Chapter Four
It’s not at all unusual for the victim of a trauma like yours to find herself unexpectedly emotional,” Dr. Ellerbee wrote. They were sitting across from each other in the psychiatrist’s office, there in the hospital. Each had an iPad, and they were IMing so they didn’t have to talk. He wanted Annie to speak, so he could try to read Annie’s mental state from her voice, but Annie was beginning to feel uncomfortable with trying. She couldn’t modulate her volume, her intonation. She feared that she was forgetting how to express herself verbally.
And then there was that other thing. “Not me,” she said out loud, then typed the same words into the instant message box. “I don’t even like my own emotions. I’ve spent my adult life chasing them away with work, booze, meaningless sex, TV, all that good stuff. This is just completely alien to me.”
“The emotions, or the intensity with which you feel them?”
Annie regarded the psychiatrist, planted behind his desk, his face blank except for eyes that bored into her like drills trying to plumb her innermost secrets. His eyes were brown, his brow animated, each eyebrow seemingly able to arch independently of anything else, his forehead creasing or smoothing or collapsing into a series of wrinkles right in the center. He didn’t need to speak to be understood, not with that talent.
“Both,” she spoke and typed. As before, though, she kept typing after she stopped speaking. “I mean, I’m not a robot or anything. I have emotions. I just prefer to block them whenever possible. To feel them as … I don’t know, as superficial distractions rather than anything I really have to deal with. Probably that’s unhealthy or something, I don’t know, but I don’t think I’d be able to function professionally if I really internalized all the pain and sorrow and terror that a cop runs across. But the feelings I’ve had since being here in the hospital are totally different, on every level. Strong doesn’t come close. Overwhelming. Crying in front of strangers? Never. If I did that, I wouldn’t last three days on the job.”
Dr. Ellerbee read her message, tapped his knife-edged chin with his right index finger. His suit fit well but was not stylish or expensive. Annie thought that was an intentional choice—not that he couldn’t afford better, but he wanted to create the impression that clothing wasn’t important to him. Most people would get the intended impression without going the step deeper to examine what lay behind it. Most people weren’t cops.
After he considered for a few moments, he wrote something out. “Are you worried about that? That it might affect your ability to do the job?”
She laughed. Out loud, probably, not that you could prove it by her. “I think deafness has that pretty much settled,” she wrote.
“It’s temporary,” he wrote back.
“Maybe,” she said.
He nodded, typed. “Probably. Or so I’m led to believe.”
“Probably is what they say. But it doesn’t seem to be getting any better.”
“You’ve only been here four days,” he wrote.
“I’m a cop, you think I can afford to stay much longer?”
“You have insurance.”
“Right. And every day I’m here I can’t work. My savings … never mind, you don’t need to hear my financial worries. I’m scheduled for surgery tomorrow, then I have a feeling I’ll be booted out of here pretty quick, ears or no ears.”
“You’re optimistic, though. About the surgery.”
She felt optimistic. At least in here, ridiculously sending instant messages to a man eight feet away, she felt like tomorrow would be fine and the day after that would be better. She couldn’t bring herself to worry about money, or health, just knew that everything would be fine.
And something else, a stirring that took her by surprise. Sexual attraction? That wasn’t an unfamiliar emotion for Annie, but the psychiatrist wasn’t her type at all.
But am I his? Is that what’s going on?
He was looking at her. At her body, athletic, slim-hipped, narrow-waisted, with compact breasts. Her red hair attracted its share of attention, her green eyes and full lips drew stares now and again. She knew the look of someone who wanted her, and he was wearing it.
And she was reciprocating. Against her will. There was something else, too, an undercurrent that gnawed at her insides, as if she had swallowed a tiny wolverine.
“Is there something wrong?” he wrote. “You’re distracted.”
“I think I have to leave,” she said. “Right now.”
“We’re not done.”
“Yes we are.” She picked up her iPad. He came out of his seat, coming toward her, saying something that he knew full well she couldn’t hear. She avoided his gaze and his grasp and headed for the door.
“I feel like I’m losing my mind,” Annie wrote in an email to Nanci Keller, one of the most intuitive people she knew. Nanci was a casual friend, the only kind Annie seemed able to make. Nanci knew her way around people, and seemed able to connect with them easily, in more intimate ways than Annie had ever mastered. In an interview or an interrogation, Nanci was the one she wanted on her side. “But not in a way the shrinks can deal with. I’m constantly deluged with emotions that aren’t mine, but they feel like mine while I’m in them. I know I’m not making any sense, but it’s like whatever someone else feels strongly becomes my own feeling too. At least while I’m close to that person. Do you think this can really be the result of my injuries?”
Annie sent the email, then set her phone aside. She picked up the thriller she was reading and tried to focus on it, but the words kept coming unstuck from the page, swimming in the air before her, and she set the bookmark back in it and closed her eyes.