The Hypnotist’s Love Story

by Liane Moriarty

  That was the one time when she hovered on the edge of feeling something momentous: A sense of loss for everything that could have been? The family she never knew? Grandparents were her soft spot.

  "Your mother who read tarot cards?" said Ellen.

  He looked startled. "That's right. She did. It was a funny hobby of hers. How in the world did you--"

  "Your mother read my cards once," said Anne quickly. (Presumably David didn't know about the scoring system.) "Don't you remember? She told me she saw a journey to far-off lands in my future. I think she was hoping I would take a long journey far away from you. She didn't like me much."

  "I think she saw you as a threat." David smiled. "She was fond of Jane."

  "Was Jane your wife?" said Ellen, and then she'd flushed, because his wife had been the woman he'd cheated on when Ellen was conceived and Ellen felt weirdly culpable.

  David cleared his throat. "Yes." He lifted his cappuccino to his mouth. Ellen's mother tapped her teaspoon against the rim of her saucer. At the table next to them, two women were looking at a laptop together and speaking passionately about "poor response rates."

  "My mother died in 1998," said David. "She would have been fond of you. She would have been very interested in your choice of career."

  "She might not have approved of my existence," said Ellen, and smiled, to show that he didn't need to worry, none of this really mattered to her, she was not a mixed-up teenager, that it was all such a long time ago.

  "Still," said her father. He chewed on his lip. "Still..."

  He glanced at his watch. "I must run. This was a pleasure, Ellen. I hope we can do it again. And of course, I'd like to meet, perhaps, your husband-to-be, ah, Patrick, isn't it? That is, if you would like that."

  Oh, the awful strangeness of it all! It was just like the end of an Internet date, one where the man was trying to ascertain her interest in a second date, when he was pretty sure he had no chance but thought it might be worth a shot anyway.

  "Of course!" said Ellen, all false smiles, in Internet date mode.

  He'd kissed them both and left, stopping at the counter to swiftly, efficiently pay their bill. He was clearly a man who always automatically paid the bill.

  "So, what did you think?" asked Anne, her eyes on David's back as he left the cafe. He didn't look back. He was looking at the screen of his iPhone as he walked. There was something about the look in her mother's beautiful violet eyes that reminded Ellen of the expression on Patrick's face at Colleen's grave. Was it a yearning look? It made her feel grumpy.

  "Did you go to their wedding?" she said abruptly.

  "Whose wedding?" said Anne.

  "His. David's wedding to Jane."

  "Oh." Her mother had regained her normal posture and her voice had gone back down a few octaves. "Well, I did actually. Mel, Pip and I were all there. We were all in the same group of friends. A dreadful day. I felt so sick."

  "With guilt?"

  "Well, no. I meant because I was three months pregnant with you."

  "Oh, Mum." Imagine if that poor girl had known that one of her guests was pregnant by her brand-new husband.

  "I'm not sure why you're acting like this is a surprise to you," said her mother. "You always knew that he was engaged to someone else."

  "I know I did," said Ellen. "I'm sorry. I just hadn't thought about the fact that you were at their wedding."

  She knew what she was doing. She was overidentifying with the bride. It was because she was subconsciously--no, actually, quite consciously--worried that she might be marrying a man who was still in love with someone else, albeit a dead someone else.

  "Did you ever think about telling him that you were pregnant?" asked Ellen.

  "Not really," said Anne. "I barely admitted to myself how much I cared about him. I repressed it--to use your language. I pretended I was the tough feminist who just wanted a baby."

  But I liked it when you were the tough feminist, thought Ellen. I liked it when you were so different from me. It made me more me.

  "I thought you'd find this all so romantic!" continued Anne. "I thought it was right up your alley! I said to Pip and Mel, Ellen is going to love this! And yet, you've been so strangely negative about it all. My daughter, Miss Positivity! Miss I-empathize-with-the-whole-world! Even your fiance's crazy stalking ex-girlfriend! Well, how about a little empathy for your own mother?"

  "My hormones..." began Ellen tentatively.

  "Oh, please. Don't give me hormones!"

  "OK," said Ellen. And then she knew what she needed to say. Her mother had just introduced her to a new man.

  "He's lovely," she said. "David, that is. Charming. Handsome. I really like him." It was actually not untrue.

  It was like switching on a light globe. Her mother had glowed. "I know!"

  And then they'd spent the next half hour talking about David's positive attributes in comparison to all the men her mother had ever dated.

  "Of course, none of those poor unfortunate men ever had a chance," said her mother. "I see that now. How could they, when I was still in love with your father? I was subconsciously holding back, wasn't I? I should have let you hypnotize me! We could have worked on my issues."

  "Like that would have ever happened in a million years," said Ellen.

  It had been strangely comforting seeing the snarky glint in her mother's eyes when she used the word "issues." It would have been just too much if her mother had started coming over all respectful of hypnotherapy.

  Now Ellen pulled up in front of her house and saw all the lights blazing.

  There would be no fumbling in the dark for the key. The porch light had been broken for years, but like so many other things around the house, it had been quietly, magically fixed by Patrick within a week of his moving in. She'd complained to the girls about his boxes in the hallway. She hadn't mentioned all the things he'd done to make life easier for her.

  She laughed when she saw the silhouettes of Patrick and Jack suddenly dash by the window, their arms waving in the air. We're home, she said to the baby. Looks like your dad and your big brother are still up.

  She put her hands over her stomach and suddenly, like a message from the future, felt an exquisitely painful, hot, tingling rush envelop her breasts. It was a revelation that her body could experience such new sensations.

  "Hi, in there." This time she spoke out loud. "That sort of hurts. But that's OK, I don't mind. You just rest up. Keep growing."

  There was that blinding feeling of joy again. A baby. For heaven's sake, she was having a baby with a man who adored her. None of the rest of it mattered.

  Chapter 19

  Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.

  --The classic conscious auto-suggestion created by the

  famous French psychologist and pharmacist (the "father

  of auto hypnosis"), Emile Coue (1857-1926)

  Did you sleep OK last night, Jack?" asked Ellen.

  It was a Tuesday morning a couple of weeks after the dinner with Julia and Madeline, and she and Patrick and Jack were eating breakfast. Patrick was reading the paper, and Jack was being uncharacteristically quiet. He was normally bouncing about at breakfast time, as if he'd banked up a whole lot of thoughts through the night and they all had to come spilling out as he ate his cornflakes, but today he was dully banging his spoon against the side of his bowl, and Ellen noticed shadows under his eyes. They looked especially wrong on his smooth little boy face.

  "I had a really big long dream," said Jack. "It went on and on for, like, the whole night. It was like a movie that went on forever."

  "Huh," said Patrick without looking up from his newspaper. "Eat your breakfast."

  "What was the movie in your dream about?" asked Ellen.

  "Armageddon," said Jack.

  Patrick put his paper down and raised an eyebrow at Ellen. "Do you even know what that means?" he asked Jack

  "Yeah, of course," said Jack. He looks pale, thought Ellen. "It means the en
d of the world. I've been looking it up on the Internet."

  "I'm sure you picked up lots of sensible stuff there," sighed Patrick.

  "Yeah," said Jack obliviously. "It's coming, you know. Armageddon."

  "Well, it's not," said Patrick.

  "How do you know?" said Jack. "You said just the other day that you don't know everything."

  Patrick briskly folded up his newspaper. "I know this."

  "In my dream everyone I know died," said Jack. "It was pretty scary." He stood up and took his half-eaten bowl of cereal over to the sink. "I'll have to tell Ethan about the dream. We've got an Armageddon Club."

  Patrick shook his head. "I was in a spy club when I was at school. Can't you change your club to a spy club?"

  Jack looked at his father like he was deranged. "No, Dad, I really could not do that." He sounded like he was about thirty: a stressed-out business executive who could not possibly take on another project, as much as he'd like to help out.

  He left the room, the weight of the world on his narrow little shoulders.

  "So, Armageddon, eh? That's a cheerful topic of conversation for breakfast, isn't it," said Patrick, as they listened to Jack clumping up the stairs to his room.

  He took his own plate to the sink and smiled at her. "Are you excited?"

  They were going for Ellen's first ultrasound.

  "Yes," said Ellen. "I can't wait to see it. At the moment this baby just feels like some sort of horrendous stomach bug. I want proof that there's an actual baby making me feel so sick."

  She thought, Please don't say anything about Colleen's lack of nausea or Colleen's first ultrasound.

  Patrick went to speak and Ellen interrupted him hurriedly, afraid she might scream if the word "Colleen" came out of his mouth.

  "So you remember it's at eleven o'clock? You'll meet me there? At the ultrasound place?"

  "That's what I was about to say," said Patrick. "We can go together. After I drop Jack off at school, I'm going to come back here and finally move those boxes. When I woke up this morning, I thought, What's the point of working for myself if I can't take a few hours off when I need it? And you've put up with those boxes for long enough."

  Before Ellen had a chance to answer, Jack called from upstairs. "Da-aaad!"

  "Better go see what Mr. Armageddon wants," said Patrick. He paused and frowned. "I wonder if the club was his idea. What would make a kid develop an interest in Armageddon? What do you think? Isn't it a bit--"

  "Da-adddd!" The first time Jack had shrieked like this Ellen had gone skidding down the hallway, her heart pounding, assuming he was lying in a pool of his own blood. Now she knew better. He'd probably lost a sock.

  "I'm coming!" roared back Patrick, and he went clumping up the stairs in exactly the same way as his son, except possibly even louder.

  Ellen put down her spoon and contemplated her porridge and her conscience.

  He was taking the morning off work to move the boxes.

  She felt herself smile: a satisfied, creamy, catlike smile. Oh, she was good. She was damned good. Every day, in every way, she was making him better and better.

  The smile vanished almost immediately. Oh my goodness, it was a wonder she wasn't waggling her fingertips together while tossing her head back and cackling fiendishly! She was a witch! A manipulative, unethical--

  But actually, that was all bluster. She didn't really feel any of that. Deep down she felt nothing but cool, crisp satisfaction for a job well done.

  The only guilt she felt was over her lack of guilt.

  It hadn't been planned; at least as far as she knew. She'd had no conscious intention of hypnotizing Patrick into moving the boxes. Patrick had been upset again about the client who wasn't paying his bill. "He doesn't return my calls or answer my e-mails," Patrick had ranted as they lay together in bed the previous night. "He ignores me, like I'm the one in the wrong. He treats me like I'm stalking him, like I'm Saskia!"

  "Do you want me to do a relaxation?" Ellen had asked. After the night before the proposal she'd stopped offering, and they'd been so distracted by so many things: the pregnancy, meeting her father, Patrick and Jack moving into the house.

  Patrick had been so grateful, and he was such a good subject; that was the thing. He was like Julia. He had the ability to focus and visualize. He was more imaginative than he knew.

  She got him to imagine himself climbing to the top of a mountain. He was carrying a backpack filled with the worry and the fury and the stress that the horrible client was causing him, and as he climbed the mountain he gradually discarded each one of those negative emotions, until he finally took off the backpack completely, and then he reached the summit, where he took in deep breaths of pure relaxing mountain air, and with each breath he went deeper and deeper into himself.

  And as she'd watched his forehead smoothing and seen his chest rise and fall as he breathed in so deeply, it felt as if they were together at the top of that mountain, breathing the same air. She'd talked about how that clean, crisp mountain air was going to help him take clean, crisp decisive action. "You'll do exactly what you need to do to get your life under control," she'd said, "whether it's calling your solicitor, or delegating paperwork, or moving those boxes that you've been wanting to move. You will systematically de-clutter your life, so that by the end of the week you'll feel completely in control, able to breathe, energetic and exhilarated, as though you're standing on that summit with your arms held high!"

  You cannot be hypnotized into doing something that goes against your intrinsic values or, in fact, into doing anything that you don't want to do.

  She'd explained that so many times to her clients.

  Patrick wanted to move the boxes. He wanted to get through his paperwork. He wanted to call the solicitor. He freely admitted that he was a procrastinator when it came to unpleasant tasks.

  Her own self-interest didn't change the fact that he would feel great once he'd moved the boxes.

  "Bribe him with sexual favors," Julia had said at dinner the other night.

  "Refuse sex until he moves them," said Madeline.

  Surely a gentle suggestion during an enjoyable hypnosis session was better than nagging or yelling or manipulating him with sex. That was so 1950s.

  Also, she had not instructed his conscious mind to forget her suggestion about moving the boxes. So he should be fully aware of what she'd said. She would ask him about it. "Did you mind me mentioning the boxes last night?" she'd say, lightly, casually.

  Once he'd moved them, of course. No point mentioning it until it actually happened.

  "Bye, Ellen!" Jack came running into the kitchen carrying his schoolbag.

  "Did you get your lunch?" asked Ellen.

  She'd taken over the making of school lunches when she'd seen what Patrick had been giving him every day: a slapped-together Vegemite sandwich on limp white bread (who ate white bread anymore? Wasn't it sort of against the law?) and a green apple. "He should have protein with every meal," she told Patrick. He'd protested, saying that he wasn't so sexist as to expect her to take on making Jack's lunch just because she was a woman, and he'd been in charge of Jack's lunches for years, and anyway, Jack wouldn't eat anything else, and wasn't Vegemite sort of protein-ish? But she'd insisted, surprised at her forcefulness. As soon as Jack had moved into her home she'd felt like his diet had become her responsibility. It had something to do with the sight of his heartbreakingly skinny little boy body. Every time she managed to get him to eat something healthy she found herself deeply satisfied, her mouth virtually chewing along with his, as if some innate, biological need was being met. At the end of each day she would mentally list everything that Jack had eaten during the day, as though she was presenting a report on his diet to somebody. It certainly wasn't for Patrick; it must be for his mother. This is what I fed your son today, Colleen: a good mix of complex carbohydrates and protein.

  Today she'd made him a tuna rice wrap and a little container of fruit salad to have with yogurt. Jack t
ook the lunch she gave him from the fridge without noticeable enthusiasm.

  "You could pour the yogurt over the fruit," she told him.

  Jack looked at her blankly.

  She sighed. Perhaps he was still worried about Armageddon, or else the poor child was missing his Vegemite sandwich. Her attempts to give him a healthy diet didn't appear to be paying off; he looked exhausted.

  "Are you feeling OK?" she said to him. "Maybe you should stay home today?"

  "Nah," said Jack. "I'm going to Ethan's place after school."

  She met Patrick's eyes over Jack's head. If she insisted Jack stay home, he would make a point of agreeing with her. He backed her up anytime she made the slightest show of authority.

  "Well, an early night tonight then."

  "Definitely." Patrick ruffled Jack's hair in that rough, loving Dad way. "And no more looking at the computer without adult supervision. We'll research spy clubs."

  Jack rolled his eyes.

  After they left for school, Ellen looked at her diary to check what appointments she had booked before the ultrasound.

  Luisa Bell.

  How sadly inappropriate that on the day she was going for her first ultrasound she was treating someone for "unexplained infertility."

  Or maybe it was happily appropriate. She would put her heart and soul into doing what she could for Luisa.

  A wave of nausea swept over her, and Ellen looked around for her "wellness stone." It was the pleasingly shaped white stone she'd found on the beach soon after meeting Patrick. She'd decided to use it as part of the self-hypnosis she was trying to handle the morning sickness or the every-minute-of-the-whole-bloody-day sickness. The idea was that every time she rolled the stone across her stomach her subconscious would help the wave of nausea to recede. The only problem was that she couldn't find the stone. The last time she'd seen it, Patrick had been tossing it up in the air while he walked around the house swearing to someone on the phone. The conversation had sounded too serious for her to say, "Hey, give me back my wellness stone!"

  She sighed and made herself a cup of ginger tea instead, while she imagined her mother snorting, "Wellness stone indeed; drink your tea!"

  An hour later Luisa walked up the path and nearly collided with Patrick, who was barreling out of the front door down the footpath with his arms stretched around a box of random items he'd announced he was donating to charity. He stepped aside for Luisa, nodded grimly at her, and kept walking toward the car. His brow was sweaty and his eyes were crazed. Ever since he'd got back from dropping Jack at school he'd been working at a frenzied pace, as though he'd been set an impossible deadline he was determined to meet.