Chapter 52
“Susannah?” I repeat.
Susannah. Anna.
I remember the pictures I found. The teenager, smiling with her mouth full of braces; the young woman with the long, expertly curled lengths of hair, the face plastered in makeup.
She looked like anyone else. Like a thousand girls walking the streets of Stockholm, or London, or New York. Young and blond and beautiful in a way that would never stick with you.
I didn’t look for her here. I didn’t see her face in Anna. I thought Susannah was long gone, her body buried somewhere deep in the woods. I never expected her to be behind the reception at Himlafall.
Waiting. Watching. Biding her time.
When I asked Anna if she had heard about Susannah, she froze, for just a second.
Not because she didn’t recognize the name, but because she did.
Because she thought, for a moment, that I might know her. Recognize her.
That wasn’t confusion I saw on her face; it was relief, when it dawned on her that I didn’t know.
And I told Belinda that Susannah Wallin had recommended Himlafall; she seemed upset.
Not because Susannah Wallin had gone missing in the woods. Not because she had been told of some grand conspiracy.
It was because she thought it strange that I had named her coworker, seemingly without recognizing her.
She must have asked Anna about it. Asked Susannah.
And Susannah told her it was a lie, or a mistake.
And so Belinda thought to suspect me; not because Himlafall is a cult, not because there were secrets she didn’t want me to find, but because she thought it was a strange lie to tell.
That I might have some unhealthy fixation on one of the caretakers.
Tendency to lie for attention. Keep away from Anna.
The taste of bile fills my mouth.
I was wrong. I got it all so wrong.
Anna—Susannah—has begun reading from her file.
“Patient presents as well-mannered and empathetic. She talks about her former fiancée”—Anna chokes up on this word, then clears her throat and continues talking—“with obvious warmth, and says her goal is to get back together with the fiancée in question. Patient needs adjusting of goals, but in general appears well-adjusted, though in obvious distress.”
Anna pauses.
“That was your bitch of an employee, by the way,” she notes to Dr. Martina. “Dr. Nina.” She breathes out hard, through her nostrils.
“Do you know what it feels like to take all your life savings, every penny you’ve got, and pay them to you, and drive five hours north to go to your stupid fucking treatment clinic, thinking that you’re going to be there—thinking the person who’s taught me so much, the person who’s kept me going through hard times, the person who responded to every DM I wrote, even late at night, when I thought about killing myself—is going to be there to help you, only to be met with Dr. fucking Nina? !”
Her voice is climbing, but she stops herself, takes a deep breath, and turns to me, in a cutesy little aside.
“I don’t know if you’ve met Dr. Nina, Isobel, but she’s a dried-up old bitch. I think she might be a psychopath, honestly. Says something about this one’s hiring policies.”
She laughs, a high, girlish sound.
“Then again, maybe I should be grateful for that.” She turns back, and the smile she gives Martina is almost warm. “If you’d been more diligent about who you hired, I never would have had this opportunity!”
She stops and frowns.
“But, then again, if you’d been better at your goddamned job, I wouldn’t have had to do this in the first place. Catch-twenty-two, I guess. Or maybe it’s an ouroboros? I’m not sure.”
She shrugs.
“Anyway,” she says. “Let’s jump forward.”
She flips a few pages.
I see her eyelid twitching, see her biting down, hard, her jaw tensing.
“This is the good part,” she notes, to me. The audience. “You’ve got to listen to this.”
She raises her voice again.
“Patient shows low receptiveness to challenges to her world view.” Her voice grows lower, more gritted.
“Patient describes previous relationship patterns that are clearly abusive in nature but refuses to acknowledge them as such. When given even mild pushback on her version of events, patient reacts with alternating self-victimization and overt aggression.”
She stares down on the page for a few seconds. I can see the paper shaking. Her nostrils are flaring.
But when she turns back to Martina, her voice is calm.
“Self-victimization,” she says. “I came here to get help. I was in pain. The love of my life had just broken my heart. I trusted you. And instead, I got attacked, over and over again, by some fucking nobody. Someone who was only here because you were too busy taking cutesy pictures for Instagram and doing interviews down in Stockholm to do your job.”
“I’m sorry,” Martina whispers, but Anna shakes her head. The paper crumples in her hand.
“That’s not good enough, Doctor,” she says. “You know what your Dr. Nina told me when I said that I couldn’t understand why Linn had left me?”
She waits. She waits until Martina says:
“I don’t know.”
“She said Actions have consequences.” Anna smiles, teeth gritted.
“Actions have consequences,” she repeats. “Like it was all my fault. Like I had done it to myself.”
She slams the folder down onto the desk, and Martina shakes her head.
“I wouldn’t have said that to you,” she says. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t—”
“But you weren’t here, were you?!” Anna yells at her. “You weren’t fucking here! You weren’t here when I needed you! None of it would have happened if you had just been here like you promised! It’s all on you! All of it is your fault!”
I try to get back up on my feet, grab onto the armchair and pull myself up, slowly, because I have to put an end to it. I have to stop it, somehow, have to do something, have to wake up, have to move, have to act, have to, have to.
Anna falls quiet, and she stares down at Martina.
“You made me do this.” She is suddenly terrifyingly calm. “You made me do all of it. I never wanted any of this. I just wanted Linn to take me back. I just wanted her to hear me out.”
She turns away for a moment, and I see her pressing a hand to her face.
I manage to get up into the armchair, prop myself up, but my knees want to give way, my head swimming.
“Anna,” I try to speak. “Susannah. It’s okay. I get why you’re angry. You have every right to be.”
If I can just get through to her, if I can just calm her down … she thinks I’m on her side, so let her think I’m on her side.
Anna shakes her head.
“You don’t understand, Isobel.” When she turns around, her eyes are red.
“You don’t know what it is to love someone so much you can’t live without them.
I couldn’t live without her. She was my everything.
She was my soulmate. I’m not perfect, but she wasn’t, either.
We fought. But couples fight. I know we could have made it.
She overreacted. I knew that if I could just make Linn listen, if I could just make her hear me out …
I thought she would help me.” She spits out the she.
“It must have been horrible.” I’m swaying slightly. “You must have felt … so alone.”
Anna swallows, and she nods.
“I did. I really did.” Her voice breaks.
“I never meant to hurt her. She just made me so angry sometimes. But people get angry. Everyone gets angry sometimes. It’s normal.
I tried to explain it to her, over and over again.
I tried to explain to her that if she would just be a little bit careful, if she would just listen to me more, I wouldn’t get so mad.
I only got mad because I loved her. I’m a passionate person. That’s why she loved me.”
My knees are shaking.
“Maybe…” I try. “Maybe you can tell her that now. Maybe she’ll want to talk to you. Martina can help you. We can call her now. Right, Doctor? You can coach Anna on what to say so that … Linn … will listen.”
Martina looks over at me at the sound of her name, gray-faced and terrified, but then she swallows and nods.
“Yes,” she croaks. “Yes, of course.”
Anna’s features contort, rage and sorrow battling on her face.
“No.” A sigh, searingly quiet. “No, it’s too late now.”
She turns away.
“I didn’t mean to.”
I can barely hear her.
It’s working. I’m calming her down. I can still put an end to this. I can get her to let us both go.
“You loved her.” I have to get through to her. “Martina hurt you. She abandoned you. She shouldn’t have made you think she was your friend. It was wrong. But you don’t have to prove anything to her. You can just go. Move on with your life. You don’t want to hurt anyone.”
It’s the wrong thing. I always say the wrong thing in the end.
Anna turns around. Her eyes are blazing.
“You’re right. I didn’t.”
Linn.
Her palms were sweaty, her eyes aching from staring at the screen. The comments rolling in were making her feel simultaneously stronger and weaker.
Strangers, on the other side of the world, giving her advice, as though it were all so easy; as though a whole person, two whole people, could be distilled down to a few easy sentences, a few easy steps to follow.
Some part of her was angry with them, for not knowing her very pain; for not understanding how very scared and lonely she was without Susannah, how utterly unmoored.
None of them could know the thousands of lovely little moments, the long, slow mornings in bed they had spent together, the way Susannah used to kiss her eyelids and tap out love in Morse code on her naked hip.
Some other part of her, a stronger, better part, probably, knew that they were right.
Knew that a thousand good moments couldn’t make up for how small and worthless she had felt toward the end.
That part was what had led her to post her innermost secrets anonymously on the internet for strangers to see, in the hope that she could make herself listen.