Saving Meghan(63)

“What?” I scrunched up my eyes, looking at him like he was speaking a foreign language.

“Did she say something to you that triggered your reaction? Something that might have encouraged you to be sick?”

Encouraged me? My eyes became slits as I tried to wrap my brain around that one, but it was like bending steel with my hands. It couldn’t be done.

“I was sick,” I said, sounding quite sure of myself because, fuzzy as I felt, that memory was vivid and real.

Dr. Nash looked at me with these dewy, sympathetic eyes. You poor, poor thing, she was saying without having to say it.

“Your vitals were completely normal, Meghan,” Nash said, her voice now coolly detached and clinical. “No fever. No irregular heartbeat. We did blood work on you—and, yes, before you ask, we used needles, but you were quite confused and didn’t even notice. With symptoms as severe as those you presented, you’d think there’d be something to clue us in as to the cause, some biological marker that would help us come to a diagnosis. But there was nothing, no markers, no indicators. All your test results were perfectly healthy and normal for an almost-sixteen-year-old girl.”

I was less surprised that she knew my birthday was coming up than I was confused at what she was trying to tell me. “Are you saying … are you saying I was faking being sick?”

“No, dear,” Dr. Nash said, her tone dipping into condescending territory. “I’m saying that you were sick, that you felt sick, that you acted very, very sick. But without a biological indicator, something that tells us your system was compromised—a fever, a dip or rise in your blood pressure, an accelerated heart rate, something of that nature—we have to look at the possibility that your illness was triggered by something psychosomatic. Do you know what that means?”

I wasn’t an idiot. I did pretty well in English even though I didn’t attend school regularly anymore. I knew what that word meant. That’s when I remembered my mother saying something like: If you’re sick, you can get out of here.

I wasn’t sure what she’d meant at the time, because of course I was sick. I’d been sick going on two years now. But was my mom suggesting I might not have been sick enough? Is that why my stomach had cramped? Why my vision had turned blurry? Was it like some weird hypnotic suggestion she’d given me? How would that even be possible? I felt like I was going to die, and that’s not exaggerating.

As my thoughts continued to crystallize, I felt oddly detached from my body. From the start of this ordeal, as I’ve been ferried from one appointment to another, a walking, talking episode of House, there has never been any real diagnosis—not with Dr. Fisher, or Dr. Nash, or with any of the countless doctors my mom has taken me to see. I’ve been a great mystery, as unknowable as Stonehenge or the Bermuda Triangle. But now they think they’ve solved me like the Sunday crossword puzzle: Meghan Gerard is either sick in her head, or Meghan’s mommy is the crazy one. That’s it. That’s the answer. But I knew that couldn’t be true. Not my mother. Not her. Nobody loved me like my mom. Nobody.

A little voice in my head spoke up, asking me over and over again: What if it is true? What if it was “psychosomatic,” to use Dr. Nash’s word? What if my mom had triggered some kind of a strange, subconscious reaction that even I couldn’t understand or control? If so, it would mean I might never get out of here, because every time I’d see my mom, I’d get sick like I did, and they’d run all sorts of tests on me again, and those tests would show nothing wrong, and they’d say it was all in my head, and they’d keep me here, locked up in this shit-hole prison for the rest of my life.

“I don’t know what you’re all talking about,” I eventually said. “I just know how I felt.”

Dr. Levine studied me anew. “Your reaction was pretty intense, Meghan,” he said. “What we’re trying to figure out here is if your symptoms were psychologically rooted, or if there are other symptoms we can’t measure in some way,” he said. “That’s what we need to answer. So, can you help us?”

“I’m not faking,” I told him.

“You can trust me, Meghan,” Levine said. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

“I did tell you the truth.”

I swear he looked like he believed me.

“You saw the labs, Peter,” Nash said.

“Yes, yes I suppose I did. But still—”

“‘But still’ what?” Nash asked, as if I wasn’t even there. “What else could it be? Is there another psychiatric condition here we should discuss?”

“No … no, not that, it’s just…” Dr. Levine sounded concerned about something. But what? “Meghan, this is a strange question,” he said, “but I need you to be very, very honest with me right now. Okay?”

“Okay,” I answered, feeling more than a little apprehensive.

“Has your mother ever been violent before? Has she ever hit you, or threatened to hit you?”

“No,” I said with conviction. “She loves me. She’d never.”

“What about your father?”

“No.”

Dr. Levine rubbed his chin, studying me, and I panicked, thinking he could see right through me.





CHAPTER 29