CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
"He's been demanding to see you, Dr. Violet."
I stared at Christopher as he spoke. When his lips moved it revealed his crooked teeth. They played peek-a-boo with his lips.
"Are you listening to me, Dr. Violet?"
I coughed and met his gaze. "Sure."
Christopher's gaze narrowed. "I'm not sure what's going on, but Aaron Whitman has acted completely erratic since he woke up from whatever testing you and Dr. Wintrone did day before yesterday. He seems to be back in one of his lows."
I hadn't been in yesterday. For the first time since I arrived down in Ward Z, I took a day off. A Wednesday. Or rather a day and half. I had run out of Ward Z after the MEI testing on Aaron. My feet had carried me out of the ward and into the cold. Into the wilderness that surrounded the hospital. When I finally managed to claw my way out of my thoughts, it had been dark on Tuesday night, and I'd been laying somewhere amongst the trees beyond my house, staring up into the canopy of trees overhead, my iPod playing the song. His song. The stars had been barely visible. They played peek-a-boo with me in the darkness, much like Christopher's teeth behind his lips. They swirled and danced just like the inkblot had.
Richard had been out in the cold wilderness of Silent River too. He found me. He leaned over me, peering down at me with that concerned expression he wore more often lately. There hadn't been any judgment there either as he helped me up and walked me home. He didn't look at me when he drew me a bath and helped me in. I'd been shivering, deathly cold. Numb. I fell asleep in the bath and when I woke up the water was cold and Richard was gone.
"Lows?" My mind went back to his file, his diagnosis of bipolar disorder with manic depressive lows and equally manic, happy highs. "Erratic how?"
"From the moment he woke up yesterday, he's been throwing a tantrum. His face, his hands, his feet, they're all cut up and bleeding all over the place."
"Bleeding?"
"He's been yelling and screaming, banging his face against the wall. Dr. Wintrone forced him into his chains, but he fought it." He ran a hand of the sparse hair on his head, looking weary. "I've never seen anyone try to fight it before, not like that. Not even Aaron, when he's had these episodes before."
"What are you talking about?"
"He fought tooth and nail to keep from being chained to the chair. The chains twisted, I thought it was going to break his leg or something."
"Did it?" I asked.
"Did it what?"
"Break his leg?" My voice was even, bland, emotionless. I felt nothing, but I imagined it, the sound it would make. The snap of bone, the rip of flesh. There was something satisfying about it.
"No. Dr. Wintrone checked him out. Leg seems to be fine as far as he can tell. Aaron won't let us treat him for the other injuries." He paused, suspicion covered his face. "I've never seen him this deep in a low, Dr. Violet, and I've been here since his arrival, when they brought him in bleeding, fighting, and spitting."
I chewed the inside of my lip. "What has he been saying?"
"He's been demanding to see you, like I said." He shook his head, as if I was dense.
"That's all. Nothing else? He hasn't said anything about anything or anyone else?"
Christopher sighed. "No. He won't take any drugs that would help subdue him. He hasn't slept either."
"Hmm." I tried to feel something about the words Christopher spoke. I tried to feel worried about my patient, but I felt nothing. Something numb had taken over me and hadn't left since I ran out of that room where the images of Ruby and their red love had painted everything.
Christopher looked at me expectantly, for a moment I wondered what was he could want from me? Then I remembered. "I'll meet with him and see what I can do."
"Good." He pressed a file into my hand and I realized it was Aaron's file. The one I had pored over, what seemed like hundreds of times.
When I stood before Aaron's room and pressed my hand against the tab to gain entrance, I felt nothing. The typical excitement, fear, lust – it didn't exist inside me anymore.
"Where the fuck is she?!" The strain of his yell was hoarse, raspy, as if he had indeed been yelling for hours. "Where is that fucking bitch? I want—" But he stopped when he saw me.
The sight of him made me pause just inside the room. He was shackled to the wall this time. The other place a patient could be confined if needed, though I had never used it before. He bled from his hands, from his face, and his feet, just as Christopher said, dried in dark brown rivulets on the stark white wall. Aaron's nose was so swollen it looked broken, like he had slammed it against something. A glance around the room revealed a myriad of different, blood-splattered options. The walls were covered with knuckle prints. I could see it in my mind, him slamming his fists against the wall over and over, his face. Pain radiated from my hands and my nose, empathetic pains. Aaron's feet were bare, a dried pool of blood at his feet. Shackled there with his back against the stark white wall, with dark blood staining the white linen of his clothes and splattered all around him and the black ink in his skin - he looked like some sort of fairy tale demon. A lurid nightmare. A black hole of violent tragedy. The script purgatory on his face literally dripped with gore. And yet I still felt nothing. I waited for the horror to envelop me, to consume me. I waited for the ache that would accompany my knowledge of his self-mutilation, but it never came.
His gray eyes were darker than normal, almost completely black. Nearly matching the dark bags underneath his eyes. "How nice of you to fucking show up, Violet." The scorn in his voice made me smile. I couldn't explain it, but my lips curled in the corners. "You feel pretty good about yourself, don't you?"
I moved inside, standing before him, but I didn't respond. The momentary bout of happiness was the first thing I'd felt in the last few days and I wanted to ride that feeling as long as I could.
"You had no business digging around in my head like that!" He shouted the words at me, seething. A vein pulsed in his temple. For once he wasn't tapping his fingers. There was no humming. Instead his hands were squeezed tightly into fists.
"Why have you been hurting yourself, Aaron?" I pulled my pen from the pocket of my coat and flipped open his file.
"Fuck you!"
"That's not a very nice thing to say Aaron."
"Oh, yeah? You think so? You didn't mind it when you were finger fucking yourself every night pretending it was me."
I cleared my throat. "I don't know what you're talking about." I'd never seen him like this before. Erratic. Angry. Violent. Sure, his file boasted of all these things, but I'd never seen them – not like this.
"Aaron, words are a weapon, but they can't hurt anyone here."
"They can't?" He laughed, the sound was hoarse, strained. "That's where you're wrong, words can create and destroy anything. You know that, Violet. You know it better than anyone."
I didn't take the time to ponder his words. "I suggest you calm down. Christopher informed me that you haven't slept, and have refused to take any medication that might help calm you. This is a concern for—"
"A concern for you? For you? Is it? You don't give a shit about me."
"I'm here to help you, Aaron."
"Then what was the point of that?"
"The point of what?"
"Fuck!" He jerked at his chains, the silver bracelets slid through the blood on his wrists. The vein in his temple seemed to bulge more. "Of making me relive all that shit? Or digging around in my fucking head and watching my private memories."
"It's all in the name of science, Aaron."
He spit in my face. "You're a crazy bitch, you know that?" He paused. Blood and spit dripped down his chin. "She's mine, you know. She's my memory." His voice grew quiet. "She's my Ruby. Mine." He leaned forward. "You've fucked up, Violet. You made a mistake. You've ruined everything." He shook his head. His gaze more twitchy than normal. "Things were supposed to be different. You were supposed to be different."
I felt it then. Hurt. I wiped my eyes, removing the spit, the blood. The hurt pressed through the numb bubble I'd existed in for the last day and a half. "I don't know what you're talking—"
"Shut up!" His words cut through the air silencing me. "You were supposed to be different, Violet. I felt it the first day you walked into my room. It wormed around inside me, when you sat across from me with your fucking wavy blond hair and your eyes somewhere between blue and…" His voice trailed off. He swallowed. "Between blue and violet. My one letter away. My Violet. That was you. That was supposed to be you. I can read people Violet. I learned my lesson the hard way, but you know that don't you. You saw my memory. The one where my mother left me behind, didn't you?"
I looked away. I couldn't meet his bloodshot gaze anymore.
"You saw her leave me behind, like the fucking drugged-out piece of shit she was. You saw her discard me to the cold. The fucking winter, Violet. You saw her leave me to die under a fucking bridge with a shirt and coat that were too small." He vibrated his fists against the wall, trying to slam them but the electronic chains stopped him. "She taught me the most valuable lesson I've ever learned. That you have to pay attention, you have watch, understand people, their actions. It's their actions that speak, not their words. Words can create and destroy, if you let them, Violet. That's their power, but only if you let them. Actions are everything. People forget that. They cling to words and are disappointed too often."
I stared down at my hand, at the wrinkles around my knuckles.
"My mother had left me alone before, in our shithole apartment. But at least it was warm, warmer that the fucking Detroit winter. She would stay gone for weeks, but she would always come back and she would tell me she loved me, and I would forgive her." His voice cracked. "Every time." He paused. "Fucking look at me, Violet. You didn't mind watching my memories, so I will be damned if you stand here and cower now."
Unbidden my gaze met his. Black, darkness, it seemed to stretch on for eternity in his irises. Irises surrounded by busted capillaries where the whites of his eyes should have been. Black and red. Black and red. Black and red.
"I believed her that time, when she said she would come back." He sucked in a deep breath. "She always came back, Violet. Always. But not this time. She never came back." His voice cracked. "She left me out there with the cold and the rain and the monsters that wait out in the dismal parts of the world. She left me out there to be destroyed, to die." His eyes turned glassy. "I trusted her words. And look where it got me – fucking homeless. Raped by men, bigger and stronger than me."
"Stop." I couldn't listen to it anymore.
"Stop? You want me to stop now? That's exactly what I said to them, to those men. I begged them to stop. But do you think they did?" He laughed now, the sound was dry, choked on the end. "They didn't. But I guess you already knew that didn't you? Did it make you happy when I cried for her, the woman that had abandoned me to that fate? Did it?"
"Aaron, please." My head swam. The numbness had receded like it had never existed.
"I never relive those memories. The last moments with her, or right after. Not often. But you made me do that the other day. You made me relive some of the most fucked up moments of my life, when love failed me." He cleared his throat. The bit of emotion leaving his damaged face. "But back to you. When you walked in, I knew you. I knew you were different. My Violet. Your actions, your movements. The flush on your skin. The way you fidgeted with you hair. It became everything. Everything. You were my key. You breathed life back into me. Life I hadn't had in a long time." He sighed. "Life I'm not sure I've ever had, not exactly." He paused. "And that made it worse – that you were different, more somehow."
Ache, it bloomed inside me with each passing word.
"I have always relied on actions, since that day my mother left me in the cold and never came back. Character is actions. But with you, I did something I haven't done since my mother. I trusted you. From the moment you walked through that door, you were mine."
I sucked in a breath, feeling the heat of tears behind my eyes.
Don't you cry, Adeline.
"I had to know, Aaron."
"Had to know what? How fucked up I am? Is that what you wanted? You wanted to see it with your own eyes? Well how does it feel, Violet?" He attempted to stretch his arms wider. "How do you like it? How do you like Aaron Whitman? The little boy who was raped and abused?" He shook his arms, the chains rattled, his voice loud taking up all the space in the room. "Huh? How do you fucking like him?"
"I had to know what she was like, Aaron. I had to know." I pressed the folder against my chest. Aaron's folder. It bent awkwardly against my breasts.
"Ruby." He said her name with a reverence that slashed through me.
"Yes."
"She was everything to me, Violet. Everything." He released the tight hold on his fists, letting them relax. "She was mine, Violet, and then she died. Just like that. Just like she had never existed at all. She was gone, and it was my fault."
"It wasn't your fault, Aaron. You couldn't help what happ—"
"Shut up. You don't know anything. You think that just because you saw into my mind for a few minutes that you understand what Ruby and I had? That you understand the complexities of my life before I landed here in the fucking shithole mental hospital?" His hands were fists again. "You don't know anything. You're nothing. You've always been nothing." He smiled then, that cruel smile that didn't reach his eyes. His teeth were crimson stained, like the rest of him. "I made a mistake. These white walls made me soft, Violet. I almost forgot who I am."
"Who you are." I repeated.
"I'm Aaron Whitman. I'm a monster. I let them scream. I have no mercy on anyone who stands in my way. I'm a murderer. An image that proves that hope has never existed. Hope isn't real. Life is a figment, a moment that can be snatched away. Actions define who you are – and I'm nothing but gore and violence. A nightmare."
"You weren't always that way." I thought of his file again of Dr. Smith's words.
I may be wrong to make this assumption, but it seems that he had been in a state of this "manic low" for sometime before brought to Silent River, which would explain his volatile actions during that time.
"This is just an episode, Aaron. A manic low. That's all it is. That's what controlled your actions then and it's what is controlling your actions now." It all made sense, really. It had made sense all along, but I hadn't been able to connect it. I hadn't physically seen him in this mania, this low - simultaneously. I had tried to find the driving need behind him, behind why he did the terrible things that landed him here – but now I knew. He couldn't help it, he was a victim of his own mind – that perfect brilliant mind of his. It turned on him when triggered.
"You don't fucking know me!" he shouted, pressing hard against the chains. He took a deep breath and relaxed back against the wall. "But there is something you should know, Violet."
I swallowed. "Aaron—"
"I'm getting out of here, Violet." His gaze bore into mine. "I'm getting out of this place. I'm leaving here." He started to chuckle. "And you're going to be fucking sorry you ever existed. You're going to regret ever being a doctor. A human."
Something inside me faltered. "I just needed to know, Aaron. I—"
"You made me relive things I have pushed to the back of my mind. All the heartache, the happiness – the moments that changed me for the better and for the worse. Don't you understand that? You hurt me – no one fucking hurts me and gets away with it."
"But Aaron—"
"You know your pretty face, Violet? The smooth perfect features, your flawless skin? I'm going to mutilate it so the whole world knows about the demon that lives inside you." His laugh grew louder, his eyes crinkling as he spoke. "I'm going to break your soul, Violet. I'm going to run it through a shredder, your soul, your body – everything that makes you, you. Until you beg for me to save you. Until you beg for my love. My affection. My body." His bloody teeth gleamed in the light. "I'll consume you. You'll hate me. You'll love me. You'll want only me." He paused, his laughter dying out slowly. "And all I'll have to give you is pain. Pain like you've caused me."
Something hit me, all of the sudden, triggered by his words. His anger. The truth about what his memories revealed. They all seemed to slam together in a cataclysmic moment.
"Stop! Just stop!" I threw his folder at him, it bounced off his chest, and slammed my fists on either side of his body. I jerked my arms out of my doctor's coat, letting it fall in a heap by the folder.
Memory of all those nights I watched him on the camera. Flashed into my head. Our interlude, in his room, on his bed. Hot, wet tears tracked down my cheeks. I hated them. The feeling. The hurt. It shouldn't hurt like this. I shouldn't love Aaron Whitman. I shouldn't have been drawn to his brilliant mind. I knew he had a sickness, being bipolar. I knew his lows, coupled with his mania would be incredibly deep and dark, at least that's what his file had said. I had drug him down there, to that darkness in his mind. I was the reason. I had drudged up all the pain he had bottled up inside him. Yet somehow I still let his words hurt me. I still let them funnel down beneath my skin until I wanted to scream. Until I wanted to hurt him even more.
I reached forward and traced my hands roughly down the front of the stained shirt he wore. My fingers slipped along the dried blood that had dripped down his neck and onto the coarse material. I pressed hard against the sinewy muscles underneath.
He sucked in a breath and I remembered his intake of breath when he'd been on top of me just across the room on his bed.
"I'm going to be inside you, Violet. Over and over and over until there's nothing left of either of us. Until your skin bleeds and you're nothing with me or without me. Until you're everything."
It didn't matter what came after those words. It mattered that he said them.
"Until you're everything."
I'm everything.
I could feel it, that something inside me that let go, like a hand releasing its tight hold. Something inside me broke, like a record that just couldn't play right, a scratch on a CD, a bat to a TV.
"I've never wanted anyone the way I want you, Aaron. That's why I did it. That's why I looked inside your mind." The crusted blood on his shirt made the material feel thicker. Dense. "I had to know. You understand that, needing to know." I paused. "Needing to see your past. I had to see it." The tears continued to track down my face. "I-I'm sorry." I meant those words for him on multiple levels. I was sorry that I'd hurt him as a person – but I was also sorry that I had hurt him as my patient. I'd forced him down deeper into his mental illness. I had triggered it. This was my fault. All of it.
Suddenly I needed him. I needed him to want me. To tell me he wanted me. That he loved me – that I was everything. I needed his approval, his forgiveness. I wanted to hear him talk about Green Eggs and Ham, the sun, the moon, love, violence, tragedy, happiness, murder, deception, his hopes, his dreams. I wanted to hear all the things – to feel them with my hands, my soul. I took my hands off him and reached up, freeing my hair from its loose bun.
I needed to know what he felt like from the inside. I throbbed deep down within, in the most intimate places. I throbbed for Aaron. The tears continued to flow as I shifted my black pencil skirt up my hips. He didn't say anything. Aaron's twitchy gaze missed nothing. The black panties I wore underneath drew the first sound out of him. It was a snarl. A ravaged sound.
Aaron had never seen my body. I had seen his many times, but the camera didn't work both ways. Even that night alone in his room he hadn't seen me without them. My body was new to him.
I expected him to say something. He didn't. He chewed on his lips. His gaze glued to panties.
"I've wanted you all this time." The words were soft from my lips. They hung there between us, heavy, full. I stared down at his pants. The thin white fabric hardly concealed the length of him. "I'm sorry." I touched him through the fabric. I didn't know what this apology was for – for hurting him, for digging around in his mind, or for touching him while he hung restrained and bloody against a wall.
"Violet." He said my name as if it was a plea – but for what?
I stared up at him. I watched as the emotions battled, there in his irises. Hate. Love. Understanding. Violence. It was a beautiful thing to witness – this inner war of the mind.
"I'm going to destroy you." The words didn't hold the same anger as before. They were lost somewhere between all those emotions.
"You already have." The tears continued to flow down my face as I got down on my knees.
He said things, words now. But I didn't hear them. I was somewhere else far away as I pulled down the bloody pants he wore. I could smell the copper of his blood and the detergent on his clothes, together it made a stale flowery scent.
He was beautiful here, up close. I'd seen him before, but through a screen. His thick length seemed bigger in the flesh. In spite of all the blood and violence that covered the rest of him, he was pristine here, not a speck of blood or ink had touched it. A blank canvas. I had thought about this before when I was alone, when I touched the intimate parts of myself. Would the sounds he made be different from the moans he made on the camera when he touched himself? I wanted to know.
I took him into my mouth. I stared up into his bloody gaze. Something terrifying stared back, something demonic and twisted. Black and red. Reckless. Deranged.
He said things, he spoke words, but I still didn't hear them. I couldn't. I wouldn't. I had to have this. I needed it. I needed him to see, to feel, all of it, the way I did.
Until something did break through.
"Adeline."
My name. He spoke my name.
I pulled back. "What?"
"Let me go, Adeline." The words were cold, dry, empty.
"Adeline?" He'd never called me that. Never. Not once in the months I'd been his doctor. I'd always been his Violet. His one letter away.
Now I was here before him. Just the two of us. On my knees with him inside me. Aaron Whitman. I was fixing my mistake.
"Look at me." But he didn't. His gaze was lost somewhere over my shoulder.
"Adeline," he repeated my name, but he still didn't look directly at me.
"Look at me, Aaron. Please."
"Adeline." Monotone. No feeling, no emotion. As if I wasn't there before him, on my knees. As if he hadn't been inside me just moments before.
"No." I shook my head. "No." I rocked back on my heels. "No."
"Adeline."
And then I was back there. Back on the broken pavement of Wuthering Lane.
"Adeline? You ready?"
I looked over at Maria, my best friend. She sat on her pink Huffy bike, with shiny pink streamers on the handles. The same bike I asked for last Christmas, but didn't get. Instead I had this one. I looked down at my old scuffed-up red bike. It wasn't fair. Maria hadn't even asked for a new bike. I did. She didn't even like pink that much. Orange was her favorite color. Orange. Not pink.
She got the pink bike though with the sparkly streamers that she didn't even want. I actually needed a new bike. My old one was too small. When I opened my present I found this one. This red, old, scuffed up bike. It didn't even have any streamers, just plain black handles, the rubber almost completely peeled off one.
Maria had the bike I dreamed about all year. She sat on it just feet away.
"You ready to go down the hill again?"
We'd been doing it all day, riding down the hill and then back up again. Over and over. The tops of my thighs throbbed. Our street was something of an anomaly, a downward descent from the rest of the street down into a dead-end cul-de-sac. The hill sloped down to just two houses. Mine and Maria's. Not many people liked the area, claiming danger if a motorist lost control, not just for the driver by for those of us who lived at the bottom of the hill.
I didn't mind the hill. It was the best for bike riding – Maria agreed with me. I stared at her bike. The breeze caught the streamers, causing them to sparkle in the afternoon sun. The spokes on the wheels shone a shiny silver, still looking brand new, even though Christmas was several months ago.
"Adeline?"
I blinked and met her gaze. "What?"
"What's wrong? You ready?"
I nodded.
"Yippee!" she shouted as she took off.
I followed behind her. The pink of her shorts were darker than the pink of the bicycle seat. I had always thought it strange that one color could have so many shades. How could they both be pink if they were both so different? The pink on her shorts was too dark. The pink on the seat was light, pretty, perfect.
Life isn't fair.
I heard the rumble of the car engine behind me about halfway down the hill. No one ever came this way – only our parents for the most part.
I pumped my legs, moving them out of coasting mode. A few pumps and I'd caught up to Maria. She looked over at me and laughed. Her small teeth glinted in the sun, just like the streamers on her bike. The bike I wanted so badly.
Happy. That's what she was. Maria was happy. Her bike was pink and her mom and dad didn't fight all the time. Not the way my parents did. They loved her. They loved her so much they bought her the pink Huffy bike I wanted.
Nobody loved me.
The engine rumbled closer. Too close.
I reached for Maria. My opal butterfly ring glinted in the sunlight. She hadn't noticed the car. Hadn't heard the rumble. She laughed, with her mouth spread wide, but I couldn't hear the sound over the engine. She reached out her hand for mine. We'd done this before. Numerous times. Linking hands as we coasted down the hill like some sort of circus act. We imagined we rode matching unicycles on parallel tight ropes that dangled us over a precipice of nets far below. We survived every time. Never a fall. The crowd would go wild.
I didn't take her hand this time. I reached beyond her grasp and shoved against the pink shirt that matched her shorts.
It happened all at once and yet, in slow motion.
One moment Maria had been laughing all the way down Wuthering Lane on her pretty pink Huffy bike and the next she was dead. Dead was too simple a word, I decided. Too simple for the sound she made when the car hit her. She didn't have time to scream, and if she did, I didn't hear it because the engine was too loud.
It was the sound of her bones snapping, and breaking, crushed under the old steel truck, red like my bicycle. Her face had twisted in fear, in pain, the smile gone from her lips. Even after it was over, her hand still extended toward me, lifeless and limp on the ground.
Yet what stood out the most was the pink Huffy bicycle, all bent and twisted from the impact, scuffed up worse than mine. It wasn't really pink anymore either, but red now, like mine. A different shade of red. Darker, but still red. The sparkly streamers were muted, unable to blow in the breeze, too wet, sticky.
Maria's happiness was gone. Something inside me soared.
"Adeline."
I blinked, but there was no solace to be found. My eyes burned.
"Adeline."
Someone stumbled out of the old red truck, cans rolling out onto the cracked pavement. Feet under the truck door – worn brown boots unlaced – were all I could see, but I recognized them. I knew them. Daddy's boots.
"Adeline."
Daddy's hands fumbled with mine.
"Adeline."
There was something desperate about his touch, but I couldn't look at him. I tried to look up, tried to meet his gaze, but I couldn't. I was trapped somehow staring down at his bumbling hands over the cracked pavement. They danced, they twisted.
"Adeline!"