When Through Deep Waters Read online

  “My uncle Donald, who raised me on this very campus, used to say, ‘Only through the acknowledgment of our stains are we cleansed.’ Better stated: all are troubled, Alicen. Here I offer you acceptance and perhaps peace with your trouble.”

  Alicen swallowed her building emotions as the wind seemed to whirl about her suddenly. Pulling at her hair, sending chilled ripples across her skin. Soft mumbling whispers rose with the breeze, drifting into her ears and tingling at the edges of her brain. Her heart jerked, and she instinctively glanced toward the tree line to her left, where the sound had come from.

  Nothing but bark and branches. As was to be expected. Yet the peculiar sense remained that she’d almost thought she’d see more.

  “Alicen,” Victoria said, yanking Alicen out of her reverie. Alicen opened her mouth to apologize, but Victoria held up her hand and silenced her.

  “It’s all right,” Victoria said. “Few come here willingly, but I assure you we can offer you something tangible, if you let us.”

  The soft whispers Alicen had heard before pricked behind her head and became a single word.

  Run.

  Her heart quickened.

  Victoria gave a small nod. “Let’s continue.” She turned and started again toward the main building.

  Alicen released the breath she’d trapped inside her throat, stole a quick glance to either side to confirm that she was in fact hearing nothing, and followed. Even though every nerve in her body told her not to.

  Alicen sat in a padded folding chair and faced a circle of twelve strangers. Four men and eight women, none of whom she knew, none of whom she had any intention of getting to know. It had only been ten minutes, and Alicen was convinced that enduring these sessions wouldn’t help clarify her mind but would, in fact, probably drive her to a state of insanity from which she could never return.

  A plump, white-haired woman in her sixties named Gina had addressed the group to start. She was their network host, guiding them through the process of sharing and healing, she’d said with the type of tone one might use to address a classroom of preschool students. Alicen had immediately pictured the old woman baking apple pies and placing them on her stone cottage windowsill and beckoning for the animals of the forest to come and help her tidy up her kitchen.

  Alicen already hated Gina.

  Gina had then opened up the group discussion, and a man named Stew—“Spelled like the soup,” he’d announced for Alicen’s benefit—had started sharing about the dark rain cloud that followed him everywhere, soaking him through even though everyone else around him was dry. He was envious of others’ ability to maintain their state of “not wet” and found himself constantly depressed.

  Gina had listened intently and with great concern, which made Alicen like her even less, and then after some thought had suggested Stew remember to carry an umbrella with him at all times. The idea had been received well from the group, with nods of approval, which seemed to give Stew some peace.

  Another woman, smaller in frame and younger, giggled awkwardly throughout Stew’s sharing, and then apologized profusely. Apparently several hundred penguins lived inside her head and were making jokes. Someone asked her if the green penguins had returned, and the girl announced they had not, and the group seemed pleased. Gina told her this was great progress, and the giggling girl smiled shyly, apologized again, and then asked Stew to continue.

  Alicen waited for someone to jump out from behind a wall and yell, “Gotcha,” while the rest of the room laughed as though they had all been in on the joke, but no one ever did. Because Stew actually believed a rain cloud was following him, and the laughing girl actually heard the voices inside her head.

  Alicen tried to wrangle her prickly defenses. She knew it was poor form to think so negatively of people around her. People who were truly trying to seek help because their brains worked differently than the world deemed normal. She wasn’t trying to be nasty, but all she could keep thinking was how on earth had she ended up here? Yes, she had tried to kill herself, and yes, admittedly she had heard a couple strange things, all sure signs of PTSD, but she wasn’t like Stew or the strange giggling girl who actually needed help. She just needed to be left alone with her suffering.

  A couple others shared as Alicen took to watching the ticking hands on the clock. Ryan, a heavyset man with black hair and a matching mustache was sleeping better and yelling less at his nurse. Hooray. Bethany, a mild-mannered middle-aged woman with terribly bleached blonde hair, had gone an entire week without stealing any of her roommate’s things and burying them in the garden. Huge plus. And Heather, a very pale woman with an English accent, was just thrilled that they were now serving white chocolate pudding instead of red Jell-O. Congrats to the kitchen staff.

  Alicen took deep, calming breaths, working very hard to hide her discomfort and counting down the final moments before she was free.

  “Well, we have a couple of minutes left,” Gina said.

  Alicen felt Gina’s gaze shift toward her, and the entire room rose in temperature. Alicen stared sweating before her name left Gina’s mouth.

  “Alicen, I know it’s your first meeting, but we always like to invite our new guests to share,” Gina said.

  Every eye turned toward her, and it made Alicen want to vomit. No way was she sharing; she wasn’t even convinced she was in the right group.

  Gina smiled brightly and waited.

  “Um, no, I don’t really have anything to say,” Alicen said. She moved awkwardly in her seat and commanded her legs to keep still instead of jumping up and carrying her far away from here.

  “Are you sure? It’s customary to share at your first session. Maybe just something interesting about yourself,” Gina said. The syrupy sound of her voice rattled inside Alicen’s eardrums.

  The space around Alicen’s head began to fill with cotton. She’d felt something similar while touring with Victoria and earlier, in the bookstore. The feeling was beginning to seem familiar. She could hear the distant pounding of her heart through the muffled air and felt the prying gazes from her groupmates. They were all just sitting and staring and waiting.

  A tiny giggle echoed around her, then another, then several. The noise tickled behind her ears and made the hair on her arms rise. The soft, eerie sound bounced off the walls, and Alicen glanced at the penguin girl, who was sitting completely still. And silent.

  A gentle tap pressed against the back of her right shoulder, and simultaneously the giggling changed to a single voice.

  Alicen.

  Alicen whipped her head to the right to find nothing. She reached around to brush her shoulder while the voice echoed to her left.

  Alicen, do you hear us?

  She whipped her head left. Still nothing. The cotton thickened, the giggling muffled in the background, the childlike voice whispering through.

  Do you hear us?

  Alicen stood frantically, nearly knocking her chair over, causing the voice, the soft laughter, and the cotton to vanish. Her head cleared, but her panicked, heavy breathing and thundering heart rate pounded in her ears.

  “It’s okay, Alicen,” said Gina, who had also stood, very calmly, and was extending a concerned hand toward Alicen in the middle of the circle. Everyone was still staring at her, watching to see what she would do next. She opened her mouth to defend herself, but her mouth was dry, and she was unable to think of anything past her terror.

  “It’s okay,” Gina said again. “You don’t have to share today. Why don’t you just take a seat, and we’ll try again next time.”

  Alicen felt her sanity start to drop back into place. Yes, Alicen, sit down. You look like a fool, Alicen. You only suffer from PTSD, Alicen. Stop acting as crazy as those around you. Sit down before they think you’re just like them, Alicen.

  “Sorry,” Alicen said, glancing at Gina and then the rest of the group.

  Gina smiled with ease, and the wrinkles around the corners of her eyes held such authentic kindness, it made Alicen feel terrib
le for thinking so cruelly of her before.

  “It’s okay,” someone said behind her. Alicen turned to see a soft-featured, green-eyed woman smiling at her. It was the woman who had been sitting quietly beside Alicen during the meeting. “This is a safe place, away from the evil of the world.”

  The woman’s words echoed those she’d heard from Victoria, and Alicen noticed others nodding, understanding and recognition in their expressions.

  “Thank you, Shannon,” Gina said. “She’s right, Alicen; this is a safe place.”

  Alicen, unsure of what else to do, just nodded and returned to her seat. As the group session came to a close, Gina added some final remarks that Alicen couldn’t have repeated, because she wasn’t listening. She was too busy searching through the realms of her feeble sanity to hear anything. She avoided eye contact with anyone for fear that she’d see more understanding, which would mean that she wasn’t as different from them as she believed. Hearing voices, sensing she wasn’t alone, creating things that weren’t there. Yes, she was suffering from a traumatic loss, but she wasn’t insane. Was she?

  Alicen bit her back teeth together hard enough for it to ache up behind her ears. She was at war with her mind, and she was losing; that was all. She would do her time, she would control her crazy, she would defeat the hysterical whims of her brain, and then she’d be free, left alone with her suffering. Jane was dead because of her. She didn’t want to heal, didn’t believe she could, and more importantly didn’t believe she deserved to.

  Victoria closed the door to her office and let her hand rest on the knob. A twitch pulled at her chin. An outcome of her day. An outcome of Alicen’s presence here. She took a deep drag of air in with her lungs and then let it pass slowly out between her lips.

  The tension in her shoulders began to ease. A second twitch tapped her chin, and she swallowed back the reality she was in. Letting them onto campus was always the hardest step. Seeing their faces, watching their pain, masking her disgust. It wasn’t all of them, of course. No, most of them were simply sorry sacks needing release from their dirtied pasts. Victoria let them roll off her skin like dust.

  It was the special cases that seeped through her flesh and attacked her bones. Cases like Alicen.

  Alicen had committed a horrendous crime. She’d been given something precious and had taken it for granted. She hadn’t been better than the world around her. She’d taken a life with her carelessness, and now she had the audacity to walk around victimized, as if something had been taken from her. She was worse than a sorry sack. She was an infection. Victoria knew infections needed to be monitored carefully, or they would spread and eventually kill.

  No, no, no, Victoria thought. She knew how to deal with special cases. A handful had come through during her time as head administrator. Several lived here currently, all managed and contained. Alicen would be no different.

  Careful, little Victoria. Best-laid plans often rot.

  Her uncle Donald’s familiar voice burned inside her brain like a match too often struck whose flame she could never fully douse. Her constant penance. A mix of friend and foe. Giver and thief. The veins in her wrists pulsed. She craved relief from her darkness and quivered at her own inability to be free from her dirty secrets.

  Born from filth, full of weakness. Have you learned nothing?

  “Enough,” Victoria said out loud. The voice inside her mind stilled. For the moment. It never really left her, though. She wasn’t even sure she wanted it to, for then she would be utterly alone, and loneliness was the cruelest of fates. Uncle Donald had saved her from such a fate. He continued to save her even after being buried in the ground.

  Accuser and savior.

  Victoria took another breath and released it before letting her hand fall from the doorknob. She moved across her office toward the desk. Outside the window, the sky was caught in twilight. Night was on its way.

  Victoria used to be afraid of the dark. No matter how much time passed, she could still clearly see the double bed she had occupied as a girl. Her small square room on the upper floor, down the hall from her uncle’s. Scratchy sheets and drafty windows. Moving shadows and walking nightmares. When it became too much, she’d imagine she was somewhere else. Someone else.

  Vicky. Sweet. Innocent. Not cursed, born to a family filled with evil and filth. Loved and hopeful. Vicky was delusional about the world, ignorant. Victoria felt sad for Vicky yet longed to be her. She was jealous of her stupidity and would have traded places with her in a heartbeat.

  They’d have quiet debates in the middle of the night.

  Vicky: Life can be beautiful.

  Victoria: Only when you are blind.

  Vicky: Then let me be blind.

  Victoria: He says only fools are blind.

  Vicky: Then let me be a fool.

  Victoria: You are a fool because you believe in stories.

  Vicky: My parents tell me the greatest stories.

  Victoria: Parents lie.

  Vicky: My parents love me.

  Victoria: My parents ruined me, because that’s what parents do.

  Vicky: Why?

  Victoria: He says people are worms.

  Vicky: Worms? No, my parents are lovely.

  Victoria: Only because they aren’t real.

  Victoria’s head twitched again. She smudged out the memory, silencing the character she’d conjured to survive dark, cruel nights. She’d been a child then. She wasn’t a child now.

  She sat back in her office chair and folded her hands in her lap. It had been a while since she’d thought of Vicky. Her mind could easily track the recurrence to Alicen. Not Alicen herself but rather what Alicen represented. A parent who had failed her child. As Victoria’s parents had failed her.

  So easily you’ve let her get under your skin, little Victoria.

  “I’m controlling it,” she replied.

  Control? Another illusion you’ve conjured, I see.

  “I am in control.”

  We will see.

  “Don’t forget where I am, and where you are.”

  Uncle Donald’s full, dark chuckle echoed through the air around her head. It mocked her. Poked at her inadequacies, held her under her own fears.

  Don’t forget who you are. Where you come from.

  “How could I forget?” Victoria whispered into the darkness.

  Then you will show her, as you were shown.

  “I must.” Again, her wrists beckoned. She instinctively ran her fingers over the scars that lined her forearm. A beat of desire matched by disgust pulsed in her chest.

  You reap what you sow, and life always comes to collect.

  “Retribution is necessary for all who are troubled,” Victoria repeated from memory, her fingers still tracing the lines of relief carved into her skin.

  Alicen is troubled. Time to collect. Do not fail.

  Victoria nodded and removed her fingers from her wrists. She wouldn’t fail.

  6

  Alicen lay on the couch in the summer home’s main living room. The fan overhead spun at a moderately slow pace, the blades cutting the air and sending down a gentle breeze that ruffled the stringy edges of the throw pillows around her. The sun was gone now; it had been headed toward the mountains when she’d lain down.

  Its absence left the room dark, with only a corner lamp to cast shadows. Alicen watched those too. They almost seemed to move if she stared at them long enough, which drew her buzzing mind back to the mysterious whispers she’d heard in the bookstore and at Clover Mountain Retreat Center.

  Her visit to the campus yesterday and the uneasy feeling that had plastered itself to the inside of her chest cavity afterward had followed her into this morning, through the afternoon sorting at the bookstore, and sat with her still. A discomfort and panic she couldn’t seem to shake. Her brain was usually good at compartmentalizing things, tying up all the wispy threads of thought and then shoving them into their appropriate boxes so she was no longer plagued by them.

  But
not with this. Not of late. She was broken, and the tools that had served her so well throughout her adulthood were failing her. What a terrible time for her mind to become so curious and distractible.

  Louise hadn’t asked much after picking Alicen up yesterday, and Alicen hadn’t offered anything more than “It was fine.” Thankfully, the topic hadn’t come up today. Louise had announced a couple of hours ago that she had to drive into Billings to grab some necessary paperwork. She’d invited Alicen to join, but Alicen was happy for the space. She knew Louise wasn’t trying to smother, but the concerned glances, the checking-in questions, the constant eye contact—it was enough to make her feel rather claustrophobic about this unusual situation.

  Alicen’s stomach growled, and she placed her palm over it. She should move to the kitchen and find something to eat, but the effort would involve more than staring at spinning blades, so she ignored her hunger. Loss brought about an array of circling reactions. At times Alicen needed to be moving, working, anything that required her not to be still for fear of getting trapped. And then other times the numbness of depression swallowed every cell in her body, and moving was out of the question. And then there were times like now, when a combination of the two was worse than either singularity. Numb through her body but active in her mind. The wheels of consciousness turning while she lay trapped in the deep stillness that overpowered her physical senses.

  It was basically torture, but the only way out was . . . well, actually, there was no way out. Only less of it, or control of it. Right now Alicen had neither. Because behind every spinning thought wheel was her. Her golden curls, her soft face, her crystal eyes, her voice, her smell, her touch, her laugh, her tears, her memories.

  Her.

  Her.

  Her.

  Alicen closed her eyes and exhaled into the soundless room. It was moments like this that had driven her to swallow a bottle of pills, and the idea still felt more welcoming than she dared to admit.