self-defense.
“Get away!” she screamed.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, pushing a camera in her face. “I’ve got a live shot right now and I need a warm body to talk to.”
“I’m a mess,” she said, holding up her bloody palms and brushing away her matted hair.
“It’s not a beauty contest. People need to know what just happened here.”
Something about the genuineness of the request touched Catherine, even in her disoriented and disheveled state. Somebody, she thought, had to be a witness, and fate had chosen her.
“Okay,” she said and nodded. “I’ll do my best.”
“That’s all I can ask for,” he said.
Just as the cameraman turned on the camera light to begin the interview, a human wedge of blue burst through the bystanders, clearing a path for Captain Murphy, who’d only just arrived to take control of the crime scene.
“Back the fuck up!” a sergeant shouted, nearly knocking the newsman off his feet as he passed.
Murphy surveyed the carnage and then looked up purposefully toward the penthouse floor of Perpetual Help and stared accusingly for a good long while. He then began yelling instructions and commands to his subordinates. Catherine, whose ears were still ringing, could hardly hear any of what he was saying except for a single word that seemed to sum up the whole horrible situation. A truer word she thought, had never been spoken.
“Goddamnit!”
3 Agnes sat impatiently, lifting her thighs up periodically to keep her bare skin from sticking to the pleather seat. It was chilly in the room so she had a chunky, oatmeal-colored, hand-knitted cowl around her neck.
She crooked her neck and squinted, trying to see inside Frey’s office, but the door was not far enough ajar. She’d been waiting for a while, same as usual. Same as since she’d been remanded to his care. Five-day-a-week sessions that were torture.
But the waiting was the worst. A not-so-subtle kind of power play reminding her that she was basically more prisoner than patient. Agnes was on the doctor’s schedule. And the nurse’s and the orderly’s. Even the janitor’s. In the penthouse pecking order, she was at the bottom of the barrel. Scraps. Especially today, when everyone seemed preoccupied with yesterday’s rioting outside.
No wonder, with the story on a seemingly endless loop on the local and cable news channels, fanning the flames of division. They were headlines now, screaming from the front page of every tabloid in town from the looks of things, and though she should be used to it, Agnes still couldn’t avoid a petty thought or two, bristling at unflattering pictures of her lifted from her social media sites by lazy news editors and producers to illustrate their sensational stories. They had papers to sell, and this was their business.
She thought about the victims, prayed for their recovery, and couldn’t help feeling responsible. Still, there was nothing she could do but wait and hope that Cecilia would be safe.
The idle wait did, however, give her plenty of time to reflect. Not so much on events of the recent past, but on the hours and minutes that had brought her to Perpetual Help originally. It had all seemed a blur to her until recently, but gradually she’d begun to make sense of it. The ambulance, the gurney, the stitches. Her own bad relationship decisions. Her mother blaming her for everything. Very little had changed, apart from the wounds on her wrist, which had healed almost entirely. She pondered over her scar and imagined it now as a zipper. The place where Sebastian had been able to enter her and where her old soul had departed. An escape hatch of sorts. She smiled at the idea and stretched her head out to look down the hall, but instead saw Jude. He was sitting right next to her. He’d come up on her silently.
“You shouldn’t be here with me,” Agnes whispered. “The nurses will tell. Frey will be furious.”
Jude shrugged indifferently. Agnes admired his fearlessness.
“Have you seen the crowds outside?”
He nodded yes.
“It’s unbelievable.”
Jude smiled as if to say it wasn’t.
“I heard the staff buzzing that it was probably pressure from the people downstairs that got Cecilia out,” Agnes enthused. “I’m so happy for her.”
Jude’s expression turned somber. He shook his head no.
“What do you mean?” Agnes leaned toward him anxiously. “Is something wrong?”
Frey’s office door opened and Jude suddenly began to flap his arms and wave his hands. His head titled backward and his eyes turned upward. He was nervous.
“Hello, Agnes. Sorry to keep you waiting,” the doctor apologized. “Hello, Jude.”
Agnes eyed Frey with contempt and took Jude’s shaky hand in hers, soothing him.
“It’s okay,” Agnes said to him.
“Yes, Jude. It’s okay. Run along now. You don’t want to miss your therapy.”
The boy stood up and shuffled away, turning his head occasionally back toward Agnes and Frey as he meandered down the hallway.
“Please, come in, Miss Fremont.”
Frey stretched his arm out formally like an usher guiding an audience member to her seat. Agnes got up, stepped inside his office, and sat down in the chair across from his desk. Frey followed behind and closed the door.
“I want out of here,” Agnes insisted.
“Well, that’
s no way to begin a conversation,” Frey opined. “With a demand. We leave that for hostage takers and bratty children.”
Agnes didn’t take kindly to the slight. “What happened to Cecilia?”
“She was released. I’m sure you’ve heard.”
“So you can kill her?”
“I had nothing to do with her release or the rioting, I assure you, but if you are trying to say that she would have been safer in here with us? Judging from the events outside, you are both perceptive and correct.”
“Admit nothing, I get it. Just a little old-fashioned crowd control,” Agnes scoffed. “It won’t surprise you that I don’t think of this place as a refuge.”
“For sick people, that is exactly what it is. Here we specialize in rehabilitation, not annihilation.”
“Sounds like a great tagline for your next brochure,” she said. “But you’re full of shit.”
“I appreciate your honesty, Agnes. I think we’re making progress.”
“Can we please stop this game now?” Agnes snarked. “You aren’t talking to my mother. You’re talking to me.”
“To Saint Agnes you mean?”
“Things are not the same as when I first came in here.”
“Clearly not,” Frey observed dryly.
“You’ve gotten away with a lot, but not for much longer.”
“I might have expected those threats from Cecilia or even Lucy, but you surprise me.”
“Why, Doctor?” Agnes asked. “I know who you are and you know who I am.”
“Yes, I know who you are. And I am not the only one.”
“You can’t keep me in here forever. And even if you try, you can’t stop what’s happening outside.”
“Yes, outside,” Frey mused, looking down from his office window. “That’s the problem, isn’t it?”
“For you. Not for me,” Agnes informed.
Frey paced behind his desk, continuing to stare downward at the throng gathered in front of the hospital.
“Do you know who those people are, Agnes?”
“They believe in us, Doctor. You can’t scare them away. That’s all I need to know. And everything you need to fear.”
“Are you sure?” Frey suggested cryptically. “Do you really want to place your freedom, your future, your, pardon the pun, faith, in that hashtag militia out there.”
“Can we stop pretending you actually care about me or any of us at all?” Agnes asked. “I’d rather take my chances with them any day.”
“Sheep. Waiting to be led over a cliff by you three. With so much time on their hands, they can spend their aimless days protesting in front of a busy hospital.”
“You missed your calling, Doctor,” Agnes said.
“How do you mean?” Frey asked cautiously.
“You would have made an excellent high school girl,” Agnes snarked. “You have all the attributes—phony, undermining, backstabbing. Somewhat less appealing in a grown man though, I must say.”
“And for a high school girl you make an excellent doddering old fool. Naïve, oblivious, stuck in the past, blindly loyal.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“I’m sure you do,” Frey replied, making a quick conversational pivot. “Have you ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, Agnes?”
“No,” she said dismissively, rubbing the spot on her wrist where her chaplet once hung. “Should I?”
“It’s a cognitive theory, recently developed. In essence, it suggests that people suffering from delusions of superiority seem to be incapable of accurately rating their own inabilities or even recognizing their own ineptitude. It wasn’t meant to diagnose would-be saints and martyrs but I think it applies to Sebastian, Lucy, Cecilia, and yourself quite nicely.”
“Did you discover it looking in the mirror, Doctor?” Agnes sassed. “You’re in such denial.”
“No, but you are making my point without even realizing it. You see, the miscalibration of the incompetent, or in our case, the delusional, stems from a fundamental error about the self.”
Agnes was unimpressed with Frey’s theorizing.
“Sounds like cherry-picking, Doctor,” Agnes said scornfully. “You aren’t the only one with a theory today. Have you ever heard of bikeshedding? Look it up.”
“You are indeed a clever girl, Agnes. Perhaps a bit too clever.”
“You mean a wise-ass, don’t you? Disrespectful and condescending of your authority, your age and experience.”
“It’s part of your illness, Agnes. I don’t take my patient’s criticisms personally.”
“Patients? We’re your prisoners.”
“Not my prisoner, dear. A prisoner of your own making. Not mine.”
“You talk about illusions. This whole charade. Treatment. Therapy. That’s the illusion. We both know why you corralled us here. But Cecilia’s out now. And the crowds outside are growing, Doctor, despite your best efforts.”
“Narcissists just like you all,” Frey replied imperiously. “How many among them should be up here instead of down there?”
“Every single one of them, if you have your way.”
“Angry mobs can be unpredictable, Agnes, and crowds are the perfect place for dangerous people to hide, as we have just witnessed.”
“What are you implying?”
“Nothing more than what must be obvious to you. Not everyone wishes you and your supporters well.”
Agnes laughed out loud, unable to contain her derision. “Including present company.”
“Believe me, it could be worse, Agnes.”
“A prediction, Doctor?”
“No,” Frey answered bluntly. “An observation. Outside, you are beyond our protection.”
“You mean your control.”
“I may not be the worst you have to fear.”
Agnes lifted herself partly out of her chair, bringing herself closer to Frey. Confronting him as she hadn’t ever before.
“Do I look frightened to you?”
“If you had any instinct for self-preservation left, instead a perverse death wish, you might well be.”
“I’m not afraid, Doctor, because I know the difference between my friends and my enemies. There is a certain comfort in knowing your enemy. Being able to look him in the eye.”
Frey smiled dismissively, increasingly mystified by the girl’s steadfastness. He took her in. The pale skin, the copper curls falling and twisting downward over her cowl, the delicate hands. She looked the same as the first time they’d met. Except her eyes, which seemed to burn with clarity, with a steely confidence. With faith, if not in a higher power, then in her own self. The emotional wreck, barely held together with nylon stitches and gauze wrapping, that had once washed up in his office had been salvaged, repaired, but not by him. Not by his expertise as a therapist, by his prescriptions, potions, and powers of persuasion. She’d been saved, though he was loath to admit it, by love.
“I envy you in some ways, Agnes. How blithe you appear. Sitting here in your hospital gown, committed involuntarily to a psychiatric ward, looking as if you don’t have a care in the world. I never imagined Sebastian could have such a hold on you. On any of you.”
The doctor spoke those last words more as an aside to himself, she thought. Comments not really meant for her ears yet too honest for him to keep inside. Cecilia had slipped from his grasp and now the truth, too, was slipping out. It was all slipping away.
“You underestimated him and us, Doctor Frey. You underestimated what love can accomplish.”
“Yes, it is plain to see what love can accomplish, said the girl in the straitjacket,” Frey replied snidely. “Any other greeting card wisdom to share?”
“I think you’re feeling pressured, Doctor Frey,” Agnes proffered. “And more than a little irritated that a few teenagers and their fan mob might just be responsible for pulling the curtain back on your whole fucking shady network.”
“Can’t you see I’m trying to save you, sweet, dear girl.”
&n
bsp; “I’ll save myself.”
Frey balked at the phrasing, a bemused expression crossing his face.
“Ah, the man of the hour rears his head,” Frey said. “You risk your future, your life for a total stranger. A lost ghost. I don’t know why I should be surprised. You’re suicidal.”
“Then let me go?” Agnes offered slyly. “No matter how many pills, bull sessions, or shock treatments you prescribe, I won’t change.”
Frey stared hard at the young girl across from him. The girl he’d met not long ago was gone. The look of determination in her eyes told him what he needed to know, confirming his worst fears and reaffirming his worst instincts. It was time, he’d decided, for a new strategy.
“As you wish. Since you are determined to see this through to the end, I’ll sign the papers and have a word with your mother.”
There seemed to her something unusually and increasingly resigned in the doctor’s tone, as if he actually meant the things he was saying. Perhaps, she thought for just a fleeting moment, the loss of Cecilia had chastened him. But then she remembered: Frey was cowed by nothing and no one, and if anything, he’d come back stronger from each setback. She refused to let down her guard.
“You’ll release me?”
Agnes’s face with filled with joy and then suspicion. She knew Frey too well to believe that he would just let her go without some ulterior motive, that in letting her go, the doctor was not granting her freedom but almost certainly replacing a life of incarceration with a death sentence.
“I think we’ve covered everything,” Frey said without actually answering her.
“Yes, we’ve covered everything.”
“Don’t say you weren’t warned.”
Frey closed her file and tossed it casually to the windowsill behind him.
“What about Jude and Jesse?”
“You will all be free to go.”
Frey’s frustration was evident to her but deep inside she couldn’t help but feel that she’d been invited to a dance, a pas de deux, carefully choreographed, and the music had just stopped. It had reached a conclusion. Their session and their patience for each other.
“Thank God,” she whispered simply, and turned her eyes toward the office window to the relentless, unwavering crowd outside. “And them.”