Attempted suicide. With pills. At first, an innocuous case. Later, that feeble attempt at taking her own life would make so much more sense.
The tree Emma had hit stood in a front yard in a residential neighbourhood inhabited by twelve children under the age of fifteen (the prosecutor had been insistent to identify the exact number and ages, even though none had been injured in the crash), and that meant Emma had been labelled ‘psychologically disturbed with criminal liability’, which in turn meant she’d ended up in DHS-Metropolitan, the Department of State Hospitals facility in LA County, rather than in a cell in the women’s prison in Chowchilla or Valley State.
Which meant she came within the scope of my vision.
It took days for her conversations with Dr Marcello to open up beyond the blank stares and occasional mutterings that had characterized the first encounter. Part of that was due to the sedatives forcibly delivered to her in a little paper cup each morning, but part went beyond the medications. Something was haunting this young woman. I could see it, even from the side of the room. And my interest grew, because there was something there that was familiar. Something that stirred at memories. Something that made me want to … help her.
‘You know, you can talk to me.’ Dr Marcello said this almost every morning, usually towards the beginning of the prescribed thirty-minute sessions. It was a truth that needed to be gradually absorbed by the patient, softening up the clay that had hardened into her rock-solid defences. She’d eyed him each time he said it, sometimes glancing over in my direction as well, but usually little more than that. Only in the fifth session did she finally begin to open up.
‘It’ll help if you talk, eventually,’ he added that day. ‘You’ve been here two weeks now, a little more. Time’s got to come to speak, Miss Fairfax.’
She grunted. We weren’t to be believed. Her look was momentarily all revulsion, peering up and down at Marcello, then at me. Then the emotion evaporated. The doctor jotted a note down on his pad, just visible to me on his knee. Resistant to authority. Maybe to men.
‘Though I suppose, from another perspective,’ Dr Marcello added, ‘we could say you don’t have to speak at all.’ He laid down his pen over his notes. ‘You can stay silent, if that’s what you want, and we can just sit like this. You’re going to be in here for a while, in any case. You know that.’
‘Not long enough.’
I barely caught the words. She barely said them. But the whisper made it to my ears, and my shoulders rose, encouraged by the first sign of a real communication.
‘What does that mean, Emma?’ Dr Marcello asked. ‘Is it okay if I call you Emma?’
She shrugged, dismissive and annoyed. It was ‘I don’t care’ and ‘fuck off’ in a single, well-practised thrust of the shoulders. But it was also a solid sign of comprehension, and a concrete response.
‘You can call me whatever you want,’ she finally answered. ‘It doesn’t matter any more.’
I was startled at the strong accent with which she spoke. With her first full sentences it came out noticeably, and the elongated vowels and reassigned consonants of country bumpkin drawl clashed with her simple beauty. Her ‘whatever’ came out ‘wat-evuh’ and her ‘doesn’t matter’ was a punctuated ‘don’t mattuh’. I couldn’t immediately tell whether it was authenticity or affectation, but Emma had the motions to go with the sassy tones. There was a tedious roll of the eyes and a dismissive flick of the head. Ain’t much for ya, fukkuh. Piss off.
‘Why is that?’ Dr Marcello asked, keeping his attention focused. If he was as surprised by her voice as I, he didn’t show it. ‘Why doesn’t it matter what I call you?’
‘Nothing matters now I’m here. It’s all done.’ She rolled her eyes again. Her arms remained folded across her chest.
‘Your life isn’t over,’ he said. ‘You were fortunate – you didn’t harm anyone but yourself. The car’s totalled and you probably offed the tree, but it didn’t go further than that.’
When she laughed, the sound was pitiful. Mournful. I remember I was amazed that someone who seemed so determined to be brash could exhibit such a contrary emotion.
‘Didn’t harm no one!’ she jabbed back, her eyes suddenly going glassy. ‘That’s the whole problem. I’ve harmed plenty, and no one knows.’ She swung her head my way, stared into my eyes, as if I might understand what she felt the doctor didn’t.
I lowered my head, unsure how to meet that stare. I had a clipboard across my lap, intended for clinical notes on prescriptions the doctor might require, but I found myself scratching illegible lines across it with my pen. Muscle memory was moving my hands.
‘Is that why you were taking the drugs?’ Dr Marcello asked. Suddenly my own throat caught slightly. The mention of the pills – it wasn’t the first. But the attempt at suicide, it suddenly hit me. Not as simply a clinical fact, but as a memory. One I’d worked so hard to push away.
The pills …
I swallowed hard.
‘Was it guilt?’ Dr Marcello continued. ‘Guilt over the people you feel you’ve hurt in your life? The Xanax, the Valium – you had a lot in your system.’
God, Evelyn. I shoved the memory away. Back into its box. This wasn’t the time. The past was the past. This woman wasn’t my sister.
Emma Fairfax glared at Dr Marcello, her eyes pitying and condemning at the same time.
‘I don’t feel nothing,’ she answered. Her eyes rolled and her arms crossed tighter at her chest, defiant. I escaped the clenched feeling in my chest enough to see Dr Marcello underline the phrase as he transcribed it onto his notepad. A sentence fairly well drenched with possible interpretations.
‘So you feel you don’t sufficiently register emot—’
‘I’m not speaking psycho-shit, Doctor,’ she snapped. But she wasn’t angry. ‘I don’t feel I’ve hurt others. I know it. It’s a fact.’
There was a sob in her eyes and it shook her tongue. She stopped talking, tossing her hair aside in a show of dismissiveness. I don’t care. Nothing can make me care. The forced denial of someone who cares deeply – more than they wish or want.
‘Can you tell me about that?’ Marcello asked. He’d drawn a firm line across his paper. This was a new area, one that hadn’t come up in our brief encounters to date.
My heart was racing. The conversation was taking me in new directions, too. The memories were hitting like a flood.
The pills.
The death.
My sister’s absence.
I could barely stay in the moment.
‘It weren’t supposed to turn out the way it did!’ Emma cried out. There were tears then, streaming down her cheeks and pooling at the curve of her chin before falling onto her lap.
‘What wasn’t, Emma?’ Dr Marcello kept his voice soft.
‘It were bad. We all knew it were bad. But it got out of hand.’
She wasn’t registering his questions, so he stopped asking them.
The sob was back, this time long, vocal and heart-wrenching. A few words fumbled out from between Emma’s lips, but none of them had anything to do with the car accident.
‘Emma,’, Dr Marcello leaned in towards her in a carefully practised, unthreatening