Stand Alone (31 page)

Em opened her eyes and looked at Dr. Morton.

“Do you think I messed up, made her distrust me because I didn’t take care of her properly?” she questioned.

“What did she say? How did she act?”

“She said she didn’t want me to take her to the hospital or the doctor. She just wanted me to take care of her. She called me ‘Mommy’. She never calls me ‘Mommy’. I don’t think
  
…
 
I don’t think she ever has since. I don’t think she’s even called me ‘Mom’ since then.”

Dr. Morton tipped his chair back, studying Em through lowered lids.

“That’s interesting. And you are sure that it was a skateboard accident? Is it possible that she was attacked by someone?”

“Attacked? No
  
…” Em thought about it. “She had road rash on her arms, knees, and face, a big bump on her head. Fat lip and a bump on her jaw, too. I never thought that she was attacked. It looked just like a bad boarding accident. She’s always taking spills. But she had a bad concussion—dizzy, double vision, throwing up. She’s never had a concussion like
that
before.”

“Maybe she’ll let me talk to her about it,” Dr. Morton said, tapping his pencil on a front tooth.

“Do you think I should have taken her to the hospital? Now she’s self-injuring to get herself put in hospital? Maybe it was a test, and I failed. Maybe I was supposed to take her to the hospital even though she asked me not to. Maybe it was a test to see if I would take care of her properly, even though she asked me to do something else.”

“You want me to tell you what was going on in her mind?” Dr. Morton asked with a chuckle. “As much as I have been inside her head, I still can’t do that for you. She doesn’t usually know herself why she does things. I don’t think it was a test. But it is possible that you broke her trust somehow by not taking her to the hospital. I don’t know. I think you did the best thing you could for her, I don’t think you did anything wrong. But what Justine wants
  
…
 
what Justine wants, she wants, even if she doesn’t understand why.”

“If that’s what happened
  
…
 
is there any way to get her trust back? If she sees that I’ll get her help when she needs it, will she get straightened out again?”

Dr. Morton shook his head.

“It’s never easy. You can lose her trust in five minutes, and take five years building it back up again. Justine is growing up, getting more mature, so maybe it will be easier for her to work her way back
  
…
 
but it might also make it easier for her to just break away.”

Em sighed, discouraged.

“It’s like I’m feeling my way through the dark with her. It doesn’t seem like there’s any right answer anymore.”

They still had another professional to visit. Em took Justine back to the hospital to get her dressing changed and the stitches checked. Justine insisted that Em sit in the waiting room and not go in with her. The doctor took off the bandages and examined the angry red, swollen, pus-filled wound. He looked up at her face.

“How did this get so badly infected, Justine?” he demanded.

Justine watched as he started to clean the cut.

“I dunno.”

“Did you keep the bandage on?”

“Until today. I just took it off today to see why it hurt so much.”

“Then how did it get so badly infected?”

Justine looked at it.

“I guess it must have been here at the hospital. People can get those superbugs, those flesh-eating bacteria at hospitals. Do you think it is one of those?”

“You’d better hope not.”

He continued to work on it.

“How could you tell?” Justine inquired.

“By how fast it spreads and if it responds to antibiotics.”

After a few minutes, he looked back at Justine’s face, showing her the dirty pad in his hand.

“That didn’t come from the hospital. Did you rub dirt into the cut?”

Justine shook her head.

“No, it was just
  
…
 
I was somewhere it wasn’t very clean.”

“Where?”

Justine’s heart beat quickly while she thought about what to tell him. She wondered if he could feel her pulse racing. His hand was still on her arm.

“In
  
…
 
a basement.”

“A basement?” he repeated, searching her eyes.

“I was locked in a basement. I had to sleep there. I guess dirt got under the bandage, and infected the cut.”

The doctor looked through the folder on the table next to him. He looked back at Justine and made no comment on the story.

“You don’t believe it?” Justine asked, pouting.

He just looked at her and didn’t answer. He sponged the wound gently. He didn’t have to be so gentle, he’d already frozen her arm with half a dozen shots.

“She’s not really my mom,” Justine told him. He knew too much about her. She had to get out ahead of him, make him understand about Em.

“Doesn’t make a difference to this case,” he said.

“She kidnapped me and locked me in the basement,” Justine insisted. “Doesn’t
that
make a difference?”

His eyes traveled down her arm to the tops of her fingers. They lingered on her short, bitten nails.

“Why should a lie make any difference?” he said.

Justine pulled away from him, angry.

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“Are you lying?” he countered.

“No!” she insisted.

“You didn’t get it infected sleeping in a dirty basement any more than you got it from the hospital. You intentionally got it dirty. Right?”

“No! You’re wrong,” Justine insisted.

“Then tell me the truth.”

Justine pressed her lips together, and said nothing.

The next week, Justine had another appointment with Dr. Morton. Em preferred to keep appointments to at least two weeks apart, but he had insisted that she come back in sooner. Justine sat in her usual chair, watching out the window.
 

“I want you to think back, Justine,” Dr. Morton said in his low, soothing voice. “I want you to remember when you had an accident and had a concussion.”

Justine shook her head.

“What accident?”

“A year ago. You had a bad concussion.”

Justine knew what he was taking about, but she resisted.

“I’ve had concussions,” she said. “More than just one.”

“This one was pretty severe. Em wanted to take you to the hospital, but you didn’t want to go,”

“I don’t remember,” Justine said with a shrug.

“Think back to how you felt after that accident. You were hurt and you were sick. You were home with Em, and she was taking care of you. Tell me about how you felt.”

Justine resisted the waves of pain and regret that washed over her. Christian. Lost to her forever. Seeing him and holding him in her arms. Lying on the couch at home, sick and desperate with grief. She didn’t talk to Em about it. She didn’t talk to anyone about it. Some of the kids at school heard what happened. Some of them knew that she was friends with Christian and skated with him. But they weren’t part of her support system, and she rejected their pity and condolences. She couldn’t stand to hear anybody else talking about him. There had also been numerous fights with boys who had badmouthed Christian. That’s how boys dealt with things. They demeaned them. Diminished them. So when they talked about Christian and his accident, it wasn’t with compassion. It was with derision. And Justine made them pay, if she could.

“You felt sick,” Dr. Morton prompted. “You were hurt. But what emotions did you feel? Sad? Afraid? Dependent? What was it you felt while Em was taking care of you?”

Justine shook her head.

“No,” she objected hoarsely. “I don’t want to talk about it. I can’t.”

“You’re afraid?”

“I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid of anything. I just don’t want to talk about it. It’s personal.”

“We talk about personal things here, Justine. This is a safe place to discuss and process painful feelings. You know that. You can talk to me about it.”

“No.”

“Did Em do something that upset you? She said that your behavior changed after that. Did your feelings toward her change?”

Justine didn’t want to bring Em into this. This was nothing to do with Em. This was about Justine and Christian. That was all. Christian and Em were not part of the same world. They had never met. They never would. One supported Justine and was a friend to her. The other
  
…
 
Em couldn’t be trusted. She couldn’t be the person to Justine that she wanted to be. She didn’t love Justine. She never could. She only love the old Justine, the one in the baby pictures.

“Em isn’t my mother,” Justine insisted. “She isn’t. She can’t be.”

“That’s a strong feeling. I know you don’t feel like Em could be your mother. But we’ve gone over that before. You and I have looked through all of the evidence, piece by piece. Your brain is still playing tricks on you. Telling you that you can’t trust her, when you can. Em is your mother. As much as you don’t want her to be, she still is. Work through the feelings. Label the feelings,” he encouraged.

“Angry,” Justine snapped, “hurt, sick, sad, and angry!”

“Good. That’s right. What were you angry about? What happened that made you angry?”

“Em doesn’t know.”

“No,” Morton agreed, studying Justine intently. In spite of his soothing tone, Justin wasn’t settling down, but was feeling more agitated. “She doesn’t know. Why don’t you tell me? What is it that she doesn’t know?”

“It’s not about Em,” Justine growled. “Em makes everything about her. This isn’t about her, this is about me.”

“Okay. It’s not about Em. Tell me about you, Justine. What was it that was making you so angry? What is it that is still making you upset a year later?”

“I don’t want to tell you.”

“Secrets between a therapist and patient don’t play very well. You know that if you tell me, I won’t tell anybody else. If you don’t want me to talk to Em about it, I won’t talk to Em about it. This is private and safe, just between me and you.”

“No.”

“Let’s do some breathing exercises. You’re pretty anxious, and I’d like to help you.”

Justine obediently breathed in and out as he walked her through a breathing exercise, and in spite of herself, it did calm her down a bit. As she started to relax, and let her body and brain release and rest, she saw what he was doing.

“Don’t,” Justine said sharply.

She forced herself to sit bolt upright, to shake off the drowsiness that was starting to envelope her.

“Don’t what?” Dr. Morton questioned.

“Don’t do that hypnosis thing. I told you I don’t want to talk about it. Don’t hypnotize me to find out.”

“It’s just a relaxation technique,” Dr. Morton told her soothingly. “It’s just to help you to relax and feel better. To give you time and a way to sort out your feelings. It’s not anything that I am forcing on you, or using to get information that you don’t want to share. It doesn’t work that way.”

Justine got out of her chair and started to pace.

“I’m not sure of that,” she growled. “I don’t want you to do it. You stay out of my brain. I don’t want you poking around.”

“I understand,” he said, his face and voice masterpieces of calm. So soothing. “I will not do anything you don’t want me to.”

Justine marched back and forth, digging her feet into the carpet aggressively. She didn’t want to lose control. She didn’t want him fishing around and pulling out memories or information that she didn’t want to give him. That wasn’t fair. She wasn’t going to let him do that.

“You’re too good at that,” she told Morton, “and I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay. Do you want to tell me how you got hurt that day?”

Justine paced silently, thinking about it.

“It was nothing,” she said. “Just a fall.”

“Was this a deliberate injury? Like when you tripped and cut yourself?”

“No. I was skating and I missed my landing. Hit my head and scraped up my arms. That happens sometimes when you skate. It’s nothing. It just toughens you up for next time.”

“How did you fall?”

“I told you. Just missed my landing.”

“You must have been going pretty fast.”

“You do, when you skate. You can hit the ground pretty hard.” Her voice choked up, and she thought about Christian. “It was just an accident.”

“You got a pretty severe concussion.”

“Yeah, I hit the ground hard. Ended up doing a somersault, I was going so fast.”

“Ouch. Do you think that this concussion might have had any long-lasting or permanent effects? Em didn’t take you to the hospital for any kind of testing or scans. You might have had some irreversible damage.”

“It’s gone now,” Justine said. “It didn’t last. Just a few days.”

“But there were changes in your behavior as well. Maybe that was from the concussion. That can happen, you know. There is such a thing as post-concussion syndrome.”

“You’re not a neurologist.”

“No, I’m not. Usually I only deal with brains from the inside. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know about brain disorders. A psychologist needs to be able to figure out if there is an organic problem too. If there’s something happening physically inside the brain that needs to be dealt with.”

“Did I ever have any brain scans?” Justine questioned curiously, stopping pacing. “Not after the accident, I don’t mean. I mean when I was little. When I started having problems with Em. Did I ever have any brain scans?”

“No, I don’t think so. It was behavioral. There was no indication that there were physical problems with the brain.”

“But you couldn’t know that, right? I mean, what if I had a foreign object in my head? Or a tumor, or something like that? Or something was the wrong shape or size. Those could all cause behavioral problems too, couldn’t they?”

“Yes. But usually in those cases there are rapid changes in behavior. Alarming ones. Your problems have been pretty consistent, no big and sudden changes.”

“They should do a brain scan of all babies when they’re born. Then they would have something to compare them to later, if they had problems. Wouldn’t that be a good idea?”