The Blessed - By Tonya Hurley Page 0,11
have.”
“That is a virtuous quality. But it almost led you to a dead end, Agnes.”
Agnes shrugged indifferently. “When relationships end, it’s like a death. There are always scars.”
“It is easy to be disappointed when you feel so deeply, isn’t it?”
Agnes wasn’t usually so cynical, but the doctor had hit a nerve.
“Yes.”
“What’s his name?”
“Sayer.”
“Tell me about Sayer.”
Agnes was a little weirded-out talking openly with a nurse standing behind her—placed there mostly for the doctor’s protection, legally and otherwise.
A witness.
“Well, according to my mom . . . ,” she began.
He waved her off and leaned forward, his chair creaking. “What about according to you?” He paused. “According to Agnes?”
“She wants to run my life because she hates hers,” Agnes exploded.
“I get that you and your mother disagree about things, but I asked you about the guy.” He was intent. Intense. What started off as an evaluation was snowballing into an interrogation.
It wasn’t until that moment that Agnes realized that she hadn’t given her temp boyfriend a thought since she’d been admitted, her interest in him draining out of her veins along with her blood the night before. “Oh, Sayer wasn’t really that important. Just the most recent.”
“Not important?” Frey squinted her wraps into focus. “I can’t help you if you aren’t honest with me.”
“I liked him. Okay, I liked him a lot. But my mom thought he was poison, just like every other guy I date. It put so much pressure on the . . . relationship. He couldn’t stand it anymore. Neither could I. Obviously.”
“What about him was wrong?”
“Everything, apparently. It’s not even worth talking about.”
“But it’s worth killing yourself over?” Dr. Frey probed. “Are you angry that it didn’t work out or that she might have been right?”
She was starting to feel like her mom and the doctor shared a brain. He was reading her, pushing her places she didn’t want to go, and she didn’t like it. “Maybe both. But I believe in love.”
“Did you feel pressure to have sex?”
“I didn’t say sex. I said love. True love.”
“Do you think that may be a bit too idealistic at your age?”
“How old was Juliet?” she shot back.
He paused, noting her quick-wittedness, especially under the circumstances. It wasn’t a medical diagnosis, but it occurred to him that she could probably be a handful.
“But that’s just fiction, Agnes. Fantasy. And look how it turned out.”
“Without dreams there are only nightmares, Doctor.”
Agnes felt she’d schooled the expert.
“There are other ways to solve problems, to cope with them. Therapy, for example,” Dr. Frey explained. “Suicide is not a solution.”
She took it in, wondering seriously how much of this attempt was a suicide bid or simply a way to get revenge—to hurt Sayer for cheating, to hurt her mom for not being supportive—by hurting herself.
“I’m not sure there would even be a need for therapy,” Agnes said, “if everyone had someone to love who loved them back equally. Unconditionally.”
Dr. Frey smiled at her naïveté, or at least that’s how she saw it. Clearly, for him, love was not the only answer.
“What do you think happens after we die, Doctor?” she asked, her attention shifting to the brain models neatly displayed in the apothecary cabinet.
“I think you are in a better position to answer that question than I am, Agnes,” Frey said, feeling agitated, as if Agnes were trying to get to him. “You came pretty close tonight.”
“I mean, you certainly talk to patients all the time who’ve tried to kill themselves or had some kind of out-of-body experience.”
“I’m afraid the afterlife is above my pay grade,” Frey explained coolly. “I’m a scientist. I don’t spend a lot of time speculating about things I can’t observe, reproduce, or prove.”
“Life is probably more of an out-of-body experience, I guess,” she said. “But aren’t you curious?”
“I can only verify the biochemical processes that occur at the moment of death. The collective firing off of synapses, the death of brain cells from oxygen deprivation. If you’re looking for an explanation for the light at the end of the tunnel, that’s it.”
“In your opinion,” she clarified.
“That’s what you asked me for, isn’t it? I’m sorry if it’s not what you wanted to hear.”
“I guess we all find out, eventually, who’s right. Who’s wrong.”
“Perhaps, but there’s no rush, right, Miss Fremont?”
The more they spoke, the more she hurt. Couldn’t be the pain meds wearing off yet; she’d just gotten shot up with a ton downstairs. Agnes thought she might even be bleeding, but didn’t dare expose the bracelet in front of