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“You’re quiet today, Violet.”
His voice is deep and soothing, and she can barely remember to pick it apart from the lulling ambience of the room, with the way it melts into the background. It feels like he’s putting her to sleep, like he can tell she’s hiding her pills under her tongue at night until she can hide them in her piggy bank. And now he’s trying to make her sleep to make up for it. The mere entertainment of such an idea makes her snap out of her own little bubble entirely. For a split second she panics that he can actually know that, just by looking at her. But then she calms herself. Of course he can’t. Now she’s just acting like her brother.
“Am I?” she asks, monotone. She’s trying to be venomous, but her heart isn’t in it anymore. It’s been a long time since she pretended to care about what a therapist thought of her. Her last shrink never heard a single word from her; Violet had just sat in stony silence, glaring until the hour was up every single week. The one before that was subject to more verbal abuse than one would expect from someone of her age. She’d hardly expect it either, if she could ever look in a mirror again. It was maybe the one she felt a little guilty over.
This new one was different. He seems to have stepped out of a grainy black and white photograph and into the real world, and still isn’t sure how to act. He has an interesting name, too. One she can never quite remember. It makes him interesting, but not interesting enough for Violet to ever consider opening up to him completely. Just intriguing enough for her to continue observing him.
He takes a deep breath and rubs his forehead slowly. His dark two-piece suit sighs with him. Violet watches him scribble down more notes, probably about her behavior this week. From here, the handwriting looks like nothing but a bunch of loops. But he must be writing something, because her parents are handed a very thorough typed report each month. They always smell of new ink, and never contain a spelling or grammatical error. Perfect novellas detailing her stubborn refusal to get better.
He’s good at his job, she’ll give him that. But she doesn’t have to like it.
His pen clicks. He holds it funny, like he doesn’t actually know what a pen is. “You are. Usually you...sit down, say hello even if you don’t want to because it’s the polite thing to do, and then you try to speak as little as possible. But today you’ve said nothing. You’re thinking.”
The thing is, he never gives her any of that condescending nonsense, no soppy tone when he talks about how he wants to listen to her problems and help. He just sits, and observes her as casually as if he’s out birdwatching, and waits for her to talk.
What’s weirder is that it actually works sometimes.
“I am thinking,” she says before she can stop herself. The pen is still grasped in his fist, but it doesn’t look poised for writing. So she continues, albeit hesitantly.
“Not about anything.” A pause. “But also about everything.”
He understands immediately.
“Has it stopped you from sleeping?”
Shit, she thinks. He does know. Or maybe he just sees the heavy bags under her eyes, so dark they look more like bruises.
“Sometimes,” she says, which is code for ‘always’.
“Because you need to check?”
Violet doesn’t say anything, and he didn’t have to ask. It’s always the checking. Every single complex function her brain processes is eventually whittled down by thoughts of nothing and everything until it becomes a compulsive need to check.
There, he’s doing it again. Waiting in total silence, watching her. Not scrutinizing, no. It’s casual. Almost like for a moment he’s becoming a normal person, instead of an old photograph. And being a normal person means he’s just sitting across from her, looking nowhere in particular, but he happens to be looking nowhere in particular right in her direction.
It works. She caves. And she hates it.
“A screw in the top-left hinge was a little looser than the rest,” she huffs, and stares at her feet like they’re a difficult math question. “It needed a flat-head screwdriver. There were only phillips heads in the house.”
“What time was this?”
“Three in the morning.”
“So what did you do next?”
“I...cried.” Violet shifts uncomfortably, embarrassed to admit it. “A lot. I stood in front of that hinge and cried and cried at it until I got so frustrated, I...”
They both look down at her bandaged arm. Today’s elephant in the room. It hadn’t even seemed like a great idea at the time, but she wasn’t thinking right. She never was, in those moments. But she definitely hadn’t considered that taking to her own arm with a screwdriver would cause as much damage as it had. A lot of blood and several stitches later, and she feels like the stupidest person in the world.
“Mother and father are used to it,” she continues guiltily, “I think they were a little surprised by how late it was. But they drove me to the hospital anyway.”
“And you feel bad about that.”
He doesn’t assume, he knows. It’s so obvious how horrid she feels about it all. No decent kid wants to force their mother, six months pregnant, to wake from the sleep she barely gets anymore, all because they stabbed themselves over something as inconsequential as a door hinge.
“Klaus didn’t want to look at me when I got home,” she says. She’s spoken about this before: her brother doesn’t hate her for it. He’s not angry. And it’s not like she tried to kill herself — not this time around, anyway. He just gets so worked up with worries and what ifs that he scares himself beyond all reason, and right now the only way he knows how to deal with the panic is to block out the cause.
She gets it. It’s just another weird way to cope. But it still hurts.
There’s another question coming. Now that she’s started talking, he won’t let her stop quite so easily. She can feel the stiff tension in the room rising. Like black water out of a drain, or blood from a stab wound. It makes her feel like there are rocks in her chest.
“What were you checking for, Violet?”
Of course. Of course it’s...that. It’s a rudimentary question that she’s heard a million times from a million people. But it’ll lead to another question, which will lead to another, and another, and another. This is why she doesn’t like to talk. If she lets him, he’ll lead her through door after door until she’s in a dark place that she’d rather die than go back to.
She shakes her head. ‘Done speaking’, is what it means. It’s all laid out in front of her, like a series of stepping stones across a dark, polluted pond. She can see where it’ll end, and she doesn’t like it. If he wants to know the hows and whys of it all, he can read her case file.
Not that everyone doesn’t already know why she’s here.
“You’re an inventor,” he says, leaning back in his chair. She cocks an eyebrow at him, curious about the direction this is taking, “Would you say doors are one of mankind’s greatest inventions? Like fire, or the wheel?”
Her thoughts on such a statement are more complex than a simple shrug can convey, but nevertheless that’s what she gives him.
He continues, “You probably know that fire helps us see in the dark or keep warm or cook food, and wheels are used to make it easier to move heavy objects, or to move faster. But doors only have two purposes: to keep things in, and to keep things out.”
Violet feels uncomfortable. Instead of a metaphorical sandstone, those rocks in her chest are now made of lead: dense and sickening. She squirms in her seat, gripping the cushioned arms that are so tall she feels like she’s sitting in a box. He sees her discomfort, but he doesn’t stop talking.
“So I can see why a faulty hinge would feel troublesome, if the door’s purpose of keeping someone out was suddenly compromised,” he says. It’s like he’s reading machinery manuals to her, the way he talks about it. She hates it, she hates it. “But it’s one less thread, in one screw, in one hinge, in a locked door. Surely that wouldn’t bother you by now.”
“I know it isn’t rational,” she mutters. She refuses to look at him now, “Don’t you think I know that? I’ve always known that, but it never makes it any better...”
His suit sighs with him again. He writes something down, like an afterthought. Now she’s convinced he is just scribbling on the paper. Then he glances up at her — she’s still not looking up from her feet, but she can tell — and clicks the pen a few times. Once again, it feels alien in his fist.
“Then you aren’t taking your pills.”
Violet has always considered herself too mature to act indignant. But if that’s not how she feels right now then she isn’t sure how to describe the way she glares up at the psych and stomps her foot at him.
“They weren’t working anyway.” she insists, trying to snarl rather than pout.
“If you haven’t been taking them, how do you know they won’t work?”
“They make me feel tired. I don’t like that.”
Now he’s starting to look exasperated. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen it on him before, although it’s still very...off. Like a stiff replica of an emotion rather than the real thing. “That’s why they’re given to you at night. There’s nothing wrong with getting a good night’s rest, even if some people claim otherwise.”
The whole conversation has made her too distressed to even think of asking who in the world claims that sleep is bad for you. Her nails have moved from the arms of the chair and are now digging into the skin just above her knees — it’s starting to hurt.
“I-If it makes me too tired, I won’t wake up when I need to. And if I do, I’ll be groggy and slow and...and—”
“And vulnerable?”
“He’s going to come back!” she yells. Her chest is tight and the rocks feel like they’ve been put in a cement mixer to clang around. “I know it — I know he is! And if I can’t stay awake then I can’t fix the door and then he’ll get inside and be on the stairs and in the hallways and in my room and in Klaus’ room a-and...”
All that inky water and blood rising out of the drain has gotten to be too much. It’s just gotten higher and higher until she was drowning in it, like she knew she would be. The air in the room makes her throat burn, dry and scratchy and choking out sobs even though she’s tried so hard not to cry. All she can think to do is squeeze her eyes shut tight and pray it goes away before she does something stupid. Again.
The thing about drowning is, you have to take a breath eventually, regardless of whether you find the surface again or not. When his voice permeates through the darkness behind her scrunched up eyes, reminding her what he and the last doctor and the one before that all taught her, she can’t ignore it. She can’t just not breathe, though she sometimes wishes that wasn’t the case. Air rushes in through her nose, fills her lungs to try replace the water, hisses out between grit teeth, then repeats the cycle.
Seven seconds. Four seconds. Eight seconds. It takes a lot more effort to breathe properly than one would think. She’s concentrating hard, agitatedly pushing the heels of her hands down the front of her dress, from her hips to her knees — fingers splayed and palms facing forward, like she’s pushing away a ghost.
“I can’t...let it be my fault again...” And just like that, it’s over. The rocks weighing her down like breeze-blocks, the ink and offal filling up her lungs — it’s all been replaced by exhaustion and a horrid feeling of defeat. Where once she felt heavy, now she just feels empty.
He offers her a tissue box, she takes several and tries to hide the evidence of her breakdown. Maybe he tells her something pathetic, like that it isn’t her fault or that none of this will happen. Maybe he just tells her she needs to start taking those pills again. She doesn’t listen either way. The clock has ticked ten minutes over, and she wants out. She throws away the used tissues and smooths her skirt over the eight new crescent moons stinging just above her knees. The minute the session is over, she doesn’t care what he has to say.
“Same time next week.” He tells her.
Violet looks at him bitterly, her jaw set, then walks out of his office without a word. She wants to erase every vulnerability she showed this past hour. The irrationality, the indignation, the fear and blind panic. It was all a consequence of letting him open too many doors. Next time, she’ll fix the hinges.