might understand what she felt the doctor didn’t.
I lowered my head, unsure how to meet that stare. I had a clipboard across my lap, intended for clinical notes on prescriptions the doctor might require, but I found myself scratching illegible lines across it with my pen. Muscle memory was moving my hands.
‘Is that why you were taking the drugs?’ Dr Marcello asked. Suddenly my own throat caught slightly. The mention of the pills – it wasn’t the first. But the attempt at suicide, it suddenly hit me. Not as simply a clinical fact, but as a memory. One I’d worked so hard to push away.
The pills …
I swallowed hard.
‘Was it guilt?’ Dr Marcello continued. ‘Guilt over the people you feel you’ve hurt in your life? The Xanax, the Valium – you had a lot in your system.’
God, Evelyn. I shoved the memory away. Back into its box. This wasn’t the time. The past was the past. This woman wasn’t my sister.
Emma Fairfax glared at Dr Marcello, her eyes pitying and condemning at the same time.
‘I don’t feel nothing,’ she answered. Her eyes rolled and her arms crossed tighter at her chest, defiant. I escaped the clenched feeling in my chest enough to see Dr Marcello underline the phrase as he transcribed it onto his notepad. A sentence fairly well drenched with possible interpretations.
‘So you feel you don’t sufficiently register emot—’
‘I’m not speaking psycho-shit, Doctor,’ she snapped. But she wasn’t angry. ‘I don’t feel I’ve hurt others. I know it. It’s a fact.’
There was a sob in her eyes and it shook her tongue. She stopped talking, tossing her hair aside in a show of dismissiveness. I don’t care. Nothing can make me care. The forced denial of someone who cares deeply – more than they wish or want.
‘Can you tell me about that?’ Marcello asked. He’d drawn a firm line across his paper. This was a new area, one that hadn’t come up in our brief encounters to date.
My heart was racing. The conversation was taking me in new directions, too. The memories were hitting like a flood.
The pills.
The death.
My sister’s absence.
I could barely stay in the moment.
‘It weren’t supposed to turn out the way it did!’ Emma cried out. There were tears then, streaming down her cheeks and pooling at the curve of her chin before falling onto her lap.
‘What wasn’t, Emma?’ Dr Marcello kept his voice soft.
‘It were bad. We all knew it were bad. But it got out of hand.’
She wasn’t registering his questions, so he stopped asking them.
The sob was back, this time long, vocal and heart-wrenching. A few words fumbled out from between Emma’s lips, but none of them had anything to do with the car accident.
‘Emma,’, Dr Marcello leaned in towards her in a carefully practised, unthreatening way, ‘I’m not sure what we’re talking about. Fill me in. Why don’t you start with where, with when?’ Concrete facts, sometimes easier for traumatized patients to deal with than emotions.
She gazed more through him than at him.
‘You don’t want to know,’ she said. ‘These nice looks you give me, the “it ain’t so fuckin’ bad, you’re a good girl” sentiments, you’re not gonna have ’em for long if I tell you what … what …’
Her throat seized up. She wanted to be defiant, but a sob stopped her.
Marcello leaned forward. Despite the torrent of my memories, my emotions, I leaned forward too.
‘Emma, there’s nothing you can tell us that will cause me to change my desire to care for you.’
It’s a lie he’d been trained to tell. All of us, actually, even if we’re just pharmacists in a prison ward – and we’re taught to believe it, too. Our goal is to help the patient. Nothing can change that. There’s nothing they can say that ought to cause us to look at them differently. No deed a person has done that devalues his worth or affects our duty to care.
But it’s a lie. A terrible, dreadful, hideous lie. Maybe I was never meant to become a man of Dr Marcello’s moral objectivity, maybe my own experiences meant I couldn’t maintain that ruse of unflappable dispassion, but reality’s reality. There are things a person can say – things a young woman can say, in a little room beneath fluorescent lights before an analyst and a pharmacist at a metal table – that should make any human person change their mind radically about them. Things a person can say that show they’re not people at all, but monsters. Monsters whose existence makes the world itself groan, repulsed by more than their actions.
Repulsed by their very existence.
I have to get home. I have to get to my husband.
I’ve managed, somehow, to go through the remaining motions of the day. No customers want newspapers after 3.00 p.m., and if you haven’t caught your glossy copy of Esquire
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