The Nearly Girl

by Lisa de Nikolits

  He struck the plate sharply with his fork and there was a resounding crack but none of the gathered party flinched or twitched a muscle.

  “So, Bella’s to blame too,” he said accusingly but then he fell silent, with his head cocked to one side. “Well,” he reconsidered, “if blame needs to be accorded which it does not. Responsibility, yes, we all share that, but not blame. There is no blame.”

  He mashed a forkful of potatoes into some meatloaf.

  “They all have their own idiosyncrasies,” he confided. “Charlotte likes to eat each thing individually and she doesn’t even like her food to touch. Bella likes hers all smashed together and why I don’t just put it into a blender and give her the resulting mush, I’ve got no idea. Actually I do know. It’s because Daddy loves his honey pop so much!”

  He paused again. “Where was I? Oh that’s right, yes, I had that night of perfect peace and I found myself living for the next time it could happen again. I waited as long as I could and then, one Friday night I couldn’t hold off any longer. I came home from a terrible day at work — you nutcases are so exhausting really,” he waved a fork at Amelia. “And then there are all the politics about whose theories are proving more successful in the wards, who is getting RESULTS! I am constantly under tremendous pressure to achieve milestones and breakthroughs, you have no idea. And what did I come home to? Chaos. Utter chaos.” He wiped Bella’s chin.

  “Now,” he said, “you need to know that taking care of the kids and the house was Charlotte’s ONLY JOB! How EASY is that? Huh? She didn’t have jealous colleagues constantly trying to discredit her. She didn’t have a career to maintain and sustain and fight and stress over. She didn’t have any of it. The workplace jungle of psychotherapy is no easy arena let me tell you. It’s not for pussies. It’s a vicious war on a daily basis. Daily, I tell you.

  “So, that Friday night, I arrived home and found a pigsty. The kids were running around like savages and there was Charlotte, reclining on the sofa, watching some ridiculous soap opera and drinking red wine, not a care in the world. It was,” and he paused dramatically, “the moment when everything changed. I nearly lost it, but to my credit, I did not. No, I did not. I did not raise my voice or slam down my briefcase or do anything such unseemly thing. I just said, very calmly, ‘Hi honey, how was your day’ and she said, and I will never forget this, she said, ‘Oh darling, I’ve never been so glad to see the back of a week. It was hell.’

  “Hell? Her week was HELL? Pray tell, how was that even possible? I was gobsmacked, incredulous, but I didn’t let it show. I said something like, ‘Poor baby. I tell you what. I’ve got a great idea. How about I go and get takeout?’ The three of them went crazy when I said that. It was like they had won the lottery. The only trouble was that they wanted pizza and it’s impossible to crush sedatives into pizza, but all was not lost! Ice cream saved the day.”

  He finished feeding Bella and he put her knife and fork neatly onto her plate and moved to sit next to his son.

  “This little guy’s called Jason, which was Charlotte’s naming choice. He should have been named Frank, which should have been my name too, but I was given the moniker Frances instead. Frances! It was my father’s idea of a joke,” he said in a confidential tone to Amelia. “To give me two girls’ names; Frances, to go with Carroll. His name was Frank Bruce Carroll, nothing girly about that. But let’s not get into my daddy issues or we will be here until pigs fly.” He peered into his son’s face. “Jason’s no daddy’s boy either, is he? Oh, you’re a real mama’s boy, aren’t you, kitten? And Jason hates meatloaf,” he added as an aside to Amelia who noticed that the only thing on Jason’s plate was two slices of meatloaf. She also noticed that no napkin was tucked under Jason’s little chin and that his father fed him so quickly that it was surprising the boy didn’t choke.

  “That Friday night I dosed them and I dosed them good and I cleaned and polished and scrubbed and vacuumed. I washed the walls and the light switches and the doors. I disinfected and sanitized and sorted and folded and I restored ORDER! I came to rest at about four in the morning and I realized then that I couldn’t go back. Hadn’t I tried that once before? And the crime of it was that when they woke after that first time, they never even noticed what I had done! All they did was complain about their sore heads and their aching tummies. That’s gratitude for you. And they created disorder again in the blink of an eye. I couldn’t let that happen again. I simply couldn’t. I had to think fast. If I was going to maintain this, I needed to come up with a plan. The first thing I did was to race back to the hospital for syringes and more sedatives. I told the nursing staff that one of my patients was having a psychotic breakdown and that I’d fill out the paperwork later. Of course they believed me and I rushed back home to calculate the perfect dose to maintain the family peace. Operation Peaceful Family, that’s the code name I have in my head for this!

  “I carefully sedated them and then I sat down and created three fictitious files for three outpatients and I devised an experimental methodology and noted that I was doing a field study correlating a new type of sedative with psychoses that had a number of baseline characteristics. I was lucky. I had done something along those lines in my early years as a therapist and so I had a number of patients’ files to draw on.”

  He stopped and looked from Mike to Amelia. “Hmm, who to feed next?”

  Amelia’s mouth was watering and she hoped it would be her. She couldn’t understand how her whole body could feel numb and incarcerated and yet, she was starving, achingly hungry.

  “I think I’ll go with Mike,” he said and he grinned at Amelia. “You wanted to be next, didn’t you? You’ll have to wait. You don’t like to wait, do you? If you ask me, there’s nothing psychologically wrong with you, you just need to structure your own life the way you want to, within the confines of this world and really, that’s not very hard to do. And you,” he said to Mike, “there’s nothing wrong with your ability to speak in public, you just don’t have anything to say yet. If you came up with some great idea that you wanted to share with the world, I bet we wouldn’t be able to shut you up.”

  He loaded a fork with food and fed Mike who swallowed with evident enthusiasm, despite his deadpan expression.

  “You are such a pretty, pretty boy,” Dr. Carroll said, gazing at Mike. “Look at you. You’re nearly girly you’re so pretty. You’re so big and manly, with your broad shoulders and your little waist but you’re girly too. Maybe I should cut your pretty girly curly hair off and then we’ll see how pretty you are.” He peered at Mike. “No, you’d still be pretty then,” he said, and he sounded sad and he gazed off into space.

  “Now, me, I’ve never been pretty or handsome. And when Charlotte seemed to fall in love with me, I was baffled. It would be like Snow White falling in love with one of the Seven Dwarves. It was just wrong and yet, I couldn’t dissuade her, not that I tried too hard.”

  He forked more food into Mike’s eager mouth.

  “Such pretty sensual lips,” he said to Mike. “You’ve got such a beautiful mouth. Little dimples, cleft chin, high cheekbones, oh, I hate you, boy, and I’m not afraid to say it. That’s enough food for you.”

  Amelia saw that he’d hardly fed any of the meal to Mike and her heart went out to him. She wondered what Dr. Carroll had in store for her.

  “I couldn’t believe my good luck when Charlotte married me,” he said getting up. “I thought the sun, moon and stars had landed in my lap that very day. It was the best day of my life. I was her prince, we’d rule our kingdom together, and we would live happily ever after. She was MINE!

  “But then she got pregnant and everything changed. It was all ‘the baby this, the baby that.’”

  Dr. Carroll left and went into the kitchen. Amelia heard drawers being opened and a blender sounded but Amelia couldn’t turn her head. She heard his footsteps returning and he pulled her chair around to face him, and he sat down
holding a bowl.

  “Here, pretty girl,” he said. “We know you like things to be different and so I got you a special treat.”

  He raised a spoon to her lips and she took it greedily, nearly weeping with disappointment when she realized what he was feeding her. It was vanilla pudding, the powdered kind you mix with milk, only from the taste of it, he had mixed it with water.

  “Yucky pudding!” Dr. Carroll chortled. “No succulent meatloaf or carrots or delicious mashed potatoes for you. I’ll have yours.”

  He put the bowl of pudding on the table and he picked up her plate and proceeded to eat it with great gusto, and she, unable to move her head, had to watch him eat every mouthful.

  “Oh yummy,” he said. “I am such a good cook.”

  He finished eating and pushed the dirty plate away from him on the table. Then he leaned back and sighed with satisfaction.

  “Charlotte is an orphan,” he said. “No family whatsoever. She’s a psychiatric nurse. That’s how we met. I am quite the celebrity in the world of psychotherapists and no doubt that played a role in increasing my appeal. And I can be charming and empathetic. We learn a lot of empathy skills in medical school: how to control our body language to seem impassive, neutral and yet sympathetic. We are taught to smile but just a tiny bit, not so much that the patient will become confused and think we are friends; no, a reassuring smile, to let you know that we understand your pain. Which mostly we do not. Your pain is yours, but that said, we can and do have theories about what you are going through. Although the vast majority of you don’t want to get better and so what we do is like banging our heads against a brick wall. But, I digress. I charmed Charlotte and she loved my intellect or psycho-prowess or whatever it was. And I found ways to keep her at home, keep her away from other people who might tell her that she had married far below her level, people who would no doubt help her to leave me.

  “We are UNEVENLY YOKED,” he yelled at Charlotte. “We always were. Why did you marry me? You made my life hell. And at first I was happy about the baby because I thought it would keep you at home with me more but then I thought NO! I will have to SHARE your love and I couldn’t bear that. But it was too late. Too late, I loved you and then you had the baby and you wanted to go back to work and I thought no, no, and so I said we needed to have another child. And I love my Bella, my mini-me! I thought we would have another little me-clone, but no, out popped Jason, a mini-Charlotte and what could I do?”

  Still leaning back in his chair, he rested his hands on his belly and closed his eyes. “Home schooling! I persuaded Charlotte to home-school the kiddies! And she agreed. By the time I suggested it, she had lost confidence in her nursing skills and I am ashamed to admit that’s largely due to my repeated suggestions that she was a rather poor nurse, when in actual fact, she was excellent. Therefore,” he said, sitting up, “no one missed her when she never returned because by that time, she had been gone for too long. She had vanished from their minds. There was no one to miss her, and no one to miss the kids, when I did what I did. It’s almost like this was pre-ordained and meant to be. Sometimes I feel like the puzzle pieces fell into place so easily that I was a mere puppet in this as opposed to being the ringmaster.

  “Time for the cheese platter,” he said and he skipped off to the kitchen, returning with a large tray that he balanced underneath Amelia’s nose.

  “But you can’t have any,” he said, singsong, “You can’t have any!” He popped a cube of smoked Gouda into his mouth and chewed noisily. “Now just so you know,” he said, “we don’t have supper together every night. The calories in this meal are enough to last you until the day after tomorrow. Maybe not you,” he said and he looked at Amelia. “Or you,” he said to Mike. “But you’ve both got meat on your bones. You might be hungry but you’ll survive and it will be good for you.

  “You,” he said to Mike, “will realize that your fears were nothing when faced with the fear of death by starvation. And you,” he turned to Amelia, “will long for routine and your granny and your lovely home life that you took for granted before.

  “I bathe you every second day,” he said. “And in case you’re under the impression that your loved ones will be alarmed by your disappearance, I’ve got that worked out too. While you were both sleeping, I found your car parked down the street and I drove it to a parking lot in the Niagara, and I left it there. Niagara! So romantic! I took your journal from your backpack,” he addressed Amelia, “and I copied your handwriting and you left a note that said that you and Mike were running away, that you didn’t feel that you could be together here, and that you and he were leaving. I left your cellphones in the car too, and I bought two bus tickets to New York. Two little runaways,” he smirked. “And the evidence to back up it too. I wore Mike’s football jacket and his baseball cap and I used his credit card, so there he is, on camera at the Greyhound terminal, buying tickets to whisk his beloved away into the sunset. But it does mean I’m down two more in my group,” he mused, “and really, that is not good. Despite the data I am collecting, this group hasn’t been one of my better ones. Oh well.

  “And now it’s time to tidy up and put you to bed.” He rolled a wheelchair into Amelia’s view. “Come on my love, you first.” He picked up Charlotte and put her in the wheelchair and he pushed her down the hallway. Then he returned and loaded Jason, putting heavy Bella onto the little boy’s lap and then he rolled them out of sight.

  Amelia recalled that the last time she had seen him having dinner with his family, that he had walked them back to their rooms. She wondered if Dr. Carroll had increased their dosage or if they were weakening. As if in answer to her unspoken question, Dr. Carroll pointed at the wheelchair. “I borrowed this from the hospital. Mike may be a pretty boy but he’s much too heavy for me to carry. And,” he continued, “I had to empty my study for you two. I had to move my things to the basement. And not only that, you’ve screwed up my stash of sedatives. I’ve had to increase the patient list and that’s not good. I didn’t want to do anything to draw attention to myself and now I have no choice. I just hope no one decides to investigate my outpatient study. And you’d better hope so too, because if they do, I’m leaving town and all of you will starve to death.”

  He wheeled Amelia to his former study and laid her down on a bare mattress. He returned with Mike and he turned them on their sides so that they were facing one another.

  “Two little lovebirds,” he said, tenderly. “Enjoy the view because you’ll soon be asleep.”

  He returned what seemed like hours later with two syringes and by then Amelia couldn’t help herself, she was aching for the escape. The hunger in her belly and the hopeless, nightmarishness of the situation made her long for oblivion.

  As the sweet softness filled her blood and the soothing darkness filled her vision, she welcomed the respite.

  17. MEGAN AND HENRY AND ETHEL

  “SHE WOULD NEVER RUN AWAY,” Ethel said firmly to Megan who drew hard on a cigarette and shrugged.

  “Henry, what do you think?” Ethel asked and Megan barked a laugh.

  “You use the word ‘think’ loosely, I gather,” she said.

  Ethel glared at her. “I didn’t bring you up to be rude, Megan, and if you insist on it, then please leave the room.”

  “She’s my daughter too,” Megan said and Ethel and Henry exchanged a look.

  “You two can think whatever you like,” Megan said, exhaling two streams of smoke out of her nostrils. “I do care. And although I find it hard to believe she’d commit to a boy, I do think she ran away. You saw the note.”

  “It would be easy to fake her writing,” Ethel said.

  “But who would do that? And they left their cellphones. And they bought two tickets to New York.”

  “Amelia has never expressed an interest in New York,” Ethel said and Henry agreed.

  “Maybe her boyfriend did.”

 
“I don’t know,” Henry volunteered. “He looked quite straitlaced to me.”

  “You met him?” Megan was astounded.

  “Yes. At the hospital. He seemed like a nice boy. Too ordinary for Amelia, but nice. I can’t see him running off. He didn’t strike me as the type.”

  “And Amelia told me he was very career-orientated,” Ethel said. “She said he was in the group because he struggled with public speaking, which interfered with his entrepreneurship, which made me smile because it sounded so earnest. He wants to be the next Steve Jobs apparently.”

  “From what I saw, he’s heading for disappointment,” Henry said.

  “Did they see them on the security cameras?” Megan interrupted. “Buying the tickets for New York?

  “The cameras weren’t working that night,” Ethel said. “The police said they are broken more often than not.”

  “Here’s what I don’t get,” Megan mused. “Why leave the car? Why not sell the car? They don’t have any money and they haven’t made any ATM withdrawals even though their bank cards are missing. How have they bought food or got a hotel or anything?” She sat down. “I’m really starting to worry,” she said.

  “About time,” Ethel remarked.

  “So what can we do?”

  “Nothing,” Henry said. “That’s what makes it worse. The police don’t seem to care at all and they’ve bought the story that they ran away, hook, line, and sinker”

  “What about Mike’s family?” Megan asked.

  “They’re extremely worried,” Ethel said. “We’ve spoken a few times.”

  Again Megan was surprised. “When? Where was I?”

  “At the gym or not taking it seriously yet,” Ethel said.

  “Take me through it again,” Megan said. “Start right at the beginning.”

  “I was in hospital and Henry was there,” Ethel said patiently. “That was the Friday. Amelia and Mike came to visit and then they left. I didn’t hear anything from her on Saturday and I didn’t worry, but then the following day, I got worried. I phoned her five or six times and her phone went to voice mail, which it never does. Henry was with me the whole time and we didn’t know what to do. I phoned the police from the hospital on Sunday afternoon and they told me I had to wait before I could file a report and was I sure she was missing? I told them she has never been out of touch for this long and that she was with a young man named Mike but I didn’t know his last name. Because it was the weekend, they said I should wait, because plenty of young people get up to shenanigans on the weekend, and they would come home on Sunday night.