Chapter 16
“Thank you, Belinda,” Martina says.
Belinda smiles, and then leans down behind me, whispering in my ear, her breath warm on the sensitive skin on my neck.
“Good luck,” she whispers, like an omen.
Then she walks off.
True to her word, Belinda hasn’t left my side in the hour and a half that has gone by. She’s kept up a steady stream of small talk the whole time, talking about music and film and literature, never leaving any space for any questions or pauses.
She steered me expertly, until it was time to hand me over to Martina for my individual therapy session. And now that time has come.
I hear the door closing.
Martina looks down at her notepad on her lap. Then up at me.
“So,” she says, drawing the syllable out. “Isobel.”
It sounds like she’s tasting my name.
We’re sitting by the window. I’m on the green couch, Martina in the armchair. There are two cups of tea on the table, and I reach out and grab the one nearest me, just to have something to do with my hands.
She’s crossed her legs at the ankles; her shoes, I notice, are white patent leather loafers, and completely spotless.
“Yes,” I say. “Hello.”
“How nice of Belinda to keep you company this afternoon.” Martina looks bemused.
“Very,” I agree. “She’s very nice. You’ve all been very nice.”
“I’m glad you think so,” Martina says.
I take a sip from the tea. It tastes like cardamom and citrus; it’s lukewarm, and very good, with just a hint of sweetness.
Martina looks down at her notepad again, tapping the end of her pen against it a few times. The silence feels purposeful, like she’s waiting for me to fill it. But I want to see what she will do if I remain quiet.
When she looks up, she asks me:
“Tell me, Isobel, what is it that you want to get out of your experience here at Himlafall?”
“Healing, I guess.” An Isobel Anderssen answer. “I want to be happy. I want to find someone.”
Martina presses her lips together, studying me closely.
Then she turns the notepad upside down and puts it down on the table, leans back in her chair.
“You know,” she begins. Her tone is chatty, like we’re two girlfriends sharing casual secrets. “I had a therapist, during my marriage. I saw her twice a week for two years.”
“Oh?” I say.
“Yes.” Martina nods. “Her name was Mika. She was Finnish. Lovely woman. She was very sweet. Very kind. She had this soft, lilting voice. I found it incredibly soothing.”
“Okay,” I say, wondering where she is going with this.
“The whole time I was seeing her, I was incredibly unhappy,” Martina says.
“But I didn’t want anyone to know about that, so I didn’t tell her about it.
I’d let some of it slip occasionally, and then Mika would give me little exercises, and I would come back the next session, telling her I’d done them and that they had helped, and then we were both happy, at least for a little while.
She was happy, because she thought she was helping me.
And I was happy, because I felt like I had pleased her.
I felt like I was being a good patient, and a good psychologist, and a good wife, because I was carrying all my burdens by myself.
I wasn’t forcing anyone else to have to deal with them. ”
Martina falls silent. Her amber eyes bore into me without blinking.
After another sip of tea, I put the cup back on the table.
“You’re wondering if I’m telling the truth.” Martina chuckles. “Aren’t you? You’re thinking I’m making this up, in order to make a point.”
“I … no.” The surprise makes my voice hollow.
“Yes, you are,” Martina says immediately. “But yes, I’m being truthful.”
That word again.
Truthful.
As though being truthful is the highest good; as though I’m a liar, and she knows it, and I know it.
Do they repeat that with all the patients?
Or can she tell there is something off about me? Can she tell what I’m hiding?
“I didn’t think you were lying.”
Martina ignores me.
“I want you to tell me why I told you that story.” Martina raises an eyebrow. “Take a guess. Humor me.”
“Probably in order to … find a parallel in what you’re telling me. Right? Like it says in your book. All stories are the same stories.”
I surprise myself with the quote. I read all her books cover to cover in preparation for this story, but I didn’t know it was going to pop out of my mouth.
Martina leans forward in her chair and rests her chin in her hands, her elbows resting on her knees.
It makes her look like a schoolgirl at a sleepover: conspiratorial, as though about to share a morsel of gossip.
Like we are whispering to each other in the dead of night, fragile threads of trust weaving back and forth until the web is stronger than any of the individual fibers could be on their own.
“You think you’re too smart for therapy.”
“No,” I say, but she shakes her head.
“You’re lying,” she says, a singsongy twist to her words.
“You do. You think you can see through all this shit. You think you’re too complicated and too intelligent for therapy to work on you.
It’s a superiority complex. You hold it up as a shield against the world, thinking it will keep you safe, and despite the fact that it keeps failing, despite the fact that the only thing it’s doing is keeping you lonely, you keep holding on to it, because you’re too scared to try anything else. ”
I feel my cheeks burning.
In my mind, I flash back to a memory. An old one.
Standing in the kitchen, having broken a plate, panicked tears pooling in my eyes. One of the good ones my mother had inherited from her own grandmother: true bone china, with gold trim and intricate seashell-green patterns.
My dad’s hand on my shoulder.
“It will be our secret. You and I, we don’t care about silly things like plates. We know they don’t matter.”
And then, later, when she found out, and she was telling me off, hurt and disappointment radiating from her like waves, repeating his words back at her:
“I don’t care about your silly plates. They don’t matter at all.”
The shock on her face. The strength I found in it, the glorious feeling of being above it all, of not having to admit to a mistake because I was better than that, better than caring about breaking things that were precious to other people.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” I shoot back, rattled, and Martina smiles.
“Yes, you are,” she says. “Because at the end of the day, you don’t want to keep living like this. You’re torn between wanting to change and finding that you can’t.”
She straightens back up, leaning back, and looks at me like she’s sizing me up.
“I’m going to tell you something you’re not going to like,” Martina says. “It’s going to make you angry, and it’s going to make you want to leave, or hurt my feelings, or shut down. But I think you need to hear it.”
“Okay. Hit me.” It’s not Isobel Anderssen speaking anymore. There is only me.
“You’re not as special, or as different, as you think you are,” Martina says. “I’ve seen hundreds of patients like you. This thing you keep doing, this facade you keep putting up? It’s not working nearly as well as you think it is.”
“That doesn’t upset me.” I smile, small and tight.
“Sure it doesn’t.” Martina laughs.
Fuck you lingers on my tongue, but I swallow the words.
It doesn’t matter what she thinks she’s seeing. It doesn’t even matter if she’s right. She can’t tell me who I am.
I grasp for my role, for the comfort of Isobel Anderssen, but I can’t figure out how she’d react in this situation.
Isobel Anderssen the character doesn’t isolate herself, shut herself off; she seeks out any means of understanding and comfort.
If Isobel Anderssen was real, if she was here, Martina Hastings would never have spoken to her like this.
“I don’t know why you are trying to make me uncomfortable,” I finally manage.
“I’m not trying to do that,” Martina says. “That is not my goal. But it’s interesting that you’re perceiving it that way.”
“That is what you said,” I insist. “That I would feel attacked.”
“Do you feel attacked?”
“I feel like…” I search for something to say, something that won’t give me away. “I feel like you don’t like me.”
I don’t like the bitter taste the words leave on my tongue.
Like chalk. Like failure.
Is there a part of me that wants her to like me? That wants to be seen, heard, appreciated by this woman, despite what she’s done, despite what she is?
I don’t want to know the answer to that.
“I don’t dislike you, Isobel,” Martina says, softer now. “Hey. Look at me.”
It’s not a question; it’s a command.
“I like you very much,” Martina says. “I think you are a very intelligent, very compassionate, very interesting woman. I’ve seen how much care you’ve tried to take with the other patients, even though you only just met them yesterday.
I see how hard you’re working to keep it together, to keep your emotions in check so as to not burden other people with them. ”
She reaches out over the table and puts her hand over mine, squeezing it carefully.
“You’re right in that I told you that story because I was hoping you would recognize something in it. I hope it’s not too much of a cliché, but I see quite a bit of myself in you.”
A shaky laugh tears out of my throat.
“I don’t think so.”
“You can’t see yourself the way others see you,” she says.
“The way I see you, Isobel. And I want you to trust me enough to open up to me. Because I don’t want you to make the mistakes I’ve made.
I don’t want you to choose the wrong partner because it feels safer to be loved than to love.
I don’t want you to get stuck in something that feels just good enough because you are too scared to be vulnerable.
You are suffocating yourself slowly, little by little, because it feels easier to hurt yourself than to risk letting others hurt you. ”
“I’m not,” I say, but my voice doesn’t sound like my own; it sounds small and scared.
I have to ground myself. I can’t let myself be sucked in.