by John Decure
Still glad I’m alive. And thankful for that much.
Dr. Weaver is making me address the traits that allowed others to take so much away from me. It’s terrible, and it hurts like death. But he’s also helping me find reasons to push on, to want to see my kids again, reach out, get on speaking terms with them at least. Maybe go back to school, do some training in crisis intervention, get a job counseling abused women. I don’t know if anyone would ever see fit to hire me, but I’ve been volunteering at a shelter for Christian women lately, learning to be a good listener, and that seems to add up to be a lot when it comes to helping those who need a calm, quiet port in the storm. If my wreck of a life has taught me one thing so far, it’s that if people with problems will ever overcome them, they’ve got to talk, and somebody’s gotta listen. Another benefit for me is when I listen, I can’t think of my own problems, so it’s like a vacation from myself. Sounds kooky but it’s true.
So when Dr. Weaver said we should both go to court I didn’t really question his judgment. Still, that doesn’t mean I couldn’t question my own judgment. I was nervous and shaking and practically peeing my pants over seeing Dr. Don again, had no idea what I’d say if he tried to approach me, come up and talk to me, tried any of that v-neck-sweater, saddle-shoe, I’m-so-accomplished-but-still-I’m just-a-charming-guy-at-heart bullshit—excuse my French, but I swear, I can’t think of a better word—of his on me. But Dr. Weaver has always told me to trust him, bless his heart, and I have, and that trust has continued to pay off.
Because when I got there, I realized I had interpreted the dragon dream all wrong. Turns out the dream didn’t involve my failed quest to save a damsel in distress. Turns out I was the damsel in distress. The dream? It was but a premonition of what was to come, a tap on the shoulder from the hand of God.
Now, I’m not much of a complainer, but by any measure I’m a person who has had her share of trials and tribulations. The forgiving view might reveal that neither luck, nor other human beings, have been kind to me. The harsher view is that I should have seen a lot of the ill will that’s leveled me coming, and I should have done something, anything, to get out of the way. Some would even call me a loser, a charge that I would be hard-pressed to deny. So, let them, I guess; can’t stop the doubters anyway.
I wept, right there in the hallway outside the courtroom, got all teary in front of strangers. Please forgive me for getting emotional, I wanted to tell them, especially the one who introduced herself as Bradlee Aames. Because today my dream came alive. Today I met my real-life dragon.
Bradlee Aames. A lawyer for the state, a black-haired young woman with a body and a face that reminded me that life isn’t fair, and these tiny silver orbs shaped like… skulls? Wow—dangling from her ears, a death image, but on her, it was shaped into something definite and powerful and lovely. Meeting her, shaking her hand, I recognized instantly her key feature, a pair of big dark eyes full-up with trepidation, but an equal complement of courage. Slow-lidded eyes, with a tired, damaged look I’ve seen so many times sitting on a plastic chair across from me among a circle of strangers, everybody dying for a cigarette amid familiar tales of woe. Battle weary, resisting demons she can’t see, her arms tired from swinging but she can’t stop, lest she lose the fight.
But oh, to know she’s fighting for me now! It’s hard to explain, but in that moment I followed her into the courtroom, I saw the faces of the men lined up to defend my tormentor, and I knew they had underestimated her, like mice ignoring the shadow gliding overhead until it’s too late. Meal time, boys! I almost shouted as their smug faces tightened a turn or two at the sight of me, the one witness that could sink their lying, jackass of a client. And yes, I was scared to death but exhilarated that in this moment. I had located an unexpected source of power: the spoken word, the truth to be told. And yes, I would tell my story as the only person on Earth who could tell it. I was scared as hell, but that bastard shrink should be even more so.
Bradlee Aames? For her part she saw what I saw, too, and she turned to me and smiled as if to show me she knew we were together in this, and no man could pull us down. God, what a moment—pure electricity.
A judge came out, a towering but hunched-over gentleman with a little white beard and probing eyes who was formal the way you’d expect a judge to be, but he didn’t appear too happy to be there and quickly made a study of the wall clock. Dr. Weaver sat next to me, rubbing his facial scruff as he whispered asides about what was happening. The lead defense lawyer was that piece of work, Mr. Heidegger, a sour man who’d stolen a week of my life last summer, dragging out my deposition in Andrew’s—that is, my ex’s—lawsuit against Dr. Don. Heidegger argued first, and to me he sounded just as long-winded as before, pausing every five seconds or so like he was Abe Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address. According to him, I’d supposedly waived my privacy rights to Dr. Weaver’s records of my treatment when Andrew filed the civil suit against Dr. Don. Once I made the sexual misconduct allegations public, “that was that,” and Heidegger claimed it was open season now to find what I’d been talking about with Dr. Weaver in our sessions.
At first all this talk made my head spin, since I don’t know the law and could barely remember what my name was the first time I stumbled into Dr. Weaver’s office.
Boy, was I ever a mess when I found Dr. Craig. Living on a gin-and-oj starter or three in the morning, switching to red wine in the afternoons, and whatever I could get my hands on from there on out. Skin and bones, no appetite for real food. About the only nourishment I could find was from those court shows on TV where every case gets wrapped up with a bow just before the next commercial break. Those shows were my little stab at finding some truth and justice in a mean, mean world that had shown me none. Lying around in a bathrobe till all hours, watching reality shows where the contestants eat worms and roaches and belly flop from helicopters into shallow water, none of which made me feel any better about myself, though I always wished it would. The pain and degradation seemed to draw me in. I sorely wished I could be a contestant so I could lose. Spectacularly.
I must admit, Heidegger’s ploy, his hot-stuff air of overconfidence, it delivered quite a jolt. They were coming after me. But it didn’t make sense why they’d want the chart notes in the first place. As I said, Dr. Weaver and I have been steadily confronting what happened. I’ve told him everything, one sorry story after another, and of course, what Dr. Don did to me sits like a bullseye at the center of my shame. Wouldn’t Dr. Weaver’s records show I was telling the truth?
Well, maybe, but that Heidegger could get down-and-dirty nasty, and he’d have fun taking every last word in those records out of context, confusing me, embarrassing me. For now he was playing nice, suggesting that I was, perhaps, concealing something important, significant even, and all he wanted now was to know what I was afraid of, if I was honest with Dr. Weaver. Then he turned and looked right at me as if I were supposed to answer him, right there in court.
That’s when Bradlee Aames stepped in—I mean literally, smack-dab between Heidegger and me. She told Heidegger to cool it, I was her witness, and nobody messed with her witnesses, not ever. He’d have his chances to question me at trial, but that was later and for now, he had nothing. With that, Ms. Aames succeeded at sucking the air right outta the courtroom. Heidegger wasn’t used to pushback, especially from a young woman looking like the lead singer in a rock band and he sputtered something tired about being well within his rights. Bradlee Aames, she just shook her head like she couldn’t believe the crap he was spouting, and said, “That’s fine and dandy but it’s not your rights I’m concerned about, Counsel, it’s the patient’s rights I’m here to protect.”
And just like that, he was irrelevant. Fine and dandy, indeed. Good God, I wanted to pump a fist or shake a pom-pom, shout out a hallelujah. If I could out-talk a bold, pushy man just once in my life, leave him as flustered and perturbed as Mr. Heidegger was right now, I’d die a happy girl.
The judge, he was qui
etly enjoying the show, and when Heidegger shrunk back down to size, Bradlee Aames was given the floor. First off, she gave the judge a sketch of the laws of confidentiality. Then she tore apart Heidegger’s civil-case exception, which she said did not extend to anything outside the very same civil case. In other words, if I claimed in Andrew’s lawsuit that Dr. Don had wronged me as a patient, I couldn’t very well keep my patient records from coming into that same case, because I’d made an issue of the same care he provided in the lawsuit. That would be unfair, to cast allegations against the doctor and then refuse to let anyone look at my chart.
But the state case here was like apples and oranges. The medical board was the party taking action against Dr. Don, and all that had gotten started when Dr. Don’s insurance company paid the settlement in Andrew’s lawsuit, because the insurance company had to report it to the board on account of some law that requires reporting settlements. Dr. Weaver’s sessions with me? They had nothing to do with this case, no connection, and because Andrew and I weren’t the ones behind the state’s case, you couldn’t say I’d waived any rights to privacy. Not here, not now.
Wow. The way Ms. Aames laid it all out made me feel a lot better, and the judge was typing so fast into his laptop he had no time to check the clock anymore. I took that as a good sign.
The judge didn’t take long in telling Dr. Don and his lawyers that they’d lost their motion and couldn’t get their grabbing hands on Dr. Weaver’s records. I thought we were done at that point, but that’s precisely when everything got bizarre.
That’s also when the good feelings I’d been building up began to fade away, and just like that, I was that scurrying mouse with the shadow of death bearing down on me.
6
BRADLEE AAMES
Shelby Drummond is a good judge, if you can get his attention. He lives way out of town in Calabasas, about halfway to Santa Barbara, and he’s obsessed with the timing of his ridiculously long commute, so he’s always counting the minutes before he can make tracks and hit the freeway. But this time, I was the distracted one.
I’d just finished drafting an argument and was thinking about clicking my way through a few good turns on an open wave-face, preferably at Malibu, way after the sundown. No moon, just the weak glow of streetlamps and streaking headlights on PCH. No one but me, like a loner freak Gidget: just a girl and her board. I thought back, tried to calculate how long it had been since the last time I’d ridden a wave. Tried to channel that sensation of glide, the speed beneath my feet. Strange—the walls on each side shifted and I felt a vision pushing into my head, so I closed my eyes; it’s a little trick I use to hold everything in place, like psychic Duct Tape. My thoughts went to Malibu at night, a band of swell rolling up beneath me as I swing my longboard into position and swiftly stroke into the steepening line… but then, behind me, a splash of whitewater, a whiff of sunbaked seaweed and dank Malibu lagoon—in the courtroom.
I open my eyes. The attorneys, and the judge, they’re all in place. The seal of the State of California hovers with ceremonious benevolence behind the bench. Those ocean scents still linger, so I turn and barely glimpse him—blink—like when you’re fast-lane hauling down the freeway and blow by a tiny scene, look sideways for a second or you’ll miss it: he, a dark-haired, deeply tanned, handsome young man in shorts and a Mexican peasant shirt hanging out behind the gallery, a pair of black Ray Bans hiding his eyes. Then he’s half out of the courtroom door and he turns and smirks at me as if he knows we’re both way too far inland for our own good, just before the door closes and he’s rear-view-mirror gone, leaving me squinting, questioning what I just… saw? Or imagined. A surfer, I’m sure, and familiar to me, but not quite of the here or the now. In the past, like a classic photo I know and cherish, a moment in time. A surefooted, stylish talent, I sense, if only by the way he so confidently slipped through that door. A good surfer, maybe even a great one, fleeing through a tear in the cosmic canopy toward another, better place I know, where I want to be, if only I can remember where…
I’m sounding looped but not feeling unstable. No drugs or alcohol, just the weight of holding back my illness pressing down on my shoulders, as terrible a pressure as being buried alive.
The hearing marched on, dragging me behind. I hadn’t spoken in a while and wondered if my rusted jaw would ever work again. No sensations to recapture, no good vibe to reclaim. A little mind-surfing might have eased me through this internal battle, but all I could conjure was a mystery man who didn’t bother to stick around. I’d been out of the water too long to detail a good ride in my head, though an open-faced screamer or two was what I needed most.
The judge, he knows I surf. One time a few years ago, when we were stuck in a two-week trial together and got into a discussion with a court reporter who was living on a boat in Ventura Harbor, I let slip some knowledge about a localized beach in Oxnard with a misnomer: Hollywood by the Sea. Misleading, because there’s nothing flash or dash about the place, just hollow, unforgiving beach break peaks up and down a half mile of sandbars, and slashed tires or a broken windshield to greet you when you get back to your car. The hoodlums who live there and, by extension, think they own the fucking place, wouldn’t stoop so low as to punch a girl at least, and I’ve never been hassled in the water. But they’d have no qualms about creeping my Chevelle. So when I go there, I park as far away from the shore as possible and keep it very incognito.
Judge Drummond and I had talked about passion that day in court. He’s got a few acres and raises horses, and as he rhapsodized, we both sort of related on the healthy buzz of having a particular pursuit, a love, outside of one’s everyday occupation. To his credit, the judge didn’t mention a single sun-kissed surfer girl cliché when I waxed poetic on surfing, but I could tell he couldn’t reconcile me with the image of a girl in the curl.
I mention this now because as I sat down and he ruled in my favor from the bench, I saw in his eyes an expression I’d seen when he found out about my love of wave-riding. Mildly puzzled. Not sure what to make of it all, or of me.
My hands fluttered, fingers tingling. I thought the pulse in my temples would explode my head if it beat any harder. Time had begun to slow down, way down. No air in my lungs, and was that a desert wind whistling through the ceiling vents? I felt my breathing stall, had to think to suck in another breath, had to fend off an irrational fear that my lungs were filling with sand.
Gag reflex, throat constricted, lips crackly dry. Choking, then suffocation, would not be far off. Panic: which way were the elevators? I couldn’t run, though, not from court, from this, unless I wanted to lose my job. Lose the mind, maybe, all in good time, perhaps; but for now, please, girl, let’s not lose the job.
I shut my eyes and gave the time-travel trick another try, saw a green, poured-glass wave spinning at a spot north of Acapulco, peeling along before a track of cobble-rocks lining the point, wet black rocks just like those at Malibu on a minus tide. Later tonight, the other side of midnight, when all the burnouts and crazies were in hiding, Malibu was surely where I’d be…
Oh, hell!—the judge is asking me a question, but my lips are rubber and free-floating, my teeth cold and useless. He is tall, like a former basketball player, and even seated, his words floated toward me on a downward slant, only to turn in on themselves, sliding back down his throat as if afraid to feel the greedy touch of my awaiting ears. I could hear the faint scream of each word dying.
Dear Jesus, I prayed as He was standing behind me, mercifully walking in the shoes of another lost one. You watch over the flock; so watch over me. But I only half believed, because in a glance, he was gone. Even the cynical surfer had stuck around longer. Cynical? Yes, it sounded right to me. Yet, like Jesus, the surfer was gone, baby, gone, and I? Well, baby, I’d never felt more alone.
My steely-resolve, no-meds plan to stay sharp and somehow hold it together was disintegrating, along with my vaunted laser-beam focus. My bag of tricks had a hole in the bottom. With all the grace
I could manage, I sat down and pushed a bent paperclip into the palm of my hand under the table until it bled. The judge’s words stopped bending back and found their mark.
“Did you wish to have a settlement judge called in for settlement discussions, Ms. Aames?”
I wanted to run: the Seal of the State of California on the wall behind Judge Drummond now resembled the business end of a locomotive—and oh Jesus, no, it was jumping the tracks to crash through the station. I shut my eyes, hard, a second before impact, and prayed again. When I opened them, the train was gone. But what it left behind was a moment in time that lingered like a freeze-frame, and what I saw now was a portrait of all that had happened since I’d stepped into the building an hour ago, the blood of my ancestors sprinkling a trail behind me through the lobby.
I prayed for clarity.
Mendibles rescued me, unwittingly taking the squeeze off with a whisper of his sour breath.
“Say yes to the settlement conference, Bradlee.”
Against my will and better judgment, I did.
He was helping himself, Mendibles, having a gaze at me close up that he wouldn’t dare try in the office. Bold for a shy man who shuffled and ruffled about behind me like a stalker every time I took a stroll to the printer or went looking for a file. My mind fixated on a thought, which was good, which would pull me out of this spin; the thought: why so confident, Mendibles?
