Medicine Man (Page 69)

I would’ve felt a little awkward and suspicious about her regular calls, but I actually don’t. I never even asked her why she calls me.

I go to the window and press my nose on the glass, looking into the dark, rainy night. “I’m good. How’re you? How’s Heartstone?”

“It’s good. Not the same without you, though.”

I smile. “Ah, you’re sweet. Do you miss me?”

“Of course.”

“Maybe I should come back.”

“Oh God, no. You stay out there.”

I laugh. “Maybe we should do coffee. You should come to the city.”

I hear her chuckle. “Yeah, maybe.”

Then she goes quiet for a few seconds and I think that I’ve lost her. I look at the screen to confirm but nope, the call’s still on.

“Beth?” I speak into the phone, frowning. “Are you there?”

“Yes, I’m here. I’m sorry I…” She hesitates, and my heart picks up.

So far, in all our calls Beth has never hesitated. She’s usually very warm and friendly, motherly even. She asks me about my job, my therapy with Ruth, even about Sunday dinners with my family.

It’s a pretty light and nice conversation. And by the end of it, I’m both smiling and hurting. Some days the hurt outweighs the smile but that’s my problem. In my head, Beth is connected to him.

It suddenly hits me, though. That I can’t talk to her anymore. I can’t have these phone calls with her if I want to move on.

The truth is that the only reason I talk to her is because I want to hold on to him. I might even be hoping to hear something about him.

“Willow, I want to ask you something.”

My heart is in my throat, throbbing, pounding as I wait for her to ask her question. I have a feeling that today I’ll find out why she’s been calling me.

“Will you tell me what happened that day?”

My head drops, and I stare at my bare feet. I can’t bear to wear my bunny slippers anymore. They remind me of him. Of how he’d put them on my feet when he was cleaning me up and how he would ask me to keep them on when he was fucking me like he loved me.

“Why?” I whisper. “You’ve never asked me before.”

It’s true.

After The Incident, Beth called me into her office and told me that I needed to focus on getting better. She gave me the option to stay on, saying that she’d talk to my psychiatrist on the Outside, recommending it highly.

 Not once did she ask me why I attacked a doctor. I had a feeling she knew, though. I don’t know why she didn’t say anything.

Josie knew, too. We never said his name out loud in our sessions, though. I told her that I never wanted to go back to that place where I could become a danger to myself, no matter how heartbroken I was.

My mental health is mine and I need to do everything to protect it. Only I am responsible for it, no one else. Not even him.

But Heartstone is a small place. Things get out. Especially since the day after The Incident, he left and never came back. Not to mention, everyone knew of our more than usual number of meetings. I was the only one who saw the doctor-in-charge every other day in his office. The rest followed a routine.

And I thought we were being so smart under the guise of medicine.

A love fool.

Anyway, they brought in another replacement doctor who stayed until Dr. Martin was better enough to join us.

She sighs, bringing me back to the present. “I’m asking because I feel like what happened was, in some way, my fault.”

My head whips up. “What?”

“I knew, Willow. I knew you were spending time with him. I saw the way you looked at him and the way you acted around each other. It was my fault. I should’ve stopped it.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Her chuckle is sad. “He asked me the same thing. And I’m going to tell you the same thing I told him. I knew you were in love. By the time I found out, I knew it was too late. Maybe it was always too late. Maybe you were always in love with him.”

My heart’s beating so fast that I can’t breathe, let alone talk. “I… I wasn’t…”

I don’t know what I’m trying to say. Perhaps I’m trying to deny it.

“He tells me that I should’ve stopped it when I had the chance.”

 “S-Simon?”

“Yes and I should’ve. And that’s how I know what you are to him. Still.”

“What am I?”

“Something he wants but won’t let himself have.”

My knees completely give out and I have to grab onto the windowsill to not crash to the ground, instead of lowering myself to it like a dignified person.

But the thing is, my dignity is dead. It’s completely gone.

God, I’m pathetic.

I’m pathetic in that in all these months, this is when my heart has chosen to race. This moment. This is the moment my body has chosen to wake up from a long-time sleep. Goose bumps, flutters, the beginnings of a storm.

 “Willow? You there?”

I laugh, a short, jabbing sound. “I’m here.”

“Hon, I know –”

“Why did he leave? After that day. Why did he leave? Why didn’t he come back?”

I’m digging my nails on my bare knees, sitting on my ass, propped against the wall of my bedroom. I’m one step away from curling into a ball.

“You should ask him that,” she replies.

Something is starting to shatter into a million pieces. It’s not my heart. It can’t be. He already broke it. So maybe it’s my psyche.

Maybe this is how I’ll lose it. Third time is the charm, isn’t it?

Maybe I’ll call it The Simon Incident.

“No. I’m asking you.”

“He left because he was going through something and he thought he was doing the right thing.”

“Does that something have to do with Claire?”

Her sharp intake of breath doesn’t go unheard. “You know about Claire?”

“No,” I snap. “And that’s the problem. I don’t know anything. I don’t have the right to know anything, Beth. He never gave me the right.”

Maybe she is choked up with a ton of emotions of her own, as well, because I hear her swallow. “I’m not condoning what he did. But at the time, he thought leaving you was for the best.”

“For whom? Him or me? Because from what I remember I was drugged up and sedated and he wasn’t there.” I sniffle. “And you know what else? I still looked for him that morning. I woke up and I thought after everything he’d be there. He’d at least, talk to me. But no, I was wrong. He never came.”

I’m just about to break my skin; I can feel it. My nails are long and sharp, unlike they were when I was locked up at Heartstone.

Now, they are lethal.

“Do you know his mother was his father’s patient?” Beth says after a while.

“Yes,” I whisper.

I do. But not because he told me. It was Renn.

After everything happened and Simon left, she found a way to get the whole story. I didn’t ask her to. She said she couldn’t see me all broken up, so she at last got the help of her father’s assistant, like she told me she would. He told her everything there was to know about Simon. Including about Claire.

But when Renn tried to tell me about her, I refused to listen. I didn’t want to know. Whatever it is, it won’t change the fact that I love a man who thought I was a phenomenally tight fuck and nothing else.