The Screaming Season (25 page)

“This is what you’re haunted by,” he said. “You think your anger at your father is acceptable, even admirable, because it’s on behalf of your mother. But being mad at Riley seems, what?” He opened his hand to me, as if to say,
You’re on
. It was time for me to make him look even better.

“Pointless. It was just a crush.”

“It was a betrayal.”

“People our age hook up. They move on.” I tried to sound philosophical. It was what Jane had told me, afterward. She had expected me to get over it. All her lectures about using boys and never caring for them had zinged right over my head. I had unleashed my inner drama queen when I found out that she’d slept with him just for fun.

People hook up. They move on.
That was what she’d said to me when we ran into each other at the park, after my breakdown.

She also said that people who had breakdowns were weak. They bailed out of their problems by going crazy and forced other people to pick up their pieces. My breakdown annoyed her. And it cast doubt on her ability to pick the right people to allow in her presence.

“You really liked him. You gave him your heart.”

“Yes,”
Celia said inside me. I jerked. He noticed.

“Are you all right?”

I cleared my throat. “Yes.”

“Tell me about that night.” He leaned forward, giving me his attention.

“Jane wanted me to throw a party. I didn’t want to, but I did it.”

And I told him all the rest. About worrying about the broken glassware, and the carpet, and the noise. Knowing my dad hadn’t really wanted me to throw a party but was happy that I had a social life, so he let me do it. But people were OOC. At Jane’s, they followed the rules: cleaning up as they went, being respectful of her family’s things. At my house, not so much.

Someone had announced that my dad’s car was in the driveway, so the partyers had to terminate any nonapproved activity, including the couple—whoever they were—who had locked themselves in my parents’ bedroom.

When the bedroom door had opened and Jane and Riley stood there arm in arm, Jane had tittered and said, “Whoops.” She had slept with him in my parents’ room, on the throw I had knitted for my mother. Riley had the decency to look shocked and ashamed, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just done.

But I had heard laughter through the door, before I’d known who was doing the deed. He hadn’t been shocked and ashamed then.

I had known I was supposed to step aside and let Jane have him if she wanted him. But she didn’t want him. Wanting a boy implied you thought they had value.

“You fault yourself for taking this relationship seriously,” Dr. Morehouse said. “You weren’t sophisticated enough not to care.”

Jane had laughed at me. All the girls had. She’d said I was too young to hang out with “her babies.” And when I had refused to speak to Riley, she said I didn’t really care about him. If I had, I would have fought to get him back.

“You equate not fighting for this boy with the battle your father refused to fight for your mother. You think that if he’d loved her enough, he’d have done more to keep her.”

“Whoa,” I said again.

“And this disappointment runs very deeply. It’s a wound you’ve been ridiculed for having, and that you’ve been told is inappropriate.

“And now, another boy has betrayed you.”

He meant Troy. “Not really,” I murmured. “All he did was break up with me.”

“To the heart, that’s a betrayal,” he said. “We’re dealing with feelings, not rationale.”

“Betrayal,”
Celia said.
“By men.”
I felt itchy, as if Celia were scratching from the inside, trying to burrow her way out.

He raised a brow and cocked his head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t catch that.”

“I—I didn’t say anything.”

Itchy, and overloaded. Too full. Brimming over.

“It’s all right,” he said. “You’re safe in here.”

“I am not safe.”

And something in me blew. Everything I had been dealing with—or trying to deal with—overwhelmed me. It was too much, all too much; I started sobbing. My mind jumped from my father to Riley to Troy to Miles.

And from there, to David Abernathy:

It was December, and there was snow. The girls were freezing. They had no blankets. They were dressed in linen shifts, in preparation for the operation. They were moved through the tunnels so they wouldn’t sound the alarm. There were secret tunnels everywhere, to make them disappear. So the other girls, the lucky girls, wouldn’t panic and scream.

David and Celia had planned the escape. She would start the fire, as a diversion. They would help everyone out, he and the orderly, Mr. Truscott. And the horrible lobotomies and the starvation and the inhuman living conditions would end. There would be no stain on his record of service, and she would be spared.

He and she would escape together and be married, and no one would take her from him. Because she would be his, plucked like a rose from her father’s garden.

“My love is like a red, red rose,” he sang as they made their plans. As he kissed her and promised her that true love would win the day.

Stealthily, she stole the lamp oil that was left out—not realizing at the time that he was the one who left it for her—and the oily rags, and she hid them in her cell. She and the others were scheduled for the surgeries the next morning—Belle Johnson would be first, and Celia would be number seven.

But Celia would start the fires and save them all, even Belle, whom she despised for trying to take her David from her. Belle, who had tried to murder her in the hydrotherapy bath because she stood between Belle herself and David.

Soon the oily rags began to smolder, then to burn. But the fire traveled too quickly; drugged for the surgeries, the seven girls were having trouble staying in advance of the flames.

Then the door flew open and David appeared on the threshold. Celia held out her arms to him, joyful, terrorized—

And he pushed her back in.

To make her burn.

“Oh, God, oh, my God,” I gasped, snapping out of the vision. I was gripping the sides of the chair, rocking back and forth.

Across the desk, Dr. Morehouse held a box of tissues. When he saw that I was looking at him, he pulled a few sheets out of the box and passed them to me.

I twisted them in my hands. I couldn’t stop crying. Every part of my body ached. My head was throbbing. Even my teeth hurt.

He didn’t soothe me or tell me that everything was all right. He let me cry, and I wept as I had never, ever cried before. Deep, low, soul-shattering, heartbreaking.

Celia’s hair on fire, she burst through the tunnel wall beneath the operating theater. The tunnel wall was blazing, but she dared to run through the flames. The world was falling down into ash.

The sky shook with smoke and screaming.

“Damn you, Celia Reaves!” Belle shouted, left behind to die. “I’ll send your soul to hell for this!”

And Celia, on fire, every inch of her burning, ran.

To the forest, to the ground, to sizzle in the snow. And he found her there, and buried her . . .

“Let me out, let me out!”

Celia pounded hard against the prison of my flesh. I coughed and bent forward so that I could look into the polished wood of the desk to check my reflection. My eyes were chocolate brown. I was myself. Still, she kept fighting. I could feel her.

“When we’ve been traumatized,” he said, “we try to find a pattern. It’s human nature to look for a cause so that we can avoid it in the future.”

“Men,”
I heard myself say. Celia’s word, my voice.

“I’m afraid we haven’t given a very good accounting of ourselves.” He handed me more tissues. “I doubt you trust even me.”

“I’m sorry,” I blurted. I didn’t know what to do. He started to reach for my hand, then stopped. I knew about therapists and the no-touching rule.

“No need to apologize,” he said. “Now that we know where we stand, we can move forward. That’s a step in the right direction.” He smiled at his little pun. “We have to find ways for you to learn to trust me. And then I can help you. Are you willing to give it a shot?”

“Help me! Help me help me help me!”
Celia screamed inside my head.

Could he help us both?

“I’ll give it a shot,” I said.

“Good.” He turned on his flashlight and aimed it at the wall. I gazed at it.

“There is a path,” he prompted.

Fire! Fire!

“With geraniums,” I said loudly. “
My
path.”

“Yours,” he assured me. “Let’s count together. Ten.”

Nine.

TWENTY-ONE

“ONE,” I SAID, and opened my eyes. Across the desk, Dr. Morehouse gave me a concerned-therapist face.

“Better?” he asked.

I paused, and checked. Celia’s frenzy was over. So was mine. I felt calm and relaxed. Safe. And not quite so wounded.

“We’ll work on this together, once a week,” he reminded me. “We can’t do it all in one day, so you need to be patient. Today we just got started.”

“It’s just . . . ” I tried to find the words to describe how badly I needed this to be fixed,
now
. It could be a matter of life and death. Correction: it already was.

“Healing takes time,” he said. “It’s not like we can do something once and be done with it. There’s no shortcut. No pill, no shock therapy. No special surgery—”

“Like a lobotomy,” I blurted.

He looked at me strangely. “Miles Winters was just discussing that with me. It seems Marlwood has a sordid history on that subject.”

“He told me too,” I said. I cleared my throat. This was risky territory. I wasn’t sure how much Dr. Morehouse knew about the night I had lost it.
Why
had I brought it up?

“Well, luckily we don’t do that kind of thing anymore.”

“No kidding.”

“It was barbaric,” he said. “What makes it problematic is that in some cases, it did work.”

“A quiet zombie is a happy zombie.”

He dipped his head. “The people of that time suffering with severe incurable schizophrenia and chronic deep depression might agree with that statement.” He made as if to rise. That was my cue to leave.

“But that’s not you. You’re a runner, yes? You can’t run one time and be done with it. You have to run every day. You’re training your mind to think a different way.”

“Got it.”

“We need to substitute new habits for the old ones.” He smiled wearily. “Which can be pretty tough.”

I went outside into the fresh air. I didn’t realize that I’d smelled smoke in Dr. Marlwood’s office until I was outside. Or dreamed that I’d smelled smoke. It had rained while I was inside, and Marlwood smelled clean. I looked for Miles and didn’t see him.

I went back to my deeply depressing room and unpacked. Claire told me I was crazy to move in there. She stayed in the doorway and wouldn’t come in.

“They should clear out one of the extra rooms and let you move in there,” she said.

“It’s not exactly wonderful,” I agreed.

“I’ll leave the art for you. It’s original, from our gallery in Maui.”

“That’s sweet.” I smiled at her. “Thanks.”

Julie didn’t make an appearance. Marica told me everyone was mad at her. No one else believed I had broken the head and torn Panda apart.

“It’s like . . . she was picking a fight,” Marica said. “Just
looking
for something to blame on you.” I agreed with that. Julie had wanted to dump me. Her destroyed possessions provided an excellent reason to do it.

“THEY THINK
YOU
broke the head,” I told Mandy when I met her in the conservatory. “You or one of your henchpersons.”

Mandy wrinkled her bruised forehead as she poured us each a glass of wine. She had given up on wearing a bandage, and the bumps and purple blotches were spectacular. It amazed me how much abuse a body could take and still function.

The goblets we were using were cut glass, with flat bevels bearing an
M
in the center—for Marlwood or Mandy, I wasn’t certain. Someone must have swept up the evidence of our last meeting. No one said a word about shattered glasses or drips of Bordeaux red on the fireplace stone.

“We did rip up the mattress last semester. Actually, Kiyoko did it.” She grimaced. “I told her it was going too far. She was OOC.” I thought it was convenient that she could pin the blame on someone who was no longer here. But I glossed over it. I had more pressing matters to discuss. I just wasn’t sure how to explain what I knew.

“I got sent to see Dr. Morehouse,” I continued. “After Julie found the head.”

She nodded. “I’m scheduled for tomorrow.”

I filed that away. “I mean, it was an extra visit, because Julie threw me out. Anyway, I was in the hall, and I heard him talking to someone in his office. And whoever it was, was freaking out. So... ” I trailed off.