The Mark (20 page)

“We won’t get through much,” she said, pulling out the file, “but we can at least get our bearings before dinner.”

I sat quietly, rethinking my desire to eat, anxiety churning in my stomach as Petra read. The living room was just big enough for a small slip-covered sofa, chair, and the coffee table chest. Everything was white or off-white: the walls, the furniture, the filmy curtains. Even the floors were a pale, weathered wood. It kind of surprised me. Being around institutional neutrals all day, I’d have thought Petra would opt for something more colorful. Or, given what I remembered from the plane, something a little more goth. This looked more country church than dank cathedral.

Through the archway, I saw Wayne adding a plate to the table before returning to the kitchen.

“Well …,” she said slowly. I sat forward, my hands gripping the cushion.

“Yeah? What do you see?”

She shook her head. “Not that much yet. She was admitted on recommendation from Bering General Psych Ward. Brought in by her mother.”

“Nan,” I whispered.

Petra nodded, still reading. “Right. Nanette Dinakis.” She looked up. “Your grandmother.”

“Yes.”

She looked back at the file. “Looks like she was having episodes of depression that started about a month before.” Petra paused, making eye contact again. “Right after the car accident that killed your father.”

I nodded for her to continue.

“That’s not unusual, you know. The admitting even noted it here. Losing a spouse, especially unexpectedly like that, is one of the toughest things a person can go through. The only thing worse is losing a child.” Petra looked back at the pages. “Her depression must have been severe, though, for Bering General to have recommended her admittance to Barrow. The shortest stay for our patients is usually a month. They wouldn’t have advised separating her from you, as young as you were and as much of a grounding influence as a child can be, unless they felt she was a danger to herself or maybe to you.”

Wayne poked his head in then. “This is ready. You want me to hold off for a little?”

Petra looked at me and I said, “No, of course not. Let’s go ahead and eat.” I mustered a smile, adding, “It smells delicious.”

I tried to relax as we sat at the table, a steaming plate of pasta in the middle. The dining room chandelier cast a warm glow throughout the room. Wayne and Petra exchanged stories about their day. He was sweet and I thought maybe Petra was a little hard on him, until he started talking about his last job. And the one before. I tried to join in the conversation, but I was eager to get back to the files. Petra must have sensed it, because as soon as we were finished, she stood.

“Fantastic meal, honey.” She kissed the top of his head. “Let’s clean up and then Cass and I need to get back to work.”

“That’s cool,” he said, collecting plates while Petra brought the serving dish, and I, the glasses. “I think I’ll go out to the porch, mess around with some tunes.”

Once the dishes were loaded and table wiped down, Petra and I went back to our seats. Wayne had grabbed a guitar from the corner of the living room and through the doorway, I could hear his strumming, soft and pretty.

“He’s not bad,” I said quietly.

Petra nodded, her head still buried in the file. “No, he’s not. I keep telling him that. He just needs to focus, start writing the songs down, putting words to them.” She glanced up, smiling. “As you might have guessed, he doesn’t take direction well.”

She read for a while longer, then stretched, working her head side to side to loosen the muscles. “Okay,” she said, resting her hands on her knees, within reach of the file on the coffee table. “It looks like your mom blamed herself for the accident. Survivor guilt. Again, not uncommon. Hers was more severe than most. Her doctor—a Mary Wells, who I met briefly when I first started at Barrow—also interviewed your grandmother Nan. Apparently she came to help out as soon as she heard about the accident. She stayed with you and your mom but could barely get your mom out of bed during the day. Then, at night, she’d find her walking the house, weeping, or watching over your bed. She got scared, unable to get Georgia—your mom—to talk to her at all. Nan says she just wasn’t sure what was going through your mom’s head, and when she took her into Bering General, they couldn’t get much out of her either. Your mom was at Barrow for almost a month before she said anything during her sessions with Dr. Wells.”

“Before she said anything? You mean she just sat there?”

Petra nodded. “Sure. That happens a lot. Patients are scared. It’s very hard for some people to open up, especially if they’ve been through a trauma. Dr. Wells wasn’t concerned. In fact, I can tell from her notes after she first met Georgia …” She paused. “Does it bother you if I call her that? It’s how Dr. Wells referred to her.”

I shook my head.

“Anyway, Dr. Wells expected it would take at least that long to get Georgia to talk.”

“Okay, so then what? After a month, she started talking?”

Petra nodded. “I’ve only just read through their first session with any dialog. Dr. Wells had suspected depression, survivor guilt. That’s obvious, given the situation, but this was the first time Georgia confirmed it.”

“What did she say?”

Petra checked the handwritten pages again. “Very little. Dr. Wells asked Georgia if she was still sad. It’s something she asked every time, sometimes getting a nod, others no response at all. This time Georgia nodded.

“ ‘Can you tell me about it?’ Dr. Wells asked.

“No response.

“ ‘Do you miss Daniel?’

“Here, she nods again. Then she says, ‘It’s all my fault.’

“ ‘What’s your fault, Georgia?’

“ ‘That he’s gone.’ She breaks down crying.” Petra looked up. “That’s it.”

“That’s it?”

“That was a real breakthrough, getting Georgia to confide at all. A chink in the armor.”

I looked at Petra, then the file, only a fraction of the pages leafed through.

“This is going to take a while,” Petra said, reading my thoughts.

“Your job requires a lot of patience,” I told her.

“That it does.”

“It’s going to take you hours to read all of that.” I felt guilty. I wanted to tell her she didn’t have to. I mean, she’d be up until after midnight at the rate we were going, and I was sure she had to work the next day. But I was desperate to know what was in the file. “Can I help you sort through it?”

“No.” She gestured to the pages. “Legally, I can’t let you without all the right forms. I’s dotted, t’s crossed and all that. But even if I wanted to bend the rules, I don’t think it would help. Dr. Wells’s notes are in a shorthand that wouldn’t make sense to you.”

She could read the disappointment on my face.

“Listen, Cass. I know you need to know what’s in here. I don’t mind reading it all, really I don’t. I’m going to skim the session notes and see what I can find. Why don’t you grab a book or even sit with Wayne for a while. I can fill you in as I go.”

I should stay, I thought, still feeling guilty about letting Petra do all the work. But she was right, there was nothing I could do, and staring at her, waiting for each little tidbit, wouldn’t help. “Maybe I’ll sit outside for a bit. Get some air.”

“Great idea.”

I paused by the front door. “Thanks a million, Petra. I really owe you.”

She smiled. “No sweat.”

Wayne was leaning against the clapboard, barefoot, with his guitar across his lap.

“We could hear you inside,” I told him when he finished playing. “Your songs are nice, very pretty.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I could hear you too.”

I didn’t say anything, embarrassed and a little annoyed.

“I didn’t mean to,” he said. “It’s just real quiet out here.”

I nodded. There was something so disarming about him. I could see why it was hard for Petra to make a break.

“Tough stuff about your mom,” he added quietly.

“Yeah, well, I never really knew her. I’m just trying to figure out what happened.”

“You’re brave to do it,” he said. “My old man walked out on us when I was five. My mom never told me why and I never asked. Don’t think I’d want to hear it.”

I shrugged. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it either, but sometimes want and need are not congruent.

“I’m going to take a little walk while Petra’s reading,” I said. “Any recommendations about which way to go?”

He chuckled. “The roads around here are all pretty much the same. Cornfields, wheat fields, and more cornfields. Take your pick.”

That sounded fine to me. I started walking.

Wayne was right, the road in both directions was long and straight, flanked by dry stalks of wheat. The sun was low in the sky and, in Ashville, would have been sinking below the hills already. Here it just hung perilously close to the flat horizon. It was warm, so I walked slowly. In no hurry.

It was awful to think about my mother, who I sometimes pictured as a younger Nan, sitting mutely, too sad to even talk about her sadness. She must have loved my father very much, I thought, unsure if having a wonderful thing while it lasted was any comfort.

I wished that I had been older and could have helped her somehow. Nan hadn’t been able to, though. And, knowing Nan, she’d have tried her damnedest.

I wondered why she’d taken me back to Ashville rather than staying here. Or why Nan hadn’t brought my mother to Ashville with us. Maybe Petra would find it in the files, the reason for putting half a country between mother and daughter. Then again, that might be one of those things I didn’t want to know.

It was hard to imagine Nan out here. She liked being close to the beach, dipping her painted toes in the icy East Coast water, walking the boardwalks. Taking long drives, just to go. It would have been hard for her somewhere like this, with the view so unvaried. It had been perfect for me, a relief from almost the day I arrived, though I wasn’t sure it was anymore. The luster had worn off with things fraying between Lucas and me, the fear of talking to another person with the mark, or running into that woman whose baby died.

I walked maybe a mile, until the sun was just above the wheat, spiny stalks teasing its bottom curve. Then I turned around and headed back, nervous but ready to hear what Petra had learned.

“I made good progress,” she said, smiling and beckoning me to the couch when I got back. “The sessions were easy to read because a lot of it was repetitive. Georgia opened up very slowly. One step forward, two steps back. Then the same one step forward, you know?”

I nodded, plucking at my shirt, trying to cool down from my walk.

“I mean, there’s still a lot here, but I’m through the first year at least. Georgia had survivor guilt all right, but it was unusual. Your mom felt responsible for the accident. Not just guilty that she survived, but she truly believed she could have prevented your father’s death.”

I felt a little shiver, the start of goose bumps on my still-sweaty skin. “How? I mean, was she the one driving? Did she distract him or something?”

“No, I don’t think it was anything like that. There are no specifics in the notes about the accident itself. Dr. Wells didn’t think Georgia had full memory of it. Georgia actually believed she knew your father was going to die that day—had some kind of psychic pre-knowledge.”

I felt very far away, as if I were looking at Petra through a long, long tunnel. “What do you mean ‘psychic pre-knowledge’?” It took all I had to ask the question.

Petra didn’t seem to notice. “I’m not sure. But that’s not all that uncommon either, for survivors to think—looking back—that they had foreknowledge. They start to manufacture things that should have told them what was coming.”

“Do you … Did Dr. Wells think that’s what happened?”

“Well, that’s the funny part,” Petra said. “Georgia must have been very convincing. Dr. Wells was working on that theory, trying to make Georgia see that it wasn’t her fault, that she couldn’t have prevented the accident, but Georgia was adamant. She was completely certain that she knew, even swore that she tried to prevent it. She claimed she had warned your father ahead of time. I can see in Dr. Wells’s notes that she did research on it, hadn’t had that much direct exposure to this exact situation, but it seems that nearly every case she could find was distinctly different from your mother’s.”

“How so?” I was clinging to Petra’s every word, hoping for something that might explain this all away and take me anywhere but where I felt sure we were heading.

“Her thinking that she had acted on her knowledge, for starters. Most of the time the guilt is for
not
acting. The other thing that was unusual is that your mother said there’d been others, other times she’d had this … knowledge. That’s odd, Dr. Wells notes, the belief generally stemming from the traumatic incident and completely confined to it. In other words, survivors twist the facts immediately preceding the incident, but not other facts unrelated to it.”

I was almost shaking now and Petra could see it: my hands clenched tightly together.

“Are you okay?” she asked, leaning forward. “Should I stop?”

“No, no. I want to hear it. Does Dr. Wells … does she say how my mother … what she saw or whatever that made her think she knew something?”

I held my breath, sure of the answer, waiting to hear it aloud.

“No.” Petra shook her head. “Not in the ones I’ve read through so far.”

Or any of the others, I guessed. It didn’t matter; I knew. Far too well. “Is there anything else?”

“Yeah,” Petra said. “She talked about you…. Are you sure you want to hear this?”

I nodded, afraid to speak.

“She was scared. Felt like she had to watch you constantly, but couldn’t stand … well, it was hard for her to be there with you.” Petra watched me as she spoke. “It happens a lot in cases like this too,” she said. “After a trauma, people become convinced something bad is going to happen to other people they love. So much so, sometimes,” she continued gently, “that they experience the heartbreak of it even before it happens.”

“Is that why I was living with Nan?”

Petra nodded. “Georgia had a lot of guilt about that. She wanted so much to have you back, but every time she and Dr. Wells talked about the steps to get there, even to a halfway house, Georgia would withdraw more.”