Off the Deep End (11)

Shane hurriedly wrapped his arms around me and steadied me on the edge of the bed. “Take it easy. You’ve got to be careful of your rib.”

“What’s wrong with my rib?” I asked, trying to breathe around the stabbing pain in my side. At least it wasn’t a heart attack, even though it felt like it.

“Isaac broke it giving you CPR.” He searched my face, trying to gauge what I remembered.

“Isaac gave me CPR? Why’d he do that?”

And why was I here? I was supposed to be disappearing on the bottom of the lake with Gabe. The only thing I recalled from Isaac was the way his face looked when I pulled him out of the water—shocked and afraid, barely breathing.

I drag myself from the memory. I don’t want to keep going. Not to what comes next. I pull my focus from then to now, back to Dr. Stephens.

“Apparently, Isaac dove in after me when it took too long for me to come up. He said that he counted to sixty. That’s how many seconds he gave me before heading down there to help. The only reason either of us could find the car was because the horn was stuck. The horn led him to the car the same way that it did me. He grabbed me and swam with me to the surface.” I rattle the facts off as quickly as I can to get it over with.

Dr. Stephens makes a weird sound with his throat. “Well, not exactly. According to Isaac, you fought with him when he tried to rescue you.” He gives me a suspicious look like I’ve done something wrong or that it says something about me pathologically, but he’s digging down the wrong hole.

“I’m sorry, but if you want me to explain why I did the things I did when I was unconscious, I’m just not going to be able to do it.” He clearly hasn’t done his homework. Severe hypothermia makes people turn combative and aggressive. They take their clothes off too. It’s called paradoxical undressing.

“It says here that the two of you were close?” He says it like a question. “That you”—he makes air quotes so there’s no mistaking he’s reading directly from the chart—“‘grew enmeshed and dependent on one another.’ Would you agree with that assessment?”

“We were close. I wouldn’t say we were enmeshed or dependent, though.” There’s no way he’s going to understand what it’s like between Isaac and me. Unless you’ve stared death in the eye with another person in the way we have, you just don’t get it. You have a shared experience impossible to put into words. “You wouldn’t understand our relationship.”

“Try me.”

I shook my head. “Unless you’ve been through trauma like we have, you don’t get it.”

“What makes you think I haven’t?”

My eyebrows went up. So did my head.

“Do you think people get into the type of work that I do without having some kind of trauma in their own background? Believe me, I’ve got my own story.” His eyes are fiery and lit. He’s telling the truth. I’ve got an amazing gut sense for when people are lying. It made me a great therapist and a hard-to-fool mom. “So, why don’t you take a risk and see if I might be able to understand in a way that others haven’t been able to. Besides, what do you have to lose?”

“There’s nothing more to lose. I’ve already lost it all.”

“Okay, then, what’s the big deal?” He lifts his hands, palms up. “Let’s hear it. When did you start getting close to Isaac?”

“After the accident.” Doesn’t that go without saying? I hate that he asks questions with answers he already knows.

“Which accident?” he asks, clearly pleased that he’s successfully volleyed my own joke back at me. I appreciate the sentiment, but I don’t feel like laughing anymore.

“The second one.” I cross my arms on my chest.

“You mean after you put your car in front of a train and somehow managed to survive?” he asks, clearly impressed, like I had something to do with my escaping death, but that part wasn’t on me. I was only responsible for putting my car on the tracks.

I nod, trying to ignore the throbbing in my temples. “Yeah, that one.”





THREE


AMBER GREER


There was a formal order signed by a judge saying Jules couldn’t come within fifty feet of Isaac or any other member of our family. That was the reason the investigators even had their eyes on her in the first place or took my accusations about her involvement seriously at all. Mark wanted to pretend like that piece didn’t belong in the puzzle, though. That somehow, even though Isaac disappeared a week after we filed it, the two things weren’t related.

“And do you remember why the judge signed off on the restraining order, Mark?” I faced off with him in the kitchen, refusing to let it go. I wouldn’t allow him to treat me like I was some hysterical woman spouting theories that had no basis in fact.

Isaac had finally broken off their relationship, and she’d called fifty-two times in one hour that day, begging and crying to talk to him. First on his phone. Then on mine. Each message grew more desperate and frightening than the last until she filled up his voice mail box. She went on and on with her rants about the universal order of things and their place in it, how she desperately needed to talk to him because she’d finally figured out their purpose. She had the answer—the thing that would make everything okay. She kept saying that over and over again.