"I want to try word association today, okay?" Audrey asked a few minutes into their session. On healthier, less complicated patients, Audrey used this tactic to get know her patients. She had been counseling Sarah for a while, so she didn't need to get to know her. Instead, she was hoping to relax Sarah enough to sneak behind her walls.
Sarah nodded, her eyebrows dipping a little to the center of her forehead, but she remained quiet.
"Good. You know how this works then? I say a word and you say the first thing that comes to your mind. We'll start with an easy one. Ocean."
"Blue," Sarah answered promptly.
Audrey nodded. The response was predictable. "Blue then," she said, building on Sarah's response.
"Harm's eyes," she said and then clapped a hand over her mouth; she flushed, but her cheeks pulled up a little, letting Audrey know that she was hiding a smile behind her hand.
"Red."
"Poppies." Sarah removed her hand from her mouth and twisted her fingers in her lap.
"Okay," Audrey drawled the word out, "that's a new one. Why poppies?"
"Did you see the 'Wizard of Oz'? I always thought the scene where they fell asleep in the meadow of poppies was so pretty. They, the poppies, were all red and they contrasted so nicely with the green city behind them. It always stuck in my mind." Sarah lifted her hands, palms up, and let them fall back onto her thighs. "I wear a lot of red, I think, partly because of that color."
"Interesting." Audrey refrained from commenting further. But there were questions forming that she could save for a later date. Most children never watched that scene with anything approaching Sarah's admiration. They wanted Dorothy to succeed. And it seemed Sarah envied Dorothy's nap. She readjusted her plans for the next session and continued on with the game. "Dogs."
"Jingo."
"Jingo?"
"My dog. I had to send him to Vermont, though. I was just away too often and it was too cruel to him to keep him locked up."
Audrey thought a pet would be a wonderful idea for Sarah. "Did you ever consider a puppy?"
"I'm away too often," she repeated, then frowned. "Or I was. Maybe I should reconsider."
Audrey glanced around her room and uttered her next word as if the décor inspired it and that she hadn't been thinking of the right phrase for the last few days. "Travel."
"Planes."
This was not the way it was supposed to work, Audrey wanted to huff. "Planes."
"Paraguay." The word slipped from her lips.
"Paraguay?" Audrey meant to ask, why Paraguay, but it sounded like a version of the association game. Watching Sarah's body tense and her eyes lose focus, she realized that her unintentional continuation may have served its purpose.
"Screams." She started to rise and fell back against the chair. Rather than looking relaxed, she reminded Audrey of the street performers who dress up as statues in the cities. Her muscles were too tense, her stillness too controlled.
"Screams?" Audrey prompted softly.
"They don't stop." Her hands cupped her ears and fell back to her sides. "I could hear him - Clay - screaming across the courtyard. All night long. It echoes in my head."
"Why was he screaming?" Audrey hoped her tone sounded neutral but she was afraid that she sounded more like an interested onlooker, grotesquely fascinated by the car accident before her.
"They were hurting him. I don't know what they did exactly. I mean, I have a pretty good idea, but I can't really say. I don't know what falls within the parameters of classified." Sarah's jaw clamped shut and she turned her face away. "He couldn't walk. When they brought him back, he couldn't walk."
"Sarah," Audrey tapped her lightly on the wrist with a finger, "did they hurt you?"
"No." She shook her head, her brown hair splaying against the side of her face. "No. He - he - Clay tried to protect me. He said, he, um," she licked her lips and drew a deep breath, "he said he loved me and that he wanted to protect me." Her fingertips touched the base of her throat lightly. "May I have a glass of water?"
Audrey got up to pour a glass. "He told you he loved you?"
"Yes." Sarah sniffled and took a long pull of water from the glass.
"Why does that make you unhappy?"
"What?"
"Why does it make you unhappy to know that someone loves you?"
"Because," she took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, " because he was right. Everyone who loves me dies or wants to die. I just hurt people. I seem incapable of doing anything else."
"Clay said that?" Audrey was proud of herself. Her voice sounded normal.
"No," she shook her head. "Not Clay. Harm did." She looked over at Audrey before glancing away again. "But he's not wrong."
"Why do you say that?"
She leaned forward, face in hands, elbows on knees. Her feet bounced a little, sending tiny vibrations of movement throughout her body. "I've - so many - there are so many people who are hurt because of me."
"Why isn't he wrong?" she repeated the question, her tone a little more strident.
"Oh God." The words tumbled from her mouth, sounding more like a call for help than oath or prayer. "Oh, God." Her hands were shaking and the water sloshed at the lips of the glass. Moving slowly, Audrey leaned forward and eased the glass from her grip. Sarah's fingers had tightened around it, Audrey could see the whitened knuckles, and she didn't know how much pressure it could before its walls caved in.
"Sarah, calm down." Audrey soothed. "Inhale slowly. Now let it out. That's it. Once more. Good girl. Now let it out slowly." She waited until Sarah seemed steadier. "Now," she prompted, "start from the beginning."
"No." Her voice was firm. "No. I don't want to talk about this. I just want it all to stop."
"What do you want to stop?"
"The pain." She pressed her lips together tightly. "I'm so tired of it. I'm so tired of hurting people."
"How do you hurt them?" Audrey rubbed her fingers across her forehead, trying to ward off the vague pain of a tension headache.
"I don't know. I just do. And the worst part is, I stay okay. I'm healthy, up until a few days ago, I had a good job, and I have a nice apartment. I stay okay and every where else, everyone else's lives turn to dust and they are left to pick up the pieces of their lives after I touch them."
"Who do you think you've hurt?"
She swept her arm across her body to encompass the whole room. "Everyone." She let her arm drop against her side. "Just everyone. First Eddie died when I was teenager, then my husband. Someone killed my ex-boyfriend because of me. Harm lost his career. Clay was hurt." Her voice rose as she listed her transgressions and then dipped to a near whisper. "I'm no damn good." She brushed her hair back from her face. "It's like the theory of karma? Only I'm paying in this life. And I don't suffer, I just have to watch everyone around me sink into a black hole because of me. It would just be so much better for everyone if I just … disappeared."
"Do you think everyone would agree with you?"
"Depending on the day," she sighed. She rubbed her eyes, swiping at the tears. "No," she admitted. "I'm not a teenager, Dr. Hepburn. I don't want them to miss me. It's not about showing them how much they'll miss when I'm gone. I want them to be safe. To be happy."
"So you do realize that they'll miss you?"
Sarah studied her cuticles. Her answer was long in coming, and Audrey was about to ask her question again, when Sarah forced her answer out. "Yes, but sometimes I don't get it. I thought the Admiral finally saw through me. When he wouldn't let Harm rescue me," she clarified. "I would have died down there, probably in a pretty ugly way, too. I thought maybe the Admiral thought it was for the best. But when I got back, he was happy to see me and he came to visit me in the hospital."
"You thought the Admiral wanted you to die?"
"Well, no. Not really, not rationally. It would have been more like sucking poison out of a wound, unpleasant but necessary to keep everything else alive." She choked on a laugh. "It sounds crazy."
"It doesn't sound crazy. Stop saying that now. You're confused, you're hurt, but you aren't crazy." Pursing her lips, she glanced down at her notes and tapped her pencil rapidly against her notepad. It was rare that she couldn't find the words she needed. It was, she sometimes joked, how she got into therapy in the first place. She needed an outlet where she had willing ears to listen to her. It was also rare for her to be angry at people she didn't know. She reminded herself that statements were ten percent intention and ninety percent perception, that there were two sides of Sarah's story, possibly three or four sides, but none of that quelled her very real desire to choke the living daylights out of someone. Preferably the man whose comment seemed to have precipitated the events. Her fingers tightened on the notepad and threatened to snap her pencil. "So," she said after a minute, her voice oddly pitched, "let's go back to Harm's comment." She glanced down at her notes. "He said what exactly?"
Sarah sniffled and rubbed her eyes before answering. "He said that every man I've ever been involved with is either dead or feels like he is."
Audrey drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. This session was rapidly becoming more exhausting than her Pilates class. She studied Sarah carefully before saying, "But that's not why you tried to kill yourself." It was meant to be a question, but as the sentence left her mouth, it grew conviction and emerged a statement. Because it was rapidly becoming clear that Sarah didn't try to kill herself because of one careless comment. As she watched for a reaction, Sarah's muscles contracted, tensing against the chair.
"What?" she asked, reaching for a tissue to blow her nose and buy herself time.
"That's not why you tried to kill yourself," she repeated.
Sarah shook her head. "No." She licked her lips nervously. "Why?"
Audrey resisted the urge to sigh and pushed her hair back from her face. "If you hadn't already been depressed, rather, if you hadn't already believed that that was the truth, you wouldn't have reacted that way. You would have reacted differently."
"Differently how?" she demanded.
"Well, without knowing all the facts, I think other women might have reacted with a jab to the nose." Audrey smiled to let Sarah know she was joking.
"I was being really horrible to him." Sarah shrugged. "We were fighting the whole time. He flew down to rescue me and I picked a fight."
"You haven't learned to fight fair yet?"
"No," she breathed. "We really haven't." She brushed at the link on her sweater, studying the knit carefully before continuing. "It wasn't him. It wasn't even that comment. It just didn't really help I suppose."
"So what was it?"
"It was," she paused, "it was me. It was me. I don't know, you know, if I was ever really happy."
"Why is that?" Audrey tried to remember details of Sarah's life from her file.
"I just - every time I think I've finally found it, it slips away." Sarah stared hard at the paneling on the wall, as if the cherry wood held the answers to her problems. She cupped her hand, turned it over, and stretched her fingers out. She turned her gaze back to Audrey. "It just goes away. And I'm tired of it. I'm tired of waiting for something good to happen only to have it take away again."
She leaned her head against her palm. Now that she had started talking, she was incapable of staunching the flow of words. "I never believed in fairy tales. Or if I did, I stopped early. There didn't seem to be any point. But there's always that one stupid part of you, you know," she fisted her hand against her chest, "that wants to hope.
"I thought, I really did, that when he showed up that that was it. And then we were so mean to each other." She waved a hand. "It wasn't all his fault. Or all my fault. But I'd really thought, really believed it, that our time had come."
"What happened?" Audrey prompted gently.
"We just couldn't stop the bickering. And Clay was hurt, Harm was jealous, and then it turned out he resigned because he thought he loved me. And I," she sighed, "I just couldn't deal with it anymore."
"But that still wasn't what prompted your attempt."
"No." Sarah pulled her knees to her chest and hooked an arm around them. "No. At some point," she exhaled sharply, "at some point, I listened to us. We couldn't love each other and say those things. At least, not in a healthy way. How could I say those things to him? How could he? It was sort of like that realization killed me. Or killed what little hope I had left, anyway."
"You lost hope?"
"Yeah, I guess. It was more like I didn't have any faith left. I destroyed everything." She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. "I always do."
"So you were pinning all, or the little left, of your hope on him?"
"No," she said, refusing to make eye contact. "Not really. But - it's just that - he gave up so much. Clay was hurt. And it was all because they thought they loved me. I get so tired of trying to find new reasons to hope for something good. I had destroyed two more men's lives." She glanced over at the doctor. "I'm just one of those women who is no damn good."
"So you tried to kill yourself?"
"It sounds stupid when you put it like that."
"No, it doesn't." Audrey leaned forward. "Sarah, I've seen teenagers who want to kill themselves because they think they aren't pretty. Hell, I've been that teenager." Audrey shrugged. "What I'm trying to say is, whatever your reasons are, they're your reasons. Which makes them legitimate and not stupid."
"Okay." Sarah brushed at the drying tears and smiled a little. "Um, I think I may have given you the wrong idea. About Harm, I mean. He's not a bad guy. In fact, he's been pretty terrific recently."
"Sarah," Audrey answered her smile with one of her own, "you may need to rethink your definition of love and just learn how to fight fairly." She reached out to pat Sarah's knee.
"Maybe," she murmured. "I just don't know what to do anymore." She tugged on a lock of hair. "I know, rationally, that I'm not just an unwitting black widow. But I don't know how to get back to the person I was before I believed that." She sniffled and blew her nose. "I'm just lost."
"Consider me your compass," Audrey soothed and handed her a fresh a tissue. "Lean on me a little and we'll find you."