Psychotherapy - Ch. 1

Psychotherapy - Ch. 1

Mom was right, of course.

She told me I would like it in our new home. Spacious, lavishing furniture, my own room. She was right. I did love it here. The salt water smell so accustom to the sea felt lost within the foreign smells of cocoanut trees and fresh rain. My sinuses even liked it here. Even the twenty-story view of great green mountains building into the misty clouds added to my good list even though I hate heights. The only thing I didn’t like was why we had moved.

Because of her job, Mom moved every few years to get closer to her cases. She loved her job, no doubt, but moving after just making friends began getting old in seventh grade. Since then, I don’t remember having a good friend to talk to --- besides Rocky, our pet lemur. What was the use of making friends everywhere we went anyway? I’d soon be shipped off again to another remote part of the country. It wasn’t like we’d stay ‘best friends’ while sending letters back and forth from one place to another. Penpals can only know each other so much. Even with today’s internet cameras, e-mails, and IMs. I did have one friend, a girl my age named Maddie who lived New York. She’s a complete Atheist, so I could tell her absolutely anything and she’d roll with it. Maybe that was why we stayed friends, because both of us just rolled with the punches. She didn’t believe in God or any higher beings, and I didn’t believe in everything else.

We’d met in a little coffee shop while Mom took on one of her cases in New York. I was trying to finish a sketch with charcoal when she came up behind me and asked, “What’s that shit?”

And she was quite right. It was shit. One of my worst works, but a block seemed to have wedged itself into my artistic senses. I told her exactly that. It was then Maddie barged into my life with her black knee-high boots and leather skirts. She was the exact opposite of me. Great legs, perky breasts, long neck, jet black hair. Seven rings adorned her left ear alone, one on her lip, and three on her right eyebrow. Tattoos reigned over her body like painted artworks. Each tattoo on her body had been designed by a different friend in the years before. Granted, some tattoos were prettier than others, and some tattoos were done by friends who weren’t her friend anymore, but it was still a cool idea. Every year she added one.

“You design one.” She tore the shitty artwork from my sketchpad, crumpled it, and tossed it like a pro into the nearest trash bin. “Go on. Work.”

After four years, I still hadn’t figured out that design for her, but she had yanked me by my underwear out of my artistic block and into art again. It was quite remarkable actually. And ever since then, we became pretty good friends.

Mom, however, didn’t seem to care about my social life, and took cases halfway across the U.S. just to piss me off. She always went with her work. That’s why Dad left, I think. Her work became her family. They were her daughters and husbands. Dad and I were just people she lived with. Which, after a while, didn’t feel that bad. I could have gone to live with Dad, but Mom had the better job. Dad always shifted between jobs, and there never was stability in his life. I needed firm concrete to stand on, and Mom laid the strongest.

So I followed her to Hawaii my junior year of high school. She took another one of those ‘special cases’ that required us to sell our last home in Charlotte, and buy one here. It was a nice home, as I said before, but I missed North Carolina. I wanted to go back. But Mom didn’t have any work back there anymore, so we had to move to keep the stability.

Mom was a psychological specialist. Or, bluntly, a psycho-therapist. The best in the country. Every asylum and hospital called her, wanted her. She graduated from Duke with flying colors, and managed to make herself legendary in the medical world in her late twenties. It was on a mid-life fling that she and Dad married, producing an Oops. Me. I was never intended, and a few months after my birth Mom and Dad split. Mom could never have a personal life. Her work was her only real home. Sometimes I got the distinct feeling she knew more about her patients than she did me.

My cell phone went off on the table, and I went to go check it. Mom had text me. She always text when at work --- it was easier with her palm pilot that also served as an alarm, a clock, a phone, an instant messenger, a file cabinet, a notepad, and a secretary. Who needed assistance when she had that monstrosity in her lab pocket at all times? I was half surprised she didn’t permanently glue it to her hand.



Harper. come 2 hos. pronto.



I sighed and shoved my cell phone into my back pocket. Of course she wanted to interrupt my tedious unpacking. Mom might not have cared about organization, but I wanted to have a clean, and tidy house --- even if it was an apartment we’d be selling after the case closed. While feeling through my pockets, I went over what I needed. Keys. Money. Credit Card. ID. O-K. Got everything.

The front door had to be closed with a forceful shove --- I’d learned that after trying to open it earlier today when the movers arrived. It was the only thing that needed a fixer-upper. A can of oil would do the trick. I slammed the door, envisioning it to be the head of Mom’s new client, and it made me feel a little better as I rushed down the twenty flights of stairs to the sidewalk. Elevators took too long, anyway.

There, after a few minutes of waving frantic arms, a taxi finally pulled over to me. Good thing we were just a block and a half from the local interstate. (Interstates in Hawaii? Yeah, that’s what I thought too.) The taxi driver asked where I wanted to go, and I told him.

I would have walked if I’d known it’d cost close to fifty dollars for a measly fifteen minute ride. Or taken a bus. Buses were everywhere in Hawaii. It was the public transportation of the century. Everyone took the bus. No wonder most taxis were open. Jeez.

Mom’s work usually resided on the topmost floor, where all the special patients ate, slept, and peed. That’s all the ever did, seriously. On other floors, music blared, TVs sputtered out the news, and sparse games of monopoly played themselves out between rivaling roomies. The psychiatric ward was nothing in comparison. White, gloomy, and silent. The smell of cleanness wafted from every room, that odorless reek that shied every visitor away. Even though the floor smelled of nothing, it smelled nonetheless. I’m used to walking along the hallways where mental people sat in their beds, eyes placidly staring into parts unknown. As if they saw things that no one else could, something better than the white, hollow walls. It might have been hard for most people to walk along that particular hallway, but I have all my life. Those patients were people too, you just had to remember that.

At the end of the hallway, Mom paced. She looked almost like an angel in her white, fluttering lab coat and abstract, colorful jewelry. Most of her patients loved the way she dressed and wore colorful things. It made her stand out from the other doctors. Even her colorblind patients loved her obsceneness. I, however, was quite sick of all the fake colors. She might have been colorful in her work, but she was all gray to me.

“There you are!” Mom spotted me, throwing her hands into the air. “I thought you’d gotten lost!”

“The cab charged me fifty bucks, Mom.”

“Everything’s more expensive in Hawaii,” she waved it off. “Come here, I want you to meet someone.” Her patient probably. She led me to the door and whispered into my ear. “He hasn’t seen a person his age in years. I want to see how he interacts.”

“Is he, you know, O-K?”

She nodded gravely. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. He’s sane enough while I’m around, but I don’t know if it’s a show. The nurses say he’s quite tricky. He might be the toughest case I’ve ever had.” There was a joy in her voice she only managed to get from work. It soured me how this unknown guy could give Mom more joy than I ever did. “Go on.”

Despite having my own two legs, she forced me into the room. I stumbled on my flip-flops, catching myself on a plastic chair. It smelled differently in the room. Too sterile to actually be livable. My nose crinkled at the scent. I looked over to the bed, and found him staring straight at me. He had beautiful sky blue eyes, and dark bronze hair that stuck up in every which way. He tilted his head and studied me. Not like a professor, studying to see if I made the cut. He studied me like an animal would, sizing up his prey, ready to sink his claws into my flesh and suck out my blood. An uncontrollable shiver quacked my body. Mom thought he was sane?

I opened my mouth to say something, but instead became enraptured by his very movements. So smooth, he could have been a snake and I not know. He tucked his legs under him and sat up, hands twining around each other. He tilted his head again, and finally deemed me worthy enough to stand before him.

“A grain of salt in a sea of fresh water.” His voice took me by surprise too. It was soft, whispery, like a willow. “Ah, the toad comes.”

“What?” I asked.

“The toad speaks, the ugly toad.”

“Excuse me?”

“Now the toad is mad. Poor toad.”

Anger flushed through my system. The ends of my hair would have caught fire if my anger was combustible. I tensed my shoulders, clenching my fists. Mom’s chiming voice rang through my head. Stay calm, Harper. Stay calm. I’ve been called a lot of things in life. Bitch. Asshole. Fucker. Never a toad. “I am not a toad!”

He tutted, wagging his finger as he would to a disobedient puppy. “Toad has anger management issues.”

I slapped my hand to my chest, “My name is Harper. Got it? Har-per.”

“I am not deaf, little toad, but you are not a Harper.”

“Then who’re you?” The quickest way to end a conversation is to begin a new one. So I did. It always worked before with unruly patients. Evidently not with this one.

“I am not a toad. I am a snake.” He slithered his tongue out and gave a hair-raising hiss. Nutcase. Nutcase. NUTCASE. I rubbed my arms to quell my goosebumps, and he loved my fear. God, why did Mom send me in here with this --- this retard? “And I will eat you soon.”

With that, I spun on my heels and marched out of the room. Mom, unable to have heard our conversation, pulled me over by the hem of my shirt and tapped her palm pilot impatiently, ready for details.

“What happened?”

I yanked away, resuming my steadfast march to the elevator. That was it. No more playing guinea pig. No way. Not with that --- that --- “He’s a psycho. Send him to a damn asylum already!” Which was the wrong thing to say, because her job was to prevent people from going to the asylum. Mom was always her patient’s last hope, and she had never had a patient go to an asylum. This one, however, might just be her first.

Mom gave a loud sigh, and opened the door. The last I heard before the elevator closed was Mom saying, “Daniel, I’m Ms. Monroe, I‘m terribly sorry for the way my daughter acted. Let‘s try this again . . .”

The elevator door dinged closed.

Daniel. A strong, supportive name. God is my judge. It would have been my name too, if I had been a boy.

Too bad he was insane.

--- - ---

Taxi services fell under my good graces after the first ride, and spending the rest of my precious allowance on a taxi home seemed inconceivable. Even though Mom made me come to the hospital, she also made me use my own money for transportation. So it didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that I didn’t take a taxi home, and instead began walking towards the larger part of Honolulu. It would have been nice to live on one of the smaller islands --- less crowded --- but Mom’s work resided here, and she insisted on being as close as she could to the hospital, just in case. She always worked on ‘just in case.’ Whenever we went out to eat, she would take her pager ‘just in case.’ We’d go to a park, and she’d call the hospital ‘just in case.’ She’d take the day off, and go in to work ‘just in case.’ I’ve learned never to count on her for anything. My dreams of being a family were immorally crushed when I was five, and she forgot my birthday while visiting a client. You know, ‘just in case.’

It took a good hour to find the apartment again, and on the way I must have passed ten ABC stores. Not the liquor store, but the Walmarts of Waikiki. All Blocks Covered. We didn’t live quite in Waikiki, but a little out of the one-mile radius where forty-one ABC stores sat infesting the pretty tourist location like forty-one spiffy-looking ticks. Many natives passed on bicycles, and it gave me the idea to buy one too. It would be cheaper in the long run, and it’d help me get rid of some of the weight I’d put on over the winter. So I bought a bike with the rest of my allowance.

And rode it home.

Too bad I had to take the elevator up twenty flights of stairs and haul it through the apartment to dock it on the balcony. No one left precious things on the streets. Hawaii, being one of the best tourist spots in the world, was also quite renown for its unemployment rate. And for it’s low crime. So, if someone did steal my bike, where would he go? We were on an island.

I sat in one of the garden chairs I’d dragged from North Carolina, and watched my first Hawaiian sunset. Tourist Weekly called it the world’s best. It was a little ruined through, because I was still shivering --- and a little clammy --- from Daniel’s cruel snake-like sky blue eyes.