Ellen sat there, just looking at me steadily. She looked exhausted: gray shadows under her eyes, pale lips. No makeup. Messy hair. Her face plain. Ordinary even. Except that there was something so pristine about her. Looking at her was like looking at something natural and true.
I caused Jack to break his arm.
It was like someone was holding a screen right up close to my face, and it was playing a movie of everything I’d done for the last three years: every text message, every phone call, every letter I knew he’d never read, leading up to the final sepia-colored moment when Jack and I crashed down the stairs.
I closed my eyes to try and escape from it, but I could still see it. It was unflinching and unrelenting.
I was being suffocated by shame.
“Breathe,” said Ellen. “Just concentrate on your breathing. Inhale and exhale. Inhale and exhale.” The sound of her voice was like an old familiar tune. It took me straight back to her little glass room overlooking the ocean. I listened greedily, as if her voice were oxygen.
“That’s it. In. And out.”
I opened my eyes and saw that she’d leaned in closer, so that her face was only inches from mine. She took my hand. Her hands were cold. My mother always had cold hands. “Cold hands, warm heart,” she used to say.
“Have you heard the phrase ‘hitting rock bottom’?” she said.
She didn’t wait for an answer. I noticed her voice had changed subtly. She was speaking in her “professional” voice.
“It’s something that happens to addicts when they finally break down in every way possible: physically, spiritually, emotionally. I think that’s sort of what’s happening to you right now, Saskia. And I don’t know, but I think it probably feels terrible. I think it probably feels like the end of the world.”
I felt a wild, flapping sensation in my chest, like a trapped bird.
Ellen kept talking. “But it’s good, it’s a good thing, it’s even a great thing, because it’s the turning point. It’s the beginning of getting better. It’s the beginning of getting your life back. I think you’ve probably tried to stop before, haven’t you?”
Again, she didn’t wait for me to reply.
“But this time it’s going to work. For one thing you’re going to be stuck.” Ellen’s eyes sparkled, as if it was all a great joke. “They tell me you won’t be walking for six to eight weeks, and after that you’ll be on crutches.”
I didn’t react to that at all. My future didn’t seem possible. It had no relevance.
“And during that time you’ll get counseling,” continued Ellen confidently, happily, as if we were discussing shared holiday plans that were already in place. “It will be a good way to pass the time. And then once you’re back on your feet, I think you should move.”
She smiled. “That might seem a bit presumptuous of me, but, well, I’ve got the right to be presumptuous. I think you need to move somewhere far away from Sydney. So you won’t be tempted.”
Her hand tightened around mine. “I expect Patrick will finally take out a restraining order against you. So legally, you won’t be able to come near us. He’s going to need to do that, but what I need is a promise from you, a promise right now, that this is it, that last night was the end and today is the beginning. The end of your old life and the beginning of your new life. Can you promise me that?”
I felt my head jerk up and down, as if I were a puppet and she was pulling the strings. I said, “I promise.”
She patted my hand and said, “Good.”
I became aware of the pain again; it gripped and viciously squeezed the lower half of my body, and it felt personal, as if someone was doing it on purpose. I tried not to resist it, to accept it as my punishment, but frankly, it hurt too much.
“Give yourself a hit,” said Ellen. She put something like a light switch in my hand. I pressed the button. A few seconds later I felt a sensation of fuzzy warmth, like pins and needles creeping up my legs, and the pain receded. I said, “Why are you here? Why are you being nice to me?”
My mouth felt as if it was full of marbles, as if I hadn’t spoken for a very long time.
Ellen went to speak and then she stopped, as if she was reconsidering.
She said, “I don’t really know. You frightened me, but at the same time you intrigued me. I even found it strangely validating. You watching us made my life seem more interesting.” She shook her head. “I was sort of addicted to you.”
“You should hate me,” I said. My voice sounded unfamiliar: slurred, like a stroke victim. “Patrick hates me.”
“That’s because I don’t have the emotional connection that Patrick has to you. Patrick hates you because he once loved you.”
“That’s nice of you to say that,” I said. My nose was running. I went to wipe it with the back of my hand and saw I had the drip attached. I sniffed noisily. I didn’t even care. I had no dignity left to lose.
“I’m not that nice,” said Ellen. “When I saw you holding the ultrasound photos, I wanted to kill you. It turns out that I do have limits. I don’t want you near my baby.”
Her eyes had turned steely.
The words “I’m sorry” came into my mind, but they seemed insultingly inadequate.
I said instead, “Patrick is lucky to have you.” And it occurred to me that I might actually mean it, that in a far-off, more generous part of my mind, I could even be happy for him.
Her face shifted in some tiny, subtle way. She said, “He’s still in love with his first wife.”
“Yes, of course,” I said. I could feel my senses starting to drift. “He still loves Colleen. First love and all that, but, so what, she’s dead, isn’t she? I always knew that I loved him more than he loved me, but I didn’t care. I just loved him so much.”
A great wave of tiredness was dragging me somewhere far away.
“I know you did.” Ellen stood up, adjusting my blankets, like a mother. “You loved him. And you loved Jack.”
For a moment I seemed to swim back up to lucidity again, and I said, “Have you hypnotized me?”
She smiled. “I’ve been trying to unhypnotize you, Saskia.”
And then I was drifting away again, and I heard her say, “It’s time to move on now, Saskia, and let go of all those memories of Patrick and Jack. It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, or that Patrick didn’t love you, or that you weren’t a wonderful mother to Jack. I know that you were. It doesn’t mean that he didn’t hurt you terribly. But now it’s time to close that door. Imagine an actual door. A big heavy wooden door with an old-fashioned gold lock. Now close it. Bang. Lock it. Throw away the key. It’s closed, Saskia. Closed forever.”