This Eternity of Masks and Shadows Page 5

  So Delphine knew everything. Cairn winced as the hazy memory of that night drifted back. She had just flown in from Canada, after scattering her mother’s ashes along the coastline where she grew up. Desperately needing an escape, she’d stopped by a house party hosted by some former classmates attending college upstate.

  The keg beer. The tequila. The Jell-O shots. More tequila. A downward, booze-fueled spiral. Theresa, her old softball teammate, sliding down next to her on the couch. The warmth of their thighs making contact. Leaning into her as they giggled uncontrollably. Her mouth on Theresa’s—who kissed whom first? Then Theresa tugging her up the stairs to an empty room in the sorority house. Hands roaming clumsily. The door creaking open. Was someone else there, watching from the shadows? Whispers, hushed laughter, the flash of a phone camera. Lurching for the bathroom. Throwing up again in the bushes on the walk home. Waking up the next day feeling like a spear had pierced her skull, that dull ache behind her eye sockets, and later, knowing that in just a handful of hours, she had irrevocably altered the course of her life for the worse.

  It was all Cairn could take not to vomit all over again right there. “I could tell you about how that night was a blur, that it was just the alcohol, that I blacked out, but I know in the history of cheating, that has literally never made anyone feel any better. I take responsibility.”

  Delphine shook her head. “I didn’t stop talking to you because you hooked up with someone else—under the circumstances, I might have been able to get past that. I stopped taking your calls because of what you said to me the next day.”

  Cairn remembered the pounding on the door that morning, unsure at first whether it was just her blistering hangover. Instead, she found an agitated Delphine standing on her doorstep. Her eyes had widened as she took in Cairn’s rumpled, day-old clothes and smelled the stale bouquet of alcohol and bile on her breath. “Where were you?” she’d demanded.

  Cairn had said nothing at first, but as Delphine began to unload on her about missing her set, and how disappointed she was, something inside of Cairn finally snapped and she said: “She’s dead because of you.”

  Those five words had stunned Delphine into silence. Her mouth gaped open as she searched for a response, but Cairn, still halfway drunk from the night before, barreled on. “I almost had her. Another few strokes and I would have reached her if you hadn’t yanked me out first. So how about this: you forgive me for missing your fucking karaoke, and I’ll forgive you for killing my mother. Seem like a fair trade?”

  Delphine, trembling, had just pulled off her Claddagh ring and dropped it at Cairn’s feet. It was still spinning like a top on the doorstep as Delphine’s car screeched away from the curb. She hadn’t said a word to Cairn since.

  Cairn tried to swallow the concrete lump in her throat. “Those were just drunken words. I hope you know that I don’t blame you for any of it. My mother decided to end her life. That’s something I’m coming to terms with.”

  Delphine shook her head. “When you’re grieving, you get a pass for doing a lot of things,” she whispered. “But there’s a limit to how much of an asshole you get to be before the people who love you say ‘enough.’ I deferred attending Juilliard for a year to stay home and take care of you, and that was the thanks I got?”

  “I didn’t ask you to press pause on your life for me,” Cairn protested.

  “Love is not having to be asked—it’s making sacrifices on your own accord. It’s being there for someone unconditionally.” Her outburst drew the stares of an older couple passing by, so she lowered her voice. “Look—after what happened, I didn’t expect us to jump right into a relationship like everything was fine and beautiful. The timing royally sucked, trust me, I get it. If anything, I just wanted to be there for you as your friend, the way I’ve always been. But you pushed me away.”

  Cairn’s eyes burned. “You can’t possibly know what the last few months have been like.”

  “Maybe I can’t know exactly what you’re going through,” Delphine admitted. “But you’re not the only person whose heart broke that day on the boat. Ahna was like the mother I never had, since as early as I can remember. She was always there for me.”

  Cairn wanted desperately to throw her arms around Delphine, to burrow her face into her best friend’s neck and never let go, but the arm’s length between them was too crowded with the weight of pain and time and betrayal.

  “I come here every week,” Cairn said finally, “because I can’t let you go. But that doesn’t mean I’m ready to let you back in either. To let anyone back in.”

  “Well, that’s a purgatory you’ve chosen to live in. As of this moment, you don’t get to drag me down there with you.” Delphine exhaled. The anger appeared to leave her body, but it was replaced with a dull look in her eyes that Cairn recognized as something even worse: resignation. “Maybe someday we can be friends again. I’d be lying if I said part of me didn’t still want to be there for you. But until that day … please don’t come around here again.”

  Delphine twirled without another word and took long strides toward the backstage entrance. Her shoulders started to quake as she went.

  “Wait,” Cairn tried to say, but the word disintegrated on her lips.

  The door slammed shut behind Delphine, and the damning sound it made could have been a judge’s gavel coming down.

  Therapy

  The next morning, Cairn drove to the seaside village of Marblehead Neck, following directions to Dr. Themis’s address. A pair of tall white gates across the gravel driveway blocked her passage, and she leaned out the window to address the intercom. The black lens of a camera gazed back at her.

  Cairn cleared her throat. “Cairn Delacroix, here for my seven-a.m. appointment with—”

  Before she could finish her sentence, the gates abruptly buzzed and parted.

  Cairn whistled as she drove onto the compound. She had expected Dr. Themis to work out of an office park, but apparently, the psychiatrist practiced right from her home.

  Her colossal French Provincial mansion.

  The estate’s countless windows glowed tangerine against the morning sky. Above the white stucco walls and black-shingled dormers, an imposing windmill turned slowly, fueled by the briny wind blowing in off the bay beyond.

  “Maybe I should major in psychology,” Cairn mumbled as she parked in the porte cochere.

  She had just raised a finger to the doorbell when the manor door swung open. A tanned boy in his twenties greeted her. He had an angular nose and a buzzcut as short as his beard stubble. “I am Dr. Themis’s assistant, Vulcan.” He waved an arm into the house. “Won’t you come in, Ms. Delacroix?”

  As she followed Vulcan into the palatial foyer, she noticed the young man sported an elaborate metal brace around one of his knees. The hydraulics hissed faintly with each step.

  They passed an ornate indoor fountain, a kinetic sculpture of the scales of justice. The water would pour into one pan until it sank into the rocky basin below. Then the process would repeat on the other side, a hypnotic, elegant seesaw tipping back and forth.

  “How do you do it?” she asked Vulcan.

  He raised an eyebrow. “Do what?”

  “Work someplace this hideous.”

  “Ah.” Vulcan smiled. “The doctor won the lottery, a long time ago.”

  Cairn caught a whiff of chlorine from an indoor pool beyond one of the closed doors. “How many times?”

  Vulcan’s hoarse laughter echoed down the halls.

  After navigating the labyrinthine mansion to the north wing, he opened a door uniform to all the others. “Have a seat,” he said. “Dr. Themis will join you momentarily.”

  Unlike the spartan, cavernous halls, the doctor’s office was surprisingly cluttered, somewhere between a museum storage room and a hoarder’s paradise. Tomes overflowed the bookshelves. Artifacts from around the world gathered dust—marble busts of Classical figures, clay pots hand-painted with mythical creatures, tattered maps to obscure is
lands she doubted you’d find in any official atlas.

  Cairn settled into the chaise and ran her hands over the leather. How many times had her mother sat in this very spot, spilling her guts to this psychiatrist, this interloper, offering a window into her bleakest thoughts, the fragile mental state that would send her spiraling into self-destruction?

  Cairn fully anticipated the psychiatrist would claim doctor-patient confidentiality, but she wasn’t leaving this room until she learned something, even the most tentative of threads for her to grasp onto as she desperately pieced together an answer to the question that kept eluding her:

  Why?

  The door opened.

  Dr. Themis was a woman of perhaps sixty, though the aviator sunglasses concealing her eyes made it difficult to accurately estimate her age. Her sun-kissed skin had an energetic glow, and her graying hair exploded in a messy bun at the back of her head. She traversed the room with a deliberate slowness and settled into the chair opposite Cairn.

  In that moment, Cairn was overwhelmed by the tsunami of rage she felt toward this stranger. How many dollars, how many hours, had Ahna Delacroix wasted on this woman, hoping to find a cure for the demons inside her, only to ultimately take that final one-way plunge into the Atlantic? How could the doctor have been so powerless to prevent her mother from resorting to the most severe measure to end her unhappiness?

  Cairn waited for the doctor to formally introduce herself. Instead, Dr. Themis crossed her legs and folded her hands in her lap. “So,” she said. “Should we skip all the bullshit and address the elephant in the room?”

  Cairn was flabbergasted. “Wow. That’s what you open our session with? Granted, I’ve never been to a shrink before, but from what I’ve seen in the movies, I figured you’d have me draw a picture of my family in crayon, or ask what I see in a series of inkblots, or poll me on what my favorite gelato flavor was, and use all that data to deconstruct my angsty, complicated feelings on mortality and the meaning of life.” She pointed to the diplomas on the wall. “Years of medical practice and your master plan to get me to dish is to refer to my dead mother as ‘the elephant in the room?’ You are either the world’s laziest therapist or the most incompetent.”

  Dr. Themis, who had remained stoic throughout the tirade, gently cleared her throat and leaned to the left, indicating something in the back of the room. Cairn looked over her shoulder, following the woman’s gaze.

  Among the cluttered assortment of old artifacts, one stood out from the rest: a giant statue of a wooly mammoth, its tusks raised in the air.

  Despite everything, Cairn found herself laughing for the first time in recent memory. She held up her hands in defeat. “You win this round.”

  Dr. Themis shrugged, the ghost of a smile tugging at her lips. “Shameless icebreaker—forgive me. Now that we’ve warmed up …” She leaned across the desk. “… Tell me why you’re so angry with your mother.”

  Just like that, Cairn’s walls went right back up. “Look, I’m not here for therapy. I’m here to find out what was haunting my mom when she decided to step off the back of a boat hugging an anchor. So you can give me that dead stare all you like but …”

  Cairn trailed off because the doctor had removed her sunglasses. Two milky gray eyes gazed off into oblivion, fixed on a point not quite centered on Cairn’s face.

  “Your rage consumes you,” the blind woman said. “How am I supposed to help you when you can’t even help yourself?”

  “I’m doing just fine on my own.”

  “Fine?” Dr. Themis echoed. “You deferred your college admission just so you could sulk around your house like an invalid. You’ve sabotaged your relationships and pushed away everyone close to you. Your healing process will never begin if your self-destructive tendencies obliterate you first. This is not what Ahna would have wanted for you.”

  Cairn’s grip on the armrests tightened, fingernails digging into the leather. How did this woman know about the deferral? About the more personal conflicts? “You don’t get to tell me what my mother would have wanted.”

  The doctor laughed darkly. “First, you demand that I violate her privacy and share with you her deepest secrets. Now you tell me not to talk about her. Make up your damn mind.” The doctor formed a steeple with her fingers. “I’ll cut you a deal: if you can survive one session with me, then I’ll answer any question you ask about Ahna. At least the parts I know.”

  “That’s it?” Cairn narrowed her eyes. “You want me to just lay back on a sofa and spill my guts to you.”

  Dr. Themis shook her head and rose from her chair. “I prefer more unconventional forms of therapy.” She beckoned toward the door.

  Cairn reluctantly followed the doctor down the hall and into a windowless, unfurnished room. The walls consisted of rice paper panels over cherry wood frames. Faded mats covered every inch of the floor. A series of glowing lanterns provided the room’s only light.

  “What is this?” Cairn asked.

  “The dojo.” Dr. Themis shut the door behind them. “And the site of your rebirth.”

  The hairs on the nape of Cairn’s neck bristled. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  Dr. Themis produced a remote from her pocket and pressed a button. Projectors hidden in the ceiling cast a flickering image onto all four walls, a home movie shot on a handheld camcorder. The timestamp in the corner of the grainy image was dated sixteen years ago. A little girl with dark hair and a puffy fur-lined coat played along a rocky beach. The tide lapped against the shore, causing the child, no older than two, to shriek with glee every time a jet of cold water sprayed in her direction.

  If Cairn had any doubts that she was watching a video of herself, they evaporated the moment she heard her mother’s carefree laughter.

  Sure enough, the camera operator—her father—panned over to Ahna, elegant and beautiful as Cairn remembered, though much younger. Ahna cupped a hand over her mouth to stifle her laughter, the skin by her eyes crinkling with joy as she watched her daughter frolic with the kind of amazed innocence you never get back.

  Her parents had told her about this trip to Canada, the first time they took her to visit her grandparents in the small seaside community where Ahna was born.

  Cairn, who had been transfixed, finally broke the spell, desperate to be free of this deceivingly happy memory and all the pain it brought rushing back. “Stop this,” she ordered quietly, then again more assertively, “Stop this!”

  Dr. Themis ignored her pleas. The video continued to play on all four walls, an inescapable 360-degree spectacle of agony. “The girl who dove into the Atlantic to save her mother never resurfaced,” the doctor said. “She’s still down there in her own personal underworld, trapped within the papier-mâché fortress she constructed around herself.”

  “Shut up!” Cairn frantically groped the walls, searching for the exit, but the door was a panel identical to the others, and she had gotten all turned around since the movie started. “Let me out, you psycho!”

  Dr. Themis stripped off her blazer and rolled up her shirt sleeves, revealing ropy, taut forearms. “We’re going to break down the barricades you’ve used to push away your loved ones, cast off the anchors that have been dragging you down. I’m here to free you—but first I’m going to have to break you. Emotionally. Spiritually. Physically.” She began to circle Cairn. Despite her blindness, she demonstrated an uncanny sense of her surroundings. “You see, when your brain detects danger and shifts into fight-or-flight mode, you lose the concentration it takes to prop up your flimsy emotional defenses. Pain is the quickest path to enlightenment.”

  “This is insane.” Cairn backed away. “This is kidnapping. I’m not playing your twisted therapist games.”

  “You can stop this at any point,” Themis said. “All you have to do is answer one question: why are you so angry with your mother?”

  “Fuck you,” Cairn spat.

  Themis rolled her shoulders and cricked her neck. “Then let’s begin.”

/>   The blind woman darted forward like a viper, so quick Cairn barely raised her arms to defend herself. With shocking, bestial strength, Themis seized Cairn by the lapel and hurled her against the wall. Cairn collided with one of the cherrywood beams. Pain lanced up her spine like lightning.

  She dropped to the mats, too stunned to speak. The crazy woman had attacked her.

  Dr. Themis loomed over her, face as sedate as ever, pewter irises peering unseeingly down at her. “Why are you so angry with your mother?” she asked again.

  “Go to hell,” Cairn wheezed.

  “I have,” Themis replied. She grabbed a handful of Cairn’s hair and wrenched her back up to her feet. Cairn screamed and tried to claw free, but Themis once again hoisted and threw her.

  Cairn tumbled across the mats and struck the ground chin-first. She tasted blood where her teeth bit the inside of her lip.

  “Why are you so angry with your mother?” Themis asked.

  Never in her lifetime had Cairn thought she would attack a blind woman, but fury took the wheel. She clambered to her feet and charged at Dr. Themis, determined to tackle her to the ground.

  At the last moment, Themis pivoted. She seized Cairn by both shoulders, wrapped a leg behind her, and viciously cast her to the mats.

  Before Cairn could recover this time, the doctor knelt on her spine and wrenched Cairn’s arm back. “Why are you so angry with your mother?”

  As Cairn lay there, struggling to breathe under Themis’s weight, her cheek pressed into the mat, her elbow gradually being hyperextended, she stared forlornly through watery eyes at the projection of her mother smiling ear to ear, and that was the moment she shattered.

  “Why are you so angry with your—?”

  “Because she was my best friend,” Cairn screamed, “and she should have told me she was hurting that bad!” The second the words left her, she collapsed into tears. A sob escaped her in a nearly soundless wheeze.

  Dr. Themis relaxed the tension on her arm. “And why are you so angry with yourself?”