Birds of Paradise

  He undid his suit jacket, for freedom of movement, I assumed. Because then he went to my closet and yanked out every item in there, systematically stuffing them into the duffel.

  I stood, feet glued to the floor, tongue glued to the roof of my mouth and watched. Dumbly silent, letting him pile my meager belongings into a single bag.

  He glanced up. “I’m assuming you have a pharmacy full of medication inside your bathroom that you’ll need to remain whatever passes as functional for you?”

  I blinked. “Drugs?”

  He nodded once. “Antipsychotics, antidepressants. Uppers. Downers. Valium, Lorazepam, Prozac.” He listed them off with impatience and malice.

  “I don’t take those,” I said in a small voice. I hated how small. How every part of me shrank in his presence, not that I was large to begin with. Not that I was strong. But I would’ve liked to have thought I would’ve had more… fight in a situation like this.

  But as I learned repeatedly about myself, I didn’t have any fight. I only had failure.

  He tapped his forefinger against his pants leg. The movement may have been a spasm on anyone else. A minor display of annoyance, perhaps. But I was certain that, for him, that little twitch was equivalent to him punching through a wall.

  I didn’t know why I knew this. I just did.

  “No wonder you’re fucking like this,” he muttered, almost to himself.

  I found it. Whatever remained of my strength, lying amongst the broken pieces of me, the accusation and cruelty in his voice. His utter disgust in what he thought he’d surmised about me.

  “You have no idea what I’ve been through,” I hissed.

  “No, I don’t,” he agreed. “I will assume it was horrible. Ugly. Evil. Unfortunately, horrible, ugly and evil aren’t surprising, nor uncommon.” He stepped over to my nightstand, fingering the book lying facedown, open. “In fact, it would be near impossible to find a person not touched with horror in their lives. Some are only brushed, others grazed, while a lot are stabbed, burned, filled with it.”

  He picked it up, dog-eared it and shoved it in the bag. I didn’t have time to inspect this strangely thoughtful gesture, as his cruelty and indifference returned. Not that it had ever left.

  His eyes focused on me as he zipped the bag. “So that isn’t special, nor is it an excuse to give up. Because there are two options after horror. You survive. You don’t. Two, that’s it. No third option. You somehow found a way to dangle between the two. It’s not indefinite. You have to choose, or your hand will be forced. I’m the one forcing that hand right now. So quite frankly, solnyshko, I don’t give a fuck what you went through, because you’re not special. People have gone through less and worse, and they’ve survived. I care not about your past, but I will ensure you have a future. Why, even I don’t know. But my decision is made, and I do not sway from decisions easily.”

  And with that said, he hoisted the duffel bag onto his shoulder, striding across the room, snatching my arm and dragging me along with him.

  Once I figured out his destination, I began to fight.

  “Let me go!” I screamed, squirming, wrenching, yanking myself from him. It was all no help, his entire hand circling the top of my skeletal arm—I was weak from malnutrition and… life. So he continued to drag me to the harbinger of my doom.

  The front door.

  “I can’t go out there!” I screamed.

  He stopped abruptly, hand on the handle. “You can,” he said. “You can because you are and if you don’t, you’re dead. Don’t you understand that?”

  I sucked in an uneasy breath as sweat beaded at the top of my forehead. “Of course I understand that,” I hissed in between breaths. “It doesn’t change anything. I cannot leave.” The thought of it, the proximity to the door, made my stomach roil painfully and violently, and my vision flickered.

  He inspected me, with disdain and something else. “You cannot die,” he declared, with something that seemed like ferocity.

  And then he turned the knob.

  And then there I was, descending into madness, tumbling and hitting every part of my psyche along the way. The pressure of the open air suffocated me, my lungs tightened, everything spun as he dragged me.

  I tumbled after him, tripping on loose gravel and ice, unable to fall because his grip hindered that. My skin was pulsating with the force with which I was trying to escape it. Shallow shafts of air escaped my mouth. I tried to suck more back in, but it didn’t work. The outside air wouldn’t work. Only safe, inside air would keep me oxygenated.

  This was poison.

  The world around me was a blur. I catalogued it in perfect detail from the safety of my window, watching it, committing it to memory. But now there was no pane of glass, no protection, so black spots danced in my vision. I saw the dark flash of a vehicle, heard the slam of a door.

  Descending into madness. No, I’m not descending. I was already there, standing inside the prison my mind had made for me. I was already there and denying it. This is just reality.

  And on that thought, the moment he snatched my arm with brutal force, shoving me into the car, I succumbed to reality.

  In other words, my panic attack deprived my brain of oxygen, so I passed out.

  Where am I going to be when I wake up? I thought, yelling at the darkness. Am I going to wake up?

  I did wake up, but I wasn’t sure if I was in this world or the next. Surely, if I was dead, waking up wouldn’t feel like I was a corpse, would it?

  My heart was still beating, because it was thundering painfully and rapidly in my chest cavity.

  I wasn’t in my room, in my home, I knew that immediately. Because there was a cinderblock that settled on my chest when a sliver of air snaked through my nostrils.

  It smelled wrong, this air. Clean, sterile almost. Cold. I knew I should panic. I wanted to panic. But there was an incorporeal quality to that panic. It couldn’t quite actualize. My thoughts were too soft at the edges. Not quite urgent enough.

  I was lucid enough to realize I should be hyperventilating, screaming, if my voice wasn’t trapped somewhere below my throat. But there wasn’t a need for that.

  My eyes found the dark wood of a ceiling, intricately carved. Old, shiny. Very clean. I could smell the musk of the wood, trickling down through the air to meet my senses.

  Or maybe I was dreaming that, the quality of my wakefulness not quite solid enough to be confirmed as awake.

  I must be on something.

  I should’ve cared about that too. Since I discovered my condition, since it slowly began to suffocate me when I ventured into the outside world before I’d been sequestered into my house, I had been adamant there would be no drugs.

  I hadn’t even been sure why at the time. Maybe because of the quality to my thoughts right then. The easiness, the numbness.

  I didn’t deserve to feel that.

  For my problems to have a cotton candy quality to them. To not have them eat up my insides every day. No, I didn’t deserve that. I deserved what madness and pain I’d spiraled into.

  But now I had no choice.

  Someone had made the choice for me.

  I glanced down. White sheets. Thick, downy, expensive white coverlet. I was only inhabiting a small space of the large bed I was lying in. The spare room yawned across the mattress, showing me just how much I’d shrunk. The ornate bed frame matched the ceiling. I weakly tried to lift my arm to play with the subtle patterns of the coverlet. For a second, I was convinced I was a puppet and someone else was pulling my strings, like the one attached to my arm. Then I realized the clear tube was going right into my skin and was attached to a clear bag of liquid.

  IV.

  It looked out of place in the room, which was large and decorated in English Country—Royalty Edition.

  A man stood by a large dresser, arms folded.

  I’d thought he was a statue at the beginning, he was that still.

  Then I remembered a man that still. The blinking statue. br />
  My assassin.

  His eyes met mine as my heart labored against the medication keeping it steady.

  He didn’t say anything, just continued to watch me with his empty stare.

  Is it empty? No, it might be so full of something that it just looks empty. It’s crafted that way.

  I was silent too, but that was because my mouth was cotton wool. Dry. My lips were heavy, unable to open, to form words. I just stared at him, dumbly mute, maybe terrified mute. Because I was terrified. Beyond that. Underneath all the layers of whatever was tamping down the panic in my system, I was unraveling. Completely. Coming out of my own skin. But I was doing it without actually doing it. That didn’t make sense. No, it didn’t, but it did. Like drowning, but someone had tricked you into thinking water was oxygen, so you drowned calmly. Without knowing it.

  But no one could drown indefinitely.

  No one could dangle between life and death.

  A man, a strange man, was suddenly at my bedside. Maybe he’d walked up and I’d been so deep inside myself I hadn’t seen. Maybe I’d been too focused on the empty—or was it full—ice eyes that were focused on me.

  I didn’t see him until he was there, right there beside me. He was tall, thin, spindly. Nice sweater. Expensive. Glasses that made me want to say the word spectacles. Because those distinguished people wore spectacles. And he was distinguished, with his fancy sweater and combed hair and his hooked nose. And his spectacles.

  His eyes, magnified by glass, focused on me. They were kind. But a cold type of kind, detached.

  Then he looked down.

  In slow motion, I did the same, as cold and dry fingers attached themselves to my wrist. Gentle but firm. They stayed there for a second. Or more. I didn’t have quite a good grasp on time. It was slippery. Then the cold and dry grip was gone.

  His mouth moved.

  I was still underwater because I didn’t hear. Or maybe because my thundering heartbeat was drowning it out. Because it was coming, panic that was only dimmed. It was the deep breath before the dragon breathed fire. And it was fire in my throat and lungs as it came over me, the reality. I was out of my safe space. In a stranger’s house. With a stranger’s hands on me. With an assassin’s eyes on me.

  The outside world would swallow me up, but not before setting me on fire first.

  And then there was pain, a small prick compared to the burning, but it followed with a cooling sensation.

  “Cotton candy,” I managed to murmur as I settled my gaze on the syringe exiting my arm.

  It was empty.

  That was nice.

  Whatever was in it was now in me, and it was nice.

  No more immediate fire. It was saved for later. But later didn’t seem quite as urgent and terrifying anymore. In fact, a sleep would be nice. My eyes dreamily landed on those full-empty ones. The ice ones. But the ice felt warm now. And it followed me to my dreams, that ice.

  Him

  He closed the door quietly behind them, though he wasn’t sure why. There was no need for quiet, not with the cocktail of drugs she’d been administered. He found himself doing it anyway, and speaking in a soft tone as they walked down the hall.

  “You need to fix it,” he said. He commanded. He worked like that, not in questions or requests, in commands.

  His doctor looked at him sideways. “By it, you mean her, I’m assuming?”

  He nodded once, resisting the urge to clench his fist. Such a gesture would display emotion, weakness. He didn’t do that. Physical tics were one of the first tells of discomfort. Of lack of control. It was one of the first things he’d mastered.

  “Oliver, you cannot fix what she has,” Evan said, stopping at the front door.

  He glared at the man for using his name—not his real one, but still. Maybe he was as close as he could be with the doctor, who knew as much as he could know without Oliver having to take him out, but he didn’t like the familiarity in his tone. “You can. Give her a pill. Or a lot of them. Whatever it takes,” he said, voice cold, dangerous.

  The doctor—Evan—regarded him in that probing way that Oliver didn’t much like. “There is no pill for this. Not for the cause, at least,” he sighed. “Especially not at this stage. We can only keep her sedated. You’ve triggered an immense psychological episode by forcing a woman suffering agoraphobia from her home. Such things should never be done under duress, which is the only circumstance in which you work.” He eyed him. “Such things definitely shouldn’t be done in a matter of hours. Gradual exposure in addition to aggressive therapy and mood stabilizers are what’ve had the most success in phasing the agoraphobic back into the world. I’m not a psychologist, but she’s near comatose from the psychological trauma of this.” He sighed again. “There is no fix for her, not from me, or you. Whatever is the root cause of this, whatever she was hiding from, it’s found her. And it’s up to her whether she lets it devour her.”

  This time, Oliver did clench his fists, and he couldn’t control it. Nor could he control the reaction he was having to Evan’s words. Frustration, surely. Because he was infuriated at the things he couldn’t control. He eliminated such things, because they were threats.

  But he’d tried that with her. And he couldn’t do that.

  Instead, he’d brought her here. To his home. Most likely the one place she’d be safe from his client. But she wasn’t safe from him. His reaction was too emotional. Too uncontrollable. The mere clenching of his fist told him that.

  “Oliver,” Evan probed.

  He snapped his gaze to him. The man refused to flinch and held his eyes.

  “She needs to be committed,” he said.

  “Not an option,” Oliver hissed.

  Evan pursed his lips. “Well then, only time will tell,” he mused, knowing Oliver well enough to know there was no swaying him.

  Oliver closed the door behind the doctor when he left.

  “Only time will tell,” he repeated.

  Yes, it would. It would tell whether Evan had a patient to come back to, or if Oliver had another addition to his collection.

  4

  Elizabeth

  “Give her to me,” I demanded, sandpaper scratching at my throat.

  The doctor holding the small infant in his hands eyed me, coldly maybe. Or with pity. I couldn’t be sure. He was likely employed by Christopher.

  I wouldn’t have even been surprised if it was on Christopher’s command that the doctor made me carry around the child he’d murdered.

  It didn’t matter much now.

  Nothing mattered.

  My arms were boneless, but I outstretched them because I had no other choice if I wanted to keep breathing. That man had the whole world in his arms. My whole world. The silent and wasting world that could’ve flourished if not for the cruelness of fate.

  My weakness.

  “Give me my daughter,” I demanded, jerking my fingers to try to reach for her.

  He moved slowly, hesitantly, but he came toward me and laid the small bundle in my arms.

  She was tiny, and he’d been holding her as if she was as light as a feather. But the weight of her silent and lifeless body on my sweat-soaked chest made it impossible to breathe. Every time my heart beat underneath her silent one, pain radiated throughout me. If I could’ve given her my thundering and healthy heart and taken her silent and broken one, I would’ve. In an instant.

  I wished for it in that moment, more than anything. So hard that black spots danced in my vison.

  Wishes didn’t come true—so her heart stayed silent, and mine slowly shattered with every beat that wasn’t matched by hers.

  I stroked her curls, full and slightly damp, blood-streaked but perfect. A full head of hair my baby girl had. Thick already. If she had been granted the gift of life, instead of having it yanked from her, she would’ve been beautiful. Her skin was pale, blue, splotchy. Her eyes were closed, little mouth a rosebud, pursed, unmoving.

  She was frozen in her infancy, and she’d always b
e that. She had never been, except inside me. She only existed inside my womb, inside my heart. I was the only thing she knew of life. She was the only thing I knew of life too.

  And so I died, right there, right then. Cradling the little corpse of my daughter.

  Then hands pulled her from me. I strained to snatch her back.

  “No!” I screeched, trying to move, needing to. “You can’t take her from me. Give her back. Give her back!”

  But they didn’t.

  They took my daughter, and I never saw her again.

  I yanked myself up from the nightmare. Or dream. Both, maybe. My tongue was swollen, mouth dry. Breathing shallow. I didn’t even have the luxury of momentary ignorance in the space between unconsciousness and waking. I knew, before I woke, where I was.

  Or where I wasn’t.

  So it was only terror, pain, agony as I woke.

  The room was blurry, full of black spots. The foreignness of it all pulsated, taunting me like a living thing. The walls stared at me menacingly.

  I focused on a black spot far in the corner, the shape of a man, watching me with more intensity than the walls.

  “Why are you doing this?” I croaked. “Why didn’t you kill me?”

  There was silence from the man.

  “I don’t know,” he said finally.

  “I wish you had.”

  More silence, and the blackness crept back.

  “Maybe I do too,” he murmured.

  Or maybe that was my nightmare.

  Oliver

  Two Days Later

  “You need to give me a succinct education on her medication, how to administer it, and the range of scenarios and how to deal with them,” Oliver commanded, crossing his arms. He didn’t like the gesture; it betrayed weakness, humanness. He preferred everyone around him to have no question about his humanity.

  But he had no choice.

  Somehow, even though he’d been certain humanity and compassion were two things he was born without—among many—he found them. Slivers, really, nothing to fully grasp onto, nothing a human would marvel at. But enough.