Off the Deep End (44)
Mark had been in the middle of an important meeting when he’d gotten the alert about Isaac’s activity, and he’d left right in the middle to see where he was going. He said he couldn’t focus on anything else. Isaac arrived at the state hospital fourteen minutes later, where he stayed for an hour. He followed the same path back to school, arriving to the pickup lane at school at exactly the right time for me to scoop him up.
“I’m not going to work tomorrow afternoon. I cleared my entire schedule, so I’m free. I’m leaving at lunch, and then I’m heading to the school. I’m going to follow him there. Watch everything that he does and then I’m going to see what he’s doing inside the hospital.” That’s what he declared that night like there was no room for disagreement, with a look of pure determination in his expression, so I didn’t bother arguing. Besides, I wanted to know what Isaac was up to too.
There was only one thing Isaac could’ve possibly been doing at the state hospital. It only housed mentally ill patients, and we knew only one patient who was there. But a parent’s denial was a powerful force, maybe one of the strongest in the universe, and neither of us could admit what might be happening.
And it was.
“I walked with him all the way in,” Mark explained to me after he’d got home from their excursion. He’d given Katie some lame excuse about needing to talk to me about a private family matter upstairs and told her she was on her own for dinner.
“How did he not see you?”
“He was so wrapped up in himself that he didn’t even notice me. Besides, I put on a hat and had it real low,” he said like that was a good disguise, but all Isaac would’ve had to do was take one look around him, and he would’ve spotted Mark. Mark was lucky that Isaac hadn’t. “I just hung back and watched. He went all the way up to the seventh floor. I didn’t get on the elevator, but I watched what he pushed and where it went. I took the next one up, and sure enough, there he was in the waiting room. I watched him walk right up to the receptionist and introduce himself as someone named Carl. He said, ‘I’m here to see my aunt Jules.’”
We should’ve kept him away from her. Stopped it right then and there, but Isaac had shown the first signs of life in months, and neither of us wanted to stop it. So we didn’t say anything. We didn’t tell him we knew he was skipping school, and we didn’t tell him we knew where he was going and who he was seeing when he was there.
I did, however, call his guidance counselor back at the school. She was happy to hear from me.
“Oh, and I just wanted to let you know that Isaac is going to keep coming home after sixth period when he needs to. Right now, that’s about all he can handle,” I said.
“That’s totally fine. I completely understand. We don’t want to push him too hard.”
“Exactly,” I’d said. “Thanks for being so understanding.”
The same feeling that I’d had that day after I hung up the phone washed over me as I listened to the sounds of the media vans and news trucks pulling up at the end of the street. I didn’t have to look out the window to know they were all pushing, prodding, and juggling for space. It was the same competition every day—finding the perfect spot so they could snap my picture the moment I walked out the front door. It didn’t matter what picture they got, though; the tagline for the article would be the same. They’d call us innocent victims. They always did in some way:
Another innocent family falls victim to the Dog Snatcher.
The latest innocent victims of the Dog Snatcher.
If this innocent family isn’t safe, nobody is.
We might be victims, but we weren’t innocent.
CASE #72946
PATIENT: JULIET (JULES) HART
“So, what do you think? Am I crazy, Doc?” I ask after I’ve finished answering his questions about Isaac’s and my relationship. I gave him as much as he’s going to get from me.
“Do you think you’re crazy?” he asks, immediately grabbing the nugget from the air and holding on to it like he discovered precious gold.
“Do you?” I lobby the question back to him. I’m not letting go of this one.
“I think grief makes people do crazy things.”
I’m not going to argue with him there. I’ve done lots of insane things. It happens almost automatically when you’ve got nothing to lose. There’s an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose. And it’s really hard to be afraid of anything when the worst thing has already happened to you.
“Have you seen my scans?” Of course he has. I just want to see if he’ll tell me the truth. Nobody likes to talk to me about what’s on them. They hide all that like it’s not affecting the entire way they treat me or their case conceptualization.
“The ones from the neurologist?” he asks, feigning innocence.
“Those are pretty much the only ones that I’ve got.” I can’t keep the sassiness out of my tone. My former life had no reason for a neurologist. Now I’ve got two, and a psychiatrist to go along with all my different therapists. Ironic how you can spend your entire profession in mental health but never know anything about it. I didn’t see clients who had experienced trauma at this level or were this messed up. You couldn’t pay me enough money to do the kind of work Dr. Stephens does. I worked with a very different clientele. My patients were people who were going through painful divorces, ones that had lost their jobs and were depressed, and ordinary, everyday anxiety disorders. I was in light mental health before. This is the real deal, and I’m in the thick of it with no idea how to get out.