I don’t know where I expected a hypnotist to have an office, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t right next to a Paradise Tans in a strip mall. Duncan wanted to go with me, but he was scheduled to work at the same time as the first open appointment time she had. Besides, I’m not nearly as certain as he is that this plan will work. I take a deep breath and open the door.
The woman sitting behind the desk unfolds herself and gets to her feet. Tall and slender, she has bright blue eyes and close-cropped hair bleached white-blond. She’s nothing like I was expecting.
“Are you Quinn Columbo?” I ask.
She nods. “You must be Olivia.”
“That’s right.” We shake hands. Like the rest of her, her fingers are long and thin.
She half sits on the edge of her desk. “On the phone you said you’re interested in being hypnotized?”
“Maybe.” I resist the sudden urge to leave. “First, I want to know more about how it works.”
“Of course. People sometimes think hypnosis is something unfamiliar and scary. But you’ve actually been in hypnotic states before. We all have. Like when you get so lost in a book or a movie that you don’t notice anything else around you. That’s a hypnotic state. Or when you’re driving and suddenly you’re at your exit, only you don’t remember how you got there.”
I nod, thinking of my drive to Medford, how I lost track of long stretches of freeway while thinking about my parents.
“Hypnosis is a state of hyperfocus.” She bunches her fingers and taps them together. “It’s not sleeping and it’s not unconsciousness. You’re fully awake. But because your attention is so focused, you have less peripheral awareness.” She pulls her fingers apart, wiggling them in all directions.
What she’s saying makes sense, but I’m still hesitant. “Once at the county fair I saw a hypnotist tell a guy he was a dog. He got on all fours and started barking.” He scurried around the small wooden stage, his tongue hanging out, while his friends in the audience fell over with laughter. “You won’t make me do anything like that, will you?”
Quinn frowns. “People who volunteer want to be in the spotlight. They already know they’ll be asked to do silly things, so they accept the hypnotist’s suggestions.”
But what about not-so-silly things? “Could you hypnotize a person to do something bad? Like commit a murder or something?”
“What! No. Not if it was something they would never do.” She leans forward. “So what is it you want to work on today?”
“There’s something else I have to ask you first.”
“Okay.” She tilts her head and waits.
“If I tell you something, does it stay here in this room? Just between us?”
“I’m bound by our code of ethics to respect confidentiality. So, yes, what you tell me stays here. The only exception would be if you were a danger to yourself, or if you were threatening to harm someone. Or if I were subpoenaed by a judge.”
This last exception gives me pause. Right now, who I am is a secret. And I want it to stay that way.
Quinn must see my expression. “Let me just say that in my twenty years in the business, that’s never happened.” She takes a slow breath. Everything about her is unhurried. “Hypnotherapy is a tool. It can help you lose weight, or stop smoking, or realize something about yourself.” Her gaze is direct. “What are you hoping to do?”
“I want”—I have to swallow before I can say anything more—“I want to remember something that happened when I was a little girl.”
“A specific event?”
I nod, my throat tight. “Someone murdered my parents.” My voice cracks. “And I was there. But I don’t remember it.”
Her breathing catches then, just for a second. “And how old were you?”
“Almost three and a half.”
Quinn sucks in her lips. She knows who I am, or guesses. But she doesn’t ask anything more. “It may be there. It may not be. Memory isn’t like a video camera. It doesn’t record everything and let you replay it later. Sometimes if a memory seems to be gone, it really is. Or sometimes it’s there, but it’s been pushed down, out of conscious thought.”
“Do you think you can help me get anything back?”
“I don’t know.” Lifting her head, she locks eyes with me. “But I can try.”
She tells me to sit in one of two facing chairs upholstered in soft apricot. She moves around the room, dimming the lights and closing the blinds. “I’m going to turn on some music.” Her voice is low and soothing. “It’s not really necessary for the hypnosis, but it gives your ears a neutral background.” She presses a button, and instrumental music begins to play.
Then she sits across from me. I realize that all this—the music, the closed blinds, her low and unhurried voice—is the beginning of the process. It’s not like in the movies. There’s not going to be a watch swinging on a chain. Already I feel different, like I’m separating from myself, observing instead of participating. There’s no I, no me, just the girl sinking into the chair. It’s like I’ve gone from first person to third.
In the darkened room, her voice is nearly a whisper. “I’ll count to ten. It will be like you’re going down a staircase, taking one step with each number. Each step will take you deeper, and when I say ten, you’ll be in a place where you’re fully relaxed.”
“Should I close my eyes?”
“You can keep them open and just focus on my face. Your subconscious will tell you when it’s time to close them.”
As instructed, I keep my gaze on her while she begins to count to ten. After each number, she says I’m doing great or that the tension is leaving my body. I keep looking at her face. I feel anxious, wondering if I should cheat and just close my eyes. But I keep focused on her. A long stare in a darkened room, but there is no intimacy in it at all. Quinn is only a place to rest my gaze. Slowly her face grows hazy.
When she says, “Five,” I blink, and her face changes. Her eyes appear to be covered by a sparkly red mask, but it doesn’t seem strange. I blink again, and her face is a man’s, complete with a goatee. Another blink, and her features morph into a butterfly.
And then I blink and don’t open my eyes again. It takes me a few seconds to realize they’re closed.
“Ten,” she says. “Good. That’s right. You are completely relaxed.”
I feel like I do just before I go to sleep, when the horizons of my mind widen.
“Now one of your hands will begin to feel heavy and one light.” Both my hands feel heavy and warm upon the arms of the chair. “The hand that feels light might begin to lift itself off the chair, maybe a finger or the whole hand.”
I monitor my hands. They’re anchored to the chair. I’m failing at this.
“And the arm that is heavy, it’s very weighty and stiff, as if it were made of granite. And your arm that is light, it’s like a feather—it just wants to float up in the air.”
My right hand twitches into life and then rises, higher and higher, until it’s over my head. There’s no sense of effort, no strain. It doesn’t even seem like I’m moving it. The breeze of the air conditioner eddies around it.
I begin to feel as if I am spinning in my chair, even though it doesn’t have wheels, even though it’s absolutely still. Around and around. It’s like being drunk, only I’m not dizzy.
“Now you will have a cheerful, pleasant memory from when you were three,” Quinn says. “Of a time when your parents are still alive.”
I have a flash: two tiny legs from the knees downward, wearing red socks and blue shoes. Walking. Each of my hands is in a big hand. Two adult voices say in unison, “One, two, three!” The hands lift me up so I swing in midair, held aloft.
I grin.
“That’s good, Olivia. And now you will have a memory about the day your parents died.”
My eyes dart wildly under closed lids.
“You are safe here, Olivia. You are safe and completely relaxed. Your memories cannot harm you. You’re an observer, that’s all.”
I see more legs. Two sets of adult legs, both in blue jeans, facing each other. I’m standing behind one of the people, and I’m little. White snow all around. The person who is farthest away from me steps closer, so the two sets of knees touch.
“No,” a voice says, and I know it’s my mom’s voice. She says it quietly. Desperately. Earlier there had been yelling. I tilt my head up to see what’s happening. My mom steps back from the other person, but then there’s a gloved hand on the nape of her neck, pulling her in close. So close. They’re dancing. Her arms slice through the air, windmilling as they do when we put on music and dance in the living room.
Something lands on my face. It’s like rain, only hot. When I touch it, my fingertips come away red.
At first I think it’s paint, but that doesn’t make sense. Then I know it’s raining blood, pockmarking the snow. The white underneath their boots is turning scarlet.
And my mother is making a noise, but it isn’t words. It’s beyond words.
I turn and run into the woods.