The Gifting (7 page)

Dad runs his palm down his face and stares past the sliding glass door, past the beach and the ocean beyond. “We kept it from everyone, Tess. Not just you. We didn’t want that stigma hanging over your heads. Mental illness is frowned upon. You know that.”

Yes, I do. Because I take Current Events. Crazy people are a burden to society. And we live in a time where burdens are not tolerated. Burdens make a nation weak. So they are removed, taken away. For everybody’s own good. I’ve never thought to question the logic of it before, but suddenly I’m terrified. What if I become a burden?

Mom relinquishes the twisted towel and wraps her arm around my shoulder. I shrug her away, keeping my attention on Dad. “What was wrong with her?”

“She had frequent episodes of psychosis.”

“Psychosis?”

“She saw things nobody else saw.”

“Things?”

“She called them demons. Spirits.” Dad laughs a humorless laugh and shakes his head, as if trying to rattle away the unpleasant memories. I can only imagine what he thought about his mother’s claims. “When the illness reached its peak, she swore she could fight them.”

Cold fear sinks like an anchor into the pit of my stomach. Mom tries to wrap her arm around me again, but I step away, a single thought echoing in my mind. One I cannot voice. One I can’t even whisper. But inside, it shouts and rattles the walls of my soul. If souls exist.

Is psychosis hereditary?

Paranoia

A
fter absorbing the bomb my parents dropped in our kitchen on Saturday morning, I spend an hour in my room Googling psychosis. What I find disturbs me.

According to one site, psychosis is a loss of contact with reality that usually includes: false beliefs about what is taking place or who one is, which are referred to as delusions; seeing or hearing things that aren’t there, which are referred to as hallucinations.

It’s the second one that gets me more than the first—seeing or hearing things that aren’t there. I spend the rest of the weekend processing, curled up in an Adirondack chair on our back deck, inhaling the briny sea air, reading
Wuthering Heights
, pausing occasionally to alternately recall or push away the things I have seen and heard over the past several weeks that nobody else can see or hear.

Mom and Dad give me my space. Pete holes up in his room. And I find that as long as I stay outside, the heaviness is not so oppressive. I tell myself that my grandmother’s insanity means nothing, changes nothing. I start to look forward to Monday, when I will see my new friend and the mysterious boy next door. I sleep relatively better on Saturday and Sunday. I experience no headaches or weird visions.

By the time Monday rolls around, I feel almost normal. The urge I have to ask more questions, to get more answers, ebbs with the tide. I don’t need to know these things. Some people say knowledge is power, but in this case, I’m pretty sure knowledge is paranoia. And let’s say for a minute that I am crazy. Paranoia will not help. So I stay far away from Google and I don’t ask my parents anymore questions and I end up with a big lump of disappointment in my gut when Luka doesn’t show up for Current Events on Monday morning. My hope dwindles even more when he is absent from Ceramics and disappears altogether when I catch sight of his empty seat during lunch.

Leela and the rest of the student body, however, are alight with the exciting afterglow of victory. None of them can stop talking about their unexpected win on Friday night. “I really wish you could have gone,” Leela says, cracking open her Coke. “Matt threw this insane hail Mary at the end. When Marshall jumped up and caught the ball in the end zone, we were all going ballistic.”

This is the third time I have heard the story, so I listen with half my heart, trying to think of a way to turn the conversation toward Luka without being obvious about my burgeoning infatuation. Thankfully, Leela makes it easy.

“And we all thought only Luka could make a pass like that.”

I set my apple on my tray and clear my throat. “Was he at the game?”

“I stood by him in line at the concession stand at halftime. He remembered that my oldest brother got into a car accident last year and asked how he was doing, which is pretty amazing. Nobody else has asked. Anyway, he asked about you.”

I cough. “He did?”

She nods emphatically. “He wondered where you were.”

“What did you say?”

“That you weren’t feeling well.” Leela’s cheeks glow. “First he stares at you at the pep rally. Then he asks about you at the football game. Do you know how many girls would love to be in your position right now?”

Yeah. My position. Crazy girl going to the Edward Brooks Facility. Somehow, I doubt that. I look over at his empty seat, as if Leela’s bit of news will conjure him into the moment. Why would Luka ask about me? “I found out he’s my next door neighbor.”

Her eyes go wide as she stuffs a bite of her sandwich into her mouth, gives it a couple good chews, and swallows it down. “Are you serious?”

“I saw him surfing on Saturday.”

Leela shakes her head, like she can’t believe my luck. I can think of nothing natural to say that might continue the conversation, so it peters out. I chew my apple, searching for a logical explanation for Luka’s interest. After all, I am my father’s daughter. If he asked about me at the football game, it was probably leftover curiosity over the mini freak-out he witnessed at the pep rally. I’m sure he noticed it. Why else was he staring at me afterward? I take another bite of my apple. It’s crunchy and sweet, but I don’t enjoy it. I’m eating because I’m supposed to, not because I have any real appetite.

“So what’s this thing you have after school?”

“Oh …” I think fast, grappling for a believable lie. “I, um … I take piano lessons.”

Leela perks. “Really?”

I nod, hoping Leela is not a big piano person. I hope she doesn’t ask if we can get together and pound out some music. Because the best I can do is “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and even that’s a bit choppy.

She looks across the cafeteria, toward Pete. “Does your brother play too?”

“No. Just me.”

She opens a bag of chips. I eat the last of my apple. I can tell we both want to ask more questions, but neither of us do.

*

The Edward Brooks Facility is right outside my neighborhood. The tall, looming building sits on an actual cliff, a picture straight out of an Alfred Hitchcock film. Mom, who is a major history buff, explains how it used to be an orphanage. A long, long time ago when our country still had them.

Now it’s a privately-owned treatment center for people like me. As I unbuckle my seat belt, Mom gives me a cheery smile and tells me everything will be okay. She reminds me that I can be honest with Dr. Roth. That it’s safe. Then she squeezes my hand and I get out of the car and walk up the cement stairs, waiting for the thunder to crack and the lightning to strike and Frankenstein’s doctor to yell, “It’s alive!”

I struggle with the heavy front door and sign my name on a sheet of paper at the front desk and read
Rebecca
by Daphne Du Maurier (I finished
Wuthering Heights
on Monday) until a lady with yellow teeth calls my name and leads me down a long corridor into Dr. Roth’s office. She doesn’t say goodbye or smile. She just walks away and leaves me standing inside the room, staring at a man who sits in a cushy red chair. He wears a stiff-looking white shirt, a navy blue tie, and bifocals that slide down his bulbous nose. He smiles at me, scratching his mousy brown goatee. “Teresa Ekhart, I presume?”

“Tess.” His office has no windows, but is somehow drafty, and smells like an overpowering mixture of oranges and ammonia.

“Tess,” he concedes, motioning to an equally-red, cushy chair beside him.

“I thought shrinks had couches.”

He chuckles.

I sit and fold my hands in my lap, taking deep, steady breaths. I don’t have to say anything. I don’t have to do anything. He will ask questions and I can answer as vaguely as possible and maybe soon, my parents will stop making me come to this place that belongs on a Hollywood horror set.

Dr. Roth reads from a manila file, pushes up his glasses, and looks at me like one might examine an extremely interesting specimen beneath a microscope. I wipe my palms against my knees and scratch my earlobe. “Aren’t we supposed to talk?”

“What would you like to talk about?” he asks.

“I don’t know. You’re the doctor. I’m the patient.”

“I prefer client.”

“Why?”

“Less of a stigma.” He pulls at the whiskers of his goatee. “Don’t you think?”

I nod at the file resting on his knee. Hasn’t he heard of a thing called technology? “Your filing system seems a little outdated.”

“Pen and paper doesn’t crash. It’s not nearly as accessible, either.”

I eye the folder with a healthy dose of skepticism. “What does that say about me?”

“That you had a bit of a breakdown in Jude and the ambulance was called.”

And I have hallucinations, but no need to admit to that. “Did you get that information from the hospital in Florida?”

Dr. Roth holds up the file. “This is all from your parents.”

“Oh.”

“Why don’t you tell me about the séance?”

His question takes me back to the hospital, only instead of Dr. Roth, I am talking to a short-legged man in a white coat who doesn’t smile, my parents’ warning all too fresh in my mind.
Don’t tell him anything, Tess.
I shift in the chair. “I have an overactive imagination.”

Dr. Roth quirks one of his eyebrows.

“And I think I fell asleep.”

His other eyebrow joins the first one. “Fell asleep?”

“The more I think about it, the more I’m sure that what I … saw … was a nightmare.”

“Do you have very many nightmares?”

I plead the fifth.

“I’d like to know more about them—these nightmares.”

I scratch my kneecap. I can’t decide if I like Dr. Roth. He’s warmer than the white-coated doctor in Jude, but there’s a fascination in his eye that makes me uncomfortable. It’s almost as though I’m a test subject instead of his patient, or client, or whatever he wants to call me. “They’re just your standard nightmares.”

“And that’s what you think happened the night you were hospitalized? You think you had a nightmare?”

No.
“Yes.”

“Do you mind sharing with me exactly what you saw?”

I close my eyes, as if doing so might shut the images away, but they are seared into my memory—the dead bodies in ditches, the people in straitjackets. I give an involuntary shudder. “I saw a lot of death.”

“Is this what you see in all of your nightmares?”

I think about Pete and the white-eyed man and the swirling mass trying to consume him. I think about the way my scream made the man stop and notice me. “Yes.”

Dr. Roth purses his lips and jots something in my file.

“I haven’t had one in a while.” Two days to be exact.

He continues writing.

I shift in my seat. “Are you going to prescribe me medicine?”

“I’m hoping to avoid medicine.”

“Why?”

He gives me a long, steady stare, then clasps his hands beneath his chin. “In many cases, medicine is extremely helpful. I’m not sure you’re one of them. I think there are other treatment options we should try first.”

I look around his office—at the cat clock on his wall and the framed degrees. I wonder if Dr. Roth has a wife or kids. I wonder what made him want to work here, in this facility, talking to people like me. I wonder if that file in his hand says anything at all about my grandmother.

He sets the folder aside. “You can be honest with me, Tess. This is a safe place.”

They are my mother’s words, but I have doubts. Something inside me warns against full disclosure. Something inside me is not sure Dr. Roth can be trusted.

Routines

L
uka is at school the next morning. He wears a darker pair of jeans, a pale blue t-shirt, and the same hemp bracelet. Hopefully, the thrill that runs through me upon seeing him is not as blatantly obvious on the outside as it is on the inside.

He sits beside Summer in Current Events, he works by himself on the pottery wheel in Ceramics, and does nothing at all in World History except stay quiet and chew on his thumbnail, but I’m positive I feel his stare several times throughout class. Only every time I gather up the courage to peek, he’s looking at Mr. Lotsam. Which means I’m either suffering from a gigantic case of wishful thinking (I refuse to call it a delusion) or he’s much more discreet than me when it comes to staring.

When the final bell rings, the zipper on my bag decides to stick. The classroom empties while I tug at the stubborn metal tag.

“Need help?”

The recognizable voice makes my heart stutter-step.

Luka stands on the other side of the table, distractingly perfect, and I curse myself for being such an easy blusher. “Um … sure,” I say, scooting the bag over.

He unsticks the zipper on his first try and hands me my bag with a half-smile that does nothing to relieve the warmth growing in my cheeks.