Off the Deep End (34)

Dr. Stephens leans over and places his hand gently on my arm. I like the way it feels. His hands are warm and soft. “I want you to know that I completely understand why you might be drawn to Isaac.”

I jerk my head up. “You do?” That’s the first time someone has said anything like that to me. Shane was disgusted by our relationship, and he’d let me have it when he found out.

“He’s a kid, Jules. A frickin’ child. What are you doing?” he screamed at me after he’d shown up unannounced and found the two of us together in my hospital room. Isaac had jumped up and ran out of the room before Shane could say a word to him.

It wasn’t like I was keeping our relationship a secret. Shane just never asked. He barely even spoke to me. He didn’t come to any of the family therapy groups at the hospital or Samaritan House. He didn’t participate in any of my individual therapy or help with the progress goals on my treatment plan. He’d washed his hands of me and moved on with his girlfriend. I had become a big inconvenience.

But I’m not an inconvenience to Dr. Stephens. He wants to know all about me, all my secrets. I give him a timid smile. “Do you really get it?” I can’t help asking him again.

Dr. Stephens reaches across the table and takes both my hands in his. “I absolutely understand why you were drawn to Isaac and why he was drawn to you.” He looks deep into my eyes, and I try my best not to pull away from the intensity of his stare. It’s hard giving another person a look inside your soul after you’ve been hurt, but I’m willing to try. He slowly pulls away and settles back into his chair. He crosses his legs again and assumes his regular therapist position. “I’m sure you already know this, but in case you’ve forgotten, I just want to remind you that what the two of you went through was incredibly traumatic, and people that go through traumatic events together often develop a strong bond. It’s incredibly powerful.”

“Maybe it was trauma bonding, or maybe it wasn’t, but whatever it was—he felt it too.” Our connection went beyond words, and I’d never experienced that with another person, not even my husband. I’d heard other people talk about it, but it’d never happened to me. Not until Isaac. He saw to the inside of my core in the same way that I saw him. Some days he would come and just plop himself on my bed without saying a word. He wouldn’t speak the entire time he was there, and I never pushed him to say a thing. And then he’d just leave. But that was the special thing about us—we didn’t need to talk. We could be together without feeling the need to fill up the space. “Things with us were okay that might not be okay with someone else. We weren’t scared of the other’s darkness or their intense emotions. We just got each other, or maybe it was because nothing else in the world made sense anymore. Either way, just being in each other’s company was comforting.”

“I’m telling you—it all makes perfect sense to me. The two of you were elevated in the community and in your families as, like, these mythical creatures that had escaped death, right? One of you represents the tragedy of every parent’s greatest fear, and the other the opposite—a parent whose child was spared, the ultimate hope. And that’s the thing, isn’t it?” He drops his voice low. “Neither of you wanted to be alive, did you?”





TEN


AMBER GREER


I wiped the warm washcloth across my tear-streaked face and tried to pull myself together so that I could go back downstairs and face people even though I didn’t want to. I was so tired of sitting in this house and doing nothing. I wished there were a way to sneak out without anyone seeing me. All I wanted was to go for a walk and to get some fresh air.

The media trucks and vans were lined up for three blocks on either side of our house. Mom said they chased her down the sidewalk every time she left and that they followed her everywhere even when she was nowhere near us—to the grocery store, at the gas station, even the doctor’s office. Her house was the only other place I wanted to be. I slowly wrung out the washcloth and hung it back in its place.

I hated that Jules could be sitting somewhere right now with full knowledge of where Isaac was and what was going on with him while I was in mental torture and agony. They might even be together at this very moment. For a brief instant, the image of the two of them smiling wide at the camera with their arms wrapped around each other flashed through me—one of the pictures I’d seen on Isaac’s phone the last time I’d snooped. The one I’d used after he’d initially tried to deny that they’d seen each other since the hospital. The same one I used with the supporting documentation for the restraining order to show they had a relationship.

What had she done to my boy?

I’d brought up the possibility of someone in Samaritan House working with Jules to Mark after I’d spoken about it on the phone with Detective Hawkins, and surprisingly, Mark agreed with me. He thought they should be looking into that potential connection more, too, but were they? Detective Hawkins had been gone most of the day, even though Stan said it was only going to be a few more hours when I’d asked about his whereabouts this afternoon. What had he been doing all day? Was he working on other cases he had going on while he waited on ours? The questions made me nauseous.

All this red tape and waiting were excruciating. Why couldn’t the police just storm over there and search the group home? At least her room? Instead, they had to send in some specialized forensic psychologist to work with her because she wasn’t mentally stable? Unstable people couldn’t be trusted, and she’d already shown on more than one occasion that she could cross the line from sanity to insanity without warning. That only proved we needed to move fast.