Keeper of Crows (Keeper of Crows #1)
Casey L. Bond
1
My father was the antichrist for sending me to this place. Rehab, it turned out, smelled like lemon-scented disinfectant, and apparently, ‘rock bottom’ was comfortably padded with heaping piles of Benjamins. Father spent enough on this place to justify the brocade upholstered couch beneath me a thousand times over, but no amount was too large to show how much Warren Kennedy loved his only child. Just pick up a tabloid; my face would be plastered there, along with bold-printed words like rebellious, addict, and promiscuous. The sad part? The tabloids were right for once.
Sunny Bridge was just as perky as the name implied, from its glistening, polished tile to the overflowing motivational posters that dripped from its walls. Even the staff seemed happy as they went about their daily tasks. The most annoying of the smiling faces here belonged to my shrink, Doctor Coleman. When he greeted me, and the orderly who escorted me to him, in the hallway with a broad smile and pink cheeks and asked me to go in to his office and have a seat, I decided to call him Doc.
“I’ll join you in just a few minutes,” he said, returning his attention to a small stack of papers at the nurse’s station that he thumbed through and scrawled his signature on at precise intervals.
He reminded me of a professionally-dressed version of one of Snow White’s dwarves. As I waited for him to finish his paperwork in the hallway, I looked around his basic-looking office. File cabinets lined the longest wall, overflowing with files stuffed with paper and unfortunate circumstances. Ink blot pictures were Doc’s preferred décor. How they used them was beyond me, and I hoped Doc wouldn’t ask me to find the hidden meanings and shapes in the paintings hanging all around his office. If he ever tested me, he might recommend I be transferred to a mental institution. The blending colors and shapes looked like Kindergarten art, globs of paint on a page that had been folded. The fact that I couldn’t tell a pelvis from a bat was disturbing.
Doc strolled into the room and assumed his position behind the large mahogany desk situated between us, shuffling more papers and shifting stacks of files until he had a clean space. Doc wasn’t the most organized person. I looked around at more ink blot pictures, trying my hardest to decipher them. He started asking questions. I didn’t feel like answering them, so I ignored him. He folded his hands over his stomach and stared at me.
I let him. It didn’t bother me if he stared.
He sat across from me with a resolute expression, tapping the end of his pen against the clipboard of paper he thought summed up my life. The court told him all he needed to know, so I didn’t know why he wanted to delve deeper. I was a junkie, a rich girl, a girl with a chip on her shoulder. A nineteen-year old getting ready to start her senior year of high school. He would assume I’d failed a grade, but I didn’t. I’d gotten sick as a child and couldn’t start school when I was supposed to, so my parents kept me home an extra year.
Doc wouldn’t care about any of that. He just cared about my apparent drug problem. The facts were all there, what he wanted to see, what he thought I wanted to hide, but Doctor Coleman wanted more for some reason. He needed me to believe he wanted to help me come to grips with my drug use and how it impacted my loved ones.
But did he really care?
My opinion? He was paid hourly by this lovely, expensive place to ask questions. Time was important to Doc. I could tell by the way his eyes kept shifting to the clock hanging on the wall just above my head. Only one hour. In one hour a day, three to five days per week, he was supposed to fix what was broken inside me, or fill sixty minutes appearing to do so. Then, he could move on to the next person, and so on until his day was over, his week was finished, and he could pick up his paycheck. I wondered what he did on the weekends to fill his time.
“You can lie back if you want,” Doc said, his eyes flicking to the minute hand.
I smirked at him, crossing and uncrossing my legs and leaning forward. Hospital scrubs weren’t sexy, but I did have a V-neck working for me. My ample cleavage caught his eye. “Would you like me to lie down?” I asked seductively.
Doc swallowed, staring down at the clipboard again. The tapping of the tip of his pen quickened.
“You can do whatever makes you comfortable, Miss Kennedy.”
“Carmen,” I corrected, hating the family name and the sound of it coming out of his pudgy lips.
“Alright. You can do whatever makes you comfortable, Carmen. It makes no difference to me whether you sit or lay. What does matter to me is making progress, so I’d like to start with you. Describe yourself in a few sentences or words.”
The truth? I wasn’t sure Doc really wanted the truth. Maybe he just wanted me to vomit the same crap that was on the documents he read. He wanted me to tell him I was a spoiled rich girl and an addict who wanted to do more with her life, but that would be a lie. I was spoiled. My father was rich. My mother was dead. I had no siblings. Did I enjoy blow? Absolutely. I wished I had some now. But could I stop using it? It would suck and life would be boring, but yes. I could. But back to Doc… He wanted three words, all about little ole’ me.
“Sexual, sarcastic, and intelligent.” Those three were accurate.
Doc raked a free hand through his gray hair. He was in desperate need of a haircut. Thick tufts of it hung over his ears and thick strands crawled up the back of his neck. I bet he was hairy all over.