Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(11)

“That’s not true. I have Kayla.”

“I’m not including the lawyer who helped you sue your father. That’s a business relationship. And she lives in San Francisco.”

“We talk once a week.”

“You’ve got all your grandmother’s friends back in Altamira, and you’ve been to visit them how many times?”

“That one’s hard.”

“Why?”

“Because my grandmother’s still dead.”

“She’s still dead whether you visit her friends or not.”

“Jesus, Dylan.”

“You need a breath, Charlotte.”

“Well, I’m not going to get it talking to you right now. And what happened to the bridge? I thought I needed a bridge. What? Are we building a whole city here?”

“You need something that’s going to reduce your anxiety levels so that you can start acting contrary to your instincts right now.”

“And what are my instincts right now?”

“To isolate, self-obsess, and convince yourself of things about yourself that aren’t true.”

“Ouch.”

“I’ve been seeing you for months now, so I’m gonna say this with confidence. Unless you initiate a small-scale change in your brain chemistry, you’ll remain incapable of developing the kind of healthy behavioral patterns that will get you out of this place you’re stuck in.”

“I love my house.”

“You live in a ghost town full of snakes.”

“People are stupid about snakes. And ghosts.”

“Maybe so, but neither make very good friends.”

“It’s beautiful out there. Especially the stars . . . at night, I mean. They’re incredible.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Maybe I’ll ask you to drop by sometime.”

“I doubt it.”

“Is that a no?”

“Does it matter? You’ll never ask.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re not.”

Why is he smiling? Shouldn’t he be pissed? She just stares at him.

“You’re not sorry, Charley, and that’s a good thing. You want to know why? Because it means you’re a fighter.”

“If I’m a fighter, then how come I can’t leave my house?”

“We’ve covered this. You can leave. You just don’t want to. And the more you give in to that urge, the more you’ll come to believe the lies you’re telling yourself about what you are and aren’t capable of. It’s a cycle, Charley. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle of mistaken thinking. And we have to come up with a way for you to break it once and for all.”

Even if it involves pills, she thinks.

Maybe if she weren’t so damn tired, this would be it, the moment she stormed out of his office and never came back. But she is tired.

So tired she wasn’t sure she was in shape to make the drive to town, a drive that’s practically a straight shot across open desert on a flat, two-lane blacktop.

He’s mentioned drugs at least once a session. In the beginning she’d figured this was just his way of reminding her he’s an actual psychiatrist who can prescribe stuff. That he isn’t just some touchy-feely psychologist with a degree he earned online.

But he’s never let up on it. And he hasn’t now even though she told him how her father tried to medicate her into silence when she was ten.

And she’s tired.

She likes these sessions, she needs them, and the sense that he’s getting impatient with her, it’s affecting her more than she wants it to. Maybe more than she thinks it should.

Or I’m feeling worn down because he’s right, she considers. Not just because he went to Harvard, or because he looks like all the actors who’ve ever played Superman run together.

What’s that’s AA saying she’s always liked?

Keep it simple, stupid.

And so what’s the simplest question and the simplest answer here?

Do I need sleep?

Yes. Hell yes. Dear God, yes.

“What do you have in mind?” she hears herself say. “Some kind of sleeping pill?”

He lowers his right leg from where he’s braced the ankle on top of his left knee, setting aside the legal pad on which he’s not taken a single note since they started. “No,” he answers. “Not a sleeping pill.”

He gets to his feet, turns to his desk, and opens the drawer. She expects him to pull out a prescription pad. Instead he removes a square of white cardboard, six bright-orange pills encased inside little plastic bubbles.

“What is that?”

“It’s called Zypraxon.” He takes a seat on the edge of his chair and holds the pill packet in between his thumb and forefinger. He’s gazing into her eyes now, the talk therapist replaced by the medical doctor. “And I think it’s going to be just perfect for you.”





5

The first gun is under the sink.

A Beretta M9 in a holster attached to the cabinet’s ceiling, within easy reach of anyone doing dishes or moving about the compact, tidy kitchen.

Jason slides his backpack off one shoulder and digs out the plastic bags.