The room inside my head filled my vision. I held my breath. I knew that he would be sitting on the left side of the Committee’s couch, as he had been for the last three and a half months.
Still holding my breath, I shifted my gaze to the pink commode on my right. My blood turned to ice water in my veins and froze like a lake across my heart. Betty Jane sat there looking pressed and polished. Her sunflower pin mocked me with its little yellow bonnet.
I nodded my head. The person directly to the right of me tugged at the corner of my eye. I turned and the familiar crew cut came into focus. On his neck was the scar diving from the corner of his jaw into the band of his white T-shirt. A thousand tiny cracks erupted across the glacier that was my heart. I sighed and lifted the corners of my mouth slightly while nodding.
Sarge winked.
I reversed my gaze back toward Betty Jane and then down to the floor where the Silent One knelt on his prayer altar.
“Hello,” I said. He bowed his head. A warmth radiated out from my heart, melting the last of the winter in my body. The Silent One bowed his head again.
I inhaled deeply as he had taught me, and for the first time, I felt a calming warmth drop over me. I exhaled and looked down at the pink Oriental rug. I inhaled deeply and looked at the Silent One once more. His face was very serious. His eyes remained fixed on me. I transferred my body weight to my left side, pressed my hands against the couch, and focused on the Committee’s therapy room.
I saw a beat-up red Converse sneaker, and on the other foot,
a blood-soaked white sock. The sound of screeching brakes and shattering glass rushed at my mind like the Furies from Greek mythology punishing me with their secret stings because I had escaped public justice for my crime. Then a thud that sounded like a piece of fruit splattering on the ground knocked the air from my lungs.
Most people can’t help but look when they come across an accident. I couldn’t help but run.And at that moment, sitting on Milton’s couch, I wanted to do it again. I wanted to get up and run as fast as I could. Crash through the closed door, leaving an outline of my frame and nothing more. But I was anchored to the couch by an overwhelming need to, now, look.
The pain behind my eyes pushed out like the runoff from a particularly fierce storm held back by wooden planks. Then the dam broke. I lifted my head slowly as if it were being pulled from the ceiling by an invisible cord attached to my crown. Through my tears I confronted the face I couldn’t look at all those years ago.
One side of his head was caved in and the skin looked like it had been run across by a cheese grater. It was a mixture of blood, pebbles, and shards of glass that caught the light like tiny stars. Aiden’s bloody blond curls were caked and matted, making his hair look like a Gorgon helmet of living, venomous red snakes. One eye disappeared behind the mangled mess of his face, and the other dripped with blood.
Staring at him, I heard the echo of Sarah’s screams mixed with the tearing sound of my mother’s pants as they ripped across the asphalt. The wailing and tearing beat at me like a thousand horrible wings, indicting me as the perpetrator of the hideous crime of fratricide. I wanted Aiden to join their lament. I wanted him to point his finger at me and say,“This is
your
fault.” I wanted him to strike out at me with a demand for justice.
Aiden smiled instead.
Aiden’s smile was always one of his best features. His teeth were large and perfectly straight. At age five, he had what used to be called the “Pepsodent smile.”
I leaned forward, wheezing as I bit my knuckles.Aiden’s mouth was gaping and mostly empty. I remembered my mother telling me that after she saw Aiden’s crushed head, she crawled through the blood collecting his teeth. She said she was ashamed that this was all she could do while her only son lay dying on the street.
“Right when I pushed you, the car hit me so hard I flew into the air,” Aiden told me. “I landed on the hood. My head hit the windshield and shattered it.Then I bounced onto the street.”
His words were not meant as an indictment, but each one of them etched into me, leaving scars like the marks I left on the wall at the back of my father’s closet.
“And that is where I died,” he said quietly.
“Aiden, please forgive me. Please forgive me,” was my anguished plea. “Please forgive me.” I closed my eyes again. Aiden’s mashed face remained.
I remember Sarah telling me I had to forgive myself. But I couldn’t. I needed Aiden to forgive me. But how could he?
“Who will forgive me now?” I said to the Committee. All eyes were fixed on me. Nobody said a word.
“Somebody, please forgive me,” I cried.
Nobody said a word.
I opened my eyes. My body started shaking as I gulped ragged breaths of air.
Milton pulled his chair over so that he sat directly in front of me. He put his hands over mine and squeezed.
“I remember . . . I remember . . . them . . . trying to tell me . . . what happened.” Milton squeezed my hands a little harder. I inhaled deeply and then exhaled, repeating this until the tremors
in my body stopped. After a while I said, “When they did, I retreated and let the Silent One have control. He scared my parents with the praying and vacant stares.They finally gave up.”
“Holly,” said Milton, “I believe you have been in a state of protracted grief for the past twenty-seven years.The Committee has protected you from your grief and kept you mired in it at the same time.”
“And the Boy, Little Bean,Aiden, he can’t forgive me because he is a part of me?”
Milton nodded. I waited for him to say the next obvious thing. But he didn’t.And I was relieved. I hated new-age crap, and Milton was a NewYork City psychoanalyst—the closest he would ever get to anything touchy-feely was sitting close and taking my hands, as he’d done at that moment.
Milton moved his chair back to its original position. He knew I was safe.
“How did the Committee come here for group therapy?” I said.
“Ah, yes,” said Milton. Up went the finger church. But this time it didn’t bother me. “When you didn’t return my third call from abroad, I called Sarah.”
“It’s not that I don’t trust her, but you guys seem to talk a lot more than I realized,” I said.
“Holly, are you aware that before you started seeing me, Sarah wanted to be declared your legal guardian so she could get you”—Milton cleared his throat—“help?”
I sat there gaping. Just when I thought I had my footing, I found out my sister wanted to lock me up.
“She and I discussed it during our initial consultation about you,” said Milton.
Betrayal and understanding braided together as I tried to assimilate this new piece of information.
“Ah, you were not aware. And because I anticipated a reaction like the one you are having, I never mentioned it. I suspected that Sarah didn’t either, but I never asked her.”
“Well, obviously something changed her mind,” I said.
“Someone.” Milton smiled. “Me.” He pointed at his chest. “After meeting with you, I was convinced that you could be helped by rigorous psychoanalytic treatment.”
Sarah’s sometimes irrational vitriol toward Milton made a lot more sense now. She’d signed on the dotted line for this devil’s bargain.
“So, what happened when you called Sarah?” I said.
“She assured me that you were depressed, angry, still without the Committee, but coping all the same.When I heard this, I had an idea.”
Here we go. Another one of Milton’s brainstorms.
“Since I’d already radically departed from standard treatment methods—”
“I’ll say,” I said.
“I decided to take a risk and try a new path into your psyche,” continued Milton, ignoring the comment. “What did I have to lose?”
A couple of things popped into my mind.
“To pursue this new treatment path, I needed Sarah’s help. I convinced her that this new course was the right one, and then we set up regular calls for the last couple of weeks I was in France.”
“What did you talk about?” I said.
“Who Sarah thought the Committee members represented for you. As we now see, her guesses were right on target.”
“Of course they were,” I said.
“Sarah is the keeper of your family history, Holly,” said Milton.
I always thought he’d hatched these harebrained recipes out of the sky. Turned out my sister provided the ingredients. I wanted to be angry, but how could I? It had worked.
“How did you know that Betty Jane would come to group therapy?” I said to Milton.
“Even though you were unaware of them, I suspected the Committee wasn’t completely gone. I thought instead that Betty Jane, as ruler of the Committee, had forced them to hide with her. Do you recall the deal I made with Betty Jane? The one that enabled you to start working as a voice-over artist? She agreed to resolve conflicts in therapy if I requested it.” I nodded my head. “I knew that despite her flaws, Betty Jane was a woman of her word.”
Milton shrugged his shoulders and held out his hands, palms up. “I had a hunch that she’d come to group therapy, so I played it.”
“But Ruffles didn’t come back with her,” I said. Then I felt as if all the air were being sucked out of my lungs. I closed my eyes. Ruffles’s pillow lay empty over in the corner.
“Ruffles isn’t here, Milton. She’s not here.”
I felt sick.
How did I miss her? I know seeing Aiden was traumatic, but how did I miss her?
Then I noticed Betty Jane’s chalky face and I knew that Ruffles’s absence wasn’t one of her tricks.
“Interesting,” said Milton.
“Interesting!” I screamed. “Ruffles
is
missing.”
“Holly, yelling is not productive,” said Milton. I wondered if strangling him would be. He leaned forward. “Remember the first session, when I made you state that you wanted to resolve the conflicts with the Committee through group?” That’s right. He’d made me say the words. “The Committee has been with you the whole time. But because Betty Jane is the ruler, she had the power to decide if they were visible or not. Because she
agreed to remain your equal, you had the power to order them back at any time. Inside or outside therapy,” said Milton.
It was a new dawn every ten minutes with Milton today. This one didn’t include sunshine.“So I could have asked Betty Jane to come back and bring the Committee?”
“It had to be an order, Holly, not a request.You had to exert your power. Remember when you ordered her to bring Ruffles back? She did it.”
As I considered the past few months of my life, I wanted to throw something at him.“We waste so much time on examining things, why didn’t we examine that moment? Why didn’t you tell me I could order her to come back full-time? You had the means to give me back my Committee and you didn’t do it.”
“No,” said Milton, “I did not do it.”
“How could you do that to me? I was miserable.” And now I was angry.
“Yes,” said Milton quietly, “I know you were miserable, but no more so than when you had Betty Jane.”
I turned toward the window. Outside it looked like a down pillow had broken over the city as featherlike snowflakes floated from the sky. Milton was sort of right and he was also wrong. But I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of examining the complexities of his statement at the moment. I needed to find Ruffles.
My eyebrows met in the middle as I concentrated on all of this. I didn’t care if I was etching the Grand Canyon between my eyes. “I don’t think Betty Jane knows where Ruffles is,” I said. “Does it work the same way? Can I order Ruffles back?”
“You can try, but I suspect not,” said Milton.
“Ruffles, come back now!” I said. Nothing happened. After the fifth time, I couldn’t stand the pained look on all the faces inside my head and sitting across from me.
“How could she abandon me like that? Just leave without saying good-bye?” I whispered.
“Holly, didn’t you tell me once you hated it when someone said good-bye because it meant that you would never see them again?”
“So you think I’ll see her again? She’s hiding like she did when she felt bad about making Betty Jane go crazy and kidnap the Committee?”
“Ruffles is here, Holly,” said Milton. “We’ll find her in due time.” I swear I heard hatching sounds and waited for another one of Milton’s barmy plans to surface.
When he didn’t elaborate, I said, “So, what happens now?” I didn’t know what felt worse, seeing Aiden’s mangled face or not feeling Ruffles’s bulk in the corner of my head. I felt so dead and exhausted I wanted to sleep for ten years.
“That depends on you.”
“The rest of the Committee . . . I can take them back, or leave them here in group therapy?”
“No,” said Milton.“Now that the group therapy has exposed the underlying cause, the Committee can no longer stay here. What you do with them next is up to you.”
“Is it? If I say I don’t want them back, then they just disappear?” I knew this was what I should do. They were in the hallway between wherever they had been and their house that sat inside my head. I was almost free.
“If I let them come back, will Ruffles be with them?” I said.
“I think you know the answer to that, Holly,” said Milton.
I felt as if I were in the crush box my vet used when he examined Cat Two. He’d place him in a Plexiglas rectangle and push against him with a panel until he was hemmed in on all sides, trapped like I was now.
The Committee pressed against me like the panel. Even if I
resisted, I’d be pushed to the wall, because saying good-bye brought about the result I feared most—I would never see them again. Saying good-bye meant letting go of Aiden. Like Cat Two, though, even faced with the obvious conclusion, I still searched for a different ending.
“You said the Committee was there to shield me. Protect me. Right?”
Milton nodded his head.