The Evolution of Mara Dyer

15

SO PHOEBE THE PSYCHO SCRATCHED MY EYES OUT. Not Jude.

I was relieved and angry at once. Jude took the pictures and made sure I found them today, and that was terrifying and awful, yes.

But I was glad he hadn’t scratched out my eyes. I didn’t know quite why, but I was.

Phoebe drifted away before I could say anything else. I took a deep breath and followed Dr. Kells down the long corridor, but it felt like the walls were closing in. Phoebe had unbalanced me, and I had to get control.

After what seemed like a ten-mile walk, I reached an open door near the end of the hall. Dr. Kells had already gone inside.

The room was white like all the others, and the only furniture in it was a blond wood desk and two white chairs dwarfed by the open space. Dr. Kells stood behind the desk, and a man was by her side.

She smiled at me and gestured to one of the chairs. I obediently went to sit but almost missed it. Weird.

“How did your tour go?” she asked me.

“Fine,” I lied again.

“Wonderful. I’d like to introduce you to Dr. Vargas.” The man next to her smiled. He was young—in his twenties, probably, with curly hair and glasses. He looked sort of like Daniel, actually.

“Dr. Vargas is a neuropsychologist. He works with some of our students who have suffered from head trauma and other acute illnesses that are causing them problems.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

“You too.” Still grinning, he moved behind me toward the door. “Thank you, Dr. Kells.”

“My pleasure.”

He closed the door, and then she and I were alone. Dr. Kells rose from behind her desk and sat in the chair next to me. She smiled. She didn’t have a pen or paper or anything with her. She just . . . watched.

The air felt heavy and my thoughts became slow as seconds stretched into minutes. Or maybe they didn’t; time was elastic in the giant empty room. My eyes darted around, searching for a clock, but there didn’t seem to be one.

“So,” Dr. Kells finally said. “I think we should begin by talking about why you’re here.”

Showtime. I reached into my memory to recall the symptoms of PTSD to make sure whatever I divulged mimicked that diagnosis and not schizophrenia. Or worse.

“I’m here,” I said carefully, “because I survived a trauma. My best friend died.” Meaningful pause. “It’s been really hard for me, and I keep thinking about it. I’ve had hallucinations. And flashbacks.” I stopped. Would that be enough?

“That’s why your family moved to Florida,” Dr. Kells said.

Yes. “Right.”

“But that’s not why you’re here in this program.”

I swallowed. “I guess I’m still not over it.” I tried to sound innocent, but I just sounded nervous.

She nodded. “No one expects you to be. But what I’m asking is whether or not you understand why you’re here. Now.”

Ah. She wanted to hear about Jude—that I believed he was alive. I had to answer her, but it was a dangerous tightrope to walk. If I spoke too carefully, she’d realize that I was manipulating her. But if I spoke too candidly, she could decide that I was crazier than I actually was.

So I said, “My father was shot. I—I thought he might die. And I freaked out. I went to the police station and just started screaming. I wasn’t—I didn’t feel like myself. It’s been a lot to deal with.” My stomach churned. I hoped she’d move on.

She didn’t. “At the police station, you mentioned your boyfriend. Jude.”

I hated hearing his name. “Ex,” I said.

“What?”

“Ex-boyfriend.”

“Ex-boyfriend,” she repeated, giving me that same look I’d seen on Dr. West’s face a few days ago. “You mentioned your ex-boyfriend, Jude. You said that he’s here.”

The words FOR CLAIRE appeared in red on the white wall behind Dr. Kells’s head. I felt a jolt of terror before I blinked them away.

“The information in your file says that your boyfriend, Jude—ex-boyfriend, I’m sorry—and your friends Rachel and Claire died in the collapse of the Tamerlane State Lunatic Asylum in Rhode Island.”

“Yes.” My voice was a whisper.

“But you said that Jude’s here,” she repeated.

I said nothing.

“Have you seen him since that night, Mara?”

I was stone. I modulated my voice. “That would be impossible.”

Dr. Kells rested her elbow on her desk and her chin in her hand. She looked at me with sympathy. “Do you want to know what I think?”

Dazzle me. “I can’t imagine.”

“I think that you feel guilty about your best friend’s death. About your boyfriend’s death.”

“Ex!” I screamed. Shit.

Dr. Kells didn’t flinch. Her voice was calm. “Did something happen with you and Jude, Mara?”

I was breathing hard but I hadn’t realized it. I closed my eyes. Control yourself.

“Please tell me the truth,” she said softly.

“What does it matter?” A tear rolled down my cheek. Damn it.

“It’s going to be so much harder to help you otherwise. And I really do want to help you.”

I was silent.

“You know,” Dr. Kells said, leaning back in her seat. “Some teens have been in this program for years; they started here and then moved to our residential center, and they’ve been there ever since. But I don’t think you need that. I think this is just a way station for you. To help you get back to where you’re supposed to be. You’ve been derailed by everything that’s happened in the past six months—and that’s understandable. You survived a catastrophic accident.”

Not an accident.

“Your best friend died.”

I killed her.

“You moved.”

To try and forget what I did.

“Your teacher died.”

Because I wanted her to.

“Your father was shot.”

Because I forced someone’s hand.

“That’s more trauma than most people are faced with in a lifetime, and you’ve experienced it within six months. And I think it will help you to talk about it with me. I know you’ve seen other therapists before—”

Ones I liked better.

“But you’re here now, and I think that even though you don’t want to be here, you might find that it isn’t a waste of your time.”

The tears were flowing steadily now. “What do you want me to say?”

“What happened with Jude?”

My throat felt raw, and my nose itched from crying. “He—kissed me. When I didn’t want him to.”

“When?”

“That night. The night he—”

Died, I almost said. But he didn’t die. He was still alive.

“Did he do anything else?”

“He tried to.” And so I told Dr. Kells about that night, and what Jude tried to do.

“Did he rape you?” she asked.

I shook my head fiercely. “No.”

“How far did it go?”

My face flooded with heat. “He pushed me against the wall but . . .”

“But what?”

But I stopped him. “The building collapsed before anything else happened.”

Dr. Kells cocked her head to one side. “And he died, and you lived.”

I said nothing.

She leaned forward just slightly. “Does Jude ever tell you to do things you don’t want to do, Mara?”

I wanted to shake her. She thought he was some imaginary devil sitting on my shoulder, whispering evil thoughts in my ear.

“Do you think Jude is alive?” she asked again.

I wanted to take her by the collar of her perfectly pressed silk blouse and scream, “He is alive!” in her face. It took a mammoth force of will just to say the word, “No.”

Dr. Kells sighed. “Mara, when you lie, I have to adjust your course of treatment for that. I don’t want to have to treat you like you’re a pathological liar. I want to be able to trust you.”

She wouldn’t trust me if I told her the truth, but at the moment, I wasn’t convincingly lying. “I don’t think he’s alive,” I said, steadily. “I know he isn’t. But sometimes . . .”

“Sometimes . . .”

“Sometimes it scares me, you know?” I hedged. “The idea that he might be? Like a monster hiding in my closet, or under the bed.” There. Maybe that would give her what she wanted without making me sound like too much of a lunatic.

She nodded her head. “I understand completely. I think your fear makes sense, and it’s something I’d like to work on during your time here.”

I exhaled with relief. “Me too,” I lied again.

“Let’s say, hypothetically, that Jude didn’t die in the asylum.”

I didn’t mean I wanted to work on it today. “Okay . . .”

“Let’s say he’s in Florida.”

“Okay . . .”

“What do you think he’d be doing here? What’s your fear?”

I was in dangerous territory, but I didn’t know how to evade the question. “That he’s—that he would be stalking me.” Which he was.

“Why would he want to come all the way to Florida just to stalk you?”

The mutilated cat. The words on my mirror, written in blood. The pictures. My pulse spiked when I thought of them. “To make me afraid,” I said.

“Why would he want that?”

Because I tried to kill him. Because I killed his sister.

Those were the answers that came to mind, but of course I couldn’t voice them. I shook my head instead and asked, “Why would he assault me in the first place?”

“Those questions are different, Mara. Rapists—”

“He didn’t rape me.”

Dr. Kells stared at me a beat too long.

“He didn’t. I—” I stopped him before he had the chance. “He didn’t,” was all I said. “What were you saying?”

“I was saying that rape is about power, not sex,” she began. “It’s about using force or the threat of it to take control over another person.”

“So maybe, if he were alive, which he isn’t, he’d stalk me to show that he can control me. That he can make me afraid.” That fit.

Dr. Kells looked at me intently. “You’ve told me a lot of things, today, Mara. And I’m going to be thinking about them for a while. But if you’re interested, I can tell you what I’m thinking right now.”

I was about as excited for her insight as I would be for an enema. “Sure.”

“When you were at the police station,” she said, “you told the detective that you killed Claire and Rachel.”

Here it comes.

“That makes me think that you feel very guilty, very responsible for the death of your best friend. For moving your family to Florida. For everything that has happened to your family since. I think that you’ve experienced two traumas—the sexual assault by Jude, and then the collapse—and I think that, in some way, it makes you feel more powerful to imagine that you stopped Jude from doing what you thought he was going to try to do. And that for every negative event or coincidence that has happened since, imagining that you triggered them, that you made them happen makes you feel like you possess a degree of control that you don’t have. But subconsciously, you believe that you don’t have control; and that’s manifesting in your fear that Jude is actually alive.”

I wasn’t sure how I would manage staying sane while I was constantly being told that I was crazy. “That’s really interesting,” I said slowly.

“Can I ask you something, Mara?”

Do I have a choice? “Sure.”

“What do you want?”

I tilted my head. “Right now?”

“No. In general.”

“I want . . . I want.” I tried to think. What did I want?

To go back? To when my biggest problem was that Claire was trying to steal my best friend? To rewind to before I even met Claire? And Jude?

But that was also before Noah.

I saw him in my mind, kneeling at my feet. Tying my shoelaces. Looking up at me with those blue eyes, flashing that half-smile I loved so much.

I wouldn’t want to go back to before him. I didn’t want to lose him. I just wanted—

“To be better,” I said finally. For my family. For Noah. For myself. I wanted to worry about things like early admission, not involuntary commitment. I would never be normal but maybe I could figure out how to live a somewhat normal life.

“I’m so glad to hear you say that,” Dr. Kells said, and stood up. “We can help you be better, but you have to want it, or there’s nothing we can do.”

I nodded and tried to stand too, but stumbled. I tried to lean against the desk to steady myself, but my synapses were slow, and I just hunched.

Dr. Kells rested a hand on my back. “Are you feeling ill?”

I heard an echo of her words—in someone else’s voice.

In my mind.

I blinked. Dr. Kells’s eyes were full of concern. I managed to nod but the movement blurred my thoughts. What was wrong with me?

“What’s the matter?” Dr. Kells asked. She looked at me curiously and I felt strange. Like she was waiting for something to happen.

I felt paranoid. Suspicious.

As I tried to speak, she shifted out of focus.

“Water?” she asked, and I heard an echo again, from far away.

I must have nodded because Dr. Kells helped me sit and said she’d be right back. I heard the door open behind me, then close.

And then I blacked out.