Comfort Food

by Kitty Thomas

  “I understand you're having a hard time dealing with what's happened to you.”

  I stared blankly at her. Was this the part where I was supposed to pour my soul out to her? Just because it was expected?

  “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked, pulling a tape recorder from her desk drawer.

  “I would prefer it if you didn't record our sessions.”

  I was uneasy about it for several reasons. Partly my semi-celebrity status. Recordings were more damning than notes. And also because it made it all too real.

  She looked as if she might protest, but then her lips met in a firm line and she nodded, placing it back in the desk before retrieving a yellow legal pad.

  “Very well then.”

  She arched a brow at me as if questioning whether I would now take issue with her making notes.

  I had intended to sit on the couch, but I laid down on it instead, pulling my feet up with me. On the outside I'm sure this behavior indicated some willingness on my part to surrender to the therapy process, but it was really a way to hide. Lying down, I could look up at the ceiling and not meet her eyes.

  “Shall we begin?” she asked.

  “Actually, I just thought maybe you could give me something; write me a prescription. Valium, Zoloft, Prozac, anything.” I wanted something to numb me out, make things blur around the edges a bit, but I didn't say that.

  “Emily, now you know that's not how I operate.”

  Then I was going to have to find someone who did. With all the outcry at shrinks who doled out prescriptions like legal and politically-correct drug dealers, surely I could find someone to give me my fix of normal.

  She sat patiently waiting, her pen poised, her attention rapt. I laid there for several minutes, the silence stretching between us. I kept waiting for her to say something. She kept waiting for me to say something. It was a battle of wills. I glanced occasionally at the clock on the wall as the minutes dragged on much more slowly than they ever had, even in the bad cell.

  I wondered if I could use up my entire session like this. A complete hour of blissful silence. There was a time the prospect would have been deeply uncomfortable to me. I wouldn't have been able to resist the urge, the need, to fill the silent spaces with words.

  Finally I did speak, but it wasn't because of discomfort with silence. I don't know what it was. It was the office, her patience, the comfortable couch, and the almost hypnotic lulling of the ticking of the wall clock. It was as if a trance had come over me, some sort of psychological possession that made me intent to spill, if not my secrets, then my feelings about them.

  “I don't fit anymore,” I began. “I don't know where to go from here. There is my life before, and my life now, and there's no bridge between the two. There is no way for me to go back to who I was.”

  “What about your life when you were where you were?” She avoided words like captive and imprisoned.

  I stared up at the ceiling. I'm sure another five minutes passed before I spoke. “I can't tell you about that. It's private.”

  “What can you tell me about?”

  I shrugged.

  She decided to switch to a more direct question and answer session, something easier and requiring less explanation on my part.

  “How many people had you?”

  “One.”

  “Male or female?”

  “Male.”

  “You want to go back to him.”

  It wasn't a question. I bolted up from the couch and stared at her. Despite understandings of the victim/tormentor relationship, most people refused to accept someone wanting to go back after they were free.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Emily, you've got your masters in psychology. You know what this is. You know it's not real.”

  Was that true? It was one thing to pontificate about nameless strangers, it was another to experience it. It was difficult to imagine that in my position Dr. Blake would see things in the same way she saw them right now.

  Of what use was it to struggle to keep everything the same? People changed. Did the catalyst matter? I shrugged again.

  “Can you tell me anything of what happened while you were with him?”

  I shook my head. No, I couldn't talk about that. It felt like betrayal. And I hated she knew that was why I couldn't talk about it. I could feel her pity from across the room.

  Poor confused Emily.

  “I'd really like some drugs,” I said.

  It was nearing the end of the session, and no progress had been made. For a brief moment, I imagined myself lying in a tub full of warm water while a peaceful buzz flowed over me, the bathwater going pink like Valentine's Day from my blood. Her voice cut off the fantasy.

  “I'll tell you what. I'm going to give you some homework. I would like for you to keep a journal this next week of as much as you feel you can share, and we'll discuss it during next week's session. If you can do that for me, then we'll talk about prescribing something.”

  Blackmail.

  It was the socially-approved equivalent of blow me, and I'll get you some of the good stuff. But I only nodded.

  She was scribbling furiously on the yellow legal pad as I got up to leave. I had no idea what brilliant insights she felt she'd gleaned from my psyche in such a short period. I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

  Since I had the car, I drove to the bookstore and picked out a journal. What the hell? I would go through my journal back in the Mercedes and copy the least revealing and private entries. I was sure enough emotion and trauma had gone into writing them.

  I'd immediately rejected the notion of giving her the original journal. Besides being too personal, she might hand it over to the police as evidence. It was more violation than I could accept. I didn't need more strangers trying to peer into the most private parts of me.

  By the time I got to the storage facility, the sun was going down. I sat in the Mercedes crying as I copied journal entries while listening to the music I'd missed having for weeks.

  I'm not sure how much time passed sitting in the car. Although the storage facility wasn't on the main drag, I knew I took some measure of risk sitting there with the garage-style door open and the car running to play the music.

  I copied several sections into the journal I'd just bought. It was heavily censored, but compared to today's session I was pouring my heart out. It would be enough to get me medicated, then I'd switch doctors.

  I didn't need someone prying into my head, taking me apart bit by bit so they could put me back together again the way they felt I was supposed to be.

  When I got home, I slipped the censored journal under the mattress of the bed in the guest room. Dinner was on the table, and my mother didn't say a word to me as she dipped food out onto my plate.

  No, Where have you been? Why didn't you call? I thought you'd driven into a lake or something. She was gritting her teeth, but she was holding it in.

  “Why the hell didn't you call? Your appointment was for an hour. You didn't think maybe I might need the car for something?”

  Or not.

  I didn't say anything. Instead, I picked up my plate and took it to the guest room and shut the door. I clicked on the TV with the remote and scooted back up on the bed leaning against the wicker headboard.

  I knew I was behaving like a twelve-year-old, but I'd learned from experience it was better to steer clear of my mother when she was in this mode.

  I pulled the journal out from under the bed again. It was light brown with Celtic knotwork. I traced a finger over the delicate design with one hand, as I absently shoveled chicken casserole into my mouth with the other. I'd filled about thirty pages of the book, surely enough for homework and drugs.

  I Love Lucy was playing on low in the background. The canned laughter filtered over to me on the bed.

  For a moment I thought about turning him in. What if? I was still angry with him for throwing me away. Shouldn't he be punished for that? Even if it seemed like he was being punished
for something quite different? He'd know the real reason.

  I tried to imagine the look on his face when the squad cars pulled into his driveway. Would he be remorseful? Ashamed? Shocked? Accepting? Would he adjust to imprisonment as well as I had?

  I wondered again if he believed freeing me had been a cruelty or a kindness, if he thought he'd done something wrong in taking me. I wondered if he regretted letting me go, and if he ever thought of me or dreamed of me as I did him. Surely my obsession couldn't now be greater than his.

  Would I be in trouble for lying and obstructing justice? Would someone lock me in a cell no matter how brief the time, thinking it was okay because I hadn't told the truth to the all-powerful police arm of the government?

  Or could I play the fear card? He terrorized me too much to speak. I was afraid he'd come for me again. I didn't know.

  But although the revenge fantasy was appealing for a moment, it quickly faded, replaced with the same feeling I always got when thinking of him as anything but omnipotent. Anxiety.

  The next day was different. I don't know if it was seeing Dr. Blake or if the reality of my freedom had finally sunk in, but I started to get things together. I looked for an apartment, a small one. I had enough in the bank to see me through a year maybe while I tried to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

  I would adjust and be okay. I'd find my place in the world again, and this would just be something I'd experienced, but not something that had changed the core of who I was. I could be cured. I'd go through all the standard trauma responses, and then at the end of it I would be a survivor.

  I could be unbrainwashed. It would require new conditioning, but it could be done. I could be free of him forever, mentally as well as physically.

  It wasn't minor fame that gave me the money to take care of myself now, but extreme responsibility with my finances. I'd always been a saver instead of a spender. It was part of why this step scared me.

  But I had to act. Otherwise, I was going to wither away and die in my parents' house in the creepy room with the white wicker furniture and the paper border wisteria dripping down from the edges of the ceiling.

  I was too cowardly to kill myself, though I'd had fleeting fantasies. My master had thrown me out with finality and my life with him was over. The only thing left to do was act.

  To anyone observing this tragedy, I was a brave little soldier. Emily Vargas, the inspiration to kidnapped women everywhere. Such strength to so quickly begin putting the pieces of her life back together after all the horrors she must have suffered spending months at the hands of a madman.

  I'd been invited already on a few talk shows to share my story, but I'd declined. No one was getting an exclusive. No one was getting the story period.

  Everything seemed normal on the outside. But no one was there to hear me wake up crying in the middle of the night, reaching out for the comfort of a man's body that wasn't there. I dreamed only of him. Nothing else. There seemed to be nothing I could do to purge him from the darkest corners of my mind.

  Thanksgiving came. Almost four weeks away from him and I couldn't even begin to not want him. I went to my parents' house for the obligatory turkey dinner. It was always a big deal. My cousins and uncles and aunts, my parents. My remaining set of grandparents on my dad's side. And of course friends, including Bobby White, the guy who'd grown up two houses down from me and had always had a crush.

  Before being taken, I'd finally consented to one date with him. Just to see, as he'd said. He was seated at the main table directly across from me, staring at me over the large shiny basted turkey that looked like it should be in a food magazine.

  I looked down at my plate. I couldn't stand to see the mixture of pity and self-absorbed disappointment that his one shot with me was probably gone for good.

  My mom, as always, was the spokesperson for Thanksgiving. Granddad was the patriarch, but both he and Dad were men of few words, and mom had never had that problem. Like me. Or like I'd once been. I stared at my plate, tracing the filigree pattern around the edges with my finger, trying not to hear her as she said what she was thankful for, my safe return.

  Various family members and friends exclaimed their agreement, and I never felt so distant from them. Who were these people? I was a stranger here. We shared blood but not much else, and I wondered why we continued to get together every year like this. Like some bizarre mockery of the family unit.

  Dinner went quickly and then there was pumpkin pie. I took my pie on a paper plate and went to sit on the couch in the living room. Several family members attempted polite conversation that skirted delicately around the facts of my absence. It was as if I'd been away at Summer Camp.

  Four weeks before, every one of these people had been wearing black and attending my funeral, and now, here we were as if none of it had happened. The denial seemed to stretch out to all my family, to all I knew. Or thought I knew.

  I sat with the paper plate propped on my knees as their voices turned into one big white noise machine. I felt the couch dip beside me but kept my focus on the pie. If I didn't acknowledge whoever it was, maybe they would go away.

  Or at least just be fucking quiet.

  “You've got more whipped cream than pie,” Bobby said.

  I glanced over to see him sitting beside me, his paper plate propped carefully on his lap mirroring mine, except for the modest amount of whipped cream, as if indulging in more would be a mortal sin.

  “Yeah,” I said and looked back at it.

  I'd tried begging out of Thanksgiving dinner, telling my mother it was too much, too soon. It was partly true. It was too much, but I didn't think a timetable made a difference in the grand scheme of things. It would still be too much five years from now. I'd been irrevocably changed, and no one wanted to accept it, not even me.

  They all wanted to believe with enough therapy and enough time, my world would be lovely again. I'd be their golden girl again, but despite my brief forays into fantasy land, I knew it wasn't true.

  Mom had insisted I come. Everybody would feel bad if I wasn't there. And we wouldn't want that. I'd been avoiding them all for weeks. They missed me. Etc. etc. I'd caved because you always caved with my mother if you knew what was good for you. She wouldn't leave you alone to make a decision. She'd just harp until she got the answer she wanted. I regretted giving it now.

  Most of the family was crowded in the other room around the new giant screen plasma television watching football. None of them were football fans, and most of them knew nothing about the game. They sat and watched football because it was what families did on Thanksgiving, or what they thought they were supposed to do.

  We were all doing what we were supposed to do, and I wondered if even one of us was doing what he wanted to do. I glanced up to see Bobby staring at me intently. Well, one person was doing what they wanted to do.

  Good for Bobby.

  “Are you going to be okay?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I lied.

  Part of me hated him right then. Either he was too clueless to understand the nature of my captivity made it completely inappropriate for him to bring it up, or worse, he was hoping to score points as the knight in shining armor who comforted me. I couldn't deal with being a pawn in his fantasy right then.

  He reached out and put his hand over mine. I jerked away and scooted to the far end of the couch. I couldn't stand for anyone to touch me. Or at least I couldn't stand for anyone but one person to touch me.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled. “Jeez Emmie, that fucking bastard fucked you up good, didn't he?”

  “Don't say that!” I was shocked by the vehemence of my voice.

  “Aw, hell. You know I didn't mean anything against you. I just wish I could get him alone in a room, you know?”

  I couldn't meet his eyes because I knew he'd see the anger boiling just beneath the surface. There was a chance he'd think the anger was directed at my captor. But there was a chance, however small, that he wouldn't.

  �
�Emmie?”

  “Yeah,” I said, acknowledging his empty threat toward my master.

  I don't know why I was angry. Bobby wouldn't have a shot in a room alone with him. I knew I hadn't just built my captor up in my mind as physically stronger than he was because of how helpless he'd made me.

  I'd seen his well-muscled body many times, felt his weight on me, the strength of his grip. I knew. He'd rip Bobby to pieces, and I couldn't decide whether that idea upset me or not. It upset me a lot less than the idea of Bobby hurting him.

  “Alright, well, um . . . I need to really get going. But if you ever need somebody to talk to, you know where I am, yeah?” He was edging toward the door.

  “Yeah.”

  He looked at me another long moment before turning and walking off with his empty paper plate. His shoulders slumped. I had been right. He'd had a picture in his head about how his love would heal me or some other similar romantic bullshit. He'd be my rescuer. But what if I no longer wanted to be rescued?

  One by one family members and friends trickled into the room to have a word with me, to tell me how much they'd missed me, how glad they were I was safe. If I needed anything . . . By the time they'd all paraded through, I was crying and couldn't stop. I waited until they left, and then I got in my car and went home.

  My mother had seen me upset and seemed to regret persuading me to come. I'm not sure if it was because some perfect mythic Thanksgiving was ruined or she really felt bad. We never spoke of it.

  That week I put in resumes at several places. My publisher called, but I had no intention to continue writing, at least not self-help books. “Maybe a memoir,” they said. I said, “Maybe,” but didn't mean it. I was done. It was time to move on to something else.

  The day of my next appointment with Dr. Blake, I sat in my apartment looking at all my stuff. The bookshelves with my books lining them, a couple bags of fan mail that had piled up while I'd been away. This was freedom. This was what I wanted, what I'd yearned for, for months. Or at least until I knew it wasn't possible and I'd given up the hope.

  I didn't think I could ever do public speaking again. I wasn't sure if I could write, at least not that sort of book anymore, the kind that changed people's lives for the better and made them go after their goals and believe in themselves. All of it now seemed like pat phrases and cheap pop psychology. How had I taken my knowledge and boiled it down to such black-and-white simplicity?