Wake for Me (Life or Death Series) (21 page)

Of course, like most of his attempts at saving people, Sam’s good intentions hadn’t succeeded in bettering the outcome. Because of his gallant lie, he’d had to watch his mother wait, year after year. Watching for the day when her husband would come back, after he was finally finished ‘dealing’ with everything. But that day would never come. Because Dad hadn’t left for them. He’d done it for himself. Because it was easier than staying and actually ‘dealing.’

Flipping through the channels until he settled on some pointless comedy—the kind so lame it came complete with a laugh track so you knew when it was supposed to be funny—Sam downed the rest of his beer and opened a second.

Even though he wasn’t scheduled at the hospital until six tomorrow night, he’d undoubtedly find himself back in the psych ward, first thing in the morning, on his own time.

Because really, Viola deserved to know that she wasn’t crazy. Hell, she was probably even right—she’d pegged him from the first time she’d opened her eyes. Sam was a caver by nature. A textbook quitter. Was it really his fault, though?

Giving up on people he loved did seem to run in the family.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.” –Sigmund Freud

“Let’s talk about your mother.”

Viola rolled her eyes. With his walrus-like face and jagged yellow tusks, Dr. Horace seemed to wait on her reply like a fish from the hand of a marine trainer. God, he was wearing on her patience.

“Isn’t that a little trite?”

She looked around the room, at the pale green of the walls—probably meant to be soothing, but only looking like a slightly more sea foam-tinted asylum—the gray steel filing cabinets, the cheap industrial desk and chairs. No location had ever been less likely to make her want to spill her secrets. Least of all the ones she’d never even really admitted to herself.

“In what way?”

“Well, come on.” Viola crossed and uncrossed her legs, re-crossing them again at the ankles. “Every passé head-shrinking session in every movie uses the same line. It’s
always
about the mother.”

“In my experience, it’s true more often than not.” Dr. Horace smiled, giving her that ‘I’m way older than you and therefore you should automatically believe everything I say’ look. Viola had always hated that look. It reminded her of Sister Baylor, her sixth grade home economics teacher.

“Alright,” she said. “You want to talk about my mother? I’ll tell you a…story about…my mother.” Furrowing her brow, she looked at the ceiling and counted to three. In her mind, she pictured a giant, old-fashioned typewriter. Whereas before, her brain had been a badly-alphabetized dictionary with a few missing pages, now she could pull the words she needed out of thin air, letter by letter. If she remained calm, and kept her focus, of course.

“The first time I got into trouble at school, I was thirteen.” Viola smiled, not because the memory was a good one, but because she was proud of the fact that she hadn’t struggled over a single word. “I talked back to a teacher, nothing major. But Sister Baylor sent me to the mother superior’s office, and they called my mom.”

“What did you say to the teacher?”

Viola fixed Dr. Horace with a direct stare, wanting to watch his reaction as she told him, because she had a feeling he would side with Sister Baylor.

“She told us that every woman needed to learn how to cook, because someday…she would be cooking for her husband and children. I asked her why my husband couldn’t learn to do his own cooking. Then I asked her…for that matter, why she was assuming that all women wanted to get married and have children in the first place. After all, she was a nun.” She smirked. “It wasn’t as if…the Lord cared whether or not she knew how to cook.”

“And that was when she sent you to the principal’s office?”
“Mother superior’s office,” Viola corrected him. And no, that had happened after Sister Baylor had yelled at her in front of everyone. After which, Viola had called her a ‘sexually frustrated 1950’s throwback.’ Or something to that effect.

“So, what happened when your mother arrived?”

Of course, he’d come back to that. The stinky old psychiatrist was like a pit bull with a chew toy, unable to let go of his original—and totally false—impression.

“Nothing,” Viola said. “She listened, nodding obediently, while the mother superior told her what a spoiled, disobedient little brat her daughter was. How I needed to learn humility and respect, because I obviously didn’t hold adults in high enough esteem. When it was over, my mother thanked her for putting up with me, and we went home.”

Dr. Horace nodded, like she’d just revealed something very profound about herself. He wrote something down in his notebook. Viola wanted to laugh at him.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“How much do you know about…dream interpretation?”

“Quite a bit, actually,” Dr. Horace smiled proudly. How anyone could be proud of that smile, Viola couldn’t imagine. “During my undergraduate studies, I wrote a thesis on Sigmund Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams
.”

Viola nodded. She’d just finished reading that one. But she wasn’t telling him that.

“So…” Viola chose her next words very carefully. “If I told you I’d been dreaming about…birds, for example. What would you say that means?”

“Oh,” Dr. Horace scratched his head. “Well, you see dream symbolism is an entirely different matter than dream interpretation. For those of us in the medical field, it’s looked down upon as a soft science; viewed more like palm reading or fortune telling. Symbols can mean different things to different people, you understand.”

Frustrated, Viola tried another track. There had to be a way for her to test him, without revealing too much about herself in the process. Without letting him in on her secrets, or giving him more details he could use to have her permanently committed.

“What if I had a dream about birds…falling from the sky?”

He eyed her speculatively. “I’d say that you were feeling disappointed.”

“Disappointed?” Was that it? For crying out loud, talk about vague. Who was giving science a soft-on now? “Disappointed about what?”

“Birds—and flying in general—tend to symbolize a person’s dreams—not in the sleep sense, but more their waking hopes and aspirations. To see them falling would indicate that you’re disappointed about something in your life not living up to your expectations.” He paused. “Unless, for you, birds have a particular significance? Something relating to your childhood, maybe?” Or your mother, his eyes added silently. Hopefully.
Viola shook her head. “No. No dead birds in my childhood.”

Dr. Horace’s beady eyes grew suddenly sharp. Damn. She’d given away too much.

“Oh, so they were dead birds? That’s a much more serious interpretation. It signifies a loss of self. Sometimes even a lack of faith in your own grasp of reality.”

Viola blinked. That wasn’t what it meant at all. But what did it mean for Viola, in terms of Dr. Horace? Was he just a hack, or was it something more sinister? Was he actually a liar, hired by Jacques to make sure she got a psychotic diagnosis? She’d looked up everything, and according to most interpretations, blue birds signified purification and ongoing struggle against conflicts.

“These birds…they weren’t deformed in any way, were they?”

She shook her head. “No, they were just regular, dead canaries.”

Canaries represented happiness. Harmony. To lie and say that canaries were dying in her dream was the equivalent of admitting to breathing and eating. Her parents had just died. She’d just broken up with Aiden, her first love—or whatever—and boyfriend of two years. Anyone would be sad. Let him try to make that sound crazy.

“Hmm…” Dr. Horace wrote something down, then looked back up at her as if he was annoyed that she hadn’t told him something more Clockwork Orange-like. Something that could give him grounds for a court order. “Do you have any other dreams you’d like to talk about?”

“Not really.” Viola folded her arms. It was official. She didn’t trust Dr. Horace any further than she could throw him. But as long as she kept coming to his stupid, pointless sessions, he wouldn’t be able to stop her from leaving in a few days.

“All right then,” he flipped the pages of his notebook in the wrong direction, maybe scanning for something she’d told him before. “Tell me about…Hannah Truitt.”

Immediately, Viola’s jaw clamped shut. After a few seconds of shallow breathing, she willed it to relax.

“Who told you about that?” Jacques. It had to be Jacques.

“It doesn’t matter,” Dr. Horace said sternly. “I’d like to hear your side of the story.”

Viola closed her eyes. Her side of the story. That was the worst side.

“Extra, extra!”
In her mind’s eye, she saw herself standing on the edge of the fountain, in front of the statue of St. Vincent Ferrer, the ‘Angel of Judgment.’ It had seemed so poetic at the time. Even now, Viola remembered the feeling of importance she’d had, looking down on the upturned faces of her classmates, who were waiting with baited breath to hear which name she was about to make infamous.
“Today’s scandal concerns our very own blessed virgin, Hannah Truitt.”

“I’m not going to break down, if that’s what you’re hoping for,” Viola said. Taking a deep breath, she forced herself to relay the facts with as little emotion as possible—even if doing so made her sound like a total sociopath. Crying and falling over herself about how sorry she was, or spewing excuses, wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference.

“That’s fine, Viola.” Dr. Horace was enjoying himself now. There was excitement hidden beneath his coffee-stained smirk of arrogance. “Just tell me how the rumor got started.”

Viola shook her head. Why was she even telling him this story? She could just as easily refuse, but some part of her never had been able to resist giving the people what they wanted. If they wanted to talk about her, she’d give them something to talk about. If Dr. Horace wanted to write about her in his stupid little notebook, well then she’d give him enough for a whole new thesis. That ought to keep him busy for the next three days, while she waited for her letter to take effect. While she planned her escape.

“It was something we used to do, back at St. Catherine’s. We called it the ‘Scandal of the Day.’”

“We?”

“My friends and I.” Viola waved a hand. “It doesn’t really matter who else was involved, though. I was the mouthpiece. I’m the only one people remember.”

The other girls didn’t matter on any level, not anymore. Like Viola, they’d all just been trying to survive the shark tank environment of an all-girl school. Unlike everyone else, though, her friends had been blessed with more resources and creativity. Especially when it came to putting would-be challengers of the social status quo in their place. They hadn’t kept in touch after graduation, probably because their tenuous alliances hadn’t been strong enough to withstand the survivor’s guilt. Like mountaineers who’d cannibalized their fallen brethren, there was a natural dread of reuniting with people who’d seen you at your most ruthless.

But Viola didn’t feel like explaining any of that to Dr. Horace. So instead, she stuck to the cold, hard facts.

“One of my friends said she saw Hannah going off alone with Dorian Van Allen at the co-ed Halloween party. The next day, a bunch of people asked her about it, but Hannah lied and said she wasn’t even there that night. We all thought she was being prudish, because she didn’t want to smudge her pristine reputation.” Viola shook her head, looking at the edge of Dr. Horace’s desk and its peeling wood grain paper, as she remembered.

The girls around the fountain had cried out in exultation, hungry for a sacrifice. But not just any sacrifice. Virgin blood.

“Dear Hannah might claim to be the patron saint of chastity,” she’d told them, pausing for dramatic effect. “But I have it on good authority that Dorian Van Allen from Gillcrest Prep has had his hand in the good virgin’s offering plate.”

As she’d looked across the crowd, basking in the gale of appreciative laughter that followed her oh-so clever play on words, Viola’s eyes had fallen on Hannah Truitt. She’d been standing at the back of the crowd, clutching—of all things—a Bible to her chest. Her face had been white, eyes round with horror, before she turned and ran away. It was a dramatic reaction, she remembered thinking, even for someone as straitlaced as Hannah.

Viola cleared her throat, bringing herself back to the present. “A few days later, Hannah slit her wrists in the dormitory bathroom.” She raised her chin, turning her expression into one of defiance, almost daring him to pity her or take her side. “She didn’t do a very good job of it, though. One of the nuns found her and called an ambulance.”

“And how did that make you feel?”

“Honestly?” Viola unfolded her arms, and re-folded them, tighter. “At the time, I didn’t think it had anything to do with me. Her parents had just split up a few months before. We thought she’d just had enough of all the drama. If it wasn’t for the note she’d left in her room, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Hannah wasn’t the first girl who’d tried something like that to get out of St. Catherine’s. Not even the tenth, probably.”

“What did the note say?”

Viola’s patience with his games was at an end. She sneered. “I think you know what the note said.”

“Indulge me.”

So his plan was to torture her into another ‘violent episode,’ was it? Well, nice try.

“It said that Dorian Van Allen had raped her the night of the Halloween party,” she told the psychiatrist, without so much as a quiver in her voice. “It said she was ashamed, that she was afraid if she accused him, no one would believe her. She didn’t want to take that chance, didn’t want anyone to find out what had happened.”

Dr. Horace was nodding. “But then, you went and told the entire school.”

There was a burning at the back of her throat. Viola swallowed. “That’s right.”

“And that was when you got expelled for the first time?”