“How did it happen?”
I took a deep breath and told her about the earrings and the bathtub. But not the unlocked front door. Or the box in my closet that I didn’t remember taking down. One thing at a time.
“Has anything like that happened before?”
“Like what?” I scanned the books on her shelves; the diagnostic manual, pharmacological volumes, journals. Nothing interesting or unusual. It could have been anyone’s office. There was no personality.
Dr. Maillard paused before answering. “Was last night the first time you’ve been in the hospital?”
I narrowed my eyes at her. She sounded more like a lawyer than a psychiatrist. “Why ask if you already know the answer?”
“I don’t already know the answer,” Dr. Maillard said, unruffled.
“My mother didn’t tell you?”
“She told me that you moved here recently because you experienced a trauma back in Rhode Island, but I didn’t get a chance to speak with her for very long. I had to switch one of my other patients to see you on such short notice.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Dr. Maillard furrowed her eyebrows. “There’s nothing to be sorry for, Mara. I just hope I can help.”
I hoped so too, but I was starting to doubt it. “What do you have in mind?”
“Well, you can start by telling me if you’ve ever been in the hospital before,” she said, clasping her hands in her lap. I nodded.
“What for?” She looked at me with only casual interest. She wrote nothing down.
“My friends died in an accident. My best friend. I was there, but I wasn’t hurt.”
She looked confused. “Why were you in the hospital, then?”
“I was unconscious for three days.” My mouth didn’t seem to want to form the word “coma.”
“Your friends,” she said slowly. “How did they die?”
I tried to answer her, to repeat what my mother had told me, but had trouble with the words. They were buried in my throat, just beyond my reach. The silence grew more and more awkward as I struggled to pull them out.
Dr. Maillard leaned in. “It’s okay, Mara,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me.”
I took a deep breath. “I don’t remember how they died, honestly.”
She nodded her head. A strand of dark blond hair fell over her forehead. “Okay.”
“Okay?” I shot her a skeptical look. “Just like that?”
Dr. Maillard smiled softly, her brown eyes kind. “Just like that. We don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to talk about in this room.”
I bristled a bit. “I don’t mind talking about it. I just don’t remember.”
“And that’s okay. Sometimes, the mind has a way of protecting us from things until we’re ready to deal with them.”
Her assumption bothered me, more than it should have. “I feel ready to deal with it.”
She tucked her hair behind her ear. “That’s fine too. When did all of this happen?”
I thought for a minute—it was so hard to keep track of time. “A few months ago? December?”
For the first time, Dr. Maillard’s demeanor changed. She seemed surprised. “That’s pretty recent.”
I shrugged and looked away. My eyes fell on a plastic-looking plant in the corner of the room that had caught the sunlight. I wondered if it was real.
“So how have you been doing since the move?”
A slight smile twitched at the corner of my mouth. “Aside from the burn, you mean?”
Dr. Maillard grinned back. “Aside from that.”
The conversation could play out a hundred different ways. Dr. Maillard was being paid to listen to me—it was her job. Just a job. When she went home to her family, she wouldn’t be Dr. Maillard. She’d be Mom. Becca, maybe. Someone else, just like my mother. And she wouldn’t think about me until I saw her next.
But I was there for a reason. The flashbacks—the dreams—I could handle. The hallucinations, I could deal with. But the burn upped the ante. I thought of Joseph, looking so scared and small and lost in the hospital. I never wanted to see him look that way again.
I swallowed hard and went for it. “I think something’s happening to me.” My grand declaration.
Her expression didn’t change. “What do you think is happening to you?”
“I don’t know.” I felt the urge to sigh and rake my hands through my hair, but resisted. I didn’t know what kind of signal it would send, and didn’t want to send the wrong one.
“All right, let’s back up for a minute. Why do you think something is happening to you? What makes you think that?”
I struggled to maintain eye contact with her. “Sometimes I see things that aren’t there.”
“What kinds of things?”
Where to begin? I decided to go in reverse chronological order. “Well, like I told you, I thought the earrings my mother lent me fell in the bathtub, but they were in my ears.”
Dr. Maillard nodded. “Go on.”
“And before I went to the party last night, I saw one of my dead friends in the mirror.” Zing.