Comfort Food (16 page)

I would have loved to have refused to talk, but then I’d be obstructing justice. Justice. As if anyone but me had any horse in that race. It was a crime against me, not the police, or the state, or the country. To force me to comply was just one more type of enslavement. So I did what I had to do. I lied.

I told them I never knew exactly where I was, but that one day he tied me up and blindfolded me, drove for what seemed like several hours, and then dropped me off on the side of a highway. By the time I got through the ropes and blindfold, he was long gone. I told them I’d found out, through hitchhiking, that I was in Nebraska and took rides from several people until I got home.

Of course, this was announced on the evening news along with a plea for anyone who’d picked up someone meeting my description on the route I’d described, to please call in with any additional information. A few people called.

Whether they were crank callers trying to get fifteen minutes of fame, or people who had picked up a hitchhiker and thought it was me, it was enough to cause the investigation to grind to a halt. There just wasn’t enough information to find anything.

I’d burned the clothing and shoes I was wearing, feigning naiveté and talking about how it was just too much, and I needed to get rid of the memories. No one knew about the storage facility.

The year lease was coming up, and I’d have to pay another year or switch to monthly soon. I wondered how long I was prepared to pay to shield my tormentor from punishment and if this wasn’t just another way for him to hurt me.

Once the business with the police was finished, I fell into a listless pattern of television watching. A few friends came by, but I didn’t have the energy or will to ask to stay with any of them. That felt too much like moving on with my life. My life had ended with him.

Everything was still too loud. Too much stimuli from too many sources. I longed for that nice, quiet room with the soft Middle Eastern drumbeats that thrummed through my body as the whip came down. To feel his weight covering me, his mouth on mine.

I’d forgotten how frantic the world was, how desperately quick everything moved, each person racing against their own clock. I was letting myself go, not taking care of my appearance.

I knew my career was over permanently. How could I ever
motivate
or
empower
anyone ever again? What else was left for me?

Strangely, though I didn’t care about my hair or makeup and wore a grungy T-shirt and shorts most days, I continued to compulsively shave my pussy bare every time I took a shower. It was my last remaining connection to my master.

At night, my hand would drift between my legs to stroke myself off. I don’t know whether I was trying to go back to him or whether I was just using an old insomnia cure, pleasure to induce sleep.

When I did sleep, he was always there. Even dreams of the bad cell most would consider nightmares held an odd sort of comfort because I knew he was watching and not far away. He’d come for me.

I’d wake around nine in the morning and then force myself to go back to sleep until I was getting up at two and three in the afternoon, all in the effort to stay unconscious as long as possible so I didn’t have to face the cold reality freedom had turned out to be. Three weeks went by like this until my mother took matters into her own hands.

“I’ve made an appointment with Doctor Blake,” she said one morning, “You know how much she helped me after your sister died.”

I stared at the television, watching an afternoon rerun of a trashy talk show. I didn’t take my eyes from the screen because I knew I wouldn’t be able to hide my contempt.

Sure Dr. Blake had helped her, which was why she hadn’t once mentioned I’d even had a sister since she died. Until just this moment.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes, I heard you,” I said.

“Well, are you going?”

“Oh, so you’re asking me now?”

She sighed loudly and tapped her foot on the floor. I rolled my eyes. I didn’t want more drama.

I’d been hoping to just curl up and die, but since that wasn’t happening, I was going to have to do something. If Dr. Blake couldn’t help, maybe she could keep me doped up. That was the next best thing.

“Sure, Mom. I’ll go.”

The shrink’s office was exactly as I’d remembered it. It was in the city, in a high-rise building on the fifth floor. Elevator music straight out of the fifties played nonstop, the same few songs over and over.

It was like a psychotic Prozac-addled pastiche. If you weren’t crazy going in, you were almost certain to be crazy coming out. I sat in one of the dark navy leather chairs and flipped through a magazine.

I’d had to convince my mother to let me drive. If I were suicidal I would have done it already. I didn’t have some pressing need to swerve into oncoming traffic. I wasn’t sure anyway how one could kill themselves if they were already dead.

I read the same article featured in every issue of trendy women’s magazines about shocking sex secrets. Maybe I was jaded, but every one of these articles shared the same tips in just a different order. And far from being shocking, or even a little naughty, they were tame and seemed the product of a stunted sexuality rather than the type of things written by a sexually vibrant and liberated woman.

There was one other person in the room, a middle-aged balding man waiting to see the other doctor in the office. He kept muttering to himself, and when I listened closely I could hear he was counting. I had no idea what he was counting, but I knew he was going to have some kind of fit if the rug remained crooked. He’d stared at it nonstop since my arrival.

Occasionally, he’d reach out his hand as if tempted to straighten it. Then he’d pull it back quickly. I wondered if he was wearing a discreet shock collar for behavioral modification.

Before I could observe more obsessive-compulsive behavior, my name was called, and I left elevator music hell to join Doctor Blake in her office.

She was even older than I remembered from when my sister had died. I guessed she didn’t plan on retiring. She’d go straight from this office to her grave, and God help the poor soul who tried to make it otherwise.

“It’s good to see you again, Emily.” She said it without it seeming to click in her mind what she was saying. Seeing me again almost guaranteed I was going in some way off the beam.

It amazed me someone so highly trained in human behavior couldn’t see her own. But I smiled politely and took a seat. The smile took more energy than I expected, and I was grateful to have a couch to collapse onto.

“I understand you’re having a hard time dealing with what’s happened to you.”

I stared blankly at her. Was this the part where I was supposed to pour my soul out to her? Just because it was expected?

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked, pulling a tape recorder from her desk drawer.

“I would prefer it if you didn’t record our sessions.”

I was uneasy about it for several reasons. Partly my semi-celebrity status. Recordings were more damning than notes. And also because it made it all too real.

She looked as if she might protest, but then her lips met in a firm line and she nodded, placing it back in the desk before retrieving a yellow legal pad.

“Very well then.”

She arched a brow at me as if questioning whether I would now take issue with her making notes.

I had intended to sit on the couch, but I laid down on it instead, pulling my feet up with me. On the outside I’m sure this behavior indicated some willingness on my part to surrender to the therapy process, but it was really a way to hide. Lying down, I could look up at the ceiling and not meet her eyes.

“Shall we begin?” she asked.

“Actually, I just thought maybe you could give me something; write me a prescription. Valium, Zoloft, Prozac, anything.” I wanted something to numb me out, make things blur around the edges a bit, but I didn’t say that.

“Emily, now you know that’s not how I operate.”

Then I was going to have to find someone who did. With all the outcry at shrinks who doled out prescriptions like legal and politically-correct drug dealers, surely I could find someone to give me my fix of normal.

She sat patiently waiting, her pen poised, her attention rapt. I laid there for several minutes, the silence stretching between us. I kept waiting for her to say something. She kept waiting for me to say something. It was a battle of wills. I glanced occasionally at the clock on the wall as the minutes dragged on much more slowly than they ever had, even in the bad cell.

I wondered if I could use up my entire session like this. A complete hour of blissful silence. There was a time the prospect would have been deeply uncomfortable to me. I wouldn’t have been able to resist the urge, the need, to fill the silent spaces with words.

Finally I did speak, but it wasn’t because of discomfort with silence. I don’t know what it was. It was the office, her patience, the comfortable couch, and the almost hypnotic lulling of the ticking of the wall clock. It was as if a trance had come over me, some sort of psychological possession that made me intent to spill, if not my secrets, then my feelings about them.

“I don’t fit anymore,” I began. “I don’t know where to go from here. There is my life before, and my life now, and there’s no bridge between the two. There is no way for me to go back to who I was.”

“What about your life when you were where you were?” She avoided words like
captive
and
imprisoned
.

I stared up at the ceiling. I’m sure another five minutes passed before I spoke. “I can’t tell you about that. It’s private.”

“What can you tell me about?”

I shrugged.

She decided to switch to a more direct question and answer approach, something easier and requiring less explanation on my part.

“How many people had you?”

“One.”

“Male or female?”

“Male.”

“You want to go back to him.”

It wasn’t a question. I bolted up from the couch and stared at her. Despite understandings of the victim/tormentor relationship, most people refused to accept someone wanting to go back after they were free.

“Yes,” I said.

“Emily, you’ve got your masters in psychology. You know what this is. You know it’s not real.”

Was that true? It was one thing to pontificate about nameless strangers, it was another to experience it. It was difficult to imagine that in my position Dr. Blake would see things in the same way she saw them right now.

Of what use was it to struggle to keep everything the same? People changed. Did the catalyst matter? I shrugged again.

“Can you tell me anything of what happened while you were with him?”

I shook my head. No, I couldn’t talk about that. It felt like betrayal. And I hated she knew that was why I couldn’t talk about it. I could feel her pity from across the room.

Poor confused Emily.

“I’d really like some drugs,” I said.

It was nearing the end of the session, and no progress had been made. For a brief moment, I imagined myself lying in a tub full of warm water while a peaceful buzz flowed over me, the bathwater going pink like Valentine’s Day from my blood. Her voice cut off the fantasy.

“I’ll tell you what. I’m going to give you some homework. I would like for you to keep a journal this next week of as much as you feel you can share, and we’ll discuss it during next week’s session. If you can do that for me, then we’ll talk about prescribing something.”

Blackmail.

It was the socially-approved equivalent of
blow me, and I’ll get you some of the good stuff
. But I only nodded.

She was scribbling furiously on the yellow legal pad as I got up to leave. I had no idea what brilliant insights she felt she’d gleaned from my psyche in such a short period. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

Since I had the car, I drove to the bookstore and picked out a journal. What the hell? I would go through my journal back in the Mercedes and copy the least revealing and private entries. I was sure enough emotion and trauma had gone into writing them.

I’d immediately rejected the notion of giving her the original journal. Besides being too personal, she might hand it over to the police as evidence. It was more violation than I could accept. I didn’t need more strangers trying to peer into the most private parts of me.

By the time I got to the storage facility, the sun was going down. I sat in the Mercedes crying as I copied journal entries while listening to the music I’d missed having for weeks.

I’m not sure how much time passed sitting in the car. Although the storage facility wasn’t on the main drag, I knew I took some measure of risk sitting there with the garage-style door open and the car running to play the music.

I copied several sections into the journal I’d just bought. It was heavily censored, but compared to today’s session I was pouring my heart out. It would be enough to get me medicated, then I’d switch doctors.

I didn’t need someone prying into my head, taking me apart bit by bit so they could put me back together again the way they felt I was supposed to be.

When I got home, I slipped the censored journal under the mattress of the bed in the guest room. Dinner was on the table, and my mother didn’t say a word to me as she dipped food out onto my plate.

No,
Where have you been? Why didn’t you call? I thought you’d driven into a lake or something.
She was gritting her teeth, but she was holding it in.

“Why the hell didn’t you call? Your appointment was for an hour. You didn’t think maybe I might need the car for something?”

Or not.

I didn’t say anything. Instead, I picked up my plate and took it to the guest room and shut the door. I clicked on the TV with the remote and scooted back up on the bed leaning against the wicker headboard.

I knew I was behaving like a twelve-year-old, but I’d learned from experience it was better to steer clear of my mother when she was in this mode.

I pulled the journal out from under the bed again. It was light brown with Celtic knotwork. I traced a finger over the delicate design with one hand, as I absently shoveled chicken casserole into my mouth with the other. I’d filled about thirty pages of the book, surely enough for homework and drugs.