“That’s what I want,” I say then hurry away through the grass, feeling my peace slip away with every step I take.
Chapter 25
Maddie
My mom about loses it when I get home, especially when I won’t tell her where I was. I let her get her anger out and when she tells me to go to my room, I confront her about what the detective said about me being drugged that night.
“I have no idea why he’d say that,” she says in shock with her hand pressed to her heart. We’re in the living room, the alarm light blinking red, telling me it’s set and I’m trapped once again. “I would never, ever just let someone hurt you and get away with it. I already told you that I want to protect you.”
“So you didn’t know I was drugged?” I ask, letting my backpack fall to floor as I drop down into a chair, tired to the point that I might collapse. “And you’ve been trying to track down the person that hit me, right?”
She doesn’t miss a beat. “Of course. I’m your mother. I want that man caught as much as anyone else.”
“Who said it was a man?” I dig my fingers into the armrest until my knuckles turn white. “I never said anything about a man and from what I understand, the driver was gone before anyone showed up.” I pause. “But I think what I really want to know is why I was out in the road to begin with. What was I running away from, mother? A hospital maybe?” She has to know that I know since she had to have seen the article on my computer that day.
Her eyes narrow as she lowers herself into the chair across from me and folds her arms. “Why would I ever put you in a hospital? You were in the hospital afterward but that’s it.”
“Then why was I out in the middle of nowhere?”
She shrugs, rolling her tongue in her mouth and examining her nails. I can nearly envision lunging out of my chair and tackling her to the ground, wrapping my fingers around her neck, making her tell me her secrets. “That’s what no one really knows.”
“Except me,” I say. “If I could remember.”
“Well, you can’t. Trust me. Preston’s tried a lot and you know as well as anyone that you can’t,” she says, then glances over my muddy, filthy clothes and hair. “Now go change. You look like you crawled out of a dumpster. And tomorrow you’re going to see Preston. It’s been too long and I’m not going to let you skip anymore appointments—I’m not going to let you regress back to the girl who woke up confused in the hospital.”
“I don’t want to see him anymore.”
“Well, you are.”
“I’m an adult, mother. I can make my own choices.”
“No you can’t.” She rises to her feet and adjusts her floral dress. “Trust me, you cannot make your own choices—you never have been able to. And when you try, you end up in the middle of the road, half dead.” It’s the last thing she says before she walks out of the room.
You need to get some answers, Lily whispers. Stop being such a pushover and make her tell you. Or let me do it. Just make her tell you. Think about the girl in the cabin and how you made her bleed. Either be that girl or be me.
Aren’t we sort of the same?
Not at this moment.
I start to picture ways to make this possible. Tie my mother up. Handcuff her and torture her. And just like that, the craziness is back. And the peace I found with Ryland is gone.
***
Late that night, the screaming in my head starts up again. It’s more powerful and deafening than it ever has been. After lying in bed for what seems like forever, staring at my ceiling, I make a choice, on my own. I tear off all the buttons on my clothes. Every single one, then I put them in a box. When I’m done, I have my very own button collection again. And even though it’s not quite the same, it still helps me calm down and silence the screaming, something it’s done in the past when I was locked up. I try to put some of the stuff I’ve figured out together as I run my fingers through them, scooping up handfuls and letting them go. I was locked up once, not counting in the hospital, if that theory is true. Once with a boy who I’m guessing is Evan and a girl, that’s either my Lily or my sister. Evan and I counted buttons to distract ourselves, hence the button collection now and the calming effect it has over me. But in the memories, the buttons came from something dark and morbid. And the fire I keep seeing… that had to be the fire the detective was talking about. The real question is, if I have been locked up, once, twice, however many times, why is my mother refusing to tell me? Does she really think that ignoring the problem will allow me to forget? Does she really think it’ll help me never remember the horrible memories I can feel about to come forward?
“Is that why I created you?” I wonder. “To help me deal with whatever happened to me? Is that when you surfaced?”
“Who said you created me?” Lily replies.
I sigh, scooping up handful of buttons. “Who else could?”
“Life. Your environment. Things done to you. Lily.”
I freeze. “My sister? Do you remember her?”
“No, but you seem to.”
I drop the buttons in the box. “I think I was locked up once because I was crazy, but that was when I was older… the younger memories, the ones with the girl and the boy…. I’m not sure what was going on there… And who the man was, the one I’m so afraid of in the memories? The one that calls me a whore. The one that was in my house… the one I hallucinate sometimes…”
“For each person I kill,” he says as he cuts a button off the blouse. “I keep one of these. It helps me keep track.”
I feel like I’m dying in the corner, hugging myself so tightly I swear I’m going to crush my own bones. “Why do you do it?” I whisper in horror, pretending like there isn’t blood all around me, death, pain. That I didn’t see the worst side of life moments ago.
He tosses the knife aside and it lands beside my feet. Then he holds up the button between his fingers, examining it in the light, his dark eyes filling with elation. “Because these people are wicked, Maddie. Bad. Just like you.”
“Yes, she is,” a woman whispers from somewhere. “And it’s time to make her pay too.”
I jolt from the memory and fall out of the bed, landing on my back. It knocks the wind out of me, but the pain is small in comparison to the pain I felt in the memory. I was locked up once, by a killer, someone who killed bad people and who thought I was bad too. And there was a woman there… her voice… I’ve heard it before.
I’m trying to push my brain further, to put the pieces together when I see a face appear in my window and the sound of something scratching on the glass.
“Shit.” I jump but then hesitate, wondering if it was the man who broke in that night, who knows about Lily, who maybe had once locked me up and killed people in front of me. Perhaps he tried to kill me once, too and now he’s doing it again. Maybe that’s what I was running away from that night.
Gathering up enough courage, I cautiously tiptoe over to the window and peer out into the front yard. I see a figure standing in the middle of the road, just out of the light of the lamppost, with their arms crossed, watching the house. I hear the words you’re a whore! Bad! You’re just like all of them! I almost bang my head on the glass just to get it to stop. My breathing quickens as I rub my eyes and by the time I lower my hands, the figure is gone and the voice has dissipated into the night.
As I turn away from the window, fearing the possibilities of who could be stalking me, I notice that my breath has created fog on the window and the words I know are traced in it. At first I think it’s on the outside of the window, but I’m able to wipe them away from the inside with the sleeve of my shirt, which means two things: 1) I zoned out and wrote them or 2) someone was in my room.
But I’m not one-hundred percent sure which one it is. It’s hard to see the reality when there’s so much craziness inside me.
Chapter 26
Maddie
I quickly discover that the longer my insomnia goes on, the more insane I get. It makes me fear my mind less be
cause there’s so much scattered nonsense in it that Lily’s voice has even become incoherent. But the longer it goes on, I do start to get paranoid about allowing myself to sleep. I start waiting by the window for the figure to show up and another message to appear every night, but it never does. Every time I shut my eyes, I slip into the nightmare full of rain, cold concrete, where I’m afraid and imprisoned by a man who loves to kill and who always threatens to kill me. The woman’s voice always appears but I can never see her. I’m forced out of my nightmare by the worry of what I’ll do when I close my eyes. I get jittery, unsettled, twitchy, not a good combination for a girl with a split personality. Lily and I both are desperate to rest, but I won’t cave and give in. My mom starts to notice, too and when she catches me one day in my room, talking to myself, she loses it and tells me no more skipping out on therapy anymore. I’m too exhausted to argue and tell myself that in a few weeks I’ll have my own place—my own life—and none of this will matter anymore.
Preston notices right away how tired I look and starts probing me with questions about my sleep schedule the moment I enter his office. Then he brings up my behavior at home.
“Your mother called me today before you came here,” he says with a pencil tucked behind his ear, like he’s a shop teacher ready to build something. I wonder if that’s how he sees me. If I’m a project he’s trying to put together. “Your mother said you’ve been having a hard time the last few days and that you’ve been very uncooperative.”
“I’m too old to be living with her,” I state, tapping my foot restlessly against the floor. His desk is a mess today, papers in a chaotic order, folders everywhere, and his shirt looks wrinkly, the smell of cigarettes more potent than ever, a real hot mess just like me. “I’m an adult for God’s sake... I think it’s time for me to move out. I’m too old to deal with this anymore, no matter what she wants to believe. Besides, it might be good for me to get some space from her… she makes me worse instead of helping me. Always lying.”
It takes him a second to answer, as if he’s calculating the right thing to say. “Maddie, I know you don’t want to hear this, but I think it might be for the best if you continue to live with your mother.” He fidgets, taking the pencil out from behind his ear and tossing it onto the desk. “I know in age your old enough to live on your own, but I think your confusion with your identity sometimes makes you act younger than you are. And the lying part… I can assure you that everything your mother does is in your best interest.”
I stare out the window at the grey sky and beads of water rolling down the glass. Out in the parking lot is a blue Camry that belongs to my mother—she refused to leave me here alone. “You sound like you’re on her side.”
“On whose side?”
I meet his gaze, wondering if he knows the stuff my mother refuses to tell me. Maybe he’s in on whatever it is too. “My mother.”
He swiftly shakes his head. “I’m on no one’s side, Maddie. All I’m here for is to help you.”
“But you talk to her all the time, right? About me? Which isn’t allowed.”
“Yeah, I do, but for a good reason.”
“You know that doesn’t help with the trust factor, Preston,” I point out, crossing my legs. “You say everything here is confidential, but you talk to my mother about me, which is wrong.” I wonder if he knows about the accident and that I was doped up when it happened. I wonder if he knows about Lily, my supposed sister. I wonder if he knows about my entrapment with the crazy man.
“I’m not breaking any trust by talking to your mother. You signed a release form so I could,” he says evenly, collecting a stack of papers and shoving them out of the way so he can rest his elbows on the desk. “I would never do anything behind your back or against you.”
“I never signed a release form,” I argue, shaking my head in protest. “I would remember if I did.”
“Yes, you did,” he says, reeling his chair around. He opens up the filing cabinet that’s behind his desk and retrieves a folder with my name on it. Dropping it on the desk, he opens it up and takes out a paper. “Back when we started these sessions.” He slides the paper across the desk at me.
I stare down at the paper that definitely has my signature, yet I can’t remember signing it. There’s no date on it either to remind me. I drag my fingers down my face. “Well, I didn’t know what I was signing.”
“I explained it to you and you understood it then,” he explains. “You even agreed it was a good idea.”
“If that’s the case, then why is this the first time I can remember hearing anything about this?” I skim read over the paper that specifically explains he’s allowed to talk to my mother about the things that go on in here with me. I clutch the paper in my hand, crinkle the corners. “I would never sign this. I know I wouldn’t.”
“It was for your own benefit,” Preston explains as if he truly believes it. “Back when we started these sessions, you were really struggling with simple tasks, like picking out outfits for yourself or writing your name down. It was for the best that you and your mother could talk about your progress so she could help you while you were at home.”
Shaking my head, I tear up the paper, not once, twice, but into tiny pieces then drop them to the floor like confetti. He stares down at the shreds of paper, scattered all over his desk and the floor. I expect him to get cross and call me out on my temper tantrum, but instead he says, in a very composed voice, “How about we get started with our session for today?”
I don’t answer, but I don’t leave the office either, so he takes that as a yes.
“Do you want to tell me why you haven’t been sleeping very well?” he asks, folding his arms and resting them on top of the folder. It makes me wonder what else he has in there? What else I’ve signed without knowing.
“Who says I haven’t been sleeping very well?” My eyes are fixated on the folder.
“You look exhausted, Maddie,” he says, sliding the folder off to the side, out of my line of vision.
I need to get a hold of it.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, Lily appears behind Preston. She’s grinning, in her blond form, piercings, happy. God, I’d forgotten what happy looked like.
She puts her finger to her lips then traces her fingers through his blond hair, Preston completely oblivious to the factor. “You need to get a hold of that folder, Maddie.” She leans over Preston’s shoulder, her hands wandering to the front of his neck. “Even I’m curious what the ken doll has in there.” She’s almost strangling him, her hands resting just at the base of his neck, eyes sparkling with need. “You know, you could always hit him over the head, knock him unconscious, and search his office. God knows what you’d find.” She cocks her head to the side, her fingertips digging into his skin. “Or you could just let me strangle him. Either way works for me.”
I consider what she said. Me, Maddie, hurting Preston… it feels easier to do than it did a few weeks ago.
“Maddie, did you hear me?” Preston’s giving me that look that lets me know I’ve dazed off.
I shake my head, blinking my eyes several times in order to focus on him, Lily is still behind him, giggling and watching me with amusement. “No, not really.”
He releases an exhausted breath, leaning forward in his chair, causing Lily’s fingers to fall from his neck. “I asked you if you wanted to tell me why you haven’t been sleeping very well.”
“I’ve already told you that I’ve been sleeping just fine.” I deliberate my next words as Lily wanders around his office. “But can I ask you a question?”
“You know you can ask me anything,” he says seriously and Lily rolls her eyes as she skims through folders.
“Wow, I’m beginning to prefer even River over this idiot,” she says, tipping her head to the side as she stares at the filing cabinet, putting her finger to her lips.
“When someone isn’t sleeping very well is it normal for them to… I don’t know… see things that aren’t there?” I ask Preston, m
y gaze skimming back and forth between Lily and him.
“Have you been seeing things?” he asks interestedly, overlapping his fingers and resting his hands on the desk.
“No… but I’m wondering if it’s possible.”
He sighs. “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me the truth.”
I’m trying to figure out where to go from here. I don’t trust him, yet I want answers. “Sometimes I do, but it’s nothing major,” I say and Lily smiles at me, laughing under her breath. “And I’ve been really tired lately.”
He picks up a pen to jot some notes down on his legal pad. “What sort of things have you been seeing?”
I press my lips together and shake my head. “No details. I’ve said enough.”
“Maddie, I can’t—”