The Hypnotist’s Love Story

by Liane Moriarty

  "Yeah, I did," said Jack cheerfully.

  "But it was absolutely nothing to do with you!" Patrick's eyes were glistening. He went to put his arm around Jack's shoulders. "Mate, Saskia loved you! She would have done anything for you! She--"

  Jack shrugged his father's arm away. "Take a chill pill, Dad. I know it wasn't my fault. You and Saskia broke up, like Ethan's parents did. I was telling you what I thought when I was a dumb little kid." He yawned. "Anyway, I might go look at my Guinness World Records book again."

  "We haven't finished talking!" protested Patrick.

  Jack rolled his eyes. "Whatever."

  "I just want to make sure you understand--"

  "You don't have to be so mean about her." Jack went to fold his arms and then realized he couldn't because of his cast. "That's all I want to say. You act like she's an actual murderer of actual people! She didn't break my arm on purpose. It was an accident."

  "Yeah," said Patrick tiredly. "I know, mate, you're right, but it's complicated--"

  "Hey, guys." Patrick's brother appeared at Jack's doorway. "I've got to get going. Meeting some friends."

  Jack took Simon's arrival as his opportunity to escape back downstairs. "See ya!" he said, giving his uncle a high five on the way out.

  "You two look totally trashed." Simon shook his head in wonder before heading back downstairs.

  "Thanks so much," Ellen called after him.

  Patrick stood up and gave his hand to Ellen to haul her up.

  She grunted. "Ooof. I feel trashed."

  Patrick pulled her to him and she rested her head against his chest for a moment. Her head swirled. Poor little Jack thinking it was his fault. Poor Saskia losing her lucky marble. Poor David being dumped by Mum for being boring. Poor me, because Patrick doesn't really love me and I'm having a teeny-tiny baby and oh my God in heaven my breasts hurt.

  "Everything is going to be fine," said Patrick quietly in her ear.

  "Is it?" she said.

  When they got downstairs they found Anne had given up on her halfhearted attempt to help Patrick's mother and was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a glass of wine while Maureen kept packing the dishwasher.

  "Well, I have to dash," she said when she saw Ellen. "Pip and Mel and I are meeting up for a drink. There's a new wine bar in the city we've been meaning to try."

  "You're going into the city now?" Maureen looked at the clock on Ellen's kitchen wall. It was eight p.m. "Goodness."

  "Oh, we three are night owls!" said Anne.

  It was like her interlude with Ellen's father had never happened. His appearance hadn't been a giant upheaval in Ellen's life at all, just an odd little ripple.

  Anne ended up leaving together with Simon, who coincidentally was meeting friends at a club on the same street as Anne's wine bar, and was thrilled to save on cab money into the city. "Well, that's just so nice of you, Anne," said Maureen unhappily.

  After Ellen and Maureen had finished clearing up the kitchen (Ellen's kitchen cabinets hadn't been so sparkling clean since before her grandmother had died), Patrick's father suggested a game of Monopoly. He'd spotted the box sitting on Ellen's grandmother's shelf and was rubbing his hands and promising to bankrupt them all within the hour.

  While George was setting up the board, carefully stacking banknotes into neat piles, Patrick asked if he and Ellen could be excused from the game.

  "We might take a quick walk on the beach," he said, raising his eyebrows questioningly at Ellen. She nodded. Maybe that would clear her head.

  "It's a cold, windy night in the middle of winter and in the middle of the night!" protested Maureen. "And your wife is pregnant!"

  "It's spring and it's half past eight," said Patrick. "It's quite balmy and I don't think the baby will mind."

  "And I'm not his wife," said Ellen.

  There was an uncomfortable silence.

  "Yet!" she amended hastily. "I mean, obviously, I will be."

  "Off you go then." Maureen gave Patrick and Ellen a swift, searching look, a specialist appraising their relationship for hairline cracks that might cause trouble. Then she rearranged her face and said, "After you come back, George and I might duck out for a game of tennis in the moonlight."

  "Ooh, my wife is so sarcastic!" said George. "Here, darling, I've got the iron for you." He held up the miniature iron from the Monopoly set.

  "You know perfectly well I always have the battleship." Maureen sat down at the head of the table and rattled the dice in her cupped hands. "Come on, Jack! Don't think I'm going easy on you because of one broken bone!"

  Patrick was right. The wind had dropped and it felt good to walk out onto the deserted beach in their jackets and scarves. The sand was still orange from the dust, but the salty cold air seemed dust-free, and they both took big, bracing breaths before tramping straight down toward the hard sand close to the water.

  They walked side by side without touching. Ellen concentrated on the rhythmic hollow sound of the waves crashing on the beach and her own breathing.

  "So," said Patrick finally.

  "So."

  "So that threw me for a six."

  "Jack."

  "Yes. I mean, I thought the fact that he never asked for Saskia was a good thing! It never occurred to me that he blamed himself for her leaving." His voice cracked. "Poor little tacker."

  Ellen had noticed that in times of stress Patrick spoke more like his father: the language of Australia in the 1950s.

  "Children think they're the center of the universe," said Ellen. "That's why they blame themselves."

  "I think," said Patrick, "that he's been angry with me about Saskia for years."

  "It's possible." Ellen stopped herself from saying anything more. He needed to work this out for himself.

  They walked in silence for a few minutes and then Patrick said quietly, "She was a good mother to him. She..."

  His words drifted away, and he looked up to the stars as if for inspiration. Then he took a deep breath and began to speak quickly, without looking at her, as if they were secret agents who had met on a beach and he only had limited time to brief her on this urgent information.

  "When Colleen died I didn't cope very well. I'd never felt that sort of pain before, it scared the crap out of me. I thought, What's this? This hurts! So my brilliant strategy was to resist it. I remember thinking, I'm not going through that seven stages of grieving bullshit. If it hurts to think about her, then don't. Get busy. That's why I started the business. I thought if I tried hard enough, if I was mentally strong enough, I could avoid the pain. So that worked out really well, as you can imagine. I was a walking, talking, breathing robot. But people thought I was coping great. They complimented me. And it was sort of true. I was coping. And then I met Saskia at that conference, and you know, I liked her; I probably even loved her, in my weird, robotic way. But she didn't seem to notice I was a robot! We'd be doing stuff, and she'd be smiling at me, and every now and then I'd think, in a sort of surprised way, she's really happy, she's not putting it on, she's genuinely happy. And I thought, Well, it doesn't matter, because this is who I am now, and Jack's happy-- Watch your feet there."

  A wave had broken farther in than the others and white, foamy water rushed toward them. Patrick used one arm to lift Ellen briefly in the air, saving her shoes, before depositing her back onto the dry sand. The sudden unexpected warmth of his body filled Ellen with a strange yearning for him, as if they weren't in a relationship, as if she was taking a walk with a nonavailable man who was just a friend.

  "Saskia took on so much of the parenting," said Patrick. "I blame Colleen for that."

  "Pardon?" said Ellen, confused, but somewhat happy to hear poor Colleen blamed for anything.

  "Colleen was a great mother, but she was very much, This is my territory. She was so condescending whenever I tried to help with Jack, as if I was an adorable buffoon, as if he wasn't really completely safe with me. So when she died, I was terrified, thinking, I can't bring up this kid on
my own! I'll dress him the wrong way, he'll be too cold or too hot, and I won't feed him right or buy the right nappy cream or whatever. I had no idea, and my mother and Colleen's mother were over all the time, taking care of him, and of course they were even worse than Colleen, as if no man was capable of changing a nappy. And then I met Saskia, and she seemed so happy to step right into Colleen's place, to take on the Mummy role, and I let her do that. I just sat back and let it happen. Jack loved her, and she loved him. I shouldn't have done that." He glanced over at Ellen. "Although, I don't know, maybe I'm doing it again with you, letting you make Jack's lunches."

  "I like making his lunches," said Ellen carefully. She could feel the presence of all those other women in Jack's life--the grandmothers, Colleen, Saskia--gathered around her, shaking their heads at Patrick and tutting, all thinking the same thing: You'd feed him white bread sandwiches!

  "Well," said Patrick. "I guess I'm trying to find a better balance this time. Not just handing over my son and saying, Here, you look after him. And when our new little baby is born, I want to be involved, right? From the beginning."

  "You've got more experience with babies than me," said Ellen.

  Patrick shot her a grateful smile. "That's right. I'll be the expert. I'll train you up, darlin', tell you what's what."

  "So, you stopped being a robot?" said Ellen. "Is that why you broke up with Saskia?" And are you still a robot? Am I just another Saskia?

  "One day, I started crying," said Patrick. "In the car. It was the strangest thing. I cried all the way from Gordon to Mascot. And it kept happening. Each time I was alone in the car, I started crying. Sometimes I caught people staring at me at traffic lights. This grown man sobbing away at the steering wheel. It went on for weeks. And then one morning I woke up and I felt different. Like when you've been really sick and you wake up and you realize you're better. It wasn't that I felt happy so much, I just felt as if maybe happiness was possible. And I looked at Saskia lying next to me, and I knew that I had to break up with her, that it was absolutely the right thing to do, that it needed to be just Jack and me for a while. It was just so blindingly clear to me. But she'd only just found out that her mother was sick, so I kept putting it off."

  "And then her mother died."

  "Yes," said Patrick. "And then I finally told her. I think I had this stupid idea that she wouldn't be that upset, that I was almost doing her a favor, because she could find someone who loved her properly. I was shocked by her reaction, and I guess I didn't take it seriously. It was like I thought, But you can't really have loved me because I haven't even been here. You know what I mean?"

  "I think so," said Ellen. She was a bit breathless. The more Patrick had talked, the faster he had walked, and she'd been struggling to keep up with him.

  "Sorry," said Patrick. "Let's sit down for a few moments."

  They walked up to the softer sand and sat down together facing the sea, their shoulders touching.

  "I think that's why I kept putting off taking out the restraining order," said Patrick. "Because, deep down, I knew I'd treated her badly, even though I didn't admit it, even to myself. I'd start driving toward the police station and I'd think, Geez, the woman toilet trained my kid. She put her career on hold so she could take care of him. I'm in debt to her. And then I'd think, Oh, she has to stop eventually. I should have taken her more seriously. I should have done something straight after Noosa, as soon as I knew you were involved. When I think what could have happened last night, to you, or Jack, or the baby." He shuddered.

  "It might not have made any difference," said Ellen. "Even if you had been to the police."

  Patrick lifted one shoulder in a "Who knows?" gesture.

  "Anyway," he said. "Enough of Saskia." He lifted his chin and looked at the starry sky. "Please God, enough of Saskia."

  "Yes," said Ellen, thinking of Saskia's white face and wondering what she was doing right at the moment, if she had friends or family visiting her at the hospital, and what was going on in her strange, mixed-up mind.

  Patrick took a deep breath. "Anyway, the reason I suggested a walk was so I could talk to you about last night and that, ah, thing that I said. About Colleen." His tone had changed completely. He spoke stiffly and formally, as if he was taking part in unfamiliar legal proceedings.

  "All right," said Ellen. Her stomach knotted, and she found that she actually didn't want him to speak about it. Words would just tangle things up further and make them feel worse. How strange. She had always thought words were the answer to everything; after all, she treated people with nothing but words.

  Keep those lines of communication open! That's what she always told her clients experiencing relationship difficulties. And now she couldn't think of anything worse than talking. This must be what it was like to be a man, his heart sinking each time a woman said, "We need to talk," thinking, Just shut up, woman! as she revealed her soul in all its naked glory when he really wanted her to keep it covered up.

  "The thing is--" began Patrick.

  Ellen said, "Is that your mother?"

  She could just make out the figure of Maureen picking her way carefully across the sand as if watching out for land mines.

  "Phone call for Ellen!" Her voice, surprisingly clear, floated down the beach. "She says it's urgent!"

  Chapter 25

  Friendship is the only cure for hatred,

  the only guarantee of peace.

  --Buddhist quote on Ellen O'Farrell's notice board

  In the end, Tammy left at the same time as Lance and Kate. She'd invited herself along to the movies with them. It was clear that they were all three going to become friends. I'd forgotten how Tammy had that childlike ability to make instant friends. She'd done the same to me years ago.

  A nurse came in to see me, just as they were all standing up to go. When she opened the door, everyone was laughing at something Kate had just said, and the nurse apologized and said, "I'll come back when your friends are gone."

  She thought I was a normal person with normal friends who were fond of me, who had rushed straight to my bedside when they'd heard I had an accident. She didn't know that Lance was someone I worked with but had never seen socially, who, to be honest, I'd never really even noticed as a person, and that his wife was a complete stranger to me, and their visiting me was really sort of odd, and that Tammy was someone I'd lost touch with for three years, and that none of the people there knew the truth about how I'd broken my pelvis.

  The really strange thing was that Lance, Kate and Tammy seemed determined to continue this performance. They all had plans to visit me again. Helping me through my six weeks of forced bed rest had become a project for them. I wondered, had they all signed up for some sort of self-improvement movement doing the rounds on the Internet--random philanthropic acts?

  Lance was going to bring me a portable DVD player so I could finally watch The Wire series. "You've got no excuse now," he'd said, with a gentle, teasing note in his voice that made me think he possibly, bizarrely, liked me.

  Also, Kate was coming back to teach me how to knit, of all things. This had come about because Tammy had said that I should use this time to do something I'd always wanted to do but never had the time for--like learning Spanish or whatever. I said that I'd always wanted to know how to knit, which was sort of half true. It was something that I'd always said I wanted to do anyway, without really ever having the intention of doing anything about it. But as soon as I said it, Kate's eyes lit up with the same evangelical glint that Lance got when he talked about The Wire, and she was now all set to give me knitting lessons.

  And it had somehow transpired that Tammy was going to live in my townhouse while I was in the hospital. Since she'd come back to Sydney, she'd been staying with her sister, who was driving her crazy, and so offering her my place had seemed the obvious thing to do. She was going to pick up clothes for me and bring them back after I had the operation on my ankle the next day.

  I wondered what she'd think of my ho
me. No books or pictures or photos on the fridge. If I'd known she was coming, I would have styled it in preparation. The bottle of wine I'd been drinking and the packet of painkillers would still be sitting on the kitchen table. Apart from that, every surface was bare and extremely, weirdly clean. The fridge and pantry were filled with functional food: milk, bread, butter. No biscuits or cakes, no treats at all. She would notice how I'd changed, remark on it. She used to visit me when I was living with Patrick and tease me about my domesticity: the cut flowers arranged in vases, freshly baked biscuits always ready in the tin. Now my home looked like it belonged to an obsessive-compulsive loner, a serial killer.

  After I'd eaten my dinner--it was described on the docket placed on the tray as a "light" meal, but it was actually the most substantial meal I'd had in months; I normally ate a bowl of cereal for dinner--I put my head back against the pillow and listened to the industrious sounds of the hospital: quick footsteps down hallways, the clunk of trolleys, voices rising and falling.

  Most people would have felt lonely, suddenly alone in a hospital room, but I didn't. I found the noises strangely comforting. This was my village. The village for sick, sad, broken people like me.

  The pain began to roll in again, and like a well-trained rat, I automatically clicked for more morphine.

  I wondered, as I habitually did, what Patrick and Ellen and Jack were doing right at that moment, whether Jack's arm was giving him a lot of pain, whether Patrick had been to the police about me. But the morphine made me lazy. My wondering was idle. I had no desire to actually be there, watching them.

  And then my mind drifted away from them, to Kate, Lance and Tammy, and whether they'd enjoyed the movie, and if they'd gone out to that Korean restaurant they'd talked about, and I imagined Lance and Tammy doing their Baltimore drug dealer impressions while Kate rolled her eyes.

  I think I actually laughed out loud before I fell asleep.

  "I didn't catch her name, I'm sorry," said Maureen, as she handed Ellen the phone. "Sorry to interrupt your walk, but she sounds like she's crying."

  "Of course, of course." Ellen took the phone nervously. What now?

  She cleared her throat. "Hello?"