1
1992 Janice sat nervously in her doctor's office, waiting
for him to call her in with the results of the hypnotherapy that had been done
the day before. She had been on pins
and needles ever since leaving his office.
She
remembered the therapist talking gently to her, asking her to close her eyes
and relax. He had said some other
things to her, but she couldn't remember them now, even though it was barely
twenty-four hours later. All she remembered
after that was waking up in a cold sweat, with both doctor's trying to calm her
down and the receptionist handing her a paper cup of water. Something had definitely happened while she
was 'under', but the doctor had insisted on her going home and getting a 'good
night's sleep' before he would talk to her about it. She had argued the point with him, but the best she could get was
an appointment for the next day, a taxi ride home, and a few sleeping pills.
He
had instructed her to call in sick, which she would have done anyway, and take
the sleeping pills an hour or so before retiring to bed. She had taken them along with a bottle of
wine, and had passed out on the sofa by six that evening. She awakened at three in the morning, and
hadn't been back to sleep since.
Between the drugs, the anxiousness, and her normal third shift sleep
schedule being broken up, she was a mess.
Finally
the receptionist told her the doctor would see her. She quickly dropped the Time magazine she was flipping through on
the seat next to hers and went inside.
The doctor told her to have a seat, closed the door and returned to his
desk. He opened a file in front of him,
she assumed it was hers, and then looked up to speak to her. His lips opened, but no words came out, and
then he ran his hand through his remaining hair and leaned back in his chair,
letting the file fall closed. She could
sense he wasn't doing a lot better than she was at the moment, which only made
her feel more uptight.
"How
did you sleep last night, Janice? Did
the pills help?" he said, opening the session.
She
looked into his eyes, which had dark shadows under them, and seemed puffier
than usual.
"Okay,
I guess. How'd you sleep last night, Doc?" she replied.
"It
shows, does it?"
"Yes."
"Well,
sometimes in my line of work, a person runs across a situation that is, let's
say, unique," he
returned, trying to sound professional and regain the status of 'me doctor,
you patient'.
"Yeah, right Doc. I feel unique. I blip out yesterday, and wake up on the floor. You send me home with some mystery pills and tell me to get some rest. I show up today and you look like you saw the ghost of Sigmund Freud dancing on your desk naked all night! Can we skip the psycho-babble and get down to brass tacks, or do I have to pay for a couple of dozen more sessions?"
"Calm
down Janice, everything in due time, and I mean today, so just try and
relax," he said, not sounding too relaxed either.
"Look
Doc, if I'm Loony Tunes, I can live with that.
It wouldn't even come as much of a surprise. But I can't stand having to live with not knowing what went on yesterday any longer. Can you relate to that?"
He
looked at his patient, and appreciated the worry in her face and voice. What really concerned him most, was his
professional responsibility to her, and how the next half hour would change her
life forever.
He
reached across his desk and rubbed his index finger over the row of buttons
that protruded from the front of a small portable cassette player. It was obvious to Janice that the doctor
wasn't quite ready to get the show on the road, so she sat back in her chair
with her arms folded across her chest, and quickly tapped her foot on the hand
woven carpet.
"Janice,
before I start the tape, you should know a couple of things."
"What
kind of things, Doc?"
"Well,
for one, you've definitely had a worse childhood than you seem to
remember," he said, giving her that fatherly look that usually meant 'you
haven't been telling me everything, have you Janice?' Today she thought it probably meant
something else.
"That's
totally understandable, and quite common in situations like yours," he
continued, "where remembering is just too much to handle. Let's just say it's nature's way of saving
you from having a complete mental collapse."
"That
bad, huh?" Janice replied, not
sure if she still wanted to go on, but too curious to stop.
"I'm
afraid it's going to be very painful, but definitely nothing that can't be
dealt with in time."
"So
let's get this over with," she said.
"Just
one more thing before we start. There
were parts of the hypnosis that didn't seem to make a sense. Perhaps it was just because things were
coming back to you in pieces, I don't know.
Be prepared for that."
"Anything
else, Doc?"
"No,
I guess not." He pressed the
button marked play.
2
Forty-five
minutes later Janice left the doctors office, with another prescription in her
hands and an appointment for the next morning.
She threw the prescription in the trashcan by the elevator doors on her
way out and never walked back into that building again. The doctor would try and get in touch with
her many times in the future, but she would eventually change her phone to an
unlisted number. She paid off the half the
bill that her insurance didn't cover, and sent him a certified letter thanking
him for his help and notifying him that she would no longer require his
services.
After
taking the winding back-roads home, which gave her plenty of time to smoke up
the gram of pot she had in her stash container, she proceeded to drain the
first of two bottles of tequila that she had bought the day before. The good doctor had opened the door to the
past, and now she and Jose' were going to put the rest of the puzzle together
by themselves, or die trying.
It
was if she lived in a valley twenty-five miles downstream of a dam, and that
dam had suddenly been blown apart. The
dam held back a reservoir of unacknowledged memories, not water, and it wasn't
twenty-five miles between her and the flood, but twenty-five years. She found it amazing how quickly those years
washed away before the oncoming torrent of reality. As she opened the second bottle of tequila, she found herself
back in Nebraska, fourteen years old and scared beyond her wildest imagination.