Chapter 26
Leyla is still there when we get back from the break, sitting in her chair, her eyes puffy and red. I feel a bit of the tension in my shoulders releasing when I see her.
I take the seat next to Leyla, sinking into the chair and leaning over, whispering to her:
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” Leyla’s voice is faint. “I’m fine.”
“Do you want to get out of here?” I ask, my lips barely moving. “I can go with you. Say you’re sick, or something. I’ll walk you to the cabin.”
Leyla doesn’t move, at first.
But then she slowly shakes her head.
“No. I’ll stick around.”
“Are you sure?” I ask her.
She raises her face and finally looks me in the eyes.
I think I see something there, shifting: a glimpse of awareness. Of struggle.
“Seriously,” I say, trying to make sure no one else can hear. “I can get you out of here. I’ll make up a story.”
“Hey, I was sitting there,” Clara pipes up behind me.
I turn; Clara is standing right behind our chairs, the corners of her mouth turned up but her eyes hard and flinty.
“I don’t think there are assigned seats,” I begin to argue, but Leyla surprises me by putting her hand on my arm.
“It’s fine, Isobel,” she says, her voice slightly stronger now. “Just … go back to your seat.”
I look back to her, searching for something to say, some way to break through to her. But I find nothing.
So I get up, and I sit back down, one seat over, as Clara happily sinks into the now vacated chair.
A surge of irritation rushes through me, and I breathe out hard through my nostrils, trying to contain it.
The room feels smaller now than it did, the walls pushing in. Like this clean, bright environment is a cover for something.
Something with teeth, trying to eat us whole.
“I hope you all had a nice break,” Martina greets us as she steps through the door.
There are high, bright spots of color on her cheeks that weren’t there before, and a cup of tea in her hands as she makes her way back into the circle.
She pushes the whiteboard out of the way and sits down.
“I want you all to know,” Martina begins, slowly stirring her tea, “that it’s okay to ask questions. It’s okay to question the methodology. And it’s okay to say no. Like Leyla just did.”
She smiles at Leyla, as though at some private little joke.
“I want to check in with all of you,” she continues. “I want to make sure that you all feel good with what’s happening in here. That you feel safe. With me, and with each other.”
“Of course,” Clara hurries to say. “This is amazing.”
“I’m glad to hear you feel that way, Clara,” Martina soothes her. “But I want to hear from everyone.”
She turns to me.
“Isobel?” She folds one long leg over the other. “Do you have anything you’d like to say? You look upset.”
Before I came here, I would have thought myself the kind of person who would speak up in this kind of environment. The kind of person who would speak out in defense of others, or myself.
I can blame wanting to keep my cover. But it wouldn’t be the whole truth. The weight of expectation feels crushing over my chest.
Despite my suspicions, despite what I’ve heard, some part of me wants desperately to … please her.
Wants her to be proud of me.
“I don’t even understand why you’re here,” a voice breaks the silence.
I jerk in my seat and look around.
Pernilla’s cut-glass syllables seem to still be ringing through the air.
I open my mouth to defend myself, but then I realize she’s not talking to me.
She’s looking at Clara.
“What is your problem?” Clara asks, shock coloring her face nearly as pink as her hair. “I have every right to be here.”
Pernilla rolls her eyes, making an extravagant show of it.
“Puh-lea-se,” she says, making a three-syllable meal out of the one-syllable word.
“You’ve never even been in a serious relationship.
You’ve come to this clinic without even the most baseline need for the help it offers.
The seat your parents paid for could have gone to someone who actually needed it. But instead, it’s taken up by you.”
Clara looks over at Martina, ostensibly searching for help, but Martina remains quiet, still stirring her cup of tea.
“Is that true?” Katarina asks Clara.
“I mean, yeah.” Clara is immediately defensive. “But I’m trying to be proactive. I want to fix my attachment style and everything before it becomes a problem. I want to be a life coach. I can’t do that if I’m making a bunch of mistakes in my own personal life. I need to learn from the ground up.”
“But how did you even get a referral to come here if you haven’t gone through a recent break-up?” Katarina has an inquisitive little frown on her face, trying to understand, trying to figure it out.
Pernilla cackles.
“Come now,” she sneers. “She went to her parents’ private doctor and asked for one. Anything is possible as long as you have money. Or access to your father’s credit card.”
“I don’t know why she seems to have a problem with me,” Clara says, addressing it to Martina, her voice shaking with barely held-back anger. “But this isn’t fair. I don’t know why I’m being accused of anything. I’m just trying to take care of myself and my health.”
“I have a problem with you,” Pernilla announces, raising her voice further, “because you are a spoiled child, and you are playacting at feeling things you have never experienced.”
“You’re just attacking me because you’re angry you fucked up your life, and you’re mad I’m here to try to make sure I don’t end up like you!” Clara yells.
Pernilla smiles, and it is a terrible thing to behold.
“You’re a tourist.” Pernilla speaks slowly, letting each word linger. “You’re here to dig around in other people’s pain so you can convince yourself you are more interesting and more intricate than you really are.”
Clara looks around, her eyes locking with mine, and I clear my throat, beginning to speak:
“I don’t know if that’s really—”
Martina holds up her hand at me.
“Isobel, let them speak,” she orders me. “This is important.”
“How is this important?” It flies out of me.
Martina turns to me.
“I’m going to need you to be quiet and let Clara and Pernilla see their conflict through.” Every syllable is a warning.
I bite down, hard enough to hurt, and an iron taste spreads in my mouth.
Be Isobel Anderssen. Isobel Anderssen wouldn’t argue with Martina. Isobel Anderssen wouldn’t try to defend any of her fellow patients. Isobel Anderssen wouldn’t question the method.
But it’s hard, so hard, because on a pure, mammalian level, I want to defend them, want to stand up for them, want to protect them. Want to scream out that this is all wrong.
“But…” Clara begins to speak, her voice thin and reedy, and Martina lowers her hand.
“Go on, Pernilla,” she encourages the older woman, not even acknowledging Clara.
“No.” Pernilla, suddenly clamming up. “I shouldn’t. This is neither the time nor the place.”
“I’m telling you,” Martina says, with more force, “that it is. Remember what we talked about yesterday?”
Something seems to pass between the two of them.
“Go on.” Martina sounds oddly breathless. “Tell her what you really think.”
Pernilla swallows. I see the tendons in her slim neck tensing, her pulse fluttering in the vein winding around her temple.
Then she whips her head around and stares at Clara.
“You disgust me,” she hisses. “You really do. You think of yourself as deep, but you’re shallow, and vapid, and you are deluding yourself.
You treat other people and their lives like set dressing.
Like they are characters you’re viewing on your phone screen.
You throw all these words around as though you know what they mean, and it’s laughable how you think your life has any meaning or any importance. ”
“Hey.” Katarina tries to speak up, but Clara cuts her off, her voice now shaking with rage.
“I don’t know what the fuck happened to you in your life to make you this way, but just because you’re a bitter, dried-up old bitch who’s never been happy or sexually satisfied in your life doesn’t mean you have any right to judge me!” she screeches.
“Of course.” Pernilla is laughing now, with terrible joy. “Even your insults lack imagination.”
“Fuck you,” Clara spits out.
“No, fuck you,” Pernilla responds, making the curse sound like an elegant condemnation.
“Fuck you for being so stupid. Fuck you for seeing the world through such a narrow lens you can’t even conceive of how conceited you really are.
Fuck you for being a hollow shell of a person.
Fuck you for being so blind to the things you’re doing, and for not seeing things the way they really are, and for not—for not—” Her voice grows rougher for every word, and finally she’s left gasping for air, appearing to choke on her own venom.
“I’ve never done anything to you.” Clara is shrinking back into herself, tears running down her cheeks.
“No.” Pernilla shakes her head. “You’ve never done anything to anyone, have you?
There is nothing there. You are not really a person.
You have never worked for anything, or achieved anything.
You never had to. You have always just been a daughter, and that has been enough, but now it might not be anymore, and you think, deep down, that you might have nothing else to give.
That there might be nothing behind the curtain. No magic trick waiting to happen.
“And you’re scared of that, terrified, and so you are going to keep running from it.
You are going to marry some man, just because being a wife is better than being nothing at all, and you are going to have a couple of children, and you are going to tell yourself it makes you happy, even as what little promise you had once is rotting away inside of you.
And then, once he’s gone, then what are you going to be?
Who are you going to be?” She’s panting, red flames reaching up the sides of her neck.
“No one.” Pernilla’s voice grows faint. “You are no one.”
Clara is wiping tears away, mascara smearing prettily under her eyelashes. Martina gets up from her chair and hands her a tissue, which Clara accepts, her hands shaking.
Then Martina turns to Pernilla.
“How old were you, when you got married?” she asks Pernilla.
“Young,” Pernilla says, a hollow echo of the righteous fury from just a few seconds ago. “Too young.”
“And how long were you married?” Martina asks.
Pernilla draws a shaky breath.
“Thirty-eight years,” she answers. “And four months.”
“He left you,” Martina says.
Pernilla nods.
“How many of those years did you spend wanting to leave?”
Pernilla is staring down at her hands. I’m not sure, but I think she is looking at the thin white skin at the base of her ring finger.
“I couldn’t leave.” Her words come out thick and unwieldy.
Clara is still crying next to me; I reach out, trying to comfort her silently, but she turns away from me.
“Why not?” Martina asks. “You told me you didn’t love him. Not anymore. Maybe not ever.”
Pernilla remains quiet.
“You told me you used to lie awake at night, fantasizing about putting a pillow over his sleeping face and pushing down until he became quiet. You said you would lie there, your eyes dry as ash, for hours, imagining selling the house after the funeral, and buying a little place of your own with the inheritance, just so you might sleep in a bed you had picked out yourself.”
Pernilla’s lips are bone white.
“But you wouldn’t leave.” Martina makes it sound like an accusation.
“I couldn’t,” Pernilla manages to push out, her mouth stiff and dry.
“No,” Martina says, sharply. “You wouldn’t. And when he left, you hated him for it. Why?”
Pernilla shakes her head.
“Tell us, Pernilla.” Martina’s voice is climbing. “Tell us, or walk away. Go back to that life. Go back to that empty bed, and lie there, every night, for the rest of your life, clinging to the wreckage, because you’re too much of a coward to tell the truth.”
Pernilla flinches, as though struck.
“Because I was too weak,” she tries.
“No,” Martina rebuffs her. “Try again.”
“Because…” Pernilla swallows, over and over again, her hand climbing up to her neck, like she is physically trying to hold the words back.
“Because I…”
Pernilla looks over at Clara, the corners of her mouth turned down, eyes blazing with hatred, or shame, or some swirling concoction of them both.
“Because I didn’t leave,” she finally manages to say, and it sounds like the very words are choking her.
“In those fantasies, I was at least … I did something. I earned it. But then he left, and he took that away from me, too. He took that dream away. That maybe I would leave. That maybe I would be capable of leaving. One day. But he took it away from me. Just like he has taken everything else. And I just let him. Again, and again, and again. I let him take everything away. Until there was nothing left.”
Her face twists, and she begins to cry, in great, gulping sobs. The sobs of a small child, left alone in the dark, the harsh words still ringing in her ears, with no power to escape.
Martina looks over at Clara.
“Go to her,” she tells Clara.
“What?” Clara’s voice is harsh and cloudy from the crying.
“Go to her. Comfort her.”
Clara begins to shake her head, but Martina stares her down.
“You are the same,” she says. “You can heal yourself by healing her. Pernilla hates in you what she hates in herself. You need to forgive her.”
I see Clara straining against it, the hurt boiling under the surface of her skin, but as Pernilla’s crying continues, and Martina’s stare refuses to break, Clara rises to her feet, walks over to Pernilla, and puts her arm around the other woman.
“I forgive you,” I hear Clara saying, as Pernilla clings to her. “I forgive you.”
“See?” Martina says, soft as the breeze. “Control is what is holding you back. Control, and shame, and anger.”
Her amber eyes seem to glow as she looks at me.
“Only by giving up control,” she says, “can you become a version of yourself that is free from pain.”