Stand Alone

by P. D. Workman

  “You felt sick,” Dr. Morton prompted. “You were hurt. But what emotions did you feel? Sad? Afraid? Dependent? What was it you felt while Em was taking care of you?”

  Justine shook her head.

  “No,” she objected hoarsely. “I don’t want to talk about it. I can’t.”

  “You’re afraid?”

  “I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid of anything. I just don’t want to talk about it. It’s personal.”

  “We talk about personal things here, Justine. This is a safe place to discuss and process painful feelings. You know that. You can talk to me about it.”

  “No.”

  “Did Em do something that upset you? She said that your behavior changed after that. Did your feelings toward her change?”

  Justine didn’t want to bring Em into this. This was nothing to do with Em. This was about Justine and Christian. That was all. Christian and Em were not part of the same world. They had never met. They never would. One supported Justine and was a friend to her. The other  … Em couldn’t be trusted. She couldn’t be the person to Justine that she wanted to be. She didn’t love Justine. She never could. She only love the old Justine, the one in the baby pictures.

  “Em isn’t my mother,” Justine insisted. “She isn’t. She can’t be.”

  “That’s a strong feeling. I know you don’t feel like Em could be your mother. But we’ve gone over that before. You and I have looked through all of the evidence, piece by piece. Your brain is still playing tricks on you. Telling you that you can’t trust her, when you can. Em is your mother. As much as you don’t want her to be, she still is. Work through the feelings. Label the feelings,” he encouraged.

  “Angry,” Justine snapped, “hurt, sick, sad, and angry!”

  “Good. That’s right. What were you angry about? What happened that made you angry?”

  “Em doesn’t know.”

  “No,” Morton agreed, studying Justine intently. In spite of his soothing tone, Justin wasn’t settling down, but was feeling more agitated. “She doesn’t know. Why don’t you tell me? What is it that she doesn’t know?”

  “It’s not about Em,” Justine growled. “Em makes everything about her. This isn’t about her, this is about me.”

  “Okay. It’s not about Em. Tell me about you, Justine. What was it that was making you so angry? What is it that is still making you upset a year later?”

  “I don’t want to tell you.”

  “Secrets between a therapist and patient don’t play very well. You know that if you tell me, I won’t tell anybody else. If you don’t want me to talk to Em about it, I won’t talk to Em about it. This is private and safe, just between me and you.”

  “No.”

  “Let’s do some breathing exercises. You’re pretty anxious, and I’d like to help you.”

  Justine obediently breathed in and out as he walked her through a breathing exercise, and in spite of herself, it did calm her down a bit. As she started to relax, and let her body and brain release and rest, she saw what he was doing.

  “Don’t,” Justine said sharply.

  She forced herself to sit bolt upright, to shake off the drowsiness that was starting to envelope her.

  “Don’t what?” Dr. Morton questioned.

  “Don’t do that hypnosis thing. I told you I don’t want to talk about it. Don’t hypnotize me to find out.”

  “It’s just a relaxation technique,” Dr. Morton told her soothingly. “It’s just to help you to relax and feel better. To give you time and a way to sort out your feelings. It’s not anything that I am forcing on you, or using to get information that you don’t want to share. It doesn’t work that way.”

  Justine got out of her chair and started to pace.

  “I’m not sure of that,” she growled. “I don’t want you to do it. You stay out of my brain. I don’t want you poking around.”

  “I understand,” he said, his face and voice masterpieces of calm. So soothing. “I will not do anything you don’t want me to.”

  Justine marched back and forth, digging her feet into the carpet aggressively. She didn’t want to lose control. She didn’t want him fishing around and pulling out memories or information that she didn’t want to give him. That wasn’t fair. She wasn’t going to let him do that.

  “You’re too good at that,” she told Morton, “and I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Okay. Do you want to tell me how you got hurt that day?”

  Justine paced silently, thinking about it.

  “It was nothing,” she said. “Just a fall.”

  “Was this a deliberate injury? Like when you tripped and cut yourself?”

  “No. I was skating and I missed my landing. Hit my head and scraped up my arms. That happens sometimes when you skate. It’s nothing. It just toughens you up for next time.”

  “How did you fall?”

  “I told you. Just missed my landing.”

  “You must have been going pretty fast.”

  “You do, when you skate. You can hit the ground pretty hard.” Her voice choked up, and she thought about Christian. “It was just an accident.”

  “You got a pretty severe concussion.”

  “Yeah, I hit the ground hard. Ended up doing a somersault, I was going so fast.”

  “Ouch. Do you think that this concussion might have had any long-lasting or permanent effects? Em didn’t take you to the hospital for any kind of testing or scans. You might have had some irreversible damage.”

  “It’s gone now,” Justine said. “It didn’t last. Just a few days.”

  “But there were changes in your behavior as well. Maybe that was from the concussion. That can happen, you know. There is such a thing as post-concussion syndrome.”

  “You’re not a neurologist.”

  “No, I’m not. Usually I only deal with brains from the inside. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know about brain disorders. A psychologist needs to be able to figure out if there is an organic problem too. If there’s something happening physically inside the brain that needs to be dealt with.”

  “Did I ever have any brain scans?” Justine questioned curiously, stopping pacing. “Not after the accident, I don’t mean. I mean when I was little. When I started having problems with Em. Did I ever have any brain scans?”

  “No, I don’t think so. It was behavioral. There was no indication that there were physical problems with the brain.”

  “But you couldn’t know that, right? I mean, what if I had a foreign object in my head? Or a tumor, or something like that? Or something was the wrong shape or size. Those could all cause behavioral problems too, couldn’t they?”

  “Yes. But usually in those cases there are rapid changes in behavior. Alarming ones. Your problems have been pretty consistent, no big and sudden changes.”

  “They should do a brain scan of all babies when they’re born. Then they would have something to compare them to later, if they had problems. Wouldn’t that be a good idea?”

  Dr. Morton nodded. Justine started pacing again, more slowly now. He watched her pace back and forth for a few minutes.

  “Do you want to sit down now?” he questioned. “Try and relax?”

  Justine stopped and considered.

  “No hypnosis,” she warned.

  “No. Just you and me talking. Okay? Fully conscious.”

  Justine sat down in the chair, breathing out slowly.

  “So nothing important happened that day?” Dr. Morton questioned. “When you got your concussion?”

  “No,” Justine said firmly, but she felt her lips twist as she said it. Felt the slight grimace as her body betrayed her, giving away the lie. And Dr. Morton, trained as he was, and so familiar with Justine after years of therapy, couldn’t miss it.

  “I think you need to talk about it, Justine,” he said softly. “I think that keeping it all bottled up is holding you back.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Justine protested.

 
“But part of you does. Part of you is crying out, pushing you to talk to somebody about it. Why do you think you feel this way? Why do you think you can’t lie to me about it?”

  Justine drew in a long breath, and held it. She watched the pigeons lining up on the roof. Where did they go when they weren’t watching her therapy? Was it like a television soap for them? Coming to watch the next installment each week? What’s new in the life of Justine Bywater? What’s the latest tragedy? Justine opened her mouth to speak, and a shudder ran through her body. She swallowed hard. She wasn’t sure how to start, how to get the words out. How did you just start talking about the most tragic event in your life? About someone who was part of your soul being stripped from you?

  “I can’t,” she breathed.

  “Maybe I can help. Something did happen that day?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Was it something between you and your mother?”

  Justine shook her head, blinking back tears.

  “No.”

  “Was it something that happened to you? Were you attacked? Did somebody hurt you?”

  “No.”

  He raised his brows at that, and frowned thoughtfully.

  “Hmm. Something you saw, then?”

  Justine shrugged. Something she saw? Poor Christian’s broken, lifeless body? His wild, joyful face when he looked back the instant before he hit the car? The policeman and the paramedics working over his corpse, trying to breathe life back into it  … that wasn’t just something she saw, it was so much more than that.

  “Yeah, I guess,” she said, her throat choked with tears.

  “Did something happen to someone else?”

  Justine nodded, and swept a curtain of hair over her face so that he couldn’t see her expression. Her face crumpled up with the grief she was trying so hard to hold off.

  “Christian.”

  She forced the word out through unwilling lips. It felt like a betrayal, and also a relief. The floodgates burst. The tears started to stream down Justine’s face. She was powerless to stop them. Dr. Morton ignored the deluge, and kept talking to her quietly, calmly.

  “Christian was a good friend of yours,” he divined.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Is Christian a boy or a girl?”

  “Boy,” Justine gasped and snuffled through her tears, trying to stop them.

  “Were you and Christian both in an accident? You were both hurt?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But Christian was hurt worse that you were.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He nudged a box of tissues toward Justine. She pulled three out of the box, but just pressed them to her face, not wiping her eyes or her nose.

  “Was Christian killed?” Dr. Morton guessed, his voice soothing and compassionate.

  Justine nodded, gasping for breath.

  “That must have been very difficult for you,” he said, “very traumatizing.”

  She nodded in agreement. Dr. Morton couldn’t possibly understand how difficult and traumatizing it had been. Her best friend. Her only friend. A piece of her own soul. Torn violently from her, in a split second. One horrifying, unexpected accident.

  “Was it a skateboarding accident,” Dr. Morton questioned, “or something else?”

  “Skating,” Justine nodded, and hiccuped.

  “Do you want to tell me how it happened now?”

  “Going down a hill  … hit a car crossing at the bottom  …”

  “Ouch. Did you both hit the car?”

  “No. Just Christian. I bailed.”

  “Were you alone? Was there anyone else there to help? You saw the whole thing?”

  “There was a cop,” Justine said. “He’d stopped a truck that was chasing after Christian. Christian was still running away from him.”

  “The cop came over to help?”

  “Yeah. He did CPR and all  … but there was nothing  …” Justine choked.

  “That must have been very hard on you.”

  She nodded. That was an understatement.

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

  Justine just breathed for a while, sniffling, wiping her nose, trying to get calmed down again. Why hadn’t she told anyone? Why had it been a secret?

  “You could have told Em, or me,” Dr. Morton suggested.

  “No  … Christian was  … part of a different life  … where I was happy  …”

  “When you lose someone you are close to, you need support. Did you go to the funeral? Talk to his parents?”

  “I didn’t know them. He didn’t get along with his family. They  … they didn’t take care of him.”

  Dr. Morton’s face brightened, and he wrote something else on his file.

  “So you shared something other than just skateboarding. You both had problems with your parents. You kind of felt like outcasts together?”

  “I guess,” Justine said.

  It was true, but it seemed like such a simplification of their relationship. They hadn’t just been outcasts together. That made it sound so juvenile. So  … normal. What they had shared together hadn’t just been camaraderie. Not just a friendship. They didn’t just hang together. They had something special.

  “I’m not minimizing your relationship,” Dr. Morton told her, obviously reading her expression accurately. “It just helps me to understand your connection. What you felt was real. Talking about it and analyzing it doesn’t make it any less than it was.”

  “I guess  …” Justine said, “I just wanted him for myself. I didn’t want to share him with you, or Em, or his parents. He was just  … mine.”

  “He was the only one you really felt could understand you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But it’s okay. You don’t lose that by talking to me. It might help you to process what happened, but it doesn’t take anything away from your relationship.”

  Justine twisted her fingers through the hair that hung in front of her face.

  “It felt like  … the end of the world. I still feel like  … an emptiness.”

  “You went through a very traumatic experience. It has affected your whole life over the past year.”

  Justine nodded in agreement.

  “Are you having flashbacks? Trouble sleeping?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Harder to control your temper. Distancing yourself from others.”

  Justine looked at Dr. Morton through her hair. She pushed her hair back and smoothed it along both sides.

  “Not like I didn’t before,” she pointed out.

  Dr. Morton chuckled.

  “True. But this makes it worse, doesn’t it? You’re suffering from post-traumatic stress on top of everything else. And grieving when there’s no one to support you and help get you through it.”

  “Post-traumatic stress,” Justine scoffed. “Everybody has post-traumatic stress these days. Kids that don’t get a cookie when they want one.”

  “You do hear more about it these days,” Dr. Morton acknowledged, “and I’m sure that there are those who get diagnosed who don’t actually have it. But that doesn’t make it any less real. You really are feeling what you are feeling. And you are experiencing the after-effects of seeing Christian die. Just because it is happening inside your head, that doesn’t make it any less real. It is very real. And there are no awards for trying to tough it out and pretend you’re a rock. You don’t get through it without help.”

  “I don’t want help,” Justine protested. And it was partially true. Part of her didn’t want help. But part of her did. It was a relief to finally acknowledge to Dr. Morton what had happened. Part of her still wanted to protect herself, this tender, bleeding memory. But the other part of her needed this acknowledgment.

  CHAPTER 14

  JUSTINE DIDN’T USUALLY SPEND a lot of time working on tricks. Mostly, she was just skating to get away, to enjoy the movement, to feel the wind blow her long hair out behind
her. She didn’t want to be at home or at school or at the therapist’s office, and she just wanted to ride away for a while.

  But today, her mood was lighter. She felt like a load had been lifted from her. And she was in the mood for tricks. She was working in front of the library, where there was a set of low stairs, a wheelchair ramp, a stone bench, and a curb. Lots of furniture to work with. She had attracted a small group of younger school children, who were naive enough to be impressed at her inadequate jumps and grinds. They gasped at her spills and clapped when she managed to catch some air. A severe librarian had come out a couple of times to tell her to move on and go somewhere else. Each time she came out, the group of spectators would scatter, and then a few minutes after the librarian went back inside the library, they would gather together again. Justine ignored the requests and threats from the librarian, working on her tricks. She had as much a right to be there as anyone else. It was public property.

  A police car pulled up to the curb. No lights or siren. Justine jumped her board off of the stairs, managing to hold the landing, and ground the curb as the two policemen walked up.

  “How’s it going?” one of the officers questioned neutrally.

  “Fine,” Justine said with a friendly smile. “Catching some good air.”

  “I think you’ve been asked to go somewhere else.”

  Justine shrugged.

  “Yeah,” she said, “but I like it here.”

  “You can’t stay here after you’ve been asked to leave. You’re trespassing now. The owners are afraid that you are going to damage the property or end up injuring yourself. So you have to leave.”

  Justine shrugged.

  “I’m not going to sue them if I get hurt. I just want a good place to do some tricks.”

  “This is no longer an option. I’m sure you can find somewhere else.”

  “If I go somewhere else, you know they’re just going to call you in ten minutes anyway. People don’t like skaters. They’re prejudiced.”