Chapter 2
TWO
GWENNA
The church is quiet at night.
Like it always is.
I skim my palm over the heads of the pew-ends, feeling the cool gloss of wood, and let my eyes close as I walk.
Funny how the time of day makes everything relative: it’s good to go to church, but bad to be here at night.
Is that why I did this? Because I’m bad?
No. Maybe. I don’t know. The truth is, I’ve never felt spiritual about churches.
Not the way you’re supposed to, like some pure Divine Godly feeling.
I feel a sense of place in them, of richness and grandeur and specialness, all this otherworldly beauty made concrete before me.
It was never about God or Jesus. It was the pure magic of the aesthetic.
I’d sit in our pew and close my eyes: I was a princess from an elfin realm, and this was my palace.
The details. I need to focus on the details.
What do I see…what do I see…
The stained glass. It looks darker at night, deeper, like jewels and gems set into windows.
The flagstones—the floor. I sit crosslegged on them, right in front of the altar, feel their coolness seep through to my skin and send a little shiver from the root of my spine up to my neck.
The candles. White and waiting. Unlit.
And the ceiling, high high above me. Too high to see in the dark.
It’s two a.m. Maybe three. There’s no clock in here and it’s too dark to see anyway. A school night. Mom will be furious. Except how can she? How can she be mad that I’m going to church?
This is supposed to be a sanctuary.
It is my sanctuary.
I sit until my legs are numb. And when my legs are numb, I lie down.
And when I lie down, I am looking up at the candelabra.
The wicks are black—charred. Not being saved for something in the future: they were lit; they just went out.
The placard on the candelabra reads:
IN MEMORIAM
LUX AETERNA LUCEAT EIS
May an eternal light shine upon them.
A little pang of irony tweaks my chest. Candles in memory of the dead, asking for an eternal light, and they’ve gone out.
Someone should light them again.
My stomach flips.
Stay in the moment, Gwenna. Stay with it.
This is where the moment turns. I come to the candles like I’m compelled, the urge so irresistible it’s like a reflex.
It lights. They all light. Fast—too fast. The flame at the match head eats up the thin wood in fast-forward towards my fingers and—
Panic. I jump, fling the match from my hand, and as I do—
As I do I hit the candles.
I lose my balance. The wrought-iron stand falls with me, plunging its fluttering flames into the dusty dry banner that hangs from the right column by the dais.
I hear it catch fire.
Stand up. Stand up. Beat out the flames. I can beat out the flames—
I rush forward, into it, slamming my forearms into the banner, but it’s not working, it’s not working, the column is wood and the varnish is bubbling and the surface is blackening and smoke is everywhere everywhere everywhere and I can hear my name
Gwenna.
Gwenna.
“Gwenna!”
I freeze.
I am not in danger. I am not in a church. I am not I am not I am not.
Not now, anyway.
I swallow, breathing hard and warm under the collar of my sweatshirt, the plastic paddles in my hands still pulsing gently: left, right, left, right.
“Let’s stop.” Across from me, Jessie the therapist recrosses her legs, her tone gentle but firm. “Take a deep breath, okay?”
I nod. In through the nose, out through the mouth.
“Maybe take a few more.”
I do as I’m told. Jessie watches.
“Can you go back somewhere safe?” she asks.
Again, I nod. I close my eyes like the good little crazy girl that I am and find it.
The safe space.
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.
EMDR. The gold standard of evidence-based trauma therapy.
Practiced extensively and—so they assured my mother in the brochures, anyway—successfully at the Renfrew Center.
You go back to the bad moment, whatever it was, relive it right there in the theater of your mind, while darting your eyes back and forth—or, in my case, holding a pair of pulsing paddles, the psych-ward version of the buzzing pagers they give you at a Cheesecake Factory—and something about the mystical combination of bilateral physical stimulation and plunging headlong into the darkest and most torturous moment of your past just… rewires your brain.
They’re not really sure how it works, Jessie the therapist had admitted to me in one of our first sessions. But it does work.
I was in no state to object, or to insist on further proof. I’m still not. I am in no state to have any strong opinions or convictions about anything. I am putty in your hands, madame.
And part of EMDR is a retreat. Putting yourself back in order, settling yourself into a mental space of safety by picturing a physical one.
I, of course, chose the sickest safe space I could think of.
The one that’s gone.
That doesn’t even exist.
That brought me here.
The B-level at the Caliburn Library.
My alcove.
My books.
Mine.
But Jessie the therapist doesn’t have to know that. No one has to know that. In my mind, the B-level is eternal, an undying Elysium I can visit whenever I want.
“Gwenna?”
Jessie’s voice startles me back to reality. Here, I want to say. Present.
“Mhm?” I say instead. I lick my lips. It’s dry in here. It’s dry everywhere at Renfrew, from our climate-controlled bedrooms (they call them dorms, as if this is just another educational opportunity) to the soft-edged, soft-lighted, pale-pastel holding pen that is the dayroom.
“Just checking.” Jessie leans over to collect the paddles from me, which I hand over. “How do you feel?”
“Better,” I say. Relative to how I did a few minutes ago, anyway.
“How was it, this time?”
“It was…”
It wasn’t any different, I want to say.
I see the same thing every time.
The same thing that happened.
That could not have happened.
But that did happen.
A fire that moved too quickly.
Burned too hot.
Wouldn’t go out.
Would not go out.
And I want to cry.
I am here because I am done. I am done indulging my pursuits. I am done giving in to my instincts. I am done insisting.
I. Am. Done.
I tried to be normal and be myself and it didn’t work. I couldn’t do it. It isn’t possible. So now I am here to put every ounce of my effort into retraining myself.
But even now, even now, when I’m not fighting or resisting or just going through the motions, when I really and truly am trying to give myself over to the process, I can’t seem to fix it.
“Gwenna?” Jessie prompts.
“It was the same,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
Jessie gives me a weak smile. “You don’t have to be sorry, Gwenna. There’s no getting an A in therapy, remember?”
Isn’t there?, I think, my eyes flickering to the three diplomas on her wall. Fairly sure that an A in therapy is required to graduate from UPenn’s medical school summa cum laude.
Outwardly, I just nod. “I know.” I breathe out. “Well, one of these days, we’ll get to the bottom of what’s wrong with me.”
At that, Jessie presses her lips together.
They’re bright red, a shocking pop of actual color in the coastal grandma palette that is the rest of Renfrew.
Her hair, too, is vivid and dark, a glossy chestnut almost-red in an angular cut that’s just this side of alternative.
I have to think that if Mom had seen Jessie, and not the gray-haired, pashmina-wearing staff therapists that Renfew shows on the website, that she might have second-guessed cutting them a check for nearly fifty grand.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you.”
I almost laugh. “With all due respect,” I say, “I think you have to say that.”
Jessie snorts. “No, I don’t. I’m not a bullshitter, Gwenna. Pardon my French.”
I like Jessie. I really do.
“Je vous pardonne,” I murmur.
She smirks. “Okay. Well, Gwenna, you know what I do here. You know who I work with.”
I do. The other girls, here at Renfrew. Girls who are skeletally thin, who leave clumps of hair behind when they shower, who purge into their pillowcases and sleep on the vomit all night.
Girls who scream and snap and claw, railing against orderlies three times their size.
Girls wrapped wrist to elbow in white bandages. Girls who simply stare into space.
Girls in pain. Real pain. Girls that it hurts my heart just to see and see and be able to do nothing about.
“This isn’t your high-school guidance counselor’s office,” Jessie goes on.
“This isn’t some cute little wellness retreat.
This is the last stop people make before they succumb, Gwenna.
Before they die. It is my professional obligation to call it like I see it.
Okay? If I pull my punches, girls die. So if I see that something is wrong with someone—when I see something is wrong with them—I tell them.
That’s where we’re at, here. Do you understand? ”
I nod. Slowly.
Jessie takes a deep breath.
“You’ve been here…what, six weeks?”
“Seven.”
“Seven,” Jessie agrees. “And I’ve seen a lot of you. We’ve seen a lot of each other.”
It’s true. I’ve seen more of Jessie the therapist than I’ve seen of my mother.
Which would be sad, if it weren’t preferable.
“And I just…don’t see someone psychotic. Don’t see any hints of personality disorder, no Cluster B, no mania or paranoia or delusions.”
I swallow hard. “But—”
Jessie puts up a hand. “I know. I know. I’ve read your previous doctor’s file on you back to back. I’ve read”—she hesitates only a second—“the incident reports from the accident. And we’ve been over it how often?”
Twice a week for the past four weeks, I think. “A lot.”