By the time Emma Fairfax was finished telling Dr Marcello and me what she’d done, there in that interview room in the ward, I despised her. I can’t say I’d seen everything yet in the short decade following graduating from UCLA and then med school in San Diego, but I’d seen a lot. Sat beside this very doctor as he’d dealt with a lot. But I’d never seen anything like this.
This was the first time I’d come face to face with a monster.
It wasn’t just the things she said, the things she’d done, that made her such a shocking revelation. It was that after all these years and a life surrounded by the kind of tortured souls that reminded me of childhood and my sister, I’d at last found one that had been in that same world – in the same kind of tortured hell as Evelyn had been. Though their stories would always be different, and this woman’s so much more grotesque and vile, I nevertheless felt that I had encountered someone, for the first time, whose life was linked to the kind of terror that had consumed my life as it had taken my sister’s.
My pen had stopped moving across my page as she spoke. Dr Marcello was an older hand, conditioned to these things. My mind, on the other hand, was trained to think of prescription options and dosage ratios, not to hear words like this woman was speaking.
Though I’d heard them before. From another perspective. That was the whole point.
Christ, it was all so repulsive.
She spoke for almost an hour, opening up about her past in sickening detail. Marcello grilled her, dispassionately toned but with the force of law behind him, and probed every corner of her story. It wasn’t really his place to judge – she’d already been in a courtroom, already beneath the gavel – and yet knowing the full details of her story was part of the process of mental treatment and care.
Because that’s what we were meant to do. Care. God help us.
In the end, I did what I’d never done before, and never done since. I lingered a moment after Dr Marcello left the room, just to take a long, uninterrupted stare at this creature. Emma didn’t respond to my sustained, probing gaze. Then, without a word and trying my best to conceal my inner world of utter disgust, I turned and stormed out of the room, slamming the door in my wake.
My heart was bursting.
I had never been so disgusted, and yet I couldn’t believe what a gift I had received.
I was back in the room two days later, as Marcello met her for his first follow-up and I was on call to see if the prescription we’d assigned forty-eight hours earlier was having any effect – the state’s desire to embrace ‘holistic, team-based approaches’ to patient care meant we often visited together. But in reality, I was there to learn much more than just the efficacy of the drugs. Secretly, of course. I couldn’t let Marcello or anyone else know about the thoughts that had overtaken my attention. This Emma Fairfax was suddenly everything to me, and yet I couldn’t permit myself to show even that slightest hint of it.
She was led to her spot opposite the doctor, as before, and while the orderlies saw her into her seat and signed off on their instructions, my mind swam. It was disgusting to me that someone so vile as this could be responsible for bringing my sister’s memory back to life, and so powerfully; and yet it was hardly a surprise that she had. Their lives were sickly linked, in the way that every victim is in some way linked to every abuser, whether it was her own abuser or someone else’s. The spirit of such agony is universal. That was the whole tragedy.
My sister had been beautiful. All these years later, I can still see her face so clearly. Evelyn was the kind of teenage girl every other teenage girl craved to be, and the shape of girl that every teenage boy wanted to have, and she knew it. Didn’t care about it, but knew it. She had the odd ability to know she was a looker, and still find herself ugly. Crazy, but totally true. Took me years to figure it out, too; though I’m not sure if, even now, I really have.
When news came that Evelyn had killed herself, my first reaction was silence. I mean, what does a boy say when he’s told his sister’s swallowed a fistful of pills and that the only place he’ll see her face again is in a casket and in his memories? I went numb, and dumb. For a few moments, I wanted pills myself, just so I could follow her and be with her. But that passed. Maybe because I was strong enough to resist such escape. Maybe because I was simply too weak to follow her example.
What I remember most about the last months of Evelyn’s life, before the suicide, was the look of emptiness she wore around her like a shawl. It was there whatever expression her face took on – when she was pensive, or smiled, or even when she laughed.
How is it possible to laugh and be empty? I ask the question now with the same bewilderment I had as a boy. It seems senseless. Impossible. At least, until you know the reasons.
‘Why do you look like that?’ I remember asking her. Little brother to older sister; the questions were allowed to be direct.
‘Like what?’ Evelyn had seemed disinterested.
‘Like you’re far away.’
I was only twelve, and not exactly eloquent. Evelyn had turned right to me. There was kindness in her face – she was always loving to me, a bond we shared in response to the fact that neither of us had ever really felt loved by our parents – but she still looked far away.
‘It’s because I’m hollow,’ she answered. ‘I’m all emptied out.’
I’d read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and heard of hollowed out tin men, but I sensed that this wasn’t what my big sister was talking about. In honesty, I didn’t have a clue what she meant, and I think she knew it. She patted my head and fluffed my hair, an act she knew I ‘hated’ but secretly loved. She walked away.
That’d been six, maybe seven months before the pills. In those months, she broke down a little more day by day, and she did finally tell me why. Never told the parents, because she said bad things would happen if she did. She looked afraid as she said it, too, like someone might overhear her. So she just told me. As if I could bear that burden.
But it wasn’t her fault. Christ, it wasn’t her fault. The things they did to her, those sons of bitches, and to the rest of them. To gut her like that, so there wasn’t anything left of the sister I loved …
And then, here, a connection.
The little room was antiseptic and the glow of the lights harsh, and I tried not to recoil from the sight of this woman. Even Dr Marcello’s normally unreadable look was a shade harsher than before, and Emma Fairfax seemed marginally happy with that. Contented by it. At least someone knew what she’d done and hated her for it, even if it was only the two of us. Sometimes even monsters know they’re monsters, and there are times when we’re all comforted by another person understanding our reality, however terrible it is.
‘You realize,’ Dr Marcello finally said, ‘that I’m going to have to write up everything you told me in an official report. Even though we’re chiefly here for care, and as much as you may have been a victim yourself, we’ll do everything we can for you, the details are going to need to go into your record, all the same. There might be repercussions, beyond your current incarceration.’
‘Thought you might talk,’ she answered, defiance in her voice, but not anger. ‘It’s why I told you. I’m done keeping secrets. Can’t do it any more.’
The fact that you feel guilt doesn’t exonerate you of anything! I wanted so much to shout out the words, to throw aside my clipboard, leap up and throttle her. Evelyn’s face smashed into my vision, and I had to blink it away to see Emma again. I’d never been so repulsed by another human being.
She leaned towards Dr Marcello, boring her gaze straight into his. ‘I ain’t looking for exoneration, Doc. I’m telling you, I can’t live with what I’ve done any more.’
He stared back at her for what seemed a very long time, simply letting her heaving breath echo through the room. Then there was the scribble of a few words on his pad, his face inscrutable. Perhaps he was pondering her wrongs; perhaps seeking vulnerabilities behind her defensiveness that may have led her to be taken advantage of. They were both routes I would expect of him, and, normally, of me.
He was about to ask another question when a small beep sounded at his hip. He had been in this line of work too long to feign apology when he reached down to examine his beeper, and as his brow rose I knew there must be some issue elsewhere in the facility that required his immediate involvement. My suspicion was confirmed a second later as he rose.
‘I’m afraid we’ll have to continue this a little later, Miss Fairfax,’ he said, turning towards the door. ‘The orderlies will be here in a moment to return you to your room.’ Then, to me, ‘It’s a patient I’m looking after with Thompson, so I won’t need you. I’ll catch up with you at our next appointment.’
A second later, he was gone.
And we were alone.