Читать книгу Secrets She Left Behind - Diane Chamberlain - Страница 15

Maggie

“DO YOU WANT ME TO DRIVE YOU TO THE THERAPIST?” Mom looked at me across the kitchen table. It was just her and me. Uncle Marcus had left for work at the fire station and Andy’d caught the school bus an hour ago. I knew Mom had made his breakfast and probably eaten with him, but she was drinking coffee while I ate my cereal. To be with me. Just to be with me.

Yes, I wanted her to drive me. I knew how all those stars felt with the paparazzi following them around. The reporters were in front of the house again. I’d heard Uncle Marcus out there when I first woke up, telling them to leave Andy alone as he walked to the bus stop. It was one thing for them to hound me, another for them to go after Andy, and I hoped Uncle Marcus walked with him to the corner. Andy wouldn’t know what to say to the vultures, or else he’d say too much. You never knew with him.

If Mom drove me, I could lie down in the backseat until we were past the news vans. But I had to face this mess sooner or later, and it was my mess. Not Mom’s.

“I’ll be okay,” I said. I wasn’t just dreading getting past the reporters, but the appointment itself. What was I supposed to say to a shrink? Open up with my deep dark secrets? Everyone already knew mine. I was an arsonist. A murderer.

“Can you work on the flyer this afternoon?” Mom asked.

“I’m almost done with it already,” I said.

“You are?”

I’d gotten to work on my “assigned tasks” right after the meeting, before Mom even came upstairs to tell me what they were. I’d been sitting at the top of the stairs during the whole meeting, taking my own notes. I’d heard how angry Keith sounded. I got a glimpse of him storming out of the family room, but didn’t see any of his face. I couldn’t blame him for being totally pissed off. He probably had plenty of anger to go around ever since the fire, most of it aimed at me. The least I could do was my part to help find Sara. “I just need a picture of Sara. Did you find one?”

“I did.” Mom stood up and walked over to the refrigerator. She pulled a photograph from behind a magnet. “Will this do?” she asked, handing it to me. It was of Sara and Dawn at Jabeen’s, both of them smiling from behind the counter.

“Yeah.” I wondered if she thought it bothered me to see Dawn in the picture. “I can crop Dawn out and blow Sara up bigger,” I said, like it was no big deal. God, Dawn was so pretty and so mature looking! How could I have thought Ben would be seriously interested in me? I’d been such an idiot.

We still had my white Jetta, only now Andy was learning to drive it. I couldn’t picture it. Andy, behind the wheel of a car? Watch out. Today, though, the car was mine. I got into the Jetta inside our garage. I’d missed driving and that sense of freedom it could give you, but I felt kind of nervous since I hadn’t driven in a year. I had to go through a mental checklist, like a pilot. The car’s in Park. Press the button on the remote to raise the garage door. Turn the key. Give it a little gas. Put it in Reverse. I started backing out of the garage.

Suddenly, there they were in my rearview mirror—the reporters with their cameras, jumping out of their vans. Oh, God. I took my foot off the gas, letting the car come to a stop. Exactly the wrong thing to do. The faster I got past them, the better off I’d be. I floored it. I’d had a few frightening moments in the last couple of years, but flying backward down my driveway toward a bunch of reporters was one of the scariest. I was totally out of control. People jumped out of the way. The crazy girl’s coming! I hit the brake when I got into the street, shifted into Drive and took off with a squeal of my tires.

I raced down our short street and turned onto the main road, glad now that the summer traffic was gone and I could go fast. I’d driven a half mile before I slowed down. Another half mile before my heart did the same.

I wasn’t free at all. Not even a little bit.

I was driving into Hampstead when I noticed the white van behind me. I couldn’t believe it! I should have been more careful. No way was I letting them follow me to the therapist’s office. Maggie Lockwood was seen walking into psychologist Marion Jakes’s office for her court-mandated counseling. I zigzagged all over Hamp-stead until I was a hundred percent sure I’d lost the van. I spotted the little parking lot behind the therapist’s building, but I drove past it to a nearby veterinarian’s office, where I hid the Jetta between a van and a pickup. I felt like I was in a movie. A thriller. By the time I walked into the therapist’s office, I was sweating.

The small waiting room was empty. I sat down in one of the eight chairs and picked up an old copy of Us from the coffee table, but I didn’t open it. I was thinking about the Web sites where I could post Sara’s information. Wow, so many missing people on those sites! It was discouraging, and I wondered if everything I was doing was for nothing. The whole situation didn’t make sense. Sara wasn’t the type of woman to just take off. At least, the Sara I knew before the fire wasn’t. But who knew how this year had changed her? It had changed me plenty.

An enormous man walked through the office door, and I figured he was another patient, maybe waiting for a different therapist. I glanced up just long enough to catch his eggplant-shaped body before quickly lowering my eyes to the magazine cover again.

“Miss Lockwood?” he said.

I was confused. Oh, God. I hoped he wasn’t one of the reporters. “Yes,” I said.

“I’m Dr. Jakes.”

“No,” I said. “Dr. Jakes is a—”

“A woman?” He smiled, and his eyes nearly disappeared above his round cheeks. “I’m Marion Jakes.”

Oh, no. I didn’t budge. The only thing that had made the idea of counseling tolerable was imagining a kindly, maternal sort of woman, maybe my mother’s age, as my shrink. This guy was not only obscenely fat, but he was ancient. The small amount of hair he had on his round head was gray. The buttons of his blue shirt strained at their buttonholes, and he wore ridiculous red, white and blue striped glasses.

“Come in,” he said.

What choice did I have? I got up and followed him into a room even smaller than the waiting room. This one had four leather chairs facing each other, and I sat down in the one closest to the door.

Dr. Jakes took up most of the space in the room. “How are you today?” He dropped into one of the big leather chairs. It creaked beneath him.

“Fine,” I said.

He looked like he didn’t believe me. “You’re very pale,” he said.

“I…I’m fine.”

“Well—” he folded his hands across his belly “—I know why you’re here, of course, since this is court-ordered psychotherapy. I know what you were convicted of doing and that you were released Monday after twelve months in prison. What I don’t know is how you feel about being here.”

He waited for me to speak, but I looked past him, out the window. I wanted to be outside again. I wanted to be home.

“Okay.”

“Just okay?”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,” I said.

“Have you ever been in therapy before?”

I shook my head. “Just…you know, the high-school counselor about college, but that’s not therapy, I guess.”

“You had college plans?”

“I was going to go to UNC Wilmington,” I said. “Before…everything happened.”

“Well,” he said, “here’s the way this goes.” He leaned forward and I was afraid he might roll right out of his chair. “We’ll be a team, you and me. Together, we’ll figure out what we should be working on. Set some goals.”

“I don’t really have anything to work on.”

“No?”

I shook my head. “I’m basically a normal person. I just got…sidetracked.”

“I don’t doubt that you’re normal,” he said. “But what you did was not, and it would be good for us to explore why you did what you did so you understand it. So you see the parts of yourself you need to pay attention to in order to prevent something like that from ever happening again.”

“It won’t,” I said.

He smiled, his eyes disappearing again behind his striped glasses. “I’m not a cop,” he said. “You don’t have to give me the answers you think you should be giving. What we talk about in this room stays in this room. The only time I would ever break confidentiality is if I believe you’re going to harm yourself or someone else. I’ll need to let your case manager know that you’ve kept your appointments with me, but not what our sessions are about. All right?”

He had to have some hefty psychological problems himself to be so fat. I couldn’t see how someone like him could help me, but I nodded. I would just nod my way through these sessions.

“What’s it been like for you since Monday?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Being out of prison? Being free?”

“Okay.”

He waited for me to go on. I stared out the window with its view of the parking lot until my eyes watered. Then I looked at my ragged fingernails. He wasn’t going to talk until I did. It was like a standoff. A war, but I had the feeling he could take the silence longer than I could.

“The reporters are everywhere,” I said finally.

“Ah,” he said. “What’s that like for you?”

I shrugged. “I hate it,” I said. “It’s not fair to my family, either. If it was just me…well, that’s bad enough, but I get why they have to be after me. I’m the story. But I want them to leave my brother and mother alone.”

“Tell me about your family.”

“You probably know all about them already. You know about Andy, for sure.”

“I know what everyone else who followed the news about the fire knows, Maggie,” he said. “But even when I listened to the news back then and heard all the details, I couldn’t help but wonder…It’s being in this business, you see.” He smiled. “I couldn’t help but wonder what it was like for you. For the young woman at the center of it all. So, yes. I know about Andy as he was presented by the news media. I want to hear about him—and the rest of your family—from you.”

I sighed. “Okay,” I said, giving in. “Andy’s very sweet and cute and a perfect brother. He’s…You know about the fetal alcohol syndrome?”

He nodded.

I twisted my watchband around and around on my wrist. I was thinking, I almost killed my baby brother. But I wasn’t going to give this guy that much of a peek inside me. “So,” I said, “Andy’s learning to drive and he’s got a girlfriend. He’s really grown up while I’ve been away. And my mother…she’s nice. She looks older than I remember her looking. She and my uncle Marcus…He was my father’s brother—”

“The fire marshal.”

“Right. He and my mother have gotten together.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“Good.” I nodded. “Really good. He still has his own place. One of the Operation Bumblebee towers.”

“Ah.” He smiled. You couldn’t think about the houses made from the old towers without smiling.

“Yeah.” I almost smiled myself. “But he stays over our house sometimes. I guess he’s been there a lot this last year.”

“And how do you—”

“Feel about it?” I finished the sentence for him. “I told you. Good. Especially with the reporters around.” I thought again about Andy walking to the school bus that morning, maybe trying to make sense of the reporters and their questions. Struggling to figure out how to answer them. Before I knew what was happening, my eyes filled with tears.

“You love your family very much,” Dr. Jakes said.

I nodded.

He motioned to the box of tissues on the table next to my chair and I took one and pressed it to my eyes. I did not want to cry here. I didn’t want to give this old sloppy fat man the satisfaction of making me cry. But suddenly, that was all I could do. I cried, and he let me. That’s about all I did for the rest of the session. He said that was okay. Good, even. I had a lot of pain inside me, he said, and we’d have plenty of time together to talk it all through.

“Our session’s nearly up,” he said when I’d gone through half the tissues in the box. “But before you leave, I wanted to ask what your plans are for community service. You have three hundred hours, is that correct?”

I let out a long, shivery breath. I needed to pull myself together in case the reporters had tracked me here and were waiting in the veterinarian’s parking lot.

“My mother…she’s a nurse at Douglas Elementary in Sneads Ferry,” I said. “I’m going to help one of the teachers there. I start Monday.”

“Did you arrange this or did your mother?” he asked.

“My mother,” I said.

He looked like he wanted to say something else, but just nodded. “Okay then.” He pushed himself out of the chair with his hands. “We’ll be meeting twice a week,” he said.

“Right.” Mom had scheduled appointments for me into infinity. I didn’t want to have to cry my eyes out twice a week, but it wasn’t like I had a choice. I stood up and gave him what felt like a dopey smile as I walked past him to the door.

It would have been going too far to say I liked him, but I could have sworn he didn’t look as fat when I left as he did when I arrived.