Sessions I

I was going to finish editting and post the E/Serra conversation today, but I had an inspiration sometime during the night. I want to post Fyre's backstory at some point. So, why not do it in a story? But, Fyre doesn't talk about herself. So, how to force her to do that? Well, how about putting her in therapy? It works for everyone else. I like to write, and often read things written in, first person, but, again, Fyre doesn't talk about herself. So, I sort of forced her, and we get to listen in, a little. Possibly the first in a series.

She enters the office with trepidation. She’d been here before and knew what to expect. It didn’t help. She’d met Dr. Connors and he struck her as sort of bland. Fifyish, nice looking, but not too good-looking. It looked as though he’d been put together entirely to blend in, not to intimidate. Her mother always said, “Don’t look intimidated, and you won’t be intimidated.” Like most of her mother’s advice, that wasn’t helping her much now.

She knows the “therapists” at Valley View shouldn’t reflect on anyone else in the mental health field. Shouldn’t. So why does she feel like she's going to have a heart attack since the moment she’d stepped into the waiting room?

“This is a bad idea,” she announces from the doorway, without planning to say it out-loud.

Dr. Connors looks up from his tablet and looks at her from across the room. “Why do you say that?” When she only shakes her head, he motions her further into the room. “You may as well come in the rest of the way. And close the door behind you.”

She takes a deep breath and takes another step into the room. Closing the door behind her feels like sealing a tomb. That thought, that over-exaggerated, melodramatic thought, and the realization of it gives her the strength to take a few more steps and sit on the couch across from Connor’s chair.

“You’re very nervous,” Connors observes. Brilliantly, she thinks. “Why is that?”

“I don’t like doctors,” she says. It comes out as a whisper. She crosses her legs and smoothes her skirt, trying to cover the weakness in her voice.

Connors nods. “We spoke briefly last week. You seemed much calmer.”

“I was leaving then,” she says.
Connors tilts his head in question. “You’ll be leaving in an hour.”

She nods. She’s looking at her hands on her skirt, looking at the manicured fingernails. She’s realized this is going to be harder than she thought. She looks up and toward the door.

“I’ve seen your medical records, of course,” Connors says. He speaks more quietly, as if not to startle her. “I know you were hospitalized at Valley View, and I’ve seen your court testimony.” He pauses, indicating the next question has nothing to do with the previous statement, but she knows that’s not the case. “Why did you decide to see a therapist after all this time?”
“
Ma-- my… friend is seeing one, a colleague of yours, and it seems to be helping him.” After thought, she adds under her breath, “Sort of.”

Connors nods. “Well, since we don’t know each other very well, why don’t we start at the beginning.”

“The beginning of what?” She’s feeling a little better. She straightens and brushes her hair back, feeling some confidence come back.

Connors smiles at her. “Of your life. Childhood memories. What was your childhood like?” He smiles again when she automatically rolls her eyes at the clichéd question. She suspects he asked it at least partly just to see what her reaction would be to it. When she doesn’t answer, he says,
“A lot of what I do is listening to what you want to tell me.”

She shifts slightly in her seat. “All right.” A pause while she thinks. “I was adopted. You probably know. It’s not a secret, or anything. I don’t remember a time not knowing that. My biological mother gave me up when I was a baby. My father’s not listed on the birth certificate, and she died about a year after she gave me up-- a car crash-- so no one can ask her. My parents, my adoptive parents, didn’t have any other children. My father was almost twenty years older than my mother, so maybe they couldn’t. I don’t really know.”

She stops and Connors lets her be silent for a minute. “What kind of childhood did you have?” He prompts her when it becomes clear she’s waiting for the next question.

She shrugs. “It was good. I was spoiled. Very. When my parents took trips, they’d have to buy more luggage to fit all the things that they brought me back.”

“They took a lot of trips?”

She knows what he’s really asking. “Yes. Especially my mother. She wasn’t home much. She worked… was with a few charities, and she was busy with that, or social things. My father worked, I mean really worked, hard for his company. He tried to be around for me, but a successful business takes a lot of hard work and long hours.”

“I’ve seen pictures of your mother in newspapers and such. She works with one of the AIDS charities, doesn’t she?”

She shrugs. “I could never keep track. Whatever’s trendy at the moment, usually.”

There’s the briefest flash of a frown before the impassive therapist face comes down again. “Your father is deceased?”

She nods. “He died of a heart attack when I was fifteen, about twelve years ago.” She looks away and knows he'll keep asking until she tells him, so she adds, “In his office, at home. I came home from school and found him. We were supposed to be going to dinner.”

Connors writes something down in his notebook. She feels a twinge of irritation, examines it, focuses on it. It’s much easier to get angry than to concentrate on whatever else she may be feeling.

“How did that effect you?”

The irriation blooms to full-fledged anger. “How did it effect me? How do you think? He was the only person who cared about me. I hate my mother--” She stops instantly, realizing what she’s said aloud.

Connors merely glances at her.

She shrugs. “I do, I guess. I just hadn’t planned on announcing it so soon. It’s not like she’s my real mother. And she didn’t try to be. She thought it was cute, for awhile, I guess, having a little girl. When I was little, she used to dress us alike. She has really pale blond hair, and she used to have mine dyed to match. She got tired of it when I was around twelve or so, though I kept up the dying. I think, maybe, that she saw me as competition.

“Our relationship got a lot worse after my father died. Either she wasn’t there at all or we were screaming and throwing things at each other. I started getting in some trouble after my father died, and I got kicked out of Saint Anne’s, my private school. Instead of finding me another, she had me put in public school. Which, just gave me the chance to get into more trouble.” She shrugs. “I calmed down when I got to college. Mostly. Did the sorority thing, and all that..”

“What did you want to do after college?” Connors asks when she doesn’t go on.

She smiles slightly. “Get married. My mother conditioned me well enough that it’s all I ever really expected to do. I was meant to be a society wife, like my mother. My father was “new money,” he earned it. But my mother comes from old Philadelphia money. That’s what the women do.”

“You’ve never been married, though,” Connors says, flipping a few pages.

“No. I was engaged. To a doctor,” she says the word with disgust unintentionally. Realizing what she did, she glances at Connors but sees no reaction. “We… broke up.”

“Your choice?”

She gives a bark of laughter. “Yes.”

Connors raises an eyebrow and waits.

She sighs. “He had me committed. Him and my mother. After… the hospital… burned down, I broke up with him. Well, I never really told him that, but I wouldn’t see him or talk to him. Or my mother.”

Connors flips through more papers. “The records of your commitment were lost when Valley View burned. Would you tell me why you were committed?”

She starts to say something, snap at him, but stops. She knows it’s not him that’s made her angry, frightened. She had been having hallucinations, daytime nightmares, brought on by her evil ancestor and a demon both trying to posses her. She’s not ready to talk about that part of her life with him, so she decides on the other part of the truth. “My mother wanted, wants, my money. My father left everything to me, including the house we lived in. My mother has some money of her own, and I never tried to… evict her from the house, but it wasn’t enough for her. Philip went along with her. That’s my ex-fiance, Philip. The doctor. Well, plastic surgeon.” Dr. Phil, E always called him. She frowns slightly, and to stay on track, she automatically answers the question everyone seems to ask next, “No, he never touched me.”

She realizes what she said and feels a blush color her cheeks. “I mean, I never had any plastic surgery. By him or anyone else.”

Connors smiles at her.

“I moved here, after… after I broke up with him.” She’s afraid he’s going to go back to talking about the hospital if she doesn’t keep talking, but she doesn’t know what to talk about. She feels herself getting nervous and frightened, and gets angry at herself for her reaction. “I’ve been here for almost a year now. I bought an apartment, over on Talos Island. There’s a lot of traffic in that area, but I have the top two floors, so the noise doesn’t travel up much, unless you’re on the roof. I’ve been thinking of buying a vacation house. Well, I have two, actually, but I mean one of my own. Or, maybe an island.”

Connors flips pages again. “It says that you’re unemployed?”

She smiles slightly. She’s still not ready to share some things, so she doesn’t think to mention her “job.” “That’s right. I show up at company meetings occasionally, and sometimes even sign checks, but that’s not a ‘job.’ Other that that, well, I’ve never worked a day in my life. Why start now? I certainly don’t need to.”

Connors nods He looks at his pages again.

She looks toward the closed door and feels panic start to set in slowly. The more she tries to push it back, the more it creeps in on her. Serra had encouraged her in this, but Serra’s not there now, now when she needs the help, a calm voice.

Suddenly, her phone rings. The quiet electronic music causes her to freeze in fear. The last breath she took burns her lungs until she forces it out. She fumbles in her purse at her feet for her phone, checking the caller ID.

“I have to take this,” she says briskly to Connors and walks out the door without waiting for his reaction. A minute later, she walks back in, scopping her bag off the floor and dropping the phone back inside.

“I have to go,” she tells him.

Connors looks at his watch, a heavy pale gold affair discretely tucked under his shirt cuff. “We still have fifteen minutes.”

She shrugs. “Give it to the next guy.”

His lips purse. “We’ll talk next week, then.”

“Maybe,” she says over her shoulder on her way out the door.

Tomorrow, I promise to get the E/Serra stuff up. Promise!