I land headlong back into the moment and shudder, trying to get a grasp on my mercurial mind.
“It’s okay,” he assures me. “You don’t have to be frightened anymore. Those memories aren’t real. They were all products of delusional thought, caused by your illness.”
“But what illness?”
“The one that made your mind shut down.”
“What are you telling me? That I suffered from some kind of psychotic episode?”
He smiles gently. “For now, let’s not talk doctor to doctor. You’re used to being the one doing the diagnosis, but that will only confuse matters and make you more anxious.”
I look into his blue eyes, and a line of logic begins to sharpen. I connect with the exact feeling I had after first realizing that Donny Ray wanted to take Devon away. But as that sensation grabs hold, with it comes so much fear.
“You . . . you killed my . . . ,” I say, still attempting to narrow the gap between reality and make-believe.
He shakes his head. “You only thought so.”
Confusion sends my vision circling the room, and I notice a painting that hangs on the wall. As I stare at the image of a young girl wearing a blue dress, another surge of memory strikes through me, then a hazy recollection drifts to the surface.
“You and I . . . we’ve been talking all this time . . .”
“We have, but your brain couldn’t interpret our therapy properly. Your perceptions became mottled. It was in fact like looking into a mirror, but that mirror was cracked. Your mind was throwing distortions back at you.”
The reflections in your mind have been blinding you, Christopher.
“I . . . I don’t understand. Everything happened. I remember it all so clearly.”
“I know it very much looked and felt like reality, and in your state, it became nearly impossible for you to tell the difference. I’ve been trying to help you find your way back. It’s why you were brought here.”
Your fear is what brought us together. You know that.
“But something’s missing. What caused me to break from reality in the first place?”
Dr. Raymond frowns. He leans forward, carefully choosing his words. “Christopher, do you remember the car accident?”
“Which one?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Which accident? There were several.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “There was only one.”
I look away, try to process his comment, but when I come back to him, I’m just more confused.
Dr. Raymond settles back in his chair. He pauses and thinks before speaking. “You were driving with Devon. You tried to avoid hitting another child and ran off the road. Can you recall any of—”
It was just an accident, Daddy.
My eyes widen as two wires touch and spark. Awareness explodes, and a threshold collapses. Memories give rise as if waiting all this time to break free, to hit air, to meet the outside world. Memories I now realize have been with me all along, yet I simply couldn’t find my way to them.
I jerk forward and cover my face, but there is no hiding from this. There is only another awareness, a deep psychic pain as the tiny pixels come together, forming a picture of tragedy, the worst kind.
And your heart will break, Christopher.
My body rocks, shoulders curled over chest, hands grabbing for fistfuls of hair. “Make him stop, goddamnit!” I scream out. “Make him go away!”
“Let it happen, Christopher,” Dr. Raymond says in a voice of measured and professional concern. “Let it all come out.”
“I can’t!”
“You can. These memories are going to seem fresh and new, but they’re not. You’re just facing them for the first time. You’re integrating them. It’s painful, but this is a very big step, Christopher, and it needs to happen.”
It has to happen. You know it does.
“It hurts!” I say through agonizing screams. “It goddamn hurts!”
“I know . . . but this is where we start.”
So we can begin rebuilding. Just you and me, partner, brick by brick.
But it doesn’t feel like a start at all. This pain just keeps coming, consuming and endless. I’m drowning in the scattered and splintered pieces that clutter my mind, trying to make sense of what I know to be so utterly senseless.
Finally, I am able to speak again. “He’s gone.” My voice is thick and husky, throat tender and stinging. Then very weakly I say, “My son is gone.”
“Yes,” Dr. Raymond says with compassion I can both hear and feel. “He is gone. It’s true.”
We’re going to find the truth.
“But why . . . How did all this . . .”
“You created a whole new world,” Doctor Raymond tells me, “a sort of rubber one. In it, you could bend reality any way you wished. You could reverse time, bring Devon back, and in the process make your family whole once again.”
“But I turned you into the enemy.”
“Because I was trying to pull you out of that world—and in that world, you thought I wanted to take Devon away, when really, I was telling you that he already had been.”
“How did I come out of it?”
“I began pushing you very hard, Christopher. One by one, I took your illusions away, until there was nothing left to see but the painful truth.”
By stripping away everything in this world that you believe in.
“After that, your two worlds finally collided and merged. You found a window of insight and crawled through it.”
Daddy, there we go . . .
Devon’s declaration sweeps through me like a soothing and far-away echo. I see his beautiful smile, so vivid and powerful and tangible. But this time, it’s no illusion.
This time, at last, I see truth.
The real one.
87
But there is still one truth I haven’t yet found.