Unhinge - Calia Read Page 0,82
on some level she has to think I’m insane. Just like the other doctors.
“Do you think I’m crazy?”
“Absolutely not. No one’s crazy. But the world is. Everything has a label and a place. But it’s impossible to group everyone’s feelings and reactions into boxes. Especially reactions. Everyone is different and everyone will react to situations differently. You’re being incredibly hard on yourself. If anyone were to travel back through their past, forced to watch the good, the bad, the ugly, they would easily be feeling the same way.”
She may be humoring me. She may be doing reverse psychology on me. Right now it doesn’t matter. “You think so?” I ask.
Dr. Calloway nods. “Of course. To be honest, I think you’re holding up pretty great.”
I want to believe her so badly. But I’m scared.
“You can keep doing this,” she says gently. “You’ve survived your past before. You can do it again.”
I find myself nodding. I find hope that’s been dying inside me slowly come back to life.
“More pictures?” she asks tentatively.
“More pictures.”
The first one is of a positive pregnancy test. It seems ridiculous—bordering on silly—to take a picture of a thin stick. For a second, I’m pushed back into the moment. The test was balanced on my knees. My hands were shaking so badly I had to take multiple pictures before I got one that wasn’t blurry.
The third is of my mother and me sitting at a table at what looks like some kind of event. My cheeks are rosy and even sitting down it’s impossible to miss my burgeoning belly, straining against my dark purple dress.
The pace picks up. Dr. Calloway moves the pictures so rapidly that one picture falls out of the stack and flutters to the floor. I break my concentration and bend to pick it up. When I turn it over I scream.
At least I think I do.
My ears start to ring and my blood runs cold. My mind is begging for me to look away, but I can’t. The dead body is all I can see. It’s lying flat on an embankment, with water lapping at the grass. The body is badly decomposed. Any skin that’s left is brown, looking as rough as tree bark. It’s impossible to distinguish any features. It’s like the lake and fish joined forces to eat the body down to the bare bones. Where the eyes should be are two black pools of nothing.
My hand shakes as I wave the picture in Dr. Calloway’s face. “What is this?”
Dr. Calloway stands. She snatches the picture out of my hands. When she gets a good look, her face goes pale. “I don’t know how this got in there.”
I know that this is the photo that makes everyone assume Wes is dead. Can I blame them? The clothes are the same ones he always wears when he visits me, but in the picture his white shirt has tears in it. The sleeve of his jacket is torn, hanging off his arm. One of his shoes is off.
“Why would you have that?”
“Victoria, I’ve looked at this stack of pictures a handful of times. I’ve never seen this before.”
“It’s not him.” Rapidly, I shake my head. “It’s not Wes. That’s not him.”
Dr. Calloway nods and slowly walks around her desk. “Just take a few deep breaths.”
“He’s doing this to me. He set this up!”
“Who?”
“WES!” I scream out his name so loudly, my ears start to ring.
“Just take a few deep breaths,” Dr. Calloway repeats.
Doesn’t she see that I’m so far past the point of deep breaths? I hunch over, my hands resting on my knees, and gasp for air. I see the pictures in perfect order and the crazy part is that it makes sense. It fits. But there’s not a single part of me that wants to admit that maybe everyone is right.
Maybe my husband has been dead all this time and I’ve been talking to the ghost of him.
Maybe I really do belong at Fairfax.
The pictures are a distant thought, but the wheels of the past are set into motion. I’m not eased slowly into the memories, as I usually am. This time they hit me so hard I fall to my knees and drop my face into my hands.
October 2014
For the past month, I’d been living with my mother. It was a temporary living situation until everything with Wes and me was figured out. I’d been back to the house once and that was during the day, while Wes was at work, so