Scott Nicholson Library Vol 1 Page 36

Julia was tempted to plug it in again, to see if those same haunting numerals were still frozen on the display. But what if they were? Or, almost as bad, what if they weren’t?

  Had someone taken her screen down, perhaps crawled in through the window she had somehow forgotten to lock? Or had the wind really blown off the screen while she was at work?

  Or had she opened the window and forced herself to forget?

  Julia sat on the bed and picked up her cell phone, punching the top number in her book.

  “Hello?” came that comforting voice.

  “Hi, Dr. Forrest?”

  A pause. “Yes.”

  “It’s me, Julia Stone. Sorry to bother you at home.”

  “That’s quite all right, Julia. That’s why I gave you my number.” Someone else’s voice, a man’s, was in the background. Julia couldn’t make out the words. “Is there a problem?”

  Of course there’s a problem, Julia wanted to scream. After four months of therapy, you’ve probably figured that out by now.

  But that was misplaced rage, the kind of thing that didn’t bring awareness and healing. That was abdicating responsibility, as Dr. Forrest had so carefully explained. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and said, “I . . . I think I’m having another episode.”

  “Worse than the last one?”

  “Not as intense, but longer in duration. I’m imagining things.” Julia tried to sound matter-of-fact, almost bored. She related the stories of the clock, the VCR, and the footprints at the window.

  “Hmm. Have you been keeping the journal like you promised?”

  Julia nodded before remembering that Dr. Forrest couldn’t see her. “Yes.”

  “Did you write down those incidents?”

  “No.”

  “Julia, it’s very important that you keep track of everything out of the ordinary, each thought or idea, each fear. I’m very disappointed in you.”

  “I . . . I’ll try harder from now on.”

  “You do want to get better, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know that you have to work hard at it. You have to fight. I can help, but only if you let me. Will you let me, Julia?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you come by the office tomorrow?”

  “Sure. But tomorrow’s Saturday.”

  “We’ll just squeeze in a little extra session. The problems are very close to the surface. You just have to let them go, bring them into the light.”

  “What time should I come by?”

  “Eleven in the morning.”

  “Okay. What should I do tonight?”

  “Try not to worry. Think about the things we’ve worked on. The truth is locked inside you. The body remembers what the mind tries to forget. Pay attention to your dreams.”

  “Thanks, I’ll do that. See you in the morning.”

  “Bye. And Julia?”

  “Yes?”

  “We’ll beat this thing.”

  Dr. Forrest hung up. Julia slid the cell back on the nightstand. She wrote the clock incident in her journal and added the part about the VCR. Lastly, she wrote down her dream of bones. Then she drifted into an uneasy sleep.

  Bones.

  Rattling at the window, hanging dry and dusty in her closet, tumbling around on the floor of her childhood bedroom like so many Barbies and wooden blocks.

  The bones stitched themselves into a skeleton.

  Julia was four. She got up from the bed. Chester Bear had fallen behind the headboard, but she didn’t retrieve him. Instead, she went to the door, listened to the voices in the next room, turned the knob.

  The skeleton stood before her, its skull grinning like a jack-in-the-box puppet.

  She tried to cry out, but then its hard clattering fingers were on her, dirty-white, squeezing, sharp, insistent. The skeleton pulled her from the room, dragged her into the living room. Daddy was gone. The bad people in the robes stood around, watching her. She opened her mouth to scream but a blanket was thrown over her. The wool scratched her skin.

  She was carried from the house into the cool dark night. A long time later, maybe hours, the blanket was pulled from her. Two of the people in robes held her. Others stood watching in the darkness. They took her clothes and tied her. Someone stuck a needle in her arm.

  She was laid on a stone, its hard chill sinking into her flesh. The bad people circled around her. She wanted to yell for help, but she was so tired, so sleepy.

  Candles burned near the stone, along with other things in clay pots. Trees loomed overhead under the bright, full face of the moon. A sweetish, heavy smoke filled the air. The bad people began swaying, singing slow songs that made her blood freeze in her veins.

  One of the bad people stood over her and held out his hands. A large ring, of a silver skull with tiny red jewels for eyes, flashed on one finger. The hand with the ring went inside the fold of his robe. He brought out a long knife, its blade gleaming in the moonlight.

  The bad people gathered near, the stench of their sweat making her want to throw up. The skull ring flashed a gleaming grin. She struggled against her bonds. Why couldn’t she scream?

  The bad man with the knife leaned forward and raised the blade high. He lifted his head as if to gaze imploringly into the night sky and his hood slipped backward. Four-year-old Julia looked up at the lower portion of his face revealed beneath the wedge of shadow. That mouth, that chin—

  No.

  Not him.

  Pleeezzzzzzzzzz–

  At last she could scream, and she awoke in her bed, the darkness thick around her, the sheets entwined in her limbs. She sat up, a clammy sweat on her skin.

  For a horrible moment, that face was still frozen in her mind. She fought for breath. It was all a dream, only a stupid, strange nightmare.

  Then why did two rivers of pain sluice down her abdomen?

  She ran her hands under the sheets and touched the scars.

  They were moist.

  She fumbled for the bedside lamp, nearly knocked it over before she found the switch. The light burst to life. Julia looked at her fingers.

  Only sweat.

  Not blood.

  Julia glanced instinctively at the clock then remembered it was in the trash. She lay back down and thought of soft, sunny things, the lake shore at the country club where Mitchell had taken her virginity, the little beach house at Cape Hatteras that her adoptive parents had owned, the playground at Denton Elementary where she’d been a diminutive kickball star.

  Soon she was breathing evenly. She pulled out her journal and wrote down the dream. The images of the fire and smoke and skull ring sliced into her willful focus on mundane things. She thrust all memories aside and calculated the Cardinals’ chances of moving up in the division standings the next year and their perennial search for a decent closer, centerfielder, and left-handed starting pitcher.

  Julia turned out the light. As much as she feared the dark, and the things it could harbor, she hated the thought that something outside could see her more easily than she could see it.

  Darkness won’t win. Please, God, if you’re up there, don’t let it get me.

  She couldn’t fix an image of God in her head. The pasty, stringy-haired old man with the shimmering aura that was popular in children’s Bible books was the first to emerge from the mists of drowsiness.

  That stern, paternal visage was no comfort, so she let it shift to a woman. She had no model for a female godhead, except the popular depictions of Venus, Athena, and other mythological goddesses, and their beautiful faces came off as haughty and vain instead of generous. She killed the formative image before it could sneer down at Julia in disdain. She recalled something she’d read once, probably by Nietzsche or Heidegger or one of the other renowned existentialists, that posited the theory that if God were dead, he’d have to be replaced.

  Sounds like something Dr. Forrest would say.

  The therapist’s face took over the spot that had been occupied by the gods. Dr. Forrest’s smi
le was benevolent, patient, and understanding. Existentialism gave no comfort in the night, but human kindness was a snug lover.

  Finally, sleep crept over her, mercifully blank, the fingers of the past receding into shadow.

  The next morning, the first thing Dr. Forrest said was, “You look exhausted.”

  “Thanks, I’ve been working at it.” Julia forced a smile. She felt rumpled, like a silk shirt in a sock drawer. Dr. Forrest had just started a pot of coffee. Her receptionist wasn’t in, and neither was the other psychiatrist who shared the small office building.

  “Do you mind if we lock the door?” Julia asked when they were in the office.

  “I don’t really think that’s necessary. It’s good that you are recognizing your fear, that you’re not lying to yourself. But let’s just risk leaving the door unlocked. Then, when we’re finished and no crazed stranger has burst in, you can claim a small victory.”

  Julia nodded. Dr. Forrest had elicited a lot of small victories. But Julia was ready for a big victory. The dark place inside her head felt as if it were growing, like a cold black fire that was consuming her from the inside out.

  Julia settled in her chair as Dr. Forrest closed the blinds. As she dimmed the lights, Julia said, “Do we have to be in the dark?”

  “Trust me,” Dr. Forrest said. “You want to become whole, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Julia said, reciting the mantra Dr. Forrest had given her. “The whole Julia Stone.”

  “Where shall we start?” the therapist asked, sitting across from her.

  Julia wondered if she should mention her imagining of Dr. Forrest on the high throne of heaven and decided sharing such a thing would be as disturbing as having had a lesbian fantasy about the older woman. Both were silly when laid on the harsh examining table of daylight, since Julia was heterosexual and secular. As far as she knew. “Maybe I should tell you about my dream.”

  “Ah. Did you bring your journal?”

  Julia fished the notebook out of her purse. Dr. Forrest perused the recent entries and looked up with excited eyes. “I think we’re onto something here. Are you willing to face it now?”

  “Whatever you think is best.”

  “Okay. I’m going to hypnotize you, and this time, we’re going to go all the way.”

  Julia’s breath caught. “All the way?”

  “Let’s find out what happened to little Julia Stone. I think I know, but what’s important is that you know.”

  Julia dug her fingers into the arm of the chair, but listened as Dr. Forrest gave the relaxation instructions and then began counting down slowly from ten, leading Julia more deeply beneath the surface of the world like Persephone making her annual descent into Hades. Her eyes were open, and she could still recognize her thoughts as her own, but she floated on a soft, insistent current. She was carried through the shadowed past, twenty-three years back.

  “The hooded man is standing over you,” came Dr. Forrest’s voice, as if from behind a wall of water. “The man with the skull ring.”

  “Help me,” Julia said, scared, her hands tight in the knotted rope, the stone hard beneath her bare back.

  “The bad people are around you, Julia. They’re chanting, belladonna and incense are burning in the crucibles. At the end of the stone is an inverted cross, a decapitated goat’s head speared on its tip. Its eyes are open and black, and flies circle the rotting flesh.”

  Julia squirmed in her chair. She couldn’t remember giving Dr. Forrest all those details. But Dr. Forrest had taken her deeply into her subconscious, had mapped and mined it, perhaps knew the territory more intimately than Julia herself did.

  And Julia was so forgetful, wasn’t she?

  “What’s the hooded man doing, Julia?”

  “He—he’s putting his hand inside his robe. He pulls out—”

  “A knife. He pulls out a long sharp knife, doesn’t he, Julia?”

  She nodded, a lump in her throat, sweating even in the chill of the imagined night air.

  “What happens next?”

  “He . . . he’s raising the knife. He shouts something.”

  “You remember, don’t you? Tell me what he says.”

  “He says ‘Lord Master Satan, we offer you this blood in your sacred name, that you may smile upon . . . that you may smile upon—”

  “You recognize the voice, don’t you, Julia?”

  Julia moaned, writhing on the granite slab under the bright eye of the moon.

  “Whose voice is it, Julia?”

  Julia whispered, her mouth dry.

  “Tell me, Julia. Who did this to you? Who is to blame for all your fear and pain and sorrow?”

  Julia looked up at the man whose hood had fallen back, his face revealed. She struggled to sit up against invisible bonds.

  The name tore itself from her lips. “Daddy.”

  And the response, drifting from the corners of the world and the cracks in her mind, insinuated in a whisper:

  Jooolia . . . .

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Julia ripped free of the dream altar, broke the hypnotic trance.

  Dr. Forrest held her as she cried.

  “You’re not alone, Julia,” the therapist repeated over and over.

  Julia wept herself dry, trying to forget the face beneath the hood, the man who held the knife, the man who had given his daughter to the bad people.

  “It’s always hard to accept a truth that’s so awful, but it’s the only way to let the healing begin,” said Dr. Forrest. She opened the blinds and let light spill into the room, and then sat across from Julia in her usual chair.

  “Daddy,” Julia whispered to herself, blinking against the harsh glare of reality. She shook her head. “No. He couldn’t have done that. He loved me.”

  She could remember his arms around her, hugging her, dressing her, holding her hand and walking her through the park. Taking her to the Pink Palace outside Memphis, showing her all the strange animals that stood stiff and still in the museum’s glass cases. She remembered his smiles, his blue eyes as warm as August sky, the way his stubble tickled her cheek when he kissed her. She told Dr. Forrest these things, evidence against this cruel, freshly conjured memory.

  “All that may be true as well, Julia,” Dr. Forrest said. “The mind tries to protect us. One of the ways it does that is by burying the bad memories deep in the basement, way down there where they’re hard to dig up. It’s natural that the mind lets you retrieve only the happy memories. A survival mechanism.”

  “He loved me.”

  “The body remembers what the mind wants you to forget. Don’t you feel the pain in your stomach and chest? In all the places the bad people touched you?”

  Julia nodded. Her muscles were sore, her stomach felt as if someone had punched it with a fistful of nails, and the place between her legs—

  “I know it’s hard for you, Julia,” said Dr. Forrest. “But we have to do this all the way. We have to be honest. What else do you remember about your father?”

  “He . . . he told me bedtime stories when he tucked me in at night.”

  “Would this take place in your bedroom, or in his?”

  “In mine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Chester Bear was always beside me. There was an oak tree out the window, and a streetlight on the other side of it. My room almost always had stripes of shadows across it. We lived next to a farm, you could smell the chickens.”

  “When he tucked you in, how did he do it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did he help you put your pajamas on?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Were you ever naked when he tucked you in?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did he ever touch you in ways that felt wrong?”

  Julia thought of that creased face, those clenched features beneath the hood, the strange light in the eyes of the man who was going to cut her. Her father. She shuddered and looked down at her hands fidgeting in her lap. His blood
was in her. Or maybe he thought of her flesh and blood as his possessions, free to give and take.

  “It’s very important, Julia.” Dr. Forrest leaned forward and touched her knee. “Other women have gone through the same experience. Do it for all of them.” A pause and a whisper. “For all of us.”

  Julia looked at the therapist, trying to read those somber gray eyes behind the glasses. Not her, too? Had this wise and supportive woman suffered through a similar experience? Was her compassion constructed on determination, perhaps seeking to resolve her own psychic wounds by applying salve to others?

  But Dr. Forrest had survived, had conquered the past and shed all its baggage. Dr. Forrest had not let abuse destroy her present and future life. The doctor was whole and healed.

  A surge of anger swept through Julia. Her life was being stolen from her. She was being raped and tortured more viciously today, by her fear and doubt, than she had been as a child. In this instance, the scar was worse than the wound, because at least wounds brought pain. Even pain was preferable to numbness.

  “Did he ever touch you, Julia?” The woman’s voice had slipped from its calm professionalism into a sharp, firm tone.

  “I don’t remember,” Julia said, her eyes welling even though she thought she had drained her reservoir of tears.

  Dr. Forrest squeezed her wrist as tightly as the bad people’s ropes had. “He touched you, didn’t he?”

  Dr. Forrest should know. Dr. Forrest had learned things about Julia that Julia herself hadn’t accepted yet. But she wasn’t going to take this last terrible step, she wasn’t willing to throw open the cellar door and shed light on those bones. She couldn’t force herself to face a memory that made her entire life a lie.

  “Okay, let’s pretend for a moment,” Dr. Forrest said softly, releasing her wrist. “It’s safer to play make-believe at first. Suppose he had touched you?”

  Julia said nothing.

  “How would that make you feel?”

  Julia looked at the clock. The session had lasted nearly two hours. The televangelist that had hijacked her VCR had threatened an eternity of fire and brimstone for sinners, and Julia wasn’t sure such a punishment could be worse than a life sentence inside her own skull.