2
WANDA
I s that my doctor, I wonder as the hot panic settles down to a simmering nervousness when I see Mama and Papa enter the room behind this blue-eyed, broad-shouldered, hard-bodied doctor who’s grinning at me like a big bad wolf who’s just cornered a cowering rabbit.
“You’re not my doctor,” I blurt out when my frazzled mind spins back to the memory of that other doctor who checked on me earlier this morning, that vaguely creepy long-faced gray-eyed man whose name was Lenmore or Lenworth or something like that. I barely remember what happened after I somehow got my hysterically hyperventilating self safely to the ER in the middle of the night. I’d been up for three days straight trying to make my PhD thesis absolutely perfect, was so exhausted that I was hallucinating to the point where everything looked like a terrifying cartoon.
Of course, all cartoons terrify me, but that’s a different problem. Let’s tackle our neuroses one at a time. Baby steps. One foot in front of the other. Breathe. Oh, shit, here comes the panic attack again. Breathe, damn it, Wanda! Breathe !
The breath comes in sharply, and the fresh oxygen buzzes through my brain, bolts my body upright against the back-rest of this large hospital bed that I vaguely think is big enough for two. Why is it big enough for two? Why is that even a consideration right now? Who is this blue-eyed doctor and why is he grinning like that?
“You’re not my doctor,” I say for the second time, my eyes bulging like marbles, the whites probably spider-webbed with blood-red capillaries from being awake three days straight.
This handsome new doctor smiles pleasantly to show healthy white teeth, and the anxiety that flashed through me from his earlier wolfish grin subsides. The blue-eyed, brown-haired doctor strides briskly to the foot of my bed, snatches up the clipboard with practiced ease, flips through the charts and notes, the test-results and prescriptions. He taps his smooth-shaved chin three times, then grunts, nods, and smiles reassuringly at me again.
“No, Miss Wanda, I am not your doctor.” His smile is still warm, that strangely dark grin he’d flashed when he first saw me nowhere to be seen, like perhaps I’d imagined the whole thing. “But I am indeed a doctor,” he continues in a smooth tone that’s both friendly and authoritative, a very good bedside manner.
The thought of this doctor close to my bedside sends a strange tingle through me, and for a moment that image of his first reaction flickers in my head again. He’d definitely grinned in a very un-doctorly way when he first saw me curled up in bed, just a thin bedsheet and a flimsy hospital gown separating my bare skin from his probing touch. I don’t even have underwear on beneath the crinkly-clean hospital gown, a fact that suddenly excites me.
Wait, what? Why are your thoughts going there? You’ve never been particularly attracted to doctors. You would know by now—after all, you’ve seen a hundred doctors in your anxiety-riddled young life.
Actually, you aren’t so young anymore, comes the needling reminder from some part of me I can’t seem to turn off. Twenty-six and counting. Life expectancy for American women is the mid-eighties, that paranoid voice continues, but with your chronic anxiety that even medication can’t control, you’re burning away all your vital energy in uselessly paranoid ruminations, thoughts spinning senselessly through your churning brain. So wave goodbye to living till you’re eighty-six. That isn’t a realistic expectation because you’re putting too much pressure on your heart by forcing it to beat hard and fast all the time, ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-BUM!
I gasp and lurch as my heart hammers behind my boobs at the thought that I’m going to die sooner than most, maybe even right now! The heart-monitor I’m hooked up to spikes like the Dutch stock-market during Tulip-mania, and I clutch the sweat-soaked sheets and grit my ground-down teeth and stare at the doctor in expectant anguish, wondering if he’s going to just watch me die with that blue-eyed gaze that makes my toes curl under the bedsheets.
Mama and Papa are clutching each other, their faces whiter than my sheets, their bodies petrified and paralyzed, all of us watching the heart-monitor now, the blood pounding in my eardrums, my vision starting to blur as I tumble towards what I’m certain is my imminent death!
But just when I’m certain my eyeballs are going to explode from the pressure, I feel the doctor’s big warm hand take my shivering paw in his. The skin-on-skin contact sends a current of electricity through my entire body, but instead of inducing the heart-attack that always feels imminent, I’m suddenly calm in a way I didn’t think possible.
Well, not calm -calm, I think when my eyes flicker back into focus and I see that my pulse is still elevated but rapidly slowing down, moving well below heart-exploding level. And now, ohmygod, I can almost breathe normally, can actually hear things other than the blood pounding in my eardrums.
“You’re all right, Wanda.” His voice is soft like a cloud, gentle like a breeze. “I’m going to take care of you. Fix you up so you can be your perfect little self. I’m going to take care of you, Wanda. Make sure you stay perfect forever.”
Both Mama and Papa gasp in chorus at the word perfect. But that word only makes my tummy lurch, and I gather the bedclothes around me and try to disappear into the burrow of sheets. I’m smart enough to know that perfection is an unreachable goal. I also recognize that my parents love me dearly and only want the best for me . . . and, of course, the best from me.
And so I can’t stop striving for the unattainable goal of being perfect, making Mama and Papa proud, living up to my potential.
A potential that perhaps isn’t as magnificent as Mama and Papa hope.
“Let’s see now . . .” says the blue-eyed doctor, glancing at the clipboard, then sliding it back into the holder attached to the metal frame near the foot of my bed. He looks up at me and smiles. He’s mid-thirties, with a boyishly handsome face that’s somehow also got a hardness to it—just like there’s a hardness to his body. “Looks like you’ve been prescribed every anti-anxiety drug on the market. You’re like a walking, talking, smiling experiment for the pharmaceutical industry. How long have you been on this cocktail of drugs?”
I blink twice at his facetious comment about my health and sanity, my brow furrowing along the grooves created from years of grimacing, gasping, and gnashing. “Um . . . forever?”
Mama and Papa both nod earnestly, perhaps even proudly, their gazes fixed on this doctor, all their hopes and dreams now being transferred to his authority, like they’re silently begging him to fix what’s broken in their once-perfect daughter.
The doctor sighs, taps his chin with his index finger. His fingernails are neatly trimmed, clean enough to perform surgery without gloves, to slide into the secret spaces of my body and heal me from the inside. His fingernails have never been bitten, I think feverishly as my own horribly chewed fingertips curl up against my palm. Oh, how wonderful it must be to have fingernails that aren’t hideous little stubs that look like chew-toys for a family of mice.
“Look, don’t get me wrong. There are tons of life-saving drugs out there, real miracles of modern medicine that absolutely benefit us all,” says the doctor thoughtfully, still tapping his chin. “But although all drugs are thoroughly tested, it’s hard to predict what happens when you mix dozens of different prescriptions. Besides, many of the drugs you’ve been taking are designed for short-term use, to temporarily take the edge off the symptoms.” He takes a breath, exhales slowly, gaze narrowing to a focus that makes me squirm. “Have you considered that perhaps there’s a root cause for your anxiety that isn’t going to be solved by popping more pills?”
The entire room goes deathly silent, like a church service where someone dares to question the existence of God. I’m not entirely sure if a doctor is even allowed to say things like this in today’s world, to even suggest that prescriptions won’t fix what’s broken, that the solution is something that won’t come from a pharmacy.
My brow still furrowed in those familiar grooves, I nod dumbly even though of course I’ve considered the possibility that my anxiety is psychological more than physical, that the insomnia and panic-attacks are just physical manifestations of something that’s broken in my mind. After all, I’m on the cusp of earning a Doctorate in Psychology. I’m not dumb. And I’m not in denial.
“I’ve tried therapy,” I inform the doctor while peering at him from above the sheets that I’m clutching around my body as I sit up in bed. “It helps for a while, just like the pills help for a while.” I shrug, then sigh, finally shake my head glumly. “I don’t think it’s all in my head. And I don’t think it’s all in my body. But what else is there? Where else can I look, Doctor . . .” I look for his nametag, but there isn’t one.
“Doctor Drake.” The doctor gazes into my eyes as he tells me his name. He rubs his chin again, glances off to the side like he’s thinking, then takes a breath and exhales slow. “And there is another place to look, Wanda. A place that’s between mind and body, the meeting place of the spirit and the flesh.” He gazes at me in silence for what feels like several minutes but is probably just a second or two. Still, in that pregnant pause I see something wicked flash behind his eyes again, something akin to that wolfish grin which twisted his dark red lips when he licked them at the sight of me curled up in bed, nothing but a hospital gown and a sweat-soaked sheet separating our bodies.
Separating our flesh.
My heart lurches when I realize my thoughts are once again spinning in a strangely sexual direction, which is very unusual for me. Gulping back the surprise, I force a smile while I wait for Doctor Drake to tell me what secret place he’s going to search for the axis of my anxiety, the source of my symptoms, the formula to my freedom.
But Doctor Drake says nothing. I wait as the silent tension builds. My heightened heartrate and escalating anxiety might be messing with my sense of time, but I’m pretty sure it’s been almost a full minute now that Doctor Drake has been gazing at me like he’s thinking deep and hard.
“It’s hard for me to say this . . .” Doctor Drake’s voice is a low drawl, his clean fingertip tapping the slight cleft in his chin, right beneath his smooth red lips that I can’t help staring at, am suddenly imagining closing on my lips, now moving down to my nipples which are uncharacteristically pert, like they’re aching to be kissed, sucked, slurped by his lips and tongue, pinched by his fingers, all of his appendages erotic instruments of provocative probing, heat-seeking tentacles snaking over my skin. “But I’m going to have to tell you the truth.”
“Tell me,” comes the whisper from my tensed-up throat as I clamp my thighs tight beneath the bedclothes, my mind beginning to unravel as my body tingles in the strangest of places, like this doctor’s presence is doing something to me, like he’s infected me with need, poisoned me with desire, is penetrating me with that blue-eyed gaze, fucking me with his facetious disregard for conventional medicine and the diagnoses of every other doctor. “You can tell me, Doctor Drake.”
Doctor Drake steps closer to my bed, and I gasp silently when I see movement at the front of his gray trousers which I only just notice aren’t standard scrubs at all, are expensive material that might be lambswool or even cashmere. Hard to tell when they’re stretched thin with whatever’s bulging beneath that belt buckle.
“Not with your parents in the room,” says Doctor Drake softly, the words barely audible, like there’s a constriction in his throat. His muscular neck thickens as he swallows, and now the buzzing in my body is loud enough that I can barely see straight, am not sure what’s happening, what’s going to happen if he’s alone in the room with me. “I need to ask you some personal questions first, and I think you’re more likely to be honest without your parents in the room.”
My eyes are wider than Jupiter’s moons as I stare at Doctor Drake and try desperately to make sense of what he’s saying and what I’m feeling. My lips move but I’m not sure if words are coming out or if I’m just a fish drowning in air. Things are getting surreal enough that yeah, it seems plausible that I’m a fish in a cosmic aquarium and some trickster just drained all the water.
And things get a whole lot more surreal when I realize I’m nodding my head and Doctor Drake is grinning and now he’s ushering my parents towards the door.
“Could you two step out of the room for a minute, please.” Doctor Drake speaks with calm authority to my parents. “I’d like to speak with your daughter in private. Doctor-patient confidentiality, you see. It’s a legal thing. Go on. I’ll call you back in when we’re done.”
“Done with what?” asks Mama, wide-eyed and worried. “Is Wanda all right?”
“No, she isn’t all right,” says Doctor Drake grimly even though I see a devilish gleam in his wicked blue eyes. “But she will be all right once I’m done with her.”