Tortured Teardrops

by P. D. Workman

  Tamara felt in front of herself, sure that’s where Zobel’s body was, that she couldn’t let him go until someone was there who could help and administer first aid. But it wasn’t there, and there was no sticky blood on her face and arm. There was nothing on the floor in front of her.

  “Let’s get up,” Zobel suggested.

  Tamara was crouching, her arms out in front of her where Zobel had been, or where she had thought he had been. Tamara rose to her feet, her head whirling. She wasn’t sure what was real and what was not. She was afraid to say anything, for fear that she wasn’t really there.

  “Okay?” Zobel asked.

  Tamara nodded.

  “What was all that?” one of the other guards demanded.

  Blacksnake was still there, a tissue held over her nose while she complained in a clogged-up voice that she hadn’t done anything to warrant the attack, but also to protest that she wasn’t actually hurt and didn’t have to go to the infirmary.

  The other inmates stood around in little clumps, or watched from their comfortable seats in front of the TV, whatever fictional drama was showing on the screen long forgotten. They whispered back and forth to each other, but Tamara noticed that none of them met her eyes, not even Lewis.

  “If I’m right, a flashback,” Zobel said. He looked at Tamara, his clear blue eyes unchanged. “Am I right?”

  A flashback. It sounded so innocuous. Just a small inconvenience. A memory blip. Tamara swallowed and nodded her head. “Yeah,” she agreed hoarsely. “Just remembering… it’s nothing.”

  “I’ll take her to her room,” Zobel suggested.

  “She should be in isolation after physically assaulting another inmate,” another voice disagreed. Tamara didn’t have the energy to identify who was talking and to follow all of the back-and-forth. It was unimportant. All that was important was that she stayed there in the present and didn’t make a further fool of herself.

  “Isolation is not a punishment,” Zobel quoted policy to the objector. “Its purpose is to keep inmates safe. The housing sheet I looked at this morning said she’s odd man out. She’s not sharing a cell.”

  “She’s odd man,” a woman guard confirmed.

  “Then the only reason to put her in isolation instead of her own room is if she’s a danger to herself.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence. Tamara rubbed her forehead. All of the tension seemed to be gathering in the middle of her forehead, the pain getting more and more intense.

  “She’s not on watch,” Zobel said. “Does anyone think she should be?”

  “Can we just go?” Tamara growled, irritated that her mental status would be discussed in front of all of the other juvies in the common room.

  “Maybe she should go to the infirmary.”

  “Blacksnake is going to the infirmary. You really want them both sent there? We’ll need twice the security measures.”

  “Take me to my room,” Tamara said. “I’m not gonna hang myself with the sheets.”

  There was another silence.

  “I don’t see a problem,” one of them said. “Let’s just get this mess cleaned up.”

  Zobel touched Tamara’s shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  She appreciated that he didn’t see the need to handcuff her. He escorted her one direction and Blacksnake was escorted toward the infirmary.

  “Blacksnake been getting on your case?” Zobel asked, his voice casual, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  “Just now, but… not since I came back. Me and the Sharks, though… aren’t exactly on good terms right now.”

  Zobel nodded slowly. “I read in the logs that you had some kind of an upset with Lewis.”

  An upset. Tamara couldn’t hide the sheepish smile that pulled at her lips. “Uh… yeah. I kinda flipped the whole breakfast table into her lap. Her and the rest of the Sharks sitting with her.”

  “I can see how that might annoy her.”

  Tamara glanced at Zobel’s face, hearing the amusement in his voice.

  “They shouldn’t have made me sit at that table.”

  “You ought to control yourself. No matter what position they put you into, you still have a choice.”

  The amusement was gone, but his face was still pleasant, not angry or accusing. Tamara could have argued with him, but she supposed it was true. She could have moderated her reaction. She could have chosen not to do something that would humiliate Lewis in front of the entire canteen and make her look like a fool. Something that wouldn’t demand retaliation and an escalation of tensions between them. So Tamara kept her mouth shut and didn’t take it up with Zobel. They walked on in silence to her cell.

  Zobel stood in the doorway and didn’t close the door immediately upon Tamara entering. She looked at him.

  “You want to talk about it?” Zobel asked.

  “What?”

  He leaned his shoulder against the doorframe. “That flashback.”

  Tamara gave a wide shrug. “What about it?”

  “Seemed like quite a doozy.”

  Tamara didn’t know what to say. She sat on her bunk and put her back to the wall, watching him. Knees bent in front of her chest, like she needed a shield.

  “Have you been having a lot?”

  “No.”

  His eyes were quick and discerning. “But it wasn’t the first one, was it?”

  “You’re not my doctor.”

  Zobel considered this. “Have you talked to a doctor about it?”

  “No. I’m fine. It’s not such a big deal.”

  “Tamara…” He spoke softly, in a voice that wouldn’t carry to any of the other cells. “Lots of people deal with PTSD. Lots of cops. Lots of inmates.”

  Tamara scratched at the fabric of her uniform as if there were something spilled on it and it was important to get it off.

  “I don’t know anyone who’s got that,” she challenged. She’d heard of PTSD. That was what soldiers got. She could understand their being traumatized by their wartime experiences. Bombs exploding, planes crashing, women and children in suicide vests, being shot at. That made sense. That was the stuff that nightmares were made of. But living in a country where there was no war, even living in juvie, a person had to be weak-minded to get PTSD from that.

  “You don’t think anyone else here has PTSD?”

  Tamara shifted, pressing herself solidly against the wall. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you know…” Zobel ran his finger down the long pink scar on his arm. “I’ve been having a lot of trouble since this happened. They put me into counseling. They’re helping me deal with it. When I looked at your file, saw all of the trouble you’d been having since you came back here… well, I figured maybe PTSD was the reason.”

  Tamara shrugged. Was that what had been going on in her brain? Was it as simple as that? Maybe there was a pill she could pop, something simple that would make it all just go away and go back to normal. She could have her old brain back. The one that worked instead of the one that kept throwing roadblocks up in her path. Hallucinations, screwed up timelines and memories, overwrought emotions, flashbacks. She could do without all of that.

  “Then in the common room…” Zobel went on. “Like I said, that looked like a hell of a flashback.”

  “It was you. I tried to help you, but I thought you were going to die. I was sure of it.” Tamara swore. “The blood… it was everywhere.”

  “I saw the video.” He didn’t say he had seen how she had been covered in his blood. “I’m… sorry.”

  Tamara snorted. “Wasn’t your fault.”

  “If I’d followed protocol, maybe things would have turned out differently. Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten hurt.”

  And unspoken, maybe she wouldn’t have gotten crazy.

  “You had to help. There were other guards down. You couldn’t leave them there.” She cleared her throat. “Did anyone die? Any of the staff?”

  “No. We all made it out of there alive, miraculously. Things could have be
en a lot different.”

  “If you didn’t help the others, maybe they would have died. You did what you had to.”

  Zobel’s eyes were far away. He ran his fingers over his scalp. Tamara watched him carefully. He didn’t look crazy. He wasn’t acting erratically like she had. He was just distant. As the minutes ticked by without him saying or doing anything, she wondered how far away he was. If he was having a flashback like she’d had, only quieter, everything enacted inside his brain rather than out where everyone could see it.

  She didn’t know whether she should call him back, as he had called her, or just to wait until it ended by itself. She bit the skin around her nails, waiting to see what would happen.

  Zobel blinked a few times and focused in on Tamara. “What did you say?”

  But she too had lost the thread of the conversation. “Nothing. You okay?”

  “Sure, I’m fine.” Then Zobel frowned and chewed on his lip. “Maybe not fine. But… I’ll get through it. The therapy is helping. It would help you.”

  “I dunno.” Tamara hugged her knees close. “Yeah, I was in the middle of that fight, but so what? Everyone who was there doesn’t have PTSD. Just you. You were hurt; just about killed. I wasn’t.”

  “And you think I believe that what happened to you wasn’t traumatic? Vernon taking you at knifepoint? Her and her ex-con boyfriend holding you hostage for days? That’s not just as traumatic as a little knife-wound?” He motioned to his scar as if it were a mere scratch.

  “It wasn’t that bad. Not like they had me in chains for three days.”

  Tamara’s stomach turned over. She could minimize the experience all she liked, but her body knew she was lying. Tamara held her stomach, waiting for the nausea to pass. Zobel raised an eyebrow, clearly not believing a word she said.

  “I don’t know what else went on. And I don’t know all of what you went through at that foster family.” It had been all over the news, so Tamara couldn’t be surprised that he knew details of her life that she would rather everyone at juvie didn’t know. “But I don’t think you can say that you haven’t been through any traumatic experiences in your life. Even just being cellmates with Spielman for two years… you dealt with a lot of crap from her, too.”

  Tamara wound a lock of hair tightly around her finger. Looking down at it, she felt like it was foreign. The dark brown hair gave her a strange feeling of unreality every time she saw it. As if she were living in someone else’s body. She wasn’t entirely sure that she was the same person she had been before the kidnapping. That girl had been replaced with someone completely foreign.

  “I’ll set up an appointment for you with Dr. Sutherland,” Zobel suggested. “You can talk to him about the PTSD. The flashbacks and other symptoms you’re having. He can talk about it with you. Help you work through it.”

  “That’s it?” Tamara asked. “No meds? Just talk?”

  Zobel pursed his lips and scratched his head. “Well… maybe. He might have suggestions for meds that will help with particular symptoms. To help you sleep, reduce anxiety, treat depression…”

  It sounded like Zobel was taking an entire pharmacy. Tamara didn’t want to be that inmate. Plenty of them had daily prescriptions they were taking for one thing or another. But there were always one or two girls who were taking so many different pills that they practically rattled when they walked. The girls who were always in and out of the Psych unit, who people avoided having anything to do with because they were so erratic.

  “Don’t bother,” she told him. “I don’t want a bunch of pills.”

  “You should have one appointment with him to discuss it, at least. It doesn’t mean he’ll put you on a bunch of meds. But if there’s something you need; wouldn’t you rather feel better?”

  Tamara stared into her knees. She rested her forehead on them and shook her head.

  12

  ZOBEL LEFT TAMARA to her whirling thoughts, needing to get back to his other duties. Tamara watched through the narrow window in the door as he walked away, disappearing from sight. She was finally alone again and could just let loose. She didn’t know whether she wanted to cry or to go back to sleep.

  As it turned out, she didn’t cry or go back to sleep. She rolled off her bunk and barely made it to the stainless steel toilet bowl to throw up.

  Vernon and her ex-con boyfriend.

  Zobel’s words echoed in her head, bringing Vernon and Sly’s faces into Tamara’s mind. The meaningful looks they exchanged, their smiles, the way they had treated her. She didn’t want to remember. Her body didn’t want to remember. She retched and retched over the toilet like her body could purge the memories.

  When her stomach finally stopped trying to turn itself inside-out, Tamara leaned on her arm, braced on the edge of the toilet.

  She tried to reconstruct her life without the bad memories. Living with Gram. That had been good. The most stable place she’d ever had to live. She could add in some of the memories of the Hensons and Sybil. She could even include portions of the three years she had spent at juvie. Times when things had been quiet. When she hadn’t been so worried about her personal safety. When things had been repetitive and routine and it was almost like being away at camp instead of prison.

  If she could just get rid of the bad memories and focus on the good ones, there would be no PTSD. There would be no traumatic events. No flashbacks.

  Tamara’s stomach heaved again. She coughed and blew her nose, trying to get all of the bile and shreds of dinner out of her mouth and nose. There wasn’t anything left in her stomach, so her body should just stop trying. Tamara climbed back into bed and curled up, closing her eyes.

  Despite the fact that she had told Zobel not to set up an appointment with Dr. Sutherland, he did. Such a helpful guy. She saved his life and he repaid her by ratting her out to the prison shrink. Of course, it could have been any of the other guards who had witnessed what happened in the common room, but Tamara’s money was on Zobel.

  Dumas was in Tamara’s room first thing in the morning, before Tamara had even had a chance to shower or have breakfast. She sniffed the air, looking around the cell with a frown. Tamara wondered if she could still smell the sour scent of vomit from the night before. Tamara pulled a lock of her hair under her nose to smell it, wondering if her whole body reeked of it. She hadn’t been planning on having a shower, avoiding it for as long as she possibly could, but if she were starting to stink, the staff would force the issue, taking her to the showers and physically putting her under the spray if they had to.

  “You have an appointment with Sutherland,” Dumas informed Tamara, wrinkling her nose but saying nothing about the smell. “I’m supposed to take you straight down.”

  “I’m still in my pinks. Give me a second.”

  Dumas just stared at her. Tamara looked down at her clothing and saw that she was in her orange day uniform. She ground her knuckles into her forehead, trying to remember whether she had gone to sleep in her days, or whether she had already changed that morning without remembering. She blinked and looked back at Dumas.

  “I mean… I need to comb my hair. Just…”

  She grabbed her hygiene kit and ran her comb through her long dark hair a few times to get out the night-time snarls and make herself presentable. She tied it back with an elastic and unbuttoned a couple of buttons on her uniform to smear deodorant into her pits, unsure of whether she had already done that or not.

  “Let’s go, then,” Dumas urged impatiently.

  “Yeah… okay. I’m coming.”

  She was surprised to be seeing Sutherland so early in the day. He must have decided it was the only way he could fit Tamara in without having to bump other appointments he already had scheduled.

  Tamara smothered a yawn as she entered Dr. Sutherland’s office. A big yawn that she couldn’t hold back, the kind that meant she probably still needed another hour or two of sleep. She rubbed her eyes, wiping away the tears that the yawn had brought on, and faced Dr. Sutherland.
<
br />   “Well, good morning, sleepyhead,” Dr. Sutherland greeted with a chuckle.

  “Sorry,” Tamara said, sliding into the chair and trying to restrain another yawn. “Guess I’m just not awake yet.”

  “I took the liberty of making coffee,” Dr. Sutherland said in a confidential tone, indicating two mugs on his desk. “I know that we’re not supposed to be providing coffee to minor inmates under all of the nutritional guidelines, but if a cup happened to go missing from my desk, I’m not sure how I could be blamed for that.”

  “Oh!” Tamara didn’t hesitate, grabbing the one that was closer to her. He had sugar packets and cream powder on his desk, so she doctored it up.

  Dr. Sutherland opened a box and took out a honey-glazed donut. The smell of fresh baking wafted through the small office. Dr. Sutherland nodded to it, which Tamara took as an invitation. She opened the box and looked over the variety Dr. Sutherland had provided.

  “I can’t take you away from your breakfast in the canteen without providing an alternative, can I?”

  Tamara’s stomach rumbled. Coffee and a real, fresh donut instead of stale toast and room temperature juice. She would take an early-morning appointment with Dr. Sutherland any day without complaint after that.

  Finally settling on a chocolate-glazed confection with colorful sprinkles, Tamara settled back in her chair again, taking a long sniff of the coffee and donut before starting in.

  “I understand you wanted to talk to me today about some symptoms you’ve been having,” Dr. Sutherland suggested. “You thought that maybe I could help you with some flashbacks…?”

  Tamara took a bite of the donut and a sip of the scalding-hot coffee.

  “I didn’t make the appointment.”

  “But you are experiencing some troublesome symptoms?”

  She eyed him, wondering how much Zobel had told him. Dr. Sutherland was good at pretending he knew far less than he did in order to draw a person out.

  “Sort of.”