this?
She tried to clear her mind, but her thoughts kept returning to her fear of death. Everyone she’d ever loved had died. Suddenly, she felt the familiar gnawing sensation in her stomach. Her mouth went dry, and her hands started to shake. Anna felt the familiar tightness in her throat and painful stomach cramps. She tried to take a deep breath, easing it out slowly, just as she’d been taught all those years ago. In and out. She closed her eyes and listened to the sounds. Focus. Laughter. Music. She took another deep breath.
Voices. Glass breaking. Seagulls. The ship’s engines.
Opening her eyes once again, she had calmed down. She returned to the kitchen, took a bottle of water from the refrigerator, and gulped down the entire bottle. She closed her eyes and went to her happy place, a technique she’d learned when she was in therapy. It had been so long since she’d had an attack. Why now? If she had to speculate, she blamed the person who had been stalking her. Now that she was on her own, with no one covering her back, she felt vulnerable.
She should have gone to Orlando with the girls. If she did that now, then she would most likely ruin Christina’s vacation since she adored being alone with Mandy. At this precise moment, she couldn’t care less about her own trip.
Just thinking about why she had panic attacks caused her heart rate to triple and her palms to go damp. “No!” she shouted. “Christina is fine!
“I am not going through this shit again.”
The physical act of talking calmed her down. She didn’t care if anyone was outside her door listening. And who would be, anyway? George? The captain? No, she was letting her thoughts drive her back into that dark place.
She’d spent too much time in therapy to have it all go down the drain over her first vacation alone. All the skills were within her; she hadn’t forgotten them. What she had forgotten, though, was that she might need to use them again.
Calm down, she told herself.
In the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, alone, knowing no one, as much as she didn’t want to, she went to the bathroom, opened her cosmetic case, and took out the bottle of pills she had brought with her. They were always with her. A security blanket of sorts. Yes, she’d dipped into the amber bottle a few times when she really needed them, but if ever there was an appropriate time, it was now. Before she could change her mind, she swallowed the yellow pill. Hating herself for being weak, she knew that if she was going to get through this evening, she didn’t have much of a choice.
Xanax. Her dirty little secret. Not even Mandy knew of the stash she kept in that little bottle. Christina had found it once when she’d asked for some cash, and Anna told her to look in her purse. Her daughter asked her what the medication was for, and she’d lied to her, telling her it was for cramps. She felt horrible for lying to her daughter, but she couldn’t tell her daughter about her hang-up.
If she did, who knew what kind of harm it might cause her? She was thirteen and vulnerable. She didn’t know her like this, the old Anna. The Anna that for years had lived in constant fear of losing her daughter because she blamed herself for her family’s dying and feared it could happen to her child. And the current Anna, who had been looking over her shoulder for weeks. The phone calls. The letters. The e-mails. The constant feeling of being watched. She didn’t want Christina to learn about this side of her.
How quickly she’d reverted back to her old ways, believing she was a jinx because all of her loved ones had died. She knew it sounded insane, but she had felt that way, and been forced to deal with it. When she started therapy, she’d learned there was no way she could have caused their deaths. In time, she was able to put the bad thoughts away and focus on Christina and her own career. She’d never been away from Christina for more than two or three days at a time. The separations were always work-related, and she had managed just fine.
Until now. She was allowing her thoughts to get the best of her.
Being out here in the middle of nowhere, away from her daughter, her work, and all