The Good Listener (12 page)

Oh, my.

I just didn’t know what to say to him anymore.

“She killed herself. But mentally and emotionally she had died a while before she’d even overdosed. And it didn’t bother me at all that she was dead. I figured if someone wanted to die before their time, you might as well let them go without too much of a fuss. I didn’t cry. I didn’t shed one single tear. So, I guess you can say that I haven’t been exactly normal as you would say for a long, long time.”

I was over being surprised by anything that came out of his mouth, but it still didn’t make it any easier for me to digest.

“So her problems were mental? Was she ever institutionalized?”

“Not that I know of. And she had all kinds of problems. She just let them win. All she had to do was take matters into her own hands. Just like I do.”

“And what does that mean?”

“It means just what I said. Every pet that I would get, I would give them my biological mother’s name and kill it. Even if it wasn’t my pet, the family pets always came up missing. I would choke the cats to death and often burn the dogs. I’ve always liked “hot dogs”. Do you get it?” He laughed.

I just needed to get away from him.

I wasn’t sure if I could save him.

I wasn’t sure if hospitalization or medication could save him.

He was just a lost cause.

“Watching them burn gave me such a thrill. I love fire. I always have. So, have you figured out what’s wrong with me yet?”

I was licensed to diagnose of course, but I tried to keep that part of my sessions to myself.

I hated for patients to feel like they were classified or in a certain category as though they were a disease or case study.

But in his case, he was so far gone that I didn’t think that it really mattered.

“You’ve displayed lots of different things from paranoia, neglect; a little bit of multiple personality disorder here and there, anxiety, depression, and even some signs, for lack of a better term, a psychopath.”

He nodded.

“Sounds about right.”

“Oh, so this isn’t your first time attending therapy?”

“Why would you think that it was? Considering everything that I have told you? Are you sure that you are listening?”

“But you were running from my help in the beginning. You wouldn’t return the messages, and kept rescheduling as though you were scared to come see me for help.”

“Maybe I was. Maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I was pretending to be scared or desperate so that you would make room for me. Of course, I’d called beforehand, and I knew that you were full and had people waiting. Maybe I just wanted a guaranteed spot. I needed this spot don’t you think? Even if I had to pay for it.”

What?

“Pay for it?”

He looked at me as if he was waiting for some kind of light bulb to go off but it didn’t.

“Isn’t it ironic that I burst in here the same day that Mrs. Whiteside said that she didn’t need your help anymore? Obviously, she still needed it because she still killed herself didn’t she?”

What?

“As I said, you came highly recommended. Her husband, James, used to work for me too. The job the Joel was initially hired for used to be his. He left for a better one. Anyway, he mentioned that his wife was in therapy here and there and one day she came to bring him lunch, and we had a little chat. She told me that she was seeing who they called “the good listener” and praised you from here to the other side of Texas. I told her that I was looking to talk to someone about all of the stress that I was under. I would go through every detail but I won’t. She expressed that they were having some financial troubles, which is why her husband had taken a better job in the first place; to hopefully get them out of debt. But I told her that I could help. And more or less, I paid her for her spot, although you still ended up giving it to someone else. I didn’t ask her for a refund, though. She’d done her part; I was the one who was tempted to have a change of heart.”

He said it as though he hadn't cared that she had died as a result of it.

“What? Why did you do that?”

“I needed your help. She took the money. I didn’t force her to take it.”

“But she really needed me.”

“And so do I.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

But that was no excuse for what he had done.

It was his fault that I’d lost her.

It was his fault that Mrs. Whiteside was dead.

And maybe partly Summer’s too; if she failed to give me correspondence.

I exhaled and tried to refocus.

“Okay. So about this woman that you plan to kill, are you ready to tell me who she is? Where she is? And why?”

“She’s around, walking around, not knowing that I’m watching her and unaware of what I want to do to her.”

“Does she work with you?”

“Maybe.”

“Who is she Blake?”

“That doesn’t matter. Just stop me. You’ve pulled some things out of me that I have never told a soul. I know that you are the right woman for the job, you just have to believe that.”

For his sake, I hope that he was right.

He had me so bent out of shape on trying to figure out his mental state that for the first time ever, I just wanted to walk away.

I wanted to quit.

I wanted to tell him to get out of my office and never come back.

But I couldn’t.

Or maybe it was that I wouldn’t.

But I wanted to.

“Okay. Let’s talk about fears. What scares you, Blake?”

He didn’t comment.

He appeared to be thinking about it.

Or maybe he was trying to figure out how to lie about it.

I waited for a while and then finally he spoke.

“Love. I’m scared of love because everyone that has ever told me that they loved me lied. They didn’t love me at all.”

“Maybe they did and it just wasn’t the way that you wanted to be loved. What about in your adult life?”

“As I said, no one has ever genuinely loved me and the ones that said that they did left me.”

Hmmm…

“And there’s no real point in wasting time on being in love these days. True love no longer exists.”

“But it does Blake. You just have to find it.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Do you want it? Do you want real love?”

He started talking again, but he didn’t answer my question.

“I fear for the kids that will end up like me because they are hurting. Because they are broken and confused. Because they are motherless, fatherless, and will never have a chance at being normal.”

I could hear the hurt and pain in his voice, but I didn’t want to interrupt him.

“I fear all of the things that everyone else loves. Love blinds them, and they can’t see past it in order to see the truth, but because I don’t love, I can always see. I can always see the truth. I can always see what is and what isn’t. I don’t love anyone. I don’t even love me.”

“But you must love someone.”

“No. I don’t.”

“And you don’t love yourself? Self-love is the most important love a person will ever know.”

“Would you love me if you were me?”

He waited for me to answer the question.

I started to lie, but he cut me off.

“No. You wouldn’t because love doesn’t want anything to do with me. I’m incapable of loving and incapable of being loved.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes. It is. People fear me. Even though I walk around here in a $300 suit, people somehow fear me. I am fear. And fear is me.”

Blake took a deep breath.

I opened my mouth to respond to what he’d just said, but he hurriedly spoke first.

“What did you say your favorite color was again?”

Oh no!

Not this again.

Blake was done for the day and after thirty minutes more of irrelevant questions, he was gone, and I was busy writing down everything that I could about him.

Joel called my phone over and over again, but I ignored it.

He was going to have to go to the doctor all by himself.

I was so close to a breakthrough with Blake, and I had to get my all of my thoughts down while they were still fresh in my head.

I ignored Joel’s call one last time before placing my cell phone in my purse, and I gave all of my attention to the computer screen in front of me.

I would just have to face the music once I got home.

It wouldn’t be the first time. And as long as Blake was my patient, it wouldn’t be the last.

~***~

I watched Joel as he mopped around.

“We need to go to the doctor.”

“I’m fine. Besides, you don’t care about me. You care more about that damn job.”

“No I don’t and no you’re not.”

“Says the woman who ignored me for hours instead of coming home to see about her sick husband and see to it that he got to the doctor.”

“Well, I’m here now.”

“I’m surprised.”

Not only did Joel have a nasty cough, but now he was weak and had been vomiting.

“I’m worried about you.”

“Don’t be. Worry about your patients just like you always do.”

He was as sick as a dog and still so nasty.

But as usual, I overlooked his comments.

“You need to get better so that you can go back to work. You’ve already been out for a while. You haven’t been in that new position all that long. Or did you forget?”

It seemed as though hearing the word “work” gave him some type of reality check, and it was all the encouragement that he needed to go see about his health.

“You’re right. Let’s go.”

We headed to the emergency room.

Joel was so weak that he could barely even stand, and they had to get him a wheelchair.

They took him to the back almost immediately.

“How long has he been like this?” The doctor asked.

“For about two weeks now. But he has had that cough for months. I told him to get it checked out a long time ago. It has gotten ten times worse than what it was.”

The doctor rechecked his vitals although the nurse already had.

“Let’s get some test going and we will see if we can figure out what the problem is.”

I shook my head as and sat beside Joel.

He wasn’t talking.

It almost seemed as though he was barely breathing.

I thought about what life would be like for me if I lost him.

I didn’t have any parents.

I didn’t have any siblings.

I had one best friend that was dead and one that was suspect, so without him, I would have been all alone.

Maybe he was right.

Maybe we needed to start bringing kids into the picture.

But I still needed to wait until after I fixed Blake.

From my sessions and talks with Blake, my mind went way left field, and I wondered if Joel knew that he was dying or something and didn’t tell me.

Was that why he was so in a rush to start a family?

He had better not be keeping something like that from me.

We were waiting in the hospital for hours before the doctor came back in.

“So, we have a few test results back. Not all, but some. We found a few things that I’m concerned about. For starters, we have reason to believe that he has been poisoned. And it looks as though it has been going on for quite some time. Maybe in small doses. Maybe it picked up here lately and made the symptoms worse.”

Poison?

Joel opened his eyes at the news.

“Poison? What kind of poison?”

“We aren’t able to tell. How often have you been vomiting?”

“Only a few times. At first, it was just a cough.”

“Do you work around chemicals?”

“No. I work in advertising, but I haven’t been to work in a little while now. Not since a family member of mine passed away.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Well, what about home? Any type of poison around there? Maybe for pest? Rats?”

As soon as he said the word rats, I thought about Blake.

Blake told me a story about placing rat poison in one of his foster brother’s food because he was giving him such a hard time.

He never said what happened to him, but he said that he was lucky that that was all that he had done to him.

“No.”

“Well, we will keep running test, but we are going to have to keep you for a few days.”

The doctor exited the room.

Joel looked at me.

“You haven’t been trying to kill me have you?”

“What? How could you ask me something like that? Of course not.”