The Nearly Girl

by Lisa de Nikolits

  “I can’t believe you’re saying this. I saw Dr. Carroll feeding his family. I saw what was going on. Mike, tell her.”

  “Did you see it?” Joanne turned to Mike who shook his head.

  “But if Amelia says she saw it, then she did,” he said.

  Joanne laughed. “That’s your dick thinking, not your head. Listen, I’ve got to go. This was very sad, very sad. But I agree with David. We got ourselves into this mess, let’s do what we have to, to get ourselves out of it and then walk away. I’ll see you at group. I’m going to carry on with it.”

  “I can’t believe her,” Amelia said, as they watched Joanne walk away. “I cannot believe her.”

  Mike sighed. “I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

  “I have to show you then,” Amelia insisted. “We’ll go to his house and I’ll show you and if he sees us, we can pretend like we’re there to talk about Angelina to him, like we need his help. Come on, let’s go.” Amelia had misgivings about her own suggestion but she figured they had little choice.

  “I don’t know,” Mike said.

  “We have to do something,” Amelia insisted. “And we’re the only ones who will.”

  Mike nodded and they got back into his car. “I feel like we’re walking into a trap,” Mike said and Amelia looked at him, narrowing her eyes with determination. “I know, we have to do it,” he said and he started the car.

  “Drive towards the hospital and I’ll direct you from there,” she said, her face worried and her arms folded tightly across her chest. Half an hour later, she pointed to a side street and Mike turned into it.

  “Stop here,” she said. “We can walk to the house.” She stopped and took her hand in his. “I know this may be stupid but else can we do?”

  “Nothing. We have to do this.” He stroked the back of her neck and she nodded.

  “Joan of Arc wouldn’t be afraid,” she said.

  “Joan of Arc never met Doctor Carroll,” Mike replied and Amelia laughed and nodded.

  “Let’s go then,” he said but she stopped him.

  “I just realized something. It’s only early afternoon. I was here around six thirty. We need to wait till then.”

  “Yeah, good thinking. While we wait, I’ll ask you something I’ve been wondering. What would you like us to do for our first date, once we actually get to have it?”

  She blushed. “I get to choose?”

  “You get to choose. Anything.”

  She chewed on her lip and thought carefully. “I’d like to fill up a picnic basket with nice things and go to the beach with you.”

  “But it’s November,” he said. “It’s like what, five degrees out, and rainy too.”

  “Perfect weather if you ask me,” Amelia said.

  “But we’ll get wet and sick and then I’ll miss work and lose my job and I won’t be able to pay off my student loan and that will be the end of me.”

  He was joking, but not really. “What about going to a movie?” he asked but Amelia shook her head.

  “That’s a stupid date. You don’t get to talk to the person you’re with. You just sit there, staring at the screen like robots.”

  “But then you go out afterwards and you can talk about it and discuss what you thought.”

  “Okay. But what kind of movie? I’m not going to see Pirates of the Caribbean. It’s stupid.”

  “Hey,” Mike said. “I didn’t call your idea stupid. I just said it could have bad consequences for me. How about we go and have dinner at a restaurant near the beach and then, if it’s not raining, we can go for a walk afterwards?”

  Amelia was silent for a moment, then she took his hand. “I’m sorry I said it was stupid. Dinner and a walk sound lovely. I guess I’m so freaked and I’m trying to show you that you and me won’t work so you can back out now.”

  He stroked the back of her hand. “I’m not backing out. We’ll figure everything out. You said your Dad’s a poet. Has he had books published?”

  “Oh yes.”

  Amelia told Mike the history of Henry’s collection of works and Mike’s eyes lit up. “I bet he’d be fascinating to talk to,” he said. “If I could get him to actually talk to me.”

  “He can be amazing to talk to,” Amelia admitted. “But when he’s out to lunch, he’s so out to lunch, and you think he’ll never come back.”

  “Speaking of lunch, I’m so hungry,” Mike said and he looked at his watch. “We’ve got time. I say we go to McDonald’s and then come back, what do you think?”

  “Great idea,” Amelia agreed and Mike started the car.

  “You know,” he said, “as screwed up as all this is, I’m happy to finally be spending time with you. You’ve been driving me crazy, if you must know.”

  “Didn’t you hear Dr. Carroll,” she joked. “We’re already officially crazy.”

  “Yeah, well then, more crazy.”

  “Are you sure we should go to McDonald’s?” she asked. “Why not Wendy’s? Or A+W? Or Burger King? Or Pizza Hut? Or wait, Baskin-Robbins!”

  “I stand corrected,” he said. “You’re driving me more crazy now.” But he grinned at her happily as he started the car.

  16. INSIDE

  “I KNOW I’M A GUY AND I SHOULDN’T admit to being scared,” Mike said later as they crept up the neighbour’s driveway, which was once again thankfully deserted. “But I am scared. Dr. Carroll freaks me out. I wonder if I should have told my dad what’s going on.”

  “Would he have believed you?”

  “I don’t know. Anyway, it’s too late now.”

  Amelia pointed to the kitchen window. “There, I looked in through there.”

  They crawled through the hedge, then ran across Dr. Carroll’s garden and Mike peered through the window.

  “There’s no one there,” he said.

  “Let me see.” Amelia couldn’t believe it. There was no way she had imagined it, that surreal tableau of chatty manic Dr. Carroll and his zombie family.

  She peered inside. Mike was right. The dining room table was there just as she remembered, all neat and tidy, but the place was eerily empty and quiet.

  “Maybe he’s running late or something,” Amelia whispered and she turned to Mike and then she let out a piercing scream and Mike jumped.

  “I see she’s having a bad influence on you,” Dr. Carroll said cheerfully to Mike. “If you want to come and see me, why not knock at the front door like everybody else?”

  “We didn’t think anybody was home,” Mike said, lamely.

  “Well, now that you’re here, come on in,” Dr. Carroll said jovially. “Good to see both of you. I understand you’re both very upset about Angelina and I’m glad you came over. Come in, and I’ll make some tea and we can have a good old chat.”

  “No thank you,” Amelia heard herself say and her voice sounded a thousand miles away to her own ears. “We must be going.”

  But Dr. Carroll chuckled. “Oh, one cup of tea. You both came the whole way, you must have something on your alleged minds, so come on.” He turned and walked around the side of the house. “Follow me,” he called out.

  “If we go in, we can see what’s going on,” Mike whispered to Amelia who shook her head.

  “I don’t like it,” she said. “Let’s leave.”

  “But how? How can we just leave? He caught us staring in his window. It would be strange and rude to leave.”

  “Strange and rude is what I do,” Amelia said. “Let’s go. Let’s go right now.”

  But Mike was following Dr. Carroll and Amelia was following Mike and before she could say anything else, they were inside the living room. The room was immaculate.

  “You like the seventies,” Mike commented, looking around and Dr. Carroll nodded.

  “Yes, I do. I go antique hunting on the weekends, if you can call the seventies
part of the antiquities era. Let me get that tea and we can have a chat. Have a seat anywhere.”

  Mike sat down on a brown corduroy sofa while Amelia prowled the room.

  “No pictures of them,” she whispered. “No pictures of anyone.”

  They heard the kettle boil and snap off and then there was the sound of pouring water. Amelia felt as if sand was running through an hourglass and when the sand ran out, she and Mike would be trapped forever, bogged down, in the quicksand of Dr. Carroll’s trap.

  “Here we go,” Dr. Carroll said. He was carrying a tray with three mugs. “I hope you like the tea. It’s a blend I got while in a conference in Boston a while back. I made the cookies too. I love baking. It helps me to think.”

  He grinned his chipmunk grin and Amelia, following Mike’s lead, picked up a cup of tea.

  “It’s delicious,” she said, surprised, and Dr. Carroll favoured her with another toothy little smile and a sideways glance.

  “How are you both feeling?” he asked. “A lot has happened, this is true. Gino and the gun. Whitney swinging from one sexual partner to another. The episode with David. And now the death of poor Angelina. I want you both to know that my groups aren’t generally this action-packed although I am gathering enough research with this one for an entire paper to be published. You certainly are an interesting group. But how are you both? Mike, you go first.”

  Mike had downed half his tea and was biting enthusiastically into a cookie. “These are great,” he said. “Oh, crumbs, sorry Dr. Carroll.”

  Dr. Carroll waved a hand. “Doesn’t matter. Carry on. What were you going to say?”

  “Just that this therapy does seem to result in extreme behaviours,” Mike said. “Far beyond the accepted norms. Would you say that D.T.O.T. would be a reasonable way for a person to live their day-to-day lives? The consequences are pretty intense.”

  “Hmmm.” Dr. Carroll perched his chin on his fingertips. “Good point. You have to ask yourself what you really want in this life. I believe we’re all entitled to live the lives we want, no matter how odd others may consider those lives to be. However, we are expected to mesh and meld with the fabric of so-called normalized society. If we all agreed to accept behavioural anarchy, that would be one thing, but we don’t. Therefore, Mike, in answer to your question, I would say no. I would recommend that we employ the powers of D.T.O.T. when we are attacking neuroses and phobias and the like, but not when we are holding down a job or having a relationship.”

  Mike didn’t appear to know what to say to this so he ate another cookie.

  “Do you have family, Dr. Carroll?” Amelia asked, taking a cookie to cloak her question in casual gesture.

  “Sadly, no. But also, happily no,” Dr. Carroll waved a hand around. “I like a neat and tidy ship and that’s just not possible with family. Families are so messy, particularly kids. Stuff everywhere from the time they’re babies. Worse when they’re toddlers and an unimaginable nightmare when they’re teenagers. It’s impossible to control.”

  “Form and function trumps emotion,” Amelia said and she gave a jaw-splitting yawn. “Sorry Dr. Carroll, that was rude of me. My gran’s in the hospital and I haven’t been getting much sleep.”

  “No problem,” Dr. Carroll replied. “And how are you doing, Amelia?”

  “I… Dr. Carroll, my, uh…”

  Amelia was finding it difficult to speak. She looked over at Mike who was fast asleep, his head awkwardly bent to one side. She felt own eyes being pulled closed, as if gates were being lowered and locked tight. She tried to force her eyelids open but then she gave up and slid into the darkness of a deep black sleep.

  Amelia swam through warm waters. Somehow able to breathe underwater, she glided among coral and floated into sea caves, emerging to be kissed by beams of sunlight that penetrated the depths. She and the large schools of fish eyed one another before swimming away. There were blue and yellow striped fish with disapproving little faces, slender red fish who blended in with the coral, and snake-like lizardfish that changed their colours, becoming white against the soft ocean sand. Angelfish, Butterflyfish, and Amelia’s personal favourite, the Squirrelfish with its huge eyes, reddish body and adorable yellow spiky fins, all kept her company.

  Amelia found that she could bounce off the seabed with her toes buried in the soft sand, and this gave her purchase to springboard upwards, but no matter how much she shot up through that warm sunlit water, she could never reach the top. She ended up floating back down to the bottom to glide among the fish and then, for a while, she would forget about trying to reach the surface, and then she would remember and she would try that heavenward bounce again.

  Jellyfish pulsated close by, the round curtains of their ball gowns opening and closing like bell jars, while wise-eyed turtles drifted past, and every manner of seashell lined the ocean floor and decorated the sea cave walls.

  Amelia found that she could tumble and turn. She could do somersaults and torpedo forward with her arms tightly at her sides and her feet kicking wildly.

  She studied her hands in the waxy green gloom of the lava lamp water and saw that her skin was pale and moonlike and her fingers were starfish. She saw her own reflection in the mirrored wall of dark water ahead of her and her eyes were staring. They were fixed wide-open and her mouth hung loose and her hair floated this way and that, like seaweed leached of life.

  Then she was seated at a table, her limbs as heavy as lead, her arms pillars of concrete by her side, her legs numb, her appetite ravenous. Trapped inside her anesthetized body and her drugged mind, she wanted to look around but her head was a ballast in heavy waters, and she could not control it.

  “Look, family, we’ve got guests!” Dr. Carroll was ecstatic. “We’re having a dinner party and I’ve made a feast. I’ve been cooking all day, slaving over a hot stove.” He gave a high-pitched giggle.

  “Mike, Amelia,” he said, “let me introduce you to my family. Yes, Amelia, I know I told a porky pie, I do, in fact, have a family. I do! I do! I do! But, but, BUT, like I said, they were so messy! The chaos was incredible. I did what I could to run after them and tidy things up but it was beyond my control.”

  He dished out the food as he spoke, circling the table with a platter of meatloaf, carefully giving two slices to each person. “And,” he continued, “as you know, I’m the master of D.T.O.T. and there I was, trying to live with the chaos, trying to be okay with the mess and it was getting harder and harder and I thought what should I do? Well, of course, I should Do The Opposite Thing, which was all well and good, but what would that be?”

  He ladled servings of mashed potato onto the plates, and the aroma of salty butter, garlic, and heavenly potatoes made Amelia’s mouth water and she drooled, feeling a trail of disgusting wet saliva slide down her face. She focused on trying to swallow and she discovered that she could. She found that she could even move her tongue around her mouth, explore her teeth and the roof of her palette, and just this modicum of control brought her joy. She could also think quite clearly and she wondered if the others could too. She looked over at Dr. Carroll’s wife and, from the expression behind the woman’s clear unblinking gaze, Amelia believed that she too was aware of what was going on.

  Oddly, though, the power of speech, like their limbs, had been stopped, sentenced to mute. Amelia tried to figure out how this was possible but she also wanted to hear what Dr. Carroll had to say and since she could not do both, she concentrated on Dr. Carroll instead.

  “What,” Dr. Carroll repeated, “would the opposite be, of me trying to live this normal, terrible, chaotic, and uncontrolled life? The answer pointed to one thing: control. But,” he continued, spooning glazed carrots onto each plate, “how does one gain and maintain control? It’s not easy when other people are involved. One can make a decision on behalf of the masses, for the good of the masses, but will the masses understand, acquiesce, and cheerfully agree? No, they
will not!”

  He sat down next to his wife and lovingly tucked a paper napkin into the neckline of her T-shirt.

  “Take my sweet Charlotte here,” he said tenderly and he carefully loaded a fork with mashed potato and meat loaf. “She had very definite opinions about things, one of which was letting the children have free rein. She was utterly convinced that they need their own space to grow and develop and I tried to explain that it wasn’t working for me but she would not, or could not, hear me. I tried reasoning with the kids too. Honestly,” he said pausing for a moment, the food-laden fork suspended, “it wasn’t as if they weren’t party to this, they were. I involved them in the decision-making and choices every step of the way but they stubbornly resisted and persisted with their unacceptable levels of behaviour.

  “It was difficult for me,” he said, now holding a glass of water to his wife’s mouth and gently cupping the back of her head with his other hand. “The idea of control came by degrees and at first I only dreamed of having one night, just one beautiful, perfect, quiet, and peaceful night and when I achieved it, the results were remarkable and my life was irrevocably changed. I tidied the entire house and the quiet was sheer heaven!”

  He grinned. “Nirvana! How did I do it? Chocolate milkshakes! That’s how I did it for the kids. And Charlotte had tea and cookies like you did,” Dr. Carroll waved a hand at Amelia and Mike. “They gently fell asleep and I tucked them safely into bed and I cannot describe the sense of peace and order and tranquility that filled my heart and soul.

  “The next morning after that pivotal night, I told Charlotte and the kids that they had food poisoning because they woke with headaches, feeling sick. I admit that it had been hard at the time to calculate the dose and I may have given them too much. I told them that they had gone to bed early and they believed me. Of course, I couldn’t do it again as soon as I wanted to. I had to wait and that nearly killed me.”

  He had finished feeding his wife and had moved on to his daughter. “This is Bella,” he said conversationally. “Bella is nearly ten and, as you can see, she is the spitting image of me. Except for the fact that she’s SO UNTIDY! Aren’t you, princess?”