3. Nicola
Nicola
Dr. Constance’s office has a smell that makes me want to cry as soon as I walk in.
There’s a certain odor of despair soaked in so deeply that it’s even in the carpets.
Overhead, the air conditioner whirs and sputters, releasing frigid air over the top of my pounding head.
I let my eyes roam over a brown stain in the shape of an eggplant in the worn carpet and wonder what created it.
Then Silvia, the receptionist, sticks her head out of the tiny square window below the sign that reads, “No food or drink allowed. No se permite comida ni bebida.”
“Mrs. Holiday?”
I nod and ease myself up, my dead leg pricking from hip to toe.
I make my way down the hall to Dr. Constance’s office. She sits at her desk, which is buried under client files and take-out containers so deep that you are never sure if you are interrupting a briefing or her lunch hour.
“Come in, come in,” Dr. Constance says, not getting up. Her fuchsia hair is done up today, her makeup heavy like she used the biggest brush she had to apply her bright blue eye shadow. “Have a seat.”
I take the furthest chair from her, near the window, even though a fern is there, close enough to hit me in the face if it’s turned right.
I like being by the window, though. There’s a little park across the street, and I imagine I’m sitting on the grass, sun on my legs, tree leaves falling around me like giant confetti. I’d rather be anywhere but here.
“How are you doing?”
I tell her about my leg and the fact that I’m all out of physical therapy time.
There’s only so much physical therapy you’re allowed before they shut you down because it doesn’t look good for the case.
And anyway, the physical therapists only get paid on a lien, just like Constance.
She nods and listens, making big sweeping notes in her file with a light pencil that feels too temporary, like at any point she could decide to erase everything from my case files and start all over again.
I watch her scribble notes as I talk, her eyes drooping, tired.
Ironically, she asks me, “Are you sleeping?”
“Yes,” I lie. “I sleep fine now.”
“And the food? How are you with the food?”
She means my appetite. “I’m doing better,” I lie again. The truth is, I have even less of an appetite than the last time I saw her, if that’s possible.
She closes the file and leans forward, like she wants to say something. She doesn’t.
“Emmy is stressing me out,” I tell her, just to keep things moving. “I’m worried about her.”
“Teenagers bounce back from these things. They are plastic,” she says, waving her hands like it’s a miracle.
I nod. “I don’t know how to help her. She seems so … damaged.” I don’t tell her my deeper fear. The one I can hardly acknowledge myself. That somehow, this trauma will act as a trigger and bring about in Emmy what it did in me so long ago.
Dr. Constance’s eyes manufacture a look of studied empathy. “You want to help your daughter. That is normal. Perhaps you think that by helping her, you can help yourself, too.”
A lot of the things she says are like this. They mean something in here and sound really good. Profound even. But when I repeat them to myself later, it’s like all the meaning has been wrung out. The words fragment and sputter lifelessly, just empty puffs of air.
She braces her hands under her chin and appears momentarily fraught with careful concern. Outside, a siren blares and grows louder, then fades. She waits for it to pass.
“You don’t look well, Nicola,” she says carefully. “What’s happening with your claim?”
I shrug. “I need to ask Steve. I don’t think they have anything yet on the driver.”
Constance shakes her head. “Not the hit and run, Nicola. I mean your personal injury claim. You and Emmy.”
I shift uncomfortably in my seat, the same sinking feeling forming in my middle.
I know she’s right, of course, and we’ve covered this a lot over the last six months.
I am supposed to “let go” of the hit and run.
I am supposed to move past it in order to focus on my and Emmy’s healing.
I am supposed to be grateful that we had uninsured motorist coverage in our policy that could pay out, since the driver fled the scene and was never found.
The police seem to have stopped searching.
Since Steve, my attorney, works on contingency, no one can be held accountable, and therefore, he can’t get paid.
It’s a vicious trap of the legal system.
No culpable party to bear the weight of the wrongful death in the eyes of the law, and therefore, no resolution for the victims beyond a few paltry physical therapy visits and appointments with lien doctors like Dr. Constance.
If this were before, I would have hired an attorney to sue someone, anyone.
The city of Beverly Hills, maybe. But these days, I don’t have the money.
So, I’m left to try and convince Steve to take the suit forward on contingency, which means doing a ton of legal work without a guarantee he’ll ever get a payout. As of yet, no such luck.
Constance leans forward and lets her hand fall across the table to me. She pats its surface as if she’s patting me, but we never touch. “What about your treatments?”
She means the series of trigger point injections meant to help with the pain, combined with the nerve blocker meds I stopped taking after the first day when I fell asleep at my desk and woke up shivering violently with Nubia standing over me, a hotel blanket on my shoulders. “Almost finished,” I tell her.
“Will you do another round of physical therapy?”
“I don’t think I can.” A light flashes in the corner of my eye from a passing bus down below. The brakes seize and squeal, and my stomach knots with bile.
“As soon as you finish your treatment, you let us know.” She glances up at me as she scribbles a note.
“Right. I will.”
It seems like a small detail, but the truth is, we can’t move forward with our personal injury claim until we finish treatment. And Dr. Constance, just like all the other lien doctors, won’t get paid from the insurance company until we do.
“And how are the panic attacks?”
I pause to think for a moment. What I really want to tell her is that it’s always there, the PTSD, the panic brimming beneath the surface, waiting to come spewing forth. But I don’t. The hum of the air conditioner for a moment is the only sound in the room.
“Let me ask it another way,” she adds, sensing my unease. “Have you had a panic attack lately?”
Yes. I don’t know. Maybe? A full-blown attack is what she’s looking for, the kind where my heart explodes in my chest, where my entire body falls slack, where I cannot move or speak.
“No, I haven’t,” I tell her.
“Good, that’s very good.” She seems pleased now and leans back in her chair.
I can tell where she’s going before she asks it.
It always ends up here. My PTSD isn’t new, she tells me, but it has reignited thanks to the unlucky turn of events that killed my husband and changed my family forever.
It’s been around for a while, in fact. Since I was a child.
“So tell me, Nicola. How are your emotions? Are you still angry at the man who hit you?”
I flinch. My dead leg sticks to the cool plastic of the chair. I unstick it with my hand and feel the underside of my moist thigh.
How to answer?
She flips open the manila folder, puts on her glasses, and scans several pages with the tip of her index finger.
“Here,” she says, trying to jog my memory.
“You said that you saw someone’s shoe come out of the driver’s side door and step out.
I asked you what kind of shoe, and you said, ‘A black polished shoe. Like a man’s shoe.
’ You say you did not see his face, but you felt very angry, vengeful even. ”
“I said that?” I rack my brain, but I have zero recollection of telling her how I felt that day, even though it’s clear I must have.
I recall the visual again now, the expensive look of it, black and too polished against the asphalt-colored ground. The encounter with Jason Redfern flashes into my mind before my brain returns to the same thought.
Should you tell her?
Should you?
Should you?
She closes the file again and sits back.
“I don’t really remember much after the accident,” I admit. “Only bits and pieces.”
Ben’s lifeless body. Emmy screaming, her face coated in bright red blood. Sirens speeding toward us. The scent of my own perspiration. The ringing in my ears. Everything but the driver’s face.
“It’s very normal to not remember aspects of traumatic experiences. Consider it a coping mechanism.”
“I want to remember,” I tell her. “In fact, I think more memories are coming back to me now. Can that happen?”
“It’s possible. But emotions play a powerful role.” She pauses and repeats her question. “So, are you still angry with the man who hit you?”
“At first, I was, but then I realized being angry wasn’t the answer. It was an accident. Accidents happen.”
I try to keep my voice even. I know this is the right answer, the respectable answer she needs, even though not being angry seems impossible to me. My throat tightens, and I instinctively swallow.
I watch her face, the arch of her eyebrows, perfectly formed and unmoving.
Benicia. Benita. Betty. What on earth is her first name?
I can’t remember. Topamax does that to you.
You get a thing in your head, and the next minute, it’s just gone.
The old me would have remembered her first name.
The old me wouldn’t have had blaring migraines that never go away.
The old me would not be caught dead in a place like this to deal with panic attacks and post-traumatic stress disorder.
The old me would have screamed the truth.
The old me would have done a lot of things.
I’m stuck, still watching her eyebrow.
“So you’re not angry anymore?”
“No, not anymore. Like I said. I have forgiven him. It was an accident.” My words falter, and my voice comes out broken.
Dr. Constance smiles, wide and flat, dissatisfied. “All right.”
When Constance asked me this question during the first visit, I squirmed.
My body burned. It took everything in me to say no.
But forgiveness is good and right and honorable.
It shows that you, the victim, are worthy.
It shows that, in the eyes of the law, you must be redeemed and replenished and made whole—numerically, of course.
Because let’s face it: the law can’t put my nerves back where they should be or fix the bulging discs in my back and neck.
The law can’t regrow the hair on my daughter’s scalp where it was torn off and re-grafted from the back of her head.
And it sure as hell can’t raise my husband from the dead.
So when Dr. Constance asks me if I’m angry at the man who hit us, who killed my husband on that clear, sunny, gorgeous afternoon and then afterwards got out, saw the mess he had made, and then got back in the car to reverse away from us like he’d hit a couple of stray dogs—well, there’s what I say, and then there’s the truth.
Am I angry?
Yes, but it’s much more than anger now. It’s a bitter little seed of revenge growing within me. I can feel it taking root, deeper and deeper, becoming part of me.