by Jen Nadol
Wayne poked his head in then. “This is ready. You want me to hold off for a little?”
Petra looked at me and I said, “No, of course not. Let’s go ahead and eat.” I mustered a smile, adding, “It smells delicious.”
I tried to relax as we sat at the table, a steaming plate of pasta in the middle. The dining room chandelier cast a warm glow throughout the room. Wayne and Petra exchanged stories about their day. He was sweet and I thought maybe Petra was a little hard on him, until he started talking about his last job. And the one before. I tried to join in the conversation, but I was eager to get back to the files. Petra must have sensed it, because as soon as we were finished, she stood.
“Fantastic meal, honey.” She kissed the top of his head. “Let’s clean up and then Cass and I need to get back to work.”
“That’s cool,” he said, collecting plates while Petra brought the serving dish, and I, the glasses. “I think I’ll go out to the porch, mess around with some tunes.”
Once the dishes were loaded and table wiped down, Petra and I went back to our seats. Wayne had grabbed a guitar from the corner of the living room and through the doorway, I could hear his strumming, soft and pretty.
“He’s not bad,” I said quietly.
Petra nodded, her head still buried in the file. “No, he’s not. I keep telling him that. He just needs to focus, start writing the songs down, putting words to them.” She glanced up, smiling. “As you might have guessed, he doesn’t take direction well.”
She read for a while longer, then stretched, working her head side to side to loosen the muscles. “Okay,” she said, resting her hands on her knees, within reach of the file on the coffee table. “It looks like your mom blamed herself for the accident. Survivor guilt. Again, not uncommon. Hers was more severe than most. Her doctor—a Mary Wells, who I met briefly when I first started at Barrow—also interviewed your grandmother Nan. Apparently she came to help out as soon as she heard about the accident. She stayed with you and your mom but could barely get your mom out of bed during the day. Then, at night, she’d find her walking the house, weeping, or watching over your bed. She got scared, unable to get Georgia—your mom—to talk to her at all. Nan says she just wasn’t sure what was going through your mom’s head, and when she took her into Bering General, they couldn’t get much out of her either. Your mom was at Barrow for almost a month before she said anything during her sessions with Dr. Wells.”
“Before she said anything? You mean she just sat there?”
Petra nodded. “Sure. That happens a lot. Patients are scared. It’s very hard for some people to open up, especially if they’ve been through a trauma. Dr. Wells wasn’t concerned. In fact, I can tell from her notes after she first met Georgia …” She paused. “Does it bother you if I call her that? It’s how Dr. Wells referred to her.”
I shook my head.
“Anyway, Dr. Wells expected it would take at least that long to get Georgia to talk.”
“Okay, so then what? After a month, she started talking?”
Petra nodded. “I’ve only just read through their first session with any dialog. Dr. Wells had suspected depression, survivor guilt. That’s obvious, given the situation, but this was the first time Georgia confirmed it.”
“What did she say?”
Petra checked the handwritten pages again. “Very little. Dr. Wells asked Georgia if she was still sad. It’s something she asked every time, sometimes getting a nod, others no response at all. This time Georgia nodded.
“ ‘Can you tell me about it?’ Dr. Wells asked.
“No response.
“ ‘Do you miss Daniel?’
“Here, she nods again. Then she says, ‘It’s all my fault.’
“ ‘What’s your fault, Georgia?’
“ ‘That he’s gone.’ She breaks down crying.” Petra looked up. “That’s it.”
“That’s it?”
“That was a real breakthrough, getting Georgia to confide at all. A chink in the armor.”
I looked at Petra, then the file, only a fraction of the pages leafed through.
“This is going to take a while,” Petra said, reading my thoughts.
“Your job requires a lot of patience,” I told her.
“That it does.”
“It’s going to take you hours to read all of that.” I felt guilty. I wanted to tell her she didn’t have to. I mean, she’d be up until after midnight at the rate we were going, and I was sure she had to work the next day. But I was desperate to know what was in the file. “Can I help you sort through it?”
“No.” She gestured to the pages. “Legally, I can’t let you without all the right forms. I’s dotted, t’s crossed and all that. But even if I wanted to bend the rules, I don’t think it would help. Dr. Wells’s notes are in a shorthand that wouldn’t make sense to you.”
She could read the disappointment on my face.
“Listen, Cass. I know you need to know what’s in here. I don’t mind reading it all, really I don’t. I’m going to skim the session notes and see what I can find. Why don’t you grab a book or even sit with Wayne for a while. I can fill you in as I go.”
I should stay, I thought, still feeling guilty about letting Petra do all the work. But she was right, there was nothing I could do, and staring at her, waiting for each little tidbit, wouldn’t help. “Maybe I’ll sit outside for a bit. Get some air.”
“Great idea.”
I paused by the front door. “Thanks a million, Petra. I really owe you.”
She smiled. “No sweat.”
Wayne was leaning against the clapboard, barefoot, with his guitar across his lap.
“We could hear you inside,” I told him when he finished playing. “Your songs are nice, very pretty.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I could hear you too.”
I didn’t say anything, embarrassed and a little annoyed.
“I didn’t mean to,” he said. “It’s just real quiet out here.”
I nodded. There was something so disarming about him. I could see why it was hard for Petra to make a break.
“Tough stuff about your mom,” he added quietly.
“Yeah, well, I never really knew her. I’m just trying to figure out what happened.”
“You’re brave to do it,” he said. “My old man walked out on us when I was five. My mom never told me why and I never asked. Don’t think I’d want to hear it.”
I shrugged. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it either, but sometimes want and need are not congruent.
“I’m going to take a little walk while Petra’s reading,” I said. “Any recommendations about which way to go?”
He chuckled. “The roads around here are all pretty much the same. Cornfields, wheat fields, and more cornfields. Take your pick.”
That sounded fine to me. I started walking.
Wayne was right, the road in both directions was long and straight, flanked by dry stalks of wheat. The sun was low in the sky and, in Ashville, would have been sinking below the hills already. Here it just hung perilously close to the flat horizon. It was warm, so I walked slowly. In no hurry.
It was awful to think about my mother, who I sometimes pictured as a younger Nan, sitting mutely, too sad to even talk about her sadness. She must have loved my father very much, I thought, unsure if having a wonderful thing while it lasted was any comfort.
I wished that I had been older and could have helped her somehow. Nan hadn’t been able to, though. And, knowing Nan, she’d have tried her damnedest.
I wondered why she’d taken me back to Ashville rather than staying here. Or why Nan hadn’t brought my mother to Ashville with us. Maybe Petra would find it in the files, the reason for putting half a country between mother and daughter. Then again, that might be one of those things I didn’t want to know.
It was hard to imagine Nan out here. She liked being close to the beach, dipping her painted toes in the icy East Coast water, walking the boardwalks. Taking long drives, just t
o go. It would have been hard for her somewhere like this, with the view so unvaried. It had been perfect for me, a relief from almost the day I arrived, though I wasn’t sure it was anymore. The luster had worn off with things fraying between Lucas and me, the fear of talking to another person with the mark, or running into that woman whose baby died.
I walked maybe a mile, until the sun was just above the wheat, spiny stalks teasing its bottom curve. Then I turned around and headed back, nervous but ready to hear what Petra had learned.
“I made good progress,” she said, smiling and beckoning me to the couch when I got back. “The sessions were easy to read because a lot of it was repetitive. Georgia opened up very slowly. One step forward, two steps back. Then the same one step forward, you know?”
I nodded, plucking at my shirt, trying to cool down from my walk.
“I mean, there’s still a lot here, but I’m through the first year at least. Georgia had survivor guilt all right, but it was unusual. Your mom felt responsible for the accident. Not just guilty that she survived, but she truly believed she could have prevented your father’s death.”
I felt a little shiver, the start of goose bumps on my still-sweaty skin. “How? I mean, was she the one driving? Did she distract him or something?”
“No, I don’t think it was anything like that. There are no specifics in the notes about the accident itself. Dr. Wells didn’t think Georgia had full memory of it. Georgia actually believed she knew your father was going to die that day—had some kind of psychic pre-knowledge.”
I felt very far away, as if I were looking at Petra through a long, long tunnel. “What do you mean ‘psychic pre-knowledge’?” It took all I had to ask the question.
Petra didn’t seem to notice. “I’m not sure. But that’s not all that uncommon either, for survivors to think—looking back—that they had foreknowledge. They start to manufacture things that should have told them what was coming.”
“Do you … Did Dr. Wells think that’s what happened?”
“Well, that’s the funny part,” Petra said. “Georgia must have been very convincing. Dr. Wells was working on that theory, trying to make Georgia see that it wasn’t her fault, that she couldn’t have prevented the accident, but Georgia was adamant. She was completely certain that she knew, even swore that she tried to prevent it. She claimed she had warned your father ahead of time. I can see in Dr. Wells’s notes that she did research on it, hadn’t had that much direct exposure to this exact situation, but it seems that nearly every case she could find was distinctly different from your mother’s.”
“How so?” I was clinging to Petra’s every word, hoping for something that might explain this all away and take me anywhere but where I felt sure we were heading.
“Her thinking that she had acted on her knowledge, for starters. Most of the time the guilt is for not acting. The other thing that was unusual is that your mother said there’d been others, other times she’d had this … knowledge. That’s odd, Dr. Wells notes, the belief generally stemming from the traumatic incident and completely confined to it. In other words, survivors twist the facts immediately preceding the incident, but not other facts unrelated to it.”
I was almost shaking now and Petra could see it: my hands clenched tightly together.
“Are you okay?” she asked, leaning forward. “Should I stop?”
“No, no. I want to hear it. Does Dr. Wells … does she say how my mother … what she saw or whatever that made her think she knew something?”
I held my breath, sure of the answer, waiting to hear it aloud.
“No.” Petra shook her head. “Not in the ones I’ve read through so far.”
Or any of the others, I guessed. It didn’t matter; I knew. Far too well. “Is there anything else?”
“Yeah,” Petra said. “She talked about you…. Are you sure you want to hear this?”
I nodded, afraid to speak.
“She was scared. Felt like she had to watch you constantly, but couldn’t stand … well, it was hard for her to be there with you.” Petra watched me as she spoke. “It happens a lot in cases like this too,” she said. “After a trauma, people become convinced something bad is going to happen to other people they love. So much so, sometimes,” she continued gently, “that they experience the heartbreak of it even before it happens.”
“Is that why I was living with Nan?”
Petra nodded. “Georgia had a lot of guilt about that. She wanted so much to have you back, but every time she and Dr. Wells talked about the steps to get there, even to a halfway house, Georgia would withdraw more.”
“Like she was afraid of it?”
“Right. Dr. Wells notes that it got to a point sometimes where she wasn’t just afraid of how she’d protect you, but also of how to protect herself. She seemed preoccupied with death, always trying to prevent it, fearful of every action.”
I nodded, thinking of how, over the last few months, I’d found myself wondering about every choice. How did it change my fate that, looking for my wallet in the morning, I was ten minutes later walking out my door than I would have been otherwise? Did I miss walking past a man, a dog, a bus that might change my life? Was that a good thing or not? If I wore pink socks instead of black, what would be the result? Would they attract the attention of the serial killer sitting next to me in the coffee shop? Were these things preordained or was I in control? You could drive yourself crazy with these questions. I guess my mother had.
Petra insisted I stay over. “You’ll never get a cab out here at this hour,” she said. I glanced at the clock, the hands hovering just past ten. “I’d drive you, but I’ve got a crazy day tomorrow.”
I protested, but it was no use. She was right, I had no way home. Petra made me chamomile tea. “To help you sleep,” she said. “Doctor’s orders.”
“You said you met Dr. Wells when you first started at Barrow,” I said, the thought occurring to me as she was showing me to the guest room, also white on white. “Is she still there? Could we ask her about some of the details? Maybe she’d remember more—”
Petra cut me off with a shake of her head. “No. She died the year after I started. She was older, would have been in her late sixties when she treated your mother. The file seems pretty complete anyway,” Petra added. “Dr. Wells had a reputation as a perfectionist. I’ll keep looking. There are still another few years of sessions to read. Anything she learned from your mother is almost certainly in there. The rest, unfortunately, is not to be known.”
The next morning Petra drove me to downtown Ridgevale. She knew of a bus service that ran to Bering twice a day.
“I’d have asked Wayne to take you,” she’d said, “but honestly, I wouldn’t trust his car to make it.”
“Please, Petra, you’ve already been so great. I can’t thank you enough. I owe you.”
“Well, then repay me by keeping in touch. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but there’s a shortage of cool people out here,” she said. “I try to make sure I know all of them.”
“I definitely will.”
“Good. Don’t flake on me,” she warned. “I have your number. I will track you down.”
“No worries.”
I slept a little on the bus ride, having gotten only broken sleep the night before, but my head kept spinning, trying to piece together the day of the accident. Had my mother been unable to convince my father about the mark? Lucas hadn’t believed me, but we’d been dating less than a month. Was it possible that she hadn’t told him? Or had she, the two of them rushing to the hospital, worried that it wasn’t just a headache, but a stroke? An aneurysm? A tumor? I tried to imagine how I’d feel if the action I’d persuaded Lucas to take caused his death. The fated accident a slip in the bathroom rather than the skidding of brakes. Could that be what happened? Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
I’d never know the whole story, but I knew enough to believe that my mother, like me, could see the mark. And it had ruined everything.
“Where have you been? I’ve been worried about you. Tell me what happened—you saw another one, didn’t you?”
Lucas showed up at Drea’s apartment around four, frantic and petulant. I wasn’t surprised to see him, though he’d never been up before. Drea wasn’t due back until later, so I let him in reluctantly, wanting nothing more than to keep sipping tea and listening to Mozart, but I knew I had to deal with him eventually. I’d ignored all his messages and texts and thrown away the notes he’d taped to her door and slipped underneath it.
“I’m not doing it anymore, Lucas,” I said, walking back to my mug by the sofa.
“What? You mean warning them? What happened? Another one who didn’t believe you?” He folded his arms, preparing for another debate. “Well, don’t forget about the one you saved.”
“Yeah.” I leaned forward to toss the paper at him, glad that I’d been too worn out to burn it or throw it away like I’d meant to. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget him.”
Lucas scanned the paper, confused.
“That’s him, Lucas. The guy in the picture. Eduard Sanchez.”
I left the couch and walked to the window, staring outside at the slow-moving traffic while Lucas read.
“Cassandra …”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Lucas. I’m done. I’m not meant to meddle. I know it doesn’t make sense to you, but I feel it in my gut.”
He said nothing.
I turned to face him, to make sure he understood me. This was it. No more discussions. No more arguments. This was a decision only I could make, and I felt sure I was making the right one.
“I can understand why you’re upset,” he said. “You should have called me.”
I shrugged, turning back to the window. What I wanted was for Lucas to come to me, put his hands on my shoulders, tell me I was right, destiny was better left undisturbed.
Instead, he said, “I can see you need some time alone. I don’t blame you. I think when you have more distance, time to sort through this, you might reconsider.”
I didn’t answer. There was nothing to say.
