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  In the end, Heather remained loyal to three women she believed had proven their devotion. Jeannie, Angie and Erin all maintained the open mindedness that was the ticket to a lifetime of her love and admiration.

  They each knew one another through Heather and she appreciated they had formed their own friendships from her introductions.

  Heather knew some women whose jealousy would have prevented such bonds; they were the same friends who no longer found themselves in her life. Heather saw envy as a toxic emotion that she rarely allowed to affect her own life and she was proud she had conquered at least one of the seven deadly sins.

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  She stiffened when she heard voices coming from the stairwell area. Feeling claustrophobic inside the car, she still hadn’t decided where to go. Glancing at her face in the rearview mirror, Heather saw the anxiety in her eyes.

  She put her hand to her hair and ran her fi ngers through a section that had fallen loose in her run for safety.

  Heather had always liked her long thick hair and the soft auburn waves that was her trademark feature. Her family bragged she had gotten the hair and mouth of the family but she wished she had gotten the perfectly straight white teeth or the fl awless, olive complexion.

  Those beautiful characteristics belonged to her sisters. She was grateful to have been blessed with the lips and hair that she hoped outweighed her fl aws.

  Heather thought about her older sister and about how different she looked from her and Jade. Lisa had been born a blonde while she and Jade arrived in the world as brunettes.

  The thoughts led to her little sister’s big pregnant belly and she remembered the night Jade discovered she was pregnant. Heather glanced quickly around the garage and made sure her locks were engaged. She knew, subconsciously, she was trying to create a comfortable setting for the barrage of memories that prepared to force themselves on her. Unable to fi ght the powerful images that assaulted her lately, all she had control of was how she received them.

  Heather remembered when she found out she was going to be an aunt. It was the evening of Valentine’s 70

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  Day and friends and family had come and gone after celebrating the day with Heather and the boys. Guests left for their own homes with plates of turkey and mashed potatoes and she had just begun to relax when Jade came running down the hallway in hysterics.

  “Come with me now, right now,” Jade had told Heather in a voice she would never forget. Her little sister’s expression had been intense; she had the rare look people got in their eyes when something surreal had unfolded before them. Immediately, Heather had jumped up from her lazy spot on the sofa and followed her little sister back to the bathroom she had apparently emerged from.

  Closing the door behind them, Jade had pointed Heather toward the sink. A pregnancy test sat on the edge and the older sister had grabbed at it greedily.

  Heather had only just begun to register the situation when Jade broke into the happiest cry she had ever seen.

  Slowly, the situation revealed itself and Heather realized she was going to become an aunt. Jade’s pregnancy test displayed a positive result with a pink strip clearly confi rming the presence of a fetus. Jade would become a mom for the fi rst time at the age of thirty-three.

  Heather sat in the car with her eyes still closed. She smiled at the irony that her sister would give birth at the same age that Jesus died. She didn’t know why the thought would occur to her at all since religion was nothing more than another horror story to her, but it did nonetheless.

  Jade had been recently divorced and never believed she would conceive a child. After several failed attempts 71

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  at pregnancy during her marriage, her little sister had decided she was infertile and that fact had led her down a dangerous road. Heather knew that once Jade looked into the eyes of her child, she would never again do anything to cause possible harm to herself. Things were different when you became a mom.

  During her divorce, Jade met Matt. He owned the bar she had begun to frequent and she latched onto him as any vulnerable, newly divorced woman would. Heather discovered he was an idiot sooner than her sister did but Jade had to learn on her own. Heather had never seen a more deceptive web of lies woven by one person. As the sisters came to realize that Matt deeply believed his own lies, Heather started to seriously question the man’s sanity. When his lies turned to betrayal and he cheated on his pregnant girlfriend with a classless hood rat from the trailer park he secretly frequented, Jade fi nally walked away.

  “I must be like four months pregnant, Heather,” Jade had told her with disbelief.

  Heather remembered how Jade had started pacing the short distance the bathroom fl oor offered.

  “How could I be four months pregnant but not have skipped one period? I haven’t had any symptoms at all, Heather!’

  “Why do you have to be four months pregnant?”

  Heather had asked as she nodded toward the test. “Jade, those things are accurate within like, the fi rst week of 72

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  pregnancy. You’re probably more like four weeks, if that.”

  “Nope,” Jade had answered adamantly.

  “What are you a doctor now?”

  “No, but I’m not an idiot either. I haven’t even seen Matt for four months,” she said.

  “What are you talking about? You haven’t been with anyone else?” Heather countered.

  “No!’

  “What do you mean?” Heather had asked her, confused.

  “What do you mean, what do I mean? I haven’t done it, had sex, hid the salami,” Jade answered sarcastically.

  She started making graphic hand motions and facial expressions when she ran out of sexual phrases.

  “Okay, gross, I get it,” Heather relented. “Well, you’re wrong. You must have done it and you don’t remember.”

  Jade had stopped pacing and simply stared at Heather, puzzled.

  “Don’t remember?” Jade asked. “What kind of life do you lead that you think that’s normal?”

  Though a small smile marked the younger sister’s question with innocent humor, Heather remembered biting her lip and turning red.

  “Don’t remember,” Jade repeated amused as she shook her head back and forth.

  “Then, you’re four months pregnant and you just didn’t know!’ Heather had retorted as she threw back a hand gesture of her own.

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  Heather remembered Jade looking down at her stomach and back up into her eyes. She had never seen her little sister quite so happy and she hoped their family would come to accept the pregnancy in time. Unmarried parents were judged harshly among the maternal clan.

  “What made you get the test anyway? I can’t believe you didn’t even tell me you suspected,” Heather had asked.

  “I didn’t,” Jade had answered. “I had a dream.”

  “What kind of dream?”

  “Something visited me and told me I was pregnant.”

  “Something?” Heather recalled squawking.

  “I don’t know,” Jade stammered. “A ghost or an angel or something.”

  “Um, I don’t know what to say to that,” Heather had responded gently, unable to hide her smile.

  “You don’t understand, Heather. It was so real.”

  Jade had spoken with animation, narrating with hand gestures and expression changes.

  “He said I was going to have a baby and that I needed to protect my child at any cost,” she said.

  “Wow, Jade. You dreams are much clearer than mine.

  My guests barely even speak English.”

  Heather remembered wanting to ask Jade if she had a progesterone imbalance and deciding against it. She hadn’t wanted her sister to take the question wrong. Both of them had become accustomed to the strange and the inexplicable but they always shared the experiences with 74

 
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  each other. The dream of a visitor had been the fi rst time Jade didn’t go to Heather and share her worries.

  Heather pulled herself out of the reverie and looked around the garage for bad guys. She smoked the last drag of her cigarette and threw it out the narrow window crack of her driver’s door. Her heart almost stopped beating when someone pounded on the back window.

  She jumped so high in her seat that she hit her head on the roof above her. Instinctively, she raised her hand to rub out the pain that was spreading through her temples.

  She turned her gaze toward the source of pounding and her blood ran cold when she saw nobody was there.

  Heather’s gaze darted toward each door lock and she tried to reassure herself she was safe. She pressed her face to the glass and tried to look down in her attempt to see if someone had hidden below window level. Again, she saw nothing.

  Deciding not to waste another moment investigating the situation, Heather peeled out of the garage. She heard the crunch that cars make when their transmission is thrown roughly into reverse and she tore through the private lot without hesitation. There was only one person for her to see right then.

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  Chapter 5

  Live to Tell

  Heather walked into her psychiatrist’s offi ce and looked around as she did at the beginning of every session. It was only in Dr. Angel’s offi ce that she followed the same routine every week.

  Her eyes always landed on the Candy Land game that lived on the corner shelf. Of all the board games on display, it was the one that always stole her attention fi rst.

  Heather chalked it up to the fact that she often immersed in the land of candy and fairies as a child.

  At the sight of the familiar beige couch, a small sigh escaped her lips. It was her safe place. She sat on the sofa, picked up the leather pillow and hugged it tightly to her chest. Throughout the next fi fty minutes, the cool cushion would give her something to grab onto if discussions got intense.

  Heather assumed her doctor appreciated her new habit more than her old one. Before the pillow squeezing, she would tear his Kleenex to shreds and leave the messy remnants all over his fl oor. Heather spent the fi rst 76

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  few years staring ahead during diffi cult conversations, unfazed as hundreds of tiny pieces were left scattered at her feet.

  She often worried about how crazy she appeared to him. Though she knew intellectually that the two of them were the only ones in the room, she still suffered anxiety that others might be listening to her biggest secrets. Visions of men in white coats rushing in after she fi nally voiced some devastating revelation sometimes kept her quieter than she wanted to be. Heather feared, somewhere in the back of her mind, that she’d wake up to an afternoon of basket weaving at the local crisis center. Her fears were part of the reason she so often held back when she really wanted to let it out.

  Her doctor had long legs that ended in the shiniest shoes she’d ever seen. He stood about six feet tall and Heather viewed their height difference as four added inches of protection within their little unit. Try as he did to keep his dark, tousled hair on top of his head, it always fell onto his forehead during sessions. Heather thought it was cute and that it only added to his already massive character.

  His shoes were sometimes black and sometimes brown but they were always so well cared for. They often became her focus when she found it diffi cult to make eye contact. Dr. Angel wore a dress shirt under his vest, exposing only the sleeves and the collar. Heather imagined his closet was in perfect order. His entire presence was both tidy and gentle and his thin build gave 77

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  him an added touch of gentility. Her doctor’s prominent nose gave away his Jewish heritage.

  Heather loved him for the role he played in her life. She thought of her psychiatrist as the most powerful person she had ever known because of the information and knowledge she had shared with him. In some ways, she felt as though he knew her better than she knew herself.

  In worse ways, she felt as though their ten years together still had never revealed who she truly was. He rarely got to see her everyday humor or view her professionalism or witness the mother she was to her boys and she wanted him to know the things he still didn’t see.

  Heather sat back against the couch and reached her arm out to the table at her right. There sat the perpetual box full of Kleenex that she often assaulted during sessions. She never knew when their discussions would turn emotional and she fi gured it was better to have Kleenex in hand and not need it than have it the other way around. The last thing she needed was for her session to be interrupted by a sudden rush of snot and tears running down her face and nothing to wipe them away with.

  After a decade of visits to Dr. Angel, the two were still attempting to recover Heather’s lost memories. It had been a long and tedious process where she had to learn to stop focusing solely on what she couldn’t remember and place the focus on the things that she did recall. They were also attempting to repair the important developmental stages she had managed to skip. Wise beyond her years in some 78

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  ways, Heather was no more advanced than a two year old in other ways.

  Her memories only came to her in bits and pieces.

  Like a movie with no real order and missing entire scenes, recollection wasn’t an easy task. Faces were unclear and details were muddied. The only things that remained clear were the feelings attached to the memories. It was all she had to prove that, however convoluted, the memories were still real.

  Heather had located Dr. Angel, the only psychotherapist left in her city, through her health insurance manual. After years wasted visiting different psychiatrists, Heather had begun amusing herself with their stupid questions and their gullibility.

  After a couple of years with Angel, however, Heather began to trust in the fi eld of psychology again. For his continued involvement in her life and his willingness to work with her on so many levels, she tried hard to remain an honest patient who remained open to healing.

  Heather’s mother had begun sending her to therapy after an attempted kidnapping when she was seventeen years old. Her mom had always blamed Heather for putting herself into bad situations and Heather struggled against the theory that her victimization was always her own fault.

  The night a stranger tried to throw her into the back of his car and take her away, Heather lost the innate faith most people have in the next person. Her mother had made Heather feel as though the attack were somehow 79

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  her own fault. Had Heather not been so sneaky, perhaps such things wouldn’t happen to her.

  She knew she had placed herself on the side of the interstate that night. She made the decision to sneak out and go with friends to the beach against her mother’s orders. What she refused to accept was that the result of her decision was the normal consequence of a wayward teenager. Because of their different outlooks, even more problems fl ourished in her and her mom’s already unstable relationship.

  The kidnapping wasn’t the fi rst time Heather was the victim of random violence and it wasn’t her last. Her bizarre string of bad luck and her willingness to plunge herself into unsafe situations led to a lifetime of near fatalities. It had also convinced Heather she had some kind of invisible warrior on her side. Somehow, she always managed to come out of the horrifi c situations mostly unscathed.

  Aside from bad nerves and mild conspiracy theories, Heather prided herself on the normalcy she was able to fi nd for herself. She had even managed to turn her potential mental health issues into a career. Each time she helped save a child, she saved the scared little girl inside herself.

  Heather’s frightening experiences provided her with defense mechanisms that allowed her to live her life rather than crumble into a drooling nutcase. Unfortunately, the defense mechanisms had become a problem of th
eir own. Heather’s ability to numb out the bad had gotten 80

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  confused and she had begun to numb out the good as well. Her ability to remain strong in the face of fear came from her ability to separate herself from reality and while it saved her in some ways, it destroyed her in others.

  She had begun to disassociate at a very young age and had found, to her dismay, she was unable to stop doing so as an adult. Dr. Angel said it was a healthy and effective defense mechanism designed to survive trauma but that it was also her biggest downfall. Heather’s defenses forced her to live in the world she created rather than the one that really existed and that had become unacceptable to her. Despite the dangers that often found her, Heather’s biggest fears were not of the world outside of her.

  She was her own worst enemy at times and often resisted identifying the origins of her problems. The scared kid inside didn’t want to locate, much less defeat, her childhood demons. Because of her subconscious fears, she often maintained continuous chaos and it stalled their work together.

  She looked across the room at her doctor and immediately tried to assess his mood. Hyper-vigilance was a long-time habit of hers that stemmed from her need to maintain awareness of all anger levels around her.

  Heather couldn’t open up to anyone whom she couldn’t read.

  She had come to not only trust Dr. Angel but to idealize him as well. She maintained complete faith in his words and looked at him as though he had all of the answers.

  He didn’t see the unwavering trust as being necessarily 81

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  healthy and he often challenged her to become angry with him. She still refused to after ten years. She would never expose him to her rage lest she lose him forever.

  Nobody in her life understood Heather’s relationship with her doctor. She could never explain how much she appreciated his ability to guide her through answers and maintain boundaries. He had the rare ability to give guidance rather than direct the progression of the therapy himself. She couldn’t imagine there was anything her doctor could say to her that she wouldn’t believe wholeheartedly.