“She’s the brick wall.”
“John,” Bree said, but she couldn’t hide a smile. “It’s not that bad.”
“If you say so, Chief,” he said. Then he gave us a salute and walked away.
CHAPTER
67
AT FOUR THIRTY the next afternoon, a Monday, there was a knock at the basement door. Closing my laptop, I got up, happy for the new client and grateful to have something beyond my own fate to think about.
I opened the door to find a tall and very attractive woman in her early thirties. Her hair was long, luxurious, and black, her skin mocha and flawless, and her exotic chocolate eyes were wide and turned up at the outer corners. She wore a tight black skirt, stiletto heels, a chic white blouse, and a simple strand of pearls beneath a black leather jacket. Lots of other jewelry. No wedding ring.
“Ms. Cassidy?”
Annie Cassidy smiled weakly, adjusted the cuff of her jacket, and said, “It’s so good of you to see me on such short notice, Dr. Cross.”
“Any friend of Father Fiore is always welcome,” I said. “Please come in.”
I stood aside, and she looked at me uncertainly before coming down the stairs. As she passed, she glanced up shyly before continuing on into my office, leaving the faintest smell of her perfume.
After I closed the door, I found her on my couch, fiddling with her iPhone.
“Just making sure no bells,” Cassidy said.
“I appreciate it,” I said, taking a seat across from her.
She set the phone facedown on the table beside her and then took a big breath and blew it out. “I’m sorry. I’ve never done anything like this before.”
“Just so you know: There are no judgments here. Ever. And nothing you say will ever leave this room.”
“Okay. Don’t I have to fill out forms or whatever?”
“You’ll do it electronically. I’ll give you the information after we decide if we can work together.”
Cassidy thought about that, said, “Fair enough.”
“So,” I said, picking up a notepad and a pen. “How can I help?”
She hesitated, squinted, said, “Are you a sleepwalker, Dr. Cross?”
“Is that what you’re having trouble with? If so, I can refer you to an excellent sleep specialist.”
Cassidy made a show of crossing her legs. “I’m not a sleepwalker myself, but I’m wondering if you are so I can understand you before I try to explain.”
It seemed like an odd and convoluted reason for the request, but I said, “I don’t think I have sleepwalked since I was a child.”
“Or since you were married,” she said, her head tilted in deference.
“I’m afraid I’m not following.”
“Of course not,” Cassidy said, and she smiled. “Sleepwalker.”
As I readjusted my position in my chair, I was thinking that I might have someone mentally unstable on my hands.
She straightened her legs and then crossed them the other way. “To be plain: I’m an addict, Dr. Cross, and I need your help.”
“Opioids?” I said with a sigh. “If so, there are better—”
“No, not opioids.”
“What then?”
“How does that old Robert Palmer song go?” Cassidy asked, smiled, and then sang quietly, “‘Might as well face it, you’re addicted to love.’”
Her happiness vanished. “That’s the long and short of what’s wrong with me, Dr. Cross. I’m a straight-up, strung-out, love junkie if ever there was one.”
CHAPTER
68
I’D HEARD AND encountered pathological love stories before, especially when unrequited desire and obsession were motives for murder. But in the hour that followed, Annie Cassidy gave me a crash course in the little-studied, rarely discussed world of love junkies and so-called sleepwalkers like me.
Cassidy told me she was like most of the love junkies she knew in that, as a little girl, she’d bought hook, line, and tiara into the myth of the fairy-tale princess. Cassidy’s mother dressed her up as a princess when she was young. She entered Cassidy in beauty pageants. And every night before bed, she read her daughter fairy tales where Prince Charming always appeared to scoop the princess out of her poor Cinderella life and ride her into the happily ever after on the back of his valiant white steed.
As I listened, I realized this story was a variation of the princess story the computer geek at Catholic University had told me as a way of explaining the minds of blond women, but I kept my mouth shut and kept an open mind.
“All my life, I dreamed of happily ever after,” Cassidy said wistfully as she sat back on the couch. “When Kevin appeared in my life, senior year at NYU, I was sure he was my Prince Charming. I’d never felt like that with anyone before. Breathless. Sick when we were apart. And when we were together, I could hold his hand, feel his love coursing through me, and tell him every dark secret in my heart. Is that what falling in love was like for you, Dr. Cross?”
I thought of Bree and me in our early days, how smitten I’d been by her, breathless and tongue-tied after our first kiss, and how euphoric we were to be together after we’d been apart.
“Yes,” I said. “We couldn’t get enough of each other.”
“Roughly two years of that, right? Like there’s no one else in the world who matters?”
I smiled. “Yes.”
“That’s because when you fall in love, there’s a chemical cocktail mixing in your brain. First it’s norepinephrine, and then the serotonins kick in, give you wild energy. It’s like bathing your brain in cocaine.”
“I think that’s right,” I said.
“You would do almost anything for that feeling once you have it. You might do crazy things that no sane person would do. Like abdicate a throne. Or walk away from your family, your life, just to be with your new love.”
Cassidy said she and Kevin fell into that kind of passionate love. They married after college and were still living the romance two years later.
Their third year together, however, Kevin began working longer hours, and when he was home, he was too tired to do much beyond sit in front of the television with his computer in his lap. He gained weight. He lost interest in her.
She grew more frustrated, in part because, while the chemicals of falling in love carry with them the rush of amphetamines, the chemicals of long-term love are more like a gentle opioid calming the brain, sedating it, in a sense.
“In retrospect, there was that, for sure,” Cassidy said. “I felt groggy all the time, like a sleepwalker. Even through the haze, I could see that I’d screwed up. I realized I hadn’t married the Prince Charming in my fairy tale. I’d married the frog.”
That crushed Cassidy. She felt like she’d settled for less than the perfect love and the beautiful life she’d been promised. Shortly afterward, she met Chet, a man who came to work at her real estate firm. Chet was handsome and funny. They flirted. He listened to her. The chemicals of new love trickled in her brain.
“I came awake, alive again,” Cassidy said. “But I did the right thing.”
She said that many women raised in the traditions of the princess myth will ask for a separation from the frog, hinting that they might be willing to recommit at a later date. They string the frog out for years, punishing him with hopes of reconciliation dashed, unwarranted restraining orders, and false charges of abuse and neglect.
“It’s all done out of spite,” she said. “They feel cheated. The fairy tale is not true, so they take their rage out on the husband while getting some love chemicals on the side.
“But I absolutely did not do that. I did not play torture-the-frog just because Kevin was not Prince C. He could have easily turned out to be an ogre, am I right? The point is that as soon as I had a commitment from Chet, I told Kevin to his face that I had to be free to love and that I wanted a divorce.”
Cassidy moved in with Chet until the chemical attraction wore off, about two years later. Chet’s place in her heart was soon occupied by Steven. Twenty-six months later, she met Carlos, a deep sleepwalker, who was ten years into his marriage.